“I’d prefer Bill, if you don’t mind.”
“All right, Bill,” he said, his lips contorted around the words the way they do in a movie when the soundtrack is off slightly.
The preacher, or minister, or pastor seemed uncomfortable standing and went to get a chair, pulling it over with a loud screech, sitting up close to the bed, then leaning his arms on the rail and looking down at his charge.
“I’ve come to deliver unto you the word of God,” the guy said, speaking in what was mostly a mumble, hardly audible over the beeps and sighs of the machines; tubes and wires yanked on his chest and arms and legs. Just then, before the preacher could begin yapping again, there was a sudden, persistent beep. A nurse came in quickly and pulled the white cotton blanket down from his neck and exposed the deep, dark curls of chest hair and prodded it until that sustained beep stopped and only his heart rate was left, and the smooth gulps of the balloon machine, the aortic counter-pulsation device. Minister Bill moved his chair back and sat quietly during all this. All for the better. He was wading through the softness of the morphine, or whatever pain reliever he was on. The word of God could wait. But then the nurse left and the preacher pulled his chair back, picking it up this time, and leaned on the rail again and began talking about the way of God and Christ, the whole rigmarole, talking about how much Angela loved him even though the scag hadn’t been in touch since ’76, good old bicentenniaclass="underline" twenty years, he thought, and then it came to a dwarf priest blabbing about his favorite hymn, something like “O Worship the King, All Glorious Above,” and quoting it to him, his medicinal breath up close, taking advantage of his helplessness to get right in there, not even a half foot from his face, and even singing it a little bit — a kind of singsong lullaby, “frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, in thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail,” and then he said to the dwarf priest, having to really dig to talk, “Father, do me a favor. Shut up. Or speak in tongues if you want. But if you sing any more, I’ll get out of this frickin’ bed and break your neck.”
It was down in Tennessee — on a run to Florida with a load of machine pans — that he saw the speaking-in-tongues church. Hooked up with a girl named Lauren, sweet girl, at a truck bar, ended up in her trailer screwing away and then the next day, Sunday, being dragged to her church and watching them blabbing in their snakelike tongues. He left the church, got his rig warmed up, and headed south, pronto. Now in the room, with Father Bill there in the chair sitting silently, he hears that sizzle of voices out in the hall, a whole family grieving over some loss, hacking away in their language, then bits of English, then their language again. Other times blending the two; all melded together into a hiss that seemed like the ones used by those speaking in tongues that morning down in whatever podunk state he happened to be in — Tennessee or Kentucky.
For a second he wants to ask this preacher about Angela, just how she’s doing, but he knows the guy, most likely sworn not to disclose anything, will just say Fine, fine, and leave it at that. What else was he going so say? That she was wallowing in shit, dirt poor, missing payments on that piece-of-crap house on Elmwood, or Shorthills? For all he knew she wasn’t there anymore, but he thought of it anyhow when he thought of her, with the kids, toiling away over a tub of dirty clothing and a washboard or something — nothing real. When he imagined it, that’s how it was, images out of someplace that never existed because he couldn’t remember what had existed. The house they owned in Rutherford. A simple clapboard number, a Sears catalog house. A nice weedy yard with one of those clothes-drying trees, and always laundry on it like a blooming white rose of sheets and underwear when he got home from work the one year he was working steady, providing, doing his bit; old preacher Bill wouldn’t admit, if asked, that she was bathing in pain like he was, maybe worse off, cancer of the brain, an invalid, or nuts, bedded full-time in some ward someplace. Of course she was fine, Bill would say. He tried to remember what she looked like and got a vision of her dark red hair, wide oval face, smooth very white skin, and her lively laugh. He got a vision of her at the cabin they rented upstate, down by the water, toking on hand-rolled smokes and drinking beer until they ended up in the bed, a rattling iron thing, with their clothing off and only that pale summer twilight, half there, half gone, making their skin smooth as whole milk; such wonderful smoothness, he recalled, especially at the flat of her belly going down, down to the pubis bone, the hard ridge on both sides, and with the breeze like that, not too hot or too cool coming through the screens.
When he woke it was night, pale green light from the screen overhead and hard orange parking-ramp lights in the window. From the hallway came a pure, downy, neon brilliance. Father Bill had vanished, his chair empty where he left it near the door. The light throb of the pump going; the faint pulse of the device in his chest cavity opening up with air and deflating next to his heart like a little bird nesting between his ribs.
How long he lay he didn’t know; hours, minutes. Just the machine and a few cries in the hall — Arabic or something, some little kid making wailing noises, the family still gathered out there but kind of quiet and silent now, maybe it was too late, asleep the lot of them out in the lounge with the others. There had to be plenty; a big hospital, overcrowded, lots of dying going on in the ICU and the CCI.
One of the docs came in looking over the charts and poking around and not talking much because he knew better, knew this old codger who’d been dragged in off the highway had a nasty temperament and didn’t care much for small talk. A few pokes and probes, a check of the data on the screen.
“We’re going to remove the balloon pump,” he said. “We’ve gone long enough now and it’s a pretty pricey hunk of machinery, and there’s a patient just coming out of emergency surgery who’s going to need it right off. The police might drive another one over from Newark, but I think you’re stabilized enough now.”
Strapped beneath his leg was a long plank to keep things flat and even, and in his leg, up near his crotch, was a hole about the size of a dime but feeling more like a quarter to him, a hole leading into the femoral artery. A hole in his frickin’ leg, he’d thought a few dozen times, and not a bullet hole. He’d thought that if he ever had a real hole in his leg — a genuine hole — it would’ve been from a bullet from one of the skags at the crappy bars he frequented en route from CA to NY. The nurses came in — a Hispanic girl, a bit on the plump side, but he’d take her anyhow if he had the heart — hardy har, har — and a large older women with blue-gray hair, and then a male nurse; all three held on to him, gripping different parts of him while the doc slowly drew the balloon out from against his heart, pulling the wire through the dime-sized hole, drawing it down his femoral artery where it shouldn’t have been and sure as fuck couldn’t fit because the pain was red-hot, explosive, convulsive, and he screwed up his face — all jawbone and sun-weathered crags — and screamed like a stuck pig: “Give me some fricking painkillers, you morons, you mooorrrrons,” while the doc jammed something that looked like a wine bottle opener over the hole and gave one last little tug and got it out, not a word, working silently except for a little murmur of directions to one of the nurses.
“Sorry.” The doc shrugged.
“I’ll bet you are.” He could barely speak. The pain was making bursts of sparks on the inside of his eyelids.
The nurses and doc exchanged glances, as if to say: This one’s a real nasty bastard, keep your distance; if we could we’d put a muzzle on him, costing the hospital money and the government money and the whole world bits of spirit; but the doc put his hand on the guy’s forehead and rubbed it there a little bit. He kept his hand there way too long to be any kind of test for fever or a thump to listen to something.