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tonight.”
    â€œPut Westy on.”
    It was fifteen minutes. Harry and I were finishing up the chicken on the plate when she called. I hadn’t heard a straight and clear message from her in three months.
    â€œRay? Raymond Forrest?” My first two names.
    â€œI hear you, darling.”
    â€œRay. We can make lovesies again.”
    â€œHoly Christ!”
    â€œYes,” she said. “I want to be lovely all over you again.”
    I was so entranced I forgot Harry King was right there beside me. You never get a whole conversation over the beeper like this unless you got somebody relaying it. Rebecca did it and was listening in.

XXVI
    I NEVER woke up feeling better. Made coffee, eggs, bacon for all my six children.
    No complaints.

XXVII
    T HE beeper goes off when Westy and I are doing something. We have our tongues so deep intoeach other’s and I am sucking her beautiful feet. It’s Rebecca.
    â€œMr. Hooch and Agnes bought a propane lantern and it exploded. He’s almost dead from burns, Doctor. She has second-degrees.”
    Hooch was burned to a crisp and he weighed about a hundred pounds. His system was so exasperated, it was a total moan. The protein and the platelets and the nerves were wrecked and closing. His kidneys were going out. His liver count was as high as a man’s who hadn’t eaten in three months. The calcium was not protecting his lungs. Yet on fruit juice and plasma, his mind stayed. Even brighter. What an organ. You got a third of it left and you can still be a genius. For a while we couldn’t even get creamed field peas down him. He was burned down to the condition of the inside of a steak as Texans like them.
    â€œYou tried to kill yourself, didn’t you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYes, you did. You know better than to light up a leaking propane tube.”
    â€œI get tired of my wife and me. There ain’t much going on since Sister except my mouth.”
    â€œGimme a poem, Mr. Hooch. Let’s hear the best.”
    One of the humiliations of my life was that my own secret poems never touched the poems of this old fart. All his genes must have run a pretty direct route into Sister.
    Fire at Night
    by J. HOOCH
    Fire at night and it’s me. I’ve been born with pain
    So this is sort of the same.
    Agnes talks about forty years ago.
    Her love is around, but I never got her mind’s number.
    Love is above and behind you,
    But someday, honey, I’ve got to find you.
    We bad luck together and it ain’t ever going to get better.
    We worse when we try to get better.
    We got the jinx and the voodoo visited upon us.
    But it’s New Year, so I’ll light myself up
    With a cup of gas.
    It’ll be a hell of a feeling,
    And this one will really, really be the last.
    â€œNot bad,” I say.
    I go back to the dinette and sit with Rebecca. I smoked about four Luckies in a row and looked into her face without saying anything for a while. Rebecca’s face is a charm. She goes heavy on the blue eye makeup. Her neck is a longish classic from the old paintings of what’s-his-name. Her nose is forward and long. She lights a Lucky and the exhaust is gray through the large sensitive nostrils. She’s half-Jew, the rest Greek. Okay,now I’ve come back from the humiliation of never thinking up a better poem than Mr. Hooch. Then we go through two cups of coffee apiece. Modigliani.
    â€œNo, he’s not, goddamn it.”
    â€œThere’s not much here at the hospital.”
    â€œThere’s the Freon tube.”
    â€œThey won’t let us use it yet.”
    â€œI have a key that’s copper-colored in the far right drawer of the front desk in the office. There is a forty-five pistol right next to it. Put it, the key, in that little safe. If you can’t open it, get a pillow from one of the chairs, push it over the muzzle of the gun, and shoot out the lock. I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
    â€œThe