Free Hangman's Game by Bill Syken Page A

from his stomach area that I can’t look too closely at.
    â€œI’m okay,” he says, though his muddled whisper suggests otherwise.
    I turn to Vicki, who shrugs. “He’s going to be here a couple more days, at least,” she says. “The bullet hit the small intestine. They had to resect it. The doctors say his wound is amazingly clean, as these things go.” She smiles wanly at what now passes for good news, and adds, “We still have to worry about infections though.”
    â€œSamuel’s funeral is in two days,” Cecil whispers, eyelids half closed. “I’m going.”
    â€œYou can’t go anywhere,” Vicki says, “until your bowels are working again.”
    So he’s here until he proves he can take a shit.
    â€œI’ll be at the funeral, Cecil,” DaFrank says. “I’ll be your ambassador.”
    I put my hands on DaFrank’s shoulders.
    â€œSee, Cecil,” I say. “You’ll be well represented.” I wait a moment and then add, “It’s about time one of us is.” Cecil normally rolls along with my jibes, but with this one he just closes his eyes, seeking out dreamland.
    *   *   *
    In the dark of the hospital parking structure I sit in my Audi, titled on the downslope, and check my messages. My mother, at last, has been clued in.
    Nick, where are you??? Are you OK?
    I have missed a couple calls from her as well.
    I send her a note:
    At hospital, visiting Cecil. The prognosis is positive. I’m fine. I’ll talk to you later.
    That is as much of a rehash as I am up for right now.
    Jessica has been writing me, too—she has, at long last, gotten the news. In her first text, she asks how I am doing. In the second, she asks if I still want to come over tonight, referencing a date that feels like it was made in another lifetime. In the third, sent a half hour later, she says that she understands if I can’t make it, but she wants to see me soon, and she is worried about me. The messages reek of an earnestness that, coming from her, underline how wrong the last twenty-four hours have gone.
    Not that Jessica and I don’t share intimacies with each other. Many times has she bemoaned to me the big lie of her marriage—her husband, Dan, son of a workaholic father, pledged to Jessica he wouldn’t live at the office, but now he puts in seventy-hour workweeks under the justification of “I could be Treasury Secretary someday. My name could be on money!” Jessica, meanwhile, has heard plenty from me about the stress and the boredom of my lucrative but low-security job. But mostly our time together is an escape from all that. She regards polite conversation to be an abomination; she prefers to keep people off balance. Once she told me this story about her husband, Dan. “Last year for my birthday, he took me the U.S. Mint,” Jessica said. “It was around one A.M. , the building was empty. We went to the printing presses, and he turned on the computer guide and adjusted the setting to one-thousand-dollar bills. Then he hit a button and the presses whirred to life and sheets of money started flying off the rollers, and Dan spread his arms wide and said, ‘All for you, my dear. All for you.’ The catch was that I couldn’t spend any of the money. So I now have sheets of thousand-dollar bills lining my underwear drawer.” I was naive enough to ask: “Really?” She gazed at me pityingly. “If my husband were capable of such bold and romantic gestures, do you think I’d be here with you?”
    That is the standard with us, all goofs and grab-assing. I write Jessica, tapping out the polite letters in a lifeless dirge:
    Thank you, I’m holding up fine. I just need to be alone now.
    After hitting Send, I see that a new text message has arrived, from a number not programmed into my phone.
    Are you OK? I would really like to see you. Melody from