To The Bone

by Neil Mcmahon

  They had moved into a tacit arrangement of living together, here, most of the time. But she had kept her house in Burlingame, south of San Francisco, and although Monks wasn't keeping count, he knew that he was alone more now. He stayed with her there sometimes, but he was rooted here, in his place, and he got restless when he was away for long. He loved solitude. The advantages of suburbia – shopping, movies, people – did not interest him. For her, the isolation of the country wore just as thin.

  There were other practicalities that came into play. She was an internist and had spent several years as the in-house physician for that same computer corporation. She had come out of last year's emotional wrenching not ready to get back into the mainstream of medicine. But inactivity was wearing thin, too.

  He heard the door open, felt her come to stand beside him.

  'This isn't fair," she said. "You're making me the bad guy. Kicking you when you're down." He noted that she had refilled her own glass, with a fine Carmenet sauvignon blanc, and she seemed a little unsteady.

  'That's not what I'm doing," he said. "And it's not what you're doing. What's happening at the hospital and what's happening here, they're two different things."

  "But that's why you're doing it. Isn't it."

  The term that came into Monks's mind was one that Emil Zukich used – the legendary mechanic who lived up the road, and who had built and rebuilt the Bronco. Metal on metal: the point where bushings and bearings and all the other buffers had ground down to dust, and the machine crashed along tearing up its own bones. It was true that external circumstances might precipitate such a thing.

  But between Martine and him, it had built on its own, unseen and unnoticed except in tiny increments – the unhappy expression in a passing glance, the slight reluctance to touch. The sense that there was something going on in the background that was never brought forth.

  "You're changing the subject," he said.

  "I don't want to be away from you, Carroll. I just don't think I can keep on making it here."

  "I understand that, Martine. I really do."

  But he knew in his guts, even if she did not, that that was not the entire truth.

  "We can do it half and half," she said. "Your place and mine."

  "You bet."

  "I've talked to some people about work. That's all, just talking, feeling around. I think I could move into a practice without too much trouble."

  "I'm sure you could," he said.

  "I didn't tell you about it because – goddammit, quit giving me that stoic act."

  "It's not an act."

  "I know it's not," she said. "Fuck you."

  They both drank.

  "Let's take a walk," Monks said.

  "The food will get cold."

  "Just around the place."

  "Okay," she said doubtfully.

  He offered his hand. She took it. They walked down the deck's steps onto a hard red dirt path that skirted the perimeter of the property's three acres.

  Thirty yards or so farther on, Monks paused, pointing at a tire-sized flat rock. "I killed a rattlesnake right there once."

  Martine pulled her hand away and turned quickly in a circle, her gaze darting around the nearby earth, littered with twisted snakelike madrone twigs.

  "Quit it," she said. "You're scaring me."

  "I didn't want to. But the kids were still little. I couldn't take the chance."

  "Did you face it hand-to-fang? Like those guys on TV?"

  "Are you kidding? I snuck up behind it and whacked it with a garden hoe."

  She shivered. "Are there a lot of them around? Rattlesnakes?"

  "I only ever killed one other. I was getting firewood and it came out of the woodpile, between me and the door. Things got pretty tight for a minute there." Monks pointed at the woodshed, an old board-and-batten structure with only a narrow aisle between the stacks of split rounds. "The cats have taken out a few. They leave them on the doorstep."

  "I didn't know cats would hunt snakes."

  Another harsh image from his past seared Monks's brain – the cats on the hood of the Bronco, leaping and howling in the moonlight, while on the front seat a cobra weaved from side to side, trying to strike at them through the venom-smeared windshield.

  "These cats will," he said.

  They walked on, past the workout shed. It was almost dark, cool and still now, with the jays quiet. Higher up, a breeze rustled the redwood fronds and madrone leaves. A few tree frogs were tuning up for the night's concert. He walked slowly and she kept pace with him, swinging her leg without complaint. But on this rough and hilly terrain, she would get tired quickly. Monks stopped again, on the edge of the gully that led down to the creekbed.

  "That old cabin down there?" he said. The neighboring place had been abandoned decades ago and had mostly fallen into the creek, a couple hundred yards down the steep hill. "I forbade the kids to go near it, but of course it was a magnet. One day, I'd worked all night and was trying to get some sleep, and I heard this shriek. I ran down there and found poor little Stephanie, she was maybe eight, screaming bloody murder. She'd jumped off something and landed on a rusty old fence post, broken off to a point, sticking a couple inches out of the ground. Went right through her tennis shoe and clear up through her foot."

  Stephanie, his daughter, was now in medical school at UCSF. She and Martine had gotten quite close.

  For a minute or so, Martine was silent. He could see her head moving, her gaze wandering the woods, but not turning to him.

  Then, abruptly, she said, "I don't think I want a kid. My mind doesn't. I don't even think my body does. I don't know what it is."

  She was forty-three. Monks was long since vasectomized and out of the child-raising mode. He did not consider that he had done all that good a job the first time around.

  "Sorry I can't help you there," he said.

  "No, you're not."

  "You're right. I'm not."

  "Have any of your women ever told you you're too honest?"

  "No," Monks said. "You're the first."

  "Liar."

  He smiled gravely. They turned and started back. He knew, and supposed she did, too, that this had been a last-ditch attempt to woo her – offering the things that made him what he was.

  When they had first been together, there were words of passion, each assuring the other that this was what they had been waiting for. But it was useless to invoke that. The problem was not any single one of the obstacles, or even all of them together. The affair was just something that had run its course, and this was like the point in a really great party that had gone on most of the night, when a silence touched the room, and everybody knew that there might be a few more drinks and laughs, but the good-byes were going to start soon.

  If he hadn't pushed, it might have lasted longer – maybe quite a while. But Monks could not leave things like that in general, and she was right. Today's events had put him in the mood to have it out. He could have pushed it the other way, and asked her to marry him. But that would only be trying to bind her, to keep her from what she wanted – another chance at the kind of life most people considered normal, the kind of life that he had pretty much let go.

  He had not thought he would ever live with a woman again. But once he had started, he had come to realize that when she was not here, he felt a sour gnawing absence.

  They managed to keep up small talk while they ate. She asked more questions about what had happened today and Monks told her, but it was dutiful from both sides. Afterward, with his belly full and drowsiness coming quickly, he turned on the TV and settled back on the couch, head in her warm lap and her hand stroking his hair.

  "I do love you," she murmured. "You know that." Monks nodded. "I love you, too," he said, in a voice that was thick with exhaustion.

  Chapter 11

  Her voice leads you to a different street, another doorway. It's darker and quieter in here than the last place. The bottles lined up on the back-bar shelves glitter with du
sty colored light.

  She's a silhouette, alone at the bar, posed for you.

  She gives you a quick smile when you walk up next to her. She's in her late twenties, thin, wearing a tank top and jeans. She's probably been hit on several times already tonight, by men and women both. You look better than most of what she sees.

  You order a glass of wine, a Clos Pegase merlot this time. Then you admire the bracelet on her right forearm. It wraps around, a silver and turquoise snake crawling up her skin. The silver seems liquid, but not from the room's light. From her.

  "Where'd you get it?" you ask.

  "In LA. It's Navaho."

  You touch it, feeling her warmth shoot up through it into your finger.

  "It looks alive," you say. She smiles again and tosses her hair.

  She tells you she's from the Midwest. She's been traveling, working part-time here and there, crashing with people she meets. Her name is Lynn. You tell her a name, too, and let her know right away that you're a doctor.

  Her eyes flicker. That could mean drugs.

  She chatters on, but you listen past her words to what her voice is telling you in your head – what has hurt her all her life. She's almost pretty, but her chin recedes, and her nostrils flare at the tip.

  You'll start with a rhinoplasty – remove a little cartilage from the base of each nostril, then tighten them together. Then implants in the mandible to move the chin bone forward. When it's finished, her face will have a beautiful balance. She'll wish you'd found her years ago.

  "Are you really a doctor?" she asks teasingly. Are we really talking drugs?

  "Really." You show her your medical license, making sure she also sees plenty of credit cards and crisp cash.

  Then you lean close, lips just brushing her ear, and say very quietly, "Look, we're both grown-ups. Let's not be coy. I like to party, and I've got a whole pharmacy at my clinic."

  She doesn't say anything, doesn't even look at you, but it's just what she wanted to hear.

  "Why don't we talk it over in my car?" you say.

  You're parked several blocks away, and the two of you don't talk much on the walk. She's wondering whether she made a bad move.

  But when she sees the car, her eyebrows rise.

  "Nice," she says.

  You unlock the passenger door for her. As she's getting in, you press a folded hundred-dollar bill into her palm.

  "Just a little fun money," you say.

  She acts surprised, even offended. "This isn't really what I do. What do you – you know – want from me?"

  "Maybe you can help me with a fantasy."

  "Well, maybe," she says warily. "But nothing weird, okay?"

  "Of course." You start the engine. It has a smooth, reassuring purr.

  "You mind if I smoke?" she asks.

  "Go ahead."

  She takes cigarettes from her purse and lights up, then relaxes back into the seat. This is looking good. There's money and drugs.

  You're a doctor. You can give her what she wants.

  Chapter 12

  When Monks woke up, the house was dim, with the only light coming from down the hall. He was still on the couch, covered with a blanket. Memory of the earlier hours began to return, and then, the fear that Martine had gone home.

  But she was still here, a small mound in his bed, buried under covers in the now cool night. He put a hand on her lightly to assure himself and heard a slight pause in her breathing before it evened out again. Omar, the big Persian, was curled at her feet, looking almost half her size. There was the sense that he had been posted as a guard while the other two were out taking care of nightly cat business.

  Monks went to the bathroom to urinate, rinse his face, and brush his teeth, then back to the kitchen to put out fresh spoonfuls of cat food in their bowls. He turned out the light. The green LED numbers on the microwave clock said 1:08 a.m. The previous day's events were flickering through his mind like a videotape now.

  He stood in the dark room, grappling with the urge to start drinking again, to blast on through the night, to reach that feverish black edge between this reality and a further one that lured, promising that it was realer still. He had been there many times, but not in several years.

  He walked back down the hall to the bedroom. When he undressed, he realized, with surprise, that he was half-hard. He lay down beside Martine and touched her small breasts, an exploratory caress, not sure how welcome he would be.

  But she stretched luxuriantly, then turned and cupped his tightened scrotum, hefting it curiously, as if judging its weight. Her hand moved to stroke his shaft, using the inside of her wrist, then pricking it with her fingernails.

  Her touch was exquisite. He adored her. He tried to concentrate all his being on her, knowing that this would soon be gone, too.

  And yet some lewd uncontrollable part of his mind kept playing the image of Eden Hale as she had been in that film, luscious, intense, braced on hands and knees and wide open to the ramming bursting need of men.

  Chapter 13

  The night is yours now. You move through the pitch-dark woods without light or sound. The trail is steep and overgrown, but your steps are sure. Power surges through your veins and pounds inside your skull, burning and brilliant and supreme. You are beyond all limits.

  Inside the plastic bag you carry is a warm limp weight.

  You come to a deep cleft in the mountainside, a spring that was diverted years ago, to fill the swimming pool for the mansion below. No one comes here anymore. You pull away the rocks and brush that you had piled in the entrance. A strong odor seeps out, but musty, like copper and wet earth. The lime has done its job.

  This is where you keep the leftover parts.

  You lay her down on top of the others, then remove her silver-and-turquoise bracelet and wind it around your own arm. It burns with her heat, right through your skin.

  Your body is tired, but your mind is full of her song, a song of worship, for the beauty you have given her.

  Chapter 14

  Monks arrived back at Mercy Hospital before eight o'clock the next morning. He had slept poorly – had lain awake beside Martine for a long time after making love, finally dozing a little. But the memory tapes had kept playing in his head, and he was wide awake by six. He had gotten up, showered and shaved, and driven to the city.

  He stopped first at the Emergency Room to check for messages. There were two. One, a hand-scrawled note from Roman Kasmarek, just said, "Stop by."

  The second was an official hospital message, typed by a clerk and computer-printed: "Dr. D' Anton wishes to extend the courtesy of examining the records of Eden Hale. Please call at your convenience."

  Monks rolled the paper up and tapped it against his thigh as he walked down to the morgue. There were such things as changes of heart, but by and large they made him suspicious.

  The hospital's cafeteria food was good and usually tempted Monks, but this morning he settled for a scoop of scrambled eggs and toast. He and Roman found a table in a corner. The place was busy, filled with staff in different colored uniforms and a few visitors who were early, or who had spent an anxious night waiting with an ill friend or relative and were not done with their vigils yet.

  'The initial tox screen is in," Roman said. "And I had a chance to look at the body before the city took her. This isn't all official, but here's what I'm sure of." He held up his forefinger, ticking off points. "She had a relatively high level of Valium in her system, but nowhere near lethal. There's no direct connection to the death." A second finger appeared. "You were right about the DIC. She bled out. That's what killed her."

  Monks felt a measure of relief. His diagnosis had been correct.

  But there remained the question of his treatment. "What caused the DIC?"

  Roman's ring finger rose to join the other two. "I saw no evidence of surgical infection. No pregnancy, no obvious signs of trauma, carcinoma, any of the other usual causes. It's possible they'll turn up on autopsy, but I doubt it. But th
ere was an infection. We found salmonella in her bloodstream."

  "Salmonella," Monks said, laying down his fork. "Salmonella doesn't cause blood clotting. Just the opposite."

  Heads at nearby tables turned toward them. Monks lowered his voice.

  "She might have had salmonella, but I can't believe that's what did it," he said.

  Roman's hand opened, palm out, for patience. "Take it easy, Carroll. I'm just telling you what the tests show."

  "Have you ever known salmonella to act like that?"

  "Not the common stuff, enteritidis" Roman said. "Which is what this is, or at least what it looked like. There are other kinds."

  "You're sure it's not typhoid?" Monks said. "I thought about that." Typhoid fever was caused by a type of salmonella, and he feared that he might have missed it after all.

  "Almost positive. I'm doing cultures, so we can verify it. But there are no other indications of typhoid, and it doesn't fit with the DIC."

  Monks waited.