Bloody River Blues

outside the camper at the Bide-A-Wee. He walked slowly around, then through, the old factory where Nina had been attacked. He wandered among the gray, corrugated metal Quonset huts, uninhabited, it seemed, since World War II. He walked along sidewalks of stores selling dusty office supplies and medical supplies. He found himself scanning the street in a window’s reflection for a long moment and realized he had been staring intently at thick mannequins wearing heavy girdles, chastely muted by an amber plastic sunscreen, and the store clerk had been studying him with amused curiosity.
    Where is he? Where is Stile’s killer?
    Pellam walked to the river and watched the sunset from a disintegrating bench in the scrubby remains of Maddox Municipal Park. The ambitions of the entiretown were expressed in a small store behind him. The wood sign that proclaimed the owner’s name was illegibly faded, but on the facade itself was a larger message, sloppily hand-painted: Scrap Metal Bought. All Kinds. All Grades. Cash NOW!
    After a dinner of a hamburger and a beer, Pellam wandered the streets again, streets he shared only with the few people meandering between the Jolly Rogue and Callaghan’s, and with packs of scrawny dogs with wild eyes but hopeful prances that sadly suggested domesticated puppyhoods.
    At midnight he sat again in the park, with a beer he did not drink, watching the moon’s stippled reflection in the water, smelling the cold, marshy air and an oily smell from some distant factory or refinery.
    When is he going to find me?
    Yet nothing found him that night but sleep, and Pellam woke on the bench at 4:00 A.M. , astonished at first at the extent of his exhaustion, then at his carelessness, and finally at his extraordinary good luck at escaping unharmed. He returned to the camper, sore and chilled, his hands shivering and the only warm aspect about him the wood grip of the Colt pressing hard against his belly.
    DR. WENDY LOOKED good.
    Breezy. That was the way she walked. Breezy. What did they say in high school? There was a word. What was it?
    Bopping.
    Right. And you had to snap your fingers when you said it. Bopping. Yeah, you see that girl? You see the way she bopped into the lunchroom?
    “Yo, Dr. Wendy.”
    “Morning, Donnie.”
    He wondered if she sailed. He pictured her in a white bikini, with thin straps. She would have a small mound of a belly—he remembered the leather near-miniskirt—but that was okay. He wondered if she owned a boat. No, probably not; she spent all her money on clothes and weird earrings. But her boyfriend might have one.
    He wondered if she spent every Sunday on his boat. He wondered what it would be like to be married to her.
    He wondered if she ever went out with patients. Donnie Buffett decided he was going to ask her on a date.
    She swung the door shut and did her cigarette routine. “I wanted to come right by. We’ve got the results, Donnie. The sexual response tests.”
    “Okay, I’m sitting down—as if I had an option.” His smile faded and his brow creased with concern. “What’s the verdict?”
    “You’re reflex incomplete.”
    He had forgotten what this meant, but the way she said it, the significant tone and smile of minor triumph, he guessed it was good news.
    “. . . nearly one hundred percent of these patients can have erections, either reflexogenic or psychogenic. Not all of them, but a good percentage, can ejaculate. There will be a lowered sperm count but all that means is if you want to have children, you’ll have to try harder.”
    Weiser shook his hand as if they’d just completed a business deal.
    “Well, there you go,” Buffett said happily, and began to sob.
    The cop’s eyes flooded with tears and his breath shook out of his body in spasms. His face swelled with a huge pressure.
    He tried to speak but was unable to.
    What’s happening to me?
    Weiser said nothing.
    Buffett was choking on tears, he was drowning in them. They were going to kill him, drain away his life like spurting blood. Was he going crazy? Had it finally happened? What stage of recovery is hysteria, sweetheart? Crying harder than when he was a kid, harder than when he broke his nose, harder than when his mother died . . . He could . . . not . . . breathe . . . He struggled to control the jag. Finally he did. The air sucked in deeply and he relaxed. “I . . .” Another attack struck. He buried his face in wads of Kleenex. “I . . .” He substituted