Life Expectancy Read online

  back here for him. But it’s awful cold, and maybe he’s had a concussion, so he might not survive.”

  Staring at the unconscious Beezo with a ferocity I hoped never to see directed at me, Lorrie said, “Baby, if I had a nail gun, I’d crucify him to the tree and never tell anyone.”

  Here was an important lesson for villains who hoped for a long career in lawbreaking. The maternal instinct to protect offspring is an awesome thing. Never threaten an expectant mother with the theft of her precious child, especially not if she is the daughter of a snake handler.

  I took the assault rifle to the back of the Explorer, opened the tailgate, and put the weapon inside.

  The toolbox contained the coiled tow cable. Each end featured a snaplink with a locking sleeve.

  Up front, Lorrie cried out urgently, “Jimmy! He’s waking up.”

  When I hurried around to the open driver’s door, I found Beezo groaning, rolling his head back and forth.

  He muttered fearfully, “Vivacemente.”

  Earlier, feeling for his pulse, I had put the rock on the seat beside him. I picked it up and tapped him solidly on the forehead.

  His right hand fluttered up from his side, fumbling feebly against his face, and he mumbled, “Syphilitic weasel, swine of swines…”

  The first tap I had administered had been too restrained. I rapped him harder with the rock, and he slumped unconscious once more.

  Having been reluctantly pushed to violence by Punchinello more than four years previously, my ruthlessness didn’t surprise me, but I was disturbed to find I enjoyed it. A warm satisfaction flushed my winter-bitten face, and I was tempted to smack him again, though I did not.

  My restraint seemed admirable and a consequence of the wholesome values with which I had been raised, but a part of me believed then—and still believes—that a restrained response to evil is not moral. Revenge and justice are twin braids in a line as thin as the high wire that an aerialist must walk, and if you can’t keep your balance, then you are doomed—and damned—regardless of whether you fall to the left or to the right of the line.

  I hauled Konrad Beezo out of the Explorer and dragged him to a suitable pine tree. He was a difficult package to handle, but that was even more true when he was conscious.

  After propping him against the pine, I opened his coat, quickly fed the tow cable up the left sleeve, across his chest, and down the right sleeve. Then I buttoned the coat to his throat.

  One at a time, I took the ends of the cable around to the farther side of the tree and hooked one snaplink through the other. I screwed the locking metal sleeves over the snap gates.

  Little slack remained in the cable. He would not be able to get his hands in front of himself to try to strip off the coat. He had been essentially straitjacketed, which seemed appropriate.

  I checked the pulse in his throat once more. The artery throbbed strong and steady.

  For a while in those days, we had a saying in our family: The only way to kill a clown is to beat him to death with a mime.

  Returning to the Explorer, I put on my leather gloves. I brushed the crumbles of safety glass off the driver’s seat, got in behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut.

  Huddled in the passenger’s seat, Lorrie pressed her hands to her rounded abdomen, alternately hissing through her clenched teeth and groaning.

  “Worse?” I asked.

  “You remember the chest-burster scene in Alien?”

  On the dashboard lay a small black leather drug kit with two hypodermics.

  “He wanted to shoot me up to make me cooperative and ‘pliable,’” she revealed.

  Rage flared in me, but nothing would be gained by letting it build into an all-consuming fire.

  As I carefully returned the filled syringe to its niche and then zipped the kit shut, setting it aside as evidence, I said, “Domestic bliss through modern chemistry. Why didn’t I think of that? I’m all for pliability in a wife.”

  “If you were, you’d never have married me.”

  I kissed her quickly on the cheek. “For sure.”

  “I’ve had enough adventure for tonight. Get me to an epidural.”

  Hesitating to turn the key in the ignition, I worried that the engine wouldn’t start, that the pinching trees wouldn’t release us.

  She said, “Beezo was going to make a sling out of the lap and shoulder belts and haul me up to the highway like a hunter dragging a deer carcass.”

  I wanted to get out of the Explorer and kill him. And I prayed that we wouldn’t be reduced to implementing his plan.

  36

  * * *

  On the second try, the engine turned over and caught. I switched on the headlights. Lorrie cranked up the heater to compensate for the icy air pouring through the broken window.

  The gap between the ancient firs that bracketed the SUV had been narrow enough to halt our backward slide; but those trees might not have us in a sufficiently tight grip to resist the forward thrust of the engine.

  I eased down on the accelerator, and the engine growled. Tires spun, stuttered, spun. The Explorer creaked, protesting the hard embrace of the trees.

  Pressed for more power, the engine shrieked. The tires squealed, and the creaking increased, augmented by a phantom rattle the source of which I could not place.

  The Explorer began to shudder like a terrified horse with a leg trapped in a rockfall.

  A hard metallic grinding arose. I didn’t like the sound of it.

  When I eased off the accelerator, the Explorer settled backward an inch or two. I had not been aware of gaining that ground when the SUV had been straining forward.

  I established a rhythmic application of the gas pedal. The Explorer rocked gently back and forth, abrading the bark on the fir trees.

  Turning the steering wheel slightly to the right had no effect. When I turned it slightly to the left, we jolted forward four or five inches before getting hung up again.

  I eased the wheel back to the right, pumped the pedal. A loud twang! reverberated around us as if we were in the hollow of a bell, and suddenly we were free.

  Lorrie said, “I hope the baby comes out that easy.”

  “Anything changes, I want to know right away.”

  “Changes?”

  “Like if your water breaks.”

  “Oh, honey, if my water breaks, you’ll know it without being told. You’ll be ankle deep in it.”

  Because of the altitude, I didn’t think that the Explorer would get far in a direct assault on the slope. Still, I had to give it a try.

  The incline wasn’t as steep down here as it became higher up, and we powered forward farther than I expected, deviating from a straight ascent only to ease around trees and the rare knob of rock. We had gone perhaps a hundred yards before the way grew steeper and the air-starved engine began to cough.

  From that point on, I intended to pursue a switchback ascent, thereby demanding less of the vehicle. Proceeding due north or due south, crossing the slope at ninety degrees to the gradient, would be suicide; the way was too steep, and the Explorer would sooner or later roll. But tacking left and right at cautious angles, we might neither stall out nor roll, and wend our way up as if following the architecture of a staircase.

  This strategy required caution and intense concentration. Each time that we switchbacked, I had to calculate, by sheer instinct, the angle of ascent that would gain us the most ground while putting us at the least risk.

  The terrain proved wildly irregular. Frequently, if I pressed forward the slightest bit too hastily, the Explorer began to rock side to side on the corrugated land, bouncing us roughly in our seats, gathering lateral momentum that on this hillside might topple it. More than once in my mind’s eye, we went crashing to the bottom of the ravine, caroming from tree to tree like a pinball bouncing off flippers and bumpers.

  Sometimes I slowed to let the vehicle stabilize. At other times I stopped altogether, frightened by the way the steering wheel pulled in my hands. Pausing,
I studied the forbidding landscape revealed by the headlights, making small adjustments in our route.

  When we passed the midpoint of our journey, I dared to believe that we would make it.

  Lorrie’s confidence must have improved, too, for she broke the tense silence in which we had thus far ascended: “There’s something I would have regretted never having told you if we died here tonight.”

  “That I’m a love god?”

  “Guys who think they’re love gods are arrogant twits. You…you’re a snuggle puppy, but if I’d died without telling you that, I wouldn’t have had any regrets.”

  “If I’d died without hearing it, I’d have been okay, too.”

  “You know,” she said, “parents and children and love come in some strange combinations. I mean, your parents can love you and you can know they love you, and you can love them, and still grow up so lonely that you feel…hollow.”

  I hadn’t expected a revelation this serious. I knew it was a genuine revelation because I understood what her next words inevitably must be.

  She said, “Love isn’t enough. Your parents have to know how to relate to you, and to each other. They have to want to be with you more than with anyone else. They have to love being home more than anywhere in the world, and they have to be more interested in you than in…”

  “Snakes and tornadoes,” I suggested.

  “God, I love them. They’re nice, Jimmy, they really are, and they mean well. But they live inside themselves more than not, and they keep their doors closed. You see them mostly through windows.”

  The tremor in her voice grew as she spoke, and when she paused, I said, “You are a treasure, Lorrie Lynn.”

  “You grew up with everything I wanted so bad, everything that I dreamed of having. Your folks live for you and for each other, for family. So does Weena in her own way. It’s bliss, Jimmy. And I’m so damned grateful that you all let me in.”

  Under her admirable toughness, under the armor of her beauty and her wit, my wife is a tender spirit and might have been a shy wallflower if she had not chosen, instead, to make herself into a survivor, and a survivor with style.

  Under my less than tough exterior, I am mushy. Mucho mushy. I have been known to cry at the sight of roadkill.

  Her words rendered me incapable of speech. If I had tried to talk, I would have teared up. Piloting the Explorer toward the crest, I dared not risk blurred vision.

  Fortunately, she picked up her next thread of thought and, with firmer voice, continued to weave the conversation without me. “You can’t know what a joy it’s going to be for me, Jimmy, to raise our kids the way that you were raised, to give them the gift of Maddy and Rudy and Weena, to bring them up in a family so close that they can find in it the deepest meaning of their lives.”

  We were two or three switchbacks from the summit.

  She said, “We’ve never discussed how many children we’re going to have. Right now I’m thinking maybe five. What about you—are you thinking five?”

  I found my voice. “I always thought three, but after that little speech, I’m thinking twenty.”

  “Let’s make the decision five at a time.”

  “Deal,” I said. “One almost out of the oven, four left to bake.”

  “Two girls and three boys,” she wondered, “or three girls and two boys?”

  “Is that really our decision?”

  “I believe we shape our own reality by positive thinking. I’m sure we could positive-think ourselves any combination we wanted, although for ideal balance we should have two girls, two boys, and one hermaphrodite.”

  “That might be taking balance too far.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, no kids will ever have been loved more than these are going to be loved.”

  “But they won’t be spoiled,” I said.

  “Damn right they won’t, the little brats. Their Great-Grandma Rowena can read them fairy tales. That’ll keep them on the straight and narrow.”

  She talked and talked, and soon I saw that she had wisely talked us through the dread and the danger of the climb, to the top of the slope and Hawksbill Road.

  37

  * * *

  We arrived on Hawksbill Road twenty feet in front of the parked Hummer. We churned across a recently compacted high curb of snow, onto the southbound lane, which had been scraped almost to the bare blacktop.

  Immediately to the south of us, a highway department crew in two vehicles was carving a passage to town through the storm. A road grader on immense knobby tires, fitted with an angled plow, led the way, trailed by a truck spreading salt and cinders in its wake.

  I followed the truck at a safe distance. A police escort could have gotten us to town no quicker in this mean weather.

  The night sky hid behind the shedding snow, and the wind was revealed only by the white shrouds that it wound about itself and whirled, and flapped, and billowed.

  Also unseen but not for long, the baby made known its impatience to be free from nine months of confinement. Lorrie’s contractions had become regular. By her wristwatch, she timed them, and by her groans and louder cries, I knew the intervals and willed the road crew to move faster.

  Suffering people frequently curse their pain. For some reason we seem to believe that acute agony can be managed by injections of obscenities. Lorrie allowed not one such word to cross her lips that night.

  I can testify that in ordinary times she is capable of treating a cut or a contusion with a verbal blue streak more astringent than iodine. Birth night was not an ordinary time.

  She said that she didn’t curse the pain because the baby, as it made its entrance, might think it wasn’t wanted in the world.

  That our child might be born with advanced language skills had not crossed my mind. I accepted her concern as legitimate—and loved her for it.

  When groans and grunts and wordless cries did not satisfy her urge to express the effect of her pangs, she resorted for the baby’s sake to words that described some of the world’s beauty and bounty.

  “Strawberries, sunflowers, seashells,” she said, hissing out the sibilants with such vehemence that someone who spoke no English would have been convinced that she had wished pestilence, disease, and damnation on a hated enemy.

  By the time that we reached town and then Snow County Hospital, Lorrie’s water had not yet broken, but it seemed instead to be coming out of her through every pore. This labor, as surely as chopping wood or digging a trench, wrung rivers of sweat from her. She unzipped her parka, then stripped it off. She was soaked.

  I parked at the emergency entrance, rushed inside, and returned in a minute with an orderly and a wheelchair.

  The orderly, a freckled young man named Cory, thought Lorrie had descended into delirium when, trading Explorer for wheelchair, she snarled in rapid succession, “Geraniums, Coca-Cola, kittens, snow geese, Christmas cakes and cookies,” with such fervency that she scared him.

  On the way inside I explained to him about welcoming the baby to the world by trading curses for words of beauty and bounty, but I think I only succeeded in making him a little afraid of me, too.

  I couldn’t accompany Lorrie directly to the maternity ward in part because I had to present our insurance card to the clerk at the admissions desk at the back of the ER waiting lounge. I kissed her, and she squeezed my hand hard enough to crack my knuckles and said, “Maybe not twenty.”

  A nurse joined the orderly, and together they wheeled Lorrie toward the elevators.

  As they rolled her out of sight, I heard her say with singular intensity, “Crêpes Suzette, clafouti, gâteau à l’orange, soufflé au chocolat.”

  I supposed that if our baby might be born with a command of English, it might also know French and might already anticipate a career as a pastry chef.

  While the admissions clerk Xeroxed my insurance card and began to fill out two pounds of registration forms, I used her phone to call Huey Foster. He was my father’s friend from childhood, the failed baker who had become
acop.

  From Huey, Dad had received the free pass to the circus on the back of which he had written the five terrible days in my life. We didn’t hold that against Huey.

  He worked nights, and I caught him at the station house. When I told him about Konrad Beezo, fugitive murderer and would-be baby bandit, shackled to a tree in the woods about three to four hundred yards downhill and west of his parked Hummer, Huey said, “That’s state trooper jurisdiction. I’ll get ’em right on it. I’ll go with ’em. After all these years, I want to personally put the cuffs on that crazy bastard.”

  Next I called my folks to tell them only that we were at the hospital and that Lorrie was in labor.

  “I’m painting a potbelly pig,” Mom said, “but that can wait. We’ll be there quick as we can.”

  “It’s not necessary for you to come in this weather.”

  “Sweetie, if it was raining scorpions and cow pies, we’d still come, though we wouldn’t like it much. It’ll take us a while because we first have to get Weena into her snowsuit. You know what an ordeal she’ll make of that, but we’ll be there.”

  I was still a relatively young man when the admissions clerk finished filling out forms for me to sign, and from her desk I went up to the maternity ward.

  The expectant-fathers’ lounge had been remodeled since the night that I gave my mother such a hard time being born. The flamboyance of cheerful clashing colors had been replaced by gray carpet, pale-gray walls, and black leatherette chairs, as though the hospital directors had reached a consensus that in the intervening twenty-four years, all the joy had gone out of parenthood.

  The admissions clerk had phoned ahead to advise that I was en route. A nurse showed me to a lavatory, where I washed up according to instructions and changed into hospital greens; then I was taken to my wife.

  Lorrie’s water had not yet broken, but all the signs pointed to an impending birth. Therefore, and because no other pregnant women had been reckless enough to go into labor in a blizzard, she had been prepared quickly in her assigned room and conveyed to Delivery.

  When I entered, a heavyset red-haired nurse was taking Lorrie’s blood pressure, and Dr. Mello Melodeon, our physician, was listening to her heart through a stethoscope.

  Mello is as solid as any football fullback, as personable as a popular tavern owner whose charm keeps the bar stools filled, and a mensch. Judging by his fine name, his skin the color of raisins, his relaxed manner, and his mellifluous voice, you might think he had once been a Jamaican Rastafarian who had traded dreadlocks and reggae for a career in medicine. Instead, he’d been born in Atlanta and came from a family of professional gospel singers.

  Finished with the stethoscope, he said, “Jimmy, how come when Rachel makes your chocolate apple lattice tart, it doesn’t taste like yours?”

  Rachel was his wife.

  I said, “Where’d she get the recipe?”

  “The resort gives it out if you ask. We ate at the restaurant out there last week.”

  “She should have asked me. That’s the original resort recipe, but I’ve modified it. Mainly, I’ve added a tablespoon of vanilla and another of nutmeg.”

  “The nutmeg I understand, but vanilla in a chocolate tart?”

  “That’s the secret,” I guaranteed him.

  “Yoo-hoo, I’m here,” Lorrie reminded us.

  I took her hand. “And you’re not snarling about crêpes Suzette and clafouti.”