by Rex Pickett
The wine came. The waiter was having trouble with the whole uncapsuling and uncorking, so I grabbed the bottle from him brusquely–I guess I needed a glass as badly as my mother and Jack!–deftly opened it myself and poured everyone around. “Don’t be pissed off,” I said, “I tip fifty percent.”
He looked at me like I was Rasputin.
My mother’s mood seemed to soften as she got some wine coursing through her bloodstream. Now and then she would raise her crooked index finger ceilingward and say, “I know you’re not going to let my Snapper die.” Her invocation of the deity was both lugubrious and borderline funny, but no one dared to laugh.
The pedestrian food arrived in gluttonous mounds of cheap carbohydrates and overcooked protein. Jack and I ate greedily. My mother had nothing and Joy wasn’t touching her order of salmon at all.
“You’re not hungry, Joy?” I leaned over and whispered in her ear, fueled now by desperation, “I’m going to get all your money back together first thing tomorrow morning. I don’t care if you lost it or my mother stole it or what, but you have to try to forgive my mother–she lives in another world. She says things she doesn’t mean. In a week this trip’ll be over.” I squeezed her shoulder, but I understood more from her frosty, non-reaction. It wasn’t a matter of her worrying about whether the money would be replaced, but that her character and pride had been impugned.
An hour on the dot, we were back at Lakeview Veterinary Hospital. I instructed Joy to stay with the car as Jack and I went up to the entrance with my mother and I knocked.
“What’re we doing back here?” my mother wondered aloud, utterly discombobulated. “Is Snapper coming with us?” she asked in all seriousness.
“No, Mom, we just thought you might like to have, you know, one last visit with him before we head out of town.”
“In case he dies, you mean?” she asked fatalistically.
“Come on, Mom, don’t be like that.”
Dr. Ariel opened the door and wordlessly let us in. We trailed her single-file down the darkened corridor, back into the bowels of the clinic. The clamorous barking and wailing dogs, sequestered in cages, heard our approach. Dr. Ariel directed us through the treatment area into the surgery room in which I’d observed the huge mixed breed get his teeth worked on. I parked my mother next to the stainless steel exam table.
“We’re going to have to get her up on the table and lay her down,” the doctor said matter-of-factly.
“What’re they going to do to me?” my mother asked. “Where’s Snapper?”
Shahar turned to me, realizing I hadn’t told my mother about the vet-turned-dentist second act of the drama.
“Mom, that tooth has to come out. The dentist in Fresno wouldn’t do it because of the Coumadin. This kind doctor is willing to look at it, and if it isn’t a big deal, she might do you a favor and yank it”–I snapped my fingers–“like that!”
“I said I would look at it,” Dr. Ariel reminded me.
“I know, we’re playing this by ear.”
“A vet?” my mother asked, her expression a quilt of puzzlement.
“She’s trained in oral surgery, Mom. In India, amateurs do it on the streets with rusty pliers. Do you want to go to the hospital?” Even for me, that was low.
“Oh, no, I’d die there.”
“Then let’s do what the doctor tells us, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Come on,” I said to Jack. “Let’s do this.”
Jack came over and stood next to me. “This is wack, man,” he said, chuckling.
“Material for my next novel,” I quipped.
“No one would believe it.”
“Sometimes reality is more fiction than fiction.” I turned to my mother and extended my hand. “All right, Mom, here we go.”
“Oh, I’m scared.”
“Come on.” I grabbed her hand before she could offer it. I got her arm extended and then hoisted her up out of her wheelchair against her continued expostulations that she was going to fall and my repeated assurances that she wouldn’t. Somehow sensing the urgency of the situation, she pushed off her right leg and I negotiated her unsteadily to her feet. With Jack’s help, I rotated her so that her butt was touching the edge of the exam table, but not resting on it. I said to Jack, “We got to get her up.”
“Roger that.”
We each took a thigh and hoisted her up and onto the exam table.
“Mom, you’ve got to cut back on those desserts. Jesus.”
She laughed. “Oh, don’t joke me.”
From her sitting position it was easy to swivel her ninety degrees and lay her down. As we did, Dr. Ariel placed a folded towel under her head. Then she went quickly to work.
“Hi, Mrs. Raymond. I’m going to look at that tooth that’s hurting you, okay?”
“Okay. How’s my Snapper?”
“He’s fine. We’ve got him in an oxygen cage. He’s stabilized.”
“Oh, that’s such good news. I can’t thank you enough. Even if you are Jewish.”
“Jesus, Mom! Watch it with the appalling racial slurs. Christ!” I turned to Dr. Ariel. “Don’t mind her, she’s… whatever.”
“Open your mouth, please.”
My mother obeyed, opening it as wide as she was capable. As Jack and I stood off to the side, Dr. Ariel, employing an instrument with a small mirror, poked around in my mother’s mouth. She turned to me and said, “It’s pretty inflamed.”
“Let’s take it out, Shahar. What is it? Five, ten minutes? We’ll be gone.”
She sucked in her breath. “You know I could lose my license for this.”
“And I would never get another book contract to save my life. And the wine world would unanimously disown me. I’d be on the street or in a loony bin for having told such a whopper to the authorities. Do the best you can. If it bleeds too much I promise I’ll take her to the hospital and say I tried to do it myself. Please, Doctor. We’re at your mercy here.”
Dr. Ariel wasted no time now that she had decided to perform the dubious procedure. “I want to give her a local. This could hurt,” she muttered. She opened a drawer and removed a syringe and a small vial of clear liquid. She plunged the needle of the syringe into the vial and withdrew a precise amount of what I assumed was Novocain. “I’m just going to numb you a bit, Mrs. Raymond.”
My mother was stoic. She bravely held her mouth open as our voices were drowned in the unrelenting din of yowling dogs.
Dr. Ariel gave the injection. My mother let out a little cry when the needle pricked her gum, her face stricken with fear. “Let’s just give it a few minutes,” Dr. Ariel said to no one in particular.
Jack found a plastic chair and slumped into it and drew a hand across his haggard face. I remained standing next to Dr. Ariel. “I really appreciate this.”
“I consulted an M.D. friend while you were gone. Keep her off the Coumadin for two days, okay? Until the bleeding subsides.”
“All right.”
“Watch for swelling in the ankles. If they start to puff up, resume the Coumadin. If they remain swollen you’d better take her to the hospital.”
“I’m not going to the hospital!” my mother yelped.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” I said sharply. “You’re not going to the hospital. Okay?” I turned to Dr. Ariel and said in a barely audible tone. “She doesn’t like hospitals. She thinks she’s going to die there. Ironic for an R.N., huh? Isn’t it, Mom?”
“Oh, yes. I saw so much death!”
Dr. Ariel returned her attention to my mother. She touched the right side of my mother’s lower jaw and asked: “Can you feel that?”
“No,” my mother said.
“Okay, then, we’re ready to start.” Dr. Ariel sorted through her drawer and produced a thick-handled instrument with a flattened end. She turned back to my supine mother, whose expression now displayed a kind of frozen mask of fear. As the vet attempted to loosen the infected tooth, my mother’s whole body noticeably stiffened. Dr. Ariel worked rapidly to push th
e gums away from the abscessed tooth. As she did, my mother’s right leg violently convulsed.
“Jack,” I implored in a rising tone, “hold her leg down!”
Jack, laughing a little, sprang to his feet and clamped both hands down on my mother’s right ankle, lashing it to the table. As if all the energy were shunted to another part of her body, her right arm started slapping like the furiously beating wing of a dying pterodactyl. I clutched it with both hands and secured it. She was suddenly a right-sided paroxysmic creature as Dr. Ariel, ignoring her patient’s physical reaction, continued to work on dislodging the infected tooth. She exchanged the tool she had for another thick-handled one with a clamp at the end controlled by a pliers-like apparatus. She gripped down on the tooth, grimaced slightly and, with little effort, pulled the molar. She held it triumphantly up in the jaws of her clamp for all to see, proud of her work. Relief washed over everyone. For totally different reasons. There should have been applause!
Moving quickly to staunch the blood, Dr. Ariel produced a vial filled with yellowish powder from her lab coat pocket. With her index finger she tapped out a small amount into the open wound. “This is Yunnan Pai Yao, an herbal coagulant,” she explained.
“You practice alternative medicine on animals?” I asked.
“Yes. Mostly acupuncture, but also some herbs,” she said as she picked up a tiny sponge from a medical tray table with a pair of dental tweezers and planted it where the tooth had been. “This is a Vetspon,” she explained. “It’ll disintegrate after a few days.” She gave one last cursory examination of my mother’s mouth and said, “It’s barely seeping, hardly bleeding at all.”
Jack let go of my mother’s leg and I held her hand in mine. Her violent shaking had now subsided and she looked more bewildered than anything as she lay there trying to process what had just happened.
“How do you feel, Mom?”
“I don’t feel anything,” she garbled.
“We got it out. No hospital. Thanks to Dr. Ariel here.”
“That’s such good news!”
“Try not to use my full name if this becomes a popular anecdote,” Dr. Ariel said sardonically.
“I’m sorry. Dr. X.”
She smiled a laugh.
Jack and I carefully transferred my mother back into the wheelchair. Getting her off the examination table and back into her chair was easier because we now had gravity on our side.
Understandably eager to lock up the clinic and make this grossly objectionable procedure disappear from her consciousness, Dr. Ariel cleaned up and put her canine dental instruments away. That done, she faced me and said, “Good luck, Miles.”
“Thank you, Doctor. If I’m ever down-and-out and need a vasectomy I’m coming to you.”
She laughed. “How about if you’re in town again you take me out to dinner?”
“It’s a promise,” I said.
She went from vet coquette to deadly serious. “If she starts bleeding, you’re going to have to take her to a hospital. But I think she’ll be okay.”
“Thanks again.” I stepped forward and gave her a hug and she hugged me back. “Bye.”
Jack took hold of my mother’s wheelchair handlebars and pushed her out of the clinic with me trailing. We rolled her up the ramp into the van and resumed our familiar positions in the cockpit. Jack turned the key in the ignition.
“Hold on a second,” I said. “I want to figure something out.” I went to my iPhone’s APPs and brought up Google maps. I surveyed the upper half of California. The original plan was to have cut over to the coast and stay at a beautiful B&B in Mendocino. But now that it was approaching night, and realizing that we had to be in the Willamette by the following evening, I altered the itinerary. “I’m going to cancel that reservation in Mendocino,” I said to Jack. “It’s going to be a fucking nightmare drive on those narrow roads at night and we’re going to have to leave first thing in the morning anyway and won’t get to enjoy the incredible scenery. So, I think what we’re going to do…”–I tapped my location on the iPhone–“is hit I-5 and just go straight to Redding.”
“Whatever you say,” Jack said. “Just get me to Wisconsin, O Lordy,” he sang.
I laughed as I typed Redding into the car’s GPS, and said, “Let’s hit it.”
We pushed out of Clearlake under a cloudless, indigo-stained sky. We looped onto rural Highway 20 in the direction of the interstate. The monochromatic brown of the flat farmland, its crops already harvested, bordered us on both sides on the deserted road as we journeyed on, a little worse for wear but, we had reason to hope, our troubles behind us.
I turned around and checked on my mother. Joy had given her a Vicodin, per my instructions and she seemed in a narcotized daze. I whispered to Joy, “Don’t give her the Coumadin tonight, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“In the morning I’m going to go to a bank and get you your money.” She remained silent. “I don’t know what happened to it–maybe it fell out of your purse, I don’t care–but I’ll replace it in full, okay?”
“Your mom steal money from me,” she said in a rapid machine-gun burst. She crossed her arms tightly against her chest.
“Okay, Joy, look. I’m replacing the money. I looked all around in my mom’s purse and I can’t find it. But, you’ve got to let it go until we make it to Wisconsin.”
“And I didn’t kill her dog!” she snapped at me.
“He’s not dead. And no one’s blaming you.”
“Your mom is.” She impersonated the excoriating voice of my mother amazingly well: “‘You let him get out. You’re a dog killer.’” She shook her head disgustedly, angled her face away and stared out at the featureless landscape and darkening sky.
“I’ll talk to my mother. I will read her the riot act. But she’s had a stroke and it’s hard to control what comes out of that mouth of hers. You have to treat her like an invalid, Joy. You can’t take anything personally. Please. For me.”
Joy offered no reply, just went on staring out the window, the hardened look cemented on her face.
I turned back to the windshield and got out my iPhone. I called the B&B in Mendocino and canceled the reservation. Naturally, given how the day was unfolding, I got hammered by an unsympathetic innkeeper who billed me 50 percent for the canceled night. I tried to reason with her that I was traveling with my mother and that her dog had been in a horrible accident and that she, herself, had to have an emergency tooth extraction, but the innkeeper didn’t give a shit–probably thought I was fabricating wildly (and who wouldn’t with that wild tale?)–and was totally intransigent.
“Well, you know what,” I said after I had clearly lost in my pleading. “I’m a professional writer, and I do a lot of writing for travel magazines, and I was thinking about doing a piece for Travel & Leisure on what a great B&B you have. But now I think I’m going to my heavily trafficked Web site and blog that we stayed at your joint and that it was crawling with vermin. Bitch.” I ended the call before she could respond. “There went five clams,” I said to Jack. “Fucking trip’s getting expensive,” I spoke ineffectually to the windshield, thinking about the $350 a day it was now costing me to keep Snapper on life support, replacing the five grand that Joy had either lost, my mother had stolen, or… Joy had… I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to believe I was traveling with an unscrupulous person and had made her responsible for the care of my mother.
I turned my attention back to my iPhone and went in virtual search of motels in Redding, as unmemorable countryside flew past like film in a high-speed projector.
“Pretty slim pickings,” I muttered while scrolling through the possibilities. “But we’re going to be in late and out early, so who gives a fuck, right?”
“Boy, I could sure use a glass,” Jack said. “This has been some mother-fucking day. This makes Shameless seem like an episode of Little House on the Prairie.”
“Let’s wait until we get there. It’s only another 100 miles.”
Jack just gritted his teeth and gripped the steering wheel as if he were in a race against time. I turned back to the information microcosm of my iPhone and decided on the Holiday Inn. It was Redding, California, city of nothing except heat and proximity to the Sacramento River, so of course there was availability when I inquired. I booked two adjacent rooms, read a credit card number over the phone, and ended the call.
I swiveled around to check on my mother and Joy, anxious now every time. My mother had awakened from her Vicodin-induced slumber and was sitting in a stony-faced silence as if a part of her soul had been ripped out in the middle of a bad dream. Joy’s face was still fixed in recrimination. Jack just looked beat, needing a shower and a shave and an air-conditioned, fully stocked bar. And I secretly fantasized a handgun.
It was close to 10:00 p.m. when we finally pulled in to the hotel. The recently-opened Redding Holiday Inn was nicer than advertised–pool and Jacuzzi and clean, spacious rooms–but given the saturnine gloom of the collective mood, soured as it was by the sequence of acrimonious and horrific events, we might as well have been at the Motel 6 with its claustrophobic spaces, threadbare towels and scratchy, semen- and menstrual-stained linens.
His hotel being mostly empty, and seeing my mother slumped forlornly in the wheelchair, the desk clerk upgraded us to more capacious suites, one of them outfitted for the handicapped and the other the honeymoon suite complete with a pink, heart-shaped tub. I worried about leaving Joy alone with my mother for fear the bickering would be rekindled, but I desperately needed a hot shower and a couple glasses to come down from the late afternoon’s woeful, albeit comically surreal, events.
After reinvigorating showers, Jack and I split a bottle of Anne Amie Pinot Noir rosé, another outstanding Willamette Valley wine. It hit the spot with its refreshing, strawberry lusciousness and cold, bracing acidity.
“Hundred-percent Pinot Noir,” I remarked. “Usually, rosés are made from Grenache, but this surprises me. Man.”
Jack smacked his lips. “Tasty. We are drinking well on this trip, my friend,” he said, the wine producing an immediate effect on our querulous moods.