Blackburn

by Bradley Denton

  “If you’ve been in there, you know about it,” she said. Her voice had a rich timbre but was hoarse. “They do abortions.”

  “They didn’t do one to me,” Blackburn said. “Now, please, let me pass. My car is across the street.”

  “So why are you here?” the woman demanded. “Did you drop off your girlfriend so she could let them kill your baby? Or—” The flames in her eyes brightened. “Or have you killed babies yourself? Are you going to a home paid for with the flesh of infants?”

  Blackburn had heard enough. These people were lucky that after his close call with Ms. Duncan, he didn’t feel much like killing anyone tonight. He strode forward.

  The man who had confronted him jumped aside, and the cluster of six did likewise. The woman in gray stayed where she was.

  Blackburn stopped again to decide whether to shoulder his way past her or to try to go around.

  The woman dropped her candle and reached into a pocket, bringing out a vial filled with dark liquid. She pulled out the stopper with her teeth (perfect teeth, Blackburn saw; white, smooth), then spat it out and screamed “Murderer!” She snapped the vial toward Blackburn as if it were the handle of a whip.

  The liquid hit him in the face and got into his left eye and his mouth. He took his hands from his jacket pockets, and as he rubbed his eye, he tasted what was on his tongue: blood. Cow’s blood, pig’s blood, maybe even blood that the woman had drawn from her own veins.

  She remained before him, holding the vial like a weapon. It was not empty.

  Blackburn took a step. The woman stood her ground. He reached out and plucked the vial from her glove, raised it to his lips, and drank. When the blood stopped flowing, he put his tongue inside and cleaned the glass.

  Then he dropped the vial to the sidewalk and crushed it under his foot. The edge of his shoe caught the discarded candle as well, flattening it.

  The woman gaped at him.

  Blackburn walked around her and crossed the street to his car. Once inside, he turned on the interior light and examined the smears on his fingers. He almost reached for his Colt Python, which was nestled under the seat, but did not. He was calling it even with the woman in gray.

  * * *

  When he returned the next evening, the protesters were pacing, their breath wafting in faint clouds. He parked the Dart where he had the day before and walked across, but they ignored him as he passed.

  Inside, Ms. Duncan gave him a personal information and medical history form to fill out, and when he had completed it (having lied where necessary), she led him to a cubicle where the staff counselor, a black man in his mid-thirties, was waiting. Ms. Duncan introduced the counselor as Lawrence Tatum.

  “Call me Larry,” Tatum said as Ms. Duncan left. He was sitting at a desk covered with a jumble of books, pamphlets, and folders. “I’ll take that data sheet off your hands.”

  Blackburn handed him the form and sat down. The desk was against the wall, so the two men faced each other with nothing between them.

  Tatum examined the form, then looked up and asked, “What happens if you decide to get married, your wife-to-be wants kids, and you’ve had your balls disconnected?”

  Blackburn tried to imagine the situation, but the only wife-to-be he could picture was Dolores, she of the perpetual white bikini patches. “I won’t be a father,” he said, remembering how his own father had shot his dog and then pushed his face into the gravel for crying. “Any woman who knew me and still wanted to have children by me would make a poor wife.”

  “A vasectomy is permanent, Arthur. What if you turn thirty and all of a sudden, blam, you want to be a daddy?”

  Blackburn doubted that he would live to be thirty, but he considered the question anyway. “That’ll be tough shit for me, I guess,” he said.

  Tatum wrote on the form. “Okay. Let’s talk about what’ll happen during the operation, and then Duncan can schedule you for surgery.”

  Blackburn was surprised. “That’s it?”

  “For you it is. Couples take longer.” Tatum began to rummage through the mess on his desk. “Besides, I figure that any guy who would be sterilized without understanding the consequences is a guy who shouldn’t be spreading his dumbass genes around anyway.”

  It was the most honest statement Blackburn had ever heard. He liked Tatum.

  Tatum found a card with a diagram of male genitalia and held it up. “You’ll be given two shots of local anesthetic in the scrotum, one on either side of the base of the penis.” He pointed with his pen. “After they take effect, the doctor will make a vertical incision midway between the vas deferens tubes. He’ll pull one vas over to the incision, put a permanent clamp on it, and cut away a section. Then he’ll repeat the procedure for the other side and close the incision with a few self-dissolving stitches. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. Any questions?”

  Blackburn stood. “How much will it cost?”

  Tatum glanced at the form. “You’ll need to bring a money order or cashier’s check for ninety bucks.” He picked up a telephone receiver and punched a button. “Ellen? When Mr. Cameron comes out, could you arrange the pre-vasectomy sample and schedule him for surgery? Thanks.”

  “What’s a pre-vasectomy sample?” Blackburn asked.

  “Semen specimen,” Tatum said, hanging up the phone. “You’ll need to take it to a medical lab within a half hour of ejaculation. We do the post-op sperm counts here, because then it doesn’t matter whether we find the sperm alive or dead, only that we don’t find any. For this one, though, we need a live count. You never know—maybe you won’t have any.”

  “What are the odds of that?”

  Tatum chuckled. “About the same as the odds of the Royals winning the Series next year. If you don’t hear from us before your surgery date, assume that your count’s in the normal range.”

  Blackburn thanked him and went out to Ms. Duncan, who gave him the address of the lab and told him to deliver his sample on Thursday morning. She also told him that his surgery would take place in one week, at 5:20 P.M.

  “Soon,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “Every Tuesday,” Ms. Duncan said. “There are two underway upstairs right now.”

  “Could I observe?”

  Ms. Duncan said that she didn’t think so. Then she gave him two instruction sheets and a baggie containing a single-bladed, blue plastic safety razor. The first instruction sheet told him what it was for.

  * * *

  Before going to the Dart, Blackburn stopped among the protesters and spoke to the woman in gray. “You have the wrong night. There’s no baby-butchering today.”

  “I suppose you call it ‘choice,’” she said.

  Blackburn smiled. “No. Tonight it’s ‘crotch-cutting.’ Or maybe ‘scrotum-slicing.’”

  “I can have you arrested for obscenity,” the woman said.

  Blackburn laughed and crossed the street. As he unlocked his car, he heard footsteps on the asphalt. Turning, he saw that the woman in gray had followed him. She had left her sign and candle on the sidewalk.

  “Are you going to throw more blood?” Blackburn asked as she drew close.

  The planes of her face seemed frozen. “You already have so much on you that it’ll never wash off.”

  “Yet blood washes away sin.”

  “What would you know about that?”

  He knew plenty, but instead of telling her so, he said, “I’m not an abortionist.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If you work there, if you’re in there, you’re one of them. Condoning it is the same as doing it. It’s evil.”

  “So why come over here? Shouldn’t you be afraid of evil?”

  She tilted her head. “I need to understand you if I’m going to fight you. How can you believe in what you do, and do what you do?”

  For a moment, the sureness of her tone made Blackburn fear that she knew who he was, and knew the things he really had done. Then he remembered that she didn’t even know him as Arthur Cameron, let
alone as James Blackburn.

  “You’re wrong about me,” he said. “In fact, I’m making sure that I’ll never be the cause of what you’re fighting.” He took the baggie containing the plastic razor from his jacket. “This is to shave the hair off my scrotum. I’m having a vasectomy next week.”

  The planes of the woman’s face crumpled, and she spun and stumbled into the street. A car was coming fast and would have hit her, but Blackburn pulled her back.

  He was startled at what he had done. He didn’t save people from themselves. He left people alone … unless they angered him, in which case he either punished them if the offense was slight, or killed them if it was great.

  In the past seven years, the only exception to this rule had been that he had not killed Dolores.

  The woman in gray clawed at his hands until he released her, and she rushed into the street again.

  “Could I have that back?” Blackburn called.

  She stopped. Her right hand was clutching the baggied razor. She dropped it and ran to her fellow protesters.

  Blackburn retrieved the razor, got into the Dart, and drove to his apartment. All that night, the woman in gray filled his thoughts. He was afraid that he might be in love with her.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, Blackburn worked twelve hours at Bucky’s. He needed the money.

  On Thursday morning, he ejaculated into an empty breath-mint box and took it to the medical lab. He was embarrassed, not because he was delivering his own fresh semen, but because he had conjured up the ghost of the woman in gray to produce it. She had thrown blood on him, and then they had rolled together, each staining the other.

  After a ten-hour shift behind the grill, he drove to Responsible Reproduction. The woman and her friends were there, but none of them seemed to recognize his car. He parked a short distance down the block, and for the next hour he watched them shout at everyone who went in and out of the building. The voice of the woman in gray rose above the rest.

  On Friday night, after cashing his paycheck, he approached the clinic from the opposite direction and parked across the street from where he had the night before. He watched longer this time. At nine-thirty the protesters blew out their candles and stacked their signs in a station wagon. Blackburn slouched low as they went to their cars.

  The woman in gray crossed the street alone to a maroon Nova. When it left the curb, Blackburn followed.

  He lost the Nova in traffic on the city’s east side, but spotted it as he drove past a side street. It was parked under a streetlight, and the woman was standing on the porch of a small house. Blackburn pulled over and adjusted his rearview mirror so that he could see her.

  A light came on in the house, glowing yellow through the shades, and the door opened. A thin, backlit figure handed the woman something, and the door closed.

  The woman returned to her car carrying bunches of red roses, their stems wrapped in green florist’s paper. She cradled them as if she were carrying a child, but when she reached the Nova, she put them into the trunk.

  Blackburn followed her again as she drove away. She went far west, into Kansas, but he didn’t lose her.

  The Nova stopped in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Mission, and Blackburn watched as the woman left her car and entered the complex through a security gate. A bank of mailboxes filled a wall beside the gate, so if he had known her name, he could have discovered her apartment number. But he didn’t know her name.

  He went to his own apartment and stayed up listening to the radio. The figure who had given the roses to the woman had looked male, but he was not her lover, Blackburn decided. She hadn’t gone into his house, and she had left the flowers in the trunk of her car. At most, he was a friend. A friend with roses.

  * * *

  Blackburn worked another ten-hour shift on Saturday, then drove past Responsible Reproduction. The lights were on, but there were only five protesters outside. The woman in gray was not among them. In bed that night, Blackburn lay awake wondering if she had abandoned her post because she had a date.

  The next evening there were no protesters at all. The street was empty, the clinic dark. Sunday in Kansas City.

  He went to the apartment complex in Mission, thinking of breaking into the woman’s car to find its registration slip and discover her name, but the Nova wasn’t in the lot. He wished that he’d had the idea two nights ago.

  Shivering and dozing, he waited for her to return. Once he dreamed of shooting a backlit figure and awoke at the Python’s report.

  The Nova didn’t appear, so Blackburn left at dawn and drove to the house of the roses. The woman’s car wasn’t there either, but he parked the Dart and watched the house until a skinny man who wore glasses came out and drove away in a Pinto.

  Blackburn walked up to the porch and saw that the name on the mailbox was “R. Petersen.” He pressed the button beside the door and heard the bell ring. Inside, a dog barked. Blackburn pressed the button again, and the dog kept barking. No one came to the door.

  Blackburn went to work. While on his midmorning break, he read in the Times that a pipe bomb had exploded at Responsible Reproduction during the night. It had been set off outside the front door.

  The police suspected that the bomber’s intent had been to cause minor building damage, but the explosion had done more than that. A counselor named Lawrence Tatum had been doing paperwork in an inner office, and the police speculated that he had heard a noise and investigated.

  They had found him in the waiting room with pieces of glass in his flesh. They thought that he had been starting to open the door when the bomb had gone off.

  At press time, Tatum was in critical condition at St. Luke’s. He had not regained consciousness. The police had no suspects. Ellen Duncan of Responsible Reproduction had announced that the clinic would continue its usual services.

  After work, Blackburn bought a six-pack and a Star, which said that Tatum was still alive. The police had questioned some people, but they still had no suspects.

  Blackburn went to his apartment. Five beers later, he was able to sleep.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, Blackburn left Bucky’s at midafternoon. He stopped at a branch post office and bought a ninety-dollar money order.

  At his apartment, he took off his work clothes and showered. Then he sat on the edge of the bathtub, soaped his scrotum, and shaved with the blue razor. It was a slow process because his testicles kept drawing up, but he persevered. His only alternative was to use his electric.

  By the time he had dressed, it was five o’clock. He took the money order and the razor and drove to Responsible Reproduction.

  More than thirty protesters were pacing the sidewalk when he arrived, and there were so many cars along the curbs that he had to park almost two blocks away. As he started to walk to the clinic, he saw the woman in gray emerge from a van with six others. He waved to her.

  He had almost reached the building when he realized that he had left his money order in the Dart. He ran back to get it, and the woman and some of her companions stepped off the sidewalk to avoid him.

  “Tonight I do it!” he shouted as he ran past. The woman averted her eyes.

  When he reached his car, he glimpsed a bit of color on the pavement and squatted to pick it up. It was a rose petal. The edges were black and curled, but the center was bright. He crushed and dropped it, then grabbed the money order and hurried back to Responsible Reproduction. Several protesters yelled at him, but the woman in gray was quiet.

  The glass-and-wire-mesh door was gone, and in its place was a slab of plywood with a handle. Blackburn opened it and went inside.

  * * *

  He lay on a padded table that was covered with blue paper. His naked buttocks rested on a pad of the stuff.

  His knees were supported by saddle-shaped pieces of plastic atop metal posts, and his feet hung in the air, chilling. He wished that he had left his socks on.

  The crewcut medical assistant took a spray bottl
e from a counter and bathed Blackburn’s crotch in a cold mist. Blackburn gasped.

  “Antiseptic,” the assistant said. He returned to the counter, opened a packet, and pulled out another pad of blue paper. When he unfolded it, a hole appeared in its center. He laid it over Blackburn’s crotch and pressed down so that the scrotum pushed up through the hole. The upper half of the paper became a curtain between Blackburn’s thighs.

  “Doctor’ll be in soon,” the assistant said, and left.

  Blackburn lowered his head and stared up. Above him, attached to the ceiling with thumbtacks, was a poster of a kitten clutching a knot in midair. Underneath the kitten were the words:

  When you’ve reached the end of your rope,

  HANG ON!

  Blackburn wanted to tear it down. He wasn’t in the mood for cute bullshit.

  Then, as the antiseptic evaporated and made his testicles feel as if they were packed in ice, it occurred to him that this room was used for vasectomies only on Tuesday evenings. On other evenings, it was used for other things.

  He was lying on a table where women had lain for abortions.

  He thought of the girl named Melissa. Would the kitten have meant something to her, or would she have thought it as stupid as he did?

  The assistant returned with the doctor, who was wearing a green smock over chinos. The doctor had thinning hair and looked about forty. “Let’s get to it,” he said.

  Blackburn raised his head and watched as the assistant brought a cart and a stool to the foot of the table. When the cloth over the cart was removed, he saw a syringe and an array of stainless-steel instruments.

  “You’ll be more comfortable if you keep your head relaxed,” the doctor said.

  Blackburn lowered his head again, but he was no more comfortable. With peripheral vision, he saw the assistant pick up the spray bottle again. A second cold mist hit his scrotum and hissed against the blue paper. The assistant placed the bottle on the cart, then opened a package of latex gloves and helped the doctor put them on.

  The doctor nudged the stool with his foot and sat down between Blackburn’s legs. Blackburn could see his face, but his hands were hidden behind the blue paper.