The Tiger's Wife

anyone on duty?”

I’d said enough for him to realize that I wasn’t from around there, which he confirmed now with a glance to the others. One of them, a huge, salt-and-pepper man, had an eye patch and a burn-stippled face; the other two seemed whole, but the blond man had an eye that looked away. The way they were staring at me made me wonder how fast I could get to the car and how much power I could get out of the engine if someone here really decided that I wasn’t leaving.

“No one’s been by in two days,” the barman said, putting his good hand in his pocket.

“Could somebody let me in?”

He picked up his beer bottle and downed what was left, put it back on the barrel top. “What do you need?”

“Someone from the clinic.” The jukebox had gone quiet, shifting tracks, and the refrigerator kept pitching in with a fierce hum. “I drove all the way from Brejevina,” I told him. And then, to present myself in the best possible light, I said: “From the orphanage.”

The barman took a phone out of his pocket and dialed. He had a cell phone, all the way out here. I didn’t; I had a pager and maybe two or three bills of the right currency. I stood by and listened while he left a message saying only, “We got someone out here for you,” and then hung up. “They’ll call us back,” he said to me. “Have a seat.”

I climbed onto a stool behind a two-top on the opposite end of the bar, and ordered a cola, which overwhelmed the room with a hiss when the barman opened it. I paid. He got four more beers and returned to the barrel where the others were waiting. I drank my cola, buttoned up in my white coat, trying to hide my reluctance to put my mouth to the lip of the bottle, trying not to think about the phone call, which could have been to a nurse, but could also have been to anybody, or to no one at all. We got someone out here for you—one way or another, he’d called reinforcements. Nobody knew where I was; Fra Antun had pointed the place out on the map, but I hadn’t told him I was coming, especially not like this, in the middle of the day when I was supposed to be inoculating his kids.

“You from the other side?” the eye patch said to me.

“I’m just a doctor,” I said, too quickly, putting my hands on my knees.

“I didn’t say you weren’t, did I? What else are you supposed to be?”

“Shut up,” the barman said.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” the eye patch said. He pushed his stool away and got up, pulling his shirt down with one hand. He made his way over to the jukebox, the sound of his shoes on the floor filling up the air. As he pushed buttons along the console, the albums flipped with a crunching sound that seemed to indicate something in the machine was broken.

“You like Extra Veka?” he said to me. “You heard of her?”

Common sense said say nothing, but I couldn’t pretend he wasn’t there, not with the three of them sitting at the barrel. “I haven’t,” I said.

He shifted from one foot to the other, cleared his throat. “You like Bob Dylan?”

“I like Springsteen better,” I said, and marveled at my own idiocy.

He pushed more buttons. “Don’t have him,” he said.

The jukebox whirred to life, an up-tempo Dylan song I didn’t recognize. The eye patch moved away from the jukebox slowly, toward the middle of the bar, bobbing a little from side to side in time to the music. As he shifted around on the balls of his feet I saw that the burn scars wrapped around his scalp, leaving a bare, glazed scallop of flesh behind his right ear. The others were watching him. The barman was half-seated behind the bar, one leg propped on the rung of his stool and the other on the floor. The blond guy was smiling.

The eye patch turned slowly, all the way around, chugging one foot and one arm. Then he stopped and held out his hands to me.

“No, thanks,” I said with a smile, shaking my head, pointing to my cola.

“Come on, Doctor,” he said. I took another drink of my cola, shook my head again. “Come on, come on,” he said, smiling, gesturing for me to get up, fanning himself with his hands. “Don’t make me dance alone,” he said. He clapped his hands and then held them back out. I didn’t move. “It’s real, you know,” he said of the eye patch. “It’s not just for show.” He took one corner and flipped it up, the flesh underneath moist with the heat, puckered and white-red where it had been stitched shut.

“Sit down, you idiot,” the barman said.

“I was just showing her.”

“Sit down,” he said again, and stood to take the eye patch’s elbow and lead him away from me.

“I’ve only got one.”

“I’m sure she’s seen worse,” the barman said, and pushed him back into his chair at the barrel. Then he got me another cola.

I had no pager service, and Zora had probably started calling by now, wondering, doubtless, where the fuck I’d gotten to, why I wasn’t back yet. I could picture the monastery hallway, the kids already reassembling, soup- stained shirts and sleepy, after-lunch eyes. Zora, livid, making a mental list of things she would say to me in private, choice expletives. There had been traffic, I would say. An accident on the road. I had gotten lost. The store had been closed, and I had to wait for them to come back for the afternoon shift.

The barman’s phone rang. He lifted it to his ear and called the person on the other end “angel.” Then he waved me over and handed it to me.

“Doctor doesn’t come in until next week,” the young woman on the line said right away. “This an emergency?”

“I don’t need the doctor,” I said. I told her I was interested in the discharge records for her patient who had died a few days ago, the one whose body had been returned to the City. The four men at the barrel were