Walkers (54 page)

Tony said, ‘Okay, Levi, just wait up
one moment,’ and sliced through the eel’s body with one swift movement, as if
he were skilled at filleting fish. The eel, however, was no ordinary eel. As
the paramedic severed its head, its jaw-muscles went into spasm, and it bit off
Paul’s little finger, as well as most of the knuckle and a diagonal piece out
of the side of his hand. Paul opened his eyes and lifted up his hand in
disbelief. Blood sprayed out of it like a garden fountain.

‘God Almighty,’ said Tony.

Levi turned around, and exclaimed,
‘What the hell -?’

Paul tried to clutch his wrist, in
the confused hope that he might be able to stop the bleeding by pressing on his
artery; but then he stumbled forward and collapsed on to the floor. Blood
pumped crimson graffiti all over the tiles, all over Jennifer’s shuddering
legs, all over Tony’s green-and-white shoes. Both paramedics immediately knelt
down beside him.

‘The woman’s dead,’ said Levi,
tightly. ‘Severe trauma to the abdominal area, presumably caused by
snake-attack. Shock, loss of blood through catastrophic internal haemorrhage,
cardiac failure, fractured skull.’

Tony opened up his medical case in
silence and began to apply a tourniquet to Paul’s wrist. Then he cleaned and
dressed the devastated finger-joint, and gave Paul an injection of tetanus
toxoid and 1.2 mega-units of benzathine penicillin. He tried to prize open the
eel’s jaws to release Paul’s bitten-off finger, but the eel’s muscles remained
too firmly locked. He wrapped up the head and the finger in a sheet of kitchen
towel, and then said, ‘I’ll get this guy to hospital. There’s a chance we could
save his finger. Meanwhile -you’d better call the coroner.’

Paul was beginning to recover
consciousness. He opened his eyes and stared at Tony and Levi, and said, ‘Jennie...
is Jennie all right?’

Tony knelt down beside him. ‘Don’t
you worry, sir. Jennie’s going to be fine. Right now, the most important thing
is getting you straight off to hospital.’

Outside, the sun was shining
brightly. Tony drove Paul off toward Hollywood West Hospital on La Brea, just
as a police patrol car was arriving. Tony gave the cops a brief salute, and
then turned on his siren, howling his way eastward with Paul lying
semi-conscious in the back, and Paul’s finger lying on the passenger-seat in a
sheet of kitchen-paper, still trapped inside the eel’s jaws.

Levi had just finished calling the
medical examiner when the two police patrolmen stepped into the
blood-splattered kitchen and warily looked around. Levi hung up the phone, and
said, ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Okay, I guess,’ said one of the
cops. ‘What happened here?’

‘Snake-attack,’ replied Levi. ‘One
dead, one missing his right-hand pinkie.’

‘Snake-attack!’
said the other cop, wrinkling up his nose. ‘Are you kidding, or what?’

Levi pointed out the eel’s
decapitated body, lying curled-up on the tiles. ‘That’s the snake – at least
what’s left of it. My partner had to take the rest to the hospital with him.’

The first cop hunkered down beside
the eel’s body, and prodded it with the tip of his finger. ‘This ain’t no
snake,’ he said .after a while.

Levi stared at him; then looked
away; then put his hand on his hip.

The cop stood up. ‘I’m telling you,
man,’ he repeated, ‘this sure as hell ain’t no snake.’

‘It isn’t a snake?’ said Levi. ‘What
is it, then, if it isn’t a snake? A necktie, maybe?

Something that fell off of the back
of somebody’s Davy Crockett hat?’

‘That’s an eel,’ said the cop,
emphatically. He pushed his thumbs into his belt and gave one of those puckered
defiant looks that almost all cops adopt as soon as they begin to suspect that
your attitude toward their omnipotence isn’t quite all that it should be. Three
more contradictory responses and you are likely to be arrested for having an
attitude problem. Levi however did not have an attitude problem. He knew from
experience how to cope with cops. He whistled softly in admiration, and said,

‘An
eel,
huh? I never would have guessed an eel. Right out here, so far
from the ocean?’

‘Still an eel,’ the cop insisted.

‘Well, um... how come you know that?’
asked Levi. ‘How come you’re so sure?’

‘Fishing,’ said the cop.

His partner said, taking off his cap
and waving it around as an aid to explanation,

‘Josh here fishes anything. Tuna,
snapper, you name it. He was Santa Monica champion three successive years.’

Levi looked towards Jennifer’s body,
completely draped now in a green sheet. ‘It seems like it bit her. The eel, I
mean.’

‘Well, eels can be vicious, some of
them,’ the cop called Josh remarked. He kept on looking around, his neck
bulging first from one side of his collar, and then the other.

He had one of those bland pugnacious
faces that always reminded Levi of Marion Brando when he could have been a
contender.

‘In your kitchen?’ asked Levi.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Josh retorted.
Polite words spoken with menace.

‘Eels can be vicious in your
kitchen?’

‘Sure eels can be vicious in your
kitchen. Eels can be vicious anyplace at all. Friend of mine flushed an eel
down the John, next thing he knew it came straight back up again and bit his
wife in the ass.’ Josh obviously found this hilarious, because he suddenly
shouted,
‘Ha!’
just once, and slapped
his thigh. He looked around again, and then jerked his head towards the body
under the green sheet. ‘Where’d it bite her?’

‘Stomach,’ said Levi. ‘Just to the
right of the navel. Bad bite, too. You could have driven a truck through it.’

‘What d’you think happened?’ asked
the cop’s partner. ‘I mean – do you have any idea how the eel got in here?’

Josh said, ‘What kind of a question
is that, William? An eel lives in the water, right, and an eel this size is an
ocean going eel, right?’

William nodded doubtfully.

‘So how do you think it got in here?
It didn’t
walk,
did it? It didn’t
hitch a ride from the beach, on the back of some wetback’s pick-up? It must
have been brought here – either by the deceased because she wanted to cook it
and eat it, or by the husband because he’d been out fishing and he was stupid
enough to bring the fucking thing home.’

Levi stared down at the eel’s body distastefully.
‘Somebody would want to eat
that?’

‘Sure they would,’ Josh told him.
‘Smoked, stewed, jellied, you can eat eel any way you like. Maybe the deceased
was trying out that Chinese recipe, where you throw the live eels into the
boiling pot, and you have to hold the lid down until they stop struggling.’

‘Chao shanhu,’
said William. Josh turned his head and stared at him fixedly. William
shrugged and looked vaguely embarrassed.

‘This guy doesn’t eat nothing except
Chinese,’ Josh explained.

Levi checked his watch. ‘The medical
examiner should be up here soon. How about your people?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Josh, wiping
his nose with the back of his hand. ‘They had a serious shooting down at the
Burger King on Highland.’

The three of them stood around with
their arms folded, trying not to step in the patterns of blood that looped and
squiggled all over Jennifer’s kitchen tiles. Josh said, after a while, ‘Some
accident, huh? You’re just about to eat your supper and your supper eats you?’

William smirked because he was
supposed to, and glanced down at Jennifer’s green-sheeted body. He frowned, and
took a second look, and then he nudged Levi’s arm, and pointed.

‘Look there,’ he said, ‘she’s
moving.’

Josh turned around. ‘Moving?’ he
exclaimed, with morbid amusement. ‘You don’t mean to tell me she’s still
alive?
Boy – are you going to get it if
she’s still alive. Some paramedic! Leaves the badly injured victim of a serious
domestic eel accident lying on the cold tiled floor of her kitchen for ten
minutes solid, while he passes the time of day with two police officers.
Demotion, at best. Dismissal, more likely.’

Levi could see that William was
quite right. The green sheet was humping up and down, and moving from side to
side, as if Jennifer were trying to raise her body up off the floor.

‘Riboyne ShelO’lem!’
Levi cried, and quickly crossed the kitchen, and picked up the sheet,
dropping on to one knee as he did so.

The eels swarmed out everywhere.
Levi shouted, a coarse terrified shout, and one of the eels jumped at his face
and clung on to the side of his jaw. Another bit at his ankle, and a third went
for his calf-muscle. There were nine or ten more, and they slithered their way
blindly around the kitchen floor, their tails making patterns in the blood that
had been spilled there, looking for a way to escape.

Levi screamed with pain. He
staggered one step backwards, and then another, with the eel waving from his
face. Josh yanked open two or three kitchen drawers, scattering cheese-graters
and egg-slicers and clean tea-towels everywhere, and at last found a drawerful
of knives. He snatched out a poultry-knife, and dodged his way around Levi,
while William banged away at the other eels with his night stick.

‘Don’t cut it!’
Levi shouted.
‘Don’t cut it, for
God’s sake! It ‘II bite my face off!’

‘Hold still!’ Josh yelled at him,
‘Hold still, will you?’

Levi tried to stay where he was,
trembling with pain, while Josh slowly approached him, glancing quickly
downwards now and again to make sure that there were no eels around his feet,
and kicking them to one side or the other when they were too close. Levi stared
at him, his eyes wide, the long silvery eel swinging from the right side of his
jaw, its teeth tightly fastened in his flesh. Every time Levi spoke, the eel
swung some more, causing him acute agony. But he had to speak. ‘The guy... who
was here before... my buddy... cut the eel’s head off... and it bit his finger
clean through... The jaw muscles...
closed...
instead of opening . . .’

‘All right,’ Josh said, softly. ‘If
that’s the way they play the game – this is the way that
we’re
going to play it.’

He beckoned to his partner, and
indicated that he should hold Levi from behind, under his arms, to support him,
and keep him comparatively still. Then, coming closer, he took hold of the
eel’s swinging tail, touching it with all the expertise and care of an
experienced fisherman, and gradually slid his hand up it until he was holding
it just behind the head. The eel’s eye stared without any emotion or expression
whatsoever. The eye of a creature without feelings, which lives only to sustain
its own life.

Josh then lifted the poultry-knife,
and slid its long thin blade in between the eel’s partly-open jaws, with the
sharp edge facing towards him.

‘You see what I’m going to do?’ he
asked Levi. ‘I’m going to hold on to the eel’s body, and then I’m going to
slice towards me, so that the knife separates the eel’s jaw muscles. He won’t
get a chance to bite you, believe me.’

Levi nodded. The eel was hurting him
too much now for him to want to speak. The eels on his ankle and calf were
causing him even more agony, too. His right trouser leg was stained dark with
blood.

Josh grasped the eel’s body
carefully, stroking it, so that its nervous system would grow accustomed to the
sensation of being held, and not recognise it as a threat. ‘All right now,’ he
said, ‘I’m going to count to ten, and when I say ten I want you to brace
yourself because that’s when I’m going to cut this bastard’s head wide open.
You got me?’

Levi grunted to show that he did.

‘One,’ said Josh. Levi’s eyes
widened.

‘Two,’ said Josh, not noticing
another eel which had slithered its way close to his shoe.

‘Three.’ The eel beside his shoe
raised its head, its bright eyes glistening yellow in the sunlight which
criss-crossed the kitchen floor.

‘Four.’ The eel nudged aside Josh’s
trouser-cuff, and began to lift its head up past his sock.

‘Five. You ready there, my friend?
This is where we do it.’

‘Six.’ The eel poured up inside his
trouser-leg. ‘Seven – what –
ahhhh!
Shit!
Shit, get out of there!
Gaahh,
you
bastard!’ Josh violently kicked his leg, and dropped the knife so that he could
grapple with the eel that was running up inside his trousers. He spun and
jumped and pirouetted, and slammed his leg against the side of the breakfast-bench
again and again. But the tough slippery eel slid right up as far as his thigh,
and even when Josh realised what it was after, and clutched himself tightly in
both cupped hands, the eel still forced its narrow head underneath his hands
and bit him.

Josh roared like a madman, and fell
backwards on to the floor, jerking and convulsing and kicking his legs. He
wrestled his belt open, and dragged down his trousers. His shorts were brightly
stained with blood. The eel’s silvery body protruded from the side of them,
coiled tightly around his thigh like one of the classical serpents of Laocdon.
‘The knife!’
he roared, his face
crimson.
“Give me the fucking knife!’