If It Bleeds Read online

  Drew tried to speak, but at first could only manage a croak. He cleared his throat—which was painful—and tried again. “I thought you just said something.”

  “I did.” The rat’s mouth didn’t move, but the voice was coming from him, all right; it wasn’t in Drew’s head.

  “This is a dream,” Drew said. “Or delirium. Maybe both.”

  “No, it’s real enough,” the rat said. “You’re awake and you’re not delirious. Your fever’s going down. Check for yourself.”

  Drew put a hand on his forehead. He did feel cooler, but that wasn’t exactly trustworthy, was it? He was conversing with a rat, after all. He felt in his pocket for the kitchen matches he’d left there, struck one, and lit the lantern. He held it up, expecting the rat to be gone, but he was still there, sitting on his back paws with his tail curled around his haunches and holding his weird pink hands to his chest.

  “If you’re real, get off my manuscript,” Drew said. “I worked too hard on it for you to leave a bunch of ratshit on the title page.”

  “You did work hard,” the rat agreed (but showing no signs of relocating). He scratched behind one ear, now seeming perfectly lively.

  Whatever fell on him must have just stunned him, Drew thought. If he’s there at all, that is. If he was ever there.

  “You worked hard and at first you worked well. You were totally on the rails, running fast and hot. Then it started to go wrong, didn’t it? Just like the other ones. Don’t feel bad; wannabe novelists all over the world hit the same wall. Do you know how many half-finished novels are stuck in desk drawers or filing cabinets? Millions.”

  “Getting sick fucked me up.”

  “Think back, think honestly. It was starting to happen even before that.”

  Drew didn’t want to think back.

  “You lose your selective perception,” the rat said. “It happens to you every time. On the novels, at least. Doesn’t happen at once, but as the book grows and begins to breathe, more choices need to be made and your selective perception erodes.”

  The rat went to all fours, trotted to the edge of Pop’s desk, and sat up again, like a dog begging for a treat.

  “Writers have different habits, different ways of getting in the groove, and they work at different speeds, but to produce a long work, there must always come extended periods of focused narration.”

  I’ve heard that before, Drew thought. Almost word for word. Where?

  “At every single moment during those focused periods—those flights of fancy—the writer is faced with at least seven choices of word and expression and detail. Talented ones make the right choices with almost no conscious consideration; they are pro basketball players of the mind, hitting from all over the court.”

  Where? Who?

  “A constant winnowing process is going on which is the basis of what we call creative wri—”

  “Franzen!” Drew bellowed, sitting upright and sending a bolt of pain through his head. “That was part of the Franzen lecture! Almost word for word!”

  The rat ignored this interruption. “You are capable of that winnowing process, but only in short bursts. When you try to write a novel—the difference between a sprint and a marathon—it always breaks down. You see all the choices of expression and detail, but the consequent winnowing begins to fail you. You don’t lose the words, you lose the ability to choose the correct words. They look all right; they look all wrong. It’s very sad. You’re like a car with a powerful engine and a broken transmission.”

  Drew closed his eyes tight enough to make spots flare, and then sprang them open. His orphan of the storm was still there.

  “I can help you,” the rat announced. “If you want me to, that is.”

  “And you’d do this because?”

  The rat cocked his head, as if unable to believe a supposedly smart man—a college English teacher who had been published in The New Yorker!—could be so stupid. “You were going to kill me with a shovel, and why not? I’m just a lowly rat, after all. But you took me in instead. You saved me.”

  “So as a reward you give me three wishes.” Drew said it with a smile. This was familiar ground: Hans Christian Andersen, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm.

  “Just one,” the rat said. “A very specific one. You can wish to finish your book.” He lifted his tail and slapped it down on the manuscript of Bitter River for emphasis. “But it comes with a condition.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Someone you care for will have to die.”

  More familiar ground. This turned out to be a dream where he was replaying his argument with Lucy. He had explained (not very well, but he had given it the old college try) that he needed to write the book. That it was very important. She had asked if it was as important as she and the kids. He had told her no, of course not, then asked if it had to be a choice.

  I think it is a choice, she’d said. And you just made it.

  “This isn’t actually a magic wish situation at all,” he said. “More of a business deal. Or a Faustian bargain. It’s sure not like any of the fairy tales I read as a kid.”

  The rat scratched behind one ear, somehow keeping his balance while he did it. Admirable. “All the wishes in fairy tales come at a price. Then there’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ Remember that one?”

  “Even in a dream,” Drew said, “I would not trade my wife or either of my kids for an oat opera with no literary pretensions.”

  As the words came out of his mouth, he realized that was why he had seized the idea of Bitter River so unquestioningly; his plot-driven western would never be stacked up against the next Rushdie or Atwood or Chabon. Not to mention the next Franzen.

  “I would never ask you to,” the rat said. “Actually, I was thinking of Al Stamper. Your old department head.”

  That silenced Drew. He just looked at the rat, which looked back with those beady black eyes. The wind blew around the cabin, sometimes gusting hard enough to shake the walls; the sleet rattled.

  Pancreatic, Al had said when Drew commented on his startling weight loss. But, he had added, there was no need for anyone to be crafting obituaries just yet. The docs caught it relatively early. Confidence is high.

  Looking at him, though—sallow skin, sunken eyes, lifeless hair—Drew had felt no confidence whatsoever. The key word in what Al had said was relatively. Pancreatic cancer was sly; it hid. The diagnosis was almost always a death sentence. And if he did die? There would be mourning, of course, and Nadine Stamper would be the chief mourner—they had been married for something like forty-five years. The members of the English Department would wear black armbands for a month or so. The obituary would be long, noting Al’s many accomplishments and awards. His books on Dickens and Hardy would be mentioned. But he was seventy-two at least, maybe even seventy-four, and nobody would say he died young, or with his promise unfulfilled.

  Meanwhile, the rat was looking at him, its pink paws now curled against its furry chest.

  What the hell? Drew thought. It’s only a hypothetical question. And one inside a dream, at that.

  “I guess I’d take the deal and make the wish,” Drew said. Dream or no dream, hypothetical question or not, he felt uneasy saying it. “He’s dying, anyway.”

  “You finish your book and Stamper dies,” the rat said, as if to make sure Drew understood.

  Drew gave the rat a cunning sideways look. “Will the book be published?”

  “I’m authorized to grant the wish if you make it,” the rat said. “I’m not authorized to predict the future of your literary endeavor. Were I to guess…” The rat cocked his head. “I’d guess it will be. As I said, you are talented.”

  “Okay,” Drew said. “I finish the book, Al dies. Since he’s going to die anyway, that seems okay to me.” Only it didn’t, not really. “Do you think he’ll live long enough to read it, at least?”

  “I just told you—”

  Drew raised a hand. “Not authorized to predict the future of my litera
ry endeavor, right. Are we done here?”

  “There’s one more thing I need.”

  “If it’s my signature in blood on a contract, you can forget the whole deal.”

  “It’s not all about you, Mister,” the rat said. “I’m hungry.” He jumped onto the desk’s chair, and from the chair to the floor. He sped across to the kitchen table and picked up an oyster cracker, one Drew must have dropped on the day he had the grilled cheese and tomato soup. The rat sat up, grasping the oyster cracker in its paws, and went to work. The cracker was gone in seconds.

  “Good talking to you,” the rat said. It disappeared almost as quickly as the oyster cracker, zipping across the floor and into the dead fireplace.

  “Goddam,” Drew said.

  He closed his eyes, then sprang them open. It didn’t feel like a dream. He closed them again, opened them again. The third time he closed them, they stayed closed.

  23

  He awoke in his bed, with no memory of how he’d gotten there… or had he been here all night? That was more than likely, considering how fucked up he’d been thanks to Roy DeWitt and his snotty bandanna. The whole previous day seemed like a dream, his conversation with the rat only the most vivid part of it.

  The wind was still blowing and the sleet was still sleeting, but he felt better. There was no question of it. The fever was either going or entirely gone. His joints still ached and his throat was still sore, but neither was as bad as they had been last night, when part of him had been convinced he was going to die out here. Died of pneumonia on Shithouse Road—what an obituary that would have been.

  He was in his boxers, the rest of his clothes heaped on the floor. He had no memory of undressing, either. He put them back on and went downstairs. He scrambled four eggs and this time ate them all, chasing each bite with orange juice. It was concentrate, all the Big 90 carried, but cold and delicious.

  He looked across the room at Pop’s desk and thought about trying to work, maybe switching from the laptop to the portable typewriter to save the laptop’s battery. But after putting his dishes in the sink, he trudged up the stairs and went back to bed, where he slept until the middle of the afternoon.

  The storm was still pounding away when he got up the second time, but Drew didn’t care. He felt almost like himself again. He wanted a sandwich—there was bologna and cheese—and then he wanted to go to work. Sheriff Averill was about to fool the gun thugs with his big abracadabra, and now that Drew felt rested and well, he couldn’t wait to write it.

  Halfway down the stairs, he noticed that the toybox by the fireplace was lying on its side with the toys that had been inside spilling out onto the rag rug. Drew thought he must have kicked it over on his sleepwalk to bed the previous night. He went to it and knelt, meaning to put the toys back in the box before starting work. He had the Frisbee in one hand and the old Stretch Armstrong in the other, when he froze. Lying on its side near Stacey’s topless Barbie doll was a stuffed rat.

  Drew felt his pulse throbbing in his head as he picked it up, so maybe he wasn’t completely well, after all. He squeezed the rat and it gave a tired squeak. Just a toy, but sort of creepy, all things considered. Who gave their kid a stuffed rat to sleep with, when there was a perfectly good teddy bear (only one eye, but still) in the same box?

  No accounting for tastes, he thought, and finished his mother’s old maxim out loud: “Said the old maid as she kissed the cow.”

  Maybe he’d seen the stuffed rat at the height of his fever and it had kicked off the dream. Make that probably, or almost certainly. That he couldn’t remember searching all the way to the bottom of the toybox didn’t signify; hell, he couldn’t even remember taking off his clothes and going to bed.

  He piled the toys back into the box, made himself a cup of tea, and went to work. He was doubtful at first, hesitant, a little scared, but after a few initial missteps, he caught hold and wrote until it was too dark to see without using the lantern. Nine pages, and he thought they were good.

  Damn good.

  24

  It wasn’t a three-day blow; Pierre actually lasted four. Sometimes the wind and rain slackened and then the storm would crank up again. Sometimes a tree fell, but none as close as the one that had smashed the shed. That part hadn’t been a dream; he’d seen it with his own eyes. And although the tree—a huge old pine—had largely spared his Suburban, it had fallen close enough to tear off the passenger side mirror.

  Drew barely noticed these things. He wrote, he ate, he slept in the afternoon, he wrote again. Every now and then he had a sneezing fit, and every now and then he thought about Lucy and the kids, anxiously waiting for some word. Mostly he didn’t think about them. That was selfish and he knew it and didn’t care. He was living in Bitter River now.

  Every now and then he had to pause for the right word to come to him (like messages floating up in the window of the Magic 8 Ball he’d had as a kid), and every now and then he had to get up and walk around the room as he tried to think of how to make a smooth transition from one scene to the next, but there was no panic. No frustration. He knew the words would come, and they did. He was hitting from all over the court, hitting from way downtown. He wrote on Pop’s old portable now, pounding the keys til his fingers hurt. He didn’t care about that, either. He had carried this book, this idea that had come to him out of nowhere while standing on a street corner; now it was carrying him.

  What a fine ride it was.

  25

  They sat in the dank cellar with no light but the kerosene lantern the sheriff had found upstairs, Jim Averill on one side and Andy Prescott on the other. In the lantern’s reddish-orange light, the kid looked no older than fourteen. He certainly didn’t look like the half-drunk, half-mad young tough who had blown off that girl’s head. Averill thought that evil was a very strange thing. Strange, and sly. It found a way in, as a rat finds its way into a house, it ate whatever you had been too stupid or lazy to put away, and when it was done it disappeared, its belly full. And what had been left behind when the murder-rat left Prescott? This. A frightened boy. He said he couldn’t remember what he had done, and Averill believed him. He would hang for it just the same.

  “What time is it?” Prescott asked.

  Averill consulted his pocket watch. “Going on six. Five minutes later than the last time you asked me.”

  “And the stage is at eight?”

  “Yes. When it’s a mile or so out of town, one of my deputies will

  Drew stopped, staring at the page in the typewriter. A bar of sun had just struck across it. He got up and went to the window. There was blue up there. Just enough to make a pair of overalls, Pop would have said, but it was growing. And he heard something, faint but unmistakable: the rrrrrr of a chainsaw.

  He put on the musty jacket and went outside. The sound was still some distance away. He walked across the yard, which was littered with branches, to the remains of the equipment shed. Pop’s bucksaw was lying beneath part of a fallen wall, and Drew was able to wiggle it out. It was a two-hander, but he’d be all right with it as long as any downed tree he came to wasn’t too thick. And take it easy, he told himself. Unless you want a relapse.

  For a moment he thought about just going back inside and resuming work instead of trying to meet whoever was down the road, cutting a path through the storm’s leavings. A day or two before he would have done just that. But things had changed. An image rose in his mind (they came all the time now, unbidden), one that made him smile: a gambler on a losing streak, abjuring the dealer to hurry up and spin those fucking cards. He wasn’t that guy anymore, and thank God. The book would still be there when he got back. Whether he resumed out here in the woods or back in Falmouth, it would be there.

  He tossed the saw in the back of the Suburban and began rolling slowly up Shithouse Road, pausing every now and then to throw fallen branches out of his way before going on. He went almost a mile before he came to the first tree down across the road, but it was a birch, and he made quick work of
it.

  The chainsaw was very loud now, not rrrrr but RRRRRRR. Each time it ceased Drew would hear a big engine revving as his rescuer came closer, and then the saw would start up again. Drew was trying to cut his way through a much bigger tree and not having much luck when a Chevy 4X4, customized for woods work, came lumbering around the next bend.

  The driver pulled up and got out. He was a big man with an even bigger belly, dressed in green overalls and a camo coat that flapped around his knees. The chainsaw he carried was industrial-sized, but looked almost like a toy in the guy’s gloved hand. Drew knew who he was at once. The resemblance was unmistakable. So was the whiff of Old Spice that went with the smells of sawdust and chainsaw gasoline. “Hey there! You must be Old Bill’s boy.”

  The big man smiled. “Ayuh. And you must be Buzzy Larson’s.”

  “That’s right.” Drew hadn’t known how much he needed to see another human being until this moment. It was like not knowing how thirsty you were until someone handed you a glass of cold water. He stuck out his hand. They shook over the downed tree.

  “Your name’s Johnny, right? Johnny Colson.”

  “Close. Jackie. Stand back and let me cut that tree for you, Mr. Larson. Take you all day with that buck.”

  Drew stood aside and watched as Jackie cranked up his Stihl and zipped it through the tree, leaving a neat pile of sawdust on the leaf- and twig-littered road. Between the two of them, they shifted the smaller half into the ditch.

  “How is it the rest of the way?” Drew asked, puffing a little.

  “Not terrible, but there’s one bad washout.” He squinted one eye closed and sized up Drew’s Suburban with the other. “That might getcha through, it’s pretty high-sprung. If it don’t, I could tow you, although it might ding up your exhaust system a dight.”

  “How did you know to come out here?”

  “Your wife had Dad’s number in her old address book. She talked to my ma, and Ma called me. Your wife is some worried about you.”