by Tyler Keevil
‘Do I need that?’
‘In the hospital, they’d give you local anaesthetic – but we got to make our own.’
‘Makeshift anaesthetic, eh?’
‘Worked for Roger when he lost his finger.’
‘Great.’
‘That reminds me – I need him to pick up some salad for your dinner.’
She fishes her cellphone out of her purse. It’s a pink brick, a Nokia, with those big, easy-touch buttons. I helped her pick it out at the start of season, when we were shopping for barge supplies. She told me she didn’t want anything fancy – no bells or whistles, she said – just a phone that could make calls, so a basic Nokia seemed like a safe bet.
‘Let me just see here,’ she says.
She tips her head to peer over her glasses at the display, punching in the number slowly and deliberately, with her forefinger, in the way older people do. She always dials, even though I’ve added Roger’s number to her contacts. Then her phone is ringing, quite loudly since she has the volume turned up, and I can hear Roger answer it. She reminds him about the salad, and then starts telling him about my little run-in with the rakes. As she does, I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m still holding the cloth on my head like some kind of pantomime clown.
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘I’m gonna patch him up here.’
I hear Roger ask something, but I can’t make out the words. In response, Doreen says, ‘He’s holding up all right. He ain’t blubbing, anyway.’ She pauses, and adds, ‘Yep – he scalped himself good.’
I can hear Roger howl at that, and I kind of chuckle, too. The way she says it makes me think of the Westerns Roger reads while we’re at sea, and which he’s got me reading: Max Brand and Louis L’amour and Zane Gray. In them, the Apaches are always scalping people, or collecting scalps. When a brave gets his first scalp, it’s a real big thing, apparently. Like he’s become a man. I don’t think it counts if you accidentally scalp yourself, though.
‘Tell him I’ll finish the rakes before dinner,’ I say.
‘You heard that?’ Doreen asks Roger. There’s another pause, and then, ‘Uh-huh. I will. Just you make sure you remember the things for my salad. And we’ll see you later.’
She puts down the phone and catches my eye in the mirror.
‘Alternator’s been delayed, but he’ll be back for dinner. He said to make sure we check you’ve had your tetanus shot, because of the rust on them rakes.’
‘What happens if I haven’t?’
‘Then we’ll get you one.’
‘At the hospital?’
‘Or the clinic.’
‘So we’ll be going in anyway?’
‘Don’t worry about that, now.’
She checks her watch. Apparently there’s still five minutes to go. In the meantime, she starts preparing her anaesthetic. She taps three Tylenol into the mortar – the pills rattling like chips of ceramic – and begins grinding them up with the pestle. Outside the window to my left, a passenger plane is streaking slowly across the sky, leaving a stream of vapour. It’s headed towards Vancouver airport, over in Richmond, where I’ll be flying out from in a month or so. I track its progress, trying to imagine that. The whole thing doesn’t seem real just yet.
‘There goes a plane,’ I say, just to be saying something.
Doreen glances at it, grunts, and asks, ‘You all set for this big trip of yours?’
‘I got my work visa, and my ticket booked.’
‘No backing out, now.’
‘No ma’am.’
‘And this girl you’re going to see – you’re sure about her?’
‘I’m sure I like her well enough.’
I haven’t told her and Roger that we’ll be living together. To them that would amount to a kind of marriage, a real commitment, and I’m trying not to think about it like that. We’re just feeling things out, is all. Seeing how it goes.
‘What’s she do, this girl?’ Doreen asks.
‘She does what they call Theatre in Education.’
Doreen frowns. ‘Like some kind of actress?’
She says it suspiciously, as if it might be improper, somehow.
‘More like a teacher. Working with kids, and doing drama.’
‘Well, I sure hope it turns out for you. The thing to ask yourself is whether or not she would stand by you. That’s all that matters, when it comes down to it. The rest is just…’ She makes a waving motion, as if brushing away a fly.
I think about that. The plane has disappeared, leaving a line that divides the sky.
‘I reckon she would,’ I say.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Doreen says, and checks her watch again.
To adapt her sewing needle into a suturing needle, Doreen has bent it with a pair of pliers – curling it into a kind of crooked, thumbnail shape. It’s sitting in the bottom of the pan of steaming water, alongside the pick-ups and needle holders, and also a turkey baster, which looks like a giant eye dropper made out of metal. Doreen puts the pan on a coaster so it doesn’t burn the dresser. The steam fogs up the mirror, obscuring my face.
‘Time to operate,’ she says. ‘How’s it feeling?’
‘It still stings something fierce.’
‘I’ll bet. And it’s gonna get worse.’
Before we start, she dumps the powdered Tylenol into a glass tumbler, splashes in a few ounces of the brandy, and stirs it around with a teaspoon. She puts the glass in my hand.
‘Go slow – there’s fifteen hundred milligrams of Tylenol in there.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘It’s enough.’
I take a sip, tentatively. It has the usual burnt-fruit taste of brandy, but with a bitter afterbite, almost salty, from the Tylenol. Doreen tears open the pack of latex gloves, shakes them out, and snaps them on. With her fingers, she smooths my hair away from the wound, so the strands won’t get tangled in the stitches. She’s humming to herself as she does it – one of her country tunes, I think – and you can tell how much she’s enjoying this whole thing.
‘The good news,’ she says, ‘is that the tough part comes first.’
‘That’s the good news, eh?’
‘We got to flush the wound.’
She picks up the turkey baster and squeezes the bulbous end. Then, while dipping the tip in the steaming water, she releases the bulb to fill up the baster.
‘This is salt water,’ she explains, ‘a makeshift saline.’
‘Seems like a lot of this operation is makeshift.’
‘Shush, you. Brace yourself – it’s gonna smart like heck.’
Using her left hand, she parts the gash in my head and peels back the flap of skin. I watch this curiously through the fogged-up mirror. Raising the baster, she squirts the warm saline into the cut in a steady stream. I jerk in my chair, slopping a bit of brandy on my chest, and make a faint, feeble sound – as if I’ve been stung by a bee.
‘There you go,’ Doreen says, patting the area dry. ‘Not so bad, was it?’
‘If you say so.’
She’s already moving on, reaching for the bottle of betadine. She splashes a little of the ochre-coloured liquid on a cotton pad, dabs this on the area surrounding the cut – but not in it – and then fishes the pick-ups, needle holders, and needle out of the pan. It takes her a few tries to thread the monofilament through the eye of the needle. When she’s managed it, and tied it off, she takes up the needle holders and I get to see how they work. They act as a set of tongs, pinching the needle. Holding it like that, she gets into position behind me. She asks if I’d like her to turn the mirror around, but I tell her no, it’s okay – I want to see this.
‘So long as you don’t faint on me,’ she says.
I raise my glass obediently. I’ve knocked back an ounce or so, now, on an empty belly, and I can feel the slow smoulde
r of the liquor spreading through my limbs. Doreen leans over me, holding the pick-ups in her left hand and gripping the needle holders in the right. The line of thread dangles down against my cheek like a cobweb.
‘I need you to sit still, now,’ Doreen says, in the same matter-of-fact tone she uses to explain one of her cooking recipes. ‘What I’m going to do is stitch this left to right, using a simple running stich. Do you know what that is?’
I tell her I don’t.
‘It’ll save us time.’ She places the tip of the pick-ups near the wound, to steady the skin, and then moves in with the needle. I feel the first prick as it pierces my scalp, and I wince instinctively. Doreen waits for me to get myself together before working the needle deeper, hooking it under the skin with a twisting motion of her wrist, talking calmly to me all the while. ‘An interrupted stitch goes sideways across the cut, like railway tracks, but you have to tie off each suture, which is a real pain in the petutty.’
‘I hear you.’
‘A running stitch crosses the wound at an angle, which means you can keep stitching continuously until you’re done, and only have to tie it off at the beginning, and the end.’
I can’t see the site of the wound too well, or what she’s doing, but I see my scalp lift up under the pressure of the needle, before it breaks the skin and pokes back out the other side. It’s an odd sight, seeing that steel crescent emerging from my scalp. I can feel it tickling, but it doesn’t hurt much. She releases it, holds it in place with the pick-ups, and pinches it again with the needle holders to pull it all the way through, trailing a tail of thread. To finish the first stitch, she loops the thread around the tips of the needle holders, making some kind of knot. She snugs that up against my scalp, and ties it off twice more for good measure.
‘If you want to get fancy,’ Doreen says, aiming the needle again, ‘if you want to get highfalutin, you can do what we call a running subcuticular, where the stitching is all under the skin – to make it less noticeable – or a vertical mattress technique, for deeper wounds.’
The needle slips in and out, and she plucks at it with the pick-ups. I tip my glass back and forth, sloshing the liquid around. ‘Sounds like you sure know your stuff, nurse Doreen.’
‘You didn’t believe me, did you?’
‘No ma’am.’
As she works, she keeps talking to me. I know it’s her way of keeping me distracted, putting me at ease, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. I watch her face in the mirror. She’s frowning slightly, and each time she sticks the needle into my scalp her eyebrows raise and her mouth parts, in a look of hopeful concentration. Her hands are steady and assured, a nurse’s hands, and now that I’m able to sit still the stitching motion is smooth: a piercing and plucking, entering and exiting, as the needle goes in, hooks under, and rises up.
This goes on for several minutes, while Doreen maintains her running commentary. She tells me that the line has to be snug, to hold the skin together, but that it’s also important not to make it too tight. ‘Choking the dog, they call that,’ she says, and chuckles. She also tells me about the various other injuries she’s had to deal with on the boats: Roger’s severed fingertip, the deckhand who mangled his arm in the ice-making machines, the fisherman who tried to leap from his boat onto the barge and got his foot crushed between the hull and the gunnel. I’ve heard most of them before. They’re the war stories of the barge, which are always recounted with a certain relish. The worse and more gruesome the injury, the better.
‘Compared to some,’ I say, ‘I guess I got off easy.’
‘This here cut of yours ain’t nothing to sniff at.’
‘No?’
‘No sir.’
‘How many stitches you putting in, anyway?’
‘Eleven and counting.’
Eleven. It seems like a lot. It seems like something you might hear about, rather than something that had happened to you. He needed a dozen stitches, people would say. He cut himself wide open. He bled like a stuck pig.
‘How you holding up?’ she asks.
‘I’m fine, Dorie,’ I say, even though I’ve never called her that. It’s what Roger calls her, sometimes. ‘I’m fine, Nurse Dorie. You just keep on putting in those stitches. Slap in as many as you like – as many as you see fit.’
Her mouth twitches, like she’s trying not to smile.
‘Okay, Chief,’ she says. ‘Now go easy on that firewater, you hear?’
‘It’s going down easy, all right.’
‘I can see that.’
My tumbler’s nearly empty, now. I sit with it resting on my belly as she finishes up. She’s found a rhythm, and executes each stitch with an expert flick, almost a flourish. She puts in two more stitches – thirteen in total – and then begins tying the thread off. She does this in the same way as before: looping the thread around the needle holders, pulling the end through, and tightening the knot. She repeats this ritual three times. To finish, she puts the needle holders aside, takes up the scissors, and snips off the thread right close to my scalp.
‘All done, Chief,’ she says.
She drops the needle, pick-ups, and needle holders back in the pan – the metal rasping on metal, making that whisking sound – and holds up the compact mirror again so I can see. She tilts the mirror back and forth to show various angles, like a barber displaying a finished haircut. The crescent wound is stitched with a diagonal series of sutures, each one about a centimetre apart. The surrounding skin is still stained by betadine, but the laceration looks smaller now that it’s been closed up. The fierce, fiery burn has faded to a dull smoulder.
‘Thanks, nurse Dorie,’ I say, knocking back the last of my brandy. ‘You did a hell of a job on that.’
‘Language.’
‘Heck of a job, I mean. Heck of a job.’ I plonk the tumbler down on the dresser and stand up, feeling nice and loose, gangly as a rag doll. ‘Well, I better get back down there, eh? Back to the front line, right? As Roger would say, those rakes ain’t gonna oil themselves.’
‘Somebody’s had a bit too much anaesthetic.’
‘No ma’am.’
‘You come with me, now.’
I keep protesting, but she takes my hand and leads me into the lounge, where she sits me down on the chair – the big reclining chair that’s usually reserved for Roger. It’s a plush chair, soft and padded, with plaid patterns on the upholstery. I sink right into it like a dream.
‘Now you sit tight, Chief,’ Doreen says, ‘I got us a meal to fix.’
‘And I got me a job to do.’
‘Your job is to sit in that chair, young man.’
She’s pretending to be cross with me, but I can tell she’s getting a kick out of it.
‘That’s no job,’ I say.
‘You’re on watch, like when we’re at sea.’
She leaves me sitting there and begins puttering about in the kitchen. Roger’s recliner has one of those levers – like the handbrake on a car – that you crank to raise a footrest and lower the chairback. I do this and lie down in it and gaze out the window. Not the one on the port side, which overlooks shore, but the aft window, which has a view of Burrard Inlet. The tide is high, the harbour swollen with water: oily and dark and roiling against the breakwater. I imagine what Roger must feel, sitting here at the helm of the Arctic King, buoyed up by the confidence of his experience, an entire life on the boats, on the sea. It’s a good feeling.
‘How’s it looking out there, Chief?’ Doreen asks from the kitchen.
‘It’s looking mighty fine, Doreen.’
My scalp is tingling again. I reach up to touch it, spider-walking my fingers around the stitches, which feel odd and knobby and foreign.
‘Say, nurse,’ I say. ‘These sutures are starting to hurt again. I think that potion of yours is wearing off.’
She comes to stand in the do
orway, arms crossed, looking stern. She’s got her apron on again. ‘You can’t have any more Tylenol, Alex. Not for a few hours, at least.’
I wince and palm my head, as if it’s really killing me. ‘Maybe just another ounce of that brandy, then. Just something to take the edge off.’
Doreen shakes her head, and I figure that’s it, but she surprises me by going into their bedroom, where we’ve left the First Aid kit, to fetch the brandy. I clap my hands and stand up and perform a wobbly-kneed pirouette. There’s a stereo above the TV in the lounge, with a stack of Roger and Doreen’s music next to it: Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris. I put on Luxury Liner and settle back into Roger’s seat, feeling just peachy, while I wait for Doreen. She’s taken the brandy into the kitchen. I hear her getting out a glass.
‘Say,’ I call, ‘why don’t you have a little yourself, Dorie? Just to take the edge off.’
‘Edge off what?’
‘Off our goodbye. I’m leaving, for God’s sake.’
‘Language!’
‘For gosh sake.’
I hear her chuckle. ‘I haven’t had a drink in eight weeks.’
‘That’s eight weeks too long.’
‘Maybe just the one.’
‘That’s right. Just the one.’
I hear the fridge door open and close, the crack of ice in the ice tray, and the clink of cubes hitting glass. When she comes in, she’s got a pair of highball tumblers, filled to the brim with liquid. She hands one to me, and I sniff at it suspiciously. It smells like lemons.
‘What’s this?’ I ask.
‘Brandy sour. Figured you needed something to slow you down, Chief.’
‘Well, I’ll be. Who would have thought you weren’t just a cook, and a nurse, but a bartender.’
She laughs and pats her hair, in a gesture I’ve only scene in old films – a kind of retro puffing of her perm. Then she takes a seat on the sofa across from me, and raises her glass.