Blackburn

by Bradley Denton

  “I’ll check on the other guy,” the assistant said. “The jerk showed up half shaved.” He left the room.

  The doctor grasped Blackburn’s testicles, pulled them away from the body, and began rolling the skin above the right testicle between his thumb and forefinger. Blackburn’s calf muscles contracted, and his feet cramped. He had to grab the edges of the table to hold himself down.

  “I have to find the vas,” the doctor said.

  Blackburn clenched his teeth and glared at the kitten.

  “Got it,” the doctor said. “Now I’ll give you the first shot of anesthetic. It’s procaine hydrochloride, like the Novocain you get at the dentist’s.”

  Blackburn had been to a dentist twice, and both times he had suffered. Novocain did not work well on him.

  “Here it comes, in the top right side,” the doctor said. “It’ll feel like a bee sting.”

  It was worse than that. Blackburn’s back arched, and his thumbs tore through the paper covering the table. He strained to keep from pulling his legs off the posts and kicking the doctor in the face.

  The needle withdrew, and the doctor began manipulating the left side as he had the right. “One more,” he said, and the needle went in. Sweat trickled into Blackburn’s ears.

  “Try to hold still,” the doctor said.

  The needle withdrew again. Blackburn lay still for a moment, then raised his head to see what was happening.

  The doctor was looking up at his face. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Ah. How many children do you have?”

  Blackburn wanted to hurt him. “None. So what?”

  “Ah,” the doctor said again. He shifted on the stool, and his right hand appeared above the blue curtain. It held a blood-smeared scalpel.

  “What does ‘ah’ mean?” Blackburn asked.

  The doctor laid the scalpel on the cart and picked up another instrument, moving it behind the paper before Blackburn could see what it looked like.

  “Never mind,” the doctor said, looking down at his work again. “I’m going to pull the right vas over to the incision now. You might feel a slight tug.”

  It was as if a vein in Blackburn’s abdomen were being yanked out through the scrotum. Blackburn rose on his elbows.

  “Please hold still,” the doctor said.

  Blackburn wished that he could feel justified in killing the doctor, but he knew that he couldn’t. He had asked for this.

  Much later, the doctor said, “You seemed to experience some discomfort, so I’ll give you another shot before I do the left vas. It won’t be as bad this time, because you’re already somewhat deadened.”

  The kitten was a yellow blur. Blackburn tried to brace himself, but it didn’t help. The woman in gray, he thought, had better appreciate this.

  * * *

  When the stitched wound was covered with gauze, Blackburn got down from the table and put on his clothes and jacket. He couldn’t feel the pressure of the athletic supporter, or of his jeans. It was as if he had no genitals.

  The doctor gave him a prescription for tetracycline and left the room. Blackburn started to leave as well, but paused at the foot of the table. He was surprised at how much the blue paper on which he had lain was blackened.

  The assistant came in with a trash bag and began taking up the paper. He glanced at Blackburn and said, “You’re finished, aren’t you?”

  Blackburn went out. Downstairs, Ms. Duncan smiled at him. “We’ll see you in a few weeks for your first sperm check, Mr. Cameron.”

  “Right.” He moved toward the plywood door.

  “Oh, you might like to know that I just called the hospital about Larry Tatum,” Ms. Duncan said. “He’ll lose two fingers and maybe his right eye, but he’s out of danger and joking about the whole thing.”

  “That’s good,” Blackburn said, and left.

  Outside, among the protesters, he stopped before the woman in gray. “I’m sterile,” he said.

  “Get away from me.” She was surrounded by candles, and her face wavered between dark and light.

  Blackburn looked back at the clinic. “A bomb went off here two nights ago. A person was hurt.”

  “That’s what they’d like us to think,” the woman said, “but it’s a lie to make it look as if we’re in the wrong. If we stopped marching, we’d be giving in to that lie.”

  Blackburn’s wound began to throb. “I admire your strength,” he said, and walked on to the Dart. Each step hurt more.

  * * *

  The van wouldn’t bring the woman home for at least two more hours, and no one approached Blackburn as he opened the trunk of the maroon Nova. When he was finished, there would be no evidence that he had done it. Trunks were easy.

  A bulb came on as the lid lifted, and a heavy scent reminded Blackburn of compost and funerals. In addition to a tire and a jack, the trunk contained three bunches of wilted roses.

  The paper around one bunch was loose, and a few flowers had fallen free. Blackburn picked up this bunch and pressed his face into the dead petals, then put it down and reached for another. This one was heavier, so he left it on the floor of the trunk and unwrapped it.

  Among the rose stems was a twelve-by-two-inch iron pipe that was capped at both ends. A cord almost as long as the pipe hung from a hole in the center of one of the caps.

  Blackburn picked up the pipe and shook it, listening to the rattle. He had used something similar once, so he knew that the pipe contained a stick of dynamite and a blasting cap. This was the simplest sort of pipe bomb, a bangalore torpedo. When he opened the third bunch of flowers, he found another.

  His pulse was trying to break through his stitches, so he began to hurry. He unbuttoned a jacket pocket and took out the razor, dropped it, and stamped on it. He used the freed blade to slice off half of each fuse.

  After rewrapping the pipes into their flower bundles, he closed the trunk and gathered up the razor’s plastic shards. On the way to the Dart, he dropped them into the gutter.

  He had his prescription filled at an all-night pharmacy. Then he went to his apartment, took four aspirin, and lay in bed with an ice pack on his crotch. He couldn’t sleep, so he read the “Instructions to Follow After a Vasectomy” sheet over and over.

  Instruction #8 said that it would take from fifteen to thirty-five ejaculations to clear the sperm from his tubes. After fifteen ejaculations, he was to bring a specimen to Responsible Reproduction for examination.

  Blackburn doubted that he would remain in Kansas City long enough to do that.

  * * *

  The name of the woman in gray, the next Monday’s Times said, had been Leslie Bonner. She had shared her apartment with her mother.

  She had placed her second bomb outside the door of an obstetrician/gynecologist’s office in Overland Park. It had gone off when she was twelve feet away, and her head had hit the sidewalk when she fell.

  Her car had been found nearby, with another bomb in the trunk. The police were investigating to discover the source of the dynamite.

  Blackburn looked at the picture of Leslie Bonner for his entire morning break.

  Either she hadn’t noticed that the fuse on her second bomb was shorter than the one on her first, or she had thought that it didn’t matter. She had trusted the maker. She had failed to understand the consequences.

  No one had saved her from herself.

  Blackburn dropped the newspaper into the garbage. He worked until the end of his usual shift and left Bucky’s without cleaning the grill.

  At his apartment, he gathered his possessions and put them into his duffel bag. Then he lay on the bed and waited for night.

  She hadn’t looked like a Leslie. If anything, Blackburn would have guessed her to be a Lisa, or a Lydia. Thinking about her, he started to have an erection, but the stitches pulled at his skin and stopped it.

  At eleven o’clock, he went into the bathroom and examined his incision. The swelling was gone and the stitches we
re dissolving, but his scrotum was still bruised. He put a new gauze pad over the wound, pulled up his jeans, and took his duffel bag out to the Dart. The weight made him ache. He wasn’t supposed to carry anything heavy yet.

  He drove to the east side of the city and parked a few blocks from the house of the roses. He tucked the Python into the back waistband of his jeans so that it was hidden by his jacket, then walked the rest of the way. The street was quiet, the homes dark.

  The house’s shades were drawn, but there was a light on inside. As Blackburn stepped onto the porch, he heard the sound of televised laughter. R. Petersen was watching David Letterman.

  Blackburn took the pieces of fuse from his pocket and tied them together. He lit one end with a match, then held the knot in his left hand while he took the Python into his right. He pressed the revolver’s muzzle against the doorbell button.

  When the door opened, he tossed the fuse inside. R. Petersen turned toward it, and Blackburn hit him behind the ear with the Python. Petersen fell.

  Blackburn went inside and closed the door as Petersen crawled across the hardwood floor toward the fuse. Blackburn stepped around him and turned up the volume on the television set.

  Petersen reached the fuse and slapped at it.

  Blackburn took a pillow from a chair, pressed it over Petersen’s head, and fired one round through it. The fuse sputtered out by itself.

  He found a roll of tens and twenties in a dresser drawer in the bedroom, and a half-grown, black-and-white mongrel pup in the kitchen. He found a box containing dynamite, blasting caps, crimpers, and fuse hidden among junk in the basement.

  When he was ready to go, he carried the box outside and dumped it on the street. Then he returned to the house and lit the fuse he had looped around the living room. That done, he took the pup and left. The pup was heavier than she looked, and she squirmed. By the time Blackburn reached the Dart, he was sore and had to take aspirin.

  He didn’t think that the single stick of dynamite in Number Twelve’s mouth would endanger the neighboring homes, but he stopped at a pay phone and called 911 anyway. He didn’t know the house’s exact address, but he told the dispatcher which street and block.

  Then he drove north on I-35. He would dump the Dart in Des Moines, acquire another car, and go on to Chicago. He had never been there.

  “Chicago sound good?” he asked the pup.

  The pup gnawed on the butt of the Python and growled.

  Blackburn was having trouble thinking of a good name for her. Maybe he wouldn’t give her one.

  VICTIMS NUMBER FOURTEEN AND FIFTEEN

  The ’68 Fury that Blackburn had bought in Joliet was running rough, and the dipstick was the color of road tar. What was needed, he decided, was a tune-up and an oil change. He would have to pay someone else to do it, though. He had no tools. Tools were too heavy to take along on sudden departures.

  So he looked in the Greater Chicago Yellow Pages and called garages. When he had called a dozen, he picked the cheapest one and drove the Fury there on a Monday morning. He had three hundred and ten dollars in his jacket pocket. Monday was his day off from the Chi-Town Chicken Hut, so he planned to do his laundry when the car was done. With luck, he would be home before Dog peed on the carpet.

  He enjoyed the drive to the garage. Chicago was cold, and the gray sky hung low. Blackburn liked it. Blue skies and sunshine made him feel as if there were no place to hide. But when everything was the color of cold flesh, he could dissolve into a wall if he had to.

  Ed & Earl’s Auto Service was a concrete-block building with two garage-bay doors. Blackburn parked the Fury in the lot out front at 8:30 A.M. and went inside through a glass door marked CUSTOMER ENTRANCE. This brought him into a waiting room that smelled of the new tires stacked along its walls. The only sound was the hum of the pop machine. No one was behind the service counter. Blackburn waited a few minutes and then went to a second glass door that led to the garage itself. Through this door he could see a car on a hydraulic lift and another car on the floor beyond it. But no people were in sight.

  Blackburn pushed open the door and stepped into the garage. It stank of grease and cigarette smoke, and was warmer than the waiting room.

  “Hey!” a voice called. “No customers in here!”

  Blackburn looked to his left. Four men in green coveralls sat on folding chairs in the back corner. They were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Two of them looked like teenagers, with long hair and sparse mustaches. The other two were older. One was a big man with dark hair and dense beard stubble. An oval patch on his chest spelled “Ed” in red thread. The other man was shorter but heavier, with a crewcut, thick forearms, and an enormous gut. His patch said “Earl.”

  “I’ve brought my car in,” Blackburn said. “I spoke to someone here on Saturday. On the phone.”

  Ed stood, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out on the cement floor. He was about six foot four, and solid except for a beer belly. He looked angry, but Blackburn thought that might be because of his black eyebrows.

  “No customers allowed in the work area,” Ed said. His voice was like gravel.

  “Sorry,” Blackburn said. “But no one’s in the other room.”

  “Be there in a minute.” Ed turned away and flipped a switch on an air compressor. The compressor rattled to life, filling the garage with its racket.

  Blackburn returned to the waiting room and watched the Dr. Pepper clock over the pop machine. The sweep hand went around eight times before Ed came in and stepped behind the counter. Ed took a clipboard from a nail on the wall, inserted a printed yellow form under the clip, and spoke to Blackburn without looking at him.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “I need a tune-up and an oil change,” Blackburn said. “It’s the Fury out front.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It just needs a tune-up and an oil change.”

  Ed looked up from the clipboard, scowling. “What’s it doing?” he asked.

  Blackburn guessed that he had committed an error similar to a patient’s telling his physician what treatment he wanted, rather than what his symptoms were. “It’s running rough,” he said. “And the oil’s dirty.”

  Ed wrote on the yellow form. “What’s the model year?”

  “’68.”

  “How long since the belts and hoses were changed?”

  “I don’t know. I just bought it last month. They seem fine, though.”

  Ed looked up scowling again. “We’ll take a look,” he said. “If you’ll fill out your name and phone number—” He turned the clipboard around and dropped his pen on the counter. “—we’ll get to it in an hour or two and give you a call.”

  Blackburn wrote down the information, using his current alias, Donald Wayne. “You still running the twenty-nine ninety-five tune-up special?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I want, then. And an oil change.”

  Ed tapped the bottom of the yellow form. “Need a signature. And your car key.”

  Blackburn signed the form, then put his key on the counter. “See you in a while,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Ed replaced the clipboard on its nail, put the key in his pocket, and returned to the garage.

  Blackburn went outside. He had a few hours to kill, and his apartment was too far away for him to walk there and back. But he had passed a multiplex cinema ten blocks away. He patted the Fury’s fender and headed down the street.

  He saw an early show, ate lunch, and was back at Ed & Earl’s at one o’clock. The Fury was sitting where he’d left it. He went into the waiting room and found Earl drinking coffee in a swivel chair behind the counter.

  “Excuse me,” Blackburn said. “Have you had a chance to work on my Fury yet?”

  Earl grimaced and stood. “What’s the name?”

  “Donald Wayne.”

  Earl took the clipboard from the wall, put it on the counter, and clicked his tongue. “You got problems,
Mr. Wayne,” he said. “Your radiator cap’s not sealing, your belts and hoses are worn, your distributor cap’s cracked, your air cleaner’s dirty, your shock absorbers are weak, your fuel pump’s shot, and you need a new ignition rotor, spark plugs, and points. New plug cables would be a good idea too, because your insulation’s brittle. And you need an oil change and filter, a cooling system drain and flush, and fresh transmission fluid and seals. We also recommend a brake job and new tires. When Ed drove it, he said the brakes felt mushy, and your tires are just about running on cord due to underinflation. If you want to put off fixing the brakes, they might last another thousand miles. But it’s best not to gamble when it comes to brakes.” Earl looked at Blackburn.

  Blackburn was confused. The Fury was parked where he had left it. But he supposed that Ed could have reparked it there. “Did you do the tune-up and oil change?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Earl said. “We don’t do anything until we get your say-so. We tried to call you, but you weren’t home.”

  “I already authorized the tune-up and oil change,” Blackburn said. “They were supposed to be done by now.”

  Earl shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. Ed said you wanted the car checked over, and then we were supposed to call you. See, we never do work without the customer’s approval.”

  “No, of course not,” Blackburn said. He was replaying his conversation with Ed in his mind. It was possible that Ed had misunderstood his wishes. “How much will it cost to fix everything on that list?”

  Earl punched numbers into a calculator. The numbers added up to $1,117.67.

  “No,” Blackburn said.

  Earl squinted at him. “Well, sir,” he said, “that’s why we wait for your say-so. We think that these things need to be done to make this a safe car, but we’ll only do what you want. What should we leave out?”

  Blackburn considered. The Fury seemed to ride and stop just fine to him, and he had a spare tire in the trunk. “No shock absorbers or brakes,” he said. “And no tires.”