The Bushwacked Piano Page 16

  But nothing disruptive, all in all. Proctor functioned. So it was that in the morning hours when most people were asleep, Proctor, who never had slept, headed for the clinic in his green Aston Martin DB-4. Heel-and-toeing to keep his revs up, he brodied and drifted through the damp morning streets of the Island City.

  Well, he said to himself, life is a shakedown cruise. Wanna bet? Through housework, pills and orgasms, he had lost eight pounds since nightfall. He hadn’t been on a zombie run like this since the service where, with his usual athletic finesse, he had distinguished himself as a fighter pilot.

  He had flown the almost legendary and sinister fireship, the carrier-based F4 Phantom, making night runs and day runs with the same penetrating fanaticism that vanished with very little aging and required the bolstering of pills.

  For a while, all the pilot’s bugaboos had haunted him: night landings on a heaving carrier deck in the fierce rocket-laden thirty-eight-thousand-pound flying piano, hoping to hell that on that blackened deck the aircraft would find one of the four arrester wires and keep him from deep-sixing off the bow.

  Vertigo: One cloudless night on the South China Sea, Proctor had been practicing his sidewinder runs and barrel rolls and high-performance climbs with the afterburner pouring the last possible thrust beyond Mach II; when suddenly his brain would no longer equilibrate and he couldn’t tell which end was up; somehow he flew pure instrument on the carrier landing, straight on for the Fresnel light on the ship’s stern, catching the fourth wire and snatching up short of a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the blackened South China Sea. He felt the entire rotation of his brain; all the physical perceptions which were his only moral facts gently rocked into place again; and the next day he started cinching them down with goof-balls.

  Soon enough, the younger pilots who had begun to resent his sheepish hand on the stick saw the old fiend was intact after all; and from then on, when he came in from a strike with leftover fuel, he sneaked in around the islands and blew up junks and sank native craft with his shock wave and really made himself felt.

  Naturally, the skipper who had been watching this appealing Yankee Doodle and who was alerted to this new panache by the revived Proctor habit of picking his arrester wire on landings—traditional fighter-jock’s machismo caper—called him in and, chuckling, told him to lay off because the gooks were going to load the junks with anti-aircraft equipment and start weeding out those four-million-dollar Phantoms.

  Proctor quipped that he didn’t care if they got the plane as long as the seat worked. But the old skipper reminded him that Charlie would find you if you ejected and make a Countess Mara with your tongue. And still Proctor didn’t give a damn, really didn’t give a damn! He boomed, bombed, blasted and killed and sank small craft the same as always except now he did it during bombing halts when he was supposed to have been on reconnaissance.

  Into his continuous vile blue yonder, Yankee Doodle Proctor went, high as high could be on various purloinings from the flight surgeon’s old kit bag; still masturbatory as all get out, he sometimes gouged at the crotch of his flight suit in the middle of combat, giggled when flak gently rocked the aircraft or snuffed one of the smaller Skyhawks that always went on strike with the dreamy, invulnerable McDonnell Phantoms.

  Sometimes, in over the trees supersonically, he would get glimpses of Migs deployed on jungle runways, some of them scrambling. And once a SAM ground-to-air missile, like a white enamel tree trunk, appeared in the formation and Proctor purposely let it pick him up and follow for a thousand feet before he duped its computer brain into overshooting. Again, he giggled and gouged at his flight suit to imagine that prize gook investment on its pitiful try at killing the sun, which Proctor had substituted for himself by way of a crazy parabolic maneuver that made the pale metal wings of the Phantom lift gently with the force of God knew how many G’s; that made even old giggling Yankee Doodle’s face pull and flow toward his ass; that made the smooth voluptuous curves of Asia, caressed by his shock wave, clog with unimaginable scrollery of trees and detail. He climbed, sonic booms volleying over the country, after-burners pulled to the utmost and cleared out at fifty thousand feet in whorls, volutes, beautiful spirals of vapor.

  Three weeks of gouging had made a shiny spot on his flight suit.

  How close this all now seemed. And, really, it spoiled his driving; a sports car for God’s sake with its stupid bland instruments that indicated the ridiculous landbound progress of the machine. By the time he was in the staff parking lot, he was cranky. A pharmaceutical supply truck was parked at the loading bay and Proctor, already coming down, imagined eating his way through the truck, stem to stern. Inside the first door, he spotted a gabble of creepy little interns with careful telltale stethoscopes hanging out of their pockets. Proctor told them to break it up and they did. They knew Proctor would besmirch them at staff meetings. In the involuted parlance of the world of interns, Proctor was an “asshole.” But this was unfair to Proctor, an altogether harmlessly overpaid popinjay of the medical profession.

  “On the table.”

  Payne obeyed. He could see the doctor was not in the mood for chatter. Neither, for that matter, was he. Endless nightmares of the possible violations of his body had left him rather testy.

  “How do you mean, doctor?”

  “I mean on the table. Right now. Crossways.”

  The nurse came in and the doctor looked up. Payne sat across the examining table.

  “Where are we with this guy?” the doctor asked. The nurse looked at her board.

  “He had the pentobarbital sodium at six this morning. Then the atropine and morphine an hour ago. I—”

  “How do you feel?” the doctor asked Payne.

  “Okay.”

  “Relaxed and ready for the operation?”

  “Vaguely.” Proctor looked him over, thought: tough guy with the lightest possible glazing of civilization: two years at the outside in some land-grant diploma mill. “I forget,” the doctor went on to his nurse, “are these external?”

  “A little of both.”

  “Ah, so. And thrombosed were they not?”

  “I should say.”

  A wispy man, the dread anesthesiologist, came in wheeling a sort of portable autoclave with his ghastly instruments inside. Through the drugs he had been given that morning, Payne could feel some slow dread arise. As for Proctor, this skillful little creep—Reeves by name—with his hair parted low over his left ear and carefully deployed over his bald head, was an object of interest and admiration. He watched him lay out the materials with some delight and waited for the little man’s eagerness to crest at the last possible moment before saying, “Thank you, Reeves. I think I’d rather.” Reeves darkened and left the room. “Hunch your shoulders, Mister—”

  “Payne. Like that?”

  “Farther. There you go.”

  After his little moment with Reeves, Proctor had second thoughts. He knew the sacral block shouldn’t be taken casually; and he didn’t do them often enough to be really in practice. But what the hell. This guy was preoperatively well prepared; he’d just wind it up.

  “Nurse, what kind of lumbar puncture needle did Reeves bring us?”

  “A number twenty-two, doctor.”

  Proctor chuckled. That Reeves was a real mannerist. A little skinny needle like that; but maybe that’s how they were doing it now. Used to be you had a needle like a rifle barrel and you’d get cerebrospinal fluid running down the clown’s back. It made for a fast job but memorable headaches for the patient afterwards.

  Proctor went at it. He pressed the needle into the fourth lumbar interspace well into the subarachnoid region and withdrew two cc’s of spinal fluid which he mixed with a hundred mg’s of novocaine crystals in a hyperbaric solution which he reinjected confident he had Payne’s ass dead to the world for four good hours.

  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 st
raight,” 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.