“Dana doesn’t know you’re here,” he said gently when we were alone. “She hasn’t…there’s been no brain activity since she arrived.”
I didn’t reply.
“You’re still in bad shape yourself. The arm should be in a sling. And the leg…” His voice trailed off when he saw that I wasn’t paying attention.
“I’ll get a sling,” he said finally. “And a blanket.”
He went away and I sat still, holding Dana’s hand.
Two days later, nothing much had changed and I took a few moments to go back upstairs to my own room. Jake had packed up my things from the motel and brought them to the hospital. I opened the suitcase and found the book I wanted, and the bit of ribbon, and spent a minute or two cleansing my hands and saying some words over a thimbleful of water, which I had put into a small medicine glass, and then went back down to the ICU.
The nurse paid no attention as I reentered Dana’s room.
I put the glass down on the reading stand and kissed the bit of ribbon and put it around my neck and opened the book and began: “O God the Father, have mercy upon the soul of thy servant. O God the Son, have mercy upon the soul of thy servant…”
The nurse looked in and I heard her draw a sharp breath. But she didn’t interfere.
“Depart, Christian soul, out of this world…”
Jake walked in behind me as I was invoking the trinity, and joined me in the final words. He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I, and after a while he went away again.
After two more days they disconnected the life-support systems.
I sat with her for a minute or two after breathing had stopped, but it meant nothing. She had died in another place, in a grove of cottonwood trees where savages fought and inflicted pain for its own sake, and she had been there because of me and nothing could never change a single part of that.
I went back to my room and made a telephone call and began putting my clothes on.
AMEN
THIRTY-SIX
Isigned myself out of the hospital and was on an airliner, west bound from Amarillo, three hours later.
Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea.
Dr. Woodbury objected on medical grounds. “The scanners didn’t show any major damage,” he said, “but the nerves in your leg need rest and you could injure them permanently.”
Jake Spence was worried about other things. “Helen wants you to stay with us,” he said, “and Mose Thieroux said he invited you to spend some time with him and the kids. We don’t think you should be alone right now.”
Robbie picked me up at the front door for the ride to Prescott Helicopters’ landing circle.
“You shouldn’t be doing this, Preacher,” he said.
“Tell me about it,” I said sourly, and he shut up and just drove the car for a while.
The town was full of ghosts.
“J. J. Barlow was our sniper,” Robbie said as we passed the Citizens National Bank. “He was a shooter from way back, alternate on the Olympic team twice running, helped set up the town rifle range.”
“Loaded his own ammunition?”
“What else?”
Lupe’s garage seemed to be closed, and there were no cars parked at the café.
“Marilyn and Mose exercised Barlow’s option to buy the land,” Robbie said. “I hear they’ll be clearing it off to start building the new plant.”
“The Lupe family?”
He favored me with a flash of the de Bonzo teeth.
“Cleared out the day they got the money. Didn’t even bother to lock the doors.”
We didn’t talk much during the flight to Amarillo.
Helicopters—even fancy ones like the new LongRanger—are noisy beasts, and if the landscape of eastern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle is uninspiring from ground level, it is even more so from the air.
But we each had enough to think about to keep from being bored.
“When do you want me back at Best Licks?” Robbie finally asked when we were down and waiting for the courtesy bus to the airline terminal.
That earned him my very first smile of the week.
“I told them to sell your bed,” I said.
He started to object, but I cut him off before he could begin.
“Farewell is your niche, Robbie. Your place in the world. You belong there. Best Licks is just for people who need healing. You’re healed…and now it’s time to go.”
His eyes thanked me and said he knew I was right, but they contained a question, too. I thought he might ask it, but he didn’t, and I was glad because I didn’t want to hear my answer.
And when will it be your healing time, Preacher?
The arm still didn’t work right and the leg was awkward, but I left the sling in an airport men’s room at Amarillo and the cane under my seat on the airliner and walked to the motorized corridor ramp at McCarran International without a limp.
Some pains are more easily controlled than others.
I took a cab downtown and went into a casino where they know me, and I think it startled the bartender a bit when I ordered a bourbon and soda. He knows I don’t drink when I play poker, and I don’t come to Vegas for any other reason. But I knew I wasn’t going to be playing poker this time, because a man needs to be on good terms with himself to do that. And for the moment I simply wasn’t qualified.
Gambling is a world of difference.
It is clockless, peopled by liars, fools, cheats, madmen, cripples, and potential suicides—all largely governed by the larcenous—and the population was out in force today, turning their hands filthy on the handles of one-arm bandits and their pockets empty on games where the house edge sometimes climbs to twenty percent or more.
Ridiculous.
Insane.
But I was here by choice. I didn’t dare go home to Best Licks in my condition, and I couldn’t have stayed in Farewell, among friendly, sane, decent, honest human beings with loving families and good lives and bank accounts and insurance programs and a sure knowledge that the world is a good and sunny place.
For a while I needed to be here, in this place and among these people. Because sometimes you just naturally want to be among your own kind.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Thackrey Jr. was a Korean War vet, an author, and newspaper reporter who, after stints at several newspapers, ended up in 1968 at the Los Angeles Times, where he became known over the next two decades for his colorful news stories, columns, and obituaries. His novel The Preacher was an Edgar Award finalist that led to two sequels, Aces & Eights and King of Diamonds, and the movie Wild Card starring Powers Boothe. He also wrote the nonfiction books The Gambling Secrets of Nick the Greek and The Thief: The Autobiography of Wayne Burke, and ghostwrote more than forty books and several screenplays. Thackrey Jr. died in 2001.
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