BIFF—HIS given name was Bedford—was darker than Jimmie. His hair was straight, a few shades from black, and he had large brownish eyes. The irises were not all brown but part greenish and part yellowish. His mother called them hazel. He was a huge, husky youngster with an overlarge head. He looked as if his basic design had been a pile of various-sized boxes. He was the archetype of a fullback—although he had played end for three years on the team of State University.
He lay on the table in the emergency room of the hospital, smoking a cigarette.
When Jimmie came in he was looking at the ceiling, blinking his eyes. The pupils of his eyes were contracted—he’d been given morphine—and his mouth had relaxed into an unaware, shadowy smile, as if he were immersed in a fantasy that had nothing to do with what was happening around him. Around him, in fact, there was no activity whatever. An intern stood against a glass cabinet with an expression of patient expectancy. Biff’s family was draped here and there in positions of anguish. Sarah and her mother, in the proper mien of horror, kept glancing down at the pool of blood on the tile floor. Mr.
Bailey was looking out the window at a wall, his shoulders high, with an admission of grief, and a proud proclamation of courage.
It was Biff’s smile, Jimmie knew, that corroborated his inner assurance. Jimmie didn’t like that smile—slick, catlike, pleased. They didn’t see Jimmie, at first. They didn’t see him because he wore soft-shod heels, and because they were not yet in the habit of expecting to see him, and because they had other things to hold their attention.
Biff’s eyes became conscious of something at their peripheral range, and the smile on Biff’s lips vanished even before he turned his head: Biff wiped it out. He substituted a small twist of pain. He said, weakly, “Hello, there, Jim.”
His older brother spoke quietly, too, but strongly. “Hello, Biff! How’d it happen?”
The other Baileys chimed in.
“It’s about time you arrived!”
“Where on earth have you been?”