Shallow Graves

You want some company or anything, my wife and I live a hundred yards up the road. There’ll be someone here all night, a nurse. Just tell her and she’ll call me.”
    “Thanks.”
    The men left the room. Pellam set the cup on the tabletop. He misjudged the distance and it hit the edge and fell to the floor. He heard one or maybe both of the pills, rolling somewhere, endlessly. He didn’t even look down. He lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling as the dusk turned into night and finally he slept.
    THE NOISE.
    Sitting in the Winnebago, Pellam remembered the way the boy would sit sideways in the camper’s smallbunk and swing his Adidas back and forth. The thud-thud, pause, thud-thud. A monotonous heartbeat.
    God, it was quiet. Pellam cocked his head and couldn’t hear a thing. A hum, but that was in his head. (Well, he heard Marty’s voice and his laugh and the fake heartbeat of his boots but those were in his head too.) No airplane drone, no diesels. No children whooping as they played. Pellam sat in the driver’s seat of the camper, looking back into the living quarters. The pain in his back was less when he sat upright. Standing was agony, unless he leaned. For some reason when he moved the pain wasn’t as bad as standing still.
    Ah, Marty. . . .
    He stood up. The tragedy tired him out more than the injuries did. He walked stiffly. He’d refused the cane the doctor recommended. There was a black scab on his head and the bruise now had some green in it.
    While he still had the courage, he filled a Macy’s shopping bag with the boy’s belongings. He rested, sitting on the bunk in the camper, looking at the bag for a few minutes, the big brown-red logo, the white, spidery wrinkles. Pellam stood, emptied the bag and packed the contents back into his own leather suitcase, which he’d bought on Rodeo Drive eight years before, folding the boy’s shirts and jeans and Jockey shorts as carefully as if he were doing piece cleaning in a Beverly Hills laundry.
    Then he sat and studied the suitcase for a half hour.
    After he’d been released from the clinic a few hours before, the first thing he’d done was shave.He’d passed a mirror, and his face, with the uneven beard laced with gray, had shocked him. He looked like he was a badly abused 50. Then he’d called Marty’s father. It had not been a good conversation. The man, a retired studio gaffer, blamed Pellam. He wasn’t contemptuous, he wasn’t snide, but throughout the conversation, Pellam could hear the pedal tone of suspicion—as if Pellam had supplied the drugs that had killed his son. Pellam wondered what the man looked like, what his house was like, what his relationship with Marty had been. The boy had complained about his parents a lot but most of the examples the boy cited made Pellam think: And the problem is what exactly? Marty bitched about the time they took away car privileges for a month after he’d passed out drunk in a HoJo’s off the Edens Expressway. And the time they made him go to a counselor when he went through a spell of cutting classes.
    All high school stuff—bitching and moaning.
    Pellam also asked to speak to Marty’s mother. He felt a wave of relief when the boy’s father said that wouldn’t be a good idea. Then he’d hung up and lain back in the camper cot.
    He clicked the heavy brass latches back and forth. The suitcase had cost him a thousand dollars.
    Pellam felt the bottle of Demerol in his pocket, took it out and tossed it into one of the kitchen drawers. He needed something different. He slowly crouched down and reached into a cabinet. Out came a bottle of mescal, a quarter full, with a bloated white worm in the bottom. Pellam poured a double shot and drank the liquid down in two swallows. He coughed and felt the crackling wave from his chest up to hisface and the nearly instantaneous deflating of the pain. He poured one more, smaller, and again began the slow crouch to replace the bottle. He set it in the back of the cabinet but it landed on something and fell forward. The loose cork stopper fell out and a quarter cup of liquor spilled out before he could snatch the bottle up again. “Damn.” He managed to save the worm. Pellam reached in the back and felt for what the bottle had landed on. It was soft and crunched. He jerked his hand back, thinking: Rat, mouse. . . .
    He looked. Just a Baggie. He reached in and pulled it out. Filled with Marty’s stash. He looked at it for a long moment then