Max Collins - Midnight Haul

He knocked on the door.

Billy answered. He seemed to have grown a little.

“Hello, Billy.”

Billy looked at Crane through squinty eyes, not recognizing him at first. When recognition came, it was a wave of disgust over the six year old’s face. He turned away and yelled, “Daddy!” and disappeared.

A moment later, like a special effect in a movie, the young version of Billy was replaced by the older one: Patrick. He was in a white shirt with his collar and tie loose. His eyes behind the wire frames showed confusion, though it was clear he, unlike Billy, knew Crane immediately.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, without hostility.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Crane said.

Patrick shrugged. “I moved in the day after it happened. That’s, what? Two days ago. Come in, come in.”

Crane did, but they did not advance to the living room; they stayed right in the entryway, standing awkwardly, like strangers thrown together at a cocktail party. Or a wake.

“Don’t you have an apartment in Fair View?” Crane said.

“Yes. And I considered staying there, to be closer to Annie. Not that I could do anything for her at this point.”

“Why move in here?”

“Greenwood’s where Billy goes to school. Fair View is thirty miles from here. So I moved in to be with Billy. So his life wouldn’t be too disrupted.”

Billy was sitting on the floor in the next room watching TV.

“It’s hell to have your life disrupted,” Crane said.

“Look. I have had some rough damn days, here, you know. Yesterday I didn’t get into work at all. Today at work I had to make up for yesterday. I haven’t even had a chance to get back to the apartment to move some of my stuff here. I just packed a bag and came, to be with my son.”

“What about your wife?”

“My ex-wife. A disturbed, irrational woman. I can’t say I feel much love for her anymore. The only thing I feel is sorry for her.”

“Sorry for her.”

“Crane, what are you doing here? Somebody called you about Annie, and you came, but there’s nothing for you to do here. She’s in a coma.”

“I noticed.”

“You saw her, then.”

“I saw her.”

Patrick swallowed. Suddenly his face looked white, long. “Poor Annie,” he said. Looking at the floor.

“Who did it?”

“Who did what?”

“Shoved those pills in her.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“It’s down. Who did it?”

“She did it.”

“She took those pills herself? Voluntarily?”

“She was irrational! Troubled.”

“She was almost murdered is what she was, and I want to know your part in it.”

“My part...? Get the fuck out of here.”

“You tell me first. Who did this? You don’t have the balls to do it yourself, Patrick. Who did it?”

Patrick spoke through his teeth. “She did it. You can’t stuff a bottle of barbiturates down somebody’s throat. They take it because they want to.”

“What was she doing with barbiturates? I know how she feels about drugs.”

“Didn’t you talk to the doctor? She had a prescription. They were to help her sleep.”

“Why would she be having trouble sleeping?”

“Maybe it was because she and her new boyfriend had a spat, and he ran out on her.”

“Fuck you, Patrick.”

“Get out of my house.”

“This isn’t your house. We both know whose house it is.”

“Get out!”

Billy called from the other room. “Daddy?”

“It’s okay, Billy,” Patrick said. Then to Crane, no sarcasm, no anger: “Please. Just go.”

“I’ll go. For now.”

Crane was halfway down the front walk when he heard Patrick’s voice behind him: “I hope to God Annie comes out of it. Then she can tell you herself what happened.”

Crane kept walking.

“Crane, I wouldn’t hurt my son’s mother. I wouldn’t do that.”

That stopped him: he felt himself believing Patrick again. Goddamnit.

“What really happened, Patrick?” he said, turning.

“I told you. I told you. I fucking told you! She was troubled. She wasn’t herself. You left town, and...”

He went to Patrick. “And what?”

“Well. In a way maybe I did contribute to it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I petitioned the court for custody of my son.”

“You what?”

“I wanted Billy and I thought I could get him. Annie wouldn’t have come off too good in court, a woman who’d made no effort to get a job, instead spending all her energies trying to destroy me and the company that employed me and, indirectly, fed her and my son. Also, she’d had a man living in the house with her — you — and that wouldn’t have looked good for her.”

“When was this?”

“Last week.”

“You’d just served the papers on her? You hadn’t gone to court yet?”

“That’s right.”

“And so she took a bottle of sleeping pills? Get serious.”

“That was just a small part of it.”

“Was it.”

“Yes.”

“What was the big part?”

“Well, the fire, of course.”

“What fire?”

“Didn’t you know? Four days ago, there was a fire here. Neither she nor Billy were in the house. Some rooms upstairs were pretty badly burned; her study was gutted. The fire department, such as it is, stopped it from spreading throughout the house. We were lucky.”

“Her study was gutted?”

“Yes. That’s what set her off, Crane, I’m sure.”

Crane looked up at the boarded-over window on the second floor.

“Her book,” Patrick was saying, “her research files. Everything. All of it. Burned up in the fire.”

It was hard to tell where the overcast day ended and the smoke from Kemco began. The buildings with their aqua plastic walls and intertwining pipes seemed to suit this bleak, cold afternoon. So did the snow-flecked empty field across the way, that immense balding dandruff-spotted scalp, farmland where no one dared grow anything.

He thanked Laurie for driving him out there. She said she could wait for him and drive him back when he was done, but he told her no, he was quite sure he could find a ride back.

They’d been to see Boone again. The doctor had let him sit in the room with Boone, for about an hour. She looked pale. A little thin. But still very pretty. She seemed to be asleep. He found himself thinking of Mary Beth. He remembered the conscious decision he’d made at the funeral not to look at her as she lay in her casket. If Boone died, he knew he would see her this way, forever: forever in a coma. He knew it and hated it. But he would be here. Even as she deteriorated physically, getting thinner, thinner. Intravenous feeding could keep her alive; but she’d still seem to waste away. But he would be here. Every day, as long as it took. Sitting in her room. Till she woke up. Or not.

Soon he’d have to deal with his parents. He hadn’t called them before he left; he wasn’t up to arguing about this. He’d written them a letter, telling them he was dropping out for the semester and going back to Greenwood. They knew nothing about him and Boone; they wouldn’t begin to understand what this was about. Eventually he would have to tell them. Eventually he would have to tell them he’d drawn out from his bank account all of the school money he worked for this summer, to live on here.

But that would have to wait.

Boone came first.

Boone, and Kemco.

He walked into the building that housed the executive offices; the receptionist looked at him from her window in her wall and asked him who he was there to see. He told her Mr. Boone was expecting him. Which was nonsense, but Patrick wasn’t likely to turn him away, either.