had written in his endnote, no matter how much you want it to be.
“Teddy?” said a voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said, or tried to say, assuming it was the anesthesiologist, reprimanding him for not counting backward from a hundred as instructed and drifting off into blissful, untroubled sleep, so they could get on with botching his surgery and shepherding him into the final stage of his life as a pathetic, general studies, limp-dicked, one-eyed man.
Except it was a nurse and she was wheeling him somewhere else on a gurney. “You’re going to be fine,” she assured him. “The operation was a success.”
When they got to where they were going and she came around to the foot of the contraption, he got a good look at her, a dark-haired woman his own age. “Jacy,” he said. “I love you.”
The old nurse grinned down at him. “Hey, I love you, too.”
Lincoln
It was nearly one o’clock by the time Lincoln got back to Rockers, which had emptied out, and not a single musician was in sight. At the far end of the long bar, a few stragglers were watching a West Coast baseball game. When the goateed, tattooed bartender who’d shouted “Rock and roll!” several hours earlier noticed Lincoln frowning at the stage, which was still crammed with sound equipment, he came down and told him that Big Mick on Pots was done for the night.
“I figured they’d play to closing,” Lincoln said, extending his hand across the bar. “I’m Lincoln, by the way.”
“Kevin,” the guy said as they shook. “Normally they do. How’s your friend?”
“Looks like he’s going to be okay.”
“Man, that was a lot of blood,” Kevin said, eyeing Lincoln’s polo shirt, patches of which were now rust colored, as were his chinos. He’d cleaned up as best he could at the hospital, but he was still a sight to behold.
“You know Mickey?”
Crossing his massive arms in front of his chest, the bartender snorted. “Everybody knows Big Mick.” Big guys, his body language seemed to say, all know one another. Guys Lincoln’s size wouldn’t necessarily be cognizant of that. “He’s a legend in these parts.”
That fact, Lincoln thought, could be added to all the other things he apparently didn’t know about his friend. In the hospital’s waiting room he’d revisited the questions Teddy had posed when they were driving here, questions that loomed larger now. Why had Mickey punched that SAE pledge all those years ago? Had this been the first real evidence of rage simmering just below his usually good-natured surface? And why had he continued to scrub pots in the steamy kitchen of the Theta House, his shirt drenched with sweat by the end of every shift, when he might have worked the cool, dry dining room serving some of the prettiest girls on campus? It couldn’t have been social awkwardness. Having grown up with all those sisters, he was pretty much at ease around even the sexiest Thetas, most of whom treated him like a big brother. And, finally, why had he gone to Canada instead of reporting for duty? A spur of the moment decision, or an intention he’d had from the start but hadn’t trusted his friends enough to confide in them?
If Lincoln was unable to answer such questions after four decades of friendship, how could he hope to fathom what Joe Coffin had told him on the phone just before Teddy fainted—that Mickey, for reasons Lincoln couldn’t begin to imagine, had beaten Jacy’s father, a man they’d all met for the first time at graduation, into a coma with his bare fists? What possible explanation could there be for that? Surely their meeting couldn’t have been coincidental. Had Mickey gone looking for him, and to what end? Did he have some reason to believe that Donald Calloway might know of his daughter’s whereabouts? If her father knew where she was, wouldn’t everybody? Unless it was the other way around and Calloway, hearing that Mickey was back in the States, had come looking for him. But again, to what possible purpose? Did he believe that Mickey was somehow involved in his daughter’s disappearance? That he’d gone to Canada not to dodge the draft but to escape interrogation and possible arrest? But that made no sense, either. If the man had been suspicious of Mickey, wouldn’t he, like Coffin, have suspected Lincoln and Teddy as well? Jacy had spent the weekend with all three of them. Why single Mickey out?