T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Their efforts were in vain. Nick missed his hold and went sprawling into a low mahogany table in an explosion of crystal, and Pat, who’d managed to lock his arms around Mr. McCormick’s neck and shoulder, took half a dozen sharp jabs to the gut and fell away from him like a wet overcoat. Mr. McCormick wouldn’t listen to reason. Mr. McCormick was in the grip of his demons, and his demons were howling for bloody sacrifice. There was no sense in cautioning him, no sense in wasting breath on mere words, and so O‘Kane just lowered his shoulder and came at him down the full length of the car in a linebacker’s rush. Unfortunately, Mr. McCormick was in motion too, having kicked Pat free of his left foot, and the two met head-on in the center of the car.

They met, of that much O‘Kane was certain, but things were a bit hazy beyond that. Something sharp and bony, some whirling appendage, calcareous and hard, came into contact with the ridge of bone over his left eye and for a moment he wasn’t sure where he was — or even who he was. Mr. McCormick, on the other hand, wasn’t even winded and had somehow managed to stay on his feet, knees and elbows slashing, a sort of long drawn-out whinny coming from deep inside him, goatish and stupid. “Ooooooouuuuuuut!” he seemed to be saying. “Ooooooouuuuuuut!” And then O’Kane was on his knees, Pat and Nick scrabbling behind him, the doctor aroused and livid and shouting out unintelligible commands, and Mr. McCormick was at the door and the door had a key in it and the key was turning under the concerted pressure of Mr. McCormick’s long, dexterous and beautifully manicured fingers.

O‘Kane saw that key and thought his heart would explode. What was he doing? What had he been thinking? That was his key in the lock and Dr. Hamilton would find that out soon enough and give him the dressing down of his life, maybe even sack him for dereliction of duty and yet another violation of the three p’s ( Never allow a patient access to the keys, never!). Even as he sprang desperately forward, O’Kane could see the orange groves and the jasmine-hung patios and wistful señoritas dissolving like a mirage. Sprinting through the car for all he was worth, Nick and Pat at his heels, he could only watch in horror as Mr. McCormick tore open the door and flung himself headlong into the vestibule, already grabbing for the door to the next car… and what sort of car was it? A sleeper. A Pullman sleeper with murals, chandeliers, plush green seats that converted to berths — and women. Women were in that car.

“Stop him!” Nick roared. “He’s got a key!”

But it was too late to stop him. He was already in the adjoining car, his angular frame thrashing from side to side, already reduced to a pair of oscillating shoulders rapidly diminishing down the long tube of the aisle. By the time O‘Kane reached the door of the sleeper, Mr. McCormick was at the far end of it, startled faces gaping pale in his wake, an elderly gentleman sprawled in the middle of the carpet like a swatted fly, the train screeling down the tracks and the whole darkling world violent with the rush of motion. O’Kane was the fastest man in his high school class, a natural athlete, and he poured it on, vaulting the old man, brushing back passengers, porters and conductors alike, but still Mr. McCormick kept his lead, wheezing and bucking his head and throwing out his long legs like stilts. He reached the head of the car, jerked open the door, and disappeared into the next car up the line.

What went through O‘Kane’s head in those frenetic moments was probably little different from what was going on in his employer’s convoluted brain, a whirling instinctual process that supersedes thought and allows the limbic system to take over: it was as simple as chase and flee. O’Kane was pugnacious, smart, tough in the way of the man who could survive anything, anywhere, anytime, and he was determined to have his way. And Stanley? Stanley was like a rubber band twisted back on itself till it was half its normal length and then suddenly released, he was a cork shot from the bottle, a bullet looking for the wall to stop it.

O‘Kane finally caught up with him in the dining car, but only because Mr. McCormick had been distracted by a passenger seated at one of the tables, a passenger who had the misfortune to be of the gender that was both his nemesis and his obsession: a woman. He’d led the chase through three cars, bobbing and weaving in his maniacal slope-shouldered gait, apparently looking to run right on up through the length of the train, over the tender and across the nose of the locomotive to perch on the cowcatcher and trap insects in his teeth all the way to California. But there was a young woman seated in the diner, facing the rear of the train and having a genteel, softly lit evening meal with an older woman, who might have been her mother or a traveling companion, and O’Kane watched in horror as Mr. McCormick pulled up short, snapped his head back like a horse tasting the bit, and in the same motion skewed to the left and fell on her. Or no, he didn’t fall — he dove, dove right on top of her. Plates skittered to the floor, food flew, the elder woman let out a howl that could have stripped the varnish from the walls.

“Mr. McCormick! ” O‘Kane heard himself cry out like some school-yard monitor, and then he was on him, grabbing at the taller man’s pumping shoulders, trying to peel him away from his victim like a strip of masking tape and make everything right again, and all the while the lady gasping and fighting under all that inexplicable weight and Mr. McCormick tearing at her clothes. He’d managed to partially expose himself, rip the bodice of her dress and crumple her hat like a wad of furniture stuffing by the time O’Kane was able to force his right arm up behind his back and apply some persuasive pressure to it. “This isn’t right, Mr. McCormick,” he kept saying, “you know it isn‘t,” and he kept saying it, over and over, as if it were a prayer, but it had no effect. One-armed, thrashing to and fro like something hauled up out of the sea in a dripping net, Mr. McCormick kept at it, working his left hand into the lady’s most vulnerable spot, and — this was what mortified O’Kane the most — taking advantage of the proximity to extend the pale tether of his tongue and lick the base of her throat as if it were an ice in a cone. “Stop it!” O‘Kane boomed, tightening his grip and jerking back with everything he had, and still it wasn’t enough.

That was when Nick arrived. In the midst of the pandemonium, the flailing and the shrieking and the useless remonstrances, plates overturned and the roast Long Island spring duck in the elder woman’s lap, Nick brought his vast head and big right fist in over O‘Kane’s shoulder and struck their employer a blow to the base of the skull that made him go limp on the spot. Together they hauled him off the distraught young woman and hustled him back down the aisle like an empty suit of clothes, leaving the apologies, excuses, explanations and reparations to Hamilton, Pat and a very pale and rumpled Mart, who were just then making their way through the door at the rear of the car.

The doctor’s color was high. The spectacles flashed from the cord at his throat and his eyes were spinning like billiard balls after a clean break. “Sheet restraints,” was all he could say, looking from the slack form of the patient to O‘Kane, Nick and the devastation beyond. The lights flickered, the train rocked. A dozen anxious faces stared up at them from plates of beef Wellington, Delmonico steak and roast squab. “And don’t you even think about loosening them until we reach California.”

Now it was night. The train licked over the rails with a mournful, subdued clatter, barreling through the featureless void for Buffalo and points west. The lamps had been turned down and the car was dark but for a funnel of light in the far corner, where Mart, a puff of cotton gauze decorating the flaring arch of his forehead, shuffled through the motions of a game of solitaire. Nick and Pat had retired to their compartment, from which a steady tremolo of contrapuntal snores could be heard against the perpetual dull rumble of the train’s buffeting. Mr. McCormick was in his compartment at the rear of the car, awake and rigid as a board, wrapped in a web of sheets dampened and twisted until they were like tourniquets and watched over by no one, at least not at the moment. O‘Kane had relieved Mart and it was his job to sit with the patient through the night, reading aloud from Jack London or Dickens or Laphroig’s Natural History of California till the windows became translucent with the dawn, but O’Kane wasn’t at his post. No, he was sitting opposite Dr. Hamilton in the latter’s cramped compartment, listening to a lecture on the nature of responsibility, vigilance and the three p’s.