Mad River

HALF THE LIGHTS in the house worked; and it smelled like a hundred years of chicken noodle soup,
Life
magazines, and
National Geographic
s, and cigarettes. But there was a big flat-screen television in the front room, with a La-Z-Boy and a couch and a satellite connection, and a DVD player, and a stereo system with hundreds of CDs.
    “I’ll check the bathroom and the bedroom and see if the old fuck had some medicine,” Becky said.
    The old fuck did. The medicine cabinet was a gold mine. He’d apparently had tooth problems, and had yellow plastic tubes half-filled with more OxyContin and a couple of dozen penicillin tabs. Some of them were outdated, but they’d be better than nothing, she thought. She also found a plastic box with a red cross on it, and a label that said: “Farm Family First Aid Kit.”
    She took them downstairs and found Jimmy figuring out the TV. “I looked at the CDs, just a bunch of shit,” Jimmy said.
    She picked one of them up and it said:
Goldberg Variations
. She’d seen some stuff in
Cosmo
about variations, but that didn’t seem like this. She tossed it on the floor and said, “Lay back on the couch. I need to look at your leg.”
    “Let me get the TV on,” he said. His eyelids were drooping again.
    He got the TV on, to a replay of
Dancing with the Stars
, and lay back and closed his eyes. Becky decided not to try to get his pants off, so she got a knife from the kitchen and cut through the denim. There was an entry wound at the back, and then a blown-out channel in the flesh along the outside of Jimmy’s thigh. Another two inches to the left, and the bullet would have missed completely. On the other hand, two inches to the right, and it would have blown the bone out of his leg.
    It looked bad, she thought, but not
that
bad.
    She said to Jimmy, “I can fix this.”
    “That’s good,” he said, distantly, and then apparently went to sleep. She got to work, cut off the pant leg and pulled it down, went into the kitchen and got some paper towels, wiped off the wound with hot water. When it was clean, it looked worse, like raw meat. She sprayed it with some Band-Aid disinfectant, then covered it with two four-by-four-inch sterile bandages from the first aid kit, one for the entry wound, the other for the exit.
    When everything was covered and looking neat, she woke up Jimmy and made him eat four of the penicillin tabs. “You’re gonna be okay,” she said.
    “That’s good,” he said, and he went back to sleep. She covered him with a blanket from the bedroom, then went back to the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and stood in the shower and washed away every bit of Tom McCall.
    That done, she went back out to the living room, wrapped in a towel, and found Jimmy snoring on the couch. She left him there, went back to the bedroom, and fell on the bed. In two minutes, she was asleep.
    Five hours later, she woke up and heard music. Strange music, like something from a nightclub. What
was
that?
    Holding the bed blanket over her shoulders, she went back to the living room and found Jimmy watching television. She looked at the screen, which showed a half dozen men having sex with one another in an improbable oral-anal chain. Jimmy cackled and said, “The old fuck was queer as a three-dollar bill. He’s got, like, a hundred of these things.”
    She looked at the screen and said, “Jeez. That’s nasty.”
    “Look at that guy,” Jimmy said. “He’s got a cock like a fuckin’ horse.”
    Jimmy, Becky thought, looked wide-awake; more than this, he looked
excited
.
    And she looked at the screen again and back to Jimmy, and suddenly understood a lot. She thought,
Oh, no.

15
    VIRGIL AND DAVENPORT hooked up at a restaurant across from St. Kate’s, a Catholic girls’ college where Virgil had done some of his best work in chasing women, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota. The thing about Catholic girls was, they had a deep feeling for sin, which made catching them a lot more satisfying than it might have been otherwise.
    Davenport was waiting in a back booth, chatting with a woman sitting at an adjacent table; he was wearing one of his two-million-dollar suits, but was tie-less.
    Virgil nodded at the woman, who looked mildly put-out by his arrival, and slid into the booth opposite Davenport. He said, “How y’ doin’?”
    “Only fair,” Davenport said. “The governor says that if we don’t catch these kids in the next couple of days, it’ll knock two