A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

what things had come through. Someone else was going to give him a kidney? I listened to the message again. He had never called me son before, and he didn’t say anything about where he had been since Tuesday.

I tried him back but got the damn machine again. I didn’t bother leaving a message this time, and my face was starting to throb bad, so I took a Dilaudid and crawled into bed with George.

I slept for more than six hours and woke up around nine. I got dressed and thought of getting an Uber and retrieving my Caprice, which was still at the spa, but I decided I was too loopy from the pill and took another one. Dilaudid, they say, is the closest there is to heroin. Makes Oxycontin look like a weak sister.

Feeling a little hungry, but not too much, because of the pill, I had a can of lentil soup and some pickles. My usual dinner. Then I ate a marijuana gummy for dessert, thinking it would mix nice with the Dilaudid. I made the mistake of checking my phone, which was nearly dead again, and there were a number of missed calls and text messages. Much more than usual. People must have seen the article in the paper. I didn’t listen to any of the voice mails or read any of the texts, and I didn’t bother to charge the thing.

Stoned, I watched a Lakers game, and all the while images of me shooting Lusk hovered on the edge of my consciousness, like this thing I should be attending to, but I kept pushing it out of my mind.

Then after the Lakers game, I went to the bathroom to look at myself, which I had managed not to do at the hospital.

I removed my bandage, and even on the drugs, I nearly swooned. The skin was all purple and green and yellow, and the black stitches formed a hideous pucker down the middle of my cheek, like a raised seam on a baseball glove.

I quickly put the bandage back on, and there in the mirror were my father’s blue eyes and my mother’s black hair, cut short; my busted big nose and my chin with stubble. But I didn’t seem to know this guy and I didn’t like him.

I said to the face: What did you do? You killed a man.

I know, the face said. But he was going to kill Mei, and he was suicidal. He used me to die.

George, hearing me talk to someone, came into the bathroom, and I felt a little more sane. “George, I killed a man,” I said.

He looked at me with compassion, and so then I treated myself to half a Dilaudid and half a marijuana gummy and took George for a walk. Glen Alder is a dead-end street with a cul-de-sac—which is where my house is, on the right side of the cul-de-sac—and we went down to Beachwood and up to Glen Holly, our usual route.

Back at the house, I grabbed a blanket and we lay down on the couch I have on the side porch, which is on the other side of the house from George’s little chicken coop. I hooked George up to the lead I keep on the porch—otherwise he’d dash off into the woods after skunks and coyotes—and he lay on my chest, under the blanket, with his face poking out and resting by my chin, and together we listened to the night birds and the night wind and the far-off sounds of the city: sirens and traffic rumble and revving motorcycles.

And in the sky the full moon was unusually large and beautiful.

At two a.m. I woke up. I was still high as hell and George was barking and I realized he’d been barking for a while. Someone was banging at the front door. I unhooked George and we went back into the house. I opened the front door and it was Lou.

He smiled weakly at me and then did a half twist and fell into my arms.

I pulled him inside and dragged him to the couch in the living room. I lay him down and his raincoat flopped open and the front of his white shirt was red with blood.

“Got shot,” he whispered.

His right hand flopped to the floor and George started licking the blood off it.

“George,” I shouted, and I pushed him away and opened up Lou’s shirt. There was a black puncture, a hole about the size of a nickel, and dark-red blood was oozing out of it. I took Lou’s hand and put it over the hole.

“Keep pressure on it!” I said, then ran into the kitchen, where my phone was, and it was dead! “Goddamn it!” I screamed.

I nearly lost control and threw the thing against the wall, but I had sense enough not to. I cursed myself for not having a landline, and I plugged the phone in, grabbed a dish towel, and ran back to Lou. My panic was rubbery. The Dilaudid and the marijuana had me all messed up, like the volume inside me was set much too loud. I knew I had to keep my head, but my head was gone.

Lou’s eyes were closed and his blood-smeared hand had flopped back to the floor, and George was licking it again. I pushed George away and knelt next to Lou and applied pressure to the hole in his belly with the dish towel.

I said: “I’m going to call 911 in a second, Lou. Just have to charge the damn fucking phone.”

His eyes opened. He looked at me sideways. He whispered: “I don’t think it matters.”

I ignored that and said: “Who shot you, Lou? What happened?”

“Don’t know their names. That was the deal. But I got the one who got me.” He seemed to smile and he was going to say something else, but a vicious pain shot through him and he bared his little yellow teeth, and then he exhaled and closed his eyes and