'Turn his back on his best friend if she put him d-'
Then she's there, a woman in a green gown with her cap tied around her throat and hanging down her back like the Cisco Kid's sombrero, short brown hair swept back from her brow, good-looking but severe-more handsome than pretty. She grabs Rusty with one short-nailed hand and pulls him back from me.
'Hey' Rusty says, indignant. 'Get your hands off me!'
'Then you keep your hands off him, ' she says, and there is no mistaking the anger in her voice. 'I'm tired of your sophomore class wit, Rusty, and the next time you start in, I'm going to report you.'
'Hey, let's all calm down,' says the Baywatch hunk Doc's assistant. He sounds alarmed, as if he expects Rusty and his boss to start duking it out right here. 'Let's just put a lid on it.'
'Why's she bein' such a bitch to me?' Rusty says. He's still trying to sound indignant, but he's actually whining now. Then, in a slightly different direction: 'Why you being such a bitch? You on your period, is that it?'
Doc, sounding disgusted: 'Get him out of here. sign the log.'
Mike: 'Come on, Rusty. Let's go
Rusty: 'Yeah. And get some fresh air.'
Me, listening to all this like it was on the radio.
Their feet, squeaking toward the door. Rusty now all huffy and offended, asking her why she doesn't just wear a mood ring or something so people will know. Soft shoes squeaking on tile, and suddenly that sound is replaced by the sound of my driver, beating the bush for my goddam ball, where is it, it didn't go too far in, I'm sure of it, so where is it, Jesus, I hate fourteen, supposedly there's poison I ivy, and with all this underbrush, there could easily be-And then something bit me, didn't it? Yes, I'm almost sure it did.
On the left calf, just above the top of my whit athletic sock. A red-hot darning needle of pain, perfectly concentrated at first, then spreading ...
... then darkness. Until the gurney, zipped up snug inside a body bag and listening to Mike ('Which one did they say?') and Rusty ('Four, I think. Yeah, four.')
I want to think it that's only because was some kind of snake, but maybe I was thinking about them while I hunted for my ball. It could have been an insect, I only recall the single line of pain. and after all, what does it matter? What matters here is that I'm alive and they don't know it. It's incredible, but they don't know it. Of course I had bad luck-I know Dr. Jennings, remember speaking to him as I played through his foursome on the eleventh hole. A nice enough guy, but vague, an antique. The antique had pronounced me dead. Then Rusty, with his dopey green eyes and his detention hall grin, had pronounced me dead. The lady doc, Ms. Cisco Kid, hadn't even looked at me yet, not really. When she did, maybe-
'I hate that jerk,' she says when the door is closed. Now it's just the three of us, only of course Ms. Cisco Kid thinks it's just the two of them. 'Why do I always get the jerks, Peter?'
'I don't know,' Mr. Melrose Place says, 'but Rusty's a special case, even in the annals of famous jerks. Walking brain death.--She laughs, and something clanks. The clank is followed by a sound that scares me badly: steel instruments clicking together.
They are of to the left of me, and although I can't see them, I know what they're getting ready to do: the autopsy. They are getting ready to cut into me. They intend to remove Howard Cottrell's heart and see if it blew a piston or threw a rod.
My leg! I scream inside my head. Look at my left leg, That's the trouble, not my heart. !
Perhaps my eyes have adjusted a little, after all. Now I can see, at the very top of my vision, a stainless steel armature. It looks like a giant piece of dental equipment, except that thing at the end isn't a drill. It's a saw. From someplace deep inside, where the brain stores the sort of trivia you only need if you happen to be playing Jeopardy! on TV, I even come up with the name. It's a Gigh saw.
They use it to cut of the top of your skull. This is after they've pulled your face off like a kid's Halloween mask, of course, hair and all.
Then they take out your brain.
Clink. Clink. Clunk. A pause. Then a CLANK! so loud I'd jump if I were capable of jumping.
'Do you want to do the pericardial cut?' she asks.
Pete, cautious: 'Do you want me to?'
Dr. Cisco, sounding pleasant, sounding like someone who is conferring a favor and a responsibility: 'Yes, I think so.'
'All right,' he says. 'You'll assist?'
'Your trusty copilot,' she says, and laughs. She punctuates her laughter with a snick-snick sound. It's the sound of scissors cutting the air.
Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic. The Nam was a long time ago, but I saw half a dozen field autopsies there-what the doctors used to call
' tent-show postmortems- -and I know what Cisco and Pancho mean to do. The scissors have long sharp blades, very sharp blades, and fat finger holes. Still, you have to be strong to use them. The lower blade slides into the gut like butter. Then, snip, up through the bundle of nerves at the solar plexus and into the beef-jerky weave of muscle and tendon above it. Then into the sternum.
When, the blades come together this time, they do so with a heavy crunch as the bone parts and the ribcage pops apart like a Couple of barrels that have been lashed together with twine. Then on up with those scissors that look like nothing so much as the poultry shears supermarket butchers usesnip-CRUNCH, snip-CRUNCH, snip- CRUNCH, splitting bone and shearing muscle, freeing the lungs, heading for the trachea, turning Howard the Conqueror into a Thanksgiving dinner no one will eat.
A thin, nagging whine-this does sound like a dentist's drill.
Pete: 'Can I-?'
