Lay Saints

by Adam Connell

  The doctor and Emmie helped Faraday into a shirt.

  “Try and sit up straight the rest of the day,” the doctor said. “Em, help him if he needs it.”

  “I should’ve been out there with you, if they hadn’t said you alone,” Dowd said. “I didn’t wanna mess — ”

  “Shut up and get yourself home,” Kinkaid said. “You been excusing your guilty conscience for hours now. It’s nauseating.”

  “No,” Faraday said. It sounded as though he was talking through mud in his throat. “Tell it to me again, who they were. I want descriptions.”

  There were no changes in Dowd’s retelling, only that Faraday was a more coherent audience this time and could follow the details better. Dowd described two men other than the twins, for he’d never met them before, and there was no comparison to make. The two he’d seen didn’t look like brothers, and certainly not twins for they’d been wearing different-colored contacts and also theatrical prostheses. Or that’s what they’d made him see, the differences. Who knows.

  The doctor gently prodded Faraday’s lips and cheeks.

  “What’d they ask exactly?” Faraday said.

  Dowd was having trouble understanding Faraday through the doctor’s hands but was afraid to request clarification. He did get the word ask, so he said, “One of them, the Hispanic on my right, he said, ‘Go get Faraday for me.’ I explained you were a busy man, and, I’m a little, The fuck’re you? ‘Two clients he’ll want to take,’ they say.”

  “The other one,” Emmie said, “what was he doing?”

  “The other one, ma’am? He never so much as opened his mouth. Stood holding that valise with both hands.”

  “Two clients he’ll wanna take,” Faraday prompted.

  “No, this is no good,” the doctor said into Faraday’s mouth.

  “Said I’d relay,” Dowd said. Sweat was running down his back, headed somewhere it was going to itch. “Opened the valise for me. There was a lot of money in there, Faraday. New money, like they’d just printed it.”

  “How’d you know they were in the alley?” Kinkaid said.

  “I check the door every two hours, see that it’s still locked,” Dowd said. “You know that, you gave me that chore last year. I heard scratching at the door, like raccoons. I don’t make complicated decisions, ’Day. I can’t. I saw what I saw and I did what I did.”

  Kinkaid could have said more — berated Dowd for his simplicity — but he thought it less suspicious to keep quiet.

  “I haven’t slept since,” Dowd said.

  “Well neither have we,” Emmie said.

  The doctor tilted Faraday’s head back, pulled down on Faraday’s chin. “They find the front tooth in the alley?” he asked no one in particular. “I could make a mold.”

  “I was out there with Iommi all morning,” Emmie said.

  “I may have swallowed it,” Faraday said.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Emmie said.

  “We’re not gonna want to make a mold of that then, it passes through your stomach and feces,” the doctor said.

  “There were two sticks of wood in the trash can,” Kinkaid said. “They’ll do us no good.”

  “These three loose teeth,” the doctor said, “they could heal, takes time. I always prefer to yank them.”

  “What he needs is a dentist,” Kinkaid said.

  “Your first upper-left premolar is cracked as well. And it’s a good crack, what I’m saying is it’s a bad crack.”

  “You’re a dentist, too,” Kinkaid said.

  The doctor looked over at Kinkaid slowly, grimly, as if no one ever dared question his many areas of expertise. “Young man.” To Faraday: “I’m not positive your jaw may be fucked, but I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so,” Kinkaid said.

  “I don’t. They might be.”

  “That’s that, then.”

  “That is that,” the doctor said.

  “What about his lower lip?” Emmie said.

  The doctor said, “That bruising would be the result of his lower teeth puncturing — ”

  “Teeth teeth teeth!” she yelled. “Doesn’t anyone else see this is all falling apart?”

  Faraday grunted, shifted to face her. “I’m not falling apart.”

  “I almost got knifed dancing, you get hopped in the alle — ”

  “Jumped in the alley,” Kinkaid said.

  “There wasn’t any chance of this happening before,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a cotton top whose sleeves whipped as she trembled. Her eyes were bloodshot but dry.

  Her voice was becoming high and crooked. “I barely had the strength to go out there last, last night and tonight you’re gonna want me, me, want me — ” She was dry sobbing, bent forwards, her fingers digging into the sofa. “This has all gotten away from us. We won’t get any of it back. Not even my husband’s tooth.”

  They were watching her like an accident that’s so mesmerizing you forget to intervene. She rocked back and forth.

  “Last night was it for me. My fucking finale,” Emmie said. “You’d have to hang me from tenterhooks to get me out there again.”

  “Kink,” Faraday said with a nod at his wife. “I would but I can’t even put an arm around her.”

  Kink didn’t want to calm her down. She was doing wonderfully, and this time all on her own. But as she became hysterical he got off his stool, put a cold hand on her neck, and with his other hand over her ear he whispered what everyone assumed were soothing orders. He walked her to his stool, sat her down. The doctor came over and gave her an injection. Her rocking would stop, and her trembling, but not for awhile. Kinkaid continued his whispering.

  “You,” Faraday said to Dowd, “why don’t you just take her home. Can you go home, babe?”

  “Go with her,” the doctor told Faraday. “Find yourself a hard bed, make a cocoon of it.”

  “Honey, go home. Look after my Dad, his new nurse started this afternoon. She needs to be shown his routine. They’re probably floundering together the two of them right now.”

  Dowd walked her out and downstairs, a big arm across her shoulders, her wobbly legs making him stagger.

  “I’m sorry, Faraday,” Kinkaid said. “If I’d have been out there by you at — ”

  “You’d have lost more teeth than me.”

  “I’d be looking worse,” Kinkaid said. “But I could’ve helped you put up a fight.”

  “I put up a fight.”

  “Of course you did, I’m not saying you didn’t.”

  “So you’re not going to lie down today,” the doctor said. He’d walked over to Kinkaid’s stool, and Kinkaid had Dowd’s place by the door.

  “I lie down,” Faraday said, holding his torso, “I don’t know that I could get up.”

  “You’re a reasonably strong man,” the doctor said. “Don’t let last night change your perception about that.”

  “The asshole’s absolutely right,” Kinkaid said. “It’s normal to feel weak cause of this, but you’ll get right again.”

  “Is that what I said?” The doctor. “That is not what I said.”

  “No one can see me like this,” Faraday said, “not for a few days till I can at least move.”

  “Wearing that tape girdle,” Kinkaid said. “Too bad you got rid of that healer. Want me to call Hoone? See if he’s got any in custody?”

  “He’s to call soon as he finds one. Since he hasn’t called, he hasn’t any.”

  “Why faucet tape?” Kinkaid asked the doctor.

  “Because it has give and it has hold.”

  Kinkaid said, “Anything I can do for him?”

  “That I can’t?”

  “Are you getting aggressive with me?” Kinkaid said.

  “You two kidding?” Faraday boomed with obvious discomfort.

  “Sorry, Faraday,” Kinkaid said. “It’s just that you’ve been wrecked, it’s a given you’re gonna get worse before you start getting better. So, jack of all doctors, doctor of all tr
ades.”

  “Some ribs fractured on one side, nothing anyone can do for that, there’s no treatment, they heal on their own. Least your lung wasn’t pierced. I don’t have the machines in my office to tell me about broken anything else, and I know you aren’t going to a hospital. Either way, your ribs, fractured or bruised, they’ll set on their own.”

  He put some Skoal in his mouth, using his tongue to gather the tobacco into a pouch between gum and cheek formed from years of use.

  “And you’re a dentist?” Kinkaid said. “Where you gonna spit?”

  “I swallow it. Faraday, no injuries to your organs. None that I could tell. Again, without a hospital’s machines. Your urine was clear, blood pressure fine. I gave you a good exam.”

  “Did you?” Kinkaid said. “I think we’d be more comfortable with a vet in here. Or are you a vet, too?”

  The doctor smiled at Kinkaid but spoke to Faraday: “Your knees are scraped, they’ll scab. Don’t pick at them. Head’s gonna ache, no question. The meperidine and hydrocodone’ll help. Tailbone’s gonna ouch when you stand and sit, like as now. Under your arm, though, that was plain cruelty, that’s a very tender spot.”

  The doctor swallowed some tobacco juice. Kinkaid shook his head.

  “No concussion. Ringing in your ear will stop tonight or tomorrow. And that’s it.” He closed his alligator-skin carryall with a snap.

  “My teeth,” Faraday said.

  “Are secondary. The one you lost, you lost. I’ll check again the rest tomorrow. If I weren’t on retainer — ”

  “You have him on retainer?” Kinkaid said.

  “Now’s when I’d ask for the bill. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here at noon when you called.”

  Faraday sat up on the sofa, his hands to his ribs, testing them.

  “I wove that truss carefully, don’t muss the layering.”

  “Why couldn’t you come at noon?” Faraday said. “I could’ve used you at noon. Could’ve used you here all night, look after this body they left me with.”

  “Told you it couldn’t be helped.”

  “Did you tell him why it couldn’t be helped?” Kinkaid said.

  “Who is this jerk?” the doctor said. “You haven’t needed me in five years. I come see you at an ungodly morning hour, I’m back again late afternoon. Five years it’s been since I’m needed and I got this guy riding my ass like a hemorrhoid, Faraday. The fuck is he?”

  “Kinkaid’s question is my question,” Faraday said.

  “I have more patients than only you, and regular ones that need more specific care.”

  “What Faraday does, besides the club, you know about that,” Kinkaid said.

  The doctor answered with a blink and a shrug.

  “Tell him what you were doing, where you were, or we’ll get it out of you. Unpleasantly.”

  “Invasively,” Faraday said to bolster Kinkaid’s threat.

  “There’s a massage parlor in Koreatown.”

  “East 30s,” Kinkaid said. “And you mean whorehouse.”

  “They’re aliens, they’ve got no insurance, their English is indecipherable. I was giving out the weekly exam, tending to their diseases, giving out their shots and pills and warnings. For that I get a free buffet. I was in the middle of a three-course meal, as it were, when you called.”

  Kinkaid said, “How, what, what could you wanna sample from that seeing firsthand what they’re riddled with?”

  “I’m cheap and I’m partial to Asians.”

  “That’s a wonderful rationale,” Kinkaid said. “It’ll lead you directly to herpes.”

  Too late.

  Faraday stared at his doctor. “But I will punish you.”

  “Live with that,” Kink said.

  “If I have to.”

  “That’s the cost of putting twat above my health,” Faraday said. “You have other whorehouses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Closer to here?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You come back tomorrow morning,” Faraday said. “And if I should call you before then you’ll drop whatever syringe or hooker you’re holding and be here in half an hour. I wouldn’t stay more than half an hour away.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said and went downstairs.

  “He doesn’t know right from wrong,” Kinkaid said.

  “It was that new club,” Faraday said.

  “I was gonna suggest that when everybody had gone.”

  “They found out what else it is we do here, and they fooled me.”

  “It would’ve happened to any of us. Only it happened to you. But it’s a logical tangent from the other day’s attack.”

  “Run things today,” Faraday said, sinking back onto the sofa. “I’ll be up here. Lundin has the day’s agenda. Probably behind on some of it. Use him. And Briggs, but only if you have to, Briggs.”

  “Okay,” Kinkaid said, hoping Faraday would tell him the same thing tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that until the twins had finished their hijinks.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Friday, late None

  Lundin was in the driver’s seat of his car, an unlit Australian Stradbroke hanging suicidally from his lower lip. He wasn’t going to light it but he knew the mystery was rankling Kinkaid, that the man would pounce like he had that morning when they were waiting for Calder to come home to the bar. Asking Lundin not to smoke in his very own car.

  Kinkaid was in the passenger’s seat, his elbows in his lap. They were parked on First Avenue, corner of 42nd Street. In a bus lane. And on the crosswalk. They couldn’t see the UN cause of a smaller building in their way, but could see everyone coming down the walkway, exiting through the gates onto First.

  It had started to rain an hour earlier.

  “Something’s been dripping,” Kinkaid said. He arched his head to examine the backseat. “You got a leak in the roof?”

  “Trunk, yeah,” Lundin said.

  “That’s it, yeah? It’s drip drip dripping. Stop it up with something.”

  “Tried. I used rubberized undercoating. There’s an empty paint can in there, catches the water.”

  “A normal person, cares about his car, they take it to the shop.”

  “I keep putting it off,” Lundin said.

  “You keep — You’re a shithead,” Kinkaid said.

  “Yeah. Why are you here again?”

  “Cause Faraday isn’t. Ever been with a woman?” Kinkaid said.

  “I don’t trust anything that bleeds for seven days and lives,” Lundin said.

  “I don’t trust them either, but have you ever gotten naked with one?”

  Lundin wasn’t sure he wanted to respond. He didn’t want to have this conversation, not with Kinkaid.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” Kinkaid said. “I been with women and I’m not ashamed.” He laughed good and long.

  The were treading in quiet for a while when Lundin said, only because he was on the verge of napping, “I did, once.”

  “I knew you did, you’re too much of a man not to.”

  “I’ll blame that on heterosexual ignorance.”

  “You’re gonna have to give out more details than just telling me you’re no virgin.”

  “Gossipmonger.”

  “I could go in and find it myself.”

  “I think we both know that’s unlikely, Kink.”

  “Please don’t call me Kink. No, fuck the please, don’t call me Kink.”

  Lundin smiled. “I tell you the story, I get to call you Kink.”

  Kinkaid mulled that over for a full minute and said, “Fine, call me Kink, but just today.”

  “Well, Kink, I was fourteen, fifteen.”

  A group of men and women left the UN and were walking away but Council Member Vianney wasn’t with them.

  The rain stopped.

  Kink said, “She was younger than you, right? I myself was nineteen. Later than most.”

  “We had a family reunion in Louisiana.”

  “New Orleans
?”

  “Nah, Lake Charles. My grandparents are from there.” Lundin rolled the window down, lit the Stradbroke, daring Kink to complain. “Lot of aunts and uncles, cousins. Relatives so distant they don’t even look alike.”

  “Except they were black,” Kink said.

  “We had a little miscegenation, a couple token whites.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, savoring the terrible taste. “My third cousin, she takes me up to her room. It was her house the reunion was at.”

  “Scandalous,” Kink said.

  Lundin stared at the building blocking the UN, enjoying the cig, thinking he’d told enough, the story was basically over.

  “Then?” Kink said.

  “Then? You’ve done it, you know what happens then.”

  “Not for a fag,” Kink said.

  “Then it took me a while to get started, plus I was afraid if I couldn’t, she’d tell, and there were a lot of people there.”

  “Tell on you, she tried to have sex with her cousin?”

  “I suppose, Kink.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “No. I mustered enough to get inside and she did most of the work.”

  “Girls like that, they’re hard to find,” Kink said. He rolled down his window, touched the raindrops on the roof, moving his fingertips on the wet surface like they were sliding on coins.

  “All ten minutes of it was messy and horrible,” Lundin said. “She was too wet, too smooth, her chest kept getting in the way. And hairless. I like a man with hair. Nothing like Sasquatch, but some fur is nice.”

  “Fur is gross, bristle is gross.”

  “The sheets were drenched from her. From my sweat but mostly her. Touching herself at the same time, her ugly clit. The whole thing was a mistake.”

  “All ten minutes of it,” Kink said.

  “I never came,” Lundin said. “Faked it. Had to, get her to stop.”

  “I was with a man once,” Kink said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “A man. This is fifteen, twenny years ago,” Kink said. His hand was back in the car; he wiped his fingers on the seat. “Handsome guy. Feminine, he was so pretty.”