Joe Hill Omnibus by Joe Hill & Stephen King; Joe Hill

Author:Joe Hill & Stephen King; Joe Hill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE FIXER

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

HIS MOTHER WAS DEAD in the next room, and Lee Tourneau was a little drunk.

It was only ten in the morning, but the house was already an oven. The fragrance of his mother’s roses, planted on the path leading up to the house, drifted in through open windows, a light floral sweetness that mingled in a rather disagreeable way with a rank odor of human waste, so the whole place smelled just exactly like a perfumed turd. Lee felt that it was too hot to be drunk, but also that he could not bear the stink of her sober.

There was air-conditioning, but it was switched off. Lee had kept it off for weeks, because his mother had a harder time breathing with the humidity weighing on her. When Lee and his mother were alone in the house, he would kill the air conditioner and put an extra comforter or two on top of the old cunt. Then he’d cut her morphine, to be sure she could really feel it: the weight and the heat. God knew Lee could feel it. By late afternoon he would be padding around the house naked, sticky with sweat, the only way he could stand it. He sat cross-legged by her bedside reading about media theory while she struggled weakly under her covers, too out of it to know why she was boiling in her parched yellow skin. When she shouted for something to drink—“thirst” was about the only word his mother still seemed to know in her last days of senility and kidney failure—Lee would get up and fetch cold water. At the sound of ice clinking in the glass, her throat would start to work, in anticipation of slaking her thirst, and her eyes would begin to roll in their sockets, bright with excitement. Then he would stand over her bed, drinking it himself, where she could see him doing it—the eagerness draining out of her face, leaving her confused and forlorn. It was a joke that never got old. Every time he did it, she was seeing him do it for the first time.

Other times he brought her salt water and forced her to swallow it, half drowning her. Just a mouthful would cause his mother to writhe and choke, trying to spit it out. It was a curious thing, how long she survived. He had not expected her to make it to the second week of June; against all odds she clung to her life right into July.

He kept clothes in a pile, on the bookshelf outside the guest-room door, ready so he could get dressed in a hurry in case Ig or Merrin made a surprise visit. He would not allow them to go in and see her, would tell them she had just fallen asleep, needed her rest. He didn’t want them to know how hot it was in there.

Ig and Merrin brought him DVDs, books, pizza, beer. They came together or they came separately, wanted to be with him, wanted to see how he was holding up.

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