'See? He's killing you ... but never mind. You don't: want me to hit him, I won't hit him. Probably not a good idea anyway. It might not end it.'
Billy nodded. This had occurred to him, as well. Take it off me, he had told Lemke - apparently even white men from town understood that was something that had to be done. If Lemke was dead, the curse might simply have to run itself out.
'The trouble is,' Ginelli said reflectively, 'you can't take back a hit.'
'No.'
He rubbed out his cigarette and stood up. 'I gotta think about this, William. It's a lot to think about. And I got to get my mind in a serene state, you know? You can't get ideas about complicated shit like this when you're upset, and every time I look at you, paisan, I want to pull out this guy's pecker and stuff it in the hole where his nose used to be.'
Billy got up and almost fell. Ginelli grabbed him and Billy hugged him clumsily with his good arm. He didn't think he'd ever hugged a grown man in his life before this.
'Thank you for coming,' Billy said. 'And for believing me.'
'You're a good fellow,' Ginelli said, releasing him. 'You're in a bad mess, but maybe we can get you out of it. Either way, we're gonna put some stone blocks to this old dude. I'm gonna go out and walk around for a couple of hours, Billy. Get my mind serene. Think up some ideas. Also, I want to make some phone calls back to the city.'
'About what?'
'I'll tell you later. First I want to do some thinking. You be okay?'
'Yes.'
'Lie down. You have no color in your face at all.'
'All right.' He did feel sleepy again, sleepy and totally worn out.
'The girl who shot you,' Ginelli said. 'Pretty?'
'Very pretty.'
'Yeah?' That crazy light was back in Ginelli's eyes, brighter than ever. It troubled Billy.
'Yeah.'
'Lay down, Billy. Catch some Z's. Check you later.
Okay to take your key?'
'Sure.'
Ginelli left. Billy lay down on the bed and put his bandaged hand carefully down beside him, knowing perfetly well that if he fell asleep he would probably just roll over on it and wake himself up again.
Probably just humoring me, Billy thought. Probably on the phone to Heidi right now. And when I wake up, the men with the butterfly nets will be sitting on the foot of the bed. They ...
But there was no more. He drifted off and somehow managed to avoid rolling on his bad hand.
And this time there were no bad dreams.
There were no men with butterfly nets in the room when he woke up, either. Only Ginelli, sitting in the chair across the room. He was reading a book called This Savage Rapture and drinking a can of beer. It was dark outside.
There were four cans of a six-pack sitting on top of an ice bucket on the TV, and Billy licked his lips. 'Can I have one of those?' he croaked.
Ginelli looked up. 'It's Rip Van Winkle, back from the dead! Sure you can. Here, let me open you one.'
He brought it to Billy, and Billy drank half of it without stopping. The beer was fine and cold. He had heaped the contents of the Empirin bottle in one of the room's ashtrays (motel rooms did not have as many ashtrays as mirrors, he thought, but almost). Now he fished one out and washed it down with another swallow.
'How's the hand?' Ginelli asked.
'Better.' In a way that was a lie, because his hand hurt very badly indeed. But in a way it was the truth, too. Because Ginelli was here, and that did more to make the pain less than the Empirin or even the shot of Chivas. Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all. This caused him to think of Heidi, because she was the one who should have been with him, not this hood, and she wasn't. Heidi was back in Fairview, stubbornly ignoring all this, because to give it any mental house-room would mean she might have to explore the boundaries of her own culpability, and Heidi did not want to do that. Billy felt a dull, throbbing resentment. What had Ginelli said? The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. He tried to push the resentment away - she was, after-all, his wife. And she was doing what she believed was right and best for him