by Paul Hoover
On the night of the raid, everyone wore dark clothes and checked their watches again. Carlo was to sit up front with Tim, so it wouldn’t appear they were on a double date. Society’s prejudices in such matters were shocking, they agreed, but for the time being they would capitulate. Arriving in Joliet, they quickly accomplished the deed, loading the car with manila folders, smearing the thick, unsatisfactory ketchup, and nailing Trotsky’s shoes to the floor. There was some concern about the noise of hammering, but Elizabeth concluded through a mathematical formula that, given the grades of steel of both hammer and nails and the distance of the nearest dwelling, there was no real basis for concern.
They climbed back into the car and headed back toward I-55 when Tim did something that cost them dearly. He missed the turn onto the access ramp and did a U-turn in the middle of the road. Out of the darkness, blooming like a poisonous flower, came the lights of the Illinois State Police, who’d been waiting for speeders. They pulled over the green Dodge Dart, approached it cautiously with drawn guns and flashlights, and immediately saw the heap of manila folders stamped “Property of the U.S. Government” that occupied the backseat. All four offenders were cramped into the front seat, and Professor Kunkel, attempting to eat the pages of her journal, was perched on Carlo’s lap. The officers knew what case they had before they even checked. What’s more, the FBI tail showed up a minute later in a Holsum bread truck.
Tim had been an informant all along. It was part of his semester project in political science, so he really couldn’t be blamed for the U-turn after all. This was pretty disappointing news to Elizabeth, since she’d been Tim’s lover for the last six months, but she forgave him when the federal district attorney offered a plea-bargaining deal. If she would tell the government about the workings of the FU before Tim went underground, they would release her into Tim’s custody, but only into his. This was one of Tim’s demands from the beginning, and the DA was an honorable man. After some tears and scenes, she joined him in Sausalito, California, where with the government’s money he was setting up a French restaurant. In his own mind, Tim was committed to the revolution, but he now believed it could only be accomplished through the use of diet. If people ate well, he reasoned, their inner being would be uplifted. It was much the same logic that led the Academie Franchise to constantly purify the language, reducing the vocabulary to such basic and stringent terms that it was finally democratizing. Since vulgar idioms and dialects couldn’t creep in and challenge the dominant idiom, users of the mother tongue would feel they shared the same goals and aspirations. They were not rich or poor. They were a language group. Tim’s theory was that food is democratic because everybody eats. Food, like art, would ultimately make us better people.
Elizabeth said the surrealists held beliefs of this kind. It had something to do with the nutritional value of strangeness. Factory workers and owners could be thrust together in the name of beauty, but that beauty had to be violent, like a revolution. It had to be the strong beauty of a dream, since as sleepers we are equal. Tim said he preferred a good sauce to a good nightmare, but he sensed Elizabeth was on to something, and with shared idealism they opened The Sliced Parrot. The fare consisted of surrealist cuisine such as Agneau d’André Breton and Fingers of Veal à la Isidore Ducasse. Tim had found a way to sculpt veal into the shape of a hand, on a bed of hearts of palm. The latter was arranged to resemble an octave on the piano. The medallions of lamb were topped with halves of boiled egg, to give the impression of two blind eyes. This was symbolic, said Elizabeth, of the blindness of society, as well as of the dreaming prophet, the inner person.
Professor Kunkel and Carlo hadn’t fared so well. It was suggested by the FBI to Eleanor Kunkel that Carlo was the chief instigator in their little chapter of the Union for a Free Union. He had a record of arrests back to the age of eleven, and it was documented that he’d organized for the Blackstone Rangers. Wasn’t it true, Professor Kunkel, that Carlo Emmanuel Bledsoe Jones was the author of the Cyclops tracts? Had he not organized the other members of the group through drugs, sex, and insidious forms of intimidation learned in prison? Had she seen these pictures, taken with a telescopic lens on infrared film through the bedroom window, of Carlo Jones and herself? An anagrammatic study of Carlo’s name kept including BLEED SO, regardless of other variants. What was the significance of this, and what had it to do with her own metaphysical journal?
To her credit, Eleanor Kunkel refused to cooperate. That is why, after a period of solitary confinement, she was herding sheep on a mountain in Spain. She’d naturally lost her position at the university and her academic career was ruined, but there were compensations. The lanolin in the wool was good for her skin, and she’d developed an interest in the mountain waters of her region. She kept flasks of the clear liquid on shelves in her room, along with extensive notes about its taste, color, weight, and texture. Carlo, who received her letters, had no idea what was meant by the “texture” of water, nor did he understand how certain water “could only be dirtied by sunlight.” But since the last of these letters was received some time ago, her whereabouts and state of mind were no longer certain. Edgar planned to look her up the next time he was in Europe, but his approach would have to be disguised, he said, in case any of the shepherds or sheep turned out to be CIA.
Everyone felt bad about Professor Kunkel, but no one had taken the rap the way Carlo had. In fact, no one could have taken it as Carlo was able. He knew his way around prison, so the first day he worked a piece of metal loose from his bed frame and filed it into a shiv on the concrete floor of the cell. After wrapping the handle with binding tape stolen from the prison library, he had all the protection he needed. Young men like himself were “chicken” to the older prisoners, meaning they were sexually attractive. While Carlo had done some male hustling when he was sixteen or so around Surf and Broadway, he was not about to become the chicken of some fat biker from Calumet City. He used the shiv on two occasions, he said, and when word got around the cornholers left him alone. Besides, he’d made an arrangement with his cellmate, and they were considered “married.” The older inmates often had “wives” of their own, and they respected these betrothals.
Carlo said his cellmate was a young white guy who had refused the draft. His name was Albert, and he spent all his time reading books. They got along pretty well, and Carlo protected him as well as he could. Albert had been given a sentence of six years, a period of time equal to his “military obligation,” according to the judge. When one of the other prisoners tried to hassle Albert, who was thin and pale, Carlo sculpted the attacker’s face into something new and strange. When Carlo last heard from him, Albert had over four years left to serve, but things would be all right with him. Before he was released, Carlo had seen to it that Albert was protected by a huge black guy named Boner, who’d been in the Black-stone Rangers. It meant, of course, that Albert would be Boner’s chicken, but it was better than some other options.
It was getting late. Everyone was tired from the grass and conversation. Rose and Carlo went into the kitchen to get some food together, and Edgar announced his new plans. He wanted to organize the sausage workers at a local factory, and he wanted to knock over another draft board. He hoped we would help in these projects, but if we didn’t want to get involved, that was all right, too. Then we had a dinner of heavily spiced spaghetti that was prepared by Carlo and Rose’s fresh spinach and garbanzo bean salad; our heads were full of outrageous plans and inventions. We knew there was little chance of our acting on them, but it made us feel important to be in the company of real revolutionaries.
The main thing, said Carlo, leaning over the dinner table and meeting each of our eyes, which of us is the spy? Who is the son of a bitch who’s going to sell out the others in exchange for a lobster farm or a piece of fine pussy? We swallowed our food more slowly after that, and in between bites, we looked at each other glancingly, with a hint of suspicion. Even if nothing happened, who indeed was the Judas?
12
I MET MARTIN BAUM when Romona walked down the hall of Orthopedics with him in tow. He wore a tan manager’s smock, and looked suave and old-fashioned, like Rudy Vallee. His black hair had a spectacular rolling curl, and his clothes and shoes were expensive. Romona said Martin would be taking over Ed’s position on the eleventh and twelfth floors. Dr. Rocks and Normal Cane had wanted Ed’s head because of the missing equipment during the carotid blow, but she’d managed to get him transferred to other units. There was also a problem, she said, with missing drugs. Since so many people had access to the drugs, it was difficult to determine who the culprit was, but suspicion pointed to Ed Grabowski.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Ed doesn’t take drugs. All he cares about is corpses.”
“I know that, and you know it,” she said, “but Norm Cane and the boys from Security have their own ideas. They’re going to be snooping around, so watch your step.”
Romona’s warning was given from the heart. All of us took home some extra drugs now and then, especially those left over when a patient was discharged. They were supposed to be sent back for credit, but usually they would gather for a couple of days at the back of the unit before anyone got around to doing so. Meanwhile, they were open game, and nurses, doctors, clerks, and everyone else helped themselves. Usually it was sleeping pills, and Romona filched them, too.
“How do you like the job so far?” I asked Martin.
“It seems very interesting,” he said, barely disguising his boredom.
Romona wanted me to break Martin in, so she left and I walked him around. I showed him where the supplies were kept, both medical and clerical, where the linen cart was supposed to go, and how to hide from work in the office if you’d had enough for the day. The idea was to bring a good book and close the office door. If anybody wanted you, they could use the paging system.
One of the first things to do on the evening shift was to check the dinner trays. It was mostly a courtesy, like the maître d’ going from table to table, but now and then a patient would have a real complaint. One day, for example, the fresh fruit was an apple, and a patient had his Macintosh delivered with a bite taken out of it. He said it didn’t inspire much confidence in the rest of his food. Our job was to agree with such patients.
We hit the sixth floor first. It was the first time he’d been in a patient’s room, and he entered with cautious reverence, almost tiptoeing through the door. One of the first things you learn when you work in a hospital, I told him, is to forget the patients are sick. After all, they don’t want to be reminded of it, and there’s no real privacy anyway. Just open the door, stroll in, and take care of your business. This is what I did, sailing through all of Six South without any problems, but he still stayed shyly behind me. On Six North, there was a private room, 695, occupied by Mr. Prentice. He was a Parkinson’s patient, and his wife was always there. She was a pain in the neck, because something was always wrong with the food. She was lying in wait when we entered the room.
“You call this food?” she screamed, jabbing her finger at the tray.
“What’s the problem this evening?” I said politely.
“Feel these mashed potatoes,” she said.
“You want me to feel the mashed potatoes?”
“Come on, they won’t bite,” she said, and before I knew it, she grabbed my hand and thrust them into a cold, meager pile next to the Salisbury steak.
“They’re cold, all right,” I said, looking around for a paper towel.
“You’re damned right they’re cold. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll get you some warm ones,” I promised. “How are you today, Mr. Prentice?”
He nodded with his whole body, the way Parkinson’s patients do. It meant that he was fine, and I patted him on the shoulder. His incessant shaking had rattled the sheets off of him, and his knees were bent and trembling. Martin withdrew toward the door.
“Come here, Martin,” I said. “Feel these mashed potatoes.”
“Do I have to?” he asked.
“Part of the job,” I said.
He put a reluctant finger to the top of a curd and instantly withdrew it.
“They’re cold, all right,” he said to Mrs. Prentice.
“We’re paying eighty dollars a day for this room,” she said, “and we want warm mashed potatoes.”
“I understand,” he said.
“You do something about it, young man.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We will,” and Martin and I left the room.
We ordered the mashed potatoes, and I got a call from Pediatrics.
It was Mrs. O’Hara, the head nurse, a very disagreeable character. She was feared by the nurses under her, and by everyone else, for that matter, but her way of instilling that fear was indirect. She would leave a small blue “drug card” on a patient’s Kardex, with a harsh note for the nurse to discover herself. The nurses called her the “Kardex Commandant” and other names that were not so polite.
Without telling me what the problem was, she insisted that I come down to the unit. When we got there, O’Hara was nowhere in sight. The invisible dictator who worked the day shift had finally gone off duty at seven P.M., but she’d left a note for me about the “immediate” need for more pillows on the unit.
“Look at this,” I said to Estelle, the unit’s only nursing assistant, “O’Hara wants more pillows.”
“You better get ʼem,” she said, cutting her throat with a finger and smiling.
I grabbed Martin by the sleeve of the coat, walked him down the hall, threw open a closet door, and turned on the light. There, in its glory, was a shining mountain of fresh pillows without their cases. The whole large closet was filled with them. It was O’Hara’s main obsession. Before I started getting them for her, she sent Estelle out on raids to other units. As a result, there was always a shortage elsewhere in the hospital. I had begun to steal them back, one at a time, but it was like taking hubcaps from under the gaze of a junkyard dog. Estelle was devoted to O’Hara, and she watched the unit with a constant eye. In order to get them by her, I’d create subterfuges, like turning on the call light in one of the kids’ rooms.
The irony was that there were only five or six kids on the unit at any given time. That meant seven or eight pillows for each patient. Most sick kids went to Children’s Hospital, so O’Hara’s urgency was of the lifeboat variety. She feared the unit was going to be closed altogether.
We went back to the station.
“Estelle,” I said, “I’m not getting any more pillows. The closet is full of them.”
“I’m gonna tell O’Hara,” she said.
“Fine.”
A little kid named Nicky whizzed by us, holding his arms out and making airplane noises. Then he flew back our way and pounded into Martin, slamming his fists into Martin’s leg and making ack-ack sounds like a machine gun. Estelle pulled him off and walked him back to his room.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Martin.
“Hyperactive. They give them uppers to slow them down.”
“I would think the opposite,” he said.
“It’s like with cats. For some reason you speed them up to slow them down.” I knew a nurse at Metropolitan who gave tranquilizers to her nervous cat, and they made it even worse. It spent the night circling the walls at eye level, like cars at Daytona.
Nancy, the beautiful nurse on the evening shift, came out of a room looking distraught. She had plastic gloves on both hands and a stethoscope around her neck. “Where’s Estelle?” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“We’ve got an expiration,” she said. “It’s Charles.”
Charles was an ethereal little boy of about five who had leukemia. They’d been keeping him going for two or three weeks with blood transfusions, IVs, and all the rest.
“I’m going to need some help,” she said.
We entered the room, and there was Charles, voluptuously dead, in a bed with chrome
bars to keep him from crawling out. The disease had yellowed his skin, giving it a soft glow, and his lips were purple. Scattered around the bed were various toys he’d been given, and next to his face, stained with blood, was a teddy bear. Even though I’d become hardened to these scenes of death, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
“Oh, God,” said Martin, looking like he was going to faint.
“Why don’t you find Romona?” I said. “I’ll take care of this.”
He was extremely grateful and left the room. Estelle entered, looking put-upon as usual, and Nancy and she began to straighten up. They put all the toys into a plastic bag for the parents to take home later, but there was disagreement about the teddy bear. Nancy thought we should throw it out, while Estelle insisted the parents would want it. It was decided that Estelle would try to wash it clean, but if that failed they would toss it down the garbage chute. I ordered the death pack and they washed the body, laying it out on clean sheets and propping the head with two pillows. Estelle had wet his hair and combed it nicely. It looked like a kid’s on the first day of school.
Half an hour later, the doctor came in with the parents. Everyone knew that Charles wouldn’t live long, so an order had been placed on the chart not to call a Dr. Blue. The parents wanted him to die with some peace. Nancy was in the room when it happened; the death was mercifully quick.
The doctor went into the room first, then he called the parents in. They were a nice-looking couple in their thirties, and they handled it well until it was time to leave. Then the mother collapsed in grief and had to be helped into the lobby.
Charles’s body was so light I took it to the morgue myself, lifting it up in my arms and placing it softly onto the cart and later the morgue slab. For some reason warmth seemed to come from the body, and the shroud smelled sweet, more like clean laundry than death. The family said we could keep all the toys, so it didn’t matter that Estelle, unable to wash the bear clean, had dropped it down the chute.