Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  I felt my knees hit the ground hard, jarring my entire body, but without sensation. Things tilted slightly as I toppled onto my side like a slowly falling tree, and then the loud water was running by my cheek, even filling an ear. I blinked several times, trying to keep the splash of water out of my eye. From this angle, almost swimming on its surface, the water looked enormous—like a huge, moonlit river, rushing to the sea in a tumult.

  I thought of how Gail would enjoy a scene like this.

  When the pain kicked in at last, from my very core, it felt like lava. The river turned to fire, and I thought maybe it would carry me to Gail. After all, hadn’t the same man killed us both, each in our own way?

  I took comfort in that—the only comfort I could find—just before I stopped thinking altogether.

  15

  WHAT I REMEMBER COMES to me in private mental snapshots—some slightly fuzzy or badly framed, some of people, others of ceilings, ambulance roofs, or views of the sky. All of them are in random order. The one constant theme, like music accompanying a slide show, is the pain. It is the pain, I’ve come to think, that stimulated my taking the snapshots in the first place. Whenever it hit badly enough, I came into focus, more or less, just as a dozing concertgoer might be jarred awake by an occasional off-key note before nodding off once more.

  There are many clear, full-face, but troubled portraits of friends—Tony, Ron, Sammie, Gail, Billy… even my younger brother Leo, a butcher from Thetford and the gentle custodian of the remnants of my family. All there, I knew, to lend me comfort, to see how I’m doing, but all looking as if they’ve lost their best friend. There is one of Willy, of course, that’s a little different. He’s farther away, standing straight and viewing from a distance. When I wasn’t taking photos but just leafing through them until the next spasm woke me up—I came to think he was looking at me as he might a dead dog in the street. But then he’s a special case; and he did show up.

  Toward the end, more lucid, although still keeping to myself in dark unconsciousness, I knew that’s what was going on—that they were visiting me—fitting themselves awkwardly in between the IV poles, the electronic monitors, the EKG machine, and a bunch of other equipment that kept a steady watch on me. But having no memory of their visits apart from these disjointed images—and judging solely from their expressions—I knew I wasn’t doing too well.

  I eventually found that out for myself when the familiar painful stimulus led to a moving picture instead of a still. I watched in grimacing fascination as a young nurse, her eyes intent on her task, manipulated something below my line of sight. It was dark all around us, the only light coming from a freestanding gooseneck lamp she had beside her and the familiar green, red, and amber glow from the various instruments plugged in all around me.

  “Ow.”

  She stopped, and turned to look at me, her face darkening in the shadow, which in turn highlighted the whiteness of her teeth as she smiled. “Good morning.”

  I moved my head slightly to take in the surrounding gloom. “Morning?”

  “Figure of speech. It’s 2:00 a.m. How are you feeling?” Her voice was soft and clear.

  “Not too good. What are you doing down there?” To me, my voice sounded like it was coming from inside an echo chamber and my throat hurt like hell. I didn’t know if I was whispering or shouting.

  “Changing your dressing. Sorry if it hurts a bit.”

  I caught my breath at an extra jolt, remembering how painlessly the knife had slipped in. “He did a hell of a job, I guess.”

  She smiled again, her eyes back on what she was doing. “That he did. He said lots of other people would’ve died from less. You’re a tough guy, Mr. Gunther.”

  She hadn’t known whom I’d meant, and I was too tired to explain it to her. Also, there was something uplifting in the way she spoke, after all those grim-faced snapshots, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood. I passed out instead, launched on a new career of collecting movie loops—small segments of action, usually of nurses like her, sometimes of doctors—always brought on by the pain. Some of these loops had dialog, occasionally as coherent and reasonable as that first one, but they tended to be a little repetitive. The time of day and concern for how I was feeling were two popular subjects. And there were other times when the movie and the soundtrack were completely out of whack, when lips moved without sound and words floated by out of context. I got more of those grim looks at those times, and eventually, like a precocious toddler, I learned to keep my mouth shut when the audience frowned.

  A breakthrough came when I woke not from pain, but from a gentle pressure on my forehead—something warm and smooth—a caress—and I opened my eyes to see Gail looking down at me.

  “Smile,” I asked her.

  She smiled—genuinely—the pleasure reaching the small crinkles near her eyes. “Hi. You’re looking better.”

  I waited for the pain, for the lights to fade and the movie to end as usual—some of them had been that short—but nothing happened. I took advantage of it to study her more closely, in the flesh, instead of in the recesses of my mind. She didn’t look better. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair tangled and unwashed, and her cheeks gaunt and shadowed with exhaustion.

  “You look terrible.”

  The smile spread to a chuckle. “Thanks a lot—you’re to blame for most of it.”

  I felt a familiar tug on my ability to focus—my brain longing to return to its black hole of peaceful contemplation. My sight darkened and blurred. But I didn’t want to go this time. I shifted my weight slightly, and the hot poker did the rest—my eyes cleared and my mind resurfaced.

  That obviously wasn’t all it did, however. Gail suddenly leaned forward, her expression intent. “Are you okay?”

  I unclenched my teeth. “Yeah—sorry.” I raised an arm to touch her, to set her at ease, and saw a thin, almost bony hand come into view—pale, slightly wrinkled, and scarred by several old IV sites along the forearm. Instead of squeezing her shoulder, I flexed my hand several times, as if at a loss to explain its function.

  She interpreted the gesture. “You’ve been here a long time, Joe. Weeks. You came close to dying a few times.”

  Her tightly controlled voice suddenly meshed with her ravaged appearance, and I felt terrible about my earlier flip comment. I put the stranger’s hand to use and gripped her arm. “Gail, I thought about you—about being with you—just after he stabbed me.”

  She smiled again. “Swell.”

  I held onto her harder. “No. It was strange. It was peaceful and didn’t hurt. I was just lying there in the water, thinking of how nice it would be to be with you. You were the one thing I could think of that helped.”

  The words sounded awkward to me, unfamiliar and slightly juvenile. I was angered at my own lack of eloquence, knowing without being told of the hours she must have spent by my bed, putting aside her own pain so she could accompany me through mine.

  “I guess it worked” was what she said, but the smile lingered in her eyes.

  I wanted to ask her how she was doing, if her own suffering at the hand of our mutual nemesis had eased any since we’d last visited. I wanted to find out what had happened to Bob Vogel, and what her reaction was to that. But it was all beyond me. My vision closed in again, I saw my hand fall away from her arm, and this time I couldn’t bring myself to move. Just as I shut down, I saw Gail lean forward to kiss me.

  · · ·

  The next visitor I knew about was Leo, my brother, who woke me up as any truly professional butcher might—by getting a firm grip on the meat of my upper arm.

  He smiled as I opened my eyes. “Jesus, Joey, you’re scrawnier’n hell.”

  I focused on his tired face—broader and darker than Gail’s. “You don’t look so hot yourself,” I croaked, clearing my throat.

  He slipped his arm behind my neck and tilted my head up to receive some cool water from a cup with a bent straw hanging out of it—his years of tending our invalid mother showing in his gentl
e dexterity. “I knew you’d want some of this—all that crap they had stuffed down your throat. I couldn’t believe it.”

  I finished sipping and he laid me back, suddenly peeling back my upper lip and looking at my teeth. “Boy, we ought to do something about that, too. I brought a toothbrush, okay?”

  I stared in wordless amazement at the brush he whipped out of his shirt pocket, his tired eyes gleaming with the bright glow of success. “That’s another thing I knew they wouldn’t think of. Has Gail tried to kiss you yet?”

  “I don’t… I think so. I’ve been kind of groggy.”

  He burst out laughing and produced a crumpled tube from another pocket, from which he slathered a thick dollop onto the brush. “God, no wonder she hasn’t said much—must still be catching her breath.”

  I blinked a couple of times, trying to banish the tendrils of a deep sleep from my brain. “Leo, what’s been going on? Where am I?”

  He raised his eyebrows and dipped the brush into the cup. “You don’t know? Open your mouth.”

  I raised a hand to hold him off. “Don’t. I can do it.”

  He handed it over cheerfully. “I doubt it.”

  I took the brush and tried to use it, my fingers trembling with the effort. After only a couple of strokes, my entire arm felt heavy, and I missed my teeth completely, delivering a swatch of foam across my chin.

  Leo shook his head, satisfied by his foresight. “Give me that. You’re making a mess.” He took it away and set to work, neatly and gently. “You’re in Lebanon, New Hampshire—the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center—and you’ve been under for three weeks, Joey—gram-negative septicemia—that’s what they said you had. Fancy for blood poisoning. What the knife started, your own guts spilling into the rest of you almost finished. You had the docs scrambling a couple of times. Bad fevers, seizures, times you were delirious—you gave ’em a run for their money. They tell me you lost forty pounds just lying here. By the way, who’s paying for all this?”

  I gurgled something, and he shrugged, “Oh, right. Sorry. Here—” He brandished the all-purpose cup. “Spit.”

  I spat.

  “The reason I ask, you got first-class all the way—police escort for the ambulance from the dam; helicopter ride up from Brattleboro; the best surgical team they had to offer here… You know how long they worked on you?”

  I knew better than to try to answer. When Leo was on a roll, there was no point trying to stop him.

  “Eight hours. Gail and I were sitting outside the whole time. They tried getting us to go home, but forget that. Anyway, it was the same bunch working on you the whole night. I thought docs were a little overpaid, you know? But when I saw the head guy—when he came out to tell us you’d pulled through the operation—he looked like he’d earned his keep. That son of a gun looked beat. You know what I mean?”

  He punched me gently on the shoulder and then immediately leaned over me, his eyes inches from mine. “Damn, you okay? Got a little carried away. That didn’t hurt, did it?”

  “It’s okay, Leo.”

  He was already massaging the shoulder with his big paw, doing far more damage than he had with the punch. He suddenly stopped again and took my face in his hands, as he might a small child’s. His face was serious and troubled, in abrupt contrast to the beaming expression he’d been showering on me so far. “You’re doing okay now, aren’t you? Feeling better?”

  I tried to nod between his hands and muttered through puckered lips, “Fine—a little tired.”

  “I know you’ve been banged up before—even out like a light for a couple of days—but this time… I don’t know… You really had me scared. You actually died a couple of times, you know that?”

  I tried shaking my head politely, with less success.

  He glanced up at the machines crowded around me. “Hadn’t been for all this stuff—and all the people here—you would’ve been history.” He paused, his eyes gleaming brightly. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, said, “Don’t do it again,” and disappeared as magically as he’d appeared.

  · · ·

  My days became more normal after that. I woke up when most people normally do, I had conversations with beginnings, middles, and ends, and I began to feel more a part of, if not the regular world, then at least a highly regimented corner of it. Then I was moved from Intensive Care to a regular room and introduced to the far less pleasant realities of physical therapy—a harsh enough contrast to make me yearn for the good old days of suspended animation.

  I was in the rehab gym, bathed in sweat from both exertion and pain, when I got my first news of what had been happening outside the hospital walls. Tony Brandt appeared on the threshold one day and came over to where I was sitting slumped on the bench of a Universal weight machine, trying to catch my breath.

  He perched trimly on a barbell rack and smiled at me. “Lifting your own weight already?”

  I answered with a short, exasperated laugh. “More like the weight of three gerbils—if that.”

  He tilted his head and looked at me appraisingly. “You look pretty good. Some guys would kill to lose forty pounds in their sleep.”

  I just looked at him sourly.

  His voice softened subtly. “How are you?”

  Ever since I’d woken up, that had been the topic—for me, for the doctors, nurses, therapists, for my friends. I spent so much time either responding to that question or pondering it myself—my fingers gingerly running along the long tender scar that extended from where Vogel had stuck me in the side, right across my belly to where the surgeons had gone in to patch me up—that I was beginning to wonder whether obsessions could be picked up like germs. I didn’t want to leave this hospital feeling like every bowel movement should be up for appraisal.

  “I’m getting better,” I answered blandly and changed the subject. “I heard we got Vogel, but nobody around here knows the details.”

  Brandt gave me a rueful glance. “Has Sammie been by?”

  I reached back into my catalogue of mental snapshots. “Yeah, but before I was conversational. Why?”

  “There’s some controversy about whether Vogel gave up before she nailed him with her flashlight, or the other way around. According to him, he thought just the two of you were behind him—that the rest were coming from the other end—and that he might be able to get around you. But he said after he knifed you, supposedly in a panic, by the way—hear the insanity plea coming?—that he realized you two had reinforcements, so he gave up, raised his hands, and then got nailed by Sammie. She put him in the hospital, too, but just overnight.”

  I wiped my face with a small hand towel and straightened up, feeling a little stronger after my rest. “Tell her thanks when you see her. You realize the rest of his story is total bullshit. He knew we weren’t alone. Sammie shouted up the ladder to the others just before he stuck me. He heard them as clearly as I did. Is that how he’s trying to weasel out of this? That he gave up and we creamed him?”

  Brandt pulled a face and shook his head. “That’s just his first line of defense. He also says he was innocent—another con framed by the pigs—and that he ran off because he was convinced we were going to persecute him. He said he’s never set eyes on Gail Zigman and that on the night in question his car broke down on his way back from work, and that he spent a couple of hours underneath it jury-rigging a repair.”

  “What kind of breakdown?”

  “Punctured oil pan. We checked the car out and found the repair, all right—he put a screw in the hole—but we also went to the place he said it happened, and the road’s clean as a whistle. According to his own testimony, there was oil all over when he was through.”

  “Did he go for help anywhere?”

  “Nope. Supposedly, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself or the illegal car, so he did it all on his own. He said it was a long time before he found out what was wrong, put the screw in, replaced the oil, and went on his way.”
/>
  “He had extra oil?”

  “Yeah—says he uses almost as much oil as gas.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Car smokes like it was on fire. And of course he happened to have the perfect screw for the job.”

  “Naturally. And when we hit him with the discrepancies, he went stone cold on us. Told us we were a bunch of fuckers out to get him, and that he’d see us in court.”

  “What?” I asked, surprised. The popular technique was to stall the process until damn-near all the principals were dead of old age. “Who’s his lawyer?”

  “Tom Kelly—he got the nod from the state when the public defender’s office claimed conflict of interest.”

  “Is Kelly playing the see-you-in-court angle, too?”

  Brandt scratched his head. “I don’t know. It’s a little early—they haven’t even had the status conference yet. After the oil-in-the-road story blew up, Kelly approached Dunn with a plea, but he withdrew it in mid-negotiation. Now, no one knows what he’s up to. He asked for a change of venue, of course, but there was a wrinkle there, too. He said he’d accommodate Dunn by requesting an out-of-county jury instead of actually moving the trial. According to Kelly, that’s because he’s being sensitive to Dunn’s schedule, since Dunn’s out politicking every minute he can find. But according to the scuttlebutt, Kelly made the offer so he can humiliate Dunn on his home turf. Of course, that only works if Kelly’s got a secret weapon, and as far as any of us can see, all he’s got is the last deck chair on the Titanic.”

  “What was the plea they were working on?”

  “Well, given the rape and the attack on you—not to mention shooting the power-company guy—he’s looking at a life sentence, easy. I think Dunn was offering fifteen to thirty on the rape alone before Kelly lost interest.”

  “What’s Dunn’s attitude?”