Absolute Zero (5 page)

The 450-horse Pratt and Whitney engine coughed a cloud of exhaust and the aluminum pontoons smacked forward over the chop. An orange windsock on a spit of land across from the dock blasted out at a three-o’clock right angle to its mast and pointed the way straight east.

Broker was paddling
flat out, heading for the boat dock in front of Uncle Billie’s Lodge and the county patrol cruiser idling next to it. Then he heard the motor.

The engine growl came in low and fast, then strings of rivets caught the pewter light as the Beaver cleared the pines. Bottom heavy with big pontoon floats, it lunged down, practically set one wing tip in the lake, turned tightly, and splash-landed a hundred yards away.

Deputy Iker’s brown and tan uniform appeared in the open hatch. He commenced to yell and wave but Broker couldn’t hear over the roaring prop, so he sculled up to the pontoon.

“You the doctor?” Iker yelled. Allen nodded and Iker pointed to the shore and yelled again. “That cop will take you to the hospital.”

“I thought there’d be a helicopter?” Allen shouted.

“Take my word for it, you want this Beaver more than a helicopter.” Then Iker rolled his eyes at Broker. They’d had dinner five days ago and they went back a ways, working a county task force together when Broker was undercover with BCA.

“You,” Iker yelled at Broker, “are coming with me.”

He pulled Broker up on the pontoon, leaned out, waved to the cop in the dock, and pointed to Allen. The cop nodded. Allen pushed off and, facing about in the bow seat, began paddling for shore.

Broker and Iker tumbled into the cargo bay. Iker whirled his forefinger, the pilot leaned into the stick, the plane wheeled, the prop bit the wind, and they vibrated over the speed-bump waves.

“That was fast,” Broker yelled.

“Not fast enough. There’s a blizzard moving in.” Iker smiled thinly.

“But we’ll beat it back to Ely?” Broker asked.

Again the thin grin from the deputy as he banged Broker on the shoulder. “Hey, we eat this shit up, right?”

Broker blinked and shook his head. “We
used to
eat this shit up.”

“Yeah, well,” Iker tossed a thumb at the pilot, “he’s young. He definitely still eats this shit up.”

Allen rode a police
cruiser into town from the east as the blizzard moved in from the west. The harried deputy dropped him off promptly and drove away. Chilled and cramped from the canoe, he stiffly dragged Broker’s waterproof duffel up the sidewalk as a thirty mph wind knocked him sideways. He made it through the shin-deep drifts and opened a door with a small orange neon emergency room sign. He dropped the bag in front of the dispatch desk where a woman stood up to confirm his identity. Deputy Iker, she explained, had radioed ahead and now she was monitoring the rescue party which was in flight to “pick up the patient.” She motioned down a corridor and a lean, dark-haired woman came forward in a blue cotton smock.

“Nancy, take Dr. Falken to Boris,” the dispatcher said.

The nurse regarded Allen with the tired slit eyes of someone who’d been up all night. Then she led him down the hall to a nurse’s station where a wiry man dressed in a white medical smock was talking to a woman wearing a sweater and jeans with fresh snow trapped in the cuffs. She held a clipboard in one hand and a telephone in the other.

“This is the doctor who paddled out of the canoe area,” said the dark-haired nurse.

Allen removed his gloves and extended a hand shriveled pinkish-white from cold water. “Allen Falken,” he offered.

“Hello, Boris Brecht, I’m glad to meet you. They said on the radio that you’re a belly guy.”

“That’s right,” Allen said. He blinked and almost lost his balance as the ward swam around him with bright lights and tile, like a large, very clean, very warm bathroom.

“Is your physician’s license current?”

“Yes, I . . .”

“May I see it and a picture ID, and I need a contact number where you currently practice?”

Allen cocked his head. “Come again?”

“Dr. Falken—Allen—I’m a family-practice physician. I take out tonsils, maybe. I can’t operate on this man they’re bringing in.”

Allen was furious. “What are you talking about? He’s in bad shape, he could perforate. He needs a level-one trauma center . . .” His shaky smile didn’t match his voice; his words and parts of his body were evidently thawing at different rates. “There’s supposed to be a helicopter to take him to Duluth.”

Brecht pointed his finger at the ceiling. “Hear that moan? That’s a blizzard. The roads are closed. There is no helicopter. We’re it. We have an anesthetist on call and we’re trying to reach her, but she could be stuck out there with the whole day shift.”

“Jesus.” Allen rallied, as he plucked the clipboard from the woman in the snow-cuffed jeans, took her pen, and wrote a number on the top of the work schedule attached to the board. Then he dug in a zippered pocket, removed his wallet from a Ziploc bag, and handed Brecht his physician’s license card and his Minnesota driver’s license.

“Call Ron Rosenbaum, he’s the senior surgeon at Timberry Trails Medical Group where I’m on staff. Now, how are you set up?”

“We have an operating-room suite on the lower level for scheduled elective surgery when a surgeon is available, usually from Virgina, sometimes Duluth or even the Cities.”

“Can you do general anesthesia?” Allen asked.

“We’ve got a Narcomed II.”

“What about the anesthetist?”

“What about her? We’re paging her.”

Allen forked his index finger and thumb, pressing his eyes and reminding himself not to be patronizing. Get focused. “Let’s assume the worst and she doesn’t show, who does that leave?”

Brecht grimaced, “If nobody makes it in before the patient arrives—it’s you, me, and,” he pointed to the woman in jeans, “Judy, which leaves Nancy on her own to cover the emergency room and two other wards. But we can’t handle the anesthesia machine.”

“Your anesthetist should have an adult intubation tray,” Allen said.

“We
are
a hospital. We
have
a pharmacy,” Judy said.

“Ketamine?”

“It’s there.” She narrowed her eyes. “Will that hold him if you open his abdomen?”

Allen shrugged; he’d operated with it on worse trauma cases in Bosnia in very hairy conditions. “It’ll have to work if there’s no alternative.” Then he cleared his throat and gestured with his arms, indicating his bedraggled clothing and wet boots. “Look, I need a cup of black coffee, some scrubs, and some comfortable shoes, if that’s possible.” He took a deep breath, exhaled. “If there’s a room where I could be alone a few minutes and use a telephone. Then I need to see the OR.”

“Sure,” Brecht said. “I have to call the state licensing board and your hospital—just, you know, going through the motions to satisfy our administrator. He’s, ah, gone sort of apeshit on the subject of emergency surgical privileges. Judy will fix you up.”

Which Judy proceeded to do. Allen took off his wet clothing and cat-washed in the men’s lavatory, then changed into a clean smock and trousers and a pair of somebody’s worn Nikes. When he came out of the john she was waiting with a cup of hot black coffee and then she showed him to an examining room. He thanked her, smiling stiffly, as she pulled the door behind her; then he turned his back to the door and planted his shoulders against it.

Allen carefully sat the coffee down on the small nurses’ table, wrapped both arms across his chest, clasped his shoulders, and hugged himself. The notion of him operating to save Hank’s life brought a slight tremor of irony—he recalled Hank’s tough-guy pontificating yesterday morning. Well, Hank, it looks like the situation is now slightly reversed.

His eyes fixed on the telephone sitting on the desk, next to the blood pressure monitor and the coffee cup. He took a moment to clearly remember a time when he was totally satisfied with himself . . .

He remembered Jolene Sommer at that party a year ago at Milt’s river place. She had playfully mussed his hair and had told him it was too perfect.

Allen, you’ve got to learn to unwind a little.

Her touch had left him permanently tousled. Like a warm breeze it had carried hints of foreign vacations and easy laughter. After meeting her he’d returned home to his life and discovered it was a colorless shell furnished with brand-name clichés.

There is more
, she’d seemed to intimate.

There is me.

But she hadn’t said anything remotely like that. It was a wish on his part. It wasn’t that he thought Jolene could change. He thought
he
could change and she might be a catalyst.

Change into someone less wooden, more with it . . .

He rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling and reminded himself:
You’re too disciplined, too trained, too tidy a man to contemplate such messy human knots
.

As always, there was refuge in his work. So he sat down at the small desk and sipped the strong, familiar, bad hospital coffee from the familiar generic Styrofoam cup. The room’s furnishings were also familiar—the whites, grays, and tans of the examining table and the cabinets, the strident biohazard logo on the Sharpes disposal box.

Allen took a deep breath to steady down. He used diaphragmatic breathing as part of his pre-op checklist to enhance visualization. But this deep breath was to prepare him for the phone call to Jolene.

As he exhaled, he visualized the sprawling house tucked on the shadowy pine bluff overlooking the St. Croix River, south of the Hudson Bridge. His watch said 9:18
A.M.
He had an idea of how she spent her days. He did not think of her at night when she was with Hank. The idea of her touching his gnarled old body that smelled of cigarettes . . .

At 9:18, depending on the weather, she’d be settling into the Mission oak rocker in the sunny corner of the kitchen with a cup of coffee. She’d be listening to the morning show on public radio. She followed the current events program every day to build her vocabulary and deepen her range of subjects. She’d have a pen and a notebook in her lap. She’d be taking notes.

Hank was proud of the fact that Jolene had never graduated from high school.

She’d be wearing the white chenille robe that complemented her green eyes and brought out the ruby highlights in her dark hair. Her smooth skin had an olive cast and she joked that she’d deliberately ordered it a size too small, like a pair of jeans, so that it would fit snug. That damn gray cat he despised would be curled on her lap.

When Allen shut his eyes he was startled by the abyss of fatigue that met him in the dark behind his eyelids. The sound of the window shuddering in the wind brought him up sharply on task and he oriented himself on the serious fact that five lives were suspended inside a tiny airplane somewhere in that sky. All to bring Hank Sommer back here.

What if the plane crashed? Suddenly he saw himself comforting Jolene, winning her over. He’d take her to Florence.

Allen killed the fantasy with a stab of concentration. He was gifted with the highest utilitarian virtues; he was meticulous, he was thorough, he’d memorized a Latinized medical library with almost total recall. His steady hands were capable of tying almost invisible knots in synthetic, absorbable Vicryl sutures.

He could not afford an overactive imagination.

So it bothered him when he couldn’t control the adolescent excitement that speeded up his heart as he dialed the area code and the number and counted one ring, two, three . . .

“Hello,” the voice came on smooth and tight and to the point.

“Jo?”

“Allen, well, that was quick; who got the big Bambi?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the kitchen looking at the Weather Channel, you guys must be really catching it.”

“I want you to sit down and listen carefully; something happened.” He spoke in the available, but guarded, professional tone he used with the families of critical patients. He was not a hand-holder but he didn’t stand in doorways with his own hands in his pockets, either.

“Oh Christ, Hank didn’t fall off the wagon, did he? The way he was yelling on the phone . . .” She paused. When she resumed talking, first fear stiffened her voice. “Allen? Is everything all right?”

“Jo, it’s Hank. He ruptured himself. Bad.”

“Oh, Christ. I told him to have that taken care of.”

It sounded like she did sit down from the rush of concern in her voice. Succinctly, he explained the storm, the rupture, leaving Milt and Hank in the winter camp, the paddle out, how the guide and the cops were going back with a floatplane, and how he was now stranded in this one-horse hospital with a skeleton staff in a blizzard, anticipating operating under less than ideal conditions.

“Just be prepared,” he told her in his best level tone.

The velvet wore thin in her voice as she showed some bare knuckle. “Just what’s that supposed to mean? I’m not some fucking Boy Scout—you’d better give me more than that. You’d better tell me he’s going to be all right.”

“I’m just saying it’s bad up here, there’s a blizzard. Christ, he’s in this little airplane with some cowboy pilot.”

“Promise me, Allen. You’ve got to pull him through.”

“Don’t worry, Jo.” He pressed the cool plastic of the receiver against his forehead and blamed the fatigue, because he found himself looking at all the possible outcomes on this bad morning, and in one of them the plane simply disappeared into the storm and was never seen again. An Act of God.

She broke his glide. “Give me the phone number for the hospital, there must be an airstrip up there. I’ll watch the weather. I’ll get Earl to find a quick charter . . .”

“I don’t think Earl is a good idea under the circumstances,” Allen said tightly.

“He’s handy, he knows how to get things done. Like hire a plane on a short notice. I’m just being practical.”

“Hank hates him,” Allen said.

“Let me worry about that. You tuck your head into your surgeon’s cap and take care of business. I’m counting on you.”

“Yes,” Allen said simply, suddenly helpless before the inadequacy of language; so he gave her the hospital phone number, hung up the phone, and tried to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the sweat on his palms. Enough of this bullshit. It was time to get serious.

And finally the traction of his willpower engaged and he jettisoned the distractions—his personal life, the exhausting canoe trip out of the park, even Jolene. They became irrelevant as he narrowed in focus until his triangular face seemed to winnow to a point.

Then he raised his raw, blistered hands and inspected them. As always, he felt contempt for people who never touched anything except keyboards and telephones and money, who talked their way through life.

He took pride in making his living with his hands. During his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic he had worn a red-and-white- striped regimental tie under his staff coat. The pattern and the colors invoked the bloody bandages of the barber pole that had served as the original shingle surgeons hung out to advertise their profession. The surgeons had followed European armies out of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the modern era. They’d cut hair and they’d amputated arms and legs.

Allen smiled. Then, with the help of Mother Church, they’d rooted out the village midwives and the herbalist “witches” and consolidated their hold on medicine.

He was not without history. He was not without wit.

A surgeon of his generation couldn’t wear a tattoo on his arm like the new kids coming up—or like Hank Sommer could, and Allen envied Hank the cryptic messages dyed into his skin. And if Allen could have a secret tattoo it would be a Bard/Parker number-ten scalpel blade and it would say:
HEAL WITH STEEL
.

Now he mentally stripped himself until he saw himself as nude as a Michelangelo anatomy study. Then he dressed himself in successive layers of knowledge, confidence, and control. Only when he was fully mentally garbed did he visualize the entire operation, starting from the first incision.

He absolutely believed that anything he could visualize he could make happen in the controlled environment of an operating room.

When Allen stood up, his brow and his palms were dry. The guide, Broker, did not look like he was intimidated by Acts of God; he would persist. He would bring Hank back and lay him on an operating table and, true to the oath he had taken, Allen would insert a blade of the sharpest stainless steel just above Hank Sommer’s pubic bone and slice him open, lift out his guts with his two hands, repair them, and save his life.