The mechanic’s name was Buddy, so that was what the cowboy decided to call himself. As for Carson, well, that was his private joke. He had found the word in a medical book for folks suffering from cancer, and Buddy figured that it pretty much summed up what he was, or what he had become. He was Buddy Carcinogenic, Buddy Carson for short.

By the time folks might come to understand the humor, they were already dying.

III

L opez drove around the streets, letting folks see that he was on the job. Like most small towns, Easton was a peaceful place with little real crime beyond petty theft, the occasional bar fight, and the omnipresent shadow of domestic violence. Lopez dealt with all of it as best he could. In a way, he suited the town: there were probably better cops than him, he figured, but there couldn’t have been too many who tried as hard.

After a couple of hours, during which he did nothing more than hand out a speeding ticket to a salesman doing sixty in a forty-mile zone and warn off a couple of kids who were skate-boarding in the bank’s parking lot, he slipped into Steve DiVentura’s diner for coffee and a sandwich. He was about to take a seat at the counter when he saw Doc Bradley alone in a deuce by the window, so he asked Steve to send his order over.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

Greg Bradley looked as if he’d been jolted out of a reverie, although Lopez didn’t think it was one that he was particularly sorry to leave. Bradley was about Lopez’s age, but pure whitebread: tanned, blond hair, good teeth, and money to his name. Lopez guessed that he could have earned a whole lot more for his services someplace other than Easton, but his family was from the country and he had a genuine attachment to the area and its people. Lopez could understand that. He shared Bradley’s view.

He also suspected that Bradley was gay, although he had never broached the subject with him. He could see why the doctor might want to keep that quiet. Most people in Easton were pretty tolerant-after all, they had a black mayor and a police chief with a Hispanic name in a town that was 90 percent white-but patients were funny about their doctors, and there were some who would drive to Boston for a consultation before they would allow an openly gay man to touch them, and that went for women as well as men. So Greg Bradley remained single, and mostly the folks in Easton chose not to comment on the fact. It was the way things were done in small towns.

“Sure, take a seat.”

Bradley’s tuna on rye had barely been touched and his coffee looked cold.

“Glad I didn’t order the tuna,” said Lopez.

“Tuna’s fine,” said Bradley. “It’s me that’s not so good.”

A waitress brought Lopez his coffee and told him his sandwich was on the way. He thanked her.

“Anything I can do to help?” asked Lopez.

“Not unless you can work miracles. I guess you’ll find out soon enough, but you may as well hear it from me first. Link Frazier has cancer.”

Lopez leaned back in his seat. He genuinely didn’t know what to say. Link seemed to have been a fixture around the town for as long as he could remember. Lopez had even dated one of his daughters, many years before. Link had been good about the whole thing, not even holding it against Lopez that he’d dumped her one week before senior prom.

Well, not holding it against him for more than a couple of years, anyway.

“How bad?”

“He’s riddled with it, as bad as I’ve ever seen. He approached me a couple of days back, first time he ever came near me. He’d passed blood that morning, a lot of it. He might have hated the idea of seeing a doctor about anything, but he knew there was something seriously wrong. I sent him for tests that afternoon, and they called me later that night with the results. Hell, I don’t think they even had to wait for the biopsies. The X-ray was enough. Looks like the liver’s where it’s worst, but it’s spread to his spine and most of his other major organs. I spoke to his son this morning, and he gave me the all-clear to start telling people close to his father.”

“Jesus. How long has he got?”

Bradley shook his head. “Not long. The thing of it is, he swears he had no pain before a couple of days ago, and no symptoms until the blood appeared. It’s almost impossible to believe.”

“Link’s strong. He could lose an arm and he wouldn’t notice until he tried to wind his watch.”

“Nobody is that strong. Believe me, he should have been in agony for months.”

Lopez’s sandwich arrived, but, like Bradley, he no longer had much of an appetite.

“Where is he?”

“ Manchester. I think they’ll keep him there until…well, until the end.”

The two men sat in silence, watching the life of the town pass by the window. People waved, and they waved back, but their smiles were automatic and without warmth.

“My father died of cancer,” said Bradley.

“I didn’t know that.”

“He smoked a lot. Drank some too. Ate red meat, fried food, didn’t believe he was eating a real dessert unless his arteries began cracking halfway through. If cancer hadn’t taken him, there were about a dozen other candidates lined up for the job.”

“I had a friend who died of cancer,” said Lopez. “Andy Stone. He was a detective with the state police. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and ran fifty or sixty miles every week. They diagnosed him, and he was dead within a year.”

“What was it?”

“Pancreatic cancer.”

Bradley winced.

“Bad. It’s all bad, but some are worse than others.”

“I hear a lot of stories like that. Some of them are people that I knew, or friends of friends: people contracting that shit without any apparent cause, people who ate like they were supposed to, didn’t work in risky jobs, didn’t even seem to have much stress in life. Next thing, they’re just shadows. I don’t think I can go that way. I don’t know how good I am with pain, to tell the truth. I’ve never been shot, never broken a limb, never even been in the hospital since I had my tonsils taken out as a boy. I saw the way Andy went, and I don’t think I could take that kind of suffering.”

“Folks are strong,” said Bradley. “Like Link, I suppose. Our instinct is to fight, and to survive. It never ceases to amaze me, the reserves of strength that lie inside the most ordinary men and women. Even in the worst of suffering, there’s cause for hope, or admiration, anyway.”

Lopez pushed his sandwich away. “This is a conversation I didn’t need to have,” he said.

“Let’s hope it’s the last time. You should feel sorry for Stevie over there. He’s going to think his food sucks.”

Lopez glanced over his shoulder to where Steve DiVentura stood at the register, a pencil behind his ear as he totaled his customers’ checks.

“Maybe he’ll give us a discount if we complain.”

“Steve? If we complain he’ll charge us extra for his time.”

The subject of food brought Lopez’s mind back to Link Frazier, and the bar that he had once owned and that he still used to frequent, driving the new owner crazy by commenting on what he described as the “fancy” food that it now served.

“You talk to Eddy Reed yet?” he asked.

“No, you’re pretty much the first person I’ve told.”

“I’ll tell Eddy. If I see anyone I think should know, I’ll spare you the trouble of telling them too. I can give you a call later, maybe let you know how things have gone.”

Bradley looked grateful. “I guess it’s a job we share sometimes, giving people bad news about their friends and relatives.”

“I guess. The difference is, I usually don’t have to tell people that they’re dying.”

Bradley smiled blackly. “Yeah, I suppose most of yours already knew they were dead.”

“Is that what they call ‘laughing in the face of death?’ ”

“Whistling by the churchyard.”

“Whatever works.”