She takes the pill with water from the kitchen tap. He tells her the side effects may include vomiting, dizziness—
‘I can read. Who else lives in this building? It’s as quiet as the … it’s quiet.’
He tells her about the Jensens and how they went on a cruise, neither of them knowing that in another six months the cruise lines will be shut down, along with just about everything else. He takes her upstairs – she comes willingly enough – and introduces her to Daphne and Walter.
‘You’re watering them too much. You want to drown them?’
‘No.’
‘Give them a couple of days off.’ She pauses. ‘Will you be here for a couple of days?’
‘Yes. It’s safer to wait.’
She looks around the Jensens’ kitchen and living room, sizing it up the way that women do. Then she astounds him by asking if she can stay with him. Maybe stay in the basement apartment even after he’s gone.
‘I don’t want to go out until the bruises get better,’ she says. ‘I look like I was in a car accident. Also, what if Tripp comes looking for me? He knows where I go to school, and he knows where I live.’
Billy thinks that Tripp and his friends will want nothing more to do with her now that they’ve had their fun. Oh, they might cruise Pearson Street to make sure the place where they threw her out isn’t a crime scene, and when they sober up – or come down from whatever high they were riding – they will surely check the local news to make sure she’s not a part of it, but he doesn’t point these things out. Having her stay solves a lot of problems.
Back downstairs she says she’s tired and asks if she can take a nap in his bed. Billy tells her that would be fine unless she’s feeling dizzy or nauseated. If she is, it would be better for her to stay awake for awhile.
She says she’s okay and goes into the bedroom. She’s doing a good job of pretending she’s not afraid of him, but Billy is pretty sure she still is. She’d be crazy if she wasn’t. But she’s also still in shock, still humiliated by what has happened to her. And ashamed. He told her she didn’t have to be, but that bounced right off. Later on she’ll undoubtedly decide that asking to stay with him was a bad call, really bad. But right now all she wants is sleep. It’s in her slumped shoulders and shuffling bare feet.
Billy hears the creak of bedsprings. He looks in five minutes later and she’s either zonked out or doing a world-class acting job.
He boots up his laptop and goes to where he left off. You can’t write today, he thinks, not with everything that’s going on. Not with that girl in the other room, the one who may wake up and decide she wants to get the hell away from here, and me.
Only he’s also thinking about Pill’s wet washcloth treatment for panic attacks, and how it worked on Alice. Sort of a miracle, really. But that wasn’t Clay Briggs’s only miracle cure, was it? Smiling, Billy begins to write. The prose seems flat at first, ragged, but then he starts to get the rhythm. Soon he’s not thinking of Alice at all.
9
Clay Briggs – Pill – was a Corpsman 1st Class. He worked on everyone who needed working on, but he was Hot Nine from top to toe. He was small and wiry. Thinning hair, beaky nose, little rimless glasses that he was always polishing. He had a peace sign on the front of his helmet and for a week or so, before the CO made him take it off, a sticker on the back that said NEVER MIND THE MILK, GOT PUSSY?
Panic attacks were common as Phantom Fury went on （and on, and on）。 Marines were supposed to be immune from things like that, but of course weren’t. Guys would start rasping for breath, doubling over, sometimes falling down. Most were good little jarheads who wouldn’t admit to being scared so they said it was the smoke and dust, because those things were constant. Pill would agree with them – just the dust, just the smoke – and wet a washcloth to put over their faces. ‘Breathe through that,’ he’d say. ‘It’ll clear the crap out and you’ll be able to breathe fine.’
He had cures for other things, too. Some were bullshit and some were not, but they all worked at least some of the time: thumping wens and swellings with the side of a book to make them disappear （he called it the Bible cure）， pinching your nose shut and singing Ahhhh for hiccups and coughing fits, breathing Vicks VapoRub steam to stop up bloody noses, a silver dollar rubbed on eyelids to cure keratitis.
‘Most of this shit is pure hill-country folk medicine I learned from my grammaw,’ he told me once. ‘I use what works, but mostly it works because I tell ’em it works.’ Then he asked me how my tooth was, because I had one in back that had been giving me trouble.