Then she noticed something odd: the light was on in the attic. It was a dim 40-watt bulb near the head of the stairs, at the other end of the attic from this one dormer window that faced on the backyard, so it made a barely perceptible glow. It would have looked well as the backdrop for the cover of a Nancy Drew mystery: The Light in the Attic Window. The bulb must have been burning since the last time she’d been up there. When? Weeks ago, at least. But more likely it was Launce who’d been poking around in the attic and forgotten to turn out the light. Whatever the explanation, her concern for energy conservation was not so strong as to propel her into the house and up to the attic to save .005¢ on the electric bill.
Such a beautiful evening. But could she really be thinking of driving off drunk to Lake Calhoun, just as though she and Launce were teenagers again—with Elvis on the radio and Lake Street bumper to bumper with great gas-guzzling cars the names of which she couldn’t even remember anymore. But she could remember the feeling of sweet release stepping outside the house—this same house, more oppressive now than then—and the wind that flowed in through the open windows, fluttering her hair across her face.
Even if they couldn’t still rent a canoe, what did it matter? The lake would still be there, and they could lie in the grass and look across the water and for two or three hours nothing else would exist. They’d be back in the eternity of their youth. She should say yes for Launce’s sake if not for her own.
So when he returned with the store’s last two bottles of the miraculous wine she didn’t take any more convincing. He said, “Well, what do you say?” and she said, “What the hell,” and went into the house to get the car keys and left a note on the kitchen table: “We’re going for a drive. Back later. Madge.” It was the same note she might have written and left under the same salt shaker forty years ago with exactly the same delicious feeling of guilt.
79
Lorine smoked while her dinner flowed through the translucent IV tubes and into the hidden plumbing of her own body. There were so few foods she could count on being able to digest, and those few so bland, that she’d really come to prefer this more direct approach to the problem of nutrition.
Doc MacDonald, meanwhile, was looking at the naked and unconscious body of his medical colleague, where it was spread out on the examining table of surgery. He palpated the man’s lower abdomen, eliciting a low, dreaming groan. “Well, I’d have to go along with his own diagnosis.”
“Appendicitis?”
He nodded, though, doctorlike, he had to find a longer way to say it: “Acute septic inflammation. No telling how long he’s got.”
“Until what?”
“Until it bursts. Then it’s too late. The poison fills the peritoneal cavity.”
“So he’s got to be operated on, is that what you’re saying?”
“Outside of this place, he would long since have been sent for surgery. But here…” Doc MacDonald shrugged. “What would be the point?”
“We only need to keep him alive a day or two. Till we can arrange for the transfer. If he pops off after that, so much the better. I’m not speaking for myself, you understand. I am passing along the wishes of top management. The Commandant.”
“If wishes were horses…”
“This is not something you’ve ever done?”
“I am an orthopedist, not a surgeon. I deal with bones, not guts.”
“But you’re always going on about how you were in that field hospital in Vietnam.”
“They didn’t have us doing appendectomies.”
“But you must’ve dealt with spilled guts. It’s supposed to be a pretty simple operation.”
“Lorine, my dear, these days I have difficulty tying my shoelaces.” By way of illustrating his motor control problems, he removed the thermometer from the armpit of the unconscious man and tried to hold it steady as he took a reading.
Lorine ignored his bid for sympathy. “What does it say?”
He frowned. “It’s up over a hundred and three.” He put a finger to the man’s neck, measuring the pulse against his wristwatch. “Ninety-five,” he announced at length, with a grave shaking of his head.
“Listen,” Lorine insisted, deftly removing the IV needle from her arm. “We both have a nice deal here, right? We’ve got perks and privileges that neither of us would care to jeopardize. So if you perform an appendectomy that is less than state of the art, who’s to know? You think there’s going to be some medical board of inquiry? If the guy doesn’t recover, that could even be a plus for us, ‘cause there’ll be no chance of his lodging a formal complaint and trying to get an investigation started. So why don’t we just do the best job we can? Details you don’t think you can handle, I’ll do myself. I am not at all squeamish. Just give me directions. I’ve always thought surgery was one of those things, like skydiving or eating oysters, that everyone should do at least once in her life. So I consider this my big opportunity. What do you say?”
Doc MacDonald shrugged. “I’ll need a couple of bottles.”
“Chivas Regal okay?”
“That would be fine.”
“I’ll go get ‘em. Meanwhile, you prep him. That’s the right word—‘prep’?”
“Lorine, you’re going to leave this camp a registered nurse.”
“A nurse? Hey, Doc, women today have got higher expectations than that. I’m going for an M.D.” She laughed huskily and pointed to the patient on the table. “That one!”
80
Judge had put off corruption, taken on incorruption, and was feeling terrific as a result. It was like having X-ray eyes, like being consumed in the fires of Pentecost. He could see things the way they really were, the way they had been and had to be. All at once and all together, broken into pieces, like a monitor with many windows, and each window streaming with light. As though everything in the world were lit up from inside like a light bulb. And if he looked into the light and held his gaze steady, Brother Orson would be there with the Angel Lazarus, but now the two of them were one, and that one was God, just as, in his heart, Judge had always supposed. Till now Brother Orson, like Jesus, had had to sidestep questions about who he was and where he came from, but now he stood revealed.
So when he read the note Madge had left under the salt shaker on the kitchen table, he was not upset, though for a moment he was surprised, since he had supposed that she had been set down for a sacrifice, like Lisa and Judith and the priest. Why else had a salt shaker been placed on her letter? For it is written—Ezekiel, chapter 43, verses 23 and 24—Thou shalt offer a young bullock without blemish, and a ram out of the flock without blemish. And thou shalt offer them before the LORD, and the priests shall cast salt upon them, and they shall offer them up for a burnt offering unto the LORD. All that was clear, but it was just as clear that the Lord did not intend Madge and the man she’d had with her to be part of the sacrifice. At least not now.
What he must do now was to search through this house and find the caduceus that Brother Orson had said had been hidden here for years and years. Though where exactly he would not say; only—Seek and you will find. The logical places to look were the basement and the attic, since those were the places where something would be likely to stay hidden for the longest time.
The bulb at the top of the steps going down to the basement was burnt out, and even with his new powers of vision Judge had to feel his way by fingertip down the steps and along the rough cinder-block walls. The only light in the entire cellar was a pinpoint of red at waist level, dimmer than a bathroom night-light. It turned out to be the light on a deep freeze.
He opened the deep freeze and was able to make out the rough outlines of other features of the basement from the light spilling out from its white interior. At the far end of the room was a wall of shelves with a ladder beside it. Something inside him told him to go climb up the ladder and look on the shelves, but when he did all he found was empty jars intended for canning. Even so, he couldn’t shake the certainty that there was something h
ere he was meant to have. Not the caduceus. Something… else. Its absence mocked him. He threw one of the bottles at the concrete wall for the satisfaction of hearing it smash. But if he’d broken every bottle on every shelf it would have only honed his frustration to a sharper edge.
He descended the ladder, feeling balked and cheated, and returned to the side of the deep freeze. He’d almost lowered its bulky lid without noticing, or taking in, the nature of the freezer’s contents—a single package bundled in a supermarket bag, its white plastic mottled with what Judge was suddenly sure was blood. And in the package, when most of the plastic had been peeled away, a man’s head. A bloated frozen tongue protruded from the distended jaw, and the eyeballs had become glassy and crackled like ice cubes. Judge felt a momentary pang of proprietary resentment, such as a hunter hidden in a blind might feel hearing another hunter’s discharge only a short distance away. But then he realized that however this head had come to be here it was intended as a sign, a sign prefigured (he realized) by the priest’s pagan parable of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh. The thick, purple tongue—could it but move again—had some purpose to communicate, like the impaled head that had spoken to him on the counter of the optometrist’s shop. Another prefiguration. In what he did God left no room for accidents.
He decided that the head had to be thawed and took it up to the kitchen and punched instructions THAW—MEAT—8 pounds—onto the keypad of the microwave. With its cheek on the turntable, the frozen head barely fit inside. Then, remembering Madge’s invitation earlier, Judge helped himself to a can of Coke from the icebox and settled down in front of the microwave and watched the head revolve on the turntable for the time it took to finish off the Coke. He remembered how, when he was little, he’d sat spellbound in front of his mother’s 33⅓-rpm phonograph, watching the music as he listened to it.
As he sipped his Coke and watched the man’s frozen features turning a brighter and brighter pink, he felt a kind of reverence such as (he supposed) people of a more conventional religious temperament must feel when they’re at church, looking at the flickering candles and smelling the incense.
Then a voice spoke to him, saying—Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for her grapes are fully ripe, just as the angel cries out in John’s Revelation, and when the vine of the earth had been cast into the great winepress of the wrath of God, blood had spurted from the winepress—even, John writes, unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs. There’d been a time when many of these details had been confusing to Judge, and when he’d asked Brother Orson about them, his answers had seemed obscure or evasive.
But now all that was changed. Brother Orson was beside him. It was his voice that had spoken aloud, repeating the words of the angel; his hand that had pulled the tab from the can of Coke, and now when the phone rang, it was the voice of Brother Orson that answered, and said—Yes?
It was the woman whose call he’d been waiting for, the one who’d phoned earlier to Willowville. She was very brusque and businesslike, and Judge was the same. He said he had the money, and he promised to bring it, at eleven o’clock, to the point they’d agreed on at the edge of Brosner Park.
He felt uneasy about leaving the house, not knowing when Madge might return with the old man she said was Ned’s father. She would undoubtedly be upset if she noticed what was in the microwave. But it was too soon to take it out, for it was far from being thawed through. Finally he figured that the Lord could be trusted to guide Madge to do the right thing just as he was guiding Judge.
For all that he felt the hand of the Lord on his shoulder, and Brother Orson’s footsteps beside him, Judge realized, when he went out to the Cadillac he’d left parked on Ludens at the side of the house, that he’d left the engine running and the keys in the ignition. It was natural enough, with all that had happened, to feel nervous, but he really couldn’t afford to be so careless.
He drove east on Ludens, hung a right onto Brosner, and drove the six blocks to the park at the sedate pace of a jogger. The breeze had quickened to a light wind, and as he came to the park and the larger sky that the trees had blocked from view became visible, he could see clouds being swept across the moon, risen now to its meridian.
In Eternity, soon, there would be no clouds, nor even a moon, changing its shape from night to night, and the sun would be fixed in the sky as it was above Jericho, impaled by Joshua’s horn.
At the hour appointed a large black van pulled up in front of the Cadillac, and two men, in jeans and T-shirts, came around to the rear of the van and opened the door and shone a flashlight across a figure lying on a mattress. Then a woman in a leather jacket came to the window of the Cadillac and asked Judge for the money. Judge watched her while she fanned through each rubber-banded sheaf of bills, checking the denominations. A smoking cigarette hung from the side of her painted mouth. Judge felt disgusted and tried not to breathe through his nose, so he wouldn’t smell her cigarette.
“Okay,” she said, with a nod to the two men waiting beside the van. Tugging at the corners of the blanket on which he lay, they pulled the man partway out the rear end of the van until one of them was able to bend over and get a grip on his legs. Then they carried him to the passenger side of the Cadillac, where Judge had already pushed the door open.
Judge regarded his father with a subdued, anticipatory triumph, but that feeling was complicated by a natural revulsion at the way he looked and smelled. His head lolling back against the seat’s headrest with a low, wordless moan. His two front teeth missing, which made Judge remember the times in Florida, long ago, when William would pry the flipper from the roof of his mouth and pretend to be an old bum. Now he really had become that old bum.
“You got to be careful how you handle him,” the woman with the cigarette cautioned. “He’s still pretty sensitive down here.” She rubbed the lower part of her leather jacket.
“You don’t have to worry,” Judge assured her. “I will take proper care of him.”
“You’ve got a southern accent,” she observed.
“Yes, I’m from the South. Florida.”
She smiled, and touched his cheek with one of her long painted fingernails. “Cute,” she said. “Real cute. Just my luck we should meet like this.”
Judge was at a loss for words.
“Well,” she said, still in the same suggestive tone, “see you around.” She winked at Judge, and then returned to the van. The two men with her had already crawled inside and pulled the rear door shut behind them. The taillights lit up bright orange, and the van drove ahead to the stoplight at Calumet and turned south along the park.
“Are you okay?” Judge asked, without looking at his father.
“I will be… soon.” William’s voice was the barest whisper.
Judge waited to start the engine in case he meant to say more, but when there was no more forthcoming, he turned the key in the ignition and headed back toward the old house on the corner of Calumet and Ludens.
81
Each familiar sight along the length of Calumet was an assurance that the nightmare was over. He would be safe where he was going. Whatever butcheries had been committed in the name of surgery would heal as soon as he had again possessed himself of the caduceus.
The car hit a red light at the corner of Calumet and Hubbard. All of the small shops had gone out of business, including the Rexall drugstore, where on the coldest winter days he’d stopped on the way home from school to get warm. The empty windows of the onetime drugstore seemed for a moment to epitomize all that was tragic and fatal in human existence. Then the light changed, and the car moved ahead, and the meaning of the scenes sliding by became jumbled and unclear. The drugs he’d been given before the woman cut him open were still in his system, dulling the pain but also making it difficult to form clear thoughts. His sense of time was all distorted. The car seemed to be moving at the speed of a person walking along the sidewalk.
A few hous
es ahead he saw a hedge, its tiny leaves jittering in the wind, a sickly, glittery yellow under the sodium street lamps, and he remembered passing before this same hedge, running home after the accident with the kite, bleeding then too, and how the woman who’d been trimming the hedge had called out to him, “Little boy!” and then “Young man!” He could remember the exact X of the open clipper in her hands, the screechy timbre of her voice, the bloodstains down the front of his shirt.
He could feel the wet warmth of the blood soaking his underpants. It seemed a shameful thing, like incontinence, and the thought of asking Judith or Madge to clean his private parts was even more unbearable. But such a simple action—leaning forward, reaching down—was beyond his capabilities now. Even to be sitting upright in the car in his condition was ill-advised. He should be on his back so the weight of his bowels would not be pressing down against the crude sutures stitching the incision closed.
The car came to a stop at Davis, only two blocks from home, and two kids on a single bicycle crossed the street in front of them. From an open window came the sound of rock music, simplified by distance (or the morphine) to a simple compound beat, systole and diastole.
“Listen! You can hear the devil,” Judge commented, “dancing in hell.”
The light changed and the car lurched forward. The silhouette of the Obstschmecker house hove into view, lights aglow in every window, a haven of welcome.
As the car turned the corner and rolled to a stop at the curb, William had his first intimation that everything was not as it should be. When Judge got out of the car and walked round to open the right-hand door, no one came out of the lighted house. Surely they would have been waiting for Judge’s return, there would be some show of concern, of curiosity. “Where…” He hadn’t strength to say more than that single word, but Judge understood.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 49
