by Jim Nisbet
“No?” she asked, a little severely.
He abruptly nodded.
“I thought so.” She smiled again. “Well, I’m here to tell you, that add-on stock is a good idea. It makes for very straight shooting. Just one shot each, was all it took. Which was a good thing, because that was all the slugs left in the clip.”
For the first time she looked as if she were looking at something more interesting than a specimen of loserhood. “That .45 automatic…” she shook her head, “that’s a lot of pistol.”
Stanley shivered.
“Anyway, darling, here we are, together at last. And I’m going to take real good care of you. After a while, who knows? Maybe you’ll learn to take care of me.”
Stanley didn’t say a word.
The door swung open and a cart entered, followed by a young-woman in a nurse’s uniform.
“Hi, Shananne,” Iris chirped, not turning around.
“Oh, hi, Iris. I didn’t know you were still in here. I can come back—”
Stay, stay, oh please stay… Stanley thought loudly.
“Oh, no, no,” said Iris pleasantly. “Just visiting our local hero, here.”
Shananne showed the tired smile endemic to the night shift. “Guess you two got a lot to talk about.”
Iris actually blushed. “I guess so,” she said. A little silence passed among them like a handful of water until it was gone, and Iris said, “So. How’s tricks?”
“Busy,” Shananne said. “These cutbacks got me hopping all over the place tonight. I got three floors to cover. Three floors! Time I get through the first round it’s time to start back on the next one. Can’t even weasel time for a coffee, with all this work.”
“That Floyd,” Iris smiled. “He likes his coffee.”
Now it was Shananne’s turn to blush.
Her eyes watching Stanley, Iris said, “Want me to handle this one?”
Stanley went cold. It was as if a platen of dry ice had been applied to his heart. He whimpered internally.
“Oh,” said Shananne, “would you?”
“I’d be delighted,” said Iris over her shoulder. She looked back at Stanley. “Anyway, it looks like I’m going to be taking care of Stanley here for a good long time.”
It was plain to both Shananne and Stanley that Iris was enjoying herself. “Can you manage from your chair?”
“If you’ll hand me Doctor’s most recent commandments,” Iris said, “I’ll be fine.”
Shananne retrieved the clipboard from the foot of the bed and handed it to Iris.
“Thank you,” Iris said, and set it on the bed without looking at it.
From her cart Shananne extracted a tray containing a covered beaker full of cotton swabs, a bottle of alcohol, capped and loaded syringes, and a paper cup with three or four variously sized and colored pills in it. She placed the tray on the bed next to the clipboard.
“Thank you so much, Shananne,” Iris cooed.
“Thank you, Iris,” Shananne replied, backing out of the door.
“Give my best to Floyd.”
“Before the hour strikes.”
“He’s on five, is he?”
“Two pings up.”
The two women laughed gaily, conspiratorially.
The closer hissed the door shut.
Iris released the brake and rolled her chair as close to the head of the bed as it would go.
Like a rooster that needs to turn sideways to see the ax, Stanley jerked his head to watch her.
Resetting the brake, Iris selected a syringe from the tray and sat back in the wheelchair. She propped her elbows on the armrests and tapped the capped syringe thoughtfully into the palm of her opposite hand, like a teacher with a ruler.
“Look, Iris…,” Stanley began huskily.
“Relax, Stanley,” she interrupted brusquely. “You know the routine.” She leaned forward and plucked away the blanket covering his right shoulder.
For the first time Stanley saw the stump. Close to the shoulder, it was white and withered. Toward the stump it was discolored, a purplish black bruise eliding into a graying yellow, the terminus crusted with congealed blood and a rust-stained gauze dressing.
The stump jerked twice, as if to lift something.
Stanley wanted to look away, to put his nose back between his good eye and the stump, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Iris steadied the stump and expertly swabbed it at the shoulder. “First the antibiotic.” She injected the serum. Practically before he realized it was happening, she had discarded the empty syringe.
“Now your favorite,” she said, picking up a second hypodermic.
“Morphine.” She smoothly injected him again, right next to the first puncture, then swabbed the two sites as one.
“Nothing to it. Right, Stanley?” She dropped the second empty syringe next to the first. “In a moment or two you should be feeling decidedly groovier than you feel now.”
Cocking his head this way and that Stanley searched her face in vain for some clue, some iota of betrayal, accusation, guilt, or even forgiveness. “Iris,” he croaked.
“Not a word, my hero. Don’t bother. There’s nothing you can say. We’re going to take care of each other, Stanley. You and I. Now,” she smiled, “you’ve got all the scars a scar-loving woman could want. Plenty to work with. It’ll take me months just to memorize them. Might never — ever ever — get bored with them. What do you think of that?”
I think that’s the shittiest thing I ever heard, Stanley thought.
“We’re going to get a little bungalow out in the avenues,” she continued. “I know you’re fond of the apartment I already rent. And I am too. But you know what? It doesn’t have a fireplace, and I want a fireplace. You know why?”
Stanley jerked his head stupidly, meaninglessly, uncomprehendingly.
“I’ll tell you why. I want a fireplace with a mantle, so I have a place to mount that dead arm of yours with that empty gun taped to it. Kind of like the musket we won the war with, you know? What do you think of this idea? Isn’t it neat?”
Shitty, thought Stanley. Shitty idea.
“I’ve already arranged it with Corrigan. He’s going to speak to the Oakland coroner who, Sean happens to know, moonlights as a taxidermist. Corrigan set you up, you know,” she added parenthetically. “When he saw you weren’t going to come across for him he let you run. You should have told him what you knew.” She patted the blanket over his knee and his whole body jumped. “As it was, you got a couple hours’ jump on him.” He was terrified by her touch. “You didn’t get a new kidney, Stanley, but with tender and loving dialysis you might last another year. We’ll get you a rocking chair. You can spend your final days planted in front of a nice warm fire, right where you can contemplate your souvenir from the organs wars, mounted on the flagstones above the mantle.”
Stanley’s skull had begun to vibrate atop his spine.
But she wasn’t finished. “I’d like to say we could take your truck out on the freeway once in a while. You know, for a little…” she nearly blushed, “you know. Your favorite thing… ?”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This was no olive branch. It was a mauling from a Get-Well Bear.
“But, gosh, you can learn to settle for reciprocal scarlingus, …can’t you?”
He narrowed his one eye at the little brown stuffed bear in her lap. If I had two hands, he thought, beaming hatred, I’d tear that fucking thing’s head off.
“Stanley, she chided. “Are you listening to me?”
He leveled his eye at her.
“Because,” she said coyly, “there’s more.”
“That’s okay, Iris,” he whispered. “I’ve heard enough for one—.”
“No you haven’t.” She made a tight smile with her mouth. “It’s not that I begrudge you your favorite thing, Stanley. …Not exactly.”
No, he thought. I’m sure it isn’t.
“I mean, I just don’t feel right… but it’s not
—”
“No rush,” Stanley said quietly. “We needn’t rush… recovery…”
She nodded thoughtfully.
Then she abruptly pinched his leg, hard. “Feeling the morphine?”
Indeed, he had begun to feel… simple? Numb? Simply numb? Her pinch was vague and far away.
He nodded.
“Shananne is a good girl,” Iris said. “Always gives a hundred and ten per cent, especially to a hero. She had me flying like a kite a couple days ago.” She placed a hand on the edge of the coverlet. “Let’s get that catheter out of the way.”
Stanley thought to clutch the coverlet to his chin. One hand, the left one, physically reacted to this thought. The other couldn’t. His left hand did fine, clutching at the blankets, and the IV pole attached to its arm rattled. The morphine was good, but it didn’t prevent him from despairing of the impulse that went from his brain to a hand that no longer existed. Five non-existent fingers gripped the sheets. Ineffectually.
Iris gathered the cloth where the phantom fingers failed, and tugged.
“Now Stanley,” she grimaced, condensing sheet and fingers into her fist. “Be a good boy.”
With superior strength she pulled the coverlet until the fingers of his real hand peeled away from it, one by one. “Be a good boy,” she whispered maternally.
She swept the coverlet aside.
He didn’t understand what he saw. A tube was there just like the last time. A short rigid plastic tube stuck up and connected to another, flexible tube, which led away to a waste vessel hidden beneath the bed. There was a clamp on the flexible tube, but it wasn’t closed.
And like the last time, the sight embarrassed him.
“Oh yes,” Iris said dreamily, “one more detail. Do you remember the night you called Fong from my apartment?”
Stanley couldn’t remember anything anymore.
“You asked him to search a newspaper database for cashiered surgeons or doctors — people who had lost their licenses to practice?”
Stanley’s lower jaw quivered.
“Well,” she continued, “you had something there. Fong eventually turned up one Dr. Manfred E. Djell. I say eventually because, while you had asked Fong to search back a couple of years, it was just last week that it occurred to him to extend the range of the search as far back as the database would go, which is just over ten years. And there your boy was. The very same unpleasant Dr. Djell who so recently perished in the Chippendale O’Hare Mortuary massacre. He lost his license about eight years ago. There were multiple minor infractions — such as writing illegal prescriptions — and an interesting felony for which he wasn’t prosecuted because nobody would testify. You had quite a good hunch, there. But do you know what his specialty was?”
Stanley’s teeth had begun to chatter.
“Of course not. Well, he practiced SRS,” she said. “Even his legitimate specialty was shady.”
SRS? What the hell did that mean? Stupid, Reliable, and Sober? Was Djell a detox specialist? Probably not. Stanley kind of wanted to know. He kind of didn’t, too. But a certain monocular data-trickle from the badly-lit room was distracting his mind.
Iris told him. “It stands for Sex-Reassignment Surgery.”
Stanley built a very dumb look on his face. Despite the morphine he was getting a headache.
“Fong told me to be sure to tell you as soon as I caught up with you, at the funeral home. But what with one thing and another, I forgot. No sooner than I got the gun in my hand and regained my composure, however, I remembered. So I had the good Dr. Djell do a little work,” she finished cheerfully, “before I shot him.”
They both considered his pelvis.
There were bandages there, along with the catheter.
His head began, ever so perceptibly, to wave back and forth on its stalk like a plastic ball with a painted face atop a steel spring glued to the back shelf of an automobile that’s just come to a gentle halt. He made a noise, too, in his throat. It sounded like a tree frog caught between wet asphalt and a gumboot.
“You want a little more light?” Iris asked him tenderly.
Stanley moved his head slightly to one side, then to the other, leaving it in each position for no more than a few seconds. His teeth clacked audibly.
“Yes,” she said complacently. “I had them do a little more work.”
A tear welled out of the duct of the one eye that remained in Stanley’s head.
“They tried to defend you.” She laughed. “They called it an outrage. Men.… They called it a waste of time and talent, too. They were sure you wouldn’t appreciate it.” She shook her head. “You’re all alike. Indefensible. Some men, of course,” she added, raising a pinky toward the gauze and tape at the base of his abdomen, “are more alike than others.”
The tree frog in Stanley’s throat made a feeble, final protest.
“This is only Phase One. The complete deal can proceed only in stages, separated by time. This fact actually helped Jaime and Djell kid themselves into thinking I might let them live long enough to finish the job, once they got started. Wrong.” She shook her head. “You don’t have that kind of time.”
She placed both her hands down there and gradually worked the tube loose. To Stanley it felt as if someone somewhere were boning a fish. A fish that may once have been a real good friend of his.
The catheter removed and dropped into the rubber disposal bin, she made no effort to cover him up. Nor did he. They sat for a while, quietly sharing his abjection.
“Trim,” Iris said thoughtfully. “That’s what Jaime called it.”
Stanley cocked his head as if to see her, but could not take his eye off the compelling object of its contemplation — or, truthfully and worse — the non-object. If he had looked at Iris he might have seen that, in the dark air of the little room, her two violet eyes had narrowed into the twin punctures of a snakebite.
“He called it trim.”
She rounded one hand in the air a few inches over the wound as if she were smoothing the hair over the forehead of a dog.
“Slang for the female genitalia, in some parts of Chicago.”
“Oh,” Stanley said after a while. But it sounded merely like a parting of his dry lips.
“Evocative term, isn’t it?”
But his lips weren’t dry. Bile leaked from their corners and trickled over his chin.
“Leave him enough to aim with, I told them. But I think they cut it a tad close. What do you think?”
It was late at night. With all the cutbacks, the hospital was only able to maintain a skeleton staff. Shananne wasn’t even on the third floor at the time. She and Floyd were having coffee in the dispensary, two stories above. Everybody else was asleep. Or half dead.
Only Iris heard Stanley scream.
ALSO BY JIM NISBET AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
* * *
DARK COMPANION
978-1-59020-202-9
Paperback • $13.95
Overlook continues its reissues of the incomparable Jim Nisbet’s oeuvre with Dark Companion. Nisbet captures the absurdities of presentday America with a rare pungency in this noir gem.
Banerjhee Rolf, a bright, levelheaded Indian-American scientist, is content to spend his days with his wife, tending his garden and studying his beloved astronomy. When Rolf’s relationship with his seedy, drug-dealing neighbor, Toby Pride, and Pride’s stoner girlfriend takes a weird turn, Rolf’s placid world is shattered and he becomes a fugitive from justice. Crime, cosmology, politics, philosophy, physics and more enter into this cautionary tale, which climaxes with the suddenness of a cobra strike and then delivers a denouement that’s both stunning and absolutely perfect.
* * *
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
New York
www.overlookpress.com
ALSO BY JIM NISBET AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
* * *
WINDWARD PASSAGE
978-1-59020-194-7
Hardcover • $25.95
LETHAL INJECTION
978-1-59020-195-4
Paperback • $12.95
“Sure, Nisbet breaks all the rules, but that’s really the whole point. His novels are the literary equivalent of road trips, and a good road trip follows no map.”
—BOOKLIST
“Jim Nisbet is a lot more than just good … powerful, provocative … remains in the mind long after the novel is finished. Nisbet’s style has overtones of Walker Percy’s smooth southern satin, but his characters—losers, grifters, con men—hark back to the days of James M. Cain’s twisted images of morality.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL
* * *
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
New York
www.overlookpress.com
ALSO BY JIM NISBET AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
* * *
THE DAMNED DON’T DIE
978-1-59020-196-1
Paperback • $13.95
“Ah, sweet mystery… where sex has come a long way since Adam and Eve and murder can be a synonym for love… a super thriller.” —L.A. TIMES
OLD AND COLD
978-1-59020-915-8
Paperback • $13.95
“Nobody has Nisbet’s distinctive style, humor, and sheer craft … one of the finest masters of noir.” —Ken Bruen
* * *
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
New York
www.overlookpress.com
ALSO BY JIM NISBET AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
* * *
THE SPIDER’S CAGE
978-1-59020-198-5
Paperback • $14.00
A brilliantly noir mystery from the author of Lethal Injection, never before published in English.
Spider’s Cage sees the return of Martin Windrow, the detective first introduced to readers in The Damned Don’t Die (“a super thriller” —Los Angeles Times). When Jodie O’Ryan, the country singer he adores, disappears after the death of her grandfather, a millionaire oil man, Windrow sets off on their trail. Strangers and storytellers cross his path: friendly tarantulas, a Verlaine-reading prostitute, an androgynous bodyguard, a pimp-entrepreneur-singer, a Salvadorean revolutionary, a car salesman hooked on tranquilizers, a cop who treats the common cold with cocaine cut with amphetamines … Windrow travels from surprise to nightmare, and from body to body, up until the dark-as-night finale.