Raven hardly sobered up for three weeks. One night I came back to our place, I’d had enough. I’d had to hurt a man bad that day, a nut who earned it trying to grab my boss’s kids. Even so I felt bad. Somehow I worked it out that it was all Raven’s fault I got in a position where I had to hurt somebody.
He was drunk on his ass. “Look at you, sucking on a wineskin like it was your mother’s tit. The great and famous tough guy Raven, so bad he offed his old lady in the public gardens at Opal. So bad he went head-to-head with the Limper. Laying around feeling sorry for himself and whining like a three-year-old with a bellyache. Get up and do something with yourself, man. I’m sick of seeing you like this.”
In a stumbling, slurred voice he told me to get stuffed, it wasn’t any of my damned business.
“The hell it ain’t! It’s my damned money paying for the room here, dipshit. And I got to come home every day to the stink of old puke and spilled wine and a goddamn soil pot you ain’t got time to empty yourself. When was the last time you bothered to change your clothes? When was the last time you had a bath?”
He cussed me in a cracked-voice scream.
“You’re just about the most selfish, thoughtless bastard I ever seen. Won’t even clean up after yourself.”
I went on like that, louder and angrier. But he never really fought back, which made me think maybe he was about as disgusted with himself as I was with him. But who can go around admitting he’s a hopeless, useless hunk of shit?
Finally he ran out of what little fight he had. He got up and staggered out, without any parting shot. He did not burn any bridges behind him.
A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and something has got to be changed.
I didn’t know if I could wait around long enough for Raven to decide he was a real grown-up man and he was going to have to face reality. Darling was gone and that was that. There were kids to be found. That whole past, down in Opal, had to be hooked back out into the light and made peace with.
Actually, I was pretty sure he would come around, given time. The kind of guy he was being was the kind he held in deep contempt. That had to seep through. But it sure was frustrating, waiting him out.
He came back home four days later, sobered up and cleaned up and looking halfway like the Raven I remembered. He was all apologetic. He promised to get straight and to do better.
Sure. They do that, too.
I would believe it when I saw it.
I didn’t make any big deal out of anything. I didn’t preach. There wasn’t no profit in that.
He hung on pretty good. He looked like he was getting somewhere. But then two days later I came home and found him so stinking he couldn’t crawl.
Hell with him, I said.