T. Boyle - Riven Rock

O‘Kane had long since recovered from his injuries, but the right knee was still a bit tricky and recalcitrant and he did walk with a pronounced limp, as the doctor had predicted, the right foot forever half a step behind the left. It ached when it rained, and sometimes when it wasn’t raining too, and he had a hell of a time keeping up with Mr. McCormick when their morning walk turned into a footrace. Still, he was reasonably fit for a forty-six-year-old former athlete, and he was able to intercept Mr. McCormick just as Mr. McCormick, his arms spread wide, had managed to back Nurse Gleason up against the barred window beside the sofa. O’Kane came in swiftly from the rear and got him in a headlock while Nurse Gleason shooed at his stiff red member as if it had a mind and life of its own, which apparently it did.

Immediately, the frenzy came into Mr. McCormick’s shoulders and he took O‘Kane for a wild ride round the room, a four-legged jig, furniture flying and Mr. McCormick pulling the air in through his nostrils in deep whinnying snorts. “No, no, no, no! ” he cried, his usual refrain, trying all the while to throw O’Kane off his back and work his jaws round to bite the inside of his arm. Two minutes, three, they kept whirling and grunting, both of them, O‘Kane gasping out truncated pleas and reproaches, Nurse Gleason maneuvering on the periphery, till finally they both tumbled onto the couch, O’Kane never relaxing his grip and Mr. McCormick’s erection pointing staight up in the air. It was then that Nurse Gleason moved in, her face like a big granite block crashing down on them both, and she performed an old nurse’s trick with a hard repeated fillip of thumb and index finger that wilted Mr. McCormick’s erection like a flower starved of water.

No one was hurt, nothing broken that couldn’t be fixed, and when Mr. McCormick, gone lax and sheepish, promised to behave himself, O‘Kane let him go. And that was it, that was the end of it. Bowing his head and mumbling an apology, he limped off into the bedroom, dragging his right foot, and a moment later O’Kane got up and went into the room to help him dress.

Nothing was said about the incident, and Mr. McCormick did a creditable job with the breakfast Giovannella sent up, but he was fretting over something, that much was evident. He kept repeating himself, something about Dr. Kempf, but wouldn’t respond when O‘Kane questioned him, and after breakfast he began to pace up and down the room, jerking his head and arms out to one side as if he were trying to pull an invisible garment over his head. This went on for an hour or so, and then he came over and sat beside O’Kane on the couch, a flux of emotions playing across his face. “Ed-Eddie,” he said, “I–I want to, because they’re taking Riven Rock and Doctor — Doctor Kempf too, I—” And he broke off, looked O‘Kane dead in the eye and lowered his voice. “Eddie,” he said, all trace of a stammer gone, “I want to get out of here. Let me out of here. Use your keys. Please. Use your keys.”

O‘Kane had been looking over his letter again, electrified with the idea of it — sure the market was going to go up, sure it would — and he’d just sealed the check in the envelope when his employer stopped pacing and sat down beside him. They were two millionaires sitting there — or one millionaire and a millionaire in potentio, because with Jim Isringhausen the sky was the limit. “You know I can’t do that, Mr. McCormick,” O’Kane said.

“B-but Dr. Kempf’s not, not here, I mean — today. Be-because—”

“Because he’s on vacation. He explained that to you last week. You remember, don’t you?” In fact, Kempf was tied up at the trial, defending himself and Freud in front of a roomful of lawyers, reporters and McCormicks, but Mr. McCormick, on strictest orders, was to know nothing of that. Each morning Nick went through the newspapers with a pair of scissors and excised any reference to what was going on in the courtroom downtown.

“Don‘t — don’t you bullshit me, Eddie. I’m not crazy and I’m — I’m not stupid. I know what — I know what’s going on. Let me out. For a d-drive, I mean, just a drive. I‘m — I’m nervous, Eddie, and you know how a drive always calms me. Please?”

And here was where O‘Kane’s judgment let him down. They were shorthanded, and so a drive would involve just Roscoe up front and himself, Mr. McCormick and Nurse Gleason in back, and there was risk in that, especially given Mr. McCormick’s mood that morning. But it would be nice to get out, the day grainy and close and pregnant with something — rain, he supposed, more rain — and they could stop for sandwiches to go and maybe a little pull at a bottle of something to speed up the future of his thirty-five hundred bucks, which he could also slip into a postbox because it wasn’t doing one lick of good sitting in his pocket. Kempf wasn’t there. Mart wasn’t there. The Ice Queen wasn’t even close.

O‘Kane gave him his richest smile. “Sure, okay,” he said. “Why not? Let’s go for a drive.”

It was raining by the time they swung through the gate, the mountains just a rumor in a sky that started at the treetops, everything heroically glistening and the road a black wet tongue lapping at the next road and the next one beyond that. Mr. McCormick, his eyes bright and his lips tightly tethered, sat between O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason in a yellow rain slicker, the hood pulled up over his head. Nurse Gleason wasn’t saying anything — she didn’t like this, not one bit — but to Roscoe, exiled up front, it was business as usual. And here was the rain, fat wet pellets bursting on the hood of the car and trailing down the windows like the tears of heaven, as O’Kane’s mother would say, the very tears of heaven.

They got soft drinks and sandwiches at a drugstore downtown, Roscoe doing the honors while O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason sat stiffly in the car on either side of their employer, and what the hell, O’Kane was thinking, better to get him out than keep him cooped up in that parlor all day and him feeling the way he was, so agitated and disturbed — and it was Kempf who was nuts if he didn’t think Mr: McCormick knew exactly what was going on. They ate in the car, windows steamed, Mr. McCormick going through two tuna-salad-on-ryes and a bottle and a half of ginger ale, O‘Kane unwrapping his own sandwich — roast beef and horseradish sauce — with a maximum of show and crinkling of waxed paper to mask the fact that he was surreptitiously spiking his ginger ale with a good jolt from the pint bottle Roscoe had picked up for him.

Lunch seemed to improve everybody’s mood, and they drove east of town toward Ojai for a while and then swung back along the coast road, the rain slackening and then picking up again before falling off to an atomized drizzle. “Let-let’s drive by the B-Biltmore,” Mr. McCormick said, and then, “Turn left here, Roscoe,” and Roscoe obeyed because Mr. McCormick was the boss. In a sense.

The Biltmore was on Channel Drive, just off Olive Mill, and it had been erected two years earlier to cater to the tastes of the itinerant tycoons in the wake of the Potter’s incineration and the New Arlington’s destruction in the quake. It was quite the place, a hundred and seventy-five luxurious rooms, ballroom, dining room, tennis courts and all the rest — and right on the ocean too, for ocean bathing and lolling richly and idly on the confectionery beach. Mr. McCormick had never of course been inside nor had he even set foot on the grounds, but he often asked to drive slowly by it and get a look at who was passing through its portals, women included — especially women. And that was all right, as long as he didn’t try to get out of the car, but on this particular day they found their way blocked by the train heading south to Los Angeles, the crossguard down, the rain misting around them, the trees and succulents and sharp-leafed exotic shrubs all shining with it, eight cars in the line ahead of them. The train creaked and rattled, brakes whining, the slow backward illusion of the wheels caught in suspended time.