The Bushwacked Piano (20 page)

“I’m surprised at you,” said Ann back at the motor home, “treating the old fart like that.”

“Are you?”

“He’s scared to death his ailment is going to carry him off.”

“How would it help if I went in and had my butt trimmed?”

“Surprised at you,” she said, “leaving him in the lurch.”

“I’m not leaving him in the lurch.”

“The lurch.”

“I’m not.”

“Explain it if you’re not,” she said and as he started to rage, she raised her camera to photograph him. He got in a conventional wedding-portrait smile before she could snap it. “Surprised at you,” she said.

“I’ll visit him every day,” Payne said.

Ann had been out photographing trash, gas stations and Dairy Queens. “Leaving him in the lurch.” She turned the
turretlike lens of the Nikon Photomic FTN and fired point-blank. “You look so wiped out I wanted to get it on film with all this plastic crap around you. It’s too much.”

“I hope it comes out,” said Payne.

“I got one of you last night that was priceless. You were making a drink in your underwear and I must say you were sagging from end to end.”

“I’ll want to see that one.”

“You will.”

“Tell me this, are you having a little social experiment here? Is this what was once called ‘slumming it’?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You tell me what it is then,” said Payne.

“It’s art.”

“Well,” Payne said, “any more fucking art around here and I’m going to commence something unfortunate. I had enough art at the hands of the Mum and Dad.”

“I cannot understand you,” Ann said; but she had got a glimpse of what the shrimpers had seen and she knew it was going to be necessary to shut up.

“I can’t understand you,” she said at a distance.

“Persevere.”

Ann left the motor home and skulked around the back of the bar. Payne watched her making desultory photographs of citrus rinds and inorganic refuse. A fat and drunken tourist in bermudas went by and she followed him for awhile, snapping away at his behind, and then returned to the motor home.

She had every hope that her dark night of the soul would be on film.

In the middle of the night, Payne suddenly awoke with a terrible, unspecific feeling of sadness. He waited until he
had a grip on himself. Then, he woke Ann. “You’re right,” he said.

“About what.”

“About Clovis. I’ll go to the hospital with him.”

Ann kissed him. “You’re always thinking of others,” she said.

“Will you feed the bats?”

Payne called Clovis and told him. He could feel his relief over the wire. “I don’t want to go it alone this time.” Payne felt as if confirmed in his decision; though he was himself frightened by the operation in store for him.

Construction of the tower was going to be in the hands of Diego Fama.

The hospital arrangements were wangled artfully by Clovis who alluded to his own medical history in veiled tones. It sounded gothic and exciting. The personnel were thrilled by Clovis’ lack of limbs. He seemed the real thing in a hospital dogged with health and minor problems.

A not unoccupied elevator passed through the building; it carried a solitary patient in gold embossed plastic bedroom slippers and an uncomfortable shift tied around his mottled neck. His hair was de rigueur wino, combed back and close. At the top floor, the door opened and he ran for daylight, radiant with his own brand of hyperesthesia.

After the proctological examination, during which Payne’s surgical need was specified as “acute,” Payne fell
asleep. He had been horrified by the doctor’s steering that machine through his inwards like the periscope of a U-boat.

The Monroe County Hospital was an unusual place. Situated next to a dump (“Sanitary land fill”), the smoke of burning garbage blew through the wards. Meanwhile, Clovis was wheeled around to all the testing facilities. He had a cardiogram, an electroencephalogram, an X-ray. His urine, stool and blood were tested. They took skin scrapings and hair samples. They weighed C. J. Clovis.

The curtain was drawn between the two beds. Payne could hear the doctor and Clovis talking. The doctor demanded to know exactly what the complaint was.

“My body’s all aching and racked with pain,” said Clovis.

The doctor, a feisty former fighter pilot of the United States Navy said simply, “There isn’t anything the matter with you. You are in the habit of illness. You ought to get out.”

“What is your name?”

“Doctor Proctor.”

“I’ll have your ass.”

“I’ve arranged,” said Proctor plainly, “to have you put out. You are in the habit of illness.”

The doctor passed the screen where Payne lay. There was silence when he was gone. In a while, Clovis hobbled around to the foot of Payne’s bed.

“You heard that?”

“Yes—”

“I’ll have his ass.”

By that evening, Clovis was gone. By the next morning he was back. He had no doctor assigned to him at all. Since there were plenty of beds, they agreed to let nurses
run tests on him from time to time and to use him as a kind of training doll. Clovis slept all the time. He was having a holiday. It was rather boring for Payne and bad times were ruining his posture. He walked around in a curve. He looked like a genius.

They never got a girl as pretty as Ann in here. A good number of the women who had come knew what they were getting into and opted for it out of some carnal compulsion. Which is to say that a certain number of gang-bangs had originated here; and were remembered. Nevertheless, she held her own at the bar, elbow to elbow with the shrimpers in their khaki clothes and their ineffable odeur of the docks.

When a fight broke out later over who exactly was going to talk to her and in what sequence, she saw the whole bloody mess as an Ektachrome fantasia hanging on the walls of the Guggenheim.

Standing next to the pool table, waiting for his shot and never having glanced up at the fight at all, was a shrimper in his late thirties who looked like a slightly handsomer, slightly more fleshed-out version of Hank Williams or any number of other hillbilly singers, save that he wore khaki fisherman’s clothes. He spoiled an easy bank shot and said, “Them cushions is soft. Don’t nobody replace nothin here?”

He walked straight over to where Ann stood. “This is no place for a lady,” he said. “Have you ever been to Galveston by sea?”

All the next day, Payne and Clovis spent on the telephone. They had decided to let Diego Fama and family go ahead and build the tower. There were many questions of credit to be settled, equipment and ready-mix concrete to
be secured. The tensest conversations—and they were Payne’s—were with the officers of the Mid-Keys Boosters who had been sold on the thing in the first place by Clovis. They were testy to begin with and grew more so the more money was required of them.

Payne tried to reach Ann at the Two Friends Bar and got unsatisfactory answers.

Diego Fama’s mother called and wanted to know what to feed the bats.

Flat on his back, Payne had a chance to fret about Ann. She was going haywire. But he thought he could help her over the phase if he could be with her. His hemorrhoids had seemed to come between them. It seemed hideously unnecessary. What had people done in ages gone by about such a condition? Nothing. And their lives had transpired like a stately pas de deux amid plentiful antiques and objets d’art of real interest to the connoisseur. We each of us know instinctively that hemorrhoids were unknown before our century. It is the pressure of the times, symbolically expressed. Their removal is mere cosmetic surgery.

When he browsed in the hallways it had seemed that the sickrooms full of, in some cases, the most monstrously injured or ailing creatures, should give onto trees, lawns and ruminant cars driven, now and then, by people with nothing in the slightest the matter with them. Nothing.

He pretended that he was among the dying and made himself quite sad with the exercise. The doctor enters. I’m sorry to have to tell you this but all of us sometime. I’m afraid it’s. I know, doctor, I know. And the others. Is it known among the others. That I’m to. And the little girls. Will they or would they take in hand the shy item of a man who will not be here?

From his window, which was none too clean, he saw many a scalped tree and sorry palm on an expanse of asphalt. God knows how, but they say you make friends here. Who never forget you. Payne looked around him. My Christ, they’ll drive their expensive steel in my fanny. And at the end I am to pick up the tab. There you are, doctor. All those simoleons for what you have done to me.

Beside Payne, asleep, a certain misshapen person, an object of great curiosity: Clovis. He had made a mess of his bed. Payne—still starched and ventilated in his back-buttoned shift—noticed that. Rumple sheets enough and they appeared to turn yellow. Possibly it was the abysmal light that threw so many soft, upsetting shadows. Payne felt his face had elongated. He knew his voice would not be strong.

But Clovis slept on, his face running all over an immense forearm. He lay on his stomach and pushed forward with his leg, sleeping like a baby.

“Close your mouth on the therm.” Payne could taste the alcohol. The nurse had that flush, clean prettiness that might have been blown from a single bead of thermodynamic plastic; that beauty so illusively distributed among majorettes and Breck shampoo girls that certain Rotarian interests have attempted to isolate as a national type.

Thinking of what was to come, pain appeared to him in a number of guises, the main one being something minute, an itching follicle, that expanded like a sonofabitch. Why me?

The next time the pretty nurse came, she drew Payne’s curtain around him, thus cutting off some incipient conversational
gloating between Payne and Clovis on the subject of the bat tower.

The girl plainly came to her profession via the misrepresentations of Nancy Drew. Fulffing pillows. There, doesn’t that feel just a lot better now? Roll over. She used his entire can to drive a column of mercury. He wondered why she took his temperature there, when she hadn’t before. She was building to something.

He rested his head, wan. Around the top of the curtain, a white painted pipe bisected the ceiling. He could hear Clovis next to him fold a newspaper roughly; its shadow jerked on the ceiling.

The nurse laid out her instruments on the cloth-covered tray beside him: the thermometer, some sort of shaving materials, and a dire rubberoid article with chambers, pet-cocks and tubes. Payne ran scared.

On his stomach, his neck cricked upward uncomfortably, he took a fix on the wall and waited in silence for the first touch. In an endless instant, he felt her tentative fingers plucking unsuccessfully at the edge of the shift, cold fingertips grazing his affrighted bottom, then up went the shift and Payne felt the horror of circulating air. He heard the sigh of some escaping pressure, smelled soapy menthol and felt a billow of soft cream smoothed onto his perineum and backside by the peerless hand of the young nurse. Perspiration poured from his face into the absorbent pillowcase.

At the first scraping, which was simultaneous with the first involuntary little noise from the nurse, he turned over his shoulder and looked. He saw her inclined face behind a broad, heart-shaped silhouette; tears streamed down as she manipulated the razor, rinsing it when it overloaded with shaving cream in a bowl on her tray. This was an
episode that appeared in no edition of Nancy Drew stories.

Her cheeks were withdrawn and her face was an altogether imploring image of loss, grief, unitemized sorrow and what not. Finally, she gave his glossy stern a wipe of towel and Payne raked down the shift. She pushed his hand away and choked, “No.”

She broke out the rubber heart, swollen with liquid, and buried its nozzle in his fanny. Holding the heavy, swollen bag in both hands, she seemed to proffer it. Payne imagined the unsightly article to contain ice water. He was impaled on a frozen stalagmite and gritted down hard until she withdrew the nozzle. He looked back to see her tears but found instead that she was laughing silently. It was disturbing.

That would have been otherwise a moment for clear and immediate thought. He would have liked to see what happened to a gesture of friendship with the nurse toward who knew what. As it was, though, his feet made a furious, impatient squeaking on the waxed institutional floor. He ran through a couple of complicated maneuvers—ones that would have been illegal in an automobile: reckless U-turns, especially—just to get around the tables to the bathroom where, sitting, he had an utter cathartic letting-go as though chambers, membranes, tiny bulkheads and walls all collapsed at once in a single directional rush.

When he was finished, that careful, Byronic grandiosity that he was inclined to cultivate was completely gone. And he felt, still sitting, like a simple shriveled fly.

“How long have I been asleep?” Clovis asked.

“A long time. I don’t know.”

“How did I act? Did I say anything.”

“You just lay there and twitched like a dog.”

It wasn’t long after dinner that the nurse came again. She drew Payne’s curtain, herself inside, and gave him enough of her unnerving smile-play that he began to fancy trying something. Throwing up his shift behind she whispered in his ear, “You foul your linen, mister, and you’re in Dutch with me!” Payne, thrilled, not hearing the words at all, not more anyway than the airy voice and smelling her fabulous dimestore jasmine, tried to twist around and kiss her.