Act of God (10 page)

“Yeah, she told me.”

“She say where?”

“Where she was going?”

“Yes.”

Cagey again. “Just Jersey somewheres.”

“But you don’t know where.”

“Uh-unh.”

“You hear from her while she was gone?”

“Never did.”

“You think about going with her?”

Teagle weighed something. “Not. Darbra and me, we’re both sun freaks, you know, but you don’t like bring sand to the beach, and you don’t like take a date on vacation.”

“You and she were seeing each other back here, then?”

“On and off.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Estimate.”

“That’s what’s tough, man. I think she like had her eye on me from Jump Street, but didn’t make her move till maybe a month ago?”

Her move. “You see each other a lot?”

“Man, we don’t exactly go out for a malted, you know? It’s more like a physical thing.”

“How did you spend the week?”

“Huh?”

“How did you spend the week she was gone?”

An elaborate shrug. “Just hung out.”

“Where?”

“Beach, clubs, practiced like always.”

“With the other guys in the band?”

“Uh, no, actually. They couldn’t … we couldn’t all get it together for a session this week.”

“You played a club on Saturday without practicing together all week?”

“Yeah, man. We had plenty of time for a good sound check, and like I said before, we’re tight.”

“And you were boss.”

Teagle didn’t like the way I said it. “Right.”

“You make enough money from the music not to need a day job?”

“I don’t need much, and I write some songs.”

“Songs to sell, you mean?”

“Yeah. You gotta do that, otherwise the band you’re in breaks up, you don’t have any product except a couple of audition tapes, you doing the leads on them.”

“So you sell your songs to other groups?”

“Yeah. I’m not into the political shit, man. Like, I don’t know nobody, I don’t owe nobody, and I don’t blow nobody. I just write the music people want to hear, the basic pure. Rock and roll.”

“How much do you get from a song you sell?”

“That’s not really the point.”

“It is if you have to pay the rent.”

“Like I said, I don’t need much, and I saved from the tour, remember?”

“When did the tour end?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know when you started living around here?”

“Awright, awright. It was like … March, maybe?”

“Three months ago.”

“Man, when you’re young, you don’t worry so much about time.”

“Darbra ever mention any other men to you?”

“Not.”

“You think you’re the only one seeing her?”

“Man, what she does is her business, what I do is mine, awright?”

“No jealousy?”

A smirk again. “I’m too young to worry about time, and too young to worry about love, man. That’ll like work itself out, you know?”

“You have a key to Darbra’s apartment?”

“No. Why should I?”

“You’ve been seeing her.”

“When she gets the urge, she calls me. When I get the urge, I call her. It works out, it works out.”

“You like her cat?”

“Her—Tigger?”

“Yes.”

“Not especially.”

“Why not?”

“Darb lets him sleep in her bed. Not the kind of pussy hairs I like in my mouth come morning, you know?”

A really special guy, Rush. “She ask you to feed him while she was away?”

Teagle paused again. “No, I think Traci was taking care of that.”

“Seems kind of odd, Darbra leaving you a note she was back but not telling Traci.”

Rush Teagle stared at me. “Darbra, she like don’t always do the considerate thing, you know?”

A
VOLUNTEER AT THE
information desk inside the pneumatic doors suggested I’d find the Orthopedic Associates by following the yellow line past the gift shop to the elevator, the elevator to the third floor, and the yellow line again to a clearly worded sign. I did as I was told and found myself standing at a counter behind a Hispanic woman leaning forward on crutches and a black man leaning sideways on a cane. When my turn came, I told the woman in the print dress staffing the counter the name of the doctor Elie had recommended. The woman found my name near the end of what upside down looked like a long list and handed me a clipboard with an even longer printed form to fill out. After she told me to take a seat and I would be called, I asked her when that might be, and she gave what I took to be an honest shrug.

Thanking her, I risked losing whatever priority I had and took the clipboard and the elevator back down to the gift shop. Their choices of magazines were slim and their paperbacks slimmer, but I found a Lawrence Block novel Nancy hadn’t bought for her own library and went back upstairs. As I hit the waiting area, a woman in a nurse’s white pantsuit with a stethoscope around her neck was calling my name.

“Right here.”

The woman gave me a measured look. “Where were you?”

I gestured vaguely with the clipboard. “Bathroom.”

She didn’t take it well. “This way, please.”

I was led around a corner to a little alcove with a plastic formed chair like those in the waiting room, a water cooler, a scales, and some kind of vertical post that rolled on wheels. The nurse pointed at the scales.

I said, “With shoes or without?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I got on the scales and she niggled the counterweight. “One-ninety-eight. Hold still for your height.”

She slid the horizontal piece down until it slanted at some angle off my head. “Seventy-six inches.”

“Between six-two and six-three, actually.”

She didn’t respond. “Sit down for your blood pressure, please.”

I asked her if she wanted me to roll up my sleeve.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She wheeled the vertical post over, wrapped the black leather bandage around my sleeve at the bicep, and starting pumping. Then she placed the stethoscope pad on my arm and released the pressure slowly. “One-twenty over eighty.”

“Is that good?”

“It isn’t bad. Please return to the waiting area and have a seat until the doctor can see you.”

“Do you know how long that’ll be?”

She said, “No.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Were you waiting long, Mr. Cuddy?”

“About seven chapters.”

“Sorry?”

I held up the book.

“Oh, I see.”

We were in a windowless, characterless examining room with one of those padded tables, a desk, and two chairs. The doctor sat at the desk, me next to it. Reading through the form I’d completed on the clipboard, she paused with the eraser of a pencil on certain lines. About five-foot-three and Asian-American, a Chinese surname appearing before the “M.D.” on the tag above the breast of her labcoat. Attractive with short black hair in a shingled haircut, she also was a good decade younger than her patient.

“Mr. Cuddy, you say here you served in Vietnam?”

“Yes.”

“Any wounds?”

“A couple, but I doubt they’re involved with my knee or shoulder now.”

“Just the same, could you describe them?”

“Mortar shell took a little chunk out of one thigh, knife—”

“Which thigh?”

“Right.”

“And it’s your left knee that’s bothering you now?”

“Correct.”

“You started to say knife?”

“Slash wound, across the ribs.”

She nodded. “Any others?”

“Not from the war.”

“Tell me.”

I did. She had to turn the form over to use the other side.

“How about other injuries, sports or accidents first.”

We went through those, a lot shorter list.

“Mr. Cuddy, I’m most concerned about the bullet wound to your left shoulder.”

“It healed fine.”

“Well, we’re going to have to take the shirt and pants off sometime. Let me step outside while you strip down to your briefs and put on this johnny coat, open side to the back. Feel free to leave your socks on if you like. Some people find the floor a little cold.”

I did as she said, at first leaving my socks on, then realizing I looked like a bad imitation of Jack Lemmon in an early sixties comedy. The doctor knocked before she came back into the examining room.

“Let’s start with the knee.”

As I repeated how I’d hurt it on Nancy’s stairs, the doctor manipulated my leg until the joint had bent at all the usual angles and a few that made me squirm. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, but she knew how to use leverage to achieve the effect she wanted.

A frown. “Patella feel like it’s floating a little?”

“If that’s the kneecap, yes.”

“And the buckling occurs mainly going downstairs?”

“Going down, period. Even just getting out of bed.”

“But not on level surfaces or upgrades?”

“Not so far.”

“Good. Let’s try the shoulder now.”

She started on it. “I see the scar.” A look at my back. “Went clean through?”

“Yes.”

“Loss of function?”

“Not after a few months.”

“Any physical therapy?”

“Nothing professional. Just exercise, Nautilus equipment for a while now.”

“You were very lucky on that, Mr. Cuddy. Most people don’t realize how complicated, and easily destroyed, the workings of the shoulder are. Now, let’s see about the current problem.”

She began manipulating, this time massaging as much as moving the joint, then doing the equivalent of isometric exercises with it. More frowning.

I said, “What do you think?”

“I’ll know better after X-rays. Can you stay for them today?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll send you down now, then. Take this out to our counter here, and Natalie will tell you the rest. Just be sure the technician in Radiology knows I’m waiting for the plates.”

“I take it I get dressed first.”

A small smile. “We generally insist on it.”

Hector said, “First, we do the knee.”

He had me stretch out, face up, on a table. Unlike the one in the examining room, this one was rigid instead of padded and had what looked like a glass window in it. He slid something under the table, then laid a heavy, thick apron over me from ribs to mid-thigh. “Protect the future generations, you know it?”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, we got to think of these things.”

He then adjusted an almond-colored cone on a flexible arm over my knee. The cone was about the diameter of a volleyball, and the arm was attached to a track system on the ceiling. The tracks allowed the arm and cone to move in roughly the same patterns as a rook in chess.

“Okay, man. We gonna shoot maybe five pictures of your knee, so just relax and breathe in and out when I tell you from behind the wall there. I’m gonna come out in between, bend your knee this way and that some. You gonna hear a buzz sound, like when you step in the dentist’s office.”

“Great.”

Hector went through the sequence, then moved the cone out of the way and had me step down off the table. “Now we gonna do the shoulder, man. Just stand up in front of this screen here. Little to the left. Good. Now we put the lead skirt on, velcro like … so. Good. First one’s gonna be head-on, then we play around a little.”

After shifting this way and that through five or six of the short bursts from the cone, Hector pronounced me finished with him.

“The doctor said I should tell you she’s waiting for your … plates, is it?”

“Yeah, plates.” He looked down at the paperback. “You enjoying the book?”

“Yes.”

Hector seemed glad for me.

“How many chapters now?”

“Fifteen.”

“We shouldn’t be too much longer today.”

“Better to get it done.”

The doctor nodded at me without conviction, then went back to studying the X-rays against a lighted screen in the examining room. “Well, I’ve got good news and inconclusive news.”

“Let’s start with the good.”

“You want it in Latin or English?”

“English would be nice.”

“Plain and simple, your kneecap’s just lifting a little from the kind of sponge it rests on in there. We tend not to see this so much from a sudden trauma like you had with the bureau on the stairs, more typically it’s from people who are marathoners.”

“We didn’t talk about this, but I ran the marathon a few months ago.”

“You did?”

Her inflection said she was less upset that I hadn’t mentioned it and more surprised that I’d actually done it.

The doctor added a note to my form. “Well, that’s more consistent, but anyway not much to worry about. I’m going to write you a prescription for an anti-inflammatory.”

“I’m not much for pills, Doctor.”

“These will just reduce the aggravation in the joint. They have a very slight tendency to make you nauseous, so be sure to take one with meals.”

“And that’s it?”

“No. No, I’m also going to give you a prescription for a neoprene sleeve.”

“A what?”

“A neoprene sleeve. It’s a kind of leg brace, made from the same stuff as a scuba wet suit. You’ve probably seen basketball players with them all the time. Football and baseball players wear them, too, but they don’t show as much under the uniforms.”

“Why do I need a prescription?”

“You don’t, but a prescription will make it easier for the medical supply house to fit you. Also, this way the brace will be mostly covered under your health plan.”

“Thanks.”

“That buckling sensation will go away by itself, but just be sure to wear the brace whenever you jog or do anything athletic on the knee. In fact, a lot of men wear them all the time, since they don’t show much under pants, like I said.”

She must have seen something in my face. “Mr. Cuddy, believe me, it’s no big deal. You’ll get used to it and not even notice it’s there.”

I nodded. “How about the shoulder?”

“That’s the inconclusive part. The pills should help you with that as well. The X-rays don’t show any major damage, but then they often don’t. You might have nothing more than a pull, but your description of the guitar-string sensation makes me believe it might be more serious.”