Mad River

harder, and his shoulders rolled back and forth, but he didn’t wake up. She cried, “Jimmy. Jimmy. Wake up, Jimmy.”
    When he still didn’t wake, she peeled the blanket off him and looked at the bandage on his leg. The bandage was dry, but long, fiery-red tendrils of infection snaked out from under the bandage and up and down his leg, which was swollen to half-again its normal size.
    She said, “Jimmy? Jimmy? Oh my God, Jimmy, are you dead or alive?”

22
    VIRGIL WENT TO BED EARLY, because he could. He hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep for a while, and was starting to feel stupid. He slept like a dead man for the first part of the night, but at five o’clock his eyes popped open, and he was wide awake.
    He didn’t want to be—a couple more hours of sleep wouldn’t hurt at all, but his mind was moving and he couldn’t get back. He tried a couple of sexual fantasies about Sally, but they didn’t catch fire, so he spent some time thinking about God, and why he made people like Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh.
    What part could they have in God’s plan? Were they simply put here to kill people at random, because, for some people, people needed to be killed at random?
    A mystery. He remembered a bumper sticker he’d seen in St. Paul that said: “Remember: Half the People Are Below Average
.
” That, he thought, was probably the key to Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh.
    They were below average, and God had made them that way. There was no way that they were ever going to be anything but that; they could watch all the above-average people they wanted, on television, driving around in big cars and making enormous amounts of money out of nothing . . . or just working at the post office, or going to trade school to be plumbers or carpenters. They’d never be able to do that. They were condemned from birth to a life of hard times and trouble.
    If people were to tell the truth about Becky, her only route to a condition even resembling prosperity would be to sell herself for sex. That was all she had. The problem with that, morality aside, was that she probably wasn’t bright enough to make the most of selling herself.
    As for Jimmy—Jimmy had no chance at all. Abused as a child, neglected in school, he probably couldn’t drive a nail. Or generate the ambition to do it.
    Virgil rolled around for a while, thinking about it, blessed his parents for their genes. He was almost back to sleep when the phone rang, its screen popping to life, a brilliant white rectangle in the dark.
    •   •   •
    THE DUTY OFFICER was stressed: “Got Becky Welsh for you, calling on a cell phone that’s registered to David Gates. We’re trying to track it.”
    Virgil sat up, dropped his feet to the floor, so he could think: “Put her on.”
    Becky came up. “Hello? Is anybody there? Hello . . .”
    “Becky, this is Virgil. Are you okay?”
    She was crying. “Aw, God, I think Jimmy is dying. He’s got big red streaks coming out of his leg.”
    “You gotta come in. He needs a hospital, really quick. If he’s got red streaks, he could lose his leg . . . or die. Where are you?”
    “I don’t know, exactly. In a woods. I want to quit. I want to come in, and make people stop chasing us. I gotta get Jimmy in . . .”
    “Do you know about where you are?” Virgil asked.
    She said, “I know where that town is . . . the town with the gas station I was at. I’m down where you were looking yesterday, not too far, but kinda far, from that old man’s house.”
    Virgil: “If you can get to Arcadia, I can meet you at the gas station. I can get an ambulance. We might have to take him to the Cities in a helicopter.”
    “Okay . . . okay. Don’t shoot us,” Becky said.
    “We won’t. I will be in Arcadia in a half hour. Can you get there by then?”
    “I have to take a bunch of shit off the truck. . . . We have a bunch of shit on the truck so the helicopters can’t see us.”
    “This is Mr. Gates’s truck? A red Dodge?” Virgil asked.
    “I think so . . . yeah, it’s the old man’s truck. The last one we took,” she said.
    “Becky: you’ve got to carry through with this. Meet me in a half hour at the gas station. It’s the only way you can save Jimmy’s life.”
    She started weeping again, and said, “Oh, God . . .” and then she was gone.
    The duty officer came back and Virgil asked, “Did we get her?”
    “I doubt we can get close to her. The GPS needs tracking satellites, and that