The Bushwacked Piano (22 page)

Just for precaution—it was really Reeves’s precaution—he gave Payne fifty mg’s of ephedrine sulfate in the arm. “Keep this man sitting up straight,” Proctor said and went outside to the drinking fountain and popped another goof-ball, this one covered with lint from his pocket. He peered sadly into the middle distance and thought:
I was the darling of the fleet
.

Payne was wheeled by, on his way to the operating room. He began to review his life. Very little of it would come. He could go back—lying there numbed, the victim of purloined spinal fluid—about two weeks with any solidity; then, flashes. As: boarding school, Saturday morning, in a spectral study hall for unsatisfactory students; Payne and three other dunces watched over like meat by the master on duty, in pure Spring light, in silence. At one window of the hall, striped boy athletes rock noiselessly past for batting practice; a machine pitched hardballs out of a galvanized hopper and the base paths were still muddy. Payne shielding his eyes in apparent concentration, occasionally dozes, occasionally slips a magazine out from under the U. S. History text:
Guns And Ammo
. In his mind, he cradles a Finnish Sako rifle, sits on a ridge in the Canadian Rockies that glitters with mica and waits two hundred years for a Big Horn Ram. Something moves a few yards up the draw: The master on duty has spotted
Guns And Ammo
. Payne’s heart whirls in his chest and loses traction.

“Miss?” Payne asks.

“Sir?”

“I feel like a dead Egyptian. You and Proctor are fixing to pull my brain out of my nose.”

“No, sir!”

“I feel that life has handed me one in the snot locker. You see I’m the last buffalo. And I’m dying of a sucking chest wound. Isn’t there something you could do in a case like mine? Some final ecstasy you could whip up?”

“Nothing that comes to mind, sir.”

“Miss, if my beak falls open and cries are heard during Doctor Proctor’s knifework, will that be it, as far as you’re concerned? I mean, will you sign off on yours truly? As another has?”

“Possibly a leetle.”

“In other circumstances I would be a simple hero to you. But maybe your life already is not unencumbered. Is there a certain someone?”

Proctor strode in. “Let’s do it.” Payne intoned a helpless sphincteric dirge. He was in terror. This room was filled with strange and frightful machinery which would have been the envy of any number of pirates whose names are household words.

“Will there be pain?” Payne inquired.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Surely the word rings one little bell in your medical carillon tower.” Payne regretted his words instantly. He did not want to antagonize Proctor.

“It appears,” said the doctor to the nurse, “that the medication has taken our friend by storm.”

Proctor looked down from his end of the operating table. He had Payne on his back, in the lithotomy position; not the one Proctor was most comfortable with; but the only one a serious proctologist would consider with spinal
anesthesia via the hyperbaric solutions that Reeves found so irresistible. Reeves! What a bleary little cornball.

From this perspective, Proctor saw with a tiny almost atavistic horror the ring of thrombosed hemorrhoids. And it was now a question of demonstrating the internal complications so that they could be excised without any further fiddling around.

Proctor thought helplessly of how he could have been a big, clean career aviator instead of staring up some wise guy’s dirt chute.

He inserted his index finger well into Payne’s rectum withdrawing and reinserting several times without, in his opinion, sufficiently extruding the internal hemorrhoids. In a moment of impatience and almost pique, he stuffed Payne’s rectum with wads of dry gauze which he hauled out slowly dragging the hemorrhoids with them. Now he had a perfectly beastly little mess to clean up. The entire anal verge was clustered with indisputably pathological extrusions. Proctor sighed languorously.

With a certain annoyance, he dilated Payne’s sphincter to an anal aperture of two centimeters and then, making more work space for himself, rather zealously went for, and got, three centimeters without tearing even a teensy bit of sphincteric muscle. He swiftly clipped four forceps into position to keep the site exposed. A smile broke out on his face as he remembered his Asian days.

All of the sound and movements around Payne were informed with the most sinister lack of ordinary reality. Implements passed his vision which were not unlike those with which we eat; yet, somehow, something was wrong with them. They had crooked handles or the ones you thought were spoons had trap doors or when they touched each other they rang with an unearthly clarity. And surrounding the hard if intolerable precision of all this weaponry
were various loose bags, drooping neoprene tubes, cups of deep blubbery gels, fleecy, inorganic sponges in space-age colors, and the masked, make-up lacking face of the nurse, her hair yanked back in utilitarian severity.

Around himself, he could hear the doctor talking, nipping off the words as if to challenge a misunderstanding of his grandiose medical technicalities. Payne felt that something like the same smugness and expertise must attend the performance of electrocutions, the kind of officiousness that would make a condemned man hesitate before using the terms “hot seat” or “fry.”

Proctor was cranky. He needn’t have made this kind of a mess. And so he muttered with the usual authoritarian voice that there wasn’t one thing there he couldn’t clean up. Not one.

Still, he didn’t know what had become of his coordination. Ordinarily, he could incise the most perfect demi-eclipse around the base of the hemorrhoid and dissect the varix from the external sphincter with a deft turn of the wrist. Truly, this was surgery that could have been performed with a rotary mower; and yet, he was barely up to it.

So, instead of a nice clean finish, he had to hunt up and down the patient’s dirt chute for bleed points, stop them—in one case resorting to catgut, so nasty was the lesion—and then impatiently make a thick dressing the size of a catcher’s mitt to sop up the serosanguineous ooze that was surely going to be a part of this man’s postoperative period.

He had Payne wheeled away unconscious after a veritable hosing down with demerol. He indicated he would have the nurse remain. When the door was shut and Proctor looked around at the spattered operating room, the
nurse stood without motion. Proctor spotted smart wads of disapprobation in her eyes.

“Nice little rectum you left him with there,” she said in a brave squeak, “with your cut-and-try surgery there.”

“A bleeder.”

“That poor boy,” she said. “I have never in my life witnessed a thing like that. It almost looked like you were trying to make some sort of meal back there.”

“What meal!”

“I don’t know, some, I don’t know, almost like some sort of pasta fazoula or—”

“Pasta fazoula! Are you Italian? Pasta fazoula is this great Italian dish—” The nurse waved him silent with a harsh and impatient motion.

“God, Doctor, I was illustrating something oh never mind I …”

“Nurse, I used to sit on the starboard catapult during international emergencies, waiting to go bomb. In a forty-thousand-pound aircraft with wings that wouldn’t glide a sparrow if the engines ever failed: a flying piano. And me in the driver’s seat getting to feel more and more like pure crash-cargo, lady. And from my viewpoint on the steam catapult I could see, below me in the waters of the South China Sea, twenty-foot man-eating sharks that had been feeding on Oriental sea burials for a thousand years. How do you think I felt?”

“How?”

“Punk. Those sharks would break up a funeral halfway through the services and there’s me on the starboard catapult: one flame-out and you’re so much fish food. And you tell me pasta fazoula.”

“But Doctor I—”

“Tell me cut-and-try, do you?”

“Doctor, I—”

“I’ve had enough. I thought that after war a man could return to a life of service with interludes of silence spent among a tasteful collection of art objects.”

“Doctor, how can I make it up to you?”

Payne lay quiet as a fossil in the deep sweeping benignity of demerol, the Kuda Bux of Key West. Pale surgical lights rolled by as moons. Then it was blistering dry and hot; an expanse of macadam curled at the far edges and made twenty-nine identical mountains. Payne held a big, ice cold chronometer.

A bedside view would have shown that, if only for the time being, Proctor, Ann and Clovis had made of Nicholas Payne pure meat.

Finally, in the middle of the night, he woke up laughing in complete weakness.
“Seep, seep, seep.”
Clovis, in perfect health, yelled, “Shut up, can’t you! I’m a dead goose as it is for crying out loud.”

Payne opened his mind like the sweet dusty comic strip from a pink billet of Fleer’s bubblegum and saw things as deep and appropriate as soft nudes on the noses of B29’s. He saw longhorn cattle being driven over the Golden Gate Bridge, St. Teresa of Avila at the Mocambo, pale blue policemen nose-to-bung in an azure nimbus around the moon.

He had happy dreams. He could hear the punctual ringing of the first pair of steel taps on his first pair of blue suede shoes and remembered Jerry Lee Lewis climbing a piano in Miami in fiery lemon-colored underwear, assaulting the keys with hands feet head knees, two-foot platinum hair flapping the Steinway contours and howling
GREAT BOWLS OF FAR!

Jerry Lee knew how to treat a piano.

• •

He awoke early in the morning in the sharpest kind of pain and with a feeling of clarity. The principal menaces were behind. And the rather murky situation with Ann seemed to have fallen into place; though he would have been hard put to say where. He felt as if he were collecting into one shape and that he would soon make a kind of sudden expansion. He would stop feeling the little nerve headaches urge their way up from his neocortex. He would get his saliva back and his lips wouldn’t stick to his teeth when he was talking.

It wasn’t at all long before he remembered the dreams of Ann and saw how extremely selective they were; to the effect that she was present in the dreams and absent in reality. An insistent phrase pressed itself upon him: I couldn’t have been more of a pig. He knew very well that an attempt to make something perfect—a love that would not exclude towers and romantic riskings of the neck—had turned swiftly into a regular fuck-up flambeau, staggering even in memory. No, he thought, it must be that I couldn’t have been more of a pig.

Soon enough, he went on a cheerless regime of mineral oil and a soft low-residue diet. Nevertheless, early in the second day, after half a dozen Sitz baths had restored the firmer edges to his personality, he found it necessary to adjourn to the bathroom for his first postoperative bowel movement.

Why go into such a nightmare? A single enormous turd explored every surgical error Proctor had made. Somewhat to his own discredit, Payne howled like the Anti-Christ.

And when he heard Proctor and the nurse muddling around the room outside the john, he booted the door open exactly as he had booted open the door on his grandfather’s
disused farmstead, shamelessly revealing himself in an exhibit of fearful squattery and tragically droned,
“You bastards core me like an apple and let me have a hard stool two days later! That makes me laugh my God that makes me laugh!”

He wouldn’t shut up though he could see Ann snapping away with her Nikon. Next to his bed, wet roses soaked on a newspaper; the note was hers:
“This is it.”

Ann looking in at this ashen, pooping, howling form felt, thus early in her career, a grave seepage of idealism, an invidious pissing away of all that was good and held meaning. She found herself staring out the window past the parking lot and the blackened contours of asphalt, past the lunatic geometry of Key West roofs to the dynamo sky of America; and turned to smile inwardly; hers was one dream that wouldn’t get off the ground.

It was a pleasure to sit at the wheel, the diesels not straining, and listen to the ship-to-shore. The captain found on a clear night like tonight he could pick up the other boats as far off as the Cay Sal Bank. After a month in the Tortugas and Marquesas and a week or two violating the nursery ground, he was ready to go back to Galveston. Where he was known.

“You don’t figure she’d use the camera to blackmail no one?”

The mate who looked more and more like a hillbilly song star the more the running lights accentuated his face’s declivities, said, “Of course not, Captain. This here is just some sort of adventurer.” The captain got up happy.

“Steady as she goes,” he said to the mate, who took the wheel with a gravity that was possibly not genuine. He waited for the captain to head for the lighted companionway.
“If you want yer trousers pressed, skipper, why the winch would be an awful good spot to leave them,” he said, bringing down the house.

It was a starry night going to Galveston with the boom of the big trawler swaying a black metronomic line over the silver fan of wake.

And it was real life out there on the Gulf of Mexico; because down in the hold of a Key West shrimper, a person of culture was committing experience.

The tower went up with embarrassing speed and now it was Saturday on Mente Chica Key. The bats had all been dyed day-glo orange so that their bug scavenging circulation would be plain to all. Confined by a single polyethelene sheet, every last one of them was sealed in the tower.

There was a blue satin ribbon tied about the base of the tower. The tower itself stood stern and mighty and impervious to termites against the Seminole sky. Around its base, the Mid-Keys Boosters stirred by the hundreds in anticipation. There were many military personnel in Polynesian mufti. There were many retired persons of legendary mediocrity known locally as “just people.” There were many snapping camera pests from the newspapers.

All around the area, the mangroves released their primitive smell and made expanses of standing water where billions upon billions of the little dark awful salt-water mosquitoes would be born
in perpetuum
, bats or no bats, quite honestly.