Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Oh, yes.” She raised her right arm and pointed her finger at the sky. “I want to say goodbye. In case he dies.”

  We stopped to inform Jack that we were heading back in to bid farewell to Snapper.

  “That’s good,” he said, sucking on his second beer.

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Not unless you really want me to.”

  “That’s okay.” I glanced over at Joy. She caught my gaze for a moment, then looked away, her expression a harbinger of things I didn’t want to think about just then.

  Jack held the door open for us and I wheeled my mother inside. The receptionist wore a somber look of concern, waved Hi, but didn’t vocalize her sympathy. We pushed on down the corridor into surgery. Snapper was lying on his side, the oxygen mask affixed to his snout, the IV drip needled into his foreleg. He seemed to be resting.

  “Oh, Snapper,” my mother cried. “Why are you so naughty, huh?”

  Dr. Ariel entered, looking at a fresh X-ray. She stopped when she saw my mother.

  “This is my mother, Phyllis,” I said.

  She squatted down so as to be at eye-level with my mother. “Hi, Phyllis.”

  “How’s my Snapper?” she inquired through tears.

  Dr. Ariel set the X-ray aside and grabbed my mother’s paralyzed hand with both of hers. “Your dog has had a bad accident.”

  “I know.”

  The vet looked up at me as if saying, Should I continue?

  “My mother was an R.N.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother chimed in.

  Dr. Ariel cleared her throat. “Snapper’s right hind leg has sustained serious soft tissue injuries. The good news is there are no broken bones. The hip was dislocated, but we got that back in place. But I’m concerned about permanent nerve injury and the potential of severe tissue death from compromised circulation. Crush injuries can be bad. They don’t declare themselves immediately. So we won’t know how bad for a few days.”

  My mother’s gaze was fixed on the conked-out Snapper. She just nodded through the doctor’s explanation and didn’t interrupt.

  “I think your son told you there’s no evidence of head trauma. And although there might be mild pulmonary contusions, I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s no serious bleeding there. Except for that leg, there’s no indication of nerve injury.”

  “That’s good,” my mother said.

  Dr. Ariel let go my mother’s hand. “If the leg doesn’t improve… we would have to amputate.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “But I’m not ready to make that call yet.”

  My mother reached her hand across her chest and patted Snapper on the head. “Oh, Snapper.” At the sound of her familiar voice, his eyes fluttered open, but they had no focus. He looked halfway to the grave to me.

  Dr. Ariel rose. “I’ll leave you with Snapper.”

  I drifted off to let my mother have as long as she wanted with Snapper. In an adjoining surgery area, a large dog was lying on its side. I watched a male vet in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair performing oral surgery on the anesthetized animal. In another room I saw stacked cages with convalescing dogs and cats, the source of the animal cacophony that had greeted me on my entrance.

  After a few long minutes, I returned to the treatment room. Dr. Ariel was comforting my mother, who was inconsolable. I saw her glance at her watch. I shot a look at mine. It was a little after five o’clock and I had noticed coming in that the vet clinic’s hours had said 8:00-5:00. And though I’m sure they felt empathy with my mother, Snapper was probably only one of a half a dozen animals that had come in on the verge of death that shift.

  I went back to my mother. “Mom, we have to go. They need to close.”

  Through squinted eyes still brimming with tears, she implored Dr. Ariel, “Is he going to die?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Raymond. We’ll know a lot more in a few days. But for now, he’s stabilized.” She motioned the technician over. “Let’s get him in the oxygen cage, Amy.”

  The technician wordlessly removed the IV tubing, but left the catheter in his leg. I sensed the presence of someone else in the surgery room, turned and found Joy standing at the entryway, duty no doubt overcoming rancor. “Hi, Joy.” She came forward. “Could you take my mother back to the van?”

  She nodded, got behind my mother, turned her slowly and wheeled her away.

  “Goodbye, Snapper,” my mother said plaintively. Then, as if he were already doomed in her mind, “I’m going to miss you.”

  As I held back in the treatment area, I worried about what kind of effect Snapper’s dire condition would have on my mother. There were other worries as well: the imbroglio over the money; the infected tooth, which had started to distend, alarmingly, the right side of my mother’s jaw. The Vicodins were ameliorating the pain and the warm saltwater rinses were keeping the infection at bay, but it was going to blow up, and if I had to hospitalize her and wait five days we’d be fucked. And she would never forgive me.

  Dr. Ariel returned to the treatment area in her street clothes. She held out her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I shrugged. “What can you do? These things happen.”

  I could see it was depressing her, too. “So, you’re traveling?” she asked.

  “Yeah. We’re taking my mother back to Wisconsin.” I told her why and where I was taking her, about the International Pinot Noir Celebration, who Joy and Jack were and what their roles were and… okay, who I was.

  “You wrote Shameless?” she said, barely able to conceal her excitement. “I loved that movie. It’s everyone’s favorite movie here. Are you joking?”

  “No,” I said. “Would you like a couple autographed copies of the book?”

  “Yeah!” she said, “I’d love one.”

  Amy reappeared after taking Snapper away. “He’s in the oxygen cage. His heart rate’s still a little up, but it’s normalizing. Do you want me to continue the morphine drip?”

  “I think so,” she replied.

  “Okay.”

  Dr. Ariel’s face brightened into a smile. “Guess what, Amy? This guy wrote Shameless. The wine movie? Remember, we saw it together?”

  Amy’s mouth opened agape. “No way.”

  I raised both arms, hands splayed open. “I confess. I’m the culprit.”

  “That’s like one of my favorite movies of all time,” Amy added. “I bought it on DVD and I don’t even ever buy DVDs.”

  “Thank you,” I muttered humbly. “I just wrote the novel. There were a lot of talented people involved.”

  “Yeah, but it all started with the book,” Dr. Ariel said charitably.

  “Speaking of which.” I raised my index finger and said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

  I strode briskly out of the clinic. Joy had parked my mother on the sidewalk, where she stared down the street, lost in grief. Jack was sitting up front in the Rampvan, listening to his music, sipping another ale–and needing one! Joy had coasted off in the direction away from my mother and was half concealed behind the clinic’s facade, puffing on a joint–and needing one. I went around to the back of the Rampvan and grabbed five copies of Shameless from the case I had brought on the trip for seduction and goodwill promotional purposes.

  Back inside the hospital, Dr. Ariel and Amy–now also in street clothes–were waiting for me in the reception area. Alerted to my minor celebrity presence, the male vet who had been performing the oral surgery on the brindled monster of a dog also materialized, wearing an ear-to-ear grin. I autographed and personally inscribed books for all of them, including the pierced-nose receptionist. They peppered me with some of the usual questions and I dispensed my usual funny, by now rote, answers that had them all in stitches. In short order, the funereal mood had been supplanted by one of congenial hilarity. I’m sure if vets took tragedy home with them after each day’s work they’d all commit suicide in the first year of practice.

  The male vet thanked me profusely and disap
peared back into the bowels of the clinic, no doubt to wrap up the oral surgery on the mongrel. The technician and the receptionist also thanked me, then departed. That left me alone with Dr. Ariel. She was looking at me with the widest smile. For a moment I thought she was flirting with me. Which, if true, played right into my hand.

  I shuffled in place, and spoke haltingly. “Um, Dr. Ariel…”

  “You can call me Shahar.”

  “Shahar. That’s such a pretty, lyrical-sounding name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Being a writer, I’m always on the lookout for unusual names. If I ever have a character who’s a veterinarian, I’m going to use it,” I flirted back.

  She smiled demurely and angled her gaze to the floor.

  “Shahar.” She looked up at me. “I’ve got a completely off-the-wall question for you…”

  “Okay,” she said, waiting, accustomed to strangers soliciting free medical advice.

  “My mother has an abscessed lower molar.”

  “Yeah, I noticed her cheek puffed out a little and I was wondering about it.”

  “Well, anyway, since she’s on a blood-thinning medication, this dentist in Fresno wouldn’t pull it because he said she could bleed to death. He said it had to be done in a hospital.”

  She blinked at me, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “I’m just curious, is that really true? I mean, do you know…?”

  “Well, the medication she’s on, which I’m assuming is Coumadin, only reduces the clotting. They probably want to wean her down a little bit. But hospitalization for a tooth extraction seems a little extreme.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I mean it’s possible,” she warmed to the subject, “that in weaning her off she develops clots and has another stroke… or heart attack, or pulmonary embolism, and they would want her in a hospital in the event of an emergency. They’re probably just erring on the side of caution.” Her look confirmed that “caution” should be interpreted as “lawsuit aversion.”

  I nodded, coughed, clearing my throat. “Shahar, we’re on our way out to the middle of America and I’m just worried about that tooth. We don’t have time for a five-day hospital stay or whatever for an abscessed molar.”

  She gave me an intent, but not prohibitive, look.

  “I’m just curious.” I held up my hands in mini-surrender. “For the sake of argument. Could a vet do a procedure like that? Say you were out camping with your boyfriend and he woke up with a baseball mouth and you were his only hope between excruciating pain and relief,” I rambled nervously. “I mean, I saw the guy in back doing dental work on a… um…” I stopped myself, fearing I had crossed the line into the ludicrous.

  “Yeah. Probably.” She chuckled. “But we wouldn’t. We’d lose our license.”

  “But you could do it? Hypothetically, of course.”

  “If it’s just a tooth extraction, yeah. I do it all the time. Can’t be much different on a human.”

  “You do dental surgery yourself?” I asked, feigning surprise.

  “Yeah. Most vets are trained to.”

  I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, sighing an emanation of seeming hopelessness. What did I have to lose? “If I offered you a thousand dollars–cash–to pull my mother’s tooth, would you?”

  A laugh shot out of her pretty face.

  “I’m dead serious,” I said. “With this Pinot festival, I’m looking at another week before we get her to Wisconsin. If that thing blows up on her, I’m royally screwed. I can’t afford to hang around for God knows how long while she goes into the hospital.” I paused. In desperation, I upped my offer: “I’ll give you two thousand. Cash.”

  “Yeah, you kinda said that already.” Dr. Ariel grabbed my sleeve and pulled me aside so our voices wouldn’t carry down the corridor. “I wouldn’t take your money,” she said. “That would make it only more unethical.”

  “I mean if you were me and it was your mother and you were in this situation, with your training, would you pull it?”

  She wouldn’t admit it, so she said, “that’s hyper-hypothetical, Mr. Raymond.”

  “Miles. If something went wrong, I wouldn’t sue you in a million years, you know that. Can you imagine? Author of book becomes hit movie takes addled mother to vet clinic…”

  She laughed, clearly in spite of herself.

  “I mean, Radar Online, TMZ, Smoking Gun, hell, The New York Post, I’d be right up there with Lindsay Lohan!”

  “I’m not worried you’d sue me,” she chuckled, “but, um…” She looked off. I could all but see how she was wrestling with her conscience.

  “I mean, what are the chances she’s going to bleed to death because of a routine tooth extraction? Come on?”

  She shrugged. “Minimal. I don’t know. I’m trained in oral surgery, but there aren’t a lot of canine patients on Coumadin.”

  I continued to plead my seemingly ridiculous, but strangely rationalized, case. “But you, yourself, just insinuated that weaning her off the Coumadin might be just as dangerous. She’s in a lot of pain. Won’t even go into the hospital–for anything!–unless I force her. And that’s if we had the five days to spare, which we do not. I mean, how long does it take to pull an abscessed tooth? Ten minutes?”

  “It depends,” Dr. Ariel noted, “on how loose it is.”

  I clasped my hands prayerfully together and pressed them histrionically to my heart. “Her dog’s just been in a horrible accident. And now this damn tooth business. I don’t know how much more her heart can take, Doctor. If I can just get her to her sister’s relatively in one piece, I’ll be a happy man.” I let my hands unclasp and dropped them from my chest. “Not that my happiness is any of your concern.”

  Dr. Ariel rolled her tongue across her upper teeth and continued to wrestle with her conscience. I waited, never once taking my eyes from hers. She gave a quick backward glance, then said in a lowered tone, “Why don’t you come back in an hour when the clinic’s closed. I’ll take a look at it, see how bad it is… But I’m not going to promise anything.”

  Still a little high on all the wine I had consumed at Gary Farrell, I stepped forward and embraced her. She allowed her arms to find my back and hugged me in return. We disengaged ourselves. It had been a long day for both of us.

  “Okay, Doctor. I’ll see you in an hour or so. Thank you so much.”

  I walked out of the clinic before she changed her mind. When Joy saw me, she went to my mother, unlocked the brakes on the wheelchair and pushed her back up into the Rampvan. Jack, seeing them approach, climbed out of the cab and pulled the ramp out. When they were in, he pushed the ramp back into its undercarriage sleeve, slid the side door shut and turned to me. “What’s the plan, Stan?”

  “Well…” I started, staring off. I clenched my teeth and made a strange face. “This has been a pretty wacky trip, wouldn’t you concur?”

  “Pretty wacky. A lot of drama.” He polished off his ale and set the empty on a brick retaining wall. “So, what’s happening?”

  “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “Miles,” he cut me off. “That went out the window years ago. Think? You are, dude. We both are. Welcome to the club.”

  “Yeah, well, it only gets better.”

  Jack waited.

  With an expressionless face, I said, “I asked the vet if she’d pull my mom’s tooth.”

  Jack’s mouth opened but he was rendered nonplused. A moment passed and he disintegrated into laughter, the kind of laughter that had him jackknifed over and turning in corkscrews. He laughed so hard it actually caused him to sit down on the concrete in an effort to regain some semblance of sanity. When he looked up at me, his eyes were red with tears and his face florid with disbelief.

  “We’re supposed to come back in an hour,” I added, poker-faced.

  “A vet’s going to pull your mom’s molar?” He tumbled into laughter again.

  “No,” I corrected him, “she’s going
to take a look at it, see how bad it is.”

  Through irrepressible laughter he managed, “You’re going to take your stroke victim mother, your own flesh and blood, the woman who gave birth to you, into a vet clinic for a dental procedure?” He laughed so hard he fell backward from his lotus position and lay on the sidewalk like an upended tick, arms and legs flailing as he laughed straight up at the limitless sky.

  “Jack,” I reasoned, “if she has to be hospitalized we’re going to be stuck in the middle of Bumblefuck, California, for a minimum of three days. Maybe longer. We’ve got to get that fucker out.”

  Jack just couldn’t stop laughing. I rooted my iPhone out of my front pocket and tapped the maps app. Using Lakeview Veterinary Hospital’s address, I located our position. With another tap, I enabled businesses and services to be displayed by those tiny, red pushpin icons. The restaurants near the vet clinic weren’t particularly appetizing as I cursor-ed over them. Mostly franchise fast food. But I did find one place that was only two miles away, right on the lake, and I desperately wanted to get a couple glasses of wine in my mother before the hoped-for oral surgery.

  The Main Street Bar & Grill is really a misnomer, as the establishment sits on the banks of Clear Lake, the largest natural lake in California, rather than on a street. The décor was nothing to write home about, the menu your basic California beach fare, but at least they had a wine list, and, amazingly, featured a Steele Chardonnay (Dupratt Vineyard, located in the nearby emerging viticultural region of Mendocino).

  “We’ve only got an hour, so figure out what you want,” I said to everybody.

  My mother’s chin hung on her chest. She was still palpably distraught. “I don’t want anything to eat,” she said, shutting her menu.

  “I’m sure you’d like a glass of wine.”

  She started to decline that too, but her brain chemistry changed magically and she said unenthusiastically, “Yes, I could use one.”

  When the teenaged waiter returned, we ordered up. I told him we were in a hurry and didn’t want the pampered treatment, not that we were going to get it in this backwater simulacrum of The Chart House.