by Jim Nisbet
“I got here as soon as I could,” Iris said tightly, in a small, wavering voice, a voice barely under control. “I never killed anybody before…”
As he explored the bandage with his fingers, he caught Sibyl’s eye. Something like a photon emitted from her and came at him. Something feral. Stanley had the sudden feeling he had found her in a dark cave, where the eyes were the only evidence of her presence, while all the rest of her lay concealed in shadow.
He covered and uncovered the right side of his face with the palm of his hand. No light waxed or waned. No shadow flitted through his perception.
“My eye,” said Stanley suddenly.
Iris began again, shakily defensive, “I got here… as fast as I—.”
“My eye…” Stanley realized everybody had been waiting for him to make this discovery, that he was a specimen on display, that, if his discovery were the first act, his reaction was the second.
“Look at it this way,” said Iris.
“What?” said Stanley. “How?” He swiveled his head her way again, so that the horrible fascination in the green eyes was eclipsed from his sight, to be replaced by the kind, if sidelong, regard of Iris.
“You’ve still got the one.” She moved the barrel of the gun uncertainly.
“One?” croaked Stanley, his voice a bushel of shards.
“One,” Iris confirmed. “They took only one.”
Chapter Twenty Six
“HOW DOES IT FEEL?” she asked tenderly, not taking her eyes off the other occupants of the room.
“Like somebody wiped my ass with a puff adder,” Stanley said.
“It hurts there, too?”
“It’s mostly mental.”
“Same thing.” She laughed nervously.
Her gun hand was shaking.
“I got here as soon as I could,” she repeated quickly. “It took a while to get Fong to tell me what was going on.” She laughed abruptly, then stopped. “He wanted to talk about his car.” Iris was scared. “He’s awfully fond of that car,” she added in a small voice.
“Want to give me the gun?” he asked.
She still wasn’t looking at him. “I had to shoot that guy.”
They all looked at the dead man. The new flower on Sturgeon’s pineapple shirt bloomed a glistening red.
“Looks like you shot him, all right,” Stanley said finally. “Better give me the gun.”
“He didn’t believe me,” Iris continued in a monotone.
“You should give the gun to me,” he repeated. But he was thinking, they took my eye.
“He walked right up to me like he was going to take the gun away from me. No. He had his hand out, like I was going to give it to him.”
Green Eyes let them take it.
“He told him to.”
Djell’s mouth twitched.
She helped them take it.
“When he got five feet away from me — five feet away! — he said, ‘Little girl,’ he said, ‘Lemme hold that rod.’”
Better to let me hold it, Stanley thought, and without speaking he extended his hand. It was the same hand he’d touched to the dark side of his nose, and there was blood on it.
“So I shot him. Loud in here.” She kicked something in front of her, which skittered under the operating table with a metallic clink and spun there. A spent cartridge. “I made them turn off that stupid music.” She glanced briefly at the hand. “You cut yourself?”
“No,” Stanley said. He had to cock his head to one side in order to see her. “I just got a hole in my head.”
“They were making jokes, too,” she said, looking away.
“Jokes? About what?”
Her mouth was wrinkled, caught between a sad smile and a tremor of fear. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes.
“They talked about cauterizing your eye socket with a blow torch. But they were worried about the…”
Stanley cocked his head so he could see Djell.
Showing the grimaces associated with biting into an unripe persimmon, Djell was gradually positioning himself in front of Green Eyes.
“What stopped them?” Stanley asked.
“Take it easy, little lady,” said Vince.
“Shut up, Vince,” said Stanley, not looking at him. Iris glanced at Stanley, then at the extended hand. The room was silent. A distant compressor motor started, briefly dimming the light over the operating table. The autoclave bubbled in its corner. Something dripped. Remnants of blue smoke swirled before a wall vent.
“He had a fresh aster. Ready to go,” Iris continued. She pointed the gun at Djell’s gut. “Show it to him.”
Djell looked surprised, but he didn’t stop moving.
“And you,” Iris said, her voice suddenly brittle. “Slide out from behind him or I’ll nail you both.”
Djell’s eyes bugged slightly at this command, but Sibyl’s stayed big, green and attentive. With the back of one hand she touched Djell’s shoulder and moved him aside as if parting a curtain. And there she stood, in the green smock over her neatly pressed nurse’s uniform, hem just above the knee, bloody swaths over her lap where she’d wiped her hands. Like Djell and Jaime, she still wore a pair of bloodstained latex gloves. Even from across the room, with one eye, Stanley could see the minute rusty speckling of dried blood on her white shoes. A surgical mask was pulled down under her chin. Magnificent, thought Stanley, this is a lot of nurse to get even with.
You ain’t gonna have her a little voice said. Take what the Good Lord’s dropped in your lap and git the hell outta here.
“Now show it,” Iris said. An edge of hysteria was creeping into her voice.
Djell raised his right arm, turned the hand, and showed a single, purple flower, its stem pinched between his fingers.
If only Corrigan could see this, thought Stanley. Isn’t this what they call circumstantial evidence? He surveyed the room. Operating table, four people on one side of the gun, two on the other, a dead man, the autoclave, lights, miscellaneous wheeled tables, cloth-covered trays, boom-box, tapes and CDs, stainless steel instruments, a purple aster…
Where was his eye?
“Say it,” Iris hissed.
Stanley cocked his head to see her. “Pardon?”
“Not you.” She gestured with the pistol. “Him.”
Stanley cocked his head so as to see Djell.
Djell smiled ingenuously. “Klein Aster?”
“Say it!” she screamed.
Djell hastily launched into the recitation.
Ein ersoffener Bierfahrer wurde auf den Tisch gestemmt.
Irgendeiner hatte ihm eine dunkelhellila Aster
zwischen die Zähne geklemmt.
Whoa, thought Stanley —
Als ich von der Brust aus
unter der Haut
mit einem langen Messer…
— I’d forgotten this bit.…
“Yes,” said Iris, “the long knife.”
Djell’s voice abrupdy trailed off. Stanley shared his realization. My fucking Christ, he thought disconsolately. She speaks German, too.
“Finish it!” Iris said.
…Zunge und Gaumen herausschnitt,
muß ich sie angestoßen haben, denn sie glitt
in das nebenliegende Gehirn.
Ich packte sie ihm in die Brusthöhle
zwischen die Holzwolle,
als man zunähte.
Trinke dich satt in denier Vase!
Ruhe sanft,
kleine Aster!
Djell had assumed the pose of a Balboa discovering the Pacific Ocean. Aster held before him, posture erect, one foot forward, teeth gleaming in the theatrical glare, his smock smeared with blood, he declaimed his prize-winning poem.
“What the hell was that?” asked Stanley.
“It’s a poem,” said Iris bitterly. “Didn’t you like it?”
Stanley shrugged. “It sounded like garbage sliding down a chute.”
Jaime smirked. “I knew you would get us in trouble with that tripe. It
was just a matter of time. I just knew—.”
“Shut up,” said Vince.
“That’s his aster anthem,” said Iris, smiling grimly. “It’s about sewing up an aster in a corpse.”
“I’ve heard it before,” Stanley said.
“He wanted to sew it up in your empty eye socket.”
Silence fell over the room.
“He recited the poem, which precipitated an argument.” Iris pointed the gun. “She said that cremating the whole works was only smart. He acquiesced, but clung to the idea of sealing the flower into the urn. The gas man, there, thought of that idea as typical of the doctor’s arrogance, of his predilection to tempt fate.”
“You see?” said Jaime.
“Shut up, Jaime,” Vince said irritably.
“Pretty cute, in any case,” Iris concluded.
Stanley sat pillion on the gurney. While the poem and “the long knife” may have intrigued him, the sight of the aster had frozen his intestines. The circumstances of his last sighting of a purple aster trained through his memory, and ended in a long tracking shot of his hospital bill, zigzagging, page by fan-folded page, from the reception desk of the bursar, across the lobby floor, down the front staircase of the hospital, the last page with its bottom line unfolding at the foot of his wheelchair, just beyond that Get-Well Bear in his lap.
A purple aster in its little Get-Well paws.
He looked at Iris.
“That’s what he was doing when I came in,” she was saying disconsolately. A sob terminated what was left of her composure. The pistol barrel wavered. Vince, in particular, was watching it very carefully. “He was reciting it as he was… as he was…”
Don’t ask for the gun again, thought Stanley. But now, suffused by rage, he felt as rigidly under control as he’d ever been in his life. Here he sat, naked. One kidney gone. One eye gone. The other kidney soon to fail. Not a hope or a prayer for mortal redemption, either. And these clowns were reciting poetry and handing out flowers and — he glanced at Iris — Get-Well Bears. He cocked his head to look at Sibyl. If Vince was watching the gun, Sibyl was watching Stanley. Remember what she taught you about getting people to give you what you want? Stanley thought: Let them come to you, then take it.
Instead of asking again for the gun Stanley asked what exactly the poem meant.
Djell didn’t have to be asked twice. Proudly, one would have said, he resumed his declamatory pose, cleared his throat, and began again, this time in English.
Little Aster
The drowned beer-truck driver
reposed on the slab.
Someone had planted a lavender
aster between his teeth.
As I unzipped the skin
over the sternum
with my long knife
to get to the tongue and palate
I must have disturbed the flower
because it slid onto the brain
lying nearby.
I transplanted it
into the excelsior
stuffing the chest cavity
before sewing up.
Drink yourself full in your vase!
Rest in peace
little aster!
Into the queasy silence that followed this recitation, Djell suddenly announced, “That’s the greatest autopsy poem ever written,” and bowed deeply.
“Damn,” said Stanley. “There’s more than one?”
Green Eyes and Vince suddenly applauded half-heartedly, their pairs of surgical gloves flapping like two flat tires.
Djell took a another, slighter bow in their direction.
Iris’ gun hand was shaking as if she were trying to hold it steady against a strong crosswind. “That damned flower’s all he cares about.”
Stanley considered the surgical quartet, cocking his one-eyed head so as to take them all in. A trickle of blood chose this moment to dart out of his sideburn and launch itself off the lobe of his ear, falling onto the stainless steel of the gurney with a little tap.
“You going to shoot them?” he asked.
“Only if they make me,” said Iris. “Although God knows they deserve shooting, and I’m tempted to do it.”
“I feel like shooting them,” said Stanley calmly.
Vince grunted. Helium Jaime whimpered. Djell looked like he would go to his grave happily now that he’d recited his poem.
Green Eyes just watched.
“I’ll bet you do.”
“But I’m not going to.”
“Why not?”
“You must have Corrigan’s home number?”
“Are you kidding? He’s sleeping with my mother.”
“Call him. Get him over here.”
“Where’s the phone?”
“Upstairs,” said Djell with a smile. “On the loading dock.”
“Oh,” snapped Jaime. “Why don’t you just dial the number for them, too?”
“Shut up, Jaime,” Vince said evenly.
“There’s not a phone down here?” Stanley asked suspiciously. “No cellular?”
“Oh, right,” Jaime said with all due sarcasm. “Like we’re gonna do business on a cell phone—”
“Jaime…,” said Vince, his tone very ominous.
“This is a funeral home,” said Djell derisively. “Who the hell’s going to need a phone down here?”
“I don’t feel up to the trip,” said Stanley. “But if you wouldn’t mind going, darling, it would give me great pleasure to tempt these animals into dying while you’re gone.”
This was the first time he’d called her darling.
“You think you can handle them?” Iris asked.
“If you hear any shooting while you’re up there, run like hell. But,” he added quietly, “there won’t be any shooting. These are professionals. Professionals don’t get themselves shot. They get themselves lawyers.”
Iris moved closer. “Okay.”
“In a line,” Stanley said to the rest of the room. “All of you. Along this side of the operating table. Keep your hands where we can see them, and think Christian thoughts.”
Nobody moved.
“Shoot one of them, Iris.”
“Wh-what?”
“Hey” said Jaime uncertainly.
“You heard me. Do it!”
“Take it easy, man.”
Iris moved the gun back and forth. “Wh-which one? I-I mean…”
Stanley locked his eye with one of the green ones. “I don’t care. Just don’t hesitate.”
“I’m moving,” said Vince, stepping around the foot of the operating table. Jaime quickly followed him. Djell already stood at the head of it with Sibyl.
Stanley turned his head forty-five degrees to his right, so as to take in his four adversaries and Iris’ gun hand all at once.
Iris was right next to him now, ready to transfer the pistol from her control to Stanley’s. She glanced at his hand. “Better wipe the blood off your paw.”
To his left was a pillow. He placed it over his lap and scrubbed his hands on it until most of the blood was gone.
“Ready?”
“I guess,” said Stanley.
Opposite, the four stood tensely; each, in his own way, measuring, calculating, studying the chances. Stanley would take but a second or two to get the gun from Iris’ hand, but he might drop it. Though he was still naked, and the room was cold, his hands were sweating. Dropping the gun was a distinct possibility, and he had a sudden vision of the heavy .45 squirting out of his or Iris’ hands. Of the two of them only Iris would be agile enough to go after it. Stanley was visibly woozy. But only Vince or Green Eyes would be possessed of enough alacrity to capitalize on such a mistake. Djell would hold himself above direct action, willing to stand by while even the most appalling events unfolded. Jaime was scared and nervous. Vince, a big man, was ready for action. And Green Eyes?
Green Eyes was watching every move Stanley made, attending her chance, abiding, confident in her prowess. All she had to do was wait, as patient and cer
tain of ultimate victory as a spider, her perfect web spun between the ceiling bulb and a broken window in a rural summer phone booth.
So Sibyl was watching Stanley, and Stanley was watching Sibyl, when he said, “Okay. Give me the gun.”
As she passed it to him Stanley did a funny thing, unexpected by anyone in the room. He withdrew his right hand and presented the palm of his left hand, into which the gun slapped as if the hand were a mitt and the gun a ball.
This simple change-up checked everybody.
“I didn’t know you were ambidextrous,” breathed Iris, taking a single step away from Stanley.
“I’m not,” Stanley smiled, switching the gun to his right hand. “But how coordinated do you have to be to pull a trigger?”
Iris hesitated. “Should I make the call now?”
A prescient weakness seemed to have possessed her, a clairvoyant passivity that momentarily robbed her of the impetus of movement, even of the will to flee.
Sibyl saw immediately that something was up.
Stanley cleared his throat. “Okay.” He pointed the gun at Sturgeon’s corpse. “What’s his blood type?”
Silence.
Stanley pointed the gun at Djell. “Answer the goddamn question.”
Djell shook his head. “No idea.”
“Tough,” said Stanley. “What’s yours?”
“AB-Negative,” Djell said, without hesitation.
Stanley sighted the pistol on Sibyl. “Yours, Green Eyes?”
She regarded him malevolently.
Stanley tilted his head back a little more. A rivulet of type O-Negative coursed over his right temple and into his ear. “I’ll kill you,” he said simply. “Don’t doubt it.”
“I’m AB-Negative too,” said Sibyl.
“That’s an interesting coincidence.”
She shrugged toward Djell.
Djell interjected, “We thought so too, when we wanted to have kids.”
Stanley set his jaw. This information annoyed him. “This really brings you down in my estimation,” he said to Sibyl.
Sibyl smiled contemptuously. “Your estimation is not even on my scope.”
Stanley stared at her. He could shoot her now. It would be easy. And smart. It might even be defensible.
But his addled brain had formed a plan. Sibyl’s contempt paled next to this plan because she had a part to play in it.