by Earl Emerson
“You think it’s Joel?” Karrie asked. “The radio report said man choking.”
“Gotta be somebody else. Joel likes to chew his food.”
Joel’s mother-in-law, a slightly more rickety version of his slender wife, answered the door in a faded housedress and sturdy black shoes with thick soles of the type I hadn’t seen since the last time I was in Sunday school. Wringing her hands, she led us under high ceilings and past an open staircase that led up to the second story. The McCains didn’t have children, so the furniture was clean, not a stick out of place, three lazy cats lounging about.
The old woman’s hands fluttered about her head as she spoke. “All I did was give him a little slice of apple. A Braeburn. When I came back in the room, he was like this. I thought he would like the taste. They’re from New Zealand.”
Our old compadre was in a motorized hospital bed, the section under his knees and back elevated, though he looked a whole lot less than comfortable. He was thinner than the last time I’d seen him, his face a blue-black color, mottled with beard growth, eyes bulging, neck veins distended. His jaw was open and he was gasping for air. When I shone a light down his throat, I could just make out a foreign object next to his tonsils.
He was barely getting enough air to support life.
I put my finger down his throat and did a finger sweep the way we’d been taught. “He was okay before you gave him the apple?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Fine. I was reading to him from the Scientific Statement of Being.”
A finger sweep wasn’t going to work.
Stan and I hauled McCain off the bed, and Stan turned him around, gripped him from behind, pressed his fists together under his sternum, and compressed violently three times. On the last compression an object flew out of McCain’s mouth past my shoulder and skidded across the floor like a hockey puck. A slice of Braeburn. From New Zealand. Sweet and tangy at the same time. Eager to conceal incriminating evidence, the old woman knelt quickly and put it in the pocket of her housedress.
It was about the size you would feed a plow horse.
Now, slumped in Beebe’s thick arms, Joel was gasping for air as if he would never get enough. When it became clear that he wasn’t physically capable of getting his feet beneath him, Beebe, Karrie, and I laid him back on the bed. We tugged his pajama bottoms back up and put a nasal cannula on his face and administered 02. The pajama bottoms bothered all three of us; what bothered us even more was that he was wearing an adult diaper under them. He hadn’t moved a limb on his own since we got there, hadn’t twitched a finger, hadn’t said squat. He hadn’t stopped drooling, and the damp bib tied around his neck told us he wasn’t going to. Karrie straightened it and patted some of his hair into place, as if she might mother him into normalcy.
“Hey, Joel,” I said amiably. “What the hell? You’re not supposed to swallow the whole thing. Just a bite at a time. How you doin’, buddy?”
No answer. No eye contact.
The setup was Spartan, to say the least. The hospital bed was in the center of the living room and had a rack over it with bars for the patient to use when repositioning himself, though I gotta tell you I couldn’t see any evidence that Joel had the capacity to use them. Beside the bed was a single straight-backed chair and, alongside that, a small table. No phone, radio, television, or magazines. No flowers, nothing to indicate it was a sickroom except the hospital bed, the lack of furniture, and, of course, the goggle-eyed patient.
There was a single item on the table next to the chair, a small book with a leather cover, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. The book was open, a purple ribbon marking the page, several paragraphs limned with blue chalk, as if they’d been read repeatedly.
“Let’s get a BP and a rate,” I said. I called for a medic unit on our portable radio. The dispatcher confirmed my request and stated the medics would be responding from Bellevue. Normally a choking victim came around as soon as the obstruction was removed, but there was something wrong here.
Brain death from lack of oxygen occurs in four to six minutes. We all knew that. It had taken us four minutes to get here.
“How long was he choking before you called?” I asked.
Joel’s mother-in-law wrung her hands and stared at me. “I don’t know.” She’d been making a point of not looking at Joel, as if not looking at him would make things better. “We’d been praying together, and I thought I saw an improvement, so I went into the kitchen and peeled that apple. I gave him a bite, and then the phone rang and I went back to the kitchen to answer it. When I came back, he was like you saw.”
“And you called us right away?”
“I prayed first.”
“How long did that take?”
“We said the Scientific Statement of Being a couple of times.”
“How long did that take?”
“A couple of minutes.”
“We? You said we were praying?”
“Joel and I.”
“He was able to pray with you?” Karrie asked.
“It was a silent prayer.” She was a diminutive woman, maybe a hundred fifteen pounds.
She burst into tears when Beebe said, “What’d you do, push it down his throat with a broom handle?”
“It’s all right.” I put my arm around her heaving shoulders and shot Stan a look. “What we need to know is how long from the time he started choking until you called us.”
“I don’t know. It might have been five minutes.”
Five minutes added to our four-minute response time was enough for some serious brain damage. But then, he’d been getting some air all along or he wouldn’t have been conscious when we arrived, although what we’d seen when we got here and were seeing now was a pretty relaxed definition of conscious.
“What’s the history here?” I asked. “He on any medication?”
“No. Of course not. Joel doesn’t take medicine. We don’t believe in it.”
“So why’s he in bed? Why were you feeding him?”
“He can’t eat by himself.”
“From falling off the roof?”
“I guess.”
“He has a head injury?”
“The doctors don’t know what he’s got. Doesn’t that tell you something about material medicine? Even the doctors can’t do anything.”
“We heard he got banged up pretty good from the fall.”
“No. He only had a few scratches.”
“So why’s he wearing a diaper?”
“Mary likes it on him. It’s easier to clean up.”
“So he’s incontinent?”
“It’s been a difficult demonstration. We thought he would have a healing before this.”
“He’s been this way for a month?” I asked, picking up Joel’s right arm. It fell limply when I dropped it.
She nodded.
“Jesus,” I said.
Stan Beebe was taking Joel’s blood pressure on his other arm. “What’d the doctors say was wrong with him?” Beebe asked.
“As I said before, they didn’t tell us.”
“Could have been an ischemic attack,” I said. “Could have been a lot of things. Head injury? Spinal column? They must have said something. They weren’t keeping him in the hospital just to jack up the bill. These days they release patients as soon as they can.”
“The doctors told us we’d have to wait to find out what was wrong. That was when Mary and I decided to bring him home and rely on Christian Science.”
“He’s been like this for a month?” Karrie said. “Why didn’t you tell somebody?”
The old woman, who was crying again, didn’t reply.
I got on the radio and advised the medic unit what we had. Near as I could tell, Joel was brain-dead. Had been for a month. The doctors couldn’t fix him, and the Christian Scientists were feeding him apples.
The old woman told us they’d hired a nurse but that she’d been called away and this was her first time alone with him. “Mar
y told me nothing but juice, but I was just so sure he was better, I guess I pushed things. That apple was just mortal mind trying to stop the healing. It was never part of the real Joel. It was the Adam apple.”
“Didn’t come out of there like the Adam apple,” Beebe said. “Came out of there like a cannonball. We should have worn eye protection.”
“The real Joel is the perfect son of God. Always has been and always will be.”
Beebe was hovering over Joel now, begging him to move his hand, a leg, anything. Mary was the godmother of Stan’s youngest child. Stan and Joel were both adherents of minority religions, Joel a Christian Scientist, Stan a Seventh-Day Adventist. I’d kept out of their frequent dialogues on religion, although there was plenty I might have brought to the table.
Beebe couldn’t get a blood pressure, tried twice more, and handed the ears to Karrie. It wasn’t like Stan to fumble a blood pressure, and I could tell he felt bad about it. Tears jeweled the corners of his dark eyes when he handed Karrie the stethoscope.
“Look at his hands,” said Beebe, presenting his own for comparison. Joel’s looked as if they’d been dipped in wax. Beebe’s looked similar, though because of his dark skin, they were a slightly different hue.
“Chapped?” I asked.
“Guess again,” Beebe said.
The medics showed up, looked Joel over, phoned his doctor, and agreed with what we’d already concluded. Joel wasn’t any different this afternoon than he had been yesterday afternoon.
The medics had just driven away and we were putting our aid kits away when the red Pontiac pulled up in the cul-de-sac.
The driver of the Pontiac got out and stalked around the front of the car, her movements looking so much like those of an assassin, I actually caught myself checking to see if she had a gun. When somebody walks toward you that deliberately, you’re usually in some sort of trouble.
“You asshole,” she said. “You dirty coward.”
Stan Beebe was on the other side of the rig. I could hear him chuckling.
6. SISTERS OF JILTED WOMEN CASTRATING MEN
Until she was ten feet away, I believed the woman coming at me like a missile was Holly Riggs, my former lover. I also believed I knew what she was going to say.
That I was a jerk. That I’d behaved badly. That I deserved her hatred. Most of which was no doubt true.
Although this woman was trim, short, pretty, and impeccably groomed, she was not Holly. For one thing, she was feistier. For another, she had a mouth on her like a snakebit sailor.
The fine lines around her eyes and brow suggested she was around thirty, maybe three or four years younger than me, the same strawberry-blond hair as Holly, though I’d never seen Holly band hers into a ponytail. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing with Holly’s car until her pale dusty-blue eyes focused angrily on me.
“You bastard,” she said.
“Don’t turn on the charm machine just for me.”
“I saw you running away from me in the parking lot.”
“You must be Stephanie, Holly’s sister.” It was a stupid remark, given their resemblance and the fact that she was driving Holly’s car, but it was all I could think of.
She’d moved closer now. We were almost touching, hate emanating off her like steam off a racehorse. To make matters worse, she was wearing the same brand of perfume as Holly. You can’t blame me for thinking of sex when I smelled it.
“I didn’t run.”
“The hell you didn’t. You thought I was Holly.”
“But you’re not.” This was so typical of me. One incredibly scintillating comment after another.
“You thought I was. You led her on and then didn’t have the decency to admit what you’d done. This innocent act of yours doesn’t surprise me. She said you could be dumber than a bag of hammers when you wanted.”
“Holly said that?”
“You don’t even want to know what Holly said.”
“What do you want?”
“I guess I came to see what a dirtbag looks like.”
“Okay. You’ve seen me.” She didn’t move, just stood close and stared into my eyes. After a few moments, I said, “I didn’t lead anyone on. And I don’t see what business it is of yours anyway. Holly and I dated for a while. Then we broke up. People break up all the time.”
For a moment, my words gave her pause. I wasn’t particularly quick-witted and almost never thought up a reply to this sort of thing until my opponent was long gone, but, damn it, she didn’t know anything about my relationship with Holly.
By now Karrie was laughing on the far side of the rig along with Beebe.
“She thought you wanted to marry her.”
“It was never even on my mind. I mean, think about it. Who gets married after a month? You know as well as I do, one person in a relationship always takes things more seriously than the other. Believe me, I never did anything to make it turn out that way. I felt as bad about the breakup as Holly.”
“You think so?”
“Look, I’m on duty and we’re not exactly having the best day around here. Why don’t you come back to the station and we’ll talk over coffee? Out of the sun.”
“It’s taken me all morning to corner you. I’m not going to let you slip away now.”
“Come back to the station and we’ll talk. How is Holly?” When I saw her eyes relax, I said, “Where is she?”
“As if you cared.”
“I’ve always wanted her to be happy. Holly’s a sweet person. She deserves the best.”
“Which was definitely not you.”
“I never pretended it was.”
She waited a few beats and continued. “When was the last time you saw my sister?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere around the first of May.”
“When was the last time you spoke?”
“She called once after that.”
“Try six times. She called six times after that. She caught you home twice, and the other calls were never returned.”
“There was nothing left to say.”
“You don’t know where this is leading, do you?”
“No.”
“Holly said you weren’t too bright.”
More laughter from behind the truck.
Stephanie was a little taller than Holly—prettier, angrier, crueler. Even at her angriest and most heartbroken, Holly had never shouted at me. Holly was a whiner, a weeper, and, in bed, a moaner—the best sex ever—but one thing she never did and never would do was make a scene in public.
Across the street, two of McCain’s neighbors came outside, attracted no doubt by the flashing red lights and our large lime-green truck. “You’re even more of a coward than I thought you were,” said Holly’s sister, who then climbed into the Pontiac and left.
You can understand I didn’t like getting braced by this pugnacious woman while two of my coworkers hid on the other side of the rig sniggering. I was a firefighter and had been for twelve years. My family and friends thought of me as a regular guy. There were even times on the job when people thought I’d displayed some bravery. Still, it was going to be a while before they stopped joking about this around the station.
When I climbed into the rig next to Karrie, my hands were trembling.
7. WELCOME TO THE CASTRATI
It was after dinner and I was driving to Tacoma, switching the truck radio between talk shows to keep myself distracted, when I noticed my hands were trembling again.
It had happened three times today, and each time Stephanie Riggs had been at the root of it, which made me wonder about her. You meet a woman and your hands start shaking, was that the same as chemistry? There were a lot of reasons why nothing would come of our meeting tonight. First of all, she was Holly’s sister. Second, she was a ball-buster. The original ice queen. And the worst part of it was that she was a whole lot smarter than I was.
My standard operating procedure was to shun smart women. It only made sense.
North Bend to
Tacoma. An hour each way, the two-way trek would consume the meat of the evening. It was Monday night and I had to work again in the morning, had been putting in seven days a week since Joel McCain’s accident, and I didn’t need additional distractions. Neither did my daughters, Britney and Allyson, who were used to having me home in the evenings and begged me not to make this trip.
I was retracing the same route I’d used for a month in the spring when I was seeing Holly, who lived in Tacoma and who, from the beginning, had required more attention than a naughty kitten.
With luck I would get back in time to play a board game with the girls. Currently they were hot on Monopoly, which, for them, was a blood sport. It was an unusual game when I didn’t go bankrupt first, rarer still when either of my lovable little connivers showed me any mercy.
The phone call had come while I was preparing dinner. “Who?” I said.
“Stephanie Riggs.”
“Oh, yes. Weren’t you the one called me a bastard? No, wait. That might have been the lady at the bank. I get confused.”
“I called to apologize.”
“For telling me I was a bastard or for making me a laughingstock at work?”
Britney looked up at me with her brown eyes and said, “Somebody said a bad word.” I kissed the top of her head and put my finger to my lips.
“I’m sorry for all of that. I’ve had a difficult visit, and I’m scheduled to fly back home day after tomorrow.”
“Gee, we’re going to miss you.”
“You’re not making this easy.”
“Sorry about that. I had a tough day. I met the original she-bitch from hell.”
The line was silent for a moment. “Okay. I deserved that. I was wondering if you could come to Tacoma so we could talk.”