had married again. But her second marriage hadn’t lasted, either, and now she was with someone else, a horse breeder like her father. Flip Boody, a man known for his high-rolling style, whose private life sometimes made the news. It was old news but evergreen scandal that he’d abandoned his wife and that he and his girlfriend were living in sin. She was worse than dead, Delphina.
Though his every attempt to reach her over the years had been met with silence or rage, PW continued to feel responsible for Delphina. If she was lost, he was at least partly to blame. “Just ’cause now I got a marriage that’s a success doesn’t mean I’m absolved of that failure.”
Delphina gone, PW had plunged headlong into darkness. He had started drinking in that way that has only one purpose and, unchecked, only one likely outcome.
Cole was fascinated by the idea of PW madly in love with an apocalyptic girl. He’d never seen Delphina, not even a picture of her, and no one had ever described her to him. But that she was apocalyptic he had no doubt.
Cole didn’t know why all of a sudden he was thinking so much about Delphina. Maybe because Tracy wasn’t there. Maybe because of Mason and Starlyn. Before the trip was over, Cole would find himself several times on the verge of spilling the beans about them. (Later, he’d be appalled to think how close he’d come to tattling.)
PW referred to the days after Delphina left him as a time when he wandered in the desert.
A desert that was, however, anything but dry.
“Many were the nights I could not find my way home.”
Passed out in the street, he got rolled more than once. All the while, he kept trying to get back with Delphina. He called it love, she called it stalking. “The law was with her.” Served with a restraining order, PW chose to leave town.
“I had this idea about starting over in Louisville.”
But in Louisville he only drank more.
One morning he woke up to find himself lying next to a Dumpster in the back lot of the Red Star Bar-B-Q.
“My wallet, my watch, my cell, my keys, my jacket, my belt, and my two shoes—they were all gone. I got up and was staggering around, hoping maybe at least my shoes were somewhere in the vicinity, when I noticed this skinny dude in a hoodie and diddy rags leaning against the Dumpster. He was smoking a cigarette and watching me.
“I was never a mean drunk. But the morning after? Dude, look out. So I cussed him in my best French, you know, and I asked him what he wanted. And he told me he knew where I could find what I was looking for. Is that right? I said, real sarcastic. But he just flicked his cigarette away and jerked his head, like, follow me. I thought maybe he really did know where some of my stuff was, so I went along, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or punch his lights out when all he did was lead me over to the other side of that Dumpster. Then I saw there was this other dude lying on the ground, and the one thing I could say for sure about him was that he didn’t have my stuff. He didn’t have anything except for one piece of clothing, a pair of filthy old hospital p.j. bottoms about three sizes too big, and a smell on him so ripe I come this close to hurling.
“This was the middle of winter. I was shivering to death myself with no jacket, and I didn’t know how he could stand it half naked like that. I didn’t see any bottles around, but I knew he was a drunk like me, or a meth head or some other kind of junkie. His eyes were open, but I might as well have been invisible. Lying next to him was this pile of bones he must’ve got from the Dumpster, and they were all picked clean. He was nothing but the sorriest sack of bones himself, and I didn’t know why I was supposed to be looking at him.
“I wheeled on the first guy and started to cuss him again. And he points a finger at me and he goes, ‘Tonight you lost your coat and your shoes. Tonight you lost some money and some of your other possessions.’
“I felt my scalp tighten up. I was thinking, How’d he know all