Blood Test (8 page)

“Eight thirty you should catch them.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Bev, “I’ve got the number
of the place they’re staying—some motel on the west side. I’ll call and leave a
message. If they show up today do you want to come back?”

I considered it. Nothing on the agenda that couldn’t
wait. “Sure. Call my exchange. They’ll know where to reach me.” I gave her the
number.

“All right, Alex, you’d better get in there before you
truck a few million pathogens over the border. See ya.”

She hoisted the large purse over her shoulder and
walked out the door.

I stepped into the Laminar Airflow Room.

He’d sat up and his dark eyes followed my entry.

“I look like a spaceman, huh?”

“I can tell who you are,” he said gravely, “everyone
looks different.”

“That’s good. I always had trouble recognizing people
when they wore these things.”

“Ya gotta look close, with strong eyes.”

“I see. Thanks for the advice.”

I got the box of checkers and unfolded the board on
the armlike table that swung across the bed.

“What color do you want to be?”

“Dunno.”

“Black goes first, I think. You wanna go first?”

“Uh huh.”

He was precociously good at the game, able to plot,
set up moves, and think sequentially. A bright little boy.

A couple of times I tried to engage him in
conversation but he ignored me. It wasn’t shyness or lack of good manners. His
attention was focused on the checkerboard and he didn’t even hear the sound of
my voice. When he completed a move he’d lean back against the pillows with a
satisfied look on his grave little face and say, “There! Your turn,” in a voice
made soft by fatigue.

We were halfway through the game and he was giving me
a run for my money when he clutched his abdomen and cried out in pain.

I eased him down and felt his brow. Low-grade fever.

“Your tummy hurts, doesn’t it?”

He nodded and wiped his eyes with the back of his
hand.

I pressed the call button. Vangie, the Filipino nurse,
appeared on the other side of the plastic.

“Abdominal pain. Febrile,” I told her.

She frowned and disappeared, returning with a cup of
liquid acetominophen held in a gloved hand.

“Swing that counter over this way, would you.”

She set the medicine on the slab of Formica.

“You can take it now and give it to him. The resident’s
due by within the hour to check him over.”

I returned to the boy’s bedside, propped him up with
one hand behind his head, and held the liquid to his lips with the other.

“Open up, Woody. This will make it hurt less.”

“Okay, Doctor Delaware.”

“I think you’d better rest now. You played a good
game.”

He nodded and the curls bounced. “Tie?”

“I’d say so. Although you were getting me pretty good
at the end. Can I come back and play with you again?”

“Uh huh.” He closed his eyes.

“Rest up, now.”

By the time I was out of the unit and had shed the
paper suit, he was asleep, lips parted, sucking gently at the softness of the
pillow.

THE NEXT morning I drove east on Sunset under a sky
streaked with tin-strip clouds and thought about last night’s dreams—the same
kind of spooky, murky images that had plagued my sleep when I first started
working in oncology. It had taken a good year to chase those demons away and
now I wondered if they’d ever been gone or had just been lurking in my
subconscious, ever ready for mischief.

Raoul’s world was madness and I found myself resenting
him for drawing me back into it.

Children weren’t supposed to get cancer.

Nobody was supposed to get cancer.

The diseases that fell under the domain of the
marauding crab were ultimate acts of histologic treason, the body assaulting,
battering, raping, murdering itself in a feeding frenzy of rogue cells gone
berserk.

I slipped a Lenny Breau cassette into the tape deck
and hoped that the guitarist’s fluid genius would take my mind far away from
plastic rooms and bald children and one little boy with henna-colored curls and
a Why Me? look in his eyes. But I could see his face and the faces of so many
other sick children I’d known, weaving in and out of the arpeggios, ephemeral,
persistent, begging for rescue…

Given that state of mind, even the sleaze that
heralded the entry into Hollywood seemed benign, the half-naked whores nothing
more than big-hearted welcome wagoners.

I drove through the last mile of boulevard in a blue
funk, parked the Seville in the doctors’ lot, and walked through the front door
of the hospital with my head down, warding off social overtures.

I climbed the four flights to the oncology ward and
was halfway down the hall before hearing the ruckus. Opening the door to the
Laminar Airflow Unit turned up the volume.

Raoul stood, bug-eyed, his back to the modules,
alternately cursing in rapid Spanish and screaming in English at a group of
three people:

Beverly Lucas held her purse across her chest like a
shield, but it wouldn’t stay in one place because the hands that clutched it
were shaking. She stared at a distant point beyond Melendez-Lynch’s
white-coated shoulder and bit her lip, straining not to choke on anger and
humiliation.

The broad face of Ellen Beckwith bore the startled,
terrified look of someone caught in the midst of a smarmy, private ritual. She
was primed for confession, but unsure of her crime.

The third member of the audience was a tall,
shaggy-haired man with a hound dog face and squinty, heavy-lidded eyes. His
white coat was unbuttoned and worn carelessly over faded jeans and a
cheap-looking shirt of the sort that used to be called psychedelic but now
looked merely garish. A belt with an oversized buckle in the shape of an Indian
chief bit into a soft-looking middle. His feet were large and the toes were
long, almost prehensible. I could tell because he’d encased them, sockless, in
Mexican huaraches. His face was clean-shaven and his skin was pale. The shaggy
hair was medium brown, streaked with gray, and it hung to his shoulders. A puka
shell necklace ringed a neck that had begun to turn to wattle.

He stood impassively, as if in a trance, a serene look
in the hooded eyes.

Raoul saw me and stopped his harangue.

“He’s gone, Alex.” He pointed to the plastic room
where I’d played checkers less than twenty-four hours ago. The bed was empty.

“Removed from under the noses of these so-called
professionals.”
He dismissed the trio with a contemptuous wave of his hand.

“Why don’t we talk about it somewhere else,” I
suggested. The black teenager in the unit next door was peering out through the
transparent wall with a puzzled look on his face.

Raoul ignored me.

“They
did
it. Those quacks. Came in as radiation techs and kidnapped him. Of course, if
anyone had possessed the good sense to
read the chart
to find out if
radiologic studies had been ordered, they might have prevented this—felony!”

He was boring in on the fat nurse now, and she was on
the verge of tears. The tall man came out of his trance and tried to rescue
her.

“You can’t expect a nurse to think like a cop.” His
speech was just barely tinged with a Gallic lilt.

Raoul wheeled on him.

“You! Keep your damned comments to yourself! If you
had an iota of understanding of what medicine is all about we might not be in
this mess.
Like a cop!
If that means exercising vigilance and care to
insure a patient’s safety and security, then she damn well does have to think
like a cop! This isn’t an Indian reservation, Valcroix! It’s life-threatening
disease and invasive procedures and using the brain that God gave us to make
inferences and deductions and
decisions
, for God’s sake! It’s
not
managing a reverse isolation unit like a bus terminal, where people come in and
out and tell you they’re someone they’re not and whisk your patient away from
under your lazy, sloppy, careless nose!”

The other doctor’s response was a cosmic smile as he
zoned back out into never-never land.

Raoul glared at him, ready to pounce. The gangly black
boy watched the confrontation, eyes wide and frightened, from behind his
plastic screen. A mother visiting her child in the third module stared, then
drew the curtains protectively.

I took Raoul by the elbow and escorted him to the
nurses’ office. The Filipino nurse was there, charting. After one look at us,
she grabbed her paperwork and left.

He picked up a pencil from the desk and snapped it
between his fingers. Tossing the broken pieces to the floor, he kicked them
into a corner.

“That bastard! The arrogance, to debate me in front of
ancillary staff—I’ll terminate his fellowship and get rid of him once and for
all.”

He ran a hand over his brow, chewed on his mustache,
and tugged at his jowls until the swarthy flesh turned rosy.

“They took him,” he said. “Just like that.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“What I want is to find those Touchers and strangle
them with my bare hands and—”

I picked up the phone. “You want me to call Security?”

“Ha! A bunch of senile alcoholics who need help
finding their own flashlights—”

“What about the police? It’s an abduction now.”

“No,” he said quickly. “They won’t do a damned thing
and it will be a freakshow for the media.”

He found Woody’s chart and leafed through it, hissing.

“Radiology—why would I schedule x-rays for a child
whose treatment is up in the air! It makes no sense. Nobody thinks anymore.
Automatons, all of them!”

“What do you want to do about it?” I repeated.

“Damned if I know,” he admitted and slapped the chart
on the desktop.

We sat in glum silence for a moment.

“They’re probably halfway to Tijuana,” he said, “on a
pilgrimage to some damned Laetrile
clinica
—did you ever see those
places? Murals of crabs on filthy adobe walls. That’s their salvation! Fools!”

“It’s possible they haven’t gone anywhere. Why don’t
we check?”

“How?”

“Beverly has the number of the place they’re staying.
We can call and find out if they’ve checked out.”

“Play detective—yes, why not? Call her in.”

“Be civil to her, Raoul.”

“Fine, fine.”

I beckoned the social worker away from a powwow with
Valcroix and Ellen Beckwith, who gave me the kind of look usually reserved for
plague carriers.

I told her what I wanted and she nodded wearily.

Once in the office she avoided looking at Raoul and
silently dialed the phone. There was a brief exchange with the motel clerk,
after which she hung up and said:

“The guy was real uncooperative. He hasn’t seen them
today but they haven’t checked out. The car’s still there.”

“If you’d like,” I offered, “I’ll go there, try to
make contact with them.”

Raoul consulted his appointment book.

“Meetings until three. I’ll cancel out. Let’s go.”

“I don’t think you should be there, Raoul.”

“That’s absurd, Alex! I’m the
physician!
This
is a medical issue—”

“Only nominally. Let me handle it.”

His thick brows curled and fury rose in the coffee
bean eyes. He started to say something but I cut him off.

“We have to at least consider the possibility,” I said
softly, “that this whole thing may be due to a conflict between the family and
you.”

He stared at me, making sure he’d heard right,
purpled, choked on his anger, and threw up his hands in despair.

“How could you even—”

“I’m not saying it’s so. Just that we need to consider
it. What we want is that boy back in treatment. Let’s maximize the probability
of success by covering all contingencies.”

He was mad as hell but I’d given him something to
think about.

“Fine. There’s no shortage of things for me to do
anyway. Go yourself.”

“I want Beverly along. Of anyone she’s got the best
feel for the family.”

“Fine, fine. Take Beverly. Take whomever you want.”

He straightened his tie and smoothed nonexistent
wrinkles in the long white coat.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, my friend,” he said,
straining to be cordial, “I’ll be off to the lab.”

The Sea Breeze Motel was on west Pico, set amid cheap
apartments, dusty storefronts, and auto garages on a dingy slice of the
boulevard just before L.A. surrenders to Santa Monica. The place was two stories
of pitted chartreuse stucco and drooping pink wrought-iron railing. Thirty or
so units looked down upon an asphalt motor court and a swimming pool
half-filled with algae-clogged water. The only breeze evident was the steaming
layer of exhaust fumes that rose from the oily pavement as we pulled in beside
a camper with Utah plates.