Free The Devil's Only Friend by Mitchell Bartoy Page A

their sewing, but he saw pretty quick that I wouldn’t go along. He kept smiling at me with his horse teeth, too close to my face. They had to change the bandages often because I would not stop bleeding. It felt like I had been boned and shredded, like a sack of wet bread, leaking and swollen and soft.
    I guess I made it hard on them. They were used to seeing wrecked-up bodies and sick people, but I suppose it wasn’t so common to see someone like me, just roughed up for the hell of it. They wouldn’t give me a mirror. But I could see how my whole body was black and purple, even yellow, from being torn up so much on the inside. The swelling was awful, and where the skin had been plain torn off, scabs came up and then cracked and more blood seeped up in black rivers to fill the cracks. It wasn’t only blood, either. From the raw skin of my wrists came a stuff like vegetable oil, clear and thick. The oil came, too, from the tips of my fingers and from the corners of my fingernails, where the skin was cracked and stretched from the swelling.
    I was doped up all the time but it didn’t make my mood good. It only made me mad that I was a little goofy. It was the first time I had to be in a hospital bed since my fingers and my eye had been blown away. I had to shit into a pan until they would let me get up.
    Pretty soon that bastard Hank Chew came to see me. He rapped with his rings on the glass of the door and breezed right in.
    â€œOh, Caudill! You’re an affront to my senses!”
    â€œGo on out of here, then. Filthy buzzard.”
    â€œGone on a bender, have you? A bit too much of the stuff?”
    â€œThat’s the story,” I muttered. “Fell off a streetcar.”
    â€œWell, it stretches the limits of credulity.”
    â€œThat’s your problem.”
    â€œListen, Caudill, aren’t we friendly? Didn’t I agree to help you out?”
    â€œThat’s nothing to me anymore,” I said. “Forget about it. I’m not in any shape now to worry about somebody else’s problems.”
    The pain by that time had become so general over my whole body that the irritation of Chew’s presence was like the chirping of a cricket. He strutted about the room and then perched on the edge of my bed so he could speak closely to me.
    â€œA man needs friends, Caudill. You need to keep up the ties that bind. You could have used a friend two nights ago, am I right?”
    â€œOpen up the curtain a little, Chew,” I said.
    He shut his yapper and looked sharply at me. Then he got up and tried to work the curtains. There wasn’t anything to see outside but the tops of some trees, but I felt closed in.
    â€œThat’s a professional workover,” he said, leaning back on the sill. “An admirable job. You expect anybody to believe that you were tossed around by some guys at a bar?”
    I shrugged and turned my bleary eye toward him.
    â€œOut-of-town guys, were they?” Chew was delighted in his way to be close to something vigorous and physical, so full of blood. His eyes roamed over the damage with admiration. “Come on, Caudill,” he said. “If it’s a good story, I’ll get at it one way or another. You’ll come out better if you put your two cents in with me now.”
    â€œMove away from that window.”
    I might have slept if it was quiet. It was an effort just to keep up with what Chew was saying.
    â€œI can work around you, Caudill. I’m not the biggest guy or the fastest guy or even the smartest guy, but I never give up. You can see that.”
    â€œIf you keep sticking your nose in, you’ll be the next one they come after.”
    â€œI’m not afraid,” he said quickly. “I keep one eye open all the time. I can take care of myself.”
    â€œStill,” I said, “still, you’ve never been worked over like this, have you?”
    â€œNo, I haven’t. I guess I haven’t been