Stung her? Was it a wasp?
“There it is!” Jesus cried.
“Kill it!” Pita shrieked.
Elizaveta felt sick. On the floor, scurrying away from her shirt, was a great fat scorpion. It was black, its segmented tail carried over its body. Its pincers alone must have been a couple of inches long.
And it had been on her back.
It had stung her.
Nitro tried stomping it beneath his flip-flop, but it escaped under the table.
“Fuck!” he said.
“Get it!” Pita said.
Jack, still holding the saw, went to the table. He ducked down and swung the saw, using the flat of the blade to squash the awful thing.
“Did you get it?” Jesus asked.
“It’s still moving.”
Jack swung the saw again, then again. He stood a moment later, holding the saw before him. The scorpion rested on the blade, its pugnacious body twisted and broken.
“It’s dead,” he said.
8
“It stung me,” Elizaveta said, folding her arms across her breasts. She didn’t care she was half naked; she wasn’t being modest. She was shaking with fright, her flesh covered in goosebumps. “Scorpions are venomous, and it stung me.”
“Most are harmless,” Nitro said.
“Most? What about that?” She pointed to the big fat horror that still rested on the saw blade, which Jack had set down on the table.
“Turn around,” Jesus said. “Let me see the sting.”
Elizaveta turned.
“It’s red,” he said. “But it doesn’t look too bad. How do you feel?”
“Are you a doctor? Have you been stung by scorpion before?” She was acting a bit hysterical, but she had every right to. Most scorpions might be harmless to humans, but some had venom that could be fatal. And that one—God, it was so big.
“How do you feel?” Jesus repeated.
“It hurts. Like bee sting.”
“But you can still breathe fine, talk? That’s good.”
“Nitro’s right, Eliza,” Jack said. “Most scorpion stings are harmless. You usually only have to go to the hospital if you’re a kid or elderly.”
“In Las Vegas maybe, Jack,” Pita said. “Not in Mexico. The scorpions here—”
“They’re not that different,” he said brusquely, silencing her with a look.
Elizaveta didn’t miss this, and she knew he was trying to reassure her…which made her all the more alarmed.
Was she going to die?
“I can breathe now,” she said. “But what of future? Maybe I will get worse. And there is no help here, no hospital, no anti-venom.”
“Someone should suck it out,” Pita offered.
“What?” Jesus said.
“Someone should suck out the venom. I saw it on TV once. A person was bit by a snake, and this man sucked the venom from the wound with his mouth.”
“That doesn’t work, Pita.”
“You don’t know, Jesus. We should at least try. Nitro—you do it.”
He shook his head. “I’m not sucking out venom with my fucking mouth.”
“I’ll do it,” Jack said.
“Nobody will suck my back!” Elizaveta snapped. “This is serious!”
“Look, Eliza,” Jesus said reasonably. “You said you feel okay. If the scorpion was really poisonous, you would know by now. We’re overreacting.”
“You are just saying that—”
“No, I’m not, cariño,” he said. “I promise, okay? You’ll be fine.”
9
Elizaveta retrieved her damp shirt and pulled it on, shivering as the cold material slid over her bare skin. Jack took the green and beige rug to Pepper’s bedroom, to drape over Pepper, while Jesus and Pita and Nitro stood near the dead scorpion, speaking quietly to each other. Elizaveta began to pace back and forth. She couldn’t relax. She couldn’t stop thinking about the sting in her back. Originally she’d felt a sharp pain, followed by a burning sensation. Now, however, all she felt was a strange tingling. Still, she didn’t believe Jesus when he said she would be fine. She had seen people stung by scorpions in movies. They always ended up foaming at the mouth, having heart attacks, and dying.
Jack returned from Pepper’s bedroom. She went to him.
“How is Pepper?” she asked.
“Sleeping,” he said.
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. He just needs rest. You do too.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Still, you should rest, relax.”
“How can I relax? I have venom inside me. It’s spreading—”
“Right, Eliza,” he said, touching her arm. “And the more worked up you get, the faster your heartbeat, the faster the venom gets absorbed.”
She considered this, nodded.
“Take a deep breath,” he said.
She did.
“Another.”
“I am not in labor, Jack.”
He smiled. She did too.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Why don’t you go to Pepper’s room, lie down?”
“What will you do?”
“Keep watch.”
She blinked. “Watch? Oh, you mean…” She’d gotten so caught up with the discovery of the trapdoor and the subsequent scorpion sting she’d completely forgotten about the potential killer on the island. “You need partner,” she added. “I will keep watch with you.”
Jack shook his head. “Pita will.”
Elizaveta frowned. “Why her?” she said, feeling a bump of irrational jealousy.
“Because if we let her go to sleep, she won’t want to wake up again for a subsequent shift.”
Elizaveta glanced at Pita. She stood by the table with Jesus and Nitro, the three of them still talking softly in Spanish. She couldn’t hear what they were saying—and she sensed that was the point.
“I’ll keep second watch then,” she said.
Jack shook his head again. “I don’t want you alone with Nitro.”
“So I keep watch with Jesus.”
“That leaves Nitro and me on the last watch, and I know he won’t be cool with that.”
“So who keeps second watch?”
“Nitro and Jesus. Then, if you’re feeling up to it, you can join me on the last one. Two hours each. That should get us to dawn. Hopefully the storm will have died down, and we can head to the pier to wait for the boatman.”
“And hopefully,” she said solemnly, “I will not die a painful, poisonous death.”
10
They went over to the others and explained to them the watch schedule.
“Does anyone have any problems with this?” Jack concluded.
“Do we get the gun?” Pita asked.
Everyone looked at Nitro.
“Fuck no,” he said.
“But whoever’s on watch should have the gun.”
“She has a point, Muscles,” Jack said.
“You’d just end up blowing your own balls off, chavo.”
“I’ve fired a gun before,” he said.
“There’s no way in hell anyone’s touching my piece, and that’s that.”
“If I’m sitting out there on the porch,” Pita said, “I want a weapon.”
“Help yourself,” Nitro said, gesturing to the wall of farm equipment.
Resigned to the fact Nitro wasn’t giving up his pistol, they scrounged through Solano’s wall of farming instruments for something to defend themselves with. Pita selected a sickle, Jesus a hatchet with a broken half and rusty patina, Elizaveta a long-handled garden claw scabrous with corrosion. Jack considered an antique post-hole digger but apparently deemed it too unwieldly and instead settled on an eleven-inch iron hay hook.
Standing there examining their weapons of choice, they resembled a motley band of peasants about to march on Doctor Frankenstein’s castle. Nevertheless, they were armed.
Jack opened the cabin’s front door for Pita. Wet air blew inside, acc
ompanied by a blast of angry wind.
“Scream if you see someone, Jack Goff,” Nitro said.
Ignoring him, Jack followed Pita into the voracious night.
1957
1
The lobotomy was originally developed in 1936 by a Portuguese physician who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The procedure involved drilling two holes in either side of the patient’s forehead to sever some of the nerve fibers in the frontal lobes of the brain. The hope was to treat intractable mental disorders by reducing the strength of certain emotional signals.
A few years later the procedure gained traction in the United States in a different incarnation called a trans-orbital lobotomy. It was not a precise surgery and simply involved hammering an icepick through the thin layer of skull in the corner of each eye socket and wiggling it about to scramble the white and gray matter located there. It took less than ten minutes to complete, and oftentimes no anesthesia was required (though patients were usually given electroshock treatment first so they were unaware of what was happening).
Around this time a neurologist and Harvard graduate named Dr. Jerome Asper was working as head of laboratories in a sprawling Boston mental institution that housed thousands of patients in abject Victorian conditions. Wanting to make a name for himself as a medical pioneer, he began performing hundreds of these trans-orbital lobotomies at the hospital. Despite his critics decrying that he was doing nothing more than turning his unwitting patients into vegetables, he had his share of successes, published his work in respected journals, and built a reputation for himself as one of the foremost experts in psychiatric science.
For much of the nineteen fifties, he became an evangelist for trans-orbital lobotomies, touring hospitals and asylums across the country, performing the procedure on thousands of individuals to treat a range of illnesses from schizophrenia to depression to compulsion disorders. It became so routine he started prescribing it for symptoms as mild as a headache, and he sometimes brazenly ice-picked both eye sockets simultaneously, one with each hand, to impress the media that usually gathered to cover his “miracle cures.”
Nevertheless, by the end of the decade Asper’s fortunes made an abrupt reversal due to two unforeseen developments. The first was the rise of antipsychotic drugs, which yielded the same pacifying results in the mentally ill as the lobotomy without the invasiveness of an icepick to the brain. The second was the widespread rumor that Joseph Stalin and the Chinese were using lobotomies to control their political enemies, fueling the Red Scare that vilified any activity related to Communism.
Consequently, Asper quickly fell out of favor with the mainstream medical establishment, and it wasn’t long until no state hospital would touch him—not in the US at any rate. So in 1957 he relocated his sideshow to Mexico where he enjoyed revived success.
He had been performing the operation throughout Mexico City for several months when he received the call from Saint Agatha’s School for Lost Children regarding a particularly troublesome ward.
Asper had never performed a lobotomy on someone so young before, but as one of the great men of medicine of the twentieth century, he was always up for a new challenge.
2
Dressed in a worsted suit and bowtie, Dr. Jerome Asper stood next to the school’s resident priest, Father Pardavé, in a classroom turned makeshift operating theatre. His patient, a twelve-year-old girl named María Diaz, lay supine on the teacher’s desk before them.
According to the priest, the girl had the IQ of a moron, participated in disruptive behavior, and was capable of violent outbursts. Moreover, she suffered several fits a week, during which time he believed the devil took control of her body and mind. Nonsense, of course. Religious gobbledygook. These fits would be the physical manifestation of the illness epilepsy, not some occult affliction. Even so, in his opinion the surgery was necessary. It would not only calm her down but also make her happier.
Looking up at him with frightened yet trustful eyes, the girl asked him a question.
Asper had learned enough Spanish in his short time in Mexico to know she was inquiring whether the procedure was going to make her more like her housemates.
“Sí,” he said, smiling as he slipped a mouth guard in her mouth and placed two paddles on her forehead. He gave Father Pardavé a brief nod. The priest held the girl down tightly by her shoulders. Asper adjusted the timer on the small ECT machine on the desk and flicked the main switch. The electrodes delivered an electrical stimulus of several hundred watts that caused the girl’s body to convulse powerfully, her jaw to clamp shut, and the tendons in her neck to stand out. The current flowed for five seconds before shutting off. Her muscles immediately relaxed.
Now that she was suitably dazed, Asper selected his icepick and hammer from his medical case and went to work.
Jack
1
The storm had attained Armageddon proportions, yet it showed no signs of relenting. The rain fell in diagonal curtains with amazing force, chewing the ground and flooding shallow depressions. The wind, vicious and cold, threatened to strip leaves from their branches and uproot the smaller vegetation. Yellow bursts of lightning tortured the sky and lit the frenetic faces of the dozens of dolls dangling from nearby trees. Thunder boomed and crackled.
Pita and I sat side by side, our backs to the cabin’s façade, sheltered by the porch roof. We both had pulled our knees to our chests, wrapping our arms around them, in an attempt to retain our body heat. I remained alert, my eyes scanning the devastated jungle, the shadows dancing beneath the wind-frenzied trees. Yet as the minutes ticked away, and there was no sign of anybody lurking in the night, my mind began to drift, and I found myself reflecting on the racing accident that had ended my career. I didn’t like going there. It filled me with sadness and resentment and regret. Nevertheless, sometimes I couldn’t avoid it.
It was the third race of the 2000 NASCAR Winston Cup Series, the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway in Florida. I won the Pole, and with the help of my teammate I ended up leading the field for the first ninety laps. But a miscue from my pit crew and a couple of other mishaps saw me fall back as far as twelfth at one point. However, I made a late charge, and with two laps to go I was running second to Ed Melvin in the No. 93 car. On the inside of Turn 1 I attempted to pass him. We made light contact, both cars veering up to the wall, my Chevy leaning on his. As soon as I cleared him I pulled off a bump ’n’ run to take the lead. By Turn 4 Melvin caught up and we were at a virtual dead heat. At the white flag he pulled a car length ahead. I stuck directly behind him through Turns 1 and 2. I tried an overtake during Turn 3 but couldn’t get around him. My chance came in the final turn. I’d entered it low and Melvin high. I cut to the bottom groove, straddling the double yellow out of bounds line, and drew even with him as we exited the turn for the front stretch. As we sped for the checkered flag at two hundred miles an hour, we were so close our side panels traded paint, and then somehow his car caught mine in such a way air got under me. The next thing I knew I was looking at my roof for a long time—and then waking in the ICU with the immediate and uncanny memories of floating above my body while I’d been dead.
I mentioned what happened to the surgeon who’d operated on me, more in passing than anything else. He didn’t agree with my neurons dying theory, as the observations occurred while the EEG was recording a flat line, and he wanted to bring in a specialist to see me. I declined. I wasn’t going on record as a near-death-experience survivor and an out-of-body nutter.
Instead, I put all my energy into my physiotherapy, hoping to jump back into the Winston Cup Series in March…not knowing then that my racing days were gone and over.
2
“What are you thinking about?” It was Pita. She was staring into the storm.
I blinked, coming back to the present, the cold and the rain and the wind. I considered making up something to tell her, because whenever the accident came up, we fought. Nevertheless, deceiving her seemed like to
o much effort, and I said, “Florida.”
She didn’t say anything, and I thought that was the end of the conversation, when she added belatedly, “It happened, Jack. You can’t change it. Get over it.”
Get over it?
Thunder rumbled. It sounded distant, as if the storm might be retreating. This illusion was shattered a second later by another blast directly above us.
Still, I barely registered it.
Get over it.
“I’m sorry,” Pita said quietly, knowing she’d struck a nerve. “I didn’t mean that…I’m…I’m just scared…”
The antagonism building inside me evaporated. I reached out my hand, squeezed her knee, and said, “Me too.”
She looked at me. “I didn’t think you got scared.”
I chuffed and released her knee. “Why did you think that?”
“Because I’ve never seen you scared before.”
“I used to get scared before every race.”
“I don’t mean like that. I mean… I don’t know.” She seemed to be reflecting. “Those were fun times.”
“The races?”
She nodded, then laughed to herself.
“What?” I asked.
“Remember when we got locked out of our room in Kansas City?”
I nodded. I’d finished first at the Kansas Speedway that day, and we’d been out all evening celebrating.
She said, “We were staying at that old hotel that didn’t have twenty-four-hour reception. We ended up in the laundry room.”
I smiled. At some point I’d lost the keycard to the room. We searched the hotel for a game room or library or somewhere we could crash until morning. The only place that offered privacy was a launderette with six coin-operated washers and dryers. We ended up fooling around instead of sleeping—which we did a lot back then—and when things heated up Pita told me she wanted to have sex on top of one of the machines. She even made me put money in it so it would vibrate.
She said, “Who the heck does their laundry at one in the morning?” She was referring to the woman who entered the launderette with a basket of clothes just as Pita was climaxing and biting my neck to suppress a cry.
World's Scariest Places: Volume Two Page 40
