Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Well, she wasn’t going to drink today. She had fourteen months of sobriety in the bank. And not a penny more. Hank had tied up every cent he owned in the trust.

Trust had sure turned into a funny word around this house.

Jolene took a deep breath. Earl always started out intending to do it by the rules. Just trying to help, he’d taken Cliff Stovall off for a heart-to-heart, to convince him to open the trust. She didn’t know the details, but she could guess. Earl got mad. So far, no cops had come snooping around.

And the bills. .

Jesus Christ, when she faced the idea of the bills she thought of the scene in Jaws when Roy Scheider first sees the shark and he jerks back-like whoa. Now, like Roy, she needed a bigger boat.

She shook her head and let her eyes drift back out the window to the woodpile. She could not imagine Earl yanking out the maul, splitting the wood, stacking it in tidy rows. He enjoyed watching it burn, all right, in the fireplace but it never occurred to him to go out and split more when it ran out. For all his pampered muscles, Earl refused to sweat outside a gym. He was the future, he’d said. In the future, the third-worlders would do the physical work. Mexicans, probably.

She looked out the window for a few more moments at the hungry cardinal and the brown leaves and the gray sky. The morning was like a moody song from an oldies station: sentimental. Perfect for feeling sorry for herself. Perfect for stinking-thinking.

It was one of her favorite alcoholic fantasies: being rescued. And a lot of men had come to grief on it, walking into a dark barroom and seeing her marooned on a bar stool.

That’s what had been so perfect about meeting Hank. She met him sober. I know I was bad, but just give me this one chance and I promise I’ll be so good. .

Hank had rescued her, all right, but Jolene saw right away that his ex-wife had handled the finances. Hank was lost around money.

The hammer fell about ninety minutes after she got to the intensive care unit at Regions in St. Paul. A neurologist had been called in to evaluate Hank; his workup and consulting was costing hundreds of dollars a minute.

Then this square-shaped lady in a maroon and black business suit had trampled though the blue-garbed medics like a rhino trashing a patch of petunias. She had pointed out that Hank Sommer’s Blue Cross policy had lapsed because of nonpayment of premiums.

Private pay.

Boy, those two words could empty a hospital ward of smiles real fast.

Well, no way could she keep him in the hospital at two, three grand a day. Milt Dane protested, said she couldn’t just take him AMA-against medical advice. Jolene, mad, said, “Watch me.” Hank had already had a feeding tube inserted, so Earl borrowed a wheelchair and they brought Hank home in Earl’s van.

A bad move that almost alienated Milt, which she could not afford to do. Now she was smoothing that over; in the meantime, until Milt put Hank in a fancy nursing home, she was working round the clock, playing nurse. And while she was sure that Milt worried about her not sleeping, the real reason he wanted Hank in that home was so he could check on him without running into Earl, whom he despised.

Riiiinggg.

An alarm went off. Every two hours alarms went off. Feeding alarms, turning alarms, range of motion alarms, bathing alarms. She heard Earl coming up the basement stairs.

“Great. Another nice guy who just wants to help out. Oh, I can drop off the Ford, no problem,” Earl said, mimicking Broker’s voice. “I hope him and Allen don’t trip all over each other.”

Earl wore an electric-yellow T-shirt with a War Wolf logo in Day-Glo blue. He’d scissored out the sleeves to show off his biceps. The shirt was a size too small and clung to his torso and wadded around his hips, clearly revealing the deep-cut ripple of his abdominal muscles and the curve of his belly above the tops of his jeans which he wore without underwear and very low on his hips, with a shadow of pubic hair peeking up and over.

Earl was unshaven and his hair was moussed and he was into looking like Brad Pitt in Fight Club this week. The stud in his ear and the cannabis shine to his blue eyes had the same tight sparkle. Jolene didn’t really care for Earl swinging his abs back and forth in her kitchen. “You’re losing your pants,” she said.

Earl smiled. “You didn’t used to mind that.”

“Why don’t you grow up,” she said.

“Aren’t we sounding grandiose today,” he quipped back. He knew all the AA jive and where all her buttons were. He’d started patrolling the house, peeking in cabinets and drawers, looking for hidden bottles of vodka.

A static sound between a dry-heaving pant and a raving growl shushed their little spat. The sound came from a white plastic baby monitor on the counter. The monitors were Jolene’s idea; she had placed them throughout the house to help her keep track of Hank.

Earl said, “C’mon, it’s feeding time.”

To him it was a fairy tale. He was Jack and he’d climbed the beanstalk and had stumbled on the mythic goose and now all he had to do was keep the goose alive until it squeezed out the golden egg. Hank’s care and feeding were a serious, round-the-clock commitment.

They went down a flight of circular stairs, through the bedroom, and out on the full-season porch that ran most of the length of the back of the house.

Hank was pink-cheeked and clean shaven, with spittle drooling down his chin. He wore a pair of diapers and a hospital gown and was propped up in a railed Hil-Rom hospital bed, fidgeting slightly back and forth. His neck twitched, his eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets. He could move his lips and tongue. The feed bag hung on an IV tree above him and a strap buckled his chest as a precaution against pitching off the bed. Allen said the movements were just spasms, involuntary. Sometimes Hank’s eyes would burn on her so intensely that she was sure he was in there, watching.

Jolene squared her shoulders and went into the room.

Actually, it was good that he lurched around; it gave him a fighting chance against the bedsores. For the last five days she had followed a strict schedule that included turning and repositioning Hank side to side every two hours-feeding and hydrating him, manipulating his arms and legs in passive range-of-motion exercises twice a day, bathing him, constantly swabbing his mouth and gums with a suction wand, and changing his diapers, which Allen referred to as adult pads.

First she wiped his chin and checked his throat. She picked up the electric suction wand and cleaned away excess saliva and mucus from his teeth and gums.

Earl took a can of Ensure from a case of the product, opened it with a church key, and dumped it in the continuously running gravity drip which spiked off the bag that connected to his stomach tube.

He tossed the can at the wastepaper basket by the door. Missed. The empty clattered on the hardwood floor. Earl licked a finger. “Yum, yum. Prune dip, my favorite.”

“Knock it off, Earl,” Jolene said. “And pick up the goddamn can.”

Earl grumbled and retrieved the can and tossed it in the basket, backhanded. “He scores.”

She cut him with a stare.

He sneered back. He didn’t like it when she’d sheared off her hair. Or when she’d brought in the single bed to sleep next to Hank at night. He thought the hair and the single-bed routine were overwrought theatrical gestures.

“Hey, c’mon; we need a little gallows humor to break the mood around here,” he said. Laughing, he backed off and then, goddamn him-just to be coarse, he tipped a few books from the bookcase as he was going out the door, like a mean little kid.

Jolene smoothed a hand through her shorn hair, took a deep breath to steady herself, and, as she swung her eyes around the room, she met her reflection in the mirror framed in the bookshelves. She was sunken-cheeked, haggard. Red around the eyes like a speed freak on a long burn. Still. .