Bright Orange for the Shroud Read Online Free PDF Page B

How do you know?”
    “That he’s sleeping? What else?”
    “But what could have happened to him?”
    “Chook, that was a very nice guy, and I don’t think he had the survival drive you and I have. He’s the victim type. Wilma was his mousetrap, and nobody cared if he got maimed. No peanut butter. We had one in Korea. A big gentle kid fresh out of the Hill School. Everybody from my platoon sergeant on down tried to get the green off him before he got nailed. But one rainy afternoon he got suckered by the fake screaming we’d gotten used to, and he went to help and got stitched throat to groin with a machine pistol. I heard about it and went over as they were sticking the litter onto a jeep. He died right then, and the look on his face was not pain or anger or regret. He just looked very puzzled, as if he was trying to fit this little incident into what he’d been taught at home and couldn’t quite make it. It’s the way some earnest people take a practical joke.”
    “Shouldn’t we see if Arthur is really all right?”
    “Let him get his sleep. Fix you a stinger?”
    “I don’t know. No. I mean yes. I’m going to take another look at him.”
    Five minutes later I tiptoed into the companionway beyond the head. The guest stateroom door was closed. I heard the tone of her voice, not the words. Gentleness. He coughed and answered her and coughed again.
    Back in the lounge I locked the big tuner into WAEZ-FM, and fed it into the smaller speakers at low volume, too low to drive my big AR-3’s. I stretched out on the curve of the big yellow couch, took small bites of the gin stinger, listened to a string quartet fit together the Chinese puzzle pieces of someice-cold Bach, and smiled a fatuous eggsucking smile at my prime solution to the Arthur problem.
    In about twenty minutes she joined me, eyes red, smile shy, walking with less assurance than her custom. She sat on the end of the couch beyond my feet and said, “I fixed him some warm milk and he went right to sleep again.”
    “That’s nice.”
    “I guess it’s just being exhausted and half starved and heartsick, Trav.”
    “That was my guess.”
    “The poor dumb bastard.”
    “Outclassed.”
    I got her stinger out of the freezer and brought it to her. She sipped it. “There isn’t anything else you can do, of course,” she said.
    “Beg your pardon?”
    She looked at me and opened her eyes very wide. “Get it back, of course. They cleaned him clean. That’s why he came to you.”
    I got up and went over to the tuner and killed Mr. Bach. I stood in front of Chook. “Now just one minute there, woman. Hold it. There’s no …”
    “For God’s sake, stop looking as if you’re going to bray like a wounded moose, McGee. We talked about you once.”
    “Make some sense.”
    “He wondered about you. You know. What you
do
. So I sort of told him.”
    “You sort of told him.”
    “Just how you step in when people get the wrong end of the stick, and you keep half of what you can recover. McGee,why in the world do you think he came right to you! Could anything be more obvious? Why do you think that poor whipped creature crawled across the state and fell on your doorstep? You can’t
possibly
turn him down.”
    “I can give it a very good try, honey.”
    Silence. She finished the drink. She clacked the empty glass down. She came up off the couch, moved close, stood tall, fixed me with a poisonous stare, upslanted, fists on hips. “Did I do you a favor coming here?” she said in almost a whisper. “Do you owe me for that, and for one or two other small things I could name? Do you want me to go after them myself? I will, you know. I’m calling you on this one, you big ugly lazy jerk. They smashed him. They gutted him. And there’s no other place he can turn.” Giving emphasis to each word by rapping my chest with a hard knuckle, she said, “You-are-going-to-help-that-man.”
    “Now listen …”
    “And I want a piece of the action,