The Thomas Berryman Number

What he found was Thomas Berryman lying across the rug. Berryman was holding his knees up around his chest. He’d kicked over the dining room table—at least it was turned over on its side. “Oh my God,” he kept gasping. “Oh God, it’s horrible.” He wasn’t having regrets about the life he’d led. He’d poisoned himself.

The exact sound he made was: O g-a-a-ad.

Late that afternoon the little cook, Mrs. Bibbs, sat on a tiny leather hassock in the front hallway of the Shepherd house. She’d cried until she had no control over her limbs. The sun was passing down through the glass portion of the front door. The woman slipped off the hassock onto the sunstreaked floor.

The family doctor had just gone out the door. He’d said that both Berryman and Benjamin Shepherd had suffered from acute food poisoning. It was lucky for them, he announced with great pomp, that they’d both thrown up so violently.

Orating in front of Charles and Willy Shepherd, the doctor had sternly and ridiculously questioned the cook about whether or not she’d washed her strawberries before serving them. “I think not,” he’d said. And who was she to argue with a doctor of medicine.

That afternoon, Benjamin Shepherd was recuperating in his own bedroom.

Propped in front of a Trinitron portable, eating ice cream like a tonsillectomy patient, his large head was positioned beneath a framed Kodachrome of Maria Schneider in

Last Tango in Paris.

The girl had more hair over her vagina than an ape does.

Benjamin wasn’t flying back to Michigan with Berryman and his brothers, he’d announced.

The family advised Thomas Berryman to do the same. Recuperate for a few days. Get the poisons out of his system. Take rhubarb and soda at regular intervals.

But when Charles and Willy Shepherd stopped to see their brother on their way to the plane, Berryman, though peaked, was packed and dressed to travel with them.

He was smiling thinly. Puffing on a characteristic cigarillo. But he looked like a man just over a hospital convalescence.

That much is approximated in a statement filed by Ben Shepherd with the Lake Stevens, Washington, police.

Pioneer types, Charles and Willy Shepherd fueled and set up their own plane. It was work they liked doing.

Berryman pitched in where he could, driving a BP fuel truck back and forth from a hangar. The three men worked without speaking.

It wasn’t until all the work was done that Berryman took Charles Shepherd aside.

They sat down on a small metal handtruck beside the private jet’s boarding stairs. Berryman was hyperventilating. Charles Shepherd’s hands were dirty as a mechanic’s and he sat with them held out away from his shirt.

“Whew!” Berryman kept blowing out air and catching his breath as he spoke. “I guess,” he said, “all this

phew

extra running around … set me off again.”

“Sure it did,” Shepherd agreed. “You should be back in bed. You look pitiful.”

“Damn stomach’s rolling.”

“Rhubarb and soda’s the thing.”

“Fuck me,” Berryman puffed.

“I told you, you dumbass. Go on back with Ben now.”

Thomas Berryman continued to swear like a man about to miss out on box seats for a pro football game. “Shee-it,” he said over and over.

Willy Shepherd stood close by, looking as if he’d suddenly figured something out. He was lighting a cigarette. “Too much running around,” he said to Berryman. “Got to take it easy after these things.”

“Phew,” Berryman said. He was beet red, blushing. “Fuck me, Willy” were his last words, really, to either of the brothers. He gave both men back-thumping

abrazos.

Then he headed back toward the big house.

The private plane cruised over Douglas fir tops like a living, looking thing. It was blue, electric blue.

Thomas Berryman watched through mottled leaves that were hiding his face. Then he turned away and began hiking through woods toward the main state road, away from the house.

Berryman walked watching the tops of his boots. Watching the underbrush. The bleached hay. Noting greenish grasshoppers. Red ants on stalks of hay. A dead field mouse like a wet, gray mitten.

Overhead, the blue jet’s wheels slowly tucked into its stomach, and as the wheels folded, the sky cracked like a giant fir splitting all the way up from its roots.

Berryman knew enough not to look back. Once, sometime in Texas, he’d seen a buck on fire. It hadn’t been pretty, or edifying.

He walked faster. In deeper woods. In a dark house with a soft needle floor. He kept seeing the burning deer.

The nose and the belly puffed smoke just about the color of sheep wool. It shot flames that were orange at first. Then just about blue. Then near-invisible in black smoke.

It smoked ashes. It made shrieking metal-against-metal noises. The entire dark sky seemed to fall into the woods.