A Small Matter

Copyright © 2010 M.M. Wilshire

This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places and incidents are either products of the
author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the
author.

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Chapter 1

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the
flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind.

It seemed a small matter, Vickie thought, the
way Dr. Bienenfeld handed out her death sentence, as though they
were talking about somebody else. He was much too young to be the
angel of death. At 48, Vickie did not consider herself all that
old, but this guy was just a big kid in a white coat. The kid said
a lot of things she didn’t really hear, but he finally came out
with it.

“The path report on your biopsy came back
positive,” he said.

"English, please," she said, her voice a
frightened squeak.

“Sorry. It's cancer. A bad one."

"Where?"

The doctor broke eye contact briefly and
looked down. Always a bad sign. "The pancreas,” he finally
announced.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes," the doctor replied, looking up.

Vickie lost all sense of time, and wondered
how long she had been sitting there with the doctor. It could have
been 30 seconds or it could have been a day.

Of course, Dr. Bienenfeld knew what time it
was. He had seen more than his share of patients hit with the shock
of bad news which instantly separated them from their normal
sensibilities. He could judge their strength for the fight which
lay ahead by the time it took them to come out of it. In Vickie's
case, the shock had been complete, had apparently caused a total
disassociation, but as her eyes returned to meet his, she was
already coming back after only a few seconds. She was a strong one.
She had a chance.

“Is it because of my dog?” Vickie asked.

“What?” the doctor said.

“Was it my dog?”

The dog question again. Completely baffling
the young doctor. He looked questioningly at the brother of the
girl, a man who called himself Dalk. The brother stood guard at one
side of the table, a stocky, short, muscular blond man in his late
thirties who’d ratcheted a few shades paler at the news.

“Doctor Bienenfeld,” the brother said, “her
dog got cancer and died last year. Vickie’s in shock. She’s asking
you if the dog’s cancer might have been contagious, if she could
have caught her cancer from the dog.”

Aha, the doctor thought--Dalk had understood
his sister’s irrational dog question, had made the complex and
creative association missed by himself--the more scientific,
left-brained man of the two.

“No,” Bienenfeld said to her. “It’s not
because of your dog.”

Vickie slid off the examining table. Her eyes
went straight past his own, to a point on some distant horizon he
hoped he’d never see. With her brother's arm wrapped around her
shoulder, she left the office.

"Christ, I need a drink," she said.

They exited the Kaiser Hospital compound and
found themselves in a late afternoon L.A. windstorm as they made
their way to her car, their forward progress hampered by a brisk
Santa Ana crosswind. Folded into the cross currents were the crisp
stirrings of a deepening October, its smell of dead leaves and
photochemical smog quickening their nostrils enough to pick up the
scent of Pacific Ocean mist delivered from over the mountains
twenty miles away.

Dalk stopped her and took her by the
shoulders. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“It's the end of my world. There is no
cure.”

“You’re in shock. Perhaps I should
drive.”

“I’m driving.”

They slid down into the cockpit and Vickie
eased the classic Z-28 muscle car past the parking kiosk in time to
make the green light before heading south on Woodman, the lean red
body of the machine slipping easily in and out of the dense pack of
lesser surrounding cars, it’s primeval, prominent exhaust rumble
blanketing the sonic landscape like a fog. She burned the tires
around the corner at Vanowen and locked in to the slow westward
crawl through the Van Nuys barrio to Sepulveda, taking the former
mule path, now turned major artery, north to The Lamplighter, a
small cop bar which shared a strip mall with a liquor store and
laundromat.

They took seats at the bar in the juke-sonic
joint and let their souls float a minute on the skyscraping
falsetto of the Chilites, doing Hot on a Thing, the lead singer
Eugene’s wailing caterwaul soaring over a funky cloud bank of close
harmonies. The place was loosely populated, with a couple of cops
playing pool, and two old geezers down on the end humping dice.

Mulroney, the big ex-cop now turned
bartender, came over and slapped down two cocktail napkins. “The
Chilites lead singer used to drive a cab,” he said. “The usual,
Vickie?”

“Not tonight. We’ll both take Blackjack neat
and keep ‘em coming.”

Mulroney--a hulking, red-faced Irishman who’d
spent a former life walking a beat and carrying justice to the
punks in the bad neighborhoods all over L.A.--had a good eye and
quickly read her face with disarming accuracy. He set the drinks
before them and studied her frightened, pinched features intently
for another few seconds. “Vickie? Why the face? Who died?”

Dalk stood off his stool and crushed his shot
glass with one electrifying squeeze of his muscled hands, the
exploding pop lending force to his words. “She is, Mulroney! She’s
got cancer! Our Vickie is dying!”

All heads turned in the psychic void left by
his words.

“I’ve got pancreatic cancer,” Vickie
said.

Mulroney, in spite of his formidable bulk,
seemed to shrink a size or two. He grabbed the revolver on his belt
and with a quick, practiced movement, blew off an ear-smoking round
into the jukebox. The ensuing silence in the place was palpable,
like something to be worked with tools until a suitable explanation
appeared.

Vickie, hands shaking, fumbled a couple of
pain pills out of their container and placed them on her tongue
before downing half the whiskey. “To love and death and that whole
thing,” Vickie cried. She raised her glass high. “And to good cops
and good friends.”

The motley crew surrounding her raised
respectful glasses to their friend as the gunsmoke, like a
departing soul, drifted slowly upward.

Chapter 2

They’d been hard at it for nearly four hours,
interrupted only by a time-out to gobble down a couple of
Mulroney’s big sloppy burgers accompanied by a large pile of
greasy, batter-dipped potato slabs he called his “tombstones”.
Vickie, having gone to freshen her face, stood before the mirror in
the powder room and took a dazed appraisal of herself while
freshening her lipstick, the new one, blatantly sexy, Cherry Crush.
Only tonight it didn’t feel sexy, it felt stupid and out of
place.

She was losing it--her face in the mirror
blurred and morphed itself into that of her deceased husband Jack.
After his death a good 13 years ago--a closed-casket ceremony--he’d
caught a round point blank in the face from a 20-gauge during a
building search--she’d experienced the phenomenon of seeing his
beatified face in the oddest places, especially after a drinking
bout, but it had been awhile since she’d last made contact.
Tonight, his face was young, unlined, righteous, like a Hindu
totem.

“Oh, Jack, I miss you so.” The force of the
missing took her by surprise, the depth of her love still strong.
She’d had something special with him, a security almost magical,
considering the usual types of relationships found in the
revolving-mate world of L.A.

Jack began to speak. “Soon you will see and
feel everything--from the Spiral Nebulae to the Stigmata of St.
Francis.”

Vickie shook her head and pressed a cold damp
paper towel to her eyes. When she looked again, Jack was gone,
returned no doubt to whatever death-without-tears corner of Cop
Heaven he inhabited along with the other good guys.

She returned to her stool. Dalk was passed
out--he’d been gamely trying to keep up with her, shot for shot,
but he was too young and fit to handle the spirits in the manner
her age and experience allowed.

“Help me get him out to my car,” she said to
Mulroney.

Mulroney commandeered a couple of buff,
younger cops who managed to cart Dalk out the front door and
harness him safely in to the jump seat of the classic Z-28 without
too much trouble, the job made easier by the car’s low proximity to
the ground.

“You look a little toasted, Vickie. You're
not thinking of driving," Mulroney said. His concern was
genuine.

“I’ve got a little double vision...and I just
saw my deceased husband in the Ladies’ Room...yeah, I can
drive."

She drove off into the perpetual
semi-twilight of the quickening Los Angeles October night, prowling
the harsh, neon-nighttime gauntlet of strip malls and apartments,
her drunken brother slumped forward against the shoulder restraint.
She hit the shortcut through the Sepulveda Dam flood control basin,
an area of semi-wilderness smack in the middle of the Valley. There
was nobody around and she had a clean one-mile ribbon of road
ahead. She punched it and the fierce beast exploded in a tire
smoking charge, the rear end skipping around a little before the
raw speed brought the body down hard over the suspension. She put
the needle squarely on 140 for a heart-stopping few seconds before
pounding the brakes to re-enter the world.

The car was well-engineered for just such
occasions and came to a smooth stop at the light, where she felt
the welcome aftermath of the adrenal body-shot to her system,
enjoying the way her embroidered wine-colored silk camisole felt on
her skin, and the heavy sensation of her baby braids pulling on her
sensitized scalp. She gave herself up to the enchantment of being
quite senselessly happy, and her laughter echoed in the confined
space of the cockpit. She was riding a wave of delirium, courtesy
of road speed, pain pills and Johnny Walker, knowing it would
dissolve soon, and probably never return.

“I’ll always love you, Jack. Make a place for
me up there. I’m coming home soon.” The tears began to flow as she
turned into the alley behind her home, beamed open the garage door
and pulled into the detached garage. She left the car in the garage
with Dalk still in it and stumbled across the back lawn, making it
up the porch steps without falling before unlocking the back door
and heading down the hallway to her bed.

The sharp pain in her lower back began to
burn white-hot. Tomorrow she’d need to get a prescription for
something stronger, but not tonight. Tonight, she offered the pain
to Jack. It was a pain which drew all things within her to itself,
all her joys and all her sorrows, melding them into a single flame
firing upwards toward the heavens. She barely got the spread turned
back before she pitched headlong into the swelling blackness of the
booze.

Chapter 3

She awoke angry, still in her clothes from
the night before, the fire in her lower back burning ceaselessly
hot where the tumor had seemingly expanded its ugly self from its
base camp atop her pancreas into a set of nerves along her lower
spine.

Dalk appeared in the doorway, looking
somewhat the worse for wear from the prior evening’s drunkfest. “It
can’t be as bad as all that,” he said, surveying her face.

“It’s worse--I feel weak. I suppose this is
inevitable. You can’t expect anyone to maintain their toughness
forever.”

“I’ll start breakfast. By the time you’re out
of the shower, it’ll be ready.”

“Don’t. I’m sick to my stomach.”

“You’ve got to eat,” he insisted, and made
tracks for the kitchen.

Under a needle-hot shower, the muscles in her
lower back relaxed a little. Recent events were beginning to force
understanding upon her. She traced her path back several months to
the slow, but steady encroachment of the nausea, drowsiness, and
inexplicable weight loss--from the CT scans to the hideous
insertion of the long thin needle which led up to the grand
finale--Bienenfeld’s announcement that she was in deep trouble from
a malignant tumor attached, of all places, to her pancreas.