The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

friends.” She was wearing a bright-green dress, too short, and she drummed on one of her pointed knees while staring at the figure on the card. Monica had the redness of her mother’s hair at the back of her neck. “I bet I’ve got a jack under here.”
    Sparrow’s own knees were aching. After being ground beneath the treads of an armored vehicle, the bones and ligaments of his legs had shrunk, in casts had become dry and grafted together. His knee caps were of silver and it was the metal itself, he claimed, that hurt. Now at either corner of his mouth the skin turned suddenly white and Larry took a step, held him up by the arm. Then under the shoulders, under the knees, Larry lifted him—Sparrow dropped the beret—and carried him to the bed where the small man lay whimpering.
    “Take off his shoes, Cowles. Carefully, if you please.”
    Cowles did as he was told, the dark coat flapping down over his hands at the laces, while the others—the radio was on the floor, a chair scraped—moved all together toward the bed. Sparrow, at such moments, was in the habit of shutting his eyes, whether instantly crippled in a picture palace, the Majesty, or in the Men’s, whether caught in Daphne’s Row or in the room with tables and dirty silverware. He was closing the lids now. Theylowered, one or two lashes in each, slowly obliterating the eyes, which were white and without tears. A single lick of black hair lay on his forehead.
    They were all at the bed, Thick and Larry on either side of the pillow with Little Dora and Cowles—he was still holding the empty shoes—and their expressions were unchanged even by Sparrow’s moans. Margaret and the little girl came also, stood in the vicinity of Sparrow’s heart and lungs.
    From his great height, drawing back his coat flaps and lapels so that the gun and the gun’s girdle—the holster, straps, strings—were visible, slowly putting his hands in his pockets, Larry spoke the name, Larry who had been the first to carry him the night he screamed, who had sipped tea out of a tin cup while watching them give preliminary treatment to the broken legs, and who had known immediately upon sight of the buttocks tiny and gnarled that the injured man was a rider: “Sparrow.” And Larry, who had greased his hair even in battle, was still compassionate. “Sparrow,” he said again and the moaning stopped, the perspiration appeared, the slit eyes began suddenly to tighten and grow shrewd.
    “Dead and dying,” came Sparrow’s answering whisper at last, and the wrists twisted in the enormous cuffs.
    “Now then, Thick,” said Larry, “roll up his sleeve.”
    Sparrow grimaced and all the while kept the round vague outline of Margaret’s face in his filmy sight. Larry took the tin packet from inside his coat, from just beneath the armpit’s holster, and opened it. He fitted the needle to the syringe, broke the neck of theampule, drew back the plunger until the scale on the glass measured the centimeters correctly. The tip of the needle dribbled a bit. He had tended to Sparrow in alleys, bathhouses with crabs and starfish dead on the floors, in doorways, in the Majesty, and the back of horsedrawn wagons on stormy nights. He had jabbed Sparrow in the depths of a barroom and upright in the booth of a phone; once on rough water with the rain beating down, once in a railway coach with his ministrations hidden from the old ladies behind a paper. Once too in the dark of a prison night, and many times, on leave, with some strange fat girl wearing rolled stockings, or with a tall girl carrying her underclothes in a respirator bag, standing idly by and swinging the bag, pulling the rolled elastic, watching. As often as Sparrow fainted, Larry revived him. Whenever Sparrow could stand on his feet no longer, whenever he went down in the crooked swoon, helpless as when he had first screamed from his bloody blankets—he had won a fiver from the kid of the battalion only that sundown—Larry the