Prelude to a Scream (34 page)

“You think you can handle them?” Iris asked.

“If you hear any shooting while you're up there, run like hell. But,” he added quietly, “there won't be any shooting. These are professionals. Professionals don't get themselves shot. They get themselves lawyers.”

Iris moved closer. “Okay.”

“In a line,” Stanley said to the rest of the room. “All of you. Along this side of the operating table. Keep your hands where we can see them, and think Christian thoughts.”

Nobody moved.

“Shoot one of them, Iris.”

“Wh-what?”

“Hey” said Jaime uncertainly.

“You heard me. Do it!”

“Take it easy, man.”

Iris moved the gun back and forth. “Wh-which one? I-I mean…”

Stanley locked his eye with one of the green ones. “I don't care. Just don't hesitate.”

“I'm moving,” said Vince, stepping around the foot of the operating table. Jaime quickly followed him. Djell already stood at the head of it with Sibyl.

Stanley turned his head forty-five degrees to his right, so as to take in his four adversaries and Iris' gun hand all at once.

Iris was right next to him now, ready to transfer the pistol from her control to Stanley's. She glanced at his hand. “Better wipe the blood off your paw.”

To his left was a pillow. He placed it over his lap and scrubbed his hands on it until most of the blood was gone.

“Ready?”

“I guess,” said Stanley.

Opposite, the four stood tensely; each, in his own way, measuring, calculating, studying the chances. Stanley would take but a second or two to get the gun from Iris' hand, but he might drop it. Though he was still naked, and the room was cold, his hands were sweating. Dropping the gun was a distinct possibility, and he had a sudden vision of the heavy .45 squirting out of his or Iris' hands. Of the two of them only Iris would be agile enough to go after it. Stanley was visibly woozy. But only Vince or Green Eyes would be possessed of enough alacrity to capitalize on such a mistake. Djell would hold himself above direct action, willing to stand by while even the most appalling events unfolded. Jaime was scared and nervous. Vince, a big man, was ready for action. And Green Eyes?

Green Eyes was watching every move Stanley made, attending her chance, abiding, confident in her prowess. All she had to do was wait, as patient and certain of ultimate victory as a spider, her perfect web spun between the ceiling bulb and a broken window in a rural summer phone booth.

So Sibyl was watching Stanley, and Stanley was watching Sibyl, when he said, “Okay. Give me the gun.”

As she passed it to him Stanley did a funny thing, unexpected by anyone in the room. He withdrew his right hand and presented the palm of his left hand, into which the gun slapped as if the hand were a mitt and the gun a ball.

This simple change-up checked everybody.

“I didn't know you were ambidextrous,” breathed Iris, taking a single step away from Stanley.

“I'm not,” Stanley smiled, switching the gun to his right hand. “But how coordinated do you have to be to pull a trigger?”

Iris hesitated. “Should I make the call now?”

A prescient weakness seemed to have possessed her, a clairvoyant passivity that momentarily robbed her of the impetus of movement, even of the will to flee.

Sibyl saw immediately that something was up.

Stanley cleared his throat. “Okay.” He pointed the gun at Sturgeon's corpse. “What's his blood type?”

Silence.

Stanley pointed the gun at Djell. “Answer the goddamn question.”

Djell shook his head. “No idea.”

“Tough,” said Stanley. “What's yours?”

“AB-Negative,” Djell said, without hesitation.

Stanley sighted the pistol on Sibyl. “Yours, Green Eyes?”

She regarded him malevolently.

Stanley tilted his head back a little more. A rivulet of type O-Negative coursed over his right temple and into his ear. “I'll kill you,” he said simply. “Don't doubt it.”

“I'm AB-Negative too,” said Sibyl.

“That's an interesting coincidence.”

She shrugged toward Djell.

Djell interjected, “We thought so too, when we wanted to have kids.”

Stanley set his jaw. This information annoyed him. “This really brings you down in my estimation,” he said to Sibyl.

Sibyl smiled contemptuously. “Your estimation is not even on my scope.”

Stanley stared at her. He could shoot her now. It would be easy. And smart. It might even be defensible.

But his addled brain had formed a plan. Sibyl's contempt paled next to this plan because she had a part to play in it.

Two more to go.

“Stanley…,” Iris began.

He trained the gun on the anesthesiologist. “Blood group?”

Jaime glanced to one side and another, then smiled nervously. “What is this,” he squeaked. “A lottery?”

“If this were a movie,” said Stanley. “I would cock this pistol. But,” he showed it sideways to them and smiled. “It's already cocked.” He pointed it at Jaime again. “Blood type.”

“AB-positive. But I have low platelets—.”

“Shut up. Vince?”

Vince shook his head and smiled. “I got no idea, boss.”

Stanley believed him. There was a good chance the others were lying, but there was little he could do about it.

Besides, given the disposition of personnel, their skills and utility, their relevance to the surgical team, there were really only three people in the room he could use.

And only one he was sure of.

Well,
said the little voice.
Is you or ain't you sick of this life, and everything good in it?

He cocked his asymmetric vision toward Iris.

Iris backed away from him a step, toward the far end of the gurney and the double doors beyond. “I'll go make the call,” she said hopefully.

He turned his head toward Green Eyes. “You'd better catch her,” Stanley said, in a very tired voice, “Before she gets to that phone.”

A stunned silence filled the room.

“He's bullshitting,” yelled Vince, and he lunged toward Stanley.

Stanley shot Vince in the chest.

Vince embraced the vector of the bullet, like a gum wrapper speared by a nail on a stick, and wilted to the floor. The windowless chamber vibrated to the discharge like an oil drum struck by an iron bar.

Gun works good,
observed the little voice.

The reverberations of the shock had hardly faded when Sibyl shouted, “Get her!” and sprang toward Iris like a mantis. She had to leap over Vince's body to do it. Jaime followed, side-stepping Vince carefully.

Iris was almost too stunned to react. She managed to turn half way around before Stanley stood off the gurney and neatly rolled it between her and the double doors, blocking her exit. Then Sibyl was on her, Jaime was clutching at her, and even Djell arrived at the margins of the fracas.

Iris fought back. She thoroughly clawed one side of Djell's face with her fingernails before Sibyl knocked her half over the gurney with a business-like backhand to the side of her head. It resounded so thoroughly that Stanley winced and shouted, “Don't hurt her!”

Subdued by six hands, Iris resigned herself to uncontrolled weeping and cursing.

“You bastard,” she said, “I saved your worthless life…”

“And you're going to save it again, Iris,” Stanley said. “Try to understand.”

“Yeah,” said Jaime, rolling his eyes incredulously. “Try to understand.”

“But why?” she wailed, shaking her head. “Why?”

“That's easy,” said Green Eyes calmly. “You two must have the same blood type.”

Iris stared at her.

“Like me and Manny,” Sibyl smirked.

“A match made in heaven,” Jaime sneered.

Iris looked from Sibyl to Djell to Jaime to Stanley. “I've had you in my bed!” she shouted.

Stanley exchanged glances with Green Eyes. Hers said,
Oh, she has, has she?
Stanley's said,
If only I could test your blood.

“Look at it this way,” he said gently. “It'll be over in no time. Then you'll have your own scar to be fond of.”

Iris cursed him.

Djell and Jaime gaped, looking from Stanley to Iris and back again.

“What deliciously low behavior,” Jaime said admiringly. “I've never seen the like of it, not even in Polk Gulch.”

Green Eyes was fascinated, too. “You want a kidney,” she said, only half aloud. “You really did come here because you want a new kidney.”

Stanley fixed her with a look. “That's all that's keeping you alive, honey.”

This disconcerted Djell. “Look,” he began. “Let's—.”

“Shut your mouth,” Stanley said. “Pay attention.”

Stanley let Iris weep and curse for a while longer. Then he said, “One scar wasn't enough for you, was it?”

Iris ceased weeping as suddenly as if she had thrown a switch. A mad leer flashed over her mouth before she could muster enough sense to bluster, “You're crazy. You think I'd let you risk an eye operation under these conditions, just to collect a fresh…” She stopped.

“Say it.”

“A fresh…”

“Yes? A fresh what?”

“Sc… Sc…”

Her voice caught in her throat.

“Put her on the table,” Stanley said. “Let's get on with it.”

“You're crazy!” shouted Iris.

By now Jaime had caught on.

“Wow.” said Jaime, looking from Iris to Stanley and back as he held one of Iris' thrashing arms. “And this chick's a friend of yours?”

“She's more than a friend,” said Stanley, fixing him with his one-eyed stare.

“She's a donor.”

Chapter Twenty Seven

I
RIS LAY ON HER SIDE.
A
PADDED DEVICE CALLED A KIDNEY REST
, built into the table, enabled Djell to elevate her hip to facilitate access.

Her skin was beautiful, lambent.

Djell's scalpel pulled a red curve along the line of her twelfth rib, back to front, ending just before her navel. This was the first trace of the flank incision. Then, with surprising rapidity, while Sibyl expertly reflected the muscle layers and fascia, the knife progressively revealed the inner Iris. Djell's dexterity impressed Stanley, for whose visceral fascination a visceral revulsion competed. If Stanley had figured a sleazy criminal as incapable of anything other than ham-fisted surgeonry, he'd been wrong.

Djell announced that the girl's kidney was “low.” Helium Jaime and Sibyl nodded.

“What's that mean?” Stanley asked suspiciously.

“Means he won't have to resect the rib,” Jaime said, adjusting a valve.

“Forehead,” said Djell. He inclined his head toward his wife and she dabbed it with a cloth.

“Ah, look, buddy,” said Jaime, raising his hand. “We can see that the Doc's hands are shaking a little bit, and nobody wants no wiggy scalpel around the peritoneum. If you don't mind, I'm just going to start a conversation, here. It helps us relax.”

“Sure,” said Stanley. “But keep it down.”

Jaime didn't hesitate. “Hey, Djell, you ever heard that Chicago slang for girlfriend?”

“No,” Djell said, carefully adjusting a reflector.

“Rib,” said Jaime gleefully. “Get it?”

“No.”

“God took a rib from Adam to make Eve, see. And the Chicago brothers all know that, 'cause they got raised in church — right? Vince told me this…”

Nobody looked at Vince, so recently deceased.

“So one day this one linguistically mythical brother, he's in need of a new slang expression by which to impress his hipness upon his contemporaries. So, totally cool, he announces to the assembled, Hey, I'm taking my rib to the lake on Saturday.”

“Rib, huh,” Djell muttered behind his mask. “That's the proper order of things. Better than that chicken-and-egg stuff.”

“You mean like who came first,” said Jaime, “the chickenshit or his rib? How about he gets his divorce, see, and says ‘I got my rib
resected'?
Ah ha ha ha…” Nobody laughed with him.

“Hey, Rib,” said Djell, ignoring him. “Reflect that iliac vein toward you a little bit.”

Sibyl applied herself to the work at hand.

Christ
, observed an increasingly nagging voice in Stanley's weary head.
Whomever it was, who remarked on the banality of evil, he didn't know the half of—.

“Arendt,” said Djell, glancing over his shoulder at Stanley. “Hannah Arendt.”

For a moment Stanley didn't understand. Then he asked, “Did I say that out loud?”

Djell, Sibyl and Jaime all paused to look at him.

Stanley looked at them.

Djell made two little circles in the air with the tip of a scalpel.

Stanley pointed the gun at him.

Requesting vacuum suction to clear the surgical site of blood, Dr. Djell made a small incision in the perinephric fat.

“Nice,” said Sibyl.

“Little close to the pleura,” said Djell.

“Steady hands,” said Jaime toward Stanley. “Not bad for an old junkie.” He winked and silently counted three latex-gloved fingers on one hand with the forefinger of the other, then nodded an exaggerated downbeat.

“Speaking of which,” began Djell, looking up.

Jaime smiled as if to say, See? I have the refractory period of Djell's cocainization timed perfectly.

“Later,” said Stanley sternly. “Keep at it.”

“Speaking of later,” Djell continued, unperturbed, “did anyone mark the time?”

“Three thirty-five, when she went under,” said Jaime, consulting a gold watch on the inside of his wrist.

Djell peeled away perinephric fat until the kidney was reasonably exposed, which to Stanley looked like the chitterlings special at the meat market, with colors no Federal Inspector would permit. The blood required constant attention from Sibyl, who made careful passes, back and forth, with a little vacuum hose, or applied fresh sponges.

Stanley couldn't get close enough to see exactly what was going on, and didn't want to. He stayed on the gurney, which still blocked the door, and idly weaved the muzzle of the big .45 in and out of the transecting loops of the lazy figure eight of infinity.

“The doctor always removes the upper pole first,” narrated Jaime, watching Djell's work with a critical eye. He glanced nervously at the gun barrel, then at Stanley. “You interested in this?”

Stanley was feeling a little sick. A strange smell had come to permeate the atmosphere of the room—a malodorous cocktail of blood, ethyl alcohol, gun powder, corpse preservative, dead flowers, talcum powder, hydraulic oil, Ringer's Solution, benzene, iodine, acetylene, and the acrid fumes of what, if he were anywhere else, Stanley would have surmised to have come from a clutch of paper matches toasting the bowl of a crack pipe.

He'd never consciously attended a surgery, and it struck him as decidedly unpleasant. Aside from the prevalent odors, the room was tense with concentration, incongruous against the commonplace chitchat. Not to mention Stanley had just had an eye removed. Not to mention he'd just thrown Iris—a part of her at least—to the wolves. His system was swimming with anesthetics, antibiotics, adrenaline fatigue, pain, and—a sensation new to him—guilt. The combination went straight to his stomach.

“Yeah,” he nevertheless said, if weakly, “I am interested in this. But not as much as you should be.”

Jaime smiled and pointed. “That's the upper pole there, at that end. If he tries to get the lower pole out first, the upper end might slip up under the rib, there — see? Don't want that to happen.”

Little slurping sounds mixed with the tinkle of instruments emanated from the nephrectomy site.

The room was starting to revolve around Stanley's head. When he tried to tighten his grip on the gun, he realized his palm was slick with perspiration. His mouth was flooding with acrid fluids, and his esophagus was choking up gas.

“So now he needs to identify the distal ureter,” Jaime continued cheerily. “We're talking pee-pee here…”

“Shut up.”

“We don't want—.”

“Shut up,” Stanley shouted, and he slipped and fell back against the wall, causing himself and the gurney to roll away from it and leaving him nearly supine.

Djell kept on operating, but the green eyes were on Stanley, and so were Jaime's.

“Nobody get inspired,” Stanley said, covering them with the gun.

They worked. Stanley cleared his throat and spit furiously toward the floor drain. The effort caused his stomach to contract, but as he'd not eaten in a couple of days there was nothing to hold down.

Still, he was barely under control. His attention kept wandering, and his eye socket had begun to throb continually.

Then Stanley had an idea.

“Where's that coke?”

Djell continued to work.

Jaime's brown eyes exchanged a glance with Sibyl's green ones. “Ah… What coke you talking about, buddy?”

Stanley laughed sinister. “Hey Djell,
buddy
,” he said. “You ever work without an anesthesiologist?”

Before Djell could answer Jaime said, “Oh — the cocaine! Why didn't you say so?” He slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand. “How could I have forgotten the coke?” He shook his head emphatically. “There's always a little coke around here.…”

Jaime hustled around the end of the operating table, approached Djell as if stealthily, and plunged his hand into the man's front pocket.

Djell grunted disagreeably while quickly elevating his scalpel and a pair of needle-nosed pliers out of the surgical wound. Jaime rummaged beneath Djell's smock and came up with a fat bindle.

“I once thought he was Sibyl's not-so-little-secret,” he smirked, “hung like a stallion. But turns out it's an eight ball.” Djell swore beneath his surgical mask. Jaime winked at Stanley. “I mean, like, he's never without. Makes you wonder about those steady hands.”

He made as if to carry the bindle to Stanley.

“Not so fast,” said Stanley, centering the .45 on Jaime's gut. He stood off the gurney and stepped to one side. “On the gurney, there.”

Jaime tentatively approached the far end of the gurney and dropped the bindle onto it.

White powder, rolled up in a plastic bag, about the size of a pig's foot. At least a quarter ounce.

“That ought to keep you awake for a while,” said Jaime, regarding the bag skeptically. “This outfit rips through one of those every working evening.”

Stanley looked at him incredulously.

“It's good stuff, too.”

“Go back to work,” Stanley ordered. “Is it milled, Djell? Hey, I'm talking to you. Is this shit ready to do up?”

Without allowing himself to be distracted from his work, Djell grunted.

“Are you kidding?” said Jaime, who hadn't moved. “He plays with it all day long. As my dead friend Vince used to say, in reference to recordings by Beniamino Gigli, the stuff's fine as frog's hair.”

Djell grunted in the affirmative.

Jaime ignored him, still smiling at Stanley. “What say I lay out a couple fat ones?” he suggested softly. “Just for you and me?”

Stanley knew that Jaime was watching his right jaw, where beads of sweat were merging with the blood leaking from his empty eye socket. The two fluids commingled their way down the side of his face, along his neck, finally to spread in a thin film along the shoulder of his gun hand. Some of that sweat was even now stinging its way over the surface of the ball of his good eye, clouding its vision. Naked except for his socks and the eye bandage, draped in a blood-stained sheet, his head to one side so he could see to aim the gun, Stanley looked every inch a master of Butoh. Djell and Sibyl, too, were waiting for Stanley to fall flat on his face.
Fuck them
. They should be marveling at the stamina of a man who, having lost an eye to greed but an hour ago, not only refused to lie down and surrender to the powerful medicinal narcotics coursing through his system, or to the pain, or to his exhaustion; who, rather, insisted on standing upright and naked all night in a funeral home with a gun in his hand in his attempt to wrest his fate away from the sinister forces attempting to co-opt it.

“If you get any closer to me,” Stanley mumbled to Jaime, rapidly blinking salty perspiration out of his good eye, “my inner barroom is going to vote to ventilate you.”

“Your inner…,” the smile faded from Jaime's face, “…barroom?”

Stanley's head wobbled at an odd angle, as if it were mounted on a spring, the better to watch Jaime, the better to inhibit stinging fluids from flooding into his good eye. “The same inner barroom that voted to put Iris onto the table.”

Jaime's jaw dropped.

“You may not hear the debate,” Stanley advised, “but you'll hear the shot.”

Actually there
was
a diminutive, unreliable part of Stanley's personality that had pirated all of his experience and none of its pain. It wasn't that part of his brain suffering from his remaining kidney's questionable viability, any more than it was the part that got the hangover headaches. This little part of his head had the exact same relationship to the rest of Stanley as the catbird seat has to a bar: it perched where it could see and comment on everything, get all the drinks it wanted without moving, and take none of the responsibility. This ethereal capacity was free to estimate any quality of Stanley's inner or outer existence with impunity, and to suggest the kind of snap judgment that made a difference in life, for good or ill, unbiased by pain, alcohol, unconsciousness, or even love.

So Stanley told himself, at any rate: in the hope that if he propped up these theories, they in turn might occasionally prop up him.

So he was telling Jaime, now.

But to speak of the Catbird Mind in public? To complete strangers? To strangers, moreover, whom one was looking to impress?

That's right, Stanley
, said the little voice.
Baffle 'em with your bullshit. If they think you're crazy, you're way ahead of the game
.

Jaime recovered his composure enough to ask, “What did you say?”

But, as Stanley could see, Jaime wasn't sure of anything anymore. What had started out as bravado on his part, reinforced by his intimate knowledge of the pain afflicting Stanley, had now dissolved into uncertainty, deepened by the revelation that he was standing five feet in front of a man holding a cocked .45 who was not only enraged and desperate enough to have Djell perform surgery on his girlfriend, but was now also talking about a barroom in his head.