35

No one official came by the following day, but lots of i unofficial people showed up. Designated Gawkers. One of the cars was full of teenagers. When they turned into the driveway to reverse direction, Annie rushed out and screamed at them to get off her land before she shot them for the dirty dogs they were.

“Fuck off, Dragon Lady!” one of them shouted.

“Where'd you bury him?” another yelled as the car backed out in a boil of dust.

A third threw a beer-bottle. As the car roared away, Paul could make out a bumper sticker pasted to the rear window. SUPPORT THE SIDEWINDER BLUE DEVILS, it read.

An hour later he saw Annie stalk grimly past his window, drawing on a pair of work-gloves as she headed for the barn. She came back some time later with the chain. She had taken the time to interlace its stout steel loops with barbed wire. When this prickly knitting was padlocked across the driveway, she reached into her breast pocket, and took out some red pieces of cloth. These she tied to several of the links to aid visibility.

“It won't keep the cops out,” she said when she finally came in, “but it'll keep the rest of the brats away.”

“Yes.”

“Your hand… it looks swollen.”

“Yes.”

“I hate to be a cockadoodie pest, Paul, but… “

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow? Really?” She brightened at once.

“Yes, I think so. Probably around six.”

“Paul, that's wonderful! Shall I start reading now, or - “

“I'd prefer that you wait.”

“Then I will.” That tender, melting look had crept into her eyes again. He had come to hate her most of all when she looked that way. “I love you, Paul. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.” And bent over his pad again.

36

That evening she brought him his Keflex pill - his urinary infection was improving, but very slowly - and a bucket of ice. She laid a neatly folded towel beside it and left without saying a word.

Paul put his pencil aside - he had to use the fingers of his left hand to unbend the fingers of his right - and slipped his hand into the ice. He left it there until it was almost completely numb. When he took it out, the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. He wrapped the towel around it and sat, looking out into the darkness, until it began to tingle. He put the towel aside, flexed the hand for awhile (the first few times made him grimace with pain, but then the hand began to limber up), and started to write again.

At dawn he rolled slowly over to his bed, lurched in, and was asleep at once. He dreamed he was lost in a snowstorm, only it wasn't snow; it was flying pages which filled the world, destroying direction, and each page was covered with typing, and all the n's and t's and e's were missing, and he understood that if he was still alive when the blizzard ended, he would have to fill them all in himself, by hand, deciphering words that were barely there.

37

He woke up around eleven, and almost as soon as Annie heard him stirring about, she came in with orange juice, his pills, and a bowl of hot chicken soup. She was glowing with excitement. “It's a very special day, Paul, isn't it?”

“Yes.” He tried to pick up the spoon with his right hand and could not. It was puffy and red, so swollen the skin was shiny. When he tried to bend it into a fist, it felt as though long rods of metal had been pushed through it at random. The last few days, he thought, had been like some nightmare autographing session that just never ended.

“Oh, your poor hand!” she cried. “I'll get you another pill! I'll do it right now!”

“No. This is the push. I want my head clear for it.”

“But you can't write with your hand like that!”

“No,” he agreed. “My hand's shot. I'm going to finish this baby the way I started - with that Royal. Eight or ten pages should see it through. I guess I can fight my way through that many n's, t's, and e's.”

“I should have gotten you another machine,” she said. She looked honestly sorry; tears stood in her eyes. Paul thought that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong. Or both. “I goofed. It's hard for me to admit that, but it's true. It was because I didn't want to admit that Dartmonger woman got the better of me. I'm sorry, Paul. Your poor hand.” She raised it, gentle as Niobe at the pool, and kissed it.

“That's all right,” he said. “We'll manage, Ducky Daddles and I. I hate him, but I've got a feeling he hates me as well, so I guess we're even.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“The Royal. I've nicknamed it after a cartoon character.”

“Oh…” She trailed away. Turned off. Came unplugged. He waited patiently for her to return, eating his soup as he did so, holding the spoon awkwardly between the first and second fingers of his left hand.

At last she did come back and looked at him, smiling radiantly like a woman just awakening and realizing it was going to be a beautiful day. “Soup almost gone? I've got something very special, if it is.” He showed her the bowl, empty except for a few noodles stuck to the bottom. “See what a Do-Bee I am, Annie?” he said without even a trace of a smile.

“You're the most goodest Do-Bee there ever was, Paul and you get a whole row of gold stars! In fact… wait! Wait till you see this!” She left, leaving Paul to look first at the calendar and then at the Arc de Triomphe. He looked up at the ceiling and saw the intertinked W's waltzing drunkenly across the plaster. Last of all he looked across at the typewriter and the vast, untidy pile of manuscript. Goodbye to all that, he thought randomly, and then Annie was bustling back in with another tray.

On it were four dishes: wedges of lemon on one, grated egg on a second, toast points on a third. In the middle was a larger plate, and on this one was a vast (oogy) gooey pile of caviar.

“I don't know if you like this stuff or not,” she said shyly. I don't even know if I like it. I never had it.” Paul began to laugh. It hurt his middle and it hurt his legs and it even hurt his hand; soon he would probably hurt even more, because Annie was paranoid enough to think that if someone was laughing it must be at her. But still he couldn't stop. He laughed until he was choking and coughing, his cheeks red, tears spurting from the corners of his eyes. The woman had cut off his foot with an axe and his thumb with an electric knife, and here she was with a pile of caviar big enough to choke a warthog. And for a wonder, that black look of crevasse did not dawn on her face. She began to laugh with him, instead.