DOB 11/02/39
90114 South Wyatt Drive
Hardin MON
TERRY WING
ROOM 509 EAST
Dr. Zorn
OUTPATIENT REFERRAL
DO YOU WISH HISTORY?
IF SO CURSOR TO D2
He studied the screen again. Then he picked up a pencil and wrote both addresses down on a scrap of paper. He cursored to QUIT and hit ESCAPE.
Not a bad idea. The screen was blank again. He felt the woman’s pulse at her carotid. She sighed and made room for his fingers under her jaw.
He smiled and patted her head and walked away. He could hear nothing at all through the doors. The silence was unnatural. If the cop was asleep, he would breathe, and if awake, he would breathe and turn pages and shuffle his feet.
Gabriel opened the door and stepped out into the darkened hallway. He heard the sound of low voices coming from a room down at the far end. He would have to pass the room to reach the stairway. He came forward at a glide, moving quickly, the big black coat billowing out behind him.
The door to the room was slightly ajar. He could see the broad blue back of the cop, leaning forward on a high stool. The nurse was hidden from him by the size of the cop’s body. He saw a fan of blond hair and heard her laughing softly. The cop’s hand was busy, his shoulder moving. The nurse’s laugh changed, became a low sigh and a whispered word. Her head came up above the cop’s shoulder, and she looked right at Gabriel for the second time.
He watched her eyes as they glittered unseeing in the bright overhead light. Her red mouth was open, and then her eyes closed and she leaned forward, resting her cheek on the cop’s dark blue shirt. Her pale blond hair burned in the light.
Gabriel moved away to the stairway door. It opened with a soft hiss, and he went soundlessly into the stairwell.
12
0500 Hours–June 16–Billings, Montana
Beau came up from a deep dreaming sleep with a gradual awareness that the light was changing in the room. Finally surfacing, eyes wide, he saw the patterned sound-tiles above as if they were the grids and mainlines of Billings, as if he were flying in through a heavy cloud. There was a kind of surreal hypersonic crack, and suddenly he knew where he was and why.
Something had changed. It took a few minutes to realize that the machine was gone from the far wall. He turned his head, carefully, as if a sudden move would explode it, and looked toward the other bed. The curtains were pulled back; a man was lying on his side, breathing deeply, whistling as he exhaled. The light from the window was pale blue and gray. Noises were coming from the hall, carts being pushed along and morning voices, full of fascist cheer. The nurses were up and about their business.
He pulled the sheet back and felt along his leg. The bandages were mounded over his wound, but that obscene tube was gone. The muscle was sore, but he could move the leg without fainting, a definite improvement. It took him a few minutes to get into a sitting position, and he was mapping out his next move when a young woman in crisp whites backed into the room, pulling a cart full of juices and magazines. She saw him sitting up at the side of the bed and flashed a luminous smile.
“Sergeant McAllister! Good morning!”
He grinned back. “Trudy, isn’t it? How are we?”
She made a face and brought the cart close to the bedside. “I hate that, too,” she said. “Orange, grapefruit, or tomato?”
“Orange. What do we hate?”
“We hate all that ‘we’ shit. How did you sleep?”
Beau took the plastic glass and lifted it cautiously to his lips. The juice was wonderful, a sensory flood. He noticed that he was off the intravenous, too. Suddenly, he was starving.
“Weird … I had a weird dream, too. Something—I think I dreamed that … like a black angel, and it was standing at the foot of the bed, and then there was this white light. Weird.”
“Percodan will do that. You have real weird dreams. That sounds like an out-of-body dream. Once I was in the hospital for arthroscopy and they gave me Percodan, and I had this dream I was over at the mall, only I was naked. Can you imagine that? I was stark naked and walking around with my girlfriend, you know, like shopping and stuff. Only I was absolutely in the total nude. Then everybody was nude and we all were on Wheel of Fortune, but all the letters were really faces. How’s Mr. Blitzer?”
Beau was still picturing Trudy naked in the mall, so when she asked him how Mr. Blitzer was he took it the wrong way and looked down to see if he was covered, but she was already over at the other bed, one hand softly shaking the patient, who groaned and rolled over. Her smile shone down upon him in a perky benediction. He croaked at her and raised his arm. She pulled him upright, and he swayed in the sheets.
“Christ … somebody kill that parrot.”
“You have a bad taste, Mr. Blitzer?”
Beau turned on his bedlight. Blitzer winced and looked across at him. Bucky Blitzer was a small leathery man with a Marine brushcut and a tattoo of a bulldog on his left bicep. His teeth were out and his cheeks were sunken. Somehow he conveyed a kind of cranky competence, and his eyes, although deep-set and surrounded by lines and shadows, were clear and direct. He pulled in a long slow breath and moaned softly.
“Drink this, Mr. Blitzer.”
He drained his cup and wiped his mouth with his hand.
He looked back at Beau and smiled weakly. “You’re McAllister, right?”
Beau nodded carefully. His head stayed on. “Yeah. Beau’s the name. You okay?”
He pulled in another breath. “Yeah. I think so. Chest feels like somebody filled it with sand.”
“You’ve been on a respirator, Mr. Blitzer,” said the nurse. “I’m Trudy. You’ll feel tender for a few days. You had a narrow escape there.”
He coughed, drank some more juice, and looked around the room. “Yeah. Anybody seen my teeth?”
Trudy bustled over to a cupboard and brought back a glass full of liquid. He fished his teeth out and slipped them in.
“Hell. That’s better.”
“Yeah,” said Beau. “You’re right.”
Blitzer sent him a black look, then grinned again. “I know. I look like a guy swallowed his face. Trudy, I’m hungry. We eating soon?”
Trudy looked at her clipboard and shook her head. Her hair was up in a French braid, and she looked very young. Beau realized that he was getting to the age when everybody looked too young to drive, let alone be a nurse or a doctor.
“You’re on liquids. Sergeant McAllister can have breakfast, but you’ll have to see your therapist first. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Do either of you want a bedpan?”
Blitzer and Beau looked at each other, and a silent agreement passed between them. They shook their heads in unison, and Trudy laughed at them.
“Okay. But I gave you a bed bath yesterday, Mr. Blitzer, so we have, like, no secrets. I really don’t mind.”
“Not at gunpoint, darling,” said Blitzer, coughing. Trudy laughed again and pushed her cart out of the room.
“I’ll help you across there, Mr. Blitzer,” said Beau.
“Call me Bucky, and no thank you. Day I need help to the bathroom, I’ll get in the tub and play with a power drill. Wish I’d been awake for that bed bath, though.”
“What the hell happened, anyway?”
Blitzer looked at him a while, considering. “That’s a hard question to answer, and I’m not sure I feel like trying. It was one of the worst things I ever hope to see. Your cop buddies fill you in yet?”
“Not completely. I’d like to hear your side of it. If you’re up to it?”
“Up to it? Not likely I’ll ever forget it. I haven’t got it figured out myself, yet. I do know what happened to you.”
“Yeah? What was that?”
“You got into that scrap over at Bell’s Friday? And then down the side road later—I heard you and your friends talking, I guess it’d be yesterday now? What day’s it?”
“Sunday, I think. They took my watch.
I’d say Sunday.”
Blitzer pulled the sheets back and slowly levered himself onto his feet. He pulled the robe around him.
“I’ll use the facilities there, if you don’t mind me going first?”
“Not at all. You can’t remember about it, or you don’t want to right now?”
Blitzer shuffled across the linoleum, talking over his shoulder as he walked. “I gotta tell the city bulls anyway, so I’ll practice on you. Gimme a minute to drain Elmore here.”
He closed the door and left Beau speculating on the habit men had of naming their nuptials, and did women have names for theirs, or was that just a male thing? Thinking about it, he’d never met a woman who called her nuptials by name. He’d named his Captain Happy years back, around the time he first discovered it had a variety of uses, some better than others. Bucky apparently called his Elmore. Eustace called his Champion, after Gene Autry’s horse. Beau had it on good information, however, that Eustace’s wife referred to it as Trigger, because it sometimes went off unexpectedly. Myron Sugar referred to his as Brutus, for reasons he would not disclose, and Finch Hyam had named his Willy because that was occasionally the question, Willy having a mind of his own sometimes.
There might be something in all of this, some profound insight about life, death, and the meaning of the universe. But he doubted it. Blitzer came back out of the bathroom and interrupted Beau’s train of thought.
“Hey, Sergeant. You know the difference between consternation and panic?”
“Can’t think of it.”
Blitzer settled into the chair and bounced a fist off his chest, clearing his throat. He had better color now, although his breathing sounded like somebody pulling a boot out of a mud puddle.
“Consternation is the first time you can’t get it up the second time. Panic … is the second time you can’t get it up the first time.”
Beau’s laugh hurt his belly, and Bucky’s ended in a gasping wheeze.
“Okay,” said Beau. “This guy goes into a bar—”
“Oh, right. That’s original.”
“Guy goes into a bar, he’s got this tiny little man sitting on his left shoulder, see?”
“Tiny little guy on his shoulder, yeah.”
“Okay, so the bartender comes over, sees the little man sitting there, but, hey, he’s a bartender, you know, he’s too cool to say anything, so he asks the guy what he’ll have. The guy says oh gimme a double bourbon and branch. So the bartender pours it out, brings it over, sets it down in front of the man. Boom, this little man gets up, runs down the guy’s arm, kicks the drink over, laughs like a loon, and runs off down the bartop kicking over everybody’s drinks, pissing in the peanuts, running wild. Now the bartender sees this, they both watch, and the bartender says to the man, hey, what the hell you hanging round with a little bastard like that for?”
“I think I heard this.”
“Yeah? Well it’s almost over. So the guy says to the bartender, I’m an archaeologist, you know, and I was on this dig in the Sahara, and I found this lamp—”
“And he rubs it—”
“And he rubs it, and the genie appears and tells him he has one wish, and he—”
“He wished for a ten-inch prick.”
Beau looked at him.
“What kind of name is Elmore anyway?”
Bucky looked back at him.
“We go back for years. Elmore’s my buddy.”
“So do me and Captain Happy.… You hear the one, guy wants to tattoo his girlfriend’s name on it, her name’s Wilma?”
“Yeah. Welcome to Jamaica’s the punchline. You hear the one, two lawyers are walking down Main Street, they see this magnificent woman, a real heart-attack blonde, and one lawyer turns to the other and says, ‘Man, wouldn’t you like to screw her!’ And the other lawyer shrugs and says, ‘Outta what?’ ”
Trudy was standing in the doorway, listening. “I have one for you. You hear about the miracle baby born here last week?”
They both stared at her. “Nope,” said Beau.
Trudy brought the trays in and set them down.
“Well, it had a penis and a brain. What do you call a woman without an asshole? No? Divorced! One more?”
“Okay.”
“What’s twelve inches and white?”
“No idea,” said Beau.
Trudy pulled the tray-table up and handed Beau a warm wet cloth.
“Absolutely nothing. Who wants some oatmeal?”
After the trays had been cleared away and Beau had cleaned himself up in the bathroom, he managed to shuffle back to the bedside chair. He sat down in it and watched Bucky run over his cheeks with an old Schick.
“So … can we talk about this a little?”
Blitzer settled himself back into his pillows and switched off the razor. He sent Beau a sidelong look.
“I’m not really inclined to. You ever been in a situation, it gets to be a situation before you notice?”
“All the time.”
“You ever been to the Mountain Bell truckyard?”
“I’ve been past it, in the cruiser.”
“Okay. I’m the night man at the yard. Mechanical and maintenance. We got thirty-eight trucks, a coupla cherry-pickers for the lines, but mostly handivans and Vanagons. My job, I used to be a motor pool ramrod. I was motor pool chief at Da Nang from ’66 to ’68 for the Third Marines, and the 109th Tactical. You know ’em?”
“Heard of them.”
“Yeah. You in?”
“No. I tried but they four-F’d me.”
“Four-F’d you? Christ, and you a cop now?”
“Well, I used to play football. I was a pretty good middle-linebacker in Ukiah, and later I played at Cal State. Scouted by Notre Dame, too.”
“No shit! What’d they say?”
“They said, what the hell is that boy doing?”
“Yeah. Tough. What was it, your knees?”
“The knees, yeah. I was at Fort Ord, the docs asked me to do a couple of things, stair tests. They could hear my knees clicking across the hall. Sounded like a jar full of nails, they said. That was the end of my military career.”
“What I heard, you done your share right here at home. I never fired but one shot in anger, and that was during Tet. Tet, wasn’t anybody could get to a piece who wasn’t firing. Whole damned country went up like a frying pan fulla bees. Damned funny, I go through three tours and a whole buncha Veetnam hookers, and here I almost die in my own hometown.”
“About the fire? How much do you remember?”
“It was a bad one. I’ll never forget it. I’ll dream about it. I’m working on this oil pan. One of the guys popped it up there on the Musselshell ridge, hit a rock, up there where they’re blasting a new road outta Musselshell? God knows why.”
“I know it.”
“So most of the service vehicles are back. I’m down under in the pit, working up, got a burred bolt on the panhead. I hear this one last truck comin’ in, I think, hey who’s that? It’s late, right? Most of the guys are in hours ago, so this one guy’s working real late.”
“They have to sign in?”
“Well, technically they do. But mostly, they just park ’em and lock ’em unless they got a problem with the truck.”
“What time’d this be?”
“Late. I’m on at eight, this was after midnight. It was the last truck in, because he hadda park it way at the far end of the lot, the rest of the trucks got all the good spots—”
He suddenly snapped forward and began to cough, pulling a sheet up into his face.
“Damn … god … damn.”
Beau had a theory about where this was going, but he didn’t want to lead a witness. He drank some juice and waited for Blitzer.
“Anyway—where was I? Whoo! Need to breathe, don’t we? Stop a guy from breathing, you get his attention right away there!”
“Spoil his whole day. I like to breathe all the time.”
“So—I say, hey fuck it, go back to work. Te
n minutes later, the smoke alarm goes off, and I come scuttling out from under the truck. There’s smoke drifting in from the lot outside, and it sets off the alarm. If there hadn’t been a wind, we’d have lost the whole yard. As it was, I got the can and went racing out there. You could see which truck it was from the windows, ’cause they were glowing. I saw—well, shit. Anyway, I get to the last truck there, I see the way it is, flames all over the forward section. I open the rear doors and … well, that wasn’t the right thing to do. The air gets to it. Hottest part is halfway up the cab there. Front of the cab, well, there’s nothing I can do. Not a thing. If I could, I would have. You—well, the flames are real bad now. And there’s this gasoline smell.”
Beau held his peace and waited.
“I don’t know. Like airplane glue. Solvent. Something like that. So I give it up, and I’m starting to close the doors, see if that’ll slow it down, and wham! The thing just blows up in my face. Knocks me on my ass. I get up, race back to the phone, and call the fire department. Then I go back, and you can see the first truck’s a goner, nothing I can do for anybody. So I get in to the one beside it, it has the keys in, and I’m backing it out when—this gets a little fuzzy here—there’s smoke all over the place now, and I’m thinking hell, if the tank goes and I’m too close … anyway, I stall the fucker.”
“I wouldn’t even have tried.”
“Maybe not. You—you ever seen anything like that?”
“Once. Before I was on the force.”
“Well, it’s a … and anyway, these trucks are mine. I take care of ’em. Know all about ’em. It’s my job. It’s gonna be on me, this whole fuckup. Been with Mountain Bell since my discharge. Anyway, I get it going again, get it out of the way. Smoke’s real bad now. I’m going back for the next one, I get to it, get my hand on it, open the door, and next thing I know I’m lying on my back halfway across the lane and I can hear the sirens coming and the smoke is … black. You know. Covering me. Like water coming up. I try to crawl, and the next thing I’m really sure of is I’m in a bed and there’s this cowboy standing by the bed looking down at me and saying no, he ain’t dead, or something. And there’s voices in the room, and I have this thing in my throat and I pass out again.”
Lizardskin Page 17
