Captain Quad (7 page)

Suddenly, explosively, he had shit in his bed.

"Come on," Peter hissed in the stormy silence. "Come on!"

But no one came.

He broke wet wind, the stink of it immediately unbearable; nothing like it had ever come from inside him before. It was an old man's stink. The stink of an open grave.

Tears scalded his cheeks.

"Come on!" he pleaded, shouting now. "Come on, you lazy bitch! Come on!"

That voice. That voice in his head.

This is it, man. This is what you are. All that physio and occupational therapy they've been putting you through is not intended to help you get better. Its only purpose is to curb the decay.

"No!" It was a roar, so huge it made his ears ring.

He broke wind again. Or was it. . . ?

"Get in here!" His head shot up like the head of a cobra, his neck muscles flaring in a hood. "Get the fuck in here!"

It was leaking out of him now. He couldn't feel it, but he knew that it was.

(oh the stink)

Peter's shouts fused together into a furious unbroken bellow, like that of an air horn. He could hear footfalls in the hallway now, quick and staccato.

Come ahead in, Larue, he thought bitterly. Got a sweet-smelling surprise for you.

(this is what you are)

"No!" he cried again, as the night nurse poked her pretty face into the room.

"What—" she started to say.

Then the smell hit her, and she knew. It was all over her face—the revulsion, the disgust—and suddenly Peter wanted her out of his sight. He wanted to lie here in the stink of his own shit and die, because the voice in his head was right; it had always been right. His mother had lied.

This was what he was.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he cried, spittle spraying from his mouth.

"Tell you what?" the nurse asked. But she knew that, too.

"Why?" Peter wailed.

Filled with pity and compassion, Louise approached Peter's bed, doing her best to ignore the smell of him. She'd seen this before with some of the other quads, this sudden savage awareness, coming so long after most people assumed they'd figured things out for themselves. The strength of denial was brute. Louise felt bad that she hadn't heard him calling before now. She'd been in the john, not preening but changing a tampon, and her partner was downstairs on break. Nights were usually so quiet up here, she hadn't thought she'd be missed for the few minutes her business would take. As it was, she'd barely avoided soiling her uniform. . .

Oh, Christ, why didn't they involve a psychiatrist in these cases earlier? Someone who could level with these poor bastards and know when it was best to do so?

She reached out to touch Peter's cheek, to comfort him—and Peter spat in her face.

"Get out, cunt! Get out!"

Biting back her own abrupt anger, Louise snatched a tissue from Peter's bedside dispenser and wiped the saliva away.

"Peter, I—"

"Out!"

Louise backed away, suddenly afraid. Her fear was irrational—there was no way he could harm her—but she felt it nonetheless, deep, solid, and cold.

"I'll be right back," she said as she left.

"Don't you dare!" Peter shouted after her. "Don't you dare come back in here!"

Her footfalls faded in the dark.

"He's in a rage," Louise told Dr. Lowe over the phone. "He spat in my face. . .”

Lowe sighed heavily. It was four in the morning. He lived twenty minutes from the hospital when the roads were bare, and they'd been issuing storm warnings all night. Still, he'd have to go in.

"Give me half an hour," he said, and hung up the phone.

Had it been possible to wish death to happen, to conjure it out of a hat, then Peter would have done so willingly on this bleak winter's night. He was a quad, a human head grafted to a nerveless garbage heap that shit itself and pissed itself and would eventually wither and die. He would never move more than his head for as long as he lived. He would never walk again, play the piano again, make love again. . . and he would never fly.

Peter's mind reeled like a toddler fresh off a carnival ride. Even parading before him as it was, the truth seemed incomprehensible. Maybe he had died and this was hell, punishment for sins unrecognized. Surely it couldn't be real?

Hell. . . that was it. He'd died beneath those huge rubber wheels, the same wheels that tramped over him anew each night in his dreams; he'd died and gone straight to hell. This was Lucifer's style, wasn't it? Let you stew for a few decades before popping up and bleating, "Guess what, motherfucker?"

The door creaked open.

"Who's there?"

The pale light of the corridor crept in, printing a stoop-shouldered shadow on the wall.

"It's me, Peter. Dr. Lowe."

"Don't you come in here," Peter warned. But a lot of the rage had drained out of him. Now he only felt stunned, concussed by the immutable truth.

Lowe came ahead in. The reek of excrement was still there, but the doctor showed no sign that he noticed. He stood at the end of the bed, hands on the foot rail, eyes unreadable in the dark.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Peter said.

Lowe sighed tiredly. "Because it wouldn't have registered."

Fury and shame battled for dominance in Peter's mind. Shame because he was lying here satcheled in his own shit, screaming at people who were only doing their jobs in the best way they knew how. And fury, not because the doctor was wrong, but because of the rehearsed smugness of his reply, as if he saved this line for all the new quads—"Because it wouldn't have registered"—waiting like a stage actor for that single elusive moment of purest dramatic effect.

Finally the shame won out. He apologized to Louise and the doctor and allowed the nurse to clean him up and then jab a sedative into his arm. Seeing the needle, he flinched in anticipation of the pain that never came.

But as the dope took effect and the door shut him in, the fury swirled up again, stewing like lava, waiting to erupt.

The next morning Kelly Wheeler left Peter's ninth-floor hospital room for the last time. She walked outside into the cruel January air with her coat half buttoned and her bare hands dangling at her sides. To the security guard stamping his feet by the parking booth, she looked like someone who'd just been clobbered with a nightstick.

The day was windy and brutally cold, the sun a high white blank in the sky. Powdery snow swirled in the gunfire gusts, and frost snapped like a wolverine at whatever exposed flesh it could find.

Kelly didn't notice. What had just transpired between her and Peter had erased the final chapters of her life. Now she was blank, like the sun. Empty and cold. She went to the bus stop, but let her bus drone past. After a while she began to walk.

She sat naked in the middle of her bed, lotus style, her head aching miserably, her face and hands smarting with chilblains. In the triangular enclosure between her legs lay a pastel assortment of pills: tranquilizers, analgesics, a dozen Demerol tablets her dad had left over from his disk surgery, others. Ranged about her on the quilt lay the tangible remnants of her past, treasured keepsakes transformed into pockets of pain by a sadistic whim of fate.

She examined each of them in turn.

The torn halves of the tickets to last year's Sadie Hawkins dance. How surprised he'd been when she asked him, stammering like a kid, glancing over his shoulder to be sure it was him she was addressing. She had known even then that if she hadn't made the first move they might never have gotten together. The desire was there, all over his face, like a rash that surfaced only when their eyes met. . . but a mover he wasn't.

A red rose, dried, pressed, and sleeved in waxed paper. He'd waited on line at the Dairy Queen, where Kelly had been working for the summer, for almost an hour on the hottest day of that August, one hand hidden behind his back, his sweat-dampened T-shirt plastered to his chest and that just-for-you smile spread bashfully over his face. And when he finally reached her window, he'd poked the rose through the slot and then pressed his lips to the glass. By the time she got it, the blossom had been limp and droopy with the heat. But she'd kept every petal.

Pictures. . .

And The Book, as they came to know it. A dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra. She'd picked it up in the Health section at the Coles bookstore on Elm Street and had begun to leaf through it idly. . . and had felt herself flush as she scanned random passages, not out of embarrassment (though the descriptions of positions and techniques left little to the imagination), but out of excitement at the prospect of bringing such forbidden ecstasies to her lover. She'd taken it up to the cashier, clumsily camouflaged amid a stack of $1.99 specials from the grab tables—such edifying titles as Dogs, Lichens and Fungi of North America and Automotive Mechanics—and had almost slipped it through. . . but then the girl at the register, a plump redhead with mascara so thick it was peeling, had trilled, "Oh, you're gonna love this one, sweetie," and had flipped it open herself. "Here," she'd confided, winking and tapping a page near the middle. "Start right here. You'll give him a hernia."

They'd had a ball with that book, she and her man. . . and she had given him everything but a hernia.

She went through it all, item by item, memory by sweet loving memory.

Then, almost dreamily, she scooped up a handful of pills.

EIGHT

On a Thursday evening in the middle of January, Rhett Kiley and Jerry Jeter sat stageside at the Coulson Hotel and watched a stripper listlessly peel off her outfit. When she cut her tits loose—fat, pendulous things with nipples the size of bullets—Jerry thumped the table with his fist, then grinned stupidly at Rhett.

Stunned fucker, Rhett thought, not unkindly. He'd always had a tolerant, big-brotherly affection for Jerry, and the sentiment seemed to have doubled since Jerry's football accident the previous fall.

"'Nother brew?" Rhett said, and Jerry nodded his bandaged head. Rhett hailed a waitress and ordered two cold ones. The quiff on the stage was down on her ass now, doing the old beaver shot for the pervs in the front row, and Rhett glanced at her disinterestedly.

What a drag, he thought, a sour belch burbling up from his guts. Barely twenty-one and already his life was on the skids. He'd been sure, so fucking sure the college scouts were going to pick him up, he hadn't even considered his alternatives. There was nothing else he wanted to do anyway. For Rhett, it had always been a pro-ball career or bust.

Well, it looked like a bust. Without a football scholarship, there had been little point in going on to college. What was he going to be? A lawyer? A fucking pharmacist like clever old Mike Gore? Right. If it hadn't been for his superstar status in high school, he never would have made it through. Even with the coach pulling strings for him, it had taken Rhett seven years to get his diploma.

The waitress came back with their beers. Rhett paid her, then drained half his bottle at a pull. He glanced at Jerry, who had his eyes glued to the stripper's snatch, and felt a faint twinge of envy for the guy. Jerry was no Einstein either, but he'd always had a cheerful, fun-loving nature, and he could run like the proverbial wind. Michigan State had picked him up on a nice juicy scholarship, but his first game out, Jerry had taken it in the head in a ten-man pileup and had ended up under the knife. Epidural hematoma, they'd called it. He spent a month in the hospital after his transfer back from the States, and now, two months later. . . well, the poor little fucker was different. Maybe it'd wear off with time, Rhett thought halfheartedly, not really believing it. But since his surgery, Jerry seemed sort of. . . stunned. Yeah. That said it best. That bright, mischievous light was gone from his eyes, and instead of spouting wild ideas like he used to, he just sort of sat there, waiting for something to happen. He looked okay, maybe a little clumsy on his feet. . . but something was missing. Too bad. He could have been big. He could have made it to the pros.

"I've been thinking," Rhett said now, having trouble diverting Jerry's attention from the stripper. "My old man's been talking about retiring this winter, and he wants me to take over the business." Gord Kiley owned a Texaco station on Frood Road. Rhett was no mechanic, but Jerry could fix just about anything, and Rhett's dad already had a Class A mechanic on the payroll. "I've been thinking I might take him up on his offer," Rhett said expansively. To this point he'd been doing little more than drawing unemployment insurance, cadging beers, and smoking cigarillos. He lit one now. "Want a job?"

Jerry grinned. "Fuckin' A, Rhett, old buddy! I'm yer man!"

Rhett puffed on his smoke and laughed. Fine fucking pair they'd turned out to be. Football jocks turned mechanics. Who'd've thought?

"Is the fishing trip still on for this weekend?" Jerry said as the stripper strode bare-assed off the stage, her performance finished.

"Shit, that's right," Rhett said into the sudden lull. He'd almost forgotten—every year, the third weekend in January. Gardner had dreamed up this gig back in seventy-nine, when the four of them had first started chumming around together. Maybe that was why Rhett had forgotten; there'd been a lot of water under the bridge in the seven months since Gardner's accident. It hadn't even occurred to him to keep up the tradition. Gardner had made it into an annual event: "Something we should try not to miss no matter where our lives take us," he'd said, "as a means of keeping our friendship alive." Gardner was like that. Sappy. They'd even built themselves a small hut back there in the woods, a condo for their own private lake. If they made the trip this year, it'd be the first time they did so without Peter.

"Think you can make it with that rag on your head?" Rhett said agreeably, thinking, What the hell. We don't need Gardner anyway.

"This shit?" Jerry said, fingering the soiled turbanlike bandage beneath his Michigan State cap. "It's comin' off tomorrow."

"Then we're on. I'll phone old Mikey tonight. I'm sure we can drag his nose out of those books long enough to drill a few holes in the ice. Whaddya think?"

Jerry thought that sounded just fine.