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“Somebody took him.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“You’re right, I don’t. Thanks for the reality check, Ringer. He probably got up and ran all the way to the safe house, except for the inconvenient fact that he was shot in the back.”
I ignore the sarcasm. “I don’t think anyone took him, Zombie.”
He laughs. “That’s right. I forgot. You’re the one with the answers. Come on, the suspense is killing me. What happened to Dumbo, Ringer?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “But I don’t think anyone took him because there’s nobody left to do the taking. Your cat lady would have seen to that.”
I start off down the street. He watches me for a few seconds, then shouts at my back, “Where the hell are you going?”
“The safe house, Zombie. Didn’t you say it was south on Highway 68?”
“Unbelievable!” He erupts in a torrent of curses. I keep walking. Then he shouts: “What the hell happened to you out here, anyway? Where’s the Ringer who told me that everyone matters?”
“Mean,” Constance whispers to him. I hear her clearly. “I told you.”
I keep walking.
Five minutes later, I find Dumbo crumpled at the base of a barricade that stretches from sidewalk to sidewalk across Main. That he made it this far—nearly ten blocks from where he was hit—is extraordinary. I kneel beside him and press my fingers against his neck. I whistle loudly. When Zombie comes sprinting to the scene, he’s out of breath and ready to collapse. So is Constance, except her exhaustion is an act.
“How the hell did he get here?” Zombie wonders aloud. He looks around wildly.
“The only way he could,” I answer. “He crawled.”
34
ZOMBIE DOESN’T ASK why Dumbo would drag himself ten blocks in great pain and with a bullet in his back. He doesn’t ask because he knows the answer. Dumbo wasn’t fleeing danger or looking for help: Dumbo was looking for his sarge.
It’s more than Zombie can handle. He falls against the side of the barricade, gulping air, his face lifted up to the sky. Lost, found, dead, alive, the cycle repeats; there’s no escape, there’s no reprieve. Zombie closes his eyes and waits for his breath to slow, his heart to steady. A small break before it begins again: the next loss, the next death.
It’s always been this way, I wanted to tell him. We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone.
I scooch next to Dumbo and lift up his shirt. The bandage is soaked. The packing beneath the bandage is saturated. If he wasn’t bleeding out before, he is now. I press my hand onto his ashen cheek. His skin is cool, but I am going deeper than the skin. I am going into him. Beside me, Constance watches; she knows what I’m doing.
“Is it too late?” she whispers.
Dumbo feels me inside him. His eyelids flutter, his lips part, and breath roils from his open mouth. In the dwindling twilight of his consciousness, a question, an aching need. I go where you go.
“Zombie,” I murmur. “Say something to him.”
To live, Dumbo would need a massive blood transfusion. He won’t get one.
But he didn’t crawl ten blocks in blistering pain for that. That isn’t why he held on.
“Tell him he made it, Zombie. Tell him he found you.”
There is a light that glimmers along the darkening edge of an infinite horizon. In that light the heart finds what the heart seeks. In that light, Dumbo goes where his beloved Zombie goes. In that light, a boy named Ben Parish finds his baby sister. In that light, Marika saves a little girl called Teacup. In that light are promises kept, dreams realized, time redeemed.
And Zombie’s voice, speeding Dumbo toward the light: “You made it, Private. You found me.”
No darkness slamming down. No endless fall into lightlessness. All was light when I felt Dumbo’s soul break the horizon.
Lost, found, and all was light.
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