Pauly chuckled without humor. He clenched his jaw. A clash inside him. Words he’d never spoken aloud, and now opening up to a stranger. A guy he didn’t trust. Thorn didn’t know why that happened, but he’d seen it more than once. Had done it himself, turning to some unknown on the next barstool, drunken sharing.
The python had slung itself out between the two beds. One of the guys.
“Sad old fuck. Lying there, all the tubes and monitors. Barely keeping his eyes open. Goes on about the bomb, how sad he was for what he’d done, him and the others. What it led to. All the dead. Way it changed everything, made it worse. It’s eating him up, he says, all his life, eating his guts.”
Thorn lay back on the bed, turning his own eyes to the ceiling, trying to picture what Pauly was seeing.
“‘Put the genie back in the bottle.’ That’s what he said. Wanted to know could I help. ‘That’s my last wish, son.’ Calling me son. ‘Put the genie back in the bottle.’ I stood there listening to him. Didn’t speak a word the whole time. Hour later he died.”
Thorn let a few moments tick by. “Never met you before, he gives you a mission.”
“‘Genie back in the bottle.’ Like that’s possible.”
“But you’re trying anyway. Make him happy, even though he’s dead.”
“Can’t put genies back,” Pauly said. “Can’t put anything back. Once it’s out, it’s fucking out. Best anybody can do, slow down the genie. Trip her up.”
Thorn watched the shadows of a branch sway on the wall. “And that’s why you’re here, under my roof. Wally’s legs, the genie.”
Pauly was quiet for a minute, drained. “Take a nap, smart guy. You’re going to need it.”
“One more thing.”
“Take a fucking nap.”
“Why’d you save my ass from Prince? Why not stay out of it, let him tear my head off?”
Pauly closed his eyes for a while as if maybe he’d shut down. When he spoke again, his voice was velvet and slow, back to his late-night radio sound. “I saved your ass because we’re buddies. We look out for each other.”
“But we’re not buddies.”
Pauly looked over. “We are now.”
* * *
One hundred and thirty-eight mousetraps.
That’s what Thorn dreamed. Not intending to nap, believing he was too wired, too on guard, just laying his head back on the pillow to relax his muscles, thinking about who these people were. What was going on. The A-bomb, Turkey Point, Prince Key, a fuck-you to Miami. Then he was into the dream, 138 mousetraps.
His eleventh-grade science teacher. Mr. Jacobs. Coral Shores High, the guy in his late sixties, gray hair, rail thin. Been teaching smart-ass punks like Thorn for thirty years and was still energized. Today in class he was wearing an Indian headdress. Hundreds of bright feathers. No shirt and Pauly’s medallion around his neck. An IV hooked up to his arm, dripping chemo.
Mr. Jacobs, the Navajo from Los Alamos. Dream logic.
Thorn and his classmates gathered at the head of the class staring at a terrarium on the table. Big glass box full of mousetraps. All those traps set with yellow Ping-Pong balls. Why 138? Thorn couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. But he remembered the number.
Mr. Jacobs was chanting an Indian ritual song. The class circled the terrarium like a tribal fire. Twenty-five smart-asses making jokes. Mousetraps covered the bottom of the glass case, each wooden base flush against the other. One thirty-eight. Jacobs opened the lid.
Holding up a single red Ping-Pong ball. See this. An electron. A stray electron. He gave his headdress a shake, feathers fluttering.
Dropped the red ball into the glass box, shut the lid. The red ball sprang a trap, a yellow Ping-Pong ball exploded, set off another trap, then a few more mousetraps sprang shut, firing their balls against the glass walls, ricocheting, setting off more traps, and then whoosh, in a handful of seconds, all the traps fired. One thirty-eight. Terrarium full of exploding Ping-Pong balls, a whirlwind, a crazy yellow chain reaction.
Nuclear fission.
Like that. Whoosh.
Thorn dreaming it as vividly and real as the day it happened. Whoosh. That high school science guy wearing an Indian headdress, hospital tubes attached to his arms.
THIRTY-ONE
“EVERYBODY’S GONE.” A WHISPER NEAR his ear.
“Gone?” Thorn heard himself speak the word, still groggy with dreams, a bleary residue from his midday nap.
“I sent them away, food shopping.” Leslie was alongside him on the bed. Her body flush against his. “We don’t have much time. Half an hour maybe. Are you awake?”
Lips next to his ear, the tickle of her breath, her head sharing his pillow.