by Jon Cohen
“Arnie, what’s wrong?”
“I want to speak to Iris Shula,” said Arnie in a loud voice.
“Arnie, this is Iris. Put the phone to your good ear!” Heads turned as she shouted into the phone.
There were crackling noises, then a loud crash as Arnie presumably dropped the phone at his end. Oh Christ, he’s had a heart attack. He’s keeled over in the kitchen with a massive MI. Iris almost hung up to go to him when she heard his voice again.
“Iris, you there, girl?”
“Arnie, this is Iris.” She drew a grateful breath.
“Iris. I don’t mean to bother you at work—”
“It’s okay. It’s all right, Arnie.” She looked around at the ER waiting room, filled to overflowing. “Things aren’t too busy here.”
“Good. That’s good. I’m not calling just to chat, though.” There was a pause.
“Yes?” said Iris.
He cleared his throat into the phone. “You see, well, something came up. Something kind of happened.” He paused again.
“Arnie, you there?”
Arnie started up again, his voice sounding a little vague. “See, what happened is, well, the thing is…”
“The thing is…?”
“The thing is, my hook kind of disappeared.”
Iris closed her eyes, squinted, then slowly opened them again. The nurse in her was fast at work: Arnie had suffered a small stroke. His hook was right there on the end of his arm, but he wasn’t able to see it. Some tiny part of his brain had ceased to function, and he’d gone partially blind, or perhaps he was experiencing some sort of aphasia which rendered him unable to recognize things. Or maybe he’d just snapped, maybe he’d lost it. She’d noticed he was getting a little wifty these last months; Krupmeyer dying in the snow had shaken him.
“Arnie,” she said carefully. “How do you mean ‘disappeared’?”
“Not so much disappeared as gone, I guess you’d say.”
Gone? Misplaced gone? Stolen gone? Who steals hooks? “Gone in what way, Arnie?” Then she said, “You want I should come on home, Arnie?”
“Just listen, I’ll tell you how it’s gone. Duke. Duke’s got hold of it.”
Rabies? Duke went crazy and turned on Arnie and he fought the dog off with his hook. “Duke attacked you? Do you have any wounds, Arnie? You should come in to the ER. No, wait, I’ll borrow a car and—”
“Hold on, girl, did I say attack? You ain’t getting me in there, poking rabies needles in my belly. Fourteen of ’em. That’s how many they give you, isn’t that right?”
“You’re not bit?”
“No, I’m not bit. So put your needles away and listen. I was walking Duke and he saw a bunch of squirrels, and that’s all it took.”
She waited. “Took for what?” she said finally.
His exasperated voice jumped through the phone. “Hell, girl. Took to get him going! He saw them squirrels and went off like a rocket. I was holding the leash with my hook, and when Duke went, so did my hook. I’m telling you, it hurt. And now he’s gone, dragging my hook all over town. Jesus, girl, I feel terrible, don’t you know?”
There was a commotion at the entrance to the ER—the ambulance crew bringing in a noisy one. Iris looked at the guy’s face as they wheeled him by. Shit shit shit. Harvey Mastuzek was back. Mr. GI Bleed himself. “Arnie,” she said. “I’m not sure what I can do. Things are kind of picking up here.”
“I’m falling apart. Your old dad’s falling apart.”
Arnie, Arnie. “I’m sure we’ll find it, I’m sure it’ll turn up.”
Arnie suddenly shouted excitedly into the phone. “Holy hell! It’s turned up right now! I see that goddamn Duke out the window.” Iris heard a rhythmic banging. Arnie pounding on the window? He was suddenly back on the line again. “He’s trying to bury my hook in the hole I dug for the azalea. Gotta go, Iris! Christ, he’s got a foot of dirt over it already.”
Arnie hung up on her so hard she jumped. She stood looking blankly at the phone, then handed it back over to Dotty. Dotty gave her a hopeful stare. She’d been trying hard to listen in on the conversation.
“You don’t want to know,” Iris said to her.
“Yeah, I do,” said Dotty. “Tell you something you don’t want to know. Guess who the crew just brought in?”
“I saw. Harvey Mastuzek. Mr. Congeniality himself.”
“Funny,” said Dotty, looking this way and that. “I don’t seem to see Inez and Winnie anywheres. Poof, they vanished just like smoke.”
“Like dust in the wind,” said Iris.
“Like turds down the toilet,” said Dotty, shaking her head.
“Dotty, I’m shocked.”
“They a bunch of lazy asses, them two. You been getting all the hard patients.”
“My reward’s waiting for me in heaven, I guess, Dotty.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t waiting for you in room 5. That’s where they got Harvey.” Then she said, “You taking him?”
“Who else?” Iris said, starting off for room 5. She bumped into Winnie as Winnie was coming out of the med room.
“Oh, sorry, Iris,” she said. “What’s in 5? You taking him?”
Iris looked up at her. She had a lot to say, and was just revving up to say it when a more fitting punishment for Winnie suddenly appeared at the ER entrance. Another ambulance crew was coming in with what looked like a code, a big fat guy with a blue face. “Yeah, I’m taking 5”—Iris nodded in the direction of the advancing chaos—“and you’re taking that. Paybacks are a bitch, huh, Winnie?”
Iris left Winnie and went to check on Harvey Mastuzek. She would let Winnie dangle for a bit, but then she’d come out to help with the code. The ambulance crew was there to cover in the interim.
Iris expected the worst, walking into room 5, expected blood on the walls, Harvey thrashing around trying to land punches on whoever came within striking distance, but what she saw when she walked through the doorway was much more alarming than that. Harvey sat upright on the stretcher, absolutely motionless, his hands folded on his lap. His skin was very pale; she could see his thin, dark veins through it. His eyes were open, but whatever he was looking at was not in the room.
The two members of the crew who brought him in shrugged at Iris. The tall one said, “We picked him up in Waverly. In the alley behind the hardware store. Drunk. Rowdy. Threw up some blood, that’s why they called us.”
The short one, who was very short but still a good five inches taller than Iris, said, “I’m telling you, he was fighting us all the way. Even coming in here—all the way till we got in this room.”
“Then his eyes kind of bugged open and he just stopped. Froze-like.”
Iris nodded, then she went over to the stretcher. Was Harvey fixing to have the Big One? Patients did that, wild one second, then going weird and quiet the next, before stroking out or going flatline. In fact, Harvey looked dead already, pale and still as he was.
Iris turned to the ambulance crew. “Thanks, guys. I got it from here.”
The short one said, “You sure?”
“Yeah, finish your paperwork. I’ll yell if I need you.”
When they left, Iris turned back to the stretcher. “Harvey. You there?” She wiggled her fingers in front of his eyes. “Anybody home?”
Harvey blinked slowly, like an owl.
“Hey Harv, it’s me. Iris from down in the Unit. The little troll. You remember calling me that?”
Harvey began to turn his head toward her, in imperceptible increments. Iris had seen many strange things in her years as a nurse, but this was definitely spooky.
She began to wrap a blood pressure cuff around one of his thin arms. “You with me, Harvey? I’m taking your pressure now. Your belly feel okay? You know how it usually hurts when you come in here? How’s your breathing been?” He looked at her. His pressure was normal. Harvey never had a normal pressure; the times he’d come in bleeding, his pressure had always been low. Even when they’d straightened out his fluid levels, his
pressure was below normal. He looked at her. She listened to his lungs. Clear. He smoked at least a pack a day. They were never clear. His heart sounds were good. Harvey looked at her, and then his mouth began to move.
He did nothing more than speak softly, but Iris still jumped when the words left Harvey’s mouth. “He’s loose,” he said.
Iris fiddled with her stethoscope. It was hard to meet Harvey’s eyes. “Loose?” she said. “Who’s loose?”
“The man,” said Harvey.
Iris cocked her head. “What man? What man is loose?”
“He’s coming here.”
“Harvey, who? What are you telling me? I don’t get it.” Did she want to? Did she want to get it? She looked at his hands. He was doing something with his fingers, playing with something small and round and black, passing it back and forth between his fingers.
Then Harvey spoke, and his words made Iris clutch the side of the stretcher for support. “The man in the window,” he said. “The man in the window is coming here.”
The Tube Man’s words.
Someone yelled for her. “Iris, you got a curved blade in here?” Inez ran in. “For the code. They can’t get an airway in the guy. Straight blade’s not working.”
Harvey closed his eyes, then Iris gathered herself and turned away from him. She grabbed a curved laryngoscope blade out of the extra code cart and followed Inez out of the room to the code.
All sorts of people crowded the hall outside the room, including four or five gloomy-looking men in dark suits. Iris squeezed past them, then she whispered to Inez, “Boy, those guys look like undertakers. Kind of early, aren’t they?” She closed the door behind her.
“Those guys are undertakers,” Inez said. She pointed to the fat man whose face was still blue, and who was almost totally obscured by busy hospital staff who were jabbing him with needles, shooting drugs into him, hooking him up to IVs and monitors and oxygen. “Don’t you know him? That’s Big Bill Rose, the funeral director from Waverly.”
Now Iris recognized him, despite his increasingly darkening color. From LuLu’s funeral. The guy who kept pushing Arnie to include a ride in the Lincoln limousine as part of the funeral deal. Arnie practically had to toss Big Bill and his son out of the house, and after he slammed the front door, he had called him a “nickel-sucking son of a bitch.” Looked like Big Bill’s nickel-sucking days were fast coming to a close.
Iris helped prepare meds from the code cart. As she worked, one of the blood techs whispered to her that Jim Rose had found Big Bill on his living room floor. Big Bill had been making terrible choking sounds, and Jim Rose Heimliched him, but nothing came out. The ambulance arrived, but they couldn’t get anything out either. Iris could see Dr. Gunther struggling to slide an airway down Big Bill’s throat; obviously there was an obstruction. Big Bill was not doing well. He was staying in V-fib now. They couldn’t shock him out of it.
“Hey, I see it,” Dr. Gunther suddenly said, from the head of the stretcher where he was bent over working the laryngoscope blade in Big Bill’s wide-open mouth. Big Bill’s tongue was the color of liver. “Give me a pair of forceps.” He worked at it. “It’s something shiny. Almost… almost. Got it.”
Everyone craned forward to see. A golden ring. Winnie did the logical thing: She lifted Big Bill’s meaty left hand. “Not his. He’s still wearing his wedding band.”
Dr. Gunther dropped the ring on an instrument tray, and they all went back to work on Big Bill. But Big Bill had been too long without a good flow of oxygen. If he’d been young, he might have had some kind of chance. But he was old, and carrying too much weight, and Iris could see from the stains on his fingers that he’d been a heavy smoker. He had nothing going for him, had had no chance from the moment he put that wedding band in his mouth. Put it in his mouth? Who sticks wedding bands in their mouth? The code was almost over, they were just going through the motions now, dragging things out a little so the people gathered outside the door would think they had engaged in a magnificent struggle for Big Bill’s life, had done everything possible, although nothing they’d done in this crowded room had altered Big Bill’s fate in the least. Iris eased over to the instrument tray where the ring shone golden among the silver scalpels and hemostats. She held it up to the bright examination light hanging above Big Bill’s stretcher. There was an inscription. She squinted, then read it aloud:
“Norman Keeston. May 10, 1886.”
Silence in the room.
“Anybody ever heard of him?”
Everyone shrugged and looked blank.
Dr. Gunther said, “Maybe he was some sort of relative.”
Gerald from Respiratory said, “Yeah. Maybe Big Bill was going through a bunch of old family jewelry.”
Inez said, “And he bit the ring to see if it was real gold.”
They all smiled and averted their eyes. What Inez said had a definite logic to it. Big Bill’s love of the holy buck was well known. That he should sink his teeth into a golden ring and then accidentally choke on it certainly seemed within the realm of possibility (and fitting, though no one would dare suggest it).
“It’s been a big year for choking deaths. That guy a month ago who choked on a Pepsi bottle cap,” said Dr. Gunther.
“Mrs. Framingham, who choked on a grape,” said Winnie.
“And the Ping-Pong ball guy from Maryland. We never did figure out why he put a Ping-Pong ball in his mouth,” said Inez.
“I guess a wedding band isn’t so strange,” said Gerald.
Truly, to the hospital personnel gathered around Big Bill’s large and discolored form, choking on a wedding band was not so strange as to be unbelievable. It might not have even seemed so strange to Big Bill, who, at the moment of his death, must have recalled the unfortunate incident of the ice and understood that although his punishment was harsh, it was not unforeseen.
Far stranger for Iris were the whispered words of Harvey Mastuzek, words that had vibrated within her brain throughout the code, as if Harvey had been standing near, his hand cupped to her ear, words that she heard now as she left the code room, made her way past the dark-suited undertakers, and aimed her small thick body toward the room in which Harvey waited. Distracted, therefore, Iris was the only human being in the Emergency Room who didn’t hear the screeching words of the tall, elderly woman who suddenly burst into the ER followed by a veritable parade of people.
“Someone get this boy a doctor!” Francine Koessler’s voice did something electrical and unpleasant to people’s nervous systems. Lab techs, Dotty the ward clerk, the four undertakers, and all of the patients in the waiting area jerked their heads in Francine’s direction and regarded her with open mouths.
“You there,” Francine shouted again, to the one person not paying attention to her. “Nurse, we need you here this instant!” Now Francine entered Iris’s head—that’s what Francine seemed to do, jump right inside Iris’s head. Iris, well past the overload stage, who wouldn’t have been in the mood for someone like Francine on the best of days, and who you certainly did not yell at as if she were a dog, not if you valued your life, whirled around and lowered her head, so that Francine was threatened for the second time in less than twenty minutes by a woman transformed into a bull. Francine realized in an instant that Iris made a far more dangerous bull than had Gracie.
“Easy now, girl.” Dotty tried to calm Iris from the side. “You know how family members get.”
Heedless, Iris advanced toward Francine, accelerating as she moved down the hallway. Francine hurriedly positioned herself behind the only thing capable of stopping Iris, and that was Louis, in his baseball hat and purple scarf, who indeed stopped Iris dead in her tracks. He took a step forward, supported on one side by Carl, and on the other by Bert, and nodded to Iris, because he recognized her. How could he not, for she had been the first woman, aside from Gracie, to whom he had spoken in sixteen years. And Iris recognized him, how could she not, the man in the scarf and hat, who had spoken as if he’d emerged from a coma, r
usty and reborn, who had the urgent all-seeing eyes of a paralyzed man. He was here, her Lawrence of Arabia. He had crossed his desert for her.
“Oh, my, my,” said Dotty in a low voice, because she recognized Louis too. She lived in Waverly, as did the undertakers and many of the hospital employees and patients in the waiting area. They all knew of Louis, knew of his scarf and hat, his sixteen hidden years. Their eyes were upon him. They were so intent, so excited and dismayed by his presence, they forgot to breathe. Louis could actually feel it, the oxygen around him that went unused, that entered his own lungs and made him dizzy with its richness. They stared at him. Dotty tried to speak again but could bring no sound to her words, not that she even knew what words she had meant to say. The undertakers momentarily forgot that Big Bill lay dying or dead in the next room. A lab tech who had been shaking a vial of newly drawn blood was shaking it still but didn’t know it, didn’t see as Louis did that her arm going up and down, up and down, was the only thing moving in the Emergency Room. The patients back in the waiting area, with their bruised knees, and their stove burns, and infected ears, and sprained tendons, they stared at Louis, too, unbreathing, and forgot their own injuries, for they either knew in fact from the legend of Louis, or if they’d never heard of Louis, they knew instinctively from his overwhelming presence, that neither their individual pains, nor the collective mass of their pains, were equal to whatever lay beneath that hat, behind that scarf, and within those frightened eyes.
A short, high-pitched scream broke the spell that Louis had cast over the Emergency Room. It came from behind the closed door of room 3, the code room. Inez, not known for her personal courage or her tact, appeared wide-eyed in the doorway and practically shouted into the faces of Jim Rose and his fellow undertakers:
“He moved!”
“Daddy’s alive?” Jim Rose pressed forward.
Inez shook her head. “No, he’s dead. But he still moved.” She rushed past the undertakers and into the locker room to find a piece of bubble gum to calm her nerves. Big Bill had not just twitched a little, as many corpses do, which probably wouldn’t have sent Inez skittering out of the room; no, Big Bill had momentarily emerged from the realm of the dead and moved as purposefully, it had appeared to the code team, as a living man. He had suddenly reached his big hand, the fingernails purple in death, out from under the sheet which Winnie had just pulled over him, and slapped it stiffly down on top of the instrument tray that lay on the rolling table beside his stretcher, the instrument tray that held scalpels, hemostats, syringes, and, of course, Norman Keeston’s ring. As if the condition of rigor mortis were occurring before their eyes, Big Bill’s fingers curled and closed around the ring. Even in death, it seemed, Big Bill sensed the nearness of gold, and sought to acquire it.