Absolute Zero (27 page)

Eyebrows.

Broker’s nickname in the world of snitches, gun dealers, and dope entrepreneurs, where his last official act had been to arrest Rodney. And he now recalled Rodney’s parting words, screamed as they stuffed him into a cruiser—“I’ll kill you, motherfucker, if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Now here was Rodney shifting a bat in his ham-sized hands. Teamed up with Earl. Getting his wish.

Not good.

But then—Rodney developed instant eloquent possibilities as a mime; recognizing Broker, he shook his head, pleaded with his eyes, and took a step back all in the same second:

You don’t know me, I don’t know you; this is a mistake; I’m outa here
.

Broker nodded ever so slightly and Rodney started backing away, flipping a very abbreviated wave good-bye, close to his hip and behind Earl’s back.

“What’d you bring him for, Earl—to block the sun?” Broker asked, encouraged by the changing odds. His eyes took in everything in the barn garage in half a second and came up with a plan. He had one chance not to wind up in an emergency ward, or worse. Even with Rodney opting out, barehanded, even in his prime, he couldn’t go up against a bat wielded by a street monster like Earl and hope to come out unscathed.

“I don’t like it,” Rodney yelled, backing away. “I highly suggest we get the fuck outa here.”

“No way; it’s gonna cost him at least a knee.” Earl stepped forward in a modified batter’s stance, gauging his target.

Broker was not about to show Earl anything like fear. He was pissed about his spat with Amy. And he could still smell burnt chili. So he stuck out his chin and taunted, “Earl, be a good little computer nerd and take his advice, because this is just the wrong time to mess with me.”

The facts of his situation were far less nonchalant. So, as he moved back to keep the same amount of distance between himself and Earl, he raised the bucket of feed to port arms, to protect himself. He was exactly where he wanted to be—within an easy reach of the dead bolt that fastened the gate to Popeye’s pen.

J.T., buddy; I hope you weren’t putting me on
.

Earl stepped forward, menacing. The bat gleamed in the overhead sodium vapor light. Brand-new, not a scratch on the scripted logo or the clean-grained ash. Earl heaved his shoulders, feinting a swing. Broker moved as Earl moved, tossing the feed bucket at Earl’s face.

Whack! Earl swung. Feed pellets exploded from the shattered plastic container.

“Yeah,” Earl giggled, an hysterical wheezing giggle on the far edge of control. He had feed pellets in his hair, he had a pale, berserker light in his eyes. Broker instinctively realized why Earl had brought Rodney as extra muscle.

It wasn’t to help work Broker over.

It was to pull him off when he lost control and was beating Broker to death.

But Rodney had disappeared out the door into the gray afternoon and Earl, sans backup, had cocked the bat again. Trembling with pleasure and rage, he took another step forward.

Okay. Life had become very simple. If he tried to close the distance and grapple, Broker would for sure take at least one blow going in. So that was out. He needed to get something between his skull and that bat. Broker’s hand reached back, seized the bolt, yanked it, and pulled the thick, chest-high gate open.

Earl let go a blinding overhand swing and Broker went to his knees, ducking as the bat smashed down, denting the framing on the top of the gate just above and behind Broker’s head. As Earl recovered, Broker scooted around to the other side of the gate and pulled it full-arc on its hinges, so he was squeezed behind it, tight against the plywood outer wall of the pen.

“What a chickenshit,” Earl sneered, trying another overhand swing that harmlessly glanced off the gate and thumped the wall. Broker was contorted sideways, one shoulder back, flattened against the wall; his other arm folded against his chest, his hand gripping the simple handle under the bolt, holding the door against him.

Earl could prod into the limited space with the bat, but he could no longer swing. So he tried to pummel Broker, but Broker grabbed at the end and tried to twist it away. With difficulty, Earl yanked it back out of the cranny.

“Give it up, Earl!” Broker yelled. “Walk away now and you won’t get hurt.”

“Can you believe this guy, Rodney . . .” And then, “Rodney?”

And then.

The high hissing sound Earl and Broker heard was all the more unnerving because its source was not mechanical but animal, because it issued from the quilled throat of an infuriated four-hundred-pound male ostrich. Popeye’s massive thigh muscles trembled, tensing, at about the same level as Earl’s shoulders. The bird’s wings flung up, rampant, and the stiff plumes lashed the doorway of the open stall.

“Now what the fuck is this?” Earl muttered as he looked up into Popeye’s bloodshot eyes. Fearlessly ignorant of his situation, he taunted Broker, “Won’t work, hiding behind Big Bird. Uh-uh.”

Broker came up to look over the gate as Earl shifted his feet to take a swing at the hissing bird. He let go an indolent one-handed swat aimed at Popeye’s head.

Like shoo.

The ostrich’s right leg cocked and shot straight forward, the scaley big toe with its claw knuckled. Earl was lucky; because of his wide haymaker swing he was rotating and Popeye struck him a glancing blow in the chest, ripping buckles and buttons off the leather trench coat. Even off target, the kick connected like an electric shock and sent Earl flying back against the tractor, and then rolling on the floor.

He scrambled to his feet, holding his ribs with one hand and reaching for the dropped bat with the other. “Son of a bitch,” he gasped.

The bird stepped into the garage and Broker lowered himself eye-level with the top of the door. Popeye’s ominous grace was an optical illusion. His long legs seemed to be moving in slow-motion when in fact they weren’t. They were lining up on Earl again.

Less bellicose now, Earl’s face was working overtime on the proposition that a mere bird could kill a man. He gripped the bat and assessed the distance to the open garage door. Instinctively, he tried to go around the high-stepping bird.

“No, no,” Broker yelled, safe behind his thick gate. “Stay in front of him. They kick to the side.”

Wide-eyed, shaken, Earl changed direction.

Dumb shit
.

This time Popeye hit Earl squarely in the left upper arm. Earl screamed as he smashed against the concrete. The kick shredded the trench coat sleeve. Dots of blood stippled the floor. Earl’s ragged shoulder flopped like a rag doll’s.

Serves you right
.

Then someone turned his name into a high-pitched, infuriated indictment: “Bro-
KER
!”

Amy stood in the doorway waving her arms to distract Popeye.

“Do
something
, he’s gonna to get killed!” Amy hollered.

Popeye’s tiny head rotated on his long neck, big-eyed and comic in contrast to his lethal feet, which shifted on the cement. Amy continued to wave her arms. Earl, his left arm useless, lay collapsed against the tractor tire like the statue of the Dying Gaul.

Broker would have liked to see Popeye get in a few more licks. But now, worried that Amy would get within Popeye’s kicking radius, he scrambled from the shelter of his plywood gate and saw the long-handled bar shovel leaning against the wall of the pen.

“Please . . .” Earl moaned.

“Get behind that tractor,” Broker shouted at Amy.

“What about . . . ?” she shouted back as she took cover.

Broker sprang for the shovel, grabbed it, and thrust it at the bird. J.T. had told him that male ostriches were territorial. No way Popeye would just walk away.

He shouted to Amy, “I’m going to distract him. You gotta come under the tractor and pull Earl out of range, get him outside, and close the door. Do it.”

Amy darted under the big John Deere. “Crawl toward me,” she shouted at Earl.

“Huh?” Earl shook his head, confused.

Broker advanced with the shovel extended. Popeye gauged this new intruder’s approach, shifted his stance, and stepped back into a tangle of loose wire that lay on the floor.

The bird kicked to free his foot from the coils. Old tin cans threaded in the rusty wire made a racket when Popeye snarled his leg. Tangled in the rattle wire, Popeye’s demeanor totally changed. Spooked, he bolted for the open door.

Broker watched the bird accelerate across the yard in bounds so powerful, they looked like special effects. Zero to forty in three seconds, J.T. had told him. Trailing tin cans, Popeye tore around a tree line and vanished.

Back in the barn, Amy was already stooped over Earl. “Get me a knife. Something to cut the coat with.”

“First I want to talk to my buddy Earl, here,” Broker said.

“Christ’s sake, man,” Earl grimaced in pain, hunching away.

“Broker,” Amy ordered, “I have to see this arm. If it’s compound and has bone sticking out we could sever an artery moving him.”

“Move him?” Broker feigned laughter. “Fuck him, leave him where he’s at.” He tugged Amy to her feet, took a firm grip on her arm, walked her outside.

She pulled away, furious. “That guy . . .”

Broker cut her off. “He’s not critical. He’s got a broken arm. So I’m going to mess with him a little. He’s the boyfriend, and he just tried to brain me with a bat and he brought some help.”

Amy’s eyes flashed, she licked her lips. “I saw the other one run.” More eager than cautious, she asked, “Are there more of them?”

She was back in her element; she liked the action and she liked being in it with him. Broker got the powerful impression the ruckus cleared the decks between them.

“Why’d the other one take off?” she asked.

And the answer to that, Broker didn’t know. He shrugged and said, “Because he came to break a leg and got a full, frontal view of a charging male ostrich.”

“Why break your leg?”

Broker grinned. “To chase me away from Jolene.”

Amy grinned with him.

Earl moaned in the barn, “Jesus Christ, will somebody call nine-one-one?”

“Hey, Earl, look out for the rats, there’s these big barn rats in there. I think they got rabies,” Broker yelled, then he turned back to Amy. “Okay, J.T. keeps a first-aid kit on the mud porch. Do
not
call nine-one-one. We’ll run him over to Timberry Emergency after I have a little talk.”

“You know what you’re doing?”

“Sure, Earl and I are both doing the same thing: trying to scare each other off. He blew his shot. I won’t.”

“Okay,” she squinted at him. “But no more rough stuff. That’s a bad arm.”

Broker held up his hands, palms out—an innocent. “Amy, I never touched the guy.”

She evaluated the look in his eyes. “You would have let that bird kill him,” she said evenly.

“Nah,” Broker grinned. “Not kill him, maybe kick him a few more times, though.”

She turned and jogged to the house. Broker went back in the barn, searched for a moment, and found the bat. To announce himself he swung the bat viscously against the tractor fender. Every time the bat landed, Earl cringed on the floor.

He extended the bat and poked Earl in the ribs. Earl moaned and gritted his teeth.

Broker shook his head. “For some reason, Jolene doesn’t want you hurt too bad, so it can end right here. If we can understand each other.”

“I need to go to a hospital,” Earl said between clenched teeth.

“Listen carefully,” Broker said. “I copied your hard drive. Jolene assures me there’s enough on there to interest the feds. Credit unions are federal, Earl. You with me so far?”

“Okay, okay.”

“Jolene’s lawyer guarantees you’ll get every cent she owes you—if you back off. You can be friends, but she gets a chance to live her life. That’s the deal.”

Earl’s left cheek and eye were starting to puff black and blue. Shock turned his skin sticky gray. With a face full of blood and dirt, he didn’t look so pretty anymore. “What about all this?” he said.

Broker smiled. “This was just testosterone gone awry.”

“I mean, what are you going to tell them at the hospital?”

Broker shrugged. “I’m watching my buddy’s farm for him, I know you, you wanted to see the birds, you came out and there was an accident.”

Earl sighed in resignation. “Friends with Jolene.”

“But no manipulation. No games,” Broker said.

“Okay,” Earl said. His eyes stayed fixed on the door. Amy came jogging back in with J.T.’s first-aid kit, a knife, and a bedsheet. He asked, “Who’s the chick?”

“Friend of mine. Lucky for you, she’s a nurse.”

Amy quickly cut open Earl’s jacket sleeve and assessed the lacerated shoulder. “Looks worse than it is, superficial muscle damage.” She applied gauze pads to the bleeding and felt around. “The left humerus is snapped, at least once, but it hasn’t poked through the skin. He probably has some cracked ribs.”

Amy decided to immobilize the arm against his chest with the sheet. Broker helped her sit Earl up and tie the makeshift restraint. Then she gave him some Tylenol. Once the arm was secured they hauled him to his feet and walked him to the Jeep.

As they got in, Amy scanned the empty fields and pastures.

“What about the bird?”

“Maybe they come home when they get hungry,” Broker said.

After a solitary dinner
in an overcrowded restaurant, Allen got away from people and drove toward his town house, deep in one of Timberry’s meandering cul-de-sacs.

His efficient two-bedroom row house was somebody’s idea of a New England design, clad in white clapboard and black trim. He had a garage, a basement, a deck, and a view. His association kept the outside tidy. He took care of the inside.

Untidy reminded him of his ex-wife, Sharon, who had remarried and moved to California. Like Annette Benning in
American Beauty
, Sharon sold real estate. Unlike Annette Benning, she had never cleaned a house in her life.

They had trudged dutifully together until the end of his residency at the Mayo Clinic.

At the clinic, residents were required to make rounds in starched white coats, suits, and a tie every day. The dress code bolstered Allen’s innate fastidiousness, and the more pressed and creased he was at the clinic the more aware he became of Sharon’s slovenly habits at home.

Thank God they never had kids.

But then, how could they? Buried alive in the heavy pleats of Sharon’s lovemaking, Allen had imagined his spermatozoa suffocated. She had possessed a certain sluggish beauty, if you enjoyed watching heavy whipping cream pour from a spout.

They’d been high school sweethearts. He had been deceived by the household Sharon grew up in, by its snug, scrubbed security. Only when it was too late, after he’d married her, did he realize that the order in that house was the work of Sharon’s mother, but none of the mother’s precision had rubbed off on the daughter. And this didn’t truly manifest until they had moved out of student housing into a town house in Rochester. One of his Mayo colleagues came over after a round of handball and spilled a beer on the scuffed kitchen linoleum. Immediately, he offered to clean it up. “I’ll get it,” he said to Sharon, “just show me where you keep the mop.”

“I don’t think we have one,” Sharon had said, in effect.

Allen aimed the garage-door clicker, opened the door, drove in, shut off his car, and closed the door behind him.

Thank you, Minnesota, for no-fault divorce.

He unlocked his door and went inside. Jolene had never visited his place. The last two women he’d dated—a lawyer and an investment banker—had given him the impression that his living quarters were too small. He’d already forgotten the personal details of both of them. He did remember that they were compulsively skinny, and the main difference between them was that the lawyer took Zoloft and the banker took Prozac.

Allen could imagine Jolene getting drunk in her past life and fucking her whole high school football team. He could not imagine her taking Prozac.

His town house had originally been chosen for its convenient location, a mile from the hospital and clinic. When he’d moved in two years ago, his deck overlooked wetlands and a woods. Now a golf course provided a deeper shade of sizzling chemical green.

He cared about the environment. He was not a flashy person, he reminded himself, as he walked through the comfortable two-bedroom unit. His furnishings were sparse and functional, well made but not extravagant.

He was not a bad person.

He was not shallow.

He’d made only one mistake in his life.

One.

And he was doing his best to learn from it.

He put a bag of popcorn in the microwave and set the timer. Cub Scout popcorn, sold door-to-door. Sure, here kid.

Not a bad person.

Not.

He left the kitchen, went into the bedroom, and selected a pair of freshly laundered blue scrubs from his dresser. Clothing kept turning up in his exercise bag and he kept forgetting to return it. When he was home alone and didn’t expect guests, like now, he wore them as lounging pajamas.

He put on the soft shirt and loose trousers, went back to the kitchen, transferred the popcorn from the microwave to a bowl, and went into the living room. The movie Garf had given him lay on the coffee table. Allen shook out the tape, inserted it in the VCR, and tapped the play button. While the leader played out, he turned
The Blue Angel
jacket over and read the tag line on the back. “A middle-aged professor is degraded and led to his destruction through his infatuation with a heartless café entertainer.”

Hmmm. He’d give it a try, to see if there was a point to Garf’s insolence. He settled back on the couch and began to eat his popcorn.

The movie was an early talky that creaked across the screen in seventy-year-old black and white. Dr. Immannuel Rath, a portly professor, fuddled his way through the pranks of his students and wound up following some of them to a seedy nightclub where Lola Lola, the Dietrich character, strutted her stuff.

Allen squirmed a little and licked the greasy popcorn residue from his fingers. Very funny.
I’m supposed to be the socially maladroit academic being swallowed alive by the hot nightclub singer. Is that it, Garf?

But the character that stuck in his imagination was not the professor or the entertainer. As the doomed romance developed backstage in the nightclub, a clown wandered through the scenes with wistful eyebrows and a sad smile painted on his face. The clown’s purpose was to underscore Professor Rath’s folly. In fact, the professor, ruined by his love for the singer, joined the vagabond traveling troupe and wound up donning the clown costume himself.

The clown was the only character who knew what was going on.

The movie ended with a melodramatic death scene. Disgraced, Rath made his way back to the schoolhouse and collapsed on his old headmaster’s desk.

As the film rewound, Allen considered Garf’s intent; was it an ironic caution or a threat? Either way, it was a clue that more intelligence was cooking behind Garf’s blue eyes than Allen had previously assumed.

Garf had to go, of course. Milt was leery about underwriting Jolene as long as Garf was living under her roof.

And now it appeared that Garf was suggesting that Allen had to go. Allen smiled a tight little smile, got up, and experimented with a six-part silver box tango step. Garf underestimated him, of course. As had Hank.

Allen slid the movie back in its jacket, took the popcorn bowl to the kitchen, washed it, and put it in the cupboard. Then he spent half an hour going over his notes on tomorrow’s surgery schedule. Satisfied, he filed the notes back in his briefcase, brushed his teeth, flossed, washed his hands, and went to bed. As always, he fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Allen woke punctually at
6:00
A.M.
, rolled out of bed, donned a wind suit and Nikes, stretched, drank a tall glass of water, and went on a five-mile run.

On his way back, at about mile four as he jogged past a long stand of fiery staghorn sumac, he had his revelation. It started with an awareness about the unself-conscious way his body was moving. For the first time in his life, outside of surgery, he felt fluid, as if his work brain had finally melted and now dripped warm and active down into the rest of his body.

The new perception was simple: the accidently-on-purpose-snuffing of Hank Sommer had not so much liberated Jolene as it had freed him. He, not Jolene, was more alive. Almost as if he sucked Hank’s ferocious life force out with a straw and digested it.

He’d finally made a mistake and the disaster had set him free. He didn’t need to possess Jolene. He didn’t need to
do
anything. He just simply had to
be
himself.

The red line had been erased.

Allen ran home, showered, and then, standing with a towel wrapped around his waist, razor held aloft, his lathered face centered in the steamy bathroom mirror—he thought,
No. Let’s let it grow and see how we look in a beard
.

On the damp tile bathroom floor Allen took a few stylized steps and bent over an imaginary tango partner. He dressed, ate cereal in a warm blur, and drove to the hospital.

It was Friday, which was his favorite day because he spent all day in surgery. As he parked and entered the building he mentally put on his work cap to begin to focus on the day’s procedures.

But he was not so intense that he forgot to take the time to smile at the nurses, to say good morning to a janitor. And the staff locker room didn’t feel like a decompression chamber this morning. Just a changing room.

Capped, wearing blue booties over his shoes, with a mask loose around his neck, he sipped a cup of black coffee in the staff lounge. A small audience had gathered at a table around Lenny Merman.

“So what does it mean if you find a lawyer buried up to his neck in cement?” Merman asked

“Groan,” Allen said.

“Shortage of cement,” Merman said. More groans.

Merman was a burly ortho guy, so passionate about his work that colleagues joked he’d probably tear his way into a body with his bare hands if the surgical tech was late with his instruments.

“Okay, here’s another one. Why are lawyers buried at twenty-six feet instead of at six feet?” Merman would not be deterred.

“Boo, hiss,” Allen said.

“Way down deep they’re really good people,” Merman said.

Allen rubbed the stubble on his cheek and smiled when he caught his reflection in the mirror next to the bulletin board. They wouldn’t approve at the Mayo Clinic.

The charge nurse came in and posted the room schedule, and the blue pack of surgeons went off to the surgery suites. Allen walked down the corridor not even paying attention to the red line, went to a sink, and meticulously scrubbed his fingers, hands, and forearms with antibacterial soap.

Allen was a belly man. His domain was the region located between the crotch and the diaphragm, the area in which lay the liver, the spleen, the pancreas, the colon, the small intestines, and the reproductive plumbing. The internal structure, shape, and color of these organs were more clearly visualized in his mind than the faces of the people they belonged to.

He walked into the surgery and held out his hands like a matador to be draped and gloved by the circulating nurse. The team assembled. Allen greeted them—first his resident, Durga Prasad from Bombay, the surgical tech, a circulating nurse, and an anesthetist. Allen, Durga, and the tech worked in direct contact with the patient and observed the sterile barrier. So they were gloved and gowned. The anesthetist, the circulating nurse, and the anesthesiologist—if she wandered in—were not sterile.

The first patient shuffled in, a middle-aged man wearing a hospital gown. Allen matched the face to the procedure on the surgery schedule: bilateral inguinal hernia repair.

They eased the patient onto the operating table. He looked up a little wary at the huge circular AMSCO quantum surgical lights hovering over him on jointed arms, like the wings of a robotic angel. Next, the patient eyed the anesthesia machine which sprouted pumps, dials, tubes, and digital screens.

“You’re going to be just fine,” Allen said.

Then the anesthetist ran his IV and hooked up his monitor leads and injected Versed in the IV, which he followed with a shot of Sublimaze. The patient was masked, pre-oxygenated, and then was put under with Pentothal.

All smooth, amid casual banter about
The Blair Witch Project,
which Jeannie had just seen on video.

“Really, really overrated,” said Jeannie, the circulating nurse.

“Fakey, I thought, the wooden stuff hanging in the trees,” said Jerry, the anesthetist.

“Smart, though,” offered Allen. “Remember the way they hyped it on the web?”

After Pentothal, the muscle relaxant, succinylcholine, was administered. The patient shuddered. Behind his mask, Allen clicked his teeth. It was the same kind of muscular spasm that he had caused in Hank Sommer.

Allen took a deep breath and waited as the patient lost control of his muscles and went flaccid. Expertly, the anesthetist fitted a plastic shield over the patient’s teeth, then inserted an instrument like a stainless-steel, right-angled trowel—a laryngoscopic blade—into the sedated man’s throat. The patient’s head shifted as the blade was levered forward and upward to elevate the epiglottis and expose the glotal opening. Then the anesthetist inserted a plastic tracheal tube, hooked up the breathing circuit to the machine, and pumped nitrous oxide into the patient’s lungs.

Allen directed everything that occurred in the OR with verbal instructions. Nonverbal cues were conveyed through the eyes, the only feature that showed above the surgical masks. Surgical teams were close watchers, especially of their surgeon leader. Now all the eyes in the room keyed on him, to sense his mood, to see what kind of day he’d have.

He heard them whisper that he hadn’t shaved this morning and what did it mean?

The patient’s stomach was draped with sterile blue sheets. Another sterile blue sheet separated the patient’s head from the operating field. The human shape became abstract. Allen’s target was an anonymous shaved square of belly which had been designated with a rubber stamp:
LEFT
.

The tech unwrapped and positioned a sterile tray that contained the instruments for hernia repair, the square of exposed flesh was washed with orange Betadine disinfectant. One last point of etiquette remained: the choice of music on the CD player that sat on a table along one wall.

The eyes over the masks turned to Allen who always selected the music.

“Jeannie, pick us some sounds,” Allen said casually to the circulating nurse.

Allen could feel the slight lift in the room as Jeannie spun some Sheryl Crowe. Allen held up a gloved hand, the scrub tech firmly put a scalpel in it, and he made the first incision.

And so the day proceeded under the hot surgical lights. In between procedures, Allen moved between the pre op suites, where he interviewed his next patient, and the consult room, where he spoke briefly with the family of his last procedure.

A hemorrhoidectomy.

A left-breast biopsy.

Time out to consult on a patient in emergency, then back down to surgery to remove another suspect lump from an elderly woman’s breast and run it though Radiology.