Before My Life Began (18 page)

“I ain't your enemy,” Avie said. He spoke quickly, frantically. “It's Fasalino and those guys are your enemies, Abe. It's them we need to take care of. They're only suckering you, with the deal on territory. They're waiting until they feel stronger and then they'll try to carve you up good. They're scared of you, the way you reacted so fast. Now's the time to move in, don't you see? Now's the time, Abe—”

“All right then,” Abe said to Benny, and he nodded once. “Yes.”

Benny left the room and returned a few seconds later, pushing a young man in front of him. The young man was blindfolded. He was tall and thin, with curly strawberry-blond hair. He wore a doctor's white coat, open in the front.

“This is Dr. Feinberg,” Benny said, removing the blindfold. “We talked him into volunteering to help us out for our little job.”

“I'm not a doctor. I told you before. I'm only a medical student. I still have a year to go before—”

“Yeah, yeah. We know all about it. He'll do just fine.” Benny patted Feinberg on the back. “You don't worry about anything, doc—you just do your job and leave the worrying to us.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Avie said. “Have a heart, Abe. I mean, have a heart, for Christ's sake.” Avie stood up, but Turkish Sammy stopped him from moving toward my uncle.

“Sometimes, Davey,” Abe was saying to me, “we have to cut out an unhealthy part of the body—an infected organ, a cancer—in order to save the entire body. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Sometimes when I was overseas we'd have to cut off a soldier's leg or arm or finger in order to save—” He stopped, blinked, then wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, as if he were sweating. He wasn't. “Avie should not have touched you. Everybody needs to know what happens to the one individual who endangers us all.” He spoke to Benny. “Did you get everything the young man needs? I don't want any complications.”

Benny flashed Abe a grin that made me feel ill. He motioned to Louie and Louie reached under the metal table and brought out a carton, took a cloth package from the carton—something wrapped in a sheet—and put it on the table. Benny told Feinberg to check things out, to make sure everything was there.

“Listen,” Feinberg said to Abe. “You seem different from the others and I feel I can reason with you. You seem like a very intelligent man. I don't really understand what's going on and I don't think I want to, but—”

“That's right, doc—” Benny said.

“But I'm not allowed to do this kind of thing. You know that. I don't know your name yet and I don't want to, but should anything go wrong—”

“Hey kid, your hands are trembling, you know that?” Benny said. He took Feinberg's two hands in his own, as if he were thinking of bending the fingers back and cracking them, one at a time. “You want a shot of whiskey or something before you get started?”

“Yeah,” Louie said. “You guys remember that movie with Brian Donlevy where he has to operate on a guy in a submarine, only he's an old drunk and the Nazis are firing torpedoes at them and they ain't got much air left?”

“It was William Bendix,” Big Jap said. “You ask the kid here. It was William Bendix in the movie.”

“All right,” Abe said. “Begin. The longer we wait, the harder it will seem, for everybody.”

Turkish Sammy stood next to Feinberg. Feinberg swallowed hard. Soft golden hairs curled out on his chin next to two birthmarks. Turkish Sammy lifted Avie from his chair. Avie called for his mother. He screamed for her to come and help him, and then he began crying out for God to save him. Nobody told him to be quiet. Big Jap helped Turkish Sammy drag Avie across the floor. I thought of the story Beau Jack told me about a friend of his whose face was chewed up by a German attack dog so that you couldn't tell who he was afterwards. I saw a dark stain on the floor, trailing behind Avie.

Louie Newman held his nose.

“Jesus, Avie,” he said. “Don't be a fucking baby, huh? You seen a lot worse.”

“Ain't it true, Abe,” Big Jap said, “that when they think they're gonna die in the war they always call for God and their mommies?”

Avie lay on the table, his body heaving, his forearm across his eyes. For an instant I saw my mother on her couch, the washcloth over her eyes.

“There should be as little pain as possible,” Abe said. “I hope you understand that I'm not interested in hurting him.” He touched my arm. “Your imagination can often make things more horrible than they actually are. This is a simple procedure, isn't it, Mr. Feinberg?”

“At the hospital, yes,” Feinberg said. “I suppose it would be relatively routine there, but here—?” He almost smiled, winced instead. “‘There are no minor surgical procedures,' my professor says, ‘only minor surgeons.'”

Benny told Feinberg to stop talking and get started. He reminded him of their conversation, of what would happen to Feinberg if he refused to help. He asked him if there were many great surgeons who could work with broken hands.

“Infection is the major cause for concern. I'll need to wash up, to clean him where he lost control of his functions.”

“You know what I really think?” Benny said. “I think you're too good to guys like these, Abe. And then they crap all over you. You ask me, you should of let us do it the old way, just tie a string tight around his balls and slice.”

“Nah,” Louie said. “You don't even gotta slice. You just leave the string there, way up high and tight, so that the balls turn black and hard in a day or so. Then you let the poor sucker drag his ass into a hospital somewhere and they do the rest of the job for you, nice and safe. That's the way I seen it done in the old days. Remember what we did to Crapanzano? Hey, didn't you do it to him yourself, Avie—?”

Avie wept. I wondered if he had ever done things with Tony. Tony said that guys in the war who jacked off all the time were the first to get killed because they were always dozing off. He said that the guys who saved it lived the longest.

“Yeah,” Benny said. “Abe likes to run things modern, though. Only the best for Abe's boys, right?”

Feinberg washed up with soap and water and alcohol. He put on thin rubber gloves and unrolled the emergency kit. It was the kind used for minor procedures, like draining abscesses, Feinberg said. There were scalpels and hemostats and Kelly clamps. There were strange-shaped silver scissors with pointy ends that looked like the snouts on baby alligators.

As soon as Feinberg started on Avie, his nervousness disappeared. His hands were steady. He pulled down Avie's pants, pushed up his shirt and undershirt. Avie's penis was almost gone, drawn back inside his scrotum like a turtle's head. Feinberg looked at Benny, who patted his gun. Feinberg looked at my uncle. Abe nodded, and then Feinberg did not look at any of us again until he was done. I'd never seen such concentration. I'd never seen anybody be so patient and steady and careful. Feinberg took a hypodermic syringe that had a long needle, like the kind I imagined they used for horses, and he gave Avie a few injections of novocaine, along his thighs. Avie screamed. Turkish Sammy and Big Jap held his arms down. Louie stayed at the end of the table, palms on Avie's head. Feinberg explained each step as he went along, as if he were talking to himself, as if he were repeating things that had been taught to him. While the novocaine took effect, he washed Avie. Feinberg said that there was one large artery running to each testicle, and that there might be a great deal of blood after the incision. Sometimes incisions were made in the groin, above the genitals, and the testes were drawn up—that was the safest and neatest way, but to do that one needed hospital facilities. The procedure he was following was one he had seen used for cancer of the testes. Normally they would give the patient a spinal, especially if they went in from the top, but Feinberg believed that the novocaine would be sufficient.

He draped cloth around Avie's groin—over his stomach and legs, above the knees, in a lopsided open rectangle, so that all you could see underneath was hairy pink skin. I stepped closer. Benny joked about putting a mirror on the ceiling so Avie could watch also, and Abe told him to be quiet, that there was no need. I imagined that Abe had seen scenes like this, only worse, in field hospitals. I imagined the night sky lit up outside the tent, rockets and bombs and howitzers and flares. Was there somebody special in his unit—a young farm boy from Minnesota—whom Abe had loved? Had he once watched a boy like that die on the operating table? I thought of Spanish Louie's blackjack, hanging out of his back pocket, how he would always call it his
yarmulke
. If Spanish Louie were alive, I knew, Abe would be in jail, in danger of dying. Dead. I remembered Avie and Spanish Louie and Little Benny warning me and Tony not to tell my uncle what we saw them do on the night the war ended. Spanish Louie was dead. Avie was on the table. Only Little Benny was left unharmed, the way he'd been.

Feinberg checked Avie's pulse. He acted as if there was nobody else in the room with him. He picked up a scalpel and the smooth steel, reflecting the light from the fixture above our heads, flashed in my eyes, gleaming like the frozen surface of a clear pond. Feinberg bent over, hesitated. Then, with a slight and definite downward motion of his wrist, he made a slit in the scrotum. He reached inside and, cupping his fingers around Avie's testicle, as if he were scooping out seeds from the inside of a cantaloupe, he separated the testicle from the lining, pulled it down. Blood flowed onto the towels, brown and thick, splattering the white sheet. Feinberg sopped up the blood, dropped the towels and gauze to the floor. He reached inside again. He pulled down the vessels leading to the testicle, sliced them neatly, applied pressure to the severed tubes, tied them off with thin white strings that looked like dental floss. I'd never seen anybody work so deftly, so delicately.

He lifted the testicle, set it on top of the white cloth. It looked very small, like the kind of egg my mother sometimes found inside her chickens—
ayelas
, she called them—except that it was threaded pink with veins. Did doctors remove patients' eyes in the same way? How far forward could you pull an eye from its socket without detaching it while you operated behind it, inside the skull?

Feinberg worked on the left testicle. For a split-second I wondered if I was really human, to be able to watch what was happening and not to find it horrible. Why didn't it make me feel sick? Why did it all fascinate me so?

I remembered my friends telling each other that the way the Japanese tortured American flyers who were shot down over the Philippines or Tokyo or Saipan was to tie them to stakes and to dance beautiful naked women in front of them. When the soldiers got erections, the Japanese commander would come along with his curved sword and chop their dicks off. I'd always gotten sweaty and cold along my thighs when the guys talked about that. Why had that frightened me, when what I was watching now didn't—when it seemed magical, almost beautiful? I felt as if I could have watched Feinberg's hands forever. With the fingers of one hand, he was tying small knots.

Abe touched the back of my neck. His fingertips were warm. He moved away from me, stroked Avie's forehead. He told him that he'd be able to lead a more normal life, that now he would live to be an old man. Avie wept like a baby, but quietly, and he didn't seem to feel pain, to know when things were happening to him. Benny said he would spread the story, for a warning to others. Avie told Abe that he was sorry for the trouble he'd caused, for making Abe do this to him. He held Abe's hand against his wet cheek.

Feinberg worked on, carefully wiping things with the corner of a towel, blotting things with gauze. Benny said that in the old days they sometimes got veterinarians to do the job. Feinberg sprinkled sulfa powder into Avie's scrotum. He said that he wasn't going to sew Avie up permanently because he wanted to be sure no infection set in. He said that Avie should walk into an emergency ward the next day—but not to Kings County—and that they would take care of the rest. He gave Avie another injection and told Abe that Avie would be in some pain when the novocaine wore off, that Abe should get a strong painkiller for him—Demerol, if he could. Feinberg looked at my uncle for the first time since he'd begun the operation and when he spoke there was something proud and defiant in his voice. He declared that he himself could not write out a prescription because he was not yet an M.D.

I watched Feinberg remove his gloves, one finger at a time. I saw how clean his nails were, how soft his palms. I saw sweat roll down his forehead and cheeks. He seemed exhausted suddenly. I had forgotten how young he was. He stepped away from the table. Abe covered Avie with a sheet, a thin gray blanket. Avie's eyes were closed. Was he asleep? If you could watch long enough and hard enough, without falling asleep or looking away, I wondered if you would be able to see cells begin to grow back toward one another, if you would be able to see the body heal itself, the new skin grow.

“Here you go, kid,” Benny said, and he peeled a few bills from his money roll, handed them to Feinberg.

Feinberg slapped Benny's hand, knocking the bills to the floor.

“I don't want your dirty money.”

“Now you be careful there, kid,” Benny said. “You did a good job for us, but if you get fresh you'll maybe have to look for another profession, like I warned you before. You need real good hands for your work.”

Feinberg turned to my uncle. “All right,” he said, breathing hard. “You got what you wanted from me, but I don't have to take your dirty money, do you hear?”

“I have ears,” Abe said.

“Pick it up, kid,” Benny said. “You be a good boy and bend down and pick up your money. We ain't welchers.”

“Never,” Feinberg said.

“Money is never dirty, Mr. Feinberg,” Abe stated. “If you were ever poor, you would know that. Money is never dirty. Money gives people the freedom to live the way they want. The world exists to protect the people who earn money and have money. That's reality. You've earned your fee and I want you to have it.”