Absolute Zero (28 page)

Lunch was interrupted by a page to consult on a man admitted with a numb, discolored leg and a history of heart problems. Allen jogged up two flights of stairs, saw the patient, and agreed with the internist to give the man a clot-busting drug.

The hours floated by with soft intensity like a long, almost weightless parachute drop.

And soon it would end, after the last scheduled procedure, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The lap choly was a routine gallbladder removal using a laparoscopic wand that contained a miniature video camera and lights.

After the patient was intubated and breathing on the machine, his abdominal cavity was inflated with carbon dioxide gas. A ten-millimeter sheath was poked inside through a port incision above the navel. Then the camera was inserted in the sleeve.

Two television monitors were positioned on either side of the operating table, so Allen and his resident could both easily view the liver and gallbladder.

Three other ports were incised higher in the stomach wall on the patient’s right-hand side, just beneath the liver. And sleeves were inserted. Two for the resident to handle his forceps and one midbelly, for Allen to use the dissecting forceps, in this case an electric cautery.

Laparoscopy was essentially a spatial-orientation video game played on a living person. Allen held the rotating, pistol-grip forceps controls in his hands and coordinated the working end of the forceps to the image the camera projected on the television towers.

The glistening coral-colored formations of human inner space reminded Allen of spelunking, going into underwater caves with Aqua-Lung and handheld lights—something he hadn’t tried yet. Maybe Milt would go for it?

“Lights,” Allen said. The powerful overhead lights were turned off.

“Music,” Allen said. Again Jeannie chose. Bruce Springsteen belted out “Born to Run” as the resident gripped the gallbladder with a forceps and positioned it against the liver. With exquisitely fine muscle control and timing, Allen clipped the cystic artery and duct with titanium staples, then severed them. He then carved the gallbladder free from the liver bed with the cautery. Before removing it through the umbilical port, as he tidied up some minor bleeders with the cautery, he had an attack of sheer whimsy.

Or perhaps inspiration.

To underscore the new boost in his mood, or perhaps to honor the secret transgression that had launched him out of his rut—Allen acted on impulse in a fleeting moment when no one was watching the video towers. With a deft whirl of the cautery controls he seared two letters into the patient’s abdominal wall:

AF

His own initials up on the screens.

No harm done, it would heal in a few days. It was just a tiny flourish. He would have preferred Vivaldi trumpets instead of Clarence Clemons’s saxophone, but, hey, what the hell . . .

Allen stripped off his
last sterile gown of the day and tossed it in a hamper. Then he dictated his notes and was on his way to the locker room when he met Merman in the hall.

“So how do you code an ostrich kick?” Merman asked.

“What’s this, another joke?” Allen was mildly intrigued.

“No way. ER just admitted a guy with a transverse fracture of the left humerus. Bam. One kick.”

“Where did it happen? At a zoo?”

“No idea. C’mon, take a look at his arm, the nurse in ER said the kick tore a hole in a heavy leather sleeve and you can see the scale pattern of the bird’s toe knuckle in the mangled skin.”

“That’d be worth seeing,” Allen said, genuinely curious. He kept pace with Merman as they left surgery, went around the pre op admitting desk, and headed down the corridor to Emergency. They turned a corner and, ahead of them, a group of nurses and the ER doc were gathered around a man on a gurney and—

Allen immediately stood absolutely still and let Merman continue on alone.

The patient was Earl Garf.

And Phil Broker was standing at the edge of the medical huddle.

And right next to Broker, holding on to his elbow real friendly-like, was the nurse-anesthetist from Ely, Minnesota: Amy Skoda.

Allen’s surprise escaped his lips in a nervous stammer: “Wha-what . . . ?” Ashamed, he backed down the hall and around the corner with his hand clamped over his mouth.

What the hell was going on?

After getting Earl admitted
to the emergency room at Timberry Trails, Broker used a pay phone in the waiting room to call Jolene.

He told her that Earl was her friend again, like she wanted, and he’d be moving his stuff out of her basement. And maybe she should send him some flowers because he’d just been admitted to the hospital after having his arm broken by an ostrich.

“That’s what I said,” he repeated. “An ostrich.”

He said he’d be at the farm until Sunday afternoon, and then he was returning to Ely. He said he hoped everything turned out all right.

He said good-bye. Then he realized something and turned to Amy. “You have a plane to catch.”

Amy shrugged, grinned. “Let’s blow it off. We have an escaped ostrich to find, remember?”

“Right. How do you find an escaped ostrich?”

They laughed, then, remembering Rodney in the barn, Broker made a fast call to John Eisenhower at the Washington County sheriff’s department. After quick pleasantries, Rose, John’s secretary, said she could squeeze him in for ten minutes if he hurried.

Rushing through the hospital parking lot, Broker explained, “I know that other guy who ran. Rodney. I need to check something with the local sheriff.”

On the road, he said, “John and I go way back. I was working on his task force when I arrested Rodney three years ago. He’s supposed to be in jail.”

Pushing the Leper Colony, he drove eighty mph on back-county roads, leaving Timberry, skirting through Lake Elmo and Oak Park Heights, and turning onto Highway 36 where it made its turn approaching the St. Croix River on the outskirts of Stillwater. A few minutes later he turned into the parking lot for the Washington County Jail and the sheriff’s office.

“This will only take a minute,” he assured Amy. He jogged into the red-brick jail complex and was buzzed through a security door. Rose waved him in. “Make it quick, he has to talk to the Elk’s Club in ten minutes.”

John was standing in front of his desk in gray dress slacks and a T-shirt breaking starch on a fresh white dress shirt. Broker hadn’t seen him since last May when he’d come up to Broker’s Beach for the fishing opener. John was running for reelection next month and he’d been spending time in the gym. He had trimmed his blond mustache and the ten desk pounds that he used to wear around his waist had migrated back to his chest and shoulders as muscle.

They shook hands warmly. Then John’s hand went to his pocket and he handed Broker a campaign button:
REELECT THE SHERIFF
.

“Kind of Nixonian,” Broker said.

John struck a pose, and framed an invisible subject in the air with parenthetically cupped hands. “I considered going with ‘Reelect Ike,’ but decided that was a little over-the-top.” He finished buttoning his shirt and tucked it in. “I heard about that business in the canoe area . . .”

Broker nodded. “Reason I’m in town; I brought the guy’s car back.”

John walked around his desk and took two ties from the back of his chair. He held them up next to the charcoal suit coat hanging from the shelves behind the desk.

“I’d go with the blue one,” Broker said.

John nodded and began to knot his tie. “I, ah, also heard from Tom about you and Nina splitting the blanket.” Tom Jeffords was Broker’s neighbor, the Cook County sheriff.

“Our latest standoff,” Broker said, clipping off the words.

“Not real good for your kid,” John observed.

“I hear you.”

John snugged up his Windsor and reached for his coat. “So what’s up? You didn’t pop in to help me pick ties,” he said.

“About two hours ago I ran into Rodney on the street. You remember Rodney.”

“Oh yeah.”

“I thought he was doing some serious federal time?”

“Don’t quote me on this, but law enforcement is still a pretty snitch-driven business. After you left the picture, everybody—local and federal—was hurting statewide for a contact in the outlaw end-of-the-gun culture.”

Broker grimaced, disbelieving. “Rodney flipped?”

John grinned. “Yeah, he’s kinda, like, the new you. He’s working deep informant to reduce his sentence.”

Broker groaned but he now understood Rodney’s disappearing act. Rodney wouldn’t be telling Earl anything.

A black phone sitting off to the side on John’s desk rang.

John eyed the phone, checked his wristwatch. “Shit.” He picked up the phone and spoke in the receiver, “I’m tight for time. Whatta you got?”

Broker watched John’s eyes roll up in a
Why me, Lord
expression. “So?” he fumed. Then he shook his head. “How the fuck should I know.” Then after a moment, he jerked alert. “
No, no, don’t shoot it
. The animal-rights nuts will be all over my ass, especially with the goddamn election.”

Shaking his head, John lowered himself to his chair, planted his elbow, and knuckled his forehead. “Try and keep track of it and call the DNR. I know it’s not wild, but they have tranquilizer rifles. Ask to borrow one. Okay, okay. Page me in an hour and let me know. Right. Later.”

John dropped the phone to its cradle. “You talk to J.T. lately?” he asked after a few beats.

“Sure,” Broker said in a neutral tone.

“Is he missing any birds that you know of?”

“Can’t say,” Broker said. Carefully.

“Well, there’s only a couple ostrich operations in the county and one of them is missing a bird because this really big-ass ostrich just did some broken-field running through traffic on I-94 near the Manning Trail and we got a twenty-car fender bender. Luckily just cuts and bruises so far. Hey, Rose,” he yelled. “Get me J.T. Merryweather’s phone number.”

“I think I better go; you look kind of busy right now,” Broker said.

Over a quick beer
at the Trapper’s Lounge in downtown Stillwater, Broker struggled to keep a straight face as he recited John Eisenhower’s one-liners: “Is he missing any birds? Well, call the DNR.”

“What are you going to tell J.T.?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How are they going to round up Popeye?”

“Probably nail him with a tranquilizer dart. So we better get back to the farm. The phone’s bound to be ringing. And I’d just as soon you answered in case it’s John who calls.”

“Okay, I’ll help you till we get the bird back. You did tell me to shut the barn door and I didn’t,” Amy said.

“Right. Except if you would have shut that door we’d be in the hospital with Earl,” Broker said.

They clinked glasses.

A message was waiting
on J.T.’s voice mail from a Washington County deputy who was checking around about missing ostriches. Amy returned the call and explained that the owner was gone and she was house-sitting, and she confirmed that a large male was missing from his pen.

Broker crossed his fingers. The more he thought about it, he worried that a county cop would overhear somebody at Timberry Trails Hospital talking about an ostrich-kick casualty. It was the kind of loose grounder that John E. would run out. He was on the verge of calling the sheriff’s office and personally confessing when the phone rang.

The deputy again; they’d found Popeye kicking an abandoned horse barn apart in Dellwood and they had darted him with a tranquilizer gun. Could someone come pick him up?

Amy said her trailer was in Iowa. The deputy said give him a few minutes. He called back and said they’d found a local farmer who’d cart Popeye for one hundred dollars. Coached by Broker, Amy gave the deputy J.T.’s address, fire number, and directions.

An hour later, a Dodge Ram pickup pulled into the yard. Popeye, groggy and twitching, lay in the bed. They backed into the barn, up to the stall, and lowered the tailgate. Broker and Amy helped the driver drag the bird over it. Popeye weakly raised his head, blinked, and resumed his nap. The amused driver took his fee and left.

Walking back to the house Broker and Amy stopped, jolted by a sudden temperature drop of twenty to thirty degrees. Broker hunched his shoulders and squinted into the bitter northwest wind. “Weather Channel,” he said.

Inside, rubbing their red hands, they studied the televised Dopler map. The cold front bulging down from North Dakota and Saskatchewan had purple edges and a bone-white heart.

“Jesus, it’s already ten below in International Falls,” Amy pointed at the map.

There was no snow in the forecast, just polar cold.

Unloading Popeye left them exhausted after their jag of a day. They went into the kitchen and couldn’t face the rest of the ostrich chili in the refrigerator. So they ordered a deluxe pizza. When it arrived they split the bottle of Pepsi, settled down in front of the TV, and raided J.T.’s movie library. They were arguing about whether to watch
Erin Brockovich
or
Contact
with Jodie Foster when the phone rang.

Jolene savored Broker’s brief
phone message as she ate a quick Healthy Choice microwave dinner. Earl had been moved on down the line. A broken arm. She’d skip the flowers.

Monday, Hank would go to the nursing home, and the vigils, hanging on his every breath, would finally end. Which left the question of Hank’s extended care.

She remembered Allen’s unsaid promise.
If it comes to that, I can help.

God, she couldn’t bring herself to think about it directly—but she so wanted to be free of them all.

So she paced in the kitchen and fantasized that her hair was long again and that she was reclining in a salon with other women waiting on her, doing her hair and her fingernails and her toes.

Things were moving ahead, so why was she so edgy? Why did she have this gummy metal taste stuck to the roof of her mouth? Her thoughts felt flimsy, like puzzle pieces jumbled in her skull.

Nervously, she analyzed the sensations and concluded that all the tension and sleeplessness had made her thirsty. She wanted a drink. The dry colors in her head would swell up, go fluid, and run together. Smooth and easy.

So she kept busy. Another trick she’d learned from Hank. She checked all the baby monitors in the house to make sure they were working. Then, in a frantic lurch of mood, she craved a cigarette.

For half an hour she rummaged through the house—drawers, cupboards, the pockets of Hank’s clothes still hanging in the closets. Nothing. Not even one of Hank’s stale Camels. Back in the kitchen, she paced and got weaker. Get in the Accord, drive to the Cenex store up on 95. It would take about seven minutes. She’d have a pack of cigarettes. Twenty diversions.

A cigarette would be bad but it would blunt the deeper urge.

Or would it just lower her resistence so it would be easier to take that first drink? Dammit. She needed more willpower.

But you weren’t supposed to use willpower, you were supposed to work the program, which was basically learning to delay gratification through talking a lot to other people. You were supposed to displace. Because willpower was an idea that got you off alone in your head and . . .

Whack! Jolene kicked the Kenmore refrigerator.

Bullshit.

It wasn’t drinking that had her shook up. Goddamit.
Hank had turned the TV on and off.

He was
in there
watching them.

She stared at the circular stairway leading down to the lower level and Hank’s room. She had to go down there and feed him, change him, stay ahead of the bedsores.

He’d turned on the TV for her.

But not for Allen and Garf.

Really spooked now, she had this image of her nerves like pink toothpaste all squirted out of the tube. Like her life now, after Earl and Stovall. No way could she put it back the way it was.

Well, screw this. Hank would have to fly solo for fifteen minutes. She grabbed her car keys and headed for the garage. Ten minutes later, she was sitting in the parking area of a Cenex station inhaling a Marlboro Light.

Nicotine turned cartwheels in her clean blood. It helped.

But not much.

She drove back to the house, parked, walked out of the garage, and shivered in a gust of suddenly cold wind. On the porch, finishing her cigarette, she amazed herself. On one hand, she was losing her mind. On the other, she was turning into a suburban ditz who didn’t want her house to smell like cigarette smoke.

Her house. Stay with that.

She went in, brushed her teeth, swished with Scope. In the middle of this task she realized she really was alone in the house. No music in the basement. No Earl.

Now, with things getting tricky, she suddenly missed him.

No, she missed his function in her life.

But Jolene’s whole idea was not to depend on men anymore. Right?

So, you’re going to figure this out on your own.

Your house.

Your money.

Your life.

No men allowed.

All you have to do is hang on through the weekend. Milt will come to the rescue. This time next week you’ll be visiting Hank in a safe, secure nursing home.

It’s going to be all right.

He had receded far into himself and his vision turned black at the edges, tunneled, like looking the wrong way through two telescopes. The enthusiasms of simply tapping the TV controls on and off a few times had left him mentally drained, and now his fingers were like cold batteries, dead. It was a revelation. He’d had nothing to use to measure his strength before. Now he realized how little energy he had left.

And he saw it as a finite amount, nonrenewable.

And he saw something else. Something approaching with a calm, unhurried tread. A blur of color flickering into the edge of his vision. His heart and lungs were strong but his brain was flaming out.

Dying.

Everything he did from now on had to count.

Jolene steeled herself and entered Hank’s room, determined to be businesslike. Just do the work. She believed in holding up her end of the deal. The deal had been for better or for worse. She could handle two more days of worse.

First she cleaned excess saliva from his mouth with the suction wand. Then she changed his wet diaper. As she fed him through his tube and added water to the IV drip, she watched him carefully for signals. He seemed almost asleep, eyes barely open. Lazy, dreamy, tired.

Dutifully, she stripped off his gown, brought in a dishpan of hot water, and gave him a sponge bath. She checked the incision where his gastrostomy inserted for leakage or infection. Then she rubbed his wasting body down with baby oil, shaved him, and trimmed his hair. She clipped his fingernails and toenails, and swabbed his gums and teeth with a sponge dipped in mouthwash.

She talked to him as she put his diaper and clean gown back on, as she struggled turning him, to put on clean sheets half a bed at a time. Just practical little asides. “Now I’m going to roll you over. Now I’m pulling on your gown.”

Then she swept around the bed, taking great care to get all the hair and clippings. When she was finished, she removed all the cleaning materials. She took the old sheets and clothes downstairs to the laundry room and put them in the washer. She armored herself with reassuring smells of hot water, Spic ’n’ Span, and Tide.

Feeling stronger, she returned to the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee, and stood, studying the restaurant-style stove. It was a regular flame thrower—must have cost eight grand, but Hank had insisted on getting it. He’d spent another hundred grand remodeling this house. He’d bought the new Ford for himself and the Honda for her.

And didn’t renew his fucking health insurance.

That’s a drunk for you.

Jolene looked around at the new granite counters, the tile floor, the new cabinets, the river scene out the windows.

Hers someday. Hell, it was hers now. She shook her head. Nothing lasts, Hank used to say. But they’d barely had even the first part of nothing.

She put on her coat and took her coffee out on the deck and lit another cigarette and pictured a happy mob of nicotine assassins stabbing the air sacs in her lungs.

She inhaled, exhaled. Dropped her head on her chest.

She’d have to sign over a deed on the house to Milt, as security, until they got through probate court. She could live with that.

Then the wind came up so frigid it must have blown in from North Dakota. Jolene hugged herself and her heart quaked in her chest like a dry leaf. She snubbed out her cigarette and hurried through the patio door into Hank’s room to get warm. She sat on the edge of his bed.

“I never lied to you, Hank. I told you I’d make you happy for a while, which, you’ll recall, I did. I also told you I’d probably take you for every cent you had.”

Jolene held Hank’s wooden right hand in both of hers and said, “You laughed at me when I said that. But you know what, honey? I guess that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

He knew he should hoard his reserves of strength; the effort to move his finger was like shoveling steel. Fire discipline, he told himself, reaching back to his most primitive survival instincts
.

But she was right there, her warm flesh on his, and he could smell her lily body wash and he couldn’t resist.

So he tickled her damp palm with the tip of his right index finger. A sly, unmistakable wiggle
.

Electrocuted, Jolene did not actually scream this time; it was more like a long gasp as she jumped off the bed, ran from the studio, through her bedroom, and up the stairs into the kitchen. She leaned with both hands braced on the counter until she caught her breath. She stared at the phone. Allen? No, she’d called him before and Hank had stopped his tricks.

That meant something, maybe.

Besides, Allen was an overeducated nice guy and right now she needed a little more red meat.

She snatched a card down from the bulletin board—the one Phil Broker had given her—and reached for the phone.

Amy answered the phone
next to the couch, thinking it might be the sheriff’s department again. She thrust the receiver at Broker. “For you, and she’s shook up.” Too ladylike to smirk, Amy curled her lip slightly.

Broker took the phone. “Hello?”

“Broker, something really weird is going on,” Jolene blurted.

“Calm down.”

“It’s Hank. He’s . . . doing things.”

“Hank’s
doing things
?” Broker repeated and Amy caught his goose bumps.

“What things?” Amy asked, huddled at his shoulder, head-to-head, with her ear against the receiver.

Jolene said, “The night before last, Earl left the TV clicker in his hand, like a joke. And I heard the TV come on and I went in there and he turned it off and on twice.”

“Jesus,” Broker and Amy read off the same page, eyes locked.

“. . . the thing is, I called Allen and he came over and I remembered the cat had been on Hank’s lap, and Allen thought it was the cat, you know. Except it wasn’t the damn cat because about three minutes ago I was holding his hand and he very deliberately tickled my palm.”

“Tickled?” Broker wondered.

“Goddammit,
tickled
. The way guys do. You know? Wanna fuck, like that? Tickled!”

“Let’s get over there fast,” Amy said, her face absolutely electric.

“You sure?” Broker said.

“What’s going on?” Jolene yelled.

“Hold tight, we’re on the way,” Broker said.