'I'd better take a shower,' I said.
'You should go to the hospital.'
'I've wasted enough of the night on these guys. Why don't you get yourself something to eat in the kitchen?'
'Eat?'
'Yeah.'
'Too much,' she said.
After she went downstairs, I got into the shower stall and turned the hot water into my face and hair and propped my palms against the tile and let the blood and dirt and dried sweat boil out of my skin and sluice into the drain.
But when I closed my eyes I felt the bottom of the stall tilt under my feet and I saw streamers of colored light, like tracers in a night sky, behind my eyelids. I dried off and dressed in my underwear, one hand gripped on the bathroom door for balance. I saw the horizon dip outside the window and I heard a voice say Just so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting of your ears, and I toppled sideways across a chair onto the floor.
Then Mary Beth was beside me, her hands gripped under my arms, pulling me erect, helping me to the bed. I fell back on the pillow and dragged the sheet across my loins. She sat on the edge of the mattress, her eyes staring down into mine. Outside the window the sky was sealed with a flat layer of black clouds that pulsed with lightning.
'I'm all right,' I said.
'You want me to go?'
I started to speak, but she saw the answer in my eyes and she leaned over me and brushed my forehead with her fingers and kissed me lightly on the mouth. The tips of her curls touched my cheeks, and I could smell her shampoo and the heat in her skin. I held her and kissed her again. She slipped off her shoes and lay beside me, her face inches from mine.
'I've seen your jacket. Your kind always gets hurt, Billy Bob,' she said.
'You are a fed.'
She didn't reply. Instead, she gathered her arms around me and pulled me against her, releasing her breath against my cheek, molding me against her, her ankle tucked inside mine.
I waited to sit up, to change my position, but I felt two bright tentacles of pain slip along my spine and wrap around the front of my thighs.
'Wait,' she said. She stood up, unbuttoned her shirt and let it drop to the floor, then unsnapped her blue jeans and worked them off her hips and stepped out of them. Behind her, I could see clouds racing across the land, blooming with quicksilver, splintering the hills with electricity.
She turned away from me briefly, unhooked her bra and slipped off her panties, then sat on the edge of the mattress, pulled the sheet away from my body, and lay against me. I tried to turn on my shoulder so that I faced her, but again I felt a muscular spasm seize my lower back and send a pain through my thighs that made my mouth drop open.
'Don't move,' she said, and spread her thighs and sat on top of me, her arms propped on each side of me. She smiled down into my face. The freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts looked like tiny brown flowers. I traced my fingers around her nipples and took them in my mouth, then felt an unrelieved hardness and desire in my loins that I couldn't contain, that was like an envelope of heat glowing off of iron, that ached to enter her softness and the beauty and charity of her body, which gave satisfaction and sanctuary long before orgasm.
'I'll be here for you,' she whispered, her lips against my cheek, her passion so genuine and pure that I knew secretly, as all men do, I was undeserving of it.
* * *
chapter eighteen
Early the next morning, I put ice on the tubular swelling along the side of my head and went to a doctor for the muscle spasms in my lower back. He showed me a set of exercises that involved lying on the floor and raising the knees to the chest and sitting in a chair and touching the floor while I sucked in my stomach. I was amazed to find that a level of pain that had been so intense could drain out of my body like water, at least temporarily.
'Whenever you feel the pain, do the exercise. You'll be fine. Just avoid any sudden movement in your back,' the doctor said. He took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. 'You want a prescription?'
'No, thanks.'
'It's light stuff.'
'It always is.'
'Tell me you're not still six-parts Baptist, Billy Bob.'
Later, I went to the health club and sat in the steam room, then showered and walked to Marvin Pomroy's office in the courthouse.
'We put out a bulletin on the three guys but we didn't have much to go on,' he said.