Pain Killers (46 page)

I positioned Mengele more or less upright in the backseat of the Prius. Tina buckled him in, then got in back too and pulled out a nail file to press into his ear while I drove.

“Do you think the freak heard you talking about the Nakam?”

“I hope so,” I said, idling at a red. By then I wasn’t thinking about survivor vengeance. I was thinking about my own. But the drive to wreak frontier justice did battle with another mutant urge: to go back to San Quentin.

I checked the dashboard clock at a red light and swallowed hard. “It’s twenty to one.”

“So what?”

“I could still make it to class.”

The red light went to green but we didn’t move.

A car behind us honked. I inched forward.

“I don’t understand,” said Tina. “We barely made it out of there. Why the fuck would you go back?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s genetic. Some cross-generational misfiring synapse.”

In the rearview, I saw the knowing crinkle form around Mengele’s light-sucking obsidian eyes. I drove carefully, just under the speed limit. Tina listened the way you would to a singing dog.

“You want to explain?”

“After my great-grandfather made it out, in nineteen thirty-seven, he saved enough to bring his two sisters from Berlin to Morgantown, West Virginia. Bessie and Essie. They were very cosmopolitan. When they saw the neighbors frying squirrel, they took the first boat back.”

We made it another block before Tina spoke. “It’s not so bad fried and battered. So what are you saying here?”

“I’m saying maybe I take after my great-aunts. Maybe I’ve got the gene that makes you go back—after you get out.”

“It doesn’t sound like a gene issue. It sounds like a squirrel issue.”

Mengele’s head had fallen to his chest. But his shoulders seemed to be riding up and down. I had the distinct feeling he was laughing at me. “That’s the thing,” I said, trying not to obsess about how much I was amusing the butcher next to me. “Once they went back to Berlin, the sisters wrote a letter to my great-grandfather, thanking him for everything and explaining the real reason why they went back.”

“It wasn’t the squirrel legs?”

“It was partly fried squirrel,” I said, “partly not wanting friends and family left behind to think they didn’t care.”

“So what happened to them?”

“Auschwitz.”

I glanced back at Mengele—considered slitting his throat—then willed my eyes back to the road and tried explaining my theory to Tina: I didn’t really know if irrational, guilt-driven impulses could be passed from generation to generation. But how else to account for the soul-deep tug I felt to go back to Quentin, in spite of barely making it out, to check on my drug class guys? To show them I was
there
for them?

“You mean show them you’re a fucking idiot,” said Tina. “If any of those convicts found out you showed back up, after what you pulled off, they’d lose whatever faith they had in you.” She reached forward and grazed a menthol-scented finger along my cheekbone. “You know this isn’t about them, Mr. Guilty. It’s about all the people you didn’t show up for.”

The finger drifted slowly down to my mouth. I could taste the sour tobacco under the minty-fresh menthol. Tina whispered in my ear. “You want to do something good for mankind? Your opportunity is riding back here.”

I caught a red light, and we both swung around to steal a peek at our passenger. Mengele snored softly, a little spit-bubble wobbling on his lips.

“Look at him,” said Tina. “Sleeping like a baby on Valium.”

“When he’s asleep he looks his age.”

“Manny!” Tina snapped, loud enough to pop the old man’s bubble. “Why does
he
get to sleep?”

“You’re right,” I said. “You are so fucking right.”

The light changed. I spotted a Wal-Mart, cut across two lanes and aimed the Prius at it. It was the first time in my life I was happy to see a Wal-Mart. Tina gazed at me with real concern.

“Manny, where the hell are you going?”

“If I don’t get out of this car, I might do something I regret.”

“But you hate Wal-Mart.”

“I need a new shirt and different shoes.” I tore onto the lot and pulled into the first spot I found, beside a Winnebago. Just the sight of an RV brought back the stench of my Quentin digs. Mengele was still snoring, still spit-bubbling. My gorge started heading north. I smacked the doctor’s knee. He jerked upright.

I killed the engine. A trio of largish women in leotards passed in front of us, and I saw Mengele’s eyes go wide. Tina grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward her. “Now what? What’s going on inside your head?”

“Don’t ask me. I just work here.” The truth was, I could pass on the morphine. The drug I was addicted to was Tina. And I did not want to get strung out again if the supply was going to disappear.

I had to wonder, not for the first time, if my whole marriage had been the setup for a crime: suicide by wife.

“When’s the last time you ate, baby?”

“I’m not hypoglycemic,” I said. “It’s just, not strangling him is fucking with me.”

“I feel the same,” she said. For a moment we both studied our freight. “Have you seen the way he looks at fat women?”

“His mother was obese.”

“Figures.” She turned to Mengele and yelled in his ear. “Free mustache rides for fatties, huh, Master Racist?” She slapped him across the face. Mengele didn’t flinch—but I did.

Here it fucking comes,
I thought. She tipped a Newport out of the pack, cracked off the menthol filter and delivered it to her mouth.

“Go do what you have to do,” she said, lighting up. “But if I’m going to be sitting here while you step into Wal-Mart, I want this
thing
in the trunk. Otherwise he’ll have holes in him when you come back. Then if we change our minds, we won’t be able to return him.” She turned and blew smoke in Mengele’s face. Despite the tape over his hands and mouth, he took this as calmly as he’d taken the slap.

Tina took another hit of menthol, working herself up. “The more I think about what he did—the babies, the twins, the dwarves, the injections, the sex torture…” She took one more puff and exhaled. “The surgeries, the probes, the poisoning, the sick, sadistic insanity disguised as
experiments
…the less I can remember why we haven’t killed him already.”

“The dead don’t suffer,” I said, popping the trunk.

“The living do,” she said, lunging for him with her lit cigarette.

I grabbed her hand before she could burn him. “You don’t want to do that, baby. Just wrap the blanket over his face and give me a hand.”

We waited until there were no Wal-Marters in the immediate vicinity, then hauled Mengele out of the backseat and squeezed him over the spare tire in the trunk. “He really stinks,” said Tina, averting her nose.

“He wet himself at Quentin.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Tina threw her cigarette on the asphalt and stomped it. We took a last look at this man who’d shown the world what men are capable of. Then Tina slammed the trunk.

“Thanks for stopping me just now.” She kissed me on the mouth and shuddered. “I have to admit, there is
something
about treating people like they’re subhuman….”

“That’s why people have personal assistants. Wish me luck in the menswear aisle.”

Joining the other Americans on their way into Sam Walton’s retail heaven, I willed myself not to look back.

My new flannel shirt made me feel like the Brawny paper towel man. Plus it itched. And my Husky Dog work boots squeaked. I’d thought about grabbing new jeans, but fear of dealing with whatever was throbbing inside my diaper prevented me.
Something
had happened. I just didn’t want to know what. Not
yet.
I’d managed to pee without looking, so I put off the big surprise until later. My swollen scrotum was still tender but, mysteriously, not in pain. Not too much, anyway, provided I juked my leg to the right when I walked, as though semibowlegged. If there was such a thing.

I was so busy itching and juking, I didn’t the see the smiling fellow in Bermudas standing in front of me when I stepped out of the Wal-Mart dressing room.

“Hey there, bunky.”

I passed right by the face but recognized the voice. “Officer Rincin?”

“The very one,” he said.

Without his brown corrections officer uniform, Rincin might have been any brush-mustached barbecue dad out for a bag of briquettes and extra buns. Above the screaming pink and green Bermudas, he wore one of those I’M WITH STUPID T-shirts popular twenty years ago. Below, he sported black Banlon socks with black tie shoes. I noticed the freshly waxed sheen of his calves and decided not to comment.

“Didn’t recognize you without your uniform,” I said instead. “So where’s Stupid?”

“Left her at home,” he said, “but I brought this for you.”

He slid his hand under the T-shirt and I grabbed his wrist.

“Whatever you’re pulling out, pull it out real slow.”

“Fine instincts.” Rincin nodded approvingly and let me ease his hand out by the wrist. “But technically, corrections officers cannot carry arms off duty, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What I’m worried about,” I said, “is why you’d follow me to Wal-Mart and stand by my dressing room.”

“I guess you wouldn’t believe it if I said I missed you.”

“Rincin,” I said, “you’re a funny guy. But right now my shirt itches, I got some kind of ball situation, and you’re standing between me and the outside of Wal-Mart. Just tell me what the fuck you’re doing. That fucking grin of yours is starting to freak me out.”

“Bell’s palsy,” he said. “Nobody believes me, but it’s true.”

What did it cost to tell a lie and make somebody happy? “I believe you,” I said.

“Great. Let go and I’ll show you what I got.”

I did, and he did, plucking a folded-over manila envelope from the waist of his shorts. I quickly plunged the thing under my flannel shirt.

“This isn’t going to explode, is it?”

“It’s photos,” said Rincin, the smile half-disappearing from his face for the first time. “You have to know, there are things that go on in there….”

“You don’t have to tell
me,
” I reminded him.

“No, I do,” he said, “’cause once you showed up, there were more of them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, Bernstein hung himself. Heard it took two belts, too. That’s one AB had a neck like an elephant leg. And of course you were there when his daddy died.”

Another dead Zell. Were they all my fault? My mouth was so dry, talking was like rubbing my tongue over rough concrete. “They let Davey go down to the funeral? Jews put the body in the ground the next day.”

“Davey’s not going anywhere,” Rincin said. “He nutted up. They got him up in the dink ward, pumped full of Haldol. I don’t think Davey’s ever comin’ back.”

By now his grin had fully returned. A mother and back-to-school teen needed to get by us into a changing booth. We moved closer to the wall. Rincin scratched his shiny calf and I looked away.

“Funny thing.” Rincin picked at a dried moth that somehow ended up on the shoulder of his Stupid T-shirt. “Zell brings you up there—then him and most of his whole family go dead.”

“You saying I have something to do with it?”

“You? No. But the doctor. He’s
dangerous.
People die. But he always lives….”

I didn’t need to hear the rest. I had the length of the Wal-Mart to chew on my heart for the mistake I’d made—leaving Tina alone with a bitter mass murderer who had nothing to lose. “Gotta run,” I called over my shoulder. “Stay in touch!”

Passing the unopened envelope from hand to hand, I stepped gingerly from car to car. I felt a strange need to sneak up on Tina. One parking spot away, I peeked around the back of a burgundy Hummer. Then I popped out, took two steps left, and raised my eyes to the black Prius. I pressed my eye to the tinted glass. Empty.

“What did you expect?” I said, to no one in particular.

Maybe this was progress. For once in my life I’d let myself hope that nothing bad had happened. Something
bad
always happens.

Frozen between Hummer and hybrid, I mumbled to the air in front of me.

“What’s behind door number three?”

“I don’t know,” came the reply, “but I think it’s where they stick people who talk to themselves at Wal-Mart—generally the same ones who shit in the Home Depot display commodes.”

I spun around and Tina held up a McDonald’s bag in each hand. “I hate this crap, but I was starving. I got a couple apple pies.”

I grabbed her. “You’re all right? I was afraid—”

“I’m fine.” She continued, “I got a Happy Meal for our little guy.”

As she took my arm, I was struck by one of those thoughts you never really expect to have in life before you have them:
This would be almost like a picnic if we didn’t have the Angel of Death in the trunk.

Tina reached for the car door and I pulled out the envelope. “Wait,” I said. “I ran into Rincin. He gave me this.”

She just shrugged. “What is it?”

“Photographs,” I said. “No doubt all the ungodly shit you did with Bernstein…”

She snatched the envelope and opened it before I could finish. “Fucking drama queen.” She pulled out a photo, stared at it. “You’re right, pretty disgusting.” Then she threw it at me.

The photo showed me naked, laid out on the table as Mengele poked me with a pointer. “Oh, man,” I mumbled, then checked out the second one. This time, I was lying on my side on a gurney, facing the wolfhound. The dog had its own gurney, just like I remembered. But in the photo he had a black leather muzzle over his mouth and a look of plaintive, accusatory despair in his eyes. The other photos showed my torso, grease-painted into sections like a side of beef.

“You never told me you were a medical anomaly,” Tina said. “How do you get three liver transplants?”

“Pittsburgh is the liver capital, and the police had great insurance.”

“Three?”