Lizardskin (21 page)

In the long ward, he walked past the beds, past the gray ovals of faces, hearing their uneven breathing, listening to the beeps and chuffs and droning of the machines. In one bed he caught the wet oystershell glitter of open eyes turning as he passed, saw the head swivel as he glided by. He stopped at that bed and stared across the sheet at the man, who stared back at him, unblinking, tubes running into his nostrils.

Above his bed, a monitor glowed green. Gabriel watched the numbers. They did not change. He was an Indian man—he had been in some kind of fight or accident. He was bound
up in bandages and his arm was held out in a brace. His ribcage was also in a plaster cast. The man made no sound, and the green letters did not change. His heart rate did not alter.

Of course. The Crow man who had been in the accident. A tractor-trailer accident. Gabriel remembered the receptionist talking about it, when he had asked about his missing uncle. And the article in the Billings paper.

Maybe the man was dreaming awake. After a while, the effort of seeing this black shadow was too much for him, and he closed his eyes again.

Gabriel found Donna Sweetwater Bent in the seventh bed.

He had to look for a long time before he recognized her. Her head was shaved and bound in a skullcap of white cloths. A bridged tracheal tube ran into her throat under her small chin. Her brown skin looked yellow in the half-light. Her cheekbone was huge, blue and swollen, an obscenity of broken bones and eruptions of raw skin. Stitches pierced her. One eye was open, blind as a cataract. The other was closed. Beside the bed, a machine on a rollaway cart was doing her breathing for her, as noisy as a steam-press as it forced life into her and then pulled it back out. The monitor above her bed showed traces of heartbeat, and the peaks and troughs of her brain waves were flattened and languid, like sand dunes in a soft wind.

He came around and stood by her bed, looking down at her.

He remembered her third birthday. She had worn her hair in pigtails and someone, her mother who died the following month, had given her pink sandals. Her smile was incandescent. Relatives came in trucks and old cars. The party was held in a dusty lot at the back of Jubal’s farmhouse. The sky had been clear and blue. It seemed to soar above the mountains like a vast blue wave. If you looked up at it long enough, it would pull you up into it and carry you away over the low yellow hills and past the black mountains to a high snowbound crest, where you would die far from your people, far from everything that held you in one shape.

You would be like water poured from a bowl.

You would sink into the earth again and be as if you had never been. That had happened to many of them.

That had happened to him.

He pulled the tape player from his coat pocket and laid it down on the pillow by her head. He had some trouble getting the headphones to fit over the skullcap. Donna did not move. Her green numbers did not change. The machine pulled at her and pushed at her.

He pressed the
PLAY
button and stepped back. The batteries were new. The machine would play the song endlessly, over and over again, until the nurses found it or the power drained away. Under the steam-press sound of the machine, he heard the droning of the singer’s voice, a tiny scratchy sound, like a wasp trapped in the sunroom of an empty house, beating itself to death in the heat and the dryness, unable to imagine what this hard nothing was that kept it shut in and trapped. Its wings buzzed again.

He was standing there for a long time, hearing the wasp sing in Donna’s ears. He was remembering now. There was a lot to remember. It came back in a river of pictures and sounds. He felt it pull at him as a river pulls at you when you stand too close to the current.

He seemed to float far above Donna’s face, to see her from a great height. He felt the wings of his black coat move around him. He felt a hawk inside him. He could hear its wings, and when he put a hand on his skin under the shirt, he could feel the wings beating.

Afterward, he could not judge how much time had passed. It was as if he had been picked up and carried to a strange country, yet when he opened his eyes again, he had not moved.

He leaned over and kissed Donna on her ruined cheek. She smelled of Novocaine and alcohol and dry cotton. She had no breath. Her lips looked as if they were stitched shut.

He went back to the duty station. The nurse had not moved. He stood beside her for a while, studying the computer screens
in front of her. One showed a list of information files. A cursor blinked at him.

He moved it to
ADMISSIONS
and hit
RETURN
.

It asked him to type in a name.

He typed
M C A L L I S T E R
and hit
RETURN
again.

The screen went blank and the cursor blinked its idiot blink. Beside him the woman moved her head and said “later” in a little-girl voice. The screen shimmered and beeped.

MCALLISTER
, June?

MCALLISTER
, Beauregard?

MCALLISTER
, Vernon?

He moved the cursor to
MCALLISTER
, Beauregard, and punched the
RETURN
key.

CONFIDENTIAL PLEASE KEY IDENT NUMBER

He thought about it for a moment. The nurse said “don’t” and sighed again.

There was a purse sitting on the floor under her station. He picked it up and found the wallet. Inside the wallet he found her ID card. He typed in her number. The machine went blank.

A second later, it read:

He studied it for twenty seconds. Then he cursored to
ADMISSIONS
again and typed in
BELL
, Joe. He hit
RETURN
.

Another wait. His senses were quivering now. He was taking
far too long. That nurse would come back and step through the door and he’d have to do something about that, and about the cop behind her. That would be the end of his anonymity. Whatever he did would make the morning papers.

The screen flickered and filled up.

He studied the screen again. Then he picked up a pencil and wrote both addresses down on a scrap of paper. He cursored to QUIT and hit ESCAPE.

Not a bad idea. The screen was blank again. He felt the woman’s pulse at her carotid. She sighed and made room for his fingers under her jaw.

He smiled and patted her head and walked away. He could hear nothing at all through the doors. The silence was unnatural. If the cop was asleep, he would breathe, and if awake, he would breathe and turn pages and shuffle his feet.

Gabriel opened the door and stepped out into the darkened hallway. He heard the sound of low voices coming from a room down at the far end. He would have to pass the room to reach the stairway. He came forward at a glide, moving quickly, the big black coat billowing out behind him.

The door to the room was slightly ajar. He could see the broad blue back of the cop, leaning forward on a high stool. The nurse was hidden from him by the size of the cop’s body. He saw a fan of blond hair and heard her laughing softly. The
cop’s hand was busy, his shoulder moving. The nurse’s laugh changed, became a low sigh and a whispered word. Her head came up above the cop’s shoulder, and she looked right at Gabriel for the second time.

He watched her eyes as they glittered unseeing in the bright overhead light. Her red mouth was open, and then her eyes closed and she leaned forward, resting her cheek on the cop’s dark blue shirt. Her pale blond hair burned in the light.

Gabriel moved away to the stairway door. It opened with a soft hiss, and he went soundlessly into the stairwell.

Beau came up from a deep dreaming sleep with a gradual awareness that the light was changing in the room. Finally surfacing, eyes wide, he saw the patterned sound-tiles above as if they were the grids and mainlines of Billings, as if he were flying in through a heavy cloud. There was a kind of surreal hypersonic crack, and suddenly he knew where he was and why.

Something had changed. It took a few minutes to realize that the machine was gone from the far wall. He turned his head, carefully, as if a sudden move would explode it, and looked toward the other bed. The curtains were pulled back; a man was lying on his side, breathing deeply, whistling as he exhaled. The light from the window was pale blue and gray. Noises were coming from the hall, carts being pushed along and morning voices, full of fascist cheer. The nurses were up and about their business.

He pulled the sheet back and felt along his leg. The bandages were mounded over his wound, but that obscene tube was gone. The muscle was sore, but he could move the leg without fainting, a definite improvement. It took him a few minutes to get into a sitting position, and he was mapping out his next move when a young woman in crisp whites backed into the room, pulling a cart full of juices and magazines. She saw him sitting up at the side of the bed and flashed a luminous smile.

“Sergeant McAllister! Good morning!”

He grinned back. “Trudy, isn’t it? How are we?”

She made a face and brought the cart close to the bedside. “I hate that, too,” she said. “Orange, grapefruit, or tomato?”

“Orange. What do we hate?”

“We hate all that ‘we’ shit. How did you sleep?”

Beau took the plastic glass and lifted it cautiously to his lips. The juice was wonderful, a sensory flood. He noticed that he was off the intravenous, too. Suddenly, he was starving.

“Weird … I had a weird dream, too. Something—I think I dreamed that … like a black angel, and it was standing at the foot of the bed, and then there was this white light. Weird.”

“Percodan will do that. You have real weird dreams. That sounds like an out-of-body dream. Once I was in the hospital for arthroscopy and they gave me Percodan, and I had this dream I was over at the mall, only I was naked. Can you imagine that? I was stark naked and walking around with my girlfriend, you know, like shopping and stuff. Only I was absolutely in the total nude. Then everybody was nude and we all were on
Wheel of Fortune
, but all the letters were really faces. How’s Mr. Blitzer?”

Beau was still picturing Trudy naked in the mall, so when she asked him how Mr. Blitzer was he took it the wrong way and looked down to see if he was covered, but she was already over at the other bed, one hand softly shaking the patient, who groaned and rolled over. Her smile shone down upon him in a perky benediction. He croaked at her and raised his arm. She pulled him upright, and he swayed in the sheets.

“Christ … somebody kill that parrot.”

“You have a bad taste, Mr. Blitzer?”

Beau turned on his bedlight. Blitzer winced and looked across at him. Bucky Blitzer was a small leathery man with a Marine brushcut and a tattoo of a bulldog on his left bicep. His teeth were out and his cheeks were sunken. Somehow he conveyed a kind of cranky competence, and his eyes, although deep-set and surrounded by lines and shadows, were clear and direct. He pulled in a long slow breath and moaned softly.

“Drink this, Mr. Blitzer.”

He drained his cup and wiped his mouth with his hand.

He looked back at Beau and smiled weakly. “You’re McAllister, right?”

Beau nodded carefully. His head stayed on. “Yeah. Beau’s the name. You okay?”

He pulled in another breath. “Yeah. I think so. Chest feels like somebody filled it with sand.”

“You’ve been on a respirator, Mr. Blitzer,” said the nurse. “I’m Trudy. You’ll feel tender for a few days. You had a narrow escape there.”

He coughed, drank some more juice, and looked around the room. “Yeah. Anybody seen my teeth?”

Trudy bustled over to a cupboard and brought back a glass full of liquid. He fished his teeth out and slipped them in.

“Hell. That’s better.”

“Yeah,” said Beau. “You’re right.”

Blitzer sent him a black look, then grinned again. “I know. I look like a guy swallowed his face. Trudy, I’m hungry. We eating soon?”

Trudy looked at her clipboard and shook her head. Her hair was up in a French braid, and she looked very young. Beau realized that he was getting to the age when everybody looked too young to drive, let alone be a nurse or a doctor.

“You’re on liquids. Sergeant McAllister can have breakfast, but you’ll have to see your therapist first. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Do either of you want a bedpan?”

Blitzer and Beau looked at each other, and a silent agreement passed between them. They shook their heads in unison, and Trudy laughed at them.

“Okay. But I gave you a bed bath yesterday, Mr. Blitzer, so we have, like, no secrets. I really don’t mind.”

“Not at gunpoint, darling,” said Blitzer, coughing. Trudy laughed again and pushed her cart out of the room.

“I’ll help you across there, Mr. Blitzer,” said Beau.

“Call me Bucky, and no thank you. Day I need help to the bathroom, I’ll get in the tub and play with a power drill. Wish I’d been awake for that bed bath, though.”

“What the hell happened, anyway?”

Blitzer looked at him a while, considering. “That’s a hard
question to answer, and I’m not sure I feel like trying. It was one of the worst things I ever hope to see. Your cop buddies fill you in yet?”

“Not completely. I’d like to hear your side of it. If you’re up to it?”