Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

He holds the back of his hand up to his forehead like he’s seen people do and his forehead feels warm. A fever? Or just the result of stress and a very, very hot day? He cups his hands under the tap and fills them with water and splashes his face. He immediately feels better, but without his fingers pinching the bandage on his leg tight it slides down to around his foot. His tears become lost in the water on his face. He wishes his mother was here. Either one.

He turns on the shower. He steps inside and lets the water run over his leg. He can feel the infection being washed away from the surface, but at the same time he can feel it inching its way through his body. He doesn’t have to see it to know it’s there. He scrubs at the wound with a facecloth. The gash is about the length of his finger and about as deep and as wide, a long furrow that an inch to the left would have had the bullet missing completely and an inch to the right have had it buried deep into his leg, severing one of those thick veins in there that would cause him to bleed out. It’s not bleeding as much as earlier, even with all the scrubbing, but it is still bleeding. The shower feels good. He has the water temperature set so it’s cool but not too cold. He spends enough time in there for the pads of his fingers to wrinkle, then he climbs out and dries himself down. The itch has faded, but he still needs to do something with the wound.

He doesn’t want to lose the leg.

Doesn’t want to die.

Can’t go to hospital.

Doesn’t want to lie down in the same bed as one of the Twins because the infection would only become more infected.

He goes outside and holds a clean medical pad over the wound, carrying Cooper’s manuscript with him. He sits on the porch. There’s a wooden swing chair that would fit two people, he rocks it slowly back and forth and it relaxes him. It’s too dark to read yet, and he can’t be bothered going back inside to turn on the porch light. The fields around him look pale blue from the moon. In four or five hours the sky will start to lighten. He’s never seen that happen before, and suddenly he is desperate to watch his first sunrise, liking the idea that one day he and Cooper may sit out here on the porch enjoying it together.

I hit the same string of drag racers. They’re going just as slowly, flashing their lights and tooting their horns and I have to drive alongside them at an intersection that I can’t get through because they’ve blocked it. I get boxed in and flick on my sirens, but it only makes things worse because then they purposely keep me trapped. It takes me fifteen minutes to get past them. The police radio spits out more news, mainly that there are now over two thousand drag racers on the roads, so far six arrests have been made and six cars impounded, and one pedestrian run over and in the hospital with minor wounds. Drag racers are outnumbering the police, outnumbering all the gangs in the country, they’re an epidemic for which there is no solution.

I park outside the halfway house wishing I was armed. There aren’t any gang members walking any dogs up the street so I take my chances and step out. It’s still at least seventy degrees and the armpits of my shirt are soaking wet.

Buttons is sitting on the porch out front with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It’s almost one-thirty. He’s still wearing the same fedora and shirt and looks the same amount of out-of-place as he did when he answered the door for me earlier today.

“You’re up late,” I tell him.

“I don’t sleep much. Never have. I knew you were going to be coming back,” he says. “Ritchie is upstairs in his bedroom, most likely fast asleep. He doesn’t know much, you know.”

“I’m not here to talk to him,” I say.

“Yeah? You after the Preacher? He’s inside somewhere.”

I shake my head. “I’m here to talk to you. Jesse Cartman said you’d know about the Twins.”

“Jesse Cartman said that now, did he?” he asks, then takes a long drink. “What else did he say?”

“He called you Buttons, ” I say, looking at the inside of his arm where all the cigarette burns are lined up in a row, each about the size and shape of a button. “What’s your name?” I ask him. “Your real name?”

“Henry,” he says. “Henry Taub,” he says, and doesn’t offer me his hand.

“You were at Grover Hills?”

“For nearly thirty years, son,” he says.

“Preacher didn’t mention it,” I tell him.

“He wouldn’t have,” Henry says. “He’s good like that.”

“So you know everything that went on out there.”

He smiles meekly. “Almost. You want to know about the Twins, right?”

“How’d you know?”

“I always knew somebody would want to know. What did Cart-man tell you, son?”

“That they were letting people die down in the Scream Room.”

“You believe that?”

“No, but there are some bodies showing up.”

“Hmm, is that so? So, what do you believe?”

“I believe they were doing something down there.”

“You’d be right to believe that, but foolish to believe much else of what Jesse Cartman tells you. The boy’s not right in the head,” he says, tapping the side of his hat. “None of them are.”

“And you?”

“We all believe what we’re saying, son, but there’s a big difference: I’m believing things the way they actually happened.”

“Then fill me in.”

He takes a long swallow of beer. “I s’pose I could,” he says, “but the way I see it, you’ve been paying everybody else for their side of things. Why should I be no different?”

“Because you seem like a man with some pride,” I tell him, “and not somebody who’d hold back when what he tells me could save the life of a seventeen-year-old girl.”

“That’s true,” he tells me, “but a man still needs to know where his next drink is coming from.”

“I’ll fix you up when this is over,” I tell him.

“Is that you believing what you’re saying, or you saying the way it’s going to be?” he asks.

“That’s the way it’s going to be. I promise.”

He takes another sip and then stares at me hard for a good few seconds, taking my measure as I’m sure he’d say. “Sounds good enough to me,” he says, finishes his beer, and opens another. “Can I get you one?” I shake my head. “It started out innocently enough, you know,” he says. “Way back fifteen years, give or take a year or two. Young fella came along. Real cocky little shit. Not much more than twenty. Could have been twenty-five, but no older. We all knew he wasn’t crazy, just mean, and mean and crazy are two different things, only the courts didn’t see it. He used to brag about how he fooled them. Used to tell us how clever he really was, and how he was going to be free in a couple of months. Courts placed him with us because he killed a girl. Just killed her because he felt like it, he told us. A young pretty little girl not much more than ten. He was with us a week when that girl’s dad came along. I can still remember seeing him outside in the parking lot. He looked nervous, like he was summoning up the courage to ask a pretty big question. You ever seen a man like that? The pain of what he wants to ask is written all over his face. I took one look at him and knew what he wanted. Then he just chose somebody. Saw somebody in a white uniform and went up to him, and that person saw the same thing I did. Never knew what he said, not exactly, but I knew what he wanted. We got TV in there. Some of us knew what was going on out in the world, and I knew who he was. The orderly he spoke to was one of the Twins. Back then the Scream Room was only a punishment. Bad things happened down there, but not real bad. The dad, he offered them money. Told them he’d like some time alone with the guy that hurt his daughter. The Twins, they sold him that time. The guy returned that night after most of the staff and nurses had gone. I saw him pull into the parking lot through my window and an hour later I saw him pull away. That boy, we never saw him again.”