right then. You tell me. Was it that girl?”
He glared sulkily into the fireplace.
“This won’t be much of a conversation if you won’t talk to me. Did she really scratch you, Angel? Let me see.” She came across the room to him and tugged at his shirt.
“Lay off, ‘Bel,” he warned, pushing her hands away. “I’m not in the mood for any of that.”
“Oh”—she laughed—“it’s true then. I’ve never liked scratching. It’s unladylike.”
“How the hell would you know?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, and her voice took on an edge. “All the usual things, I suppose? Parked car, clumsy little gropings in the dark, the steering wheel?”
Raphael’s face flamed. She saw the flush and laughed, a deep, throaty sound that made him flush even more. “You did!” she exulted. “In a car seat! My poor Angel, I thought I’d taught you better. Are motels so expensive now? Or couldn’t you wait? Was she a virgin?”
“Why don’t we just drop this?”
“I think the boy’s in love, Junior,” she said to Flood.
“Here’s to love.” Flood toasted, raising his glass. “And to steering wheels, of course.”
“Oh, that’s cute, Hood,” Raphael said sarcastically. It sounded silly even to him, but he didn’t care.
“Don’t be nasty, dear.” Isabel’s tone was motherly. “It doesn’t become you.”
It was that note in her voice more than anything—that tolerant, amused, superior tone that finally infuriated him. “Don’t patronize me, ‘Bel,” he told her, getting up clumsily. “I won’t take that—not from you.”
“I don’t think I Eke your tone, Raphael.”
“Good. At least I managed to insult you. I wasn’t really sure I could.”
“I’ve had about enough of this.”
“I had enough a long time ago.” He picked up his jacket. “Where are you going?”
“Someplace where the air’s a little cleaner.” “Don’t be stupid. You’re drunk.” “What if I am?” He started to lurch toward the door. “Stop him, Junior.”
Raphael stopped and turned toward Flood, his jaw thrust forward pugnaciously.
“Not me,” Flood said, raising both hands, palms out. “If you want to go, go ahead.” His eyes, however, were savage.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Raphael turned and stumbled out the door into the rain.
“Raphael!” Isabel called to him from the porch as he fumbled with his car keys. “Don’t be ridiculous. Come back into the house.”
“No thanks, ‘Bel,” he replied. “You cost too much for me. I can’t afford you anymore.” He got the door open and climbed into the car.
“Raphael,” she called again.
He started the car and spun away, the rear end fishtailing and wet gravel spraying out behind him.
Because he knew that Flood might try to follow him, he avoided the freeway, sticking instead to the narrow, two-lane country roads that paralleled it. He was still angry and more than a little drunk. He drove too fast on the unfamiliar roads and skidded often—heart-stopping little drifts as he rounded curves, and wrenching, side-to-side slides as he fought to bring the car back under control.
It had all been stupid, of course—overdramatic and even childish. Despite his anger he knew that his outburst had been obviously contrived. Inwardly he almost writhed with embarrassment. It was all too pat and far too easy to attach the worst motives to. Quite bluntly, he had found someone else and had deliberately dumped Isabel. He had been bad-mannered, ungrateful, and even a little bit contemptible. He knew he should go back, but he continued to roar down the wet, winding road, stubbornly resisting even his own best impulses.
He rounded a sharp right-hand curve, and the car went almost completely out of control. In a single, lucid flash he saw directly ahead of him the large white wooden “X” on a pole at the side of the road and the glaring light bearing down on him. As he drove his foot down on the brake, he heard the roaring noise. His tires howled as the car spun and skidded broadside toward the intersection.
The locomotive klaxon bellowed at him as he skidded, tail-first now, onto the tracks in front of the train.
The world was suddenly filled with noise and light and a great stunning shock. He was thrown helplessly around inside the car as it began to tumble, disintegrating, in front of the grinding mass of the locomotive.
He was hurled against a door, felt it give, and he was partially thrown out. Then the remains of the car rolled over on top of him, and he lost consciousness.
vii
At first there was only shattering, mind-destroying pain. Though he feared the unconsciousness as a kind of death, his mind, whimpering, crept back into it gratefully each time he awoke to find the pain still there.
Later—how much later he would never know—there were drugs that stunned him into insensibility. Vacant-eyed and uncaring, he would watch the slow progression of light outside the window of the room. It grew light, and it stayed light for a while, and then it grew dark again. And always, hiding somewhere below the smooth surface, the pain twisted and heaved like some enormous beast reaching up out of the depths to drag him down out of the billowy gray indifference of the drugs and feed upon his shrieking body again. Sometimes, when the drugs were wearing off and their thick, insulating cloud was growing thin, he would cry, knowing that the beast was almost upon him once more, feeling the first feathery touches of its claws. And then they would come and give him more of the drugs, and it would be all right.
There were many bandages. At times it was almost as if the whole bed was one enormous bandage, and there seemed to be a kind of wire cage over his hips. The cage bothered him because it tented the bedclothes up in front of him, so that he could not see the foot of the bed, but when he tried to move the cage, they came and gave him more drugs and strapped his hands down.
And then his mother was there, accompanied by his uncle Harry. Harry Taylor’s usually florid face blanched as he approached the bed, and Raphael vaguely wondered what could be so disturbing. It was, however, his mother’s shriek that half roused him. That animal cry of insupportable loss and the look of mindless horror on her face as she entered the room reached down into the gray fog where he hid from the pain and brought him up, partially sitting, staring beyond the tented cage over his hips at the unbelievable vacancy on the left side of the bed.
It was a mistake, of course, some trick of the eye. Quite plainly, he could feel his left leg—toes, foot, ankle, knee, and thigh. He half sat, feeling the leg in exquisite detail while his eyes, sluggish and uncomprehending, told him that it was no longer there.
viii
“Taylor,”
