Chapter 11: Bed Four

For twenty-seven days, nobody on earth had seen me and Eben Dyer lose our tempers.

Gordie had chalked it on the Board himself.

He drew a little box in the corner and wrote DAYS in it, and every Friday he changed the number with great ceremony.

It was a lie of omission.

We had been civil at the Friday table, and careful on Ash Point Road, and we had not touched each other once.

I had not told anybody about Portland.

I had not told him that I'd said yes to the interview, or that I'd bought a navy blazer for it, or that I'd rehearsed my answers in the car.

At three o'clock on a Thursday morning in October I was doing a chart in the corner of the ER at Pen Bay.

The charge nurse put her head around the door.

"Cyr," she said. "Bed four."

"What is it?"

"Laceration, left hand. A bait needle," she said.

"It's always a bait needle."

"Right hand," she said, checking. "Sorry. And he's a friend of yours."

"What friend?"

She had the look of a woman who was about to enjoy herself.

"Dyer," she said. "I can give him to someone else."

"No," I said, too fast, and put down my pen. "I've got him."

Bed four was at the end of the row, behind a blue curtain.

He sat on the edge of the gurney in a hooded sweatshirt that smelled of herring and cold.

His right hand was wrapped in a dish towel, and the towel was red.

His face was gray with tiredness under the stubble, and he did not look up when I came through the curtain.

"Hey, Cyr."

"What did you do?"

"I was baiting bags," he said.

"At three in the morning."

"I start at four thirty, and the bags don't fill themselves. I haven't got a sternman."

"I know you haven't," I said.

"The needle slipped."

I took his wrist and unwrapped the towel.

A long steel bait needle was still through the web of his hand, between the thumb and the first finger.

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