Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(60)
Billy looked resentfully at Dan. “See the trouble you got me in? I didn’t even get my morning coffee.”
The flies were gone this morning—except they were still there. Dan knew that if he concentrated, he could see them again if he wanted to . . . but who in Christ’s name would want to?
“I know,” Dan said. “There is no gravity, life just sucks. Can I use your phone, Casey?”
“Be my guest.” Casey stood up. “Guess I’ll toddle on over to the train station and punch a few tickets. You got an engineer’s cap that’ll fit me, Billy?”
“No.”
“Mine will,” Dan said.
9
For an organization that didn’t advertise its presence, sold no goods, and supported itself with crumpled dollar bills thrown into passed baskets or baseball caps, Alcoholics Anonymous exerted a quietly powerful influence that stretched far beyond the doors of the various rented halls and church basements where it did its business. It wasn’t the old boys’ network, Dan thought, but the old drunks’ network.
He called John Dalton, and John called an internal medicine specialist named Greg Fellerton. Fellerton wasn’t in the Program, but he owed Johnny D. a favor. Dan didn’t know why, and didn’t care. All that mattered was that later that day, Billy Freeman was on the examining table in Fellerton’s Lewiston office. Said office was a seventy-mile drive from Frazier, and Billy bitched the whole way.
“Are you sure indigestion’s all that’s been bothering you?” Dan asked as they pulled into Fellerton’s little parking area on Pine Street.
“Yuh,” Billy said. Then he reluctantly added, “It’s been a little worse lately, but nothin that keeps me up at night.”
Liar, Dan thought, but let it pass. He’d gotten the contrary old sonofabitch here, and that was the hard part.
Dan was sitting in the waiting room, leafing through a copy of OK! with Prince William and his pretty but skinny new bride on the cover, when he heard a lusty cry of pain from down the hall. Ten minutes later, Fellerton came out and sat down beside Dan. He looked at the cover of OK! and said, “That guy may be heir to the British throne, but he’s still going to be as bald as a nine ball by the time he’s forty.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Of course I’m right. In human affairs, the only real king is genetics. I’m sending your friend up to Central Maine General for a CT scan. I’m pretty sure what it’ll show. If I’m right, I’ll schedule Mr. Freeman to see a vascular surgeon for a little cut-and-splice early tomorrow morning.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Billy was walking up the hall, buckling his belt. His tanned face was now sallow and wet with sweat. “He says there’s a bulge in my aorta. Like a bubble on a car tire. Only car tires don’t yell when you poke em.”
“An aneurysm,” Fellerton said. “Oh, there’s a chance it’s a tumor, but I don’t think so. In any case, time’s of the essence. Damn thing’s the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It’s good you got him in for a look-see. If it had burst without a hospital nearby . . .” Fellerton shook his head.
10
The CT scan confirmed Fellerton’s aneurysm diagnosis, and by six that evening, Billy was in a hospital bed, where he looked considerably diminished. Dan sat beside him.
“I’d kill for a cigarette,” Billy said wistfully.
“Can’t help you there.”
Billy sighed. “High time I quit, anyway. Won’t they be missin you at Rivington House?”
“Day off.”
“And ain’t this one hell of a way to spend it. Tell you what, if they don’t murder me with their knives and forks tomorrow morning, I guess I’m going to owe you my life. I don’t know how you knew, but if there’s anything I can ever do for you—I mean anything at all—you just have to ask.”
Dan thought of how he’d descended the steps of an interstate bus ten years ago, stepping into a snow flurry as fine as wedding lace. He thought of his delight when he had spotted the bright red locomotive that pulled The Helen Rivington. Also of how this man had asked him if he liked the little train instead of telling him to get the f**k away from what he had no business touching. Just a small kindness, but it had opened the door to all he had now.
“Billy-boy, I’m the one who owes you, and more than I could ever repay.”
11
He had noticed an odd fact during his years of sobriety. When things in his life weren’t going so well—the morning in 2008 when he had discovered someone had smashed in the rear window of his car with a rock came to mind—he rarely thought of a drink. When they were going well, however, the old dry thirst had a way of coming back on him. That night after saying goodbye to Billy, on the way home from Lewiston with everything okey-doke, he spied a roadhouse bar called the Cowboy Boot and felt a nearly insurmountable urge to go in. To buy a pitcher of beer and get enough quarters to fill the jukebox for at least an hour. To sit there listening to Jennings and Jackson and Haggard, not talking to anyone, not causing any trouble, just getting high. Feeling the weight of sobriety—sometimes it was like wearing lead shoes—fall away. When he got down to his last five quarters, he’d play “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” six times straight.