T. Boyle - Riven Rock

O‘Kane wasn’t much of a reader himself, and he doubted that even the second coming of Christ and all his trumpeting angels, enacted live in the railway car, would have had much effect on Mr. McCormick in his present condition. But she was paying the bills, and O’Kane was on his way to California. “Of course, we’ll be happy to read to him,” he said, trying on his smile of depthless sincerity, the one he’d used on every woman and girl who’d ever crossed his path till Rosaleen caught up with him. “You can rest assured on that score.”

But now, rocking gently in the moving doorway and staring down at the insensate form of his employer and the broad bristling plane of the back of Mart’s head nodding over the open book, he saw that if anything, poor Mr. McCormick would have to dream his own books in his poor blocked hallucinatory mind. “Hey, Mart,” he said, “I’m going down for a cup of coffee and maybe a bite of something — you want anything?”

Mart swung round in his seat and gave him a faraway look, the spread wings of the book taking flight across his lap. All three of the Thompson brothers had been born with enormous heads, like bulldogs — and it was a wonder their mother survived any of them — yet it didn’t seem to affect them like some of the hydrocephalics you saw on the ward. No one would mistake any of the brothers for a genius, but they got on well enough — especially Nick — and Pat and Mart would lay down their lives for you. Mart wasn’t too good with sums, and simple division was beyond him, but he was a reader, and aside from the fact that there was too much space between his eyebrows and his hairline and he had to have his hats specially made, you’d never know he was any different from anybody else. Besides, when you came right down to it, it didn’t exactly take a Thomas Edison to pin a delusional paranoic to the floor or usher a bunch of halfwits out into the yard for a little exercise.

“Good book?” O‘Kane asked.

“Huh?” Mart scratched the back of his head, blunt fingers digging in luxuriously and fanning white to the white scalp beneath. “Oh, yeah, sure. It’s a sea story.”

O‘Kane tried again. “You want a cup of coffee from the diner?”

Mart had to think about it. He let the flecks of his eyes settle on O‘Kane as the train shook itself down the length of its couplings and thundered over a rough patch of the roadway, reminding them that, appearances to the contrary, they weren’t in a house, hotel or saloon but hurtling through the fall of night at speeds faster than any human being was meant to travel.

The book suddenly snapped shut like a set of jaws and sailed across the compartment; O‘Kane had to brace himself against the doorframe to keep from pitching forward into Mart’s lap. Catching himself, he glanced down instinctively at Mr. McCormick, but his employer just lay there undisturbed and unchanged, riding out the rough patch like lint on a blanket, his eyes moist and unblinking, a thin stream of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth and radiating across one cheek. He wore the strangest expression, halfway between mild surprise and unholy terror, as if he’d misplaced something trivial — an umbrella, his checkbook — but in that instant realized it was buried beneath a pile of rotting corpses. His hair was combed and precisely parted and he was dressed in the suit and tie and stiff formal collar the McCormicks insisted upon for his daytime attire, as if they expected him to spring out of bed at any moment, shake it off and go back to the office.

“Black,” Mart said finally. “Two lumps. You going to relieve me soon?”

Still braced in the doorway as the train picked up speed on a straightaway and the wheels settled into a smooth placatory drone, O‘Kane fished out his watch. “I’ve still got an hour or so,” he said. “What I think I’m going to do is sit awhile in the diner or maybe the club car, just for the change of scenery….”

There was no response. Mart just stared at him.

“Mart, it’s a joke — change of scenery?” O‘Kane gestured at the windows and the shadowy blur beyond. Still nothing. He shrugged and gave it up. “Anyway, give me twenty or thirty minutes and I’ll be back with your coffee, okay?”

The train lurched again, a sudden violent jolt that rocked the car like a rowboat, and the book slid back across the floor as if attached to a string. Distracted, Mart never said yea or nay — he merely reached down to pluck up the book and thumb through the pages till he found his place. Then he swung his legs round, adjusted himself in his seat and cleared his throat. “Now, you remember this part of the story, Mr. McCormick,” he said, speaking to a spot on the wall just above the pillow and the frozen drained grimacing mask of their employer’s face. “The shark bit off Mugridge’s foot and Humphrey realized he knew who the lady was.” There was no reaction from Mr. McCormick, and as O‘Kane turned to leave he could hear Mart begin to read in a soft, hesitant voice: “ ’Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on the Ghost which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the discovery of my love for Maud Brewster… ‘ ”

O‘Kane made his way back to the head of the car, his internal gyroscope adjusting to the little leaps and feints of the wheels, thinking he might just stop in the parlor car for the added stimulant of a whiskey or two before he had his coffee. Booze was nothing to him, though it had ruined his father — and his father before him — and he could take it or leave it. Tonight, though, he felt he would take it, and the more he thought about it the more he could taste the premonitory bite of it at the back of his throat and feel the tidal surge of the blood as it carried little whiskey messages to the brain. He was wearing the new suit he’d ordered from Sears, Roebuck even before he ruined the Donegal tweed — both the Mrs. McCormicks insisted that all of Mr. McCormick’s attendants be dressed as proper gentlemen at all times because Mr. McCormick was a gentleman and accustomed to the society of gentlemen — and he stopped a moment to admire his reflection in the barred glass of the doorway. He was looking uncommonly good tonight, he thought, in his Hecht & Co. fancy black-and-blue-plaid worsted with the sheeny black bow tie and brand-new collar — like a swell, like a man who had his money in oranges or Goleta oil. And the suit had only cost him thirteen-fifty at that, though the outlay had exhausted his savings and got Rosaleen screeching and flying around the apartment like some hag on a broom.

At any rate, he’d just turned his key in the lock when he became aware of a sudden sharp hiss behind him, as if someone had let the air out of a balloon, and even as he glanced over his shoulder to see the apparent figure of Mart sailing through the air in defiance of gravity, he didn’t yet appreciate what was happening. It wasn’t until Mr. McCormick burst through the doorway half a second later that O‘Kane made the connection, seeing and understanding wedded in the space of a single heartbeat: Mr. McCormick was loose. Unblocked, untangled, unfrozen. And loose. O’Kane made the connection, but he made a fatal error too. Caught up in the engine of the moment, Mart lying there in a heap against the paneling like an old rug and Nick and Pat already springing up from their cards to intercept their employer and benefactor as he raged down the length of the carpet in a milling frenzy of limbs and feet and fists, O‘Kane surged forward and forgot all about the key.

He was a big man, Mr. McCormick, no doubt about it, thirty-three years old and in his prime, with a gangling reach and the muscle to qualify it, and when the fit was on him he was a match for any man, maybe even the great John L. himself. He never hesitated. Jaws clenched, eyes sunk back into the cavity of his head till they were no human eyes at all, he came on without a word, and Nick, shouting “No, no, Mr. McCormick, no, no!” flung himself at his right side while Pat went for the left.