Victim

by Gary Kinder

  “One thing’s certain,” Dr. Hauser was saying. “He’s suffered severe brain damage. If he lives, it may be weeks, or months, before we know the extent of it. The bullet itself is lodged over here a little to the right, as you saw on the X rays.”

  Dr. Hauser extended the incision further to the right, where the missile had burrowed in and now rested in its own groove. He extracted the bullet from under the scalp, then removed the devitalized brain tissue at the point of impact, along with a fair quantity of thick, dark blood.

  “This clotted blood makes me feel a little better about his situation,” Dr. Hauser admitted, “having it to remove instead of brain to help relieve the pressure in his head.”

  Dr. Hauser then tied one sublayer of black silk sutures and stitched together the long, angled incision in Cortney’s scalp and neck. The operation was over. A nurse rolled the bullet up in gauze to give to the police for evidence, and Cortney’s head was carefully wrapped before he was wheeled back to Intensive Care. The procedure had lasted just over two and a half hours, Dr. Rees quietly monitoring Cortney’s life signs, and the orange light on the respirator blinking slowly and methodically.

  Outside the doors to Surgery, Gary and Claire sat in wheelchairs, fidgeting the chairs back and forth, sometimes spinning a short distance down the hall and coming back again. Each drifted about, absorbed in private thoughts as time passed slowly during these early, dark hours of the morning. The original shock had left them numb, and now they were focusing what hope and energy they had left on the survival of their younger brother.

  It was an agonizing wait. Police roamed the halls, and a guard had been posted a few feet away in front of an elevator.

  Claire asked the guard, “Why are so many police around here?”

  “It’s just a precaution,” he said, “in case they try to come back.”

  Claire was unsure what he meant.

  “You mean if they find out they didn’t kill everybody?”

  “Yes,” said the guard, “witnesses. Somebody went and told the press there were survivors.”

  Rebuffed by police and hospital personnel for more facts about the murders, reporters had located the ambulance driver, a crusty veteran of ten years, who had told them it was the worst scene he had ever walked in on.

  “Couple of ‘em was dead we seen right away,” he had related. “The woman and the boy was groaning, making growling noises, trying to breathe like. Reminded me of the Korean executions over there, those Chinamen, when we was over there in Korea. You know, hands tied behind your back, shot ‘em right in the head. That’s what it reminded me of. I didn’t think I’d ever see it here, frankly.”

  When asked about the victims, the driver had disclosed there were two survivors, a man at McKay-Dee and a kid at St. Benedict’s.

  “I guess it’s okay to talk,” he had added, “nobody told me not to say nothing.”

  Since midnight, radio stations along the Wasatch front had been broadcasting vague accounts of what was alleged to be the most heinous crime ever committed in Utah, the Ogden Hi-Fi Murders. And each broadcast reiterated the survival of two of the victims. Though medical personnel huddled inside ICU and Surgery were oblivious to any threats of violence, the police and personnel in other parts of the hospital anticipated a second attempt on Cortney’s life. The killers were still at large, and the elevator behind the officer was a service elevator that descended directly into the unguarded basement. It opened fifteen feet from the doors to Surgery, where Cortney lay.

  “Do you think they’ll try anything?” Claire asked the guard.

  “If they were crazy enough to do what they did in the first place,” he answered, “they may be crazy enough to come back and try to finish them off.”

  Periodically, their father or Brett had slipped into the doctors’ change room, which adjoined the waiting area with the surgical suites, and delivered reports of Cortney’s operation to Gary and Claire. One moment their hopes soared over the knowledge that the bullet had not entered Cortney’s brain, only to be apprised a short while later that the impact alone had turned a portion of his brain to pulp. It had gone back and forth that way throughout the operation. Gary queried Brett and his father for the minutest details. Where are they drilling the holes? What caliber is the bullet? How far was it deflected? he wanted to know. Involving himself with facts was Gary’s way of dealing with the tragedy; it crowded everything else out of his mind. But Claire was finally overwhelmed by the discussions of facts. She understood them, but she did not want to hear them.

  “This is too detailed for me,” she had blurted out. “I don’t want to know these things. I just want to know if he’s okay.”

  Her father had put his arm around her and said, “Yes, yes, so far he’s okay.”

  The operation was now over, and it was almost 5:00 A.M. The large surgical lamp was finally turned off. Byron walked out of Surgery, pulled off his surgical mask, and eased the green cap from his head. Gary and Claire were waiting by the entrance. Byron put his arms around them and walked them down the hall away from the operating room, as Brett followed closely behind.

  “Well, now, Cortney’s pulled through the surgery,” Byron told Gary and Claire, “and I’m grateful for that. I got the impression that Dr. Hauser felt it wasn’t as bad as what he thought it was going to be.” He stopped and moved to the side of the hall. “They still don’t have any idea what’s going to happen to him. If he lives, Hauser thinks he’ll probably have a little trouble with his eyes. The bullet struck in his visual center and that was some of the dead tissue they had to remove. Then the shock waves from the bullet Hauser feels may have bungled up his speech center and he could be a little stiff on his right side. They just don’t know. I’m explaining all of this to you because I want you to know what we’ve got left to work with.”

  What Byron hadn’t explained was his fear that the damage done to Cortney by the bullet was minor compared to the edema choking off his lungs. Oxygen to the brain was the critical factor, and Cortney’s ashen-bluish color and fixed, dilated pupils when his father had first seen him in ICU indicated Cortney had gone far too long without it.

  The Surgery doors suddenly flew open and Cortney’s body was rushed out. Except for the white sterile gauze now wrapped around his head he looked the same: prone once again, still wired with tubes and bottles, an attendant squeezing oxygen into his lungs. Byron watched the cart go by, then turned back to his three children.

  “Why don’t you kids follow Cortney back to ICU and make sure everything’s okay. I have to run downstairs for a minute. I’ll meet you back in the waiting room.”

  He gave them a gentle push in the direction of the nurses’ desk, and the three of them obediently started down the hall, turning the corner some distance behind Cortney and the technicians tending to him. Then Byron called the nursing supervisor again, stepped into the elevator, and pushed the button for the basement. Before the mortician could transport his wife’s body to the State Medical Examiner in Salt Lake City, Byron wanted a final moment with her alone.

  I just wanted to… just wanted to see her again. I didn’t particularly want to see her in that state, but… just to see her again… just to ... I guess just to make sure. I don’t know. You don’t know why the hell you do the things you do in those circumstances. But there seemed to be a purpose at the time. And whatever purpose it was, it fulfilled the purpose. I looked at her and just had some tender, warm feelings. And some heartache feelings. That everything was over with. And that’s the way it was. That the partner I had had for life was no longer with me.

  It had been nearly thirty-six years since Byron had met Carol one summer day over a scoop of ice cream. Carol’s parents owned an ice-cream company and root beer stand in Ogden where Carol and her three sisters car-hopped root beer and ice-cream cones during the warm summer months. Which is why Carol’s friends had to coax her that day to go with them for ice cream at a rival dairy across town.

  “There’s this cute guy
working down there,” they had giggled, “you gotta go see him.”

  “I was thinking,” Carol told Claire many years later, “How obvious would that be if I drop in for an ice-cream cone over there?”

  But after a good deal of coaxing from her friends, Carol had finally relented.

  The cute guy loading and serving ice cream at his uncle’s dairy was Byron Naisbitt, a tan, broad-shouldered youth of fifteen.

  “She came out there to get an ice-cream cone one day,” recalled Byron. “Then she kept coming back to get more ice-cream cones, so I just kept serving her ice-cream cones, and we just struck up a relationship.”

  Byron and Carol dated for the next two years and were engaged when Byron was seventeen. (In the frame of his closet mirror, Byron still kept a picture of Carol that year when she was a senior in high school.) Carol, who was born on Christmas Day, was exactly fifty-one weeks older than Byron. She had finished her second year of college and Byron his first, when they were married in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. Carol then quit school and went to work as a secretary to put Byron through an accelerated premed program and later medical school at the University of Utah. After graduation, internship, and residency they had returned to Ogden to live and raise their family, which had already grown by two.

  From the time they were married, Byron and Carol had made a striking couple, he ruggedly handsome, she petite, pretty, and bubbly. Though she had suppressed it all those years they were in school, Carol had a taste for clothes, and now that those years were behind them and they could afford it, Byron found pleasure in indulging her that joy.

  “He would go and sit while she modeled different outfits for him,” a neighbor remembered. “Byron was proud of Carol, he liked to see her well-dressed. She always looked like she had just stepped out of Vogue magazine.”

  Despite her taste for high fashion Carol was the handy one around the Naisbitt household. As another friend said, “She’d be more apt to fix the toilet if it leaked than By would.” Carol kept her own toolbox, neatly organized with an assortment of tools and other hardware she needed for her projects. When the Naisbitts were ready to build their first home, Carol shopped for a contractor, decided they all cost too much, that she couldn’t trust them, and that she could probably build a better house herself. She designed the house and took bids from subcontractors. Each morning she sent Gary and Brett off to school, put on jeans and a work shirt, dressed three-year-old Claire and took her with her up to the construction site, where she read the plans, learned the vernacular, and supervised each phase of the construction. The Naisbitts still lived in the second home Carol had built eleven years before.

  Once a house was built, Carol relished creating a warm and elegant atmosphere with Persian rugs and fine period antiques. The house where they now lived was a showcase of her imagination and personality. She had remodeled every room at least once, doing most or all of the work herself. Had she turned an avocation into a vocation, which admiring friends had encouraged her to do, she would have become an interior designer. In addition to being tastefully decorated Carol’s home was organized down to the last nut and bolt in her hardware collection. Every one of the children’s closets and drawers were neatly labeled Socks, Underwear, Sweaters, Pajamas, and so on. The medicine cabinets, linen closets, kitchen pantry, and her own toolroom were similarly organized. In the kitchen she kept notes of things to tell people, and when she saw them next, before another word was said, she would get out her list for that person and gripe at, remind, apologize to, or thank them.

  Byron found amusing the amount of energy Carol could generate and the projects she was unafraid to tackle: her decorating; her Junior League, bridge club, and church activities; her constant comings and goings with the children for swimming practice and Scouts, her collecting for the March of Dimes; her baking cakes all night with Claire for the Ogden High football team. Once, on a camera safari in Africa, Byron had had to jerk her inside the tent as she stood flat-footed, determined to photograph a bull elephant with his ears lowered to charge. At night, when the two of them were in bed asleep, her energy level often was still so high she would awake with “the fidgets” and attack the closets at three in the morning, cleaning and straightening until she was sure she could get back to sleep. As years had gone by, her late night workouts had become more strenuous. She would scrub the bathrooms, vacuum the downstairs, sprint in a circle through the dining room, living room, den, and kitchen, then race her Exercycle until she had just enough energy to walk back upstairs and fall into bed. On nights when the fidgets were only mild, Byron would roll over and find her jogging in place beside the bed.

  As he stood in the morgue, Byron moved a little closer to look at Carol before she was taken away.

  I looked at her, but so far as I was concerned, that wasn’t my wife the way I knew her and I just blocked it out. I saw her the way she was in life … a real dedicated mother, probably too good of a mother. And a good, devoted wife. She could do anything. If she didn’t like what the carpenter had done to the house, she’d just change it herself the way she wanted it. And if she couldn’t find something she was looking for, she’d make it herself, curtains, bedspreads, it didn’t matter. When we were in school, she made all of her clothes and some of mine. She was pretty handy, and sharp … sharp, sharp. If she thought she was right, why hell, that was the end of the program. She wouldn’t back off to anybody. And I suspect that’s the way it was down yonder. She may have been frightened, but she wouldn’t back off, I don’t think … not where one of the kids was involved.

  I’d draw it through my mind how I felt about her having to tolerate and go through this stuff, but that’s just … that’s just the way I felt towards her. I silently let her know how I felt about her situation, how bad I felt that she had to go through it. No one should have to die like that, at the hands of someone else, someone who terrorizes you and tortures you, that’s no way to die. There’s lots of terrible ways to die, but that’s no way. No one should have to tolerate that. No one should have that right over another person… .

  And I made promises to her. I promised her that I was going to make sure that the family did as well as we could without her, knowing full well it was never going to be the same, knowing full well that everything around was going to be different. I made a pledge to her that I would make sure that everything that could possibly be done for Cortney was going to be done, and that we were going to keep the family together. And we’d do the best we could with just a partial household. I promised her that we wouldn’t fold, that even though we were handicapped and we didn’t have her spirit in our household, her input, her happiness and all of the things she meant to all of us, we’d try to do the best we could.

  Byron closed the tray and walked the long white tunnel for the last time. This time his legs carried him past the nurses’ lounge and into the elevator, the same elevator where hours before Andy Tolsma had told him that Carol was dead. The elevator took him to the third floor, and when the doors opened, he could see that the knot of relatives that had gathered in the waiting room was beginning to unravel. They had received word that Cortney had survived the surgery, and now they were drifting back to their own homes and families. He passed by, touching some of them and nodding as they mumbled condolences.

  A police officer standing in the hallway came up and said for him not to worry about Cortney, nothing else would happen to the boy. Guards would be posted by his room twenty-four hours a day, and patrol cars would keep surveillance over the Naisbitt home.

  Gary, Brett, and Claire sat on a couch talking softly and waiting for their father. It was easier for them to talk now, though their faces were pale, their eyes red-rimmed and still teary. When their father appeared in the doorway of the waiting room, their conversation stopped and they went to embrace him.

  For a while Byron said nothing, just gripped his remaining children tighter around him. He wanted to explain to them something he didn’t fully understand, and to reassure th
em that things really hadn’t changed when he knew they had.

  “There’s something I want you kids to realize,” he said. “Death is a part of living. If you’re going to be here, you just as well figure on dying. That’s just part of life on this earth. There’s no sense making a big thing out of it. It happens to everybody.” He paused. “What’s happened to your mother and Cortney was horrible and there aren’t any rational explanations. There’s no way to understand why these people did what they did. But what’s important for us now is to stay close and love each other. That’s what families are for. Just because you have a disaster in your life, that doesn’t mean you go your own way and try to deal with it. If you have a lot of love and affection in your family and everybody comes around and gives love and affection to the other people, then everybody bolsters everyone else. And you know things aren’t going to fall apart that way. Because they can’t fall apart as long as one person has feelings for another person.”

  Claire was crying softly again, and her father squeezed her tightly against him.

  “We still have each other,” he told her. “We’ll always be together. We can always do things together. One thing we can’t do is worry about your mother anymore. We were married in the temple for time and eternity, and I plan to see her in another place and another time. We’ll all be together. That’s our belief, and it makes life easier. Right now we just have to concentrate on getting Cortney well again, we’ve got to get him squared away and salvage what can be salvaged.”