The Extinction Event

by David Black

Jack looked around. Looked at the sky. Disoriented.

  Was he stumbling in the right direction to get to Caroline’s?

  Hudson was behind him. North. Northish.

  That made sense.

  That’s the direction the train had been going.

  Jack realized he was not thinking as cogently as he had assumed.

  Caroline’s house—her uncle’s house—was north of Hudson.

  Through Mycenae. Along the river.

  Jack’s head throbbed. His ribs, his back, his side—everything hurt.

  Without looking down, he touched his thigh. His hand came back wet with blood.

  Jack leaned against a tree and took deep breaths.

  The only thing to do was to keep walking.

  3

  The woods ended with a scrim of pillarlike trees, backlit by a moonlit backyard. A hand-painted sign shaped like a pointing hand said See 3.6 Million Year Old Hominid Fossilized Footprints Next to Dinosaur Footprints: Proof Man Lived With Lizards—$10.

  A homemade exhibit.

  Jack blinked at the fossils next to a slab of concrete with the imprints of a high-arched human, modern foot, maybe thirty years old.

  The sign looked worn.

  On the other side of the footprints was another worn sign that asked: What killed the dinosaurs?

  The sign was decorated with a faded cartoon of two running velociraptors, a tyrannosaurus, a brontosaurus, and three pterodactyls, all fleeing from a bloody-looking comet with a face and fangs.

  The exhibit might have been popular twenty years ago. Maybe.

  Closer to the house was a broken seesaw and a rusty swing set. The breeze rattled the chairs as if ghostly kids were pushing each other.

  The house was dark.

  Beside the side door was a propane canister, looking like a space probe.

  On the road in front of the house, Jack checked his watch and headed north—past a closed farm store with its empty plywood bins, past Harvey’s Meat Company, past the twenty-foot tall ad for Stan the Vegetable Man, a figure made up of zucchini legs, pumpkin chest, corn arms, grinning tomato head. A Knish-O-Rama, abandoned by a couple from the Catskills across the river who thought to expand their franchise.

  Walking along the Taconic Parkway, Jack saw a car driven by an elderly man, sharp chin, leaning back in seat with, in the seat behind him, a huge, stuffed toy gorilla in a porkpie hat.

  A battered pickup truck stopped on the other side of the road.

  Jack half ran, half hobbled to the median, glanced to his right—no oncoming cars—and approached the truck.

  The driver—a kid with a soul patch on his chin—leaned out his window and asked, “You need a lift?”

  Jack, his throat bruised, croaked yes.

  As Jack climbed into the passenger seat, the kid surveyed him, “Looks like you’ve had an interesting night.”

  Jack nodded.

  “I’m going as far as Hudson,” the kid said. “Warren and Fourth. I can drop you off at the police station.”

  “No police,” Jack croaked.

  “Didn’t think so,” the kid said, grinning.

  In Hudson, Jack hailed a taxi.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  1

  The trees around Caroline’s house were hung with bars of deodorant soap to discourage the deer. Unsuccessfully.

  Half a dozen deer stood in the yard. Like Balinese shadow puppets.

  The front door was unlocked.

  Jack entered.

  In the living room to his right, Caroline, Nicole, and Dixie were playing chamber music. Caroline played a violin. Nicole leaned over a cello like an animal over a scrap, scraping away ferociously. Dixie, in a tattered, old-fashioned, red smoking jacket, played the piano, working the pedals as if he were taking a curve in the Indianapolis 500.

  Her back to Jack, Caroline said, “It’s harder to get my fourth finger on the F-sharp. Bach is still Bach.”

  The piano was painted bright red. The room’s drapes were red. The walls were red. On the piano, lying in front of the score, was a red Pentel pen.

  “My better-red-than-dead red,” Dixie said, serenely catching sight of Jack with his peripheral vision.

  “My God,” Caroline said.

  She put down her instrument and ran to Jack.

  Her knees clutching the cello and pointing her bow at Jack, Nicole, thinking she was joking, said, “You look like someone tried to kill you.”

  “The linoleum cutter slipped,” Jack said, “and I fell down the stairs.”

  Nicole laughed.

  She’d never been to Jack’s shack and didn’t know it had no stairs.

  “And you came all the way over here for Caroline’s care and tending,” Nicole said. “How touching.”

  “Caroline’s a good nurse,” Dixie said.

  “I hope you left a trail of blood,” Nicole said, “so you can find your way home.”

  “You should spend the night,” Caroline said.

  When Jack heaved himself up to go into the bathroom off the front hall, Nicole called after him, “We’re trying to go easy on the environment. I only use three squares of toilet paper for every flush.”

  Under his breath, Jack said, “I’m glad I don’t have to do your laundry!”

  2

  After Jack showered, the blood from his razor cut circling, diluted, down the drain, he toweled off, soaking a towel with blood—even though he had made a tourniquet from his ripped shirt.

  When Caroline handed in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, Jack said, “Better get me an old robe.”

  Caroline slipped into the steamy bathroom.

  When she saw the blood pooling on the floor, she sagged.

  Jack caught her.

  “You have to go to the hospital,” Caroline said.

  “It’s slowing down,” Jack said.

  “Please,” Caroline said.

  “If it’s still bleeding in half an hour,” Jack said. “Get me some hydrogen peroxide. Gauze if you’ve got it. Adhesive tape…”

  Caroline put her hands on Jack’s cheeks and kissed him so hard she bruised his lips.

  While she was gone, Jack, light-headed, sat on the closed toilet seat. He stared at the floor. At the molding. Which had a complicated pattern of grooves. Hard to keep clean. Maybe that’s why rich people favored complicated molding? To prove they could afford to keep it clean?

  The molding in the bathroom was immaculate.

  The neon tubes flanking the mirror buzzed.

  The shower dripped.

  On the shelf above the sink, reflected in the mirror, was a glass bottle of Geo F. Trumper after-shave, some Flomax, and mint dental floss.

  The shower dripped.

  A branch tapped the window. As if trying to get Jack’s attention.

  Across the lawn, a deer turned its head. Reflected light gave the deer X-ray eyes.

  Jack forced himself to examine the vaginal-looking wound. Something out of Dali.

  Caroline came back with the medical supplies. She watched as Jack poured the hydrogen peroxide on the wound. The hydrogen peroxide foamed.

  Jack put gauze on the cut and taped it into place.

  The exposed edge of gauze was red, damp with blood.

  “I should’ve killed the son of a bitch,” he said.

  “It’s going to leave an ugly scar,” Caroline said.

  “I know.” Jack grinned.

  “Take two,” Caroline said, spilling a dozen pills into Jack’s hand. “Dixie’s Percodan.”

  Jack popped three into his mouth.

  He told Caroline what had happened.

  “Have you noticed anyone following you?” Jack asked.

  Caroline shook her head no.

  “The police?” Caroline asked.

  “I don’t know if that would help,” Jack said, thinking of Sciortino’s warnings. “I need a drink.”

  “You just took three Percodan,” Caroline said.

  “I told you I didn’t need a cop,” he said.

>   “Hey, Jack,” Caroline said, “I didn’t throw you off the train.”

  “Nobody threw me off the train,” he said. “I pushed myself off.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  There was a silence.

  “It’s stopped bleeding,” Jack said.

  “Almost,” she said.

  Another silence.

  “I just don’t want you to die of an accidental overdose,” she explained.

  Jack grinned and said in a phony accent, “Strong like ox.”

  Caroline grinned and said, “Stupid like ox.”

  This silence had a different quality from the other two.

  “Ox,” Caroline said softly.

  She knelt at his feet, wiping up the congealing blood. In the closed room, she could smell the blood’s coppery smell.

  “I want to lick the blood off your leg,” she said.

  “Now, I’ll have to keep my window closed against vampires,” Jack said.

  3

  Before they went out to Dixie and Nicole, Caroline told Jack that she’d found no connection between Keating and the college.

  “He must have some other influence,” she said.

  “I’ll poke around,” Jack said, “call some old friends. Shapiro was fired after he got involved in that electrical pollution case.”

  “I’ll see if Keating has any connection with the electric company,” Caroline said.

  “What are you two doing in there?” Nicole called.

  She knocked on the door.

  “Your sister’s helping fix me up,” Jack called back.

  “I’ll bet she is,” Nicole said.

  “I think she’s jealous you have a boyfriend,” Jack said to Caroline.

  “She’s jealous you have a wound,” Caroline said. “She likes being the only martyr in the neighborhood.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  1

  Singing alternate dirty lyrics to “You’re the Top,” Dixie leaned over the piano keys and hit the last note with his index finger, his thumb cocked as if he were pretending his hand were a gun. Like Chico Marx.

  “The lyrics Cole Porter used to sing at parties,” Dixie said. “When he lived in Williamstown.”

  A trickle of blood wormed down Jack’s leg, over his ankle into his shoe.

  “He claimed they were written by Irving Berlin,” Dixie said.

  Jack took a clean rag from the pile Caroline had put on the arm of the horsehair sofa and wiped it away.

  The wound was clotting.

  “Thick blood,” Jack had told Caroline. “Comes from growing up messing with cars. Some people have greasepaint in their blood. Some have printer’s ink. I’ve got crankcase oil.”

  “I’ve got some filthy Larry Hart lyrics, never recorded,” Dixie said.

  “Jack doesn’t want to hear your cabaret act, Dixie,” Nicole said.

  “Mabel Mercer—” Dixie started.

  “Maybe I should put another towel down. Under my foot,” Jack said. “I don’t want to ruin your carpet.”

  “Rug,” Nicole corrected him.

  “—taught me the lyrics the night we all got drunk at El Morocco—”

  “It’s from Kurdistan,” Nicole said. “See the tiny horses along the inside left?”

  “Angelo, the maitre d’, taught them to her,” Dixie said.

  “It’s a Mina Khani pattern,” Nicole said.

  “I think Jack’s got other things on his mind right now,” Caroline said.

  Jack felt a metallic taste rising in his throat.

  “It belonged to Dixie’s grandfather,” Nicole said about the rug. “My great-grandfather.”

  Jack took a swig of his bourbon.

  “That night,” Dixie said, “we all drove up to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house in Austerlitz,” Dixie said. “She’d been dead for years, but her sister still lived there.”

  “The rug’s irreplaceable,” Nicole said.

  Caroline sighed and said, “I’ll get another towel.”

  “We arrived at dawn,” Dixie said. “She gave us breakfast and then showed home movies from when her sister lived in the same brownstone as Cary Grant—Archie Leach back then. He’s trying to teach her to stilt walk.”

  The living room windows were double paned. Cloudy stains looked like nebulae caught between the two sheets of glass.

  “You’re looking at my collection of antique false teeth,” Dixie said to Jack. “I specialize in pre-World War Two.”

  Jack—who hadn’t noticed the collection—followed Dixie’s glance to the fireplace mantelpiece, where a dozen pink-and-white dentures grinned, disembodied, at him.

  Dixie got up from the piano bench and settled in one of the Duncan Phyfe Sheraton chairs flanking the fireplace.

  “My nieces think my collection odd,” Dixie said.

  “Freaky,” Nicole said.

  Caroline came back with a dark red towel, which she spread over the blue towel under Jack’s foot.

  “If the blood stain doesn’t come out,” Caroline said to Nicole, “it will blend in.”

  “Bitch,” Nicole said.

  “Bully,” Caroline said.

  Jack took another swig of bourbon.

  “But dentures are no odder than other things people collect,” Dixie said.

  “God, Caroline,” Nicole said, “he’s going to tell about the guy in New Paltz who collects the shit of famous people.”

  Jack’s leg throbbed.

  “I should go,” he said, low, to Caroline.

  “You can’t walk,” Caroline said.

  “Then,” Dixie said, “there was that rare-book collector in Philadelphia who bought Napoleon’s penis.”

  “Caroline,” Nicole said, “Dixie’s talking about Napoleon’s penis again!”

  Jack finished his drink and poured himself another brimful glass.

  “It’ll dehydrate you,” Caroline said.

  “It’ll help kill the pain,” Jack said.

  “You already had three Percodan,” Caroline said.

  “My roommate at Deerfield collected Tijuana bibles,” Dixie said. “Pornographic satires of comic strips. Blondie and Dagwood. Blondie has the biggest bosom of any cartoon character.”

  “I should go home,” Jack said.

  “Bigger than Tootsie,” Dixie said.

  “You should go to the emergency room,” Caroline said.

  “Art, rat, tar,” Dixie announced.

  Jack, Caroline, and Nicole looked at him.

  “All have the same three letters,” Dixie said.

  “Dixie,” Nicole said, “you’re drunk.”

  “And you’re getting drunk,” Caroline said to Jack. “It’s not smart to drink with painkillers.”

  “It’s been weeks since I’ve done anything smart,” Jack said. “Years.” He took a slug of the bourbon. “My whole life.”

  “I’ll get you some coffee,” Caroline said.

  “My wife,” Dixie said, “came from the last generation of women to travel with hatboxes.”

  “I’ll get it myself,” Jack said.

  Jack hobbled across the room to the sideboard, which held a twelve-cup coffee urn.

  “Coal chutes and straw on blocks of ice,” Dixie said. “The scissor man and the junk-dealer’s horse-drawn cart,” sounding like Jack, when he was trying to convince Caroline he was too old for her.

  “For God’s sake, Jack,” Nicole said, “take a towel with you.”

  “You’re all in Technicolor,” Dixie said.

  “You’ll ruin the rug,” Nicole said.

  “I live a black-and-white life,” Dixie said.

  Jack put a cup under the coffee spigot and depressed the handle. The cup filled. When Jack pushed the handle back upright, the coffee kept pouring.

  “There’s something wrong,” Caroline said, getting up.

  Coffee spilled over Jack’s cup.

  “The spigot’s broken,” Caroline said, trying to help Jack stop the flow. “It’s burning your hand.”

 
Caroline grabbed Jack’s cup out of the way.

  Nicole watched horrified as the coffee urn emptied itself onto the Kurdistan rug.

  Jack said, “You people are nuts!”

  He stomped from the room, slamming out the front door.

  “Jack,” Caroline called.

  She ran to the door. Opened it.

  But Jack had flagged down a car and was climbing into it.

  Inside the house, Dixie was saying, “I don’t think I want to be cremated after all. I want a headstone.”

  Caroline watched the car pull away. Heard the change in pitch as the car changed gears.

  She closed the door behind her and came back into the living room.

  “Now, see what you’ve done?” Caroline said to Dixie and Nicole. “You’ve driven him away.”

  “Did you notice the back of Jack’s head?” Dixie said. “The low bulge? Above the middle part of the cerebellum? Phrenologically speaking, that indicates philoprogenitiveness. Jack will make a good father.”

  2

  Fuck them, Jack thought as he settled in the car he’d flagged down.

  “I almost hit you, standing in the middle of the street like that,” the guy driving said. A wiry man in jeans and white T-shirt. The right sleeve was folded up over a pack of Camels. His short red hair stood straight up.

  “What happened to your leg, man?” the driver asked.

  “My girlfriend bit me,” Jack said.

  “Cool,” the driver said.

  When Jack saw the pistol angling out of the driver’s belt, the driver said, “Don’t worry, fella, I got a carry permit. You don’t think I’d of picked you up if I was traveling light, do you?”

  With his left hand the driver reached across his body and unfolded the pack of cigarettes, which he shook, held up to his lips, plugging a cigarette into his mouth.

  “Want a smoke?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” Jack said.

  The driver tossed the pack onto the dashboard. From his pocket, he took a lighter with a picture of a bathing beauty on its plastic side.

  When the lighter was upside down—as it was in his hand—the bathing beauty was naked. Her flesh the color of a baby’s pacifier. The driver turned the lighter right side up. A white one-piece bathing suit slid over the naked body. He lit the cigarette, slit his eyes as he inhaled.

  “Don’t sit on the Windex,” the driver said.

  Jack moved the plastic Windex bottle from behind him, where it was half tucked into the seat.