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cocksuckers right now!”
There were a few cries of protest at this bloodthirsty sentiment, but they were mostly drowned in a
wave of applause. I left the Ivy Room and jogged back to Neely Street. When I got there, I jumped
into my Sunliner and rolled wheels for Jodie.
8
My car radio, now working again, broadcast nothing but a heaping dish of doom as I chased my
headlights down Highway 77. Even the DJs had caught Nuclear Flu, saying things like “God bless
America” and “Keep your powder dry.” When the K-Life jock played Johnny Horton caterwauling
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I snapped it off. It was too much like the day after 9/11.
I kept the pedal to the metal in spite of the Sunliner’s increasingly distressed engine and the way
the needle on the ENGINE TEMP dial kept creeping toward H. The roads were all but deserted, and I
turned into Sadie’s driveway at just a little past twelve-thirty on the morning of the twenty-third.
Her yellow VW Beetle was parked in front of the closed garage doors, and the lights were on
downstairs, but there was no answer when I rang the doorbell. I went around back and hammered on
the kitchen door, also to no effect. I liked it less and less.
She kept a spare key under the back step. I fished it out and let myself in. The unmistakable aroma
of whiskey hit my nose, and the stale smell of cigarettes.
“Sadie?”
Nothing. I crossed the kitchen to the living room. There was an overflowing ashtray on the low
table in front of the couch, and liquid soaking into the Life and Look magazines spread out there. I put
my fingers into it, then raised them to my nose. Scotch. Fuck.
“Sadie?”
Now I could smell something else that I remembered well from Christy’s binges: the sharp aroma
of vomit.
I ran down the short hall on the other side of the living room. There were two doors facing each
other, one giving on her bedroom and the other leading to an office-study. The doors were shut, but
the bathroom door at the end of the hall was open. The harsh fluorescent light showed vomit
splattered on the ring of the toilet bowl. There was more on the pink tile floor and the rim of the
bathtub. There was a bottle of pills standing beside the soapdish on the sink. The cap was off. I ran to
the bedroom.
She was lying crosswise on the mussed coverlet, wearing a slip and one suede moccasin. The other
had dropped off onto the floor. Her skin was the color of old candle wax, and she did not appear to be
breathing. Then she took a huge snoring gasp and wheezed it back out. Her chest remained flat for a
terrifying four seconds, then she jerked in another rattle of breath. There was another overflowing
ashtray on the night table. A crumpled Winston pack, charred at one end by an imperfectly stubbedout
cigarette, lay on top of the dead soldiers. Beside the ashtray were a half-empty glass and a bottle of
Glenlivet. Not much of the Scotch was gone—thank God for small favors—but it wasn’t really the
Scotch I was worried about. It was the pills. There was also a brown manila envelope on the table with
what looked like photographs spilling out of it, but I didn’t glance at them. Not then.
I got my arms around her and tried to pull her into a sitting position. The slip was silk and
slithered through my hands. She thumped back onto the bed and took another of those rasping,
labored breaths. Her hair flopped across one closed eye.
“Sadie, wake up!”
Nothing. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her against the head of the bed. It thumped