Life Expectancy (30 page)

59

F
rom her purse, Lorrie withdrew a photograph of Annie and slid it across the table to Punchinello.

“Pretty,” he said but did not touch the picture.

“She’ll be six years old in less than two months,” Lorrie said. “If she lives that long.”

“I’ll never have children,” he reminded us.

I said nothing. I had apologized once for effectively castrating him, although a surgeon eventually completed the job that I had not quite finished.

“She had nephroblastoma,” Lorrie said.

“Sounds like a grunge band,” Punchinello replied, and smiled at his weak joke.

“It’s cancer of the kidneys,” I explained. “The tumors grow very rapidly. If you don’t catch them early, they spread to the lungs, liver, and brain.”

“Thank God she was diagnosed in time,” Lorrie said. “They took out both kidneys and followed up with radiation, chemotherapy. She’s free of cancer now.”

“Good for her,” he said. “Everyone should be free of cancer.”

“But there’s a further complication.”

“This isn’t as interesting as all the baby-switching stuff,” Punchinello said.

I didn’t trust myself to speak. I felt as though my Annie’s life hung by a thread, a filament so fine that I could cut it with one word too sharp.

Lorrie proceeded as if he hadn’t spoken. “Without kidneys, she’s been on hemodialysis, four-hour sessions three times a week.”

“Six years old,” Punchinello said, “she doesn’t have a job to go to or anything. She’s got plenty of free time.”

I couldn’t decide whether he was merely as graceless as he was uncaring or whether he was needling us and enjoying it.

Lorrie said, “At the center of the dialysis machine is a large cannister called a dialyzer.”

“Could that Charlene person get in trouble with the law because of what she did?” Punchinello asked.

Determined not to be baited into losing my temper, I said, “Only maybe if my folks wanted to press charges. And they don’t.”

Soldiering on, Lorrie said, “The dialyzer contains thousands of tiny fibers through which the blood passes.”

“I usually don’t like black people,” he informed us, “but she seemed nice enough.”

“And there’s a solution, a cleansing fluid,” Lorrie continued, “that carries away the wastes and excess salts.”

“She’s quite a tub, though,” Punchinello said. “The amount of food she must pack away each day, you gotta wonder if she ate that baby instead of burying it.”

Lorrie closed her eyes. Took deep breaths. Then: “It’s very rare, but sometimes the dialysis patient is allergic to one or more of the chemicals in the cleansing solution.”

“I’m not prejudiced against black people. They should have equal rights and everything. I just don’t like the way they aren’t white.”

“The dialysate, the cleansing solution, contains a number of chemicals. Only the most minute quantities of those chemicals ever return to the body with the blood, infinitesimal amounts that are usually harmless.”

Punchinello said, “I don’t like the way their palms are pale and the tops of their hands dark. The soles of their feet are pale, too. It’s like they’re wearing badly made black-person disguises that weren’t too well thought out.”

“If the doctor prescribes a dialysate that isn’t working as well as it ought to,” Lorrie explained, “or if the patient is sensitive to it, the formula can be adjusted.”

“One of the ways I know the world is wrong,” he said, “is black people being in it. The design would be more convincing if everyone was white.”

Perhaps without realizing it, he had come as close as he might ever get to admitting that he thought the world was merely a stage, an illusion crafted to deceive him, and that he himself was the only piece of good design in it.

Lorrie looked at me, her face placid but her eyes feverish with frustration. I nodded to encourage her.

By the minute I saw less chance of reaching him, but if we gave up, Annie had no hope at all.

“Once in a great while, hardly ever,” Lorrie said a dialysis patient is so violently allergic to even the most minute quantities of an array of chemicals essential to dialysates that no adjusted formula will work for her. The allergic reactions grow worse each time until she’s at risk of anaphylactic shock.”

“Well, Jesus, give her one of your kidneys, why don’t you?” he asked. “You have to be an acceptable match for her.”

“Thanks to your father,” she reminded him, “I only have one.”

To me, he said, “Then one of yours.”

“I’d have been on the operating table already if I could,” I told him. “When they tested me to do a transplant compatibility profile, they discovered I have hemangiomas of both kidneys.”

“You’re going to die, too?”

“Hemangiomas are benign tumors. You can live with them all your life, but they make me unsuitable as a donor.”

The last thing Grandpa Josef had said on his deathbed was
Kidneys! Why should kidneys be so damned important? It’s absurd, it’s all absurd!

My father thought that my grandfather at the end lapsed back into incoherence, that those last words were of no importance.

We know what the poet William Cowper would say about that if he hadn’t died back there in 1800.

In addition to waxing on about God’s mysterious ways, Old Bill also wrote,
Behind a frowning providence, God hides a smiling face.

I had always believed the same. But lately there were times when, I must confess, I wondered if His smile was as screwy as some with which Punchinello had favored us.

Now my murderous brother suggested, “Sign the kid up on a transplant list like everyone else does.”

“We could wait a year,” Lorrie said, “maybe longer, to get a suitable match. Lucy and Andy are too young to donate.”

“A year isn’t so long. I didn’t get surgery for syndactyly until I was eight. Where were you then?”

“You’re not listening to me,” Lorrie said tightly. “Annie has to be on dialysis in the meantime—but she can’t be. I explained already.”

“I might not be a suitable match.”

“Almost certainly you will,” I disagreed.

“It’ll be a head-in-the-bucket thing again,” he predicted. “It always is.”

Trying to force an emotional connection between him and Annie, Lorrie said, “You’re her uncle.”

“And you’re my brother,” he said to me. “But where were you for the past nine years when the justice system crucified me? Just like Pontius Pilate, you washed your hands of me.”

The irrationality of his accusation and the delusional grandeur implied by his comparison of himself to Christ allowed no response.

“Another thing that’s all wrong with the black-people idea,” he said, “is a black man’s semen ought to be black if a white man’s is white. But it’s white, too. I know, I’ve seen enough porno.”

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

Lorrie attempted to persevere: “Sooner than later, anaphylactic shock will kill Annie. We can’t risk it again. We’re in a corner now. She’s literally got only…”

Her voice broke.

I finished for her, “Annie’s literally got only a couple days.”

Putting it into words, I felt a garrote of dread cinch my heart and could not for a moment inhale.

“So it always comes down to good old Punchinello,” my brother said. “The greatest clown in all history will be Punchinello Beezo. Except I wasn’t. But, oh, the greatest aerialist of his age will be Punchinello Beezo! Except I was not allowed to be. No one will ever have avenged his mother’s death as Punchinello will! Except I didn’t get away with the money and had my testicles cut off. Now again—only Punchinello of all the people in the world, only Punchinello can save little Annie Tock—whose name rightly should be Annie Beezo, by the way—only Punchinello! But in the end she’ll die anyway because this is, like all the other times, just a setup for the rug to be pulled out from under me.”

His speech had devastated Lorrie. She rose from her chair and turned away from him, stood trembling uncontrollably.

All I could say to him was “Please.”

“Go away,” he told me. “Go home. When the little bitch dies, bury her in the Baptist cemetery beside the nameless baby whose life you stole.”

60

W
hen we stepped out of the confer ence room and into the hall, Charlene Coleman knew the awful truth the moment she saw our faces. She opened her arms to Lorrie, and Lorrie fell into them, and held tightly to her, weeping.

I wished that I could turn back time while remembering all that had happened in the past half hour, and go at him again with greater finesse.

Of course I knew another session with him would not achieve anything more than the one just ended, as neither would ten sessions, a hundred. Talking to him was talking to the whirlwind, words wasted as surely as cease-and-desist commands shouted into a monsoon.

I knew that I had not failed Annie, that coming here had been a hopeless gamble from the start. Nonetheless, I
felt
that I had failed her, and I found myself in a despair so enervating that I didn’t think I had the strength to walk back to the parking lot.

“The photo,” Lorrie suddenly remembered. “The rotten bastard has Annie’s photo.”

She didn’t need to elaborate. I understood why the skin around her eyes turned livid, why her mouth tightened with revulsion.

I couldn’t bear the thought of him alone in his cell with my Annie’s photo, drinking her in with his eyes and slaking his thirst for cruelty with the thought of her painful death.

Bursting back into the conference room, I found him with the guard, who was about to unshackle him from the table.

Reaching out to him, I said, “That photo belongs to us.”

He hesitated, held it toward me, at arm’s length, but would not release it when I tried to take it from him.

“What about the cards?” he asked.

“What cards?”

“On my birthday and at Christmas.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Real Hallmark. Our deal.”

“We don’t have any deal, you son of a bitch.”

His face flushed. “Don’t call my mother names.”

He was serious. We had been here before.

The anger receded from him, and he said, “But I forgot…she’s your mother, too, isn’t she?”

“No. My mother’s at home in Snow Village, painting an iguana.”

“Does this mean no candy money, either?”

“And no Cheez Doodles.”

He seemed genuinely surprised at my attitude. “What about the Constance Hammersmith paperbacks?”

“Give me the photo.”

Releasing it to me, he said to the prison guard, “We need a few more minutes of privacy, please.”

The guard looked at me. “Sir?”

Afraid to speak, I merely nodded.

The guard retreated from the room and watched from behind the window.

“Did you bring a medical release for me to sign?” Punchinello inquired.

From the threshold of the drab room, where she had been holding open the hallway door for me, Lorrie said, “I have three copies in my purse, drawn up by a good attorney.”

“Come in,” he said. “Close the door.”

Lorrie joined me on the sane side of the table, though I’m sure she suspected, as I did, that he was playing us for fools, setting us up for one more cruel reversal.

“When would we do it?” he asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “The hospital in Denver is ready for us. They just need twelve hours’ notice.”

“The deal we made…”

“It’s still yours if you want it,” Lorrie assured him, removing the medical forms and a pen from her purse.

He sighed. “I
love
those detective stories.”

“And Hershey’s bars,” I reminded him.

“But when we negotiated,” he said, “I didn’t know I’d be giving up a kidney, which is a lot to ask, considering you’ve already gotten both my testicles.”

We waited.

“There’s one more thing I want,” he said.

Here’s where he would surely hit us with the punch line and laugh at our devastation.

“This is a private room,” he advised us. “No listening devices because inmates usually meet here with their attorneys.”

“We know,” Lorrie said.

“And I doubt the moron at the window can read lips.”

“What do you want?” I asked, certain that it would be a thing beyond my power to grant.

“I know you don’t trust me like you should a brother,” he said. “So I won’t expect you to do this
before
I give her my kidney. But once she has it, you’re obligated.”

“If it’s something I can do.”

“Oh, I’m positive you can do it,” he said cheerfully. “I mean, look what you did to the great Beezo.”

I couldn’t read him at all, didn’t know whether this was leading to a vicious joke or to a genuine proposal.

Punchinello said, “I want you to kill that scab on Satan’s ass, Virgilio Vivacemente. I want you to make him suffer and let him know I’m the one who sent you. And in the end, I want him deader than any man has ever been dead.”

This was no joke. He meant it.

“Sure,” I said.

61

T
he white fluorescent panels in the gray ceiling, the white documents on the gray steel table, the granular snow blowing white out of a gray day, tapping the windows as the pen described his signature with the faintest whisper of ballpoint on paper…

Punchinello’s guard and the one who had accompanied us from the holding chamber stood witness. They signed their names under my brother’s.

Lorrie left one copy of the document with Punchinello and returned the others to her purse. The deal had been sealed, though the conditions of it were not on paper.

We didn’t shake hands. I would have if he’d wanted to, a small unpleasantry in exchange for Annie’s life. But he didn’t seem to feel that a handshake was required.

“When this is all done and Annie’s well,” he said, “I’d like it if you’d bring her here to see me once in a while, Christmas at least.”

“No,” Lorrie replied bluntly and without hesitation, though I would have said anything he wanted to hear.

“I’m her uncle for one thing,” he said. “And her savior.”

“I won’t lie to you,” she told him. “And neither will Jimmy. You’ll never be the smallest part of her life.”

“Well, maybe the smallest part,” Punchinello said, reaching back as best he could, in chains, to indicate the position of his left kidney.

Lorrie stared him down.

He grinned at last. “You’re some piece of work.”

“Right back at ya,” she said.

We left him there and brought the news of his change of heart to Charlene Coleman in the hallway.

From the prison, we drove into Denver, where Annie had been undergoing just-in-case prep at the hospital and where we were staying at the Marriott.

The bruised sky spat granular snow like bits of broken teeth.

In the city, patches of fresh ice mottled the pavement. Wind whipped the coattails of pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Charlene had met us at our hotel that morning. Now, after hugs and thank-yous and God-blesses all around, she drove back to Snow Village.

In our Explorer again, just the two of us, with Lorrie behind the wheel, on the way to the hospital, I said, “You scared the hell out of me when you told him Annie would never be a part of his life.”

“He knew we’d never allow that,” she explained. “If we had agreed, he’d have known we were lying. Then he’d have been sure you were lying about killing Vivacemente, too. But now he thinks you’ll really do it—because, like he said, look what you did to the great Beezo. If he thinks you’ll do it, he’ll keep his end of the bargain.”

We were silent for a block or two, and then I said, “Is he crazy or evil?”

“The distinction doesn’t matter to me. Either way, we have to deal with him.”

“If he was crazy first and found his way to evil, there’s some explanation for him. And almost some sympathy.”

“None here,” she said, for she was a lioness with an endangered cub and would give no consideration to the predator.

“If he was evil first, and being evil made him crazy, I don’t owe him anything that one brother would owe another.”

“You’ve been thinking about this for some time.”

“Yeah.”

“Give yourself a pass. Forget it. The courts already settled the issue when he was judged mentally fit to stand trial.”

She braked to a stop at a red traffic light.

On the cross street, a black Cadillac hearse glided past. The windows were tinted for privacy. Maybe it was transporting a dead celebrity.

“I’m not actually going to kill Vivacemente,” I assured Lorrie.

“Good. If you ever decide to turn homicidal, don’t just run around offing people at random. Talk with me. I’ll give you a list.”

The signal light changed to green.

As we passed through the intersection, three laughing teenage boys on the corner gestured obscenely at us. They were wearing black gloves from each of which the middle finger had been cut away to add emphasis to insult. One of them threw an ice-riddled snowball that cracked hard against my door.

A block from the hospital, still brooding about Punchinello and worrying about Annie, I said, “He’ll back out.”

“Don’t even think it.”

“Because this is the fourth of my five terrible days.”

“It was already pretty terrible there for a while.”

“Not terrible enough. There’s worse coming. There’s got to be, judging by the past.”

“The power of negative thinking,” she warned me.

In spite of the defroster, ice began to crust on the windshield wipers, and the blades stuttered across the glass.

This was the day before Thanksgiving. It looked like the frozen heart of January. It felt like Halloween.