by David Martin
So what Henry figures is, the deputy brings men to this queer doctor who also has a kink about tying you to his examining table. A good deal for Henry on two counts: first, he gets forty dollars and, second, after all this they ain’t going to charge him with anything and take the chance of Henry saying something to a judge about being delivered to a local doctor for some dick sucking.
Henry lies on the examining table wishing the doctor would hurry up and get here. The deputy left fifteen, twenty minutes ago and Henry is dying for a cigarette and though he wouldn’t want to admit it to anyone, he’s getting kind of horny for what this doctor is going to do to him too.
Then finally the door to the examining room opens and in steps this nicely dressed man, suit and tie and a shirt that is very white.
“Hello,” the doctor says in a deep voice like what you might expect to hear on one of them classical stations on the radio.
“Hiya,” Henry replies, raising his head slightly, straining his neck against the rope to get a better look at the guy. Handsome.
“I understand your name is Henry Robarts. I’m Doctor Mason Quinndell.”
“Nice meeting you, Doc.” Henry wonders why the doctor gave his name, they usually don’t do that.
“Do you notice anything unusual about me, Henry?”
Henry keeps watching him as he crosses the room and leans against a counter. “Nice suit.”
Quinndell smiles. He steps to the examining table. “What color are my eyes?”
“Blue.” Henry figures the guy is vain about his eyes so why not blow him a little smoke. “About the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, make Paul Newman jealous, really.” He watches the doctor’s eyes a moment longer. “Jeez, you’re blind.”
Quinndell takes out a linen handkerchief and dabs at the tears collecting around his glass eyes. “I was blinded, yes, that’s true, Henry. What do you think of that?”
“How can you be a doctor?”
“Well, Henry, once a doctor, always a doctor. I believe what you mean to ask is how can I practice medicine. And the answer of course is that I can’t. Are you curious about why you were brought here, why you’re strapped to the table?”
“The deputy said something about some money.”
Quinndell smiles. “Of course.” Standing there at the examining table he takes some folded bills from the pocket of his pants. When the doctor unfolds the bills, Henry notices that there’s a twenty on the top of the stack and a hundred on the bottom. “Forty dollars, correct?” Quinndell asks.
“Yeah,” Henry replies, watching the doctor’s fine hands as they manipulate the bills. He starts to pull the twenty off the top but then hesitates, turns the stack over, pauses again — and pulls out the hundred-dollar bill, then a second one.
Henry watches with wide eyes.
Quinndell holds the two hundreds in one hand, folding the rest of the bills and slipping them back in his pocket. “Two twenties,” he says, extending the hundreds toward Henry. “Right?”
“Right.” Henry can’t believe his good luck. “Just tuck them there in my shirt pocket, Doc.”
Quinndell does. “And why do you suppose I’m paying you forty dollars, Henry.”
“Different strokes for different folks, Doc.”
“How about Doctor Quinndell?”
“Okay.”
“And you’re under the impression that I gave you those two twenty-dollar bills in exchange for some kind of sexual contact, is that a correct assessment?”
Henry has run across this before, the way some guys got to talk around it and talk around it, trying to talk themselves into it or hoping you’ll make the first move, grab their hand and put it on your dick and get the show on the road. Except the way he’s strapped down, Henry isn’t going to be doing any grabbing, is he?
“Henry? Is my assessment correct, you’re under the impression that I have some sort of sexual interest in you?”
“I don’t know, Doc. Doctor. The deputy said you wanted to examine me, so I guess I’m here to be examined. Go ahead, examine me any way you want.”
“But why do you think you’re in restraints?”
Jesus, how long is this going to take? “Uh, I don’t exactly know that either, Dr. Quinndell. Maybe you like guys who are tied up. Or maybe ’cause you’re blind you didn’t want to take the chance with somebody being brought here from jail.”
“Take the chance that you might steal my money and flee and I couldn’t do anything about it because I’m defenseless — having been blinded has rendered me defenseless, is that what you’re saying?”
“Something like that. Except I wouldn’t take advantage of you.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Not me, Doc. Doctor. Some guys, yeah, but me, I always treat people straight and expect to be treated the same way myself.”
“An honest man.”
“Yeah, I am.” Then Henry begins a rambling story about this time he stopped at some woman’s house and agreed to do a little yardwork in exchange for a few dollars but then when he found out the woman’s husband had been killed a few months before in a trucking accident and she had three kids, Henry went around and fixed up all the stuff that was wrong with her house, a leaking roof and replacing a broken window — he bought the new pane of glass with his own money — and twelve hours later he settles for a home-cooked meal, won’t take any of the woman’s money. In fact, before he leaves he puts a dollar bill in each of the kids’ hands, his last three bucks. “Lot of guys would think I’m a chump for doing something like that but me, I figure —”
He’s interrupted when the doctor throws back his head, opens his mouth to reveal tiny yellow teeth, and begins heaving his shoulders up and down: it would be laughter except for its eerie silence.
CHAPTER 8
Lying fully stretched out, as if in a coffin, the body is completely covered by a transluscent white cloth, a kind of elegantly silken cheesecloth that clings so intimately to the body’s features that Lyon can see that it is a black woman — he can see her breasts, the deep swollen purple of their large nipples, the dark plane of her stomach, and an even darker triangle of pubic hair, some of which sticks up through the shroud’s open weave. But he can’t make out her face, doesn’t know who it is.
Claire Cept? Impossible. But one part of Lyon’s mind is insisting he should lift the cloth to find out.
No.
He leans back from his kneeling position, gingerly closing the top of the crate, his heartbeat so strong he can hear it on his eardrums. He gets to his feet and walks around the kitchen with one hand over his mouth, astonished and baffled and absolutely convinced he cannot spend the night in this cabin, not with that crate and whoever’s inside it waiting there on the kitchen floor.
Here’s what he’ll do, he’ll get in the car and drive to town, contact the sheriff or state police, report this … There’s going to be all kinds of questions Lyon doesn’t want to answer, but he can’t not report finding a body. Who put it here? And why is it here — to scare Lyon off? It’s doing a damn good job of that but if Quinndell is behind this, maybe there is some substance to Claire’s charges against him.
For now, just get the hell out of here, Lyon tells himself as he hurries to the rental car and drives off.
Twenty minutes down the mountain road he discovers he can’t find any of the turnoffs in the dark. There must have been a half dozen of them, two rights, a left … The turnoffs were marked with red paint on certain trees, easy enough to see driving up here in the daylight but now Lyon has already made three turns — guessing — and hasn’t seen a goddamn painted tree yet. Even the map Lyon was given, which he left at the cabin, wouldn’t do him much good in the dark, the county road and logging trails and private lanes all becoming a maddening maze.
He swings around a bend and sees that a massive tree has been cut down to block the road fifty yards or so ahead. Lyon drives right up to it and then sits there in the car with both hands on the steering wheel. That tree obviously wa
sn’t blocking the road when he came up the mountain. This can’t be the county road, he must have turned onto some private road. Lyon keeps staring through the windshield at that tree as if expecting to find an answer among its green leaves.
He finally opens the door and emerges into an absolutely black night. Except for the area illuminated by his headlights, Lyon can’t see anything — no lights from town or from a farmhouse, certainly not from the kerosene lantern he left burning in the cabin, which is somewhere behind him or off to the left, he has no idea, he’s lost.
The choices are to sleep here in the car until morning or turn around and try to find his way back to the cabin. Lyon doesn’t like either of them.
He is just about to get back in the car when he hears someone walking off in the woods to his right. Maybe two people. He freezes, listening as carefully as he can. Probably nothing more than some deer or possums. Or bears. Or Bigfoot for all Lyon knows, he doesn’t have a clue about what could be out in these woods in the middle of the night.
Should have stayed in New York and taken my chances at Bellevue, he thinks.
The rustling footsteps stop. Now whatever it is out there is standing still, watching him.
Lyon slips into the car and backs up. He gets turned around and drives a few yards before hitting the brakes: someone standing in the road.
Too far away for Lyon to get a good look, the figure is tiny — small enough to be a boy. He’s holding something, a stick or a gun.
Lyon’s mind is racing. Maybe this is just some local boy out hunting.
In the middle of the night?
Or maybe he cut that tree down to trap me and now he’s going to rob me and put a bullet in my head.
Or maybe, Christ, maybe he’s got dogs with him.
Lyon was five years old when he was attacked by a neighbor’s dog, chewed up bad enough to land in the hospital, and ever since then his fear of dogs has been absolute. When he has nightmares they take canine forms.
Lyon quickly checks that all the windows are up, all the doors locked. Then he eases the car forward. Just going to drive right past him. And if he raises that gun, assuming it’s a gun, I’ll floor the accelerator and …
When Lyon is within fifty yards, the figure turns and walks off the left side of the road into the woods. Lyon continues driving slowly, stopping when he reaches the spot where the little man — or boy — was standing. Lowering the driver’s window halfway, his foot ready to jam the accelerator, Lyon searches among the dark trees, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
He’s about to ease forward again when he senses he is being watched by something close. He turns suddenly to his right and there it is, looking in the passenger window — a dog’s head, a head the size of a bear’s, those dark eyes just looking at Lyon. He never even heard the creature put its paws up on the car and now there it is, neither growling nor panting, just looking.
Lyon’s foot can’t hit the accelerator fast enough, the tires spinning so hard on the dirt road that for an instant the car doesn’t go anywhere, just sits there spinning, the dog somehow managing to stay up on the door, still looking in on Lyon with its intense stare, looking right into Lyon’s eyes as if it has a message for him, a message Lyon doesn’t want to receive. And meanwhile he is pressing so hard on the accelerator that his entire body is twisted, putting all of his weight behind that foot, go, go, goddamn it please GO! The dog is screaming, the fucking dog is screaming like a man!
No, it’s Lyon screaming, he doesn’t realize it’s him until he stops screaming a couple hundred yards down the road, still jamming that accelerator, sideswiping a tree but not letting that slow him down, both hands in a death grip on the steering wheel, constantly glancing at the passenger side window as if he expects that dog to still be there, looking at him.
It takes an hour to find his way back to the cabin, and in that hour Lyon still hasn’t recovered his composure. He stops as near as he can to the cabin’s porch, not sure he wants to chance walking from the car to the front door because maybe that dog has somehow followed him here.
Lyon looks all around, seeing nothing. The yellow glow from the kerosene lamp shows through the kitchen window in a way that is particularly uninviting, especially since Lyon knows what’s waiting for him on the kitchen floor. But there’s no way he can possibly stay here in this car and keep watching the passenger window all night, watching for that dog to put his head up there again.
What’s it going to be: slowly opening the door, looking around, then easing his way to the cabin — or making a dash for it?
Lyon chooses to dash. Out of the car, up on the porch, into the cabin, slamming the door behind him and jamming the dead bolt shut.
Now I have to go around and secure all the windows, he thinks. Make sure everything is closed and locked. Including the back door off the kitchen.
But as soon as Lyon steps through the kitchen doorway he sees that in his absence someone, something, has reopened the crate, the edge of its hinged lid now resting on the floor, the shroud torn loose to expose part of the woman’s face and one bare breast.
CHAPTER 9
Henry is smiling nervously the way you do when someone is laughing at a joke you don’t get. “What?” he finally asks Quinndell, who is just now recovering from his silent laughter.
“Henry, you’re a stitch, you really are.” The doctor has taken out his handkerchief again, wiping the tears from his glass eyes.
Henry waits for whatever is next. He doesn’t want to do or say anything that might jeopardize those two hundred-dollar bills in his shirt pocket.
When Quinndell is composed he asks Henry to describe himself. “Not your undying commitment to honesty. I want a physical description.”
Here’s where we get down to it, Henry thinks. “Okay, I’m forty-three years old, just under six foot, brown eyes, brown hair, a mustache, and I got a —”
“Brown eyes?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s your vision? Do you wear glasses?”
“Twenty-twenty in both eyes. Hey, when I was in the army I —”
“Please, Henry, no more of your pathetic stories, just answer my questions. What do you think about the fact that you have perfect vision while I’m blinded?”
“Well, I —”
“That you, part of society’s debris, a thoroughly useless man, you use your eyes to find items to steal —”
“Hey, I wasn’t stealing them tools, I told the deputy, I was going to use the tools to fix up the barn and then ask the people if they wouldn’t give me a meal and a few dollars in exchange —”
“That you go through life with no appreciation of what you see, that you don’t visit museums, have doubtlessly never seen an original painting, that you never sit and just look at a tree, at the total perfection of a tree, that you can’t examine a sick child and determine what’s wrong with her, and then correct that problem, that on you, Henry Robarts, vision is a total waste while I …” And here the doctor taps himself on the chest. “I, a man of education, cultured, a man who appreciates the finer things in life, a man who at the age of eighteen wept when he saw his first Matisse, a doctor who has been trained in the art of healing, of healing children, Henry — what do you think of the profound inequity of a God who would blind me and yet allow you to have your twenty-twenty vision?”
Henry thinks about this a moment and then says, “Jeez, I don’t know, Doc.”
“Doctor.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you, Doctor. Life’s fucking unfair, ain’t it?”
“God is unfair.”
“Seems that way sometimes, don’t it?”
“If God’s justice is unbalanced, how might we correct it?”
“I don’t catch your meaning.”
“I’ve been blinded, you have vision. My blinding is a terrible loss, your vision is a waste. How can we balance that injustice, how can we put the scales right?”
“I still don’t —”
“Henry, stop
being stupid, I’m asking a straightforward question. You can see, I can’t. That’s not right, that’s unequal, out of balance. Now how do we make it right?”
“You get your sight back?”
Quinndell smiles. “Good, good. That’s one way the scales can be balanced, the restoration of my vision. Unfortunately that simply is not possible. Can you think of another way to balance the scales?”
Henry thinks. “Not really.”
“Come on, Henry, come on, the inequity is removed if we both can see or if we both …”
“Are blind?”
“Yes!” Quinndell exclaims. “Excellent, excellent insight, Henry.”
Nervous now, the man on the table pulls against the restraints around his wrists and ankles.
“And yet,” Quinndell continues, “even if you were blind the scales would still be out of balance, because what about all the pain I’ve suffered these past five years, the richness of my life being blunted, the cruel irony of finally achieving wealth and then being robbed of the opportunity to enjoy that wealth fully, how do we balance that out?”
“Hey, all I know, Doctor Quinndell, is that the deputy said I could earn forty bucks if I came over here and let you examine me.”
“The two twenties I put in your shirt pocket.”
“That’s right, so go ahead and examine me if you want —”
“Not the two hundreds I put in your pocket.”
“What?”
“I might have put two hundred-dollar bills in your pocket instead of two twenties.”
“Really? Jeez, I wasn’t even watching.”
“So you’re not sure if you have forty dollars or two hundred dollars in your pocket?”
“Absolutely no idea, take ’em out and let me see.”
Quinndell pulls the bills from Henry’s pocket.
“Well fuck me, Doctor, those are hundreds! I wasn’t paying attention, really. Hey, take ’em back and give me the twenties.” But as Henry continues watching Quinndell’s face, that yellow-toothed grin, that look of amusement, he changes his mind. “Hell, you keep your money. Just give the deputy a call and let him take me back to that cell, we’ll just write this whole thing off as a misunderstanding.”
