Six Stories Read online

  This time he flips me by himself, probably happy to use those gym-grown Mr. Strongboy muscles of his, hiding the snakebites and the mosquito bites all around them, camouflaging them. I'm staring up into the bank of fluorescents again. Pete steps backward, out of my view. There's a humming noise. The table begins to slant, and I know why. When they cut me open, the fluids will run downhill to collection points at its base. Plenty of samples for the state lab in Augusta, should there be any questions raised by the autopsy.

  I focus all my will and effort on closing my eyes while he's looking down into my face, and cannot produce even a tie. All I wanted was eighteen holes of golf on Saturday afternoon, and instead I turned into Snow White with hair on my chest. And I can't stop wondering what it's going to feel like when those poultry shears go sliding into my midsection.

  Pete has a clipboard in one hand. He consults it, sets it aside, then speaks into the mike. His voice is a lot less stilted now. He has just made the most hideous misdiagnosis of his life, but he doesn't know it, and so he's starting to warm up.

  .II am commencing the autopsy at five forty-nine P.M.," he says,

  "on Saturday, August twenty, nineteen ninety-four."

  He lifts my. lips, looks at my teeth like a man thinking about buying a horse, then pulls my jaw down. Good color," he says,

  "and no petechiae on the cheeks." The current tune is fading out of the speakers and I hear a click as he steps on the foot pedal which pauses the recording tape. "Man, this guy really could still be alive!"

  I hum frantically, and at that same moment Dr. Arlen drops something that sounds like a bedpan. "Doesn't he wish," she says, laughing. He joins in and this time it's cancer I wish on them, some kind that is inoperable and lasts a long time. -

  He goes quickly down my body, feeling up my chest ("No bruising, swelling, or other exterior signs of cardiac arrest," he says, and what a big fucking surprise that is), then palpates my belly.

  I burp.

  He looks at me, eyes widening, mouth dropping open a little, and again I try desperately to hum, knowing he won't hear it over "Start Me Up" but thinking that maybe, along with the burp, he'll finally be ready to see what's right in front of him.

  "Excuse yourself, Howie," Dr. Arlen, that bitch, says from behind me, and chuckles, "Better watch out, Pete those postmortem belches are the worst."

  He theatrically fans the air in front of his face, then goes back to what he's doing. He barely touches my groin, although he remarks that the scar on the back of my right leg continues around to the front.

  Missed the big one, though, I think, maybe because it's a little higher than you're looking. No big deal, my little Baywatch buddy, but you also missed the fact that I'M STILL ALIVE, and that IS a big deal!

  He goes on chanting into the microphone, sounding more and more at ease (sounding, in fact, a little like Jack Klugman on Quincy, ME.), and I know his partner over there behind me, the Pollyanna of the medical community, isn't thinking she'll have to roll the tape back over this part of the exam. Other than missing the fact that his first pericardial is still alive, the kid's doing a great job.

  At last he says, "I think I'm ready to go on, Doctor." He sounds tentative, though.

  She comes over, looks briefly down at me, then squeezes Pete's shoulder. "Okay," she says. "On-na wid-da show!"

  Now I'm trying to stick my tongue out. Just that simple kid's gesture of impudence, but it would be enough ... and it seems to me I can feel a faint prickling sensation deep within my lips, the feeling you get when you're finally starting to come out of a heavy dose of novocaine. And I can feel a twitch? No, wishful thinking, just-Yes! Yes! But a twitch is all, and the second time I try nothing happens.

  As Pete picks up the scissors, the Rolling Stones move on to "Hang Fire."

  Hold a mirror in front of my nose! I scream at them. Watch it fog up! Can't you at least do that?

  Snick, snick, snickety-snick.

  Pete turns the scissors at an angle so the light runs down the blade, and for the first time I'm certain, really certain, that this mad charade is going to go all the way through to the end. The director isn't going to freeze the frame. The ref isn't going to stop the fight in the tenth round. We're not going to pause for a word from our sponsors. Petie-boy's going to slide those scissors into my gut while I lie here helpless, and then he's going to open me up like a mailorder package from the Horchow Collection.

  He looks hesitantly at Dr. Arlen.

  No! I howl, my voice reverberating off the dark walls of my skull but emerging from my mouth not at all. No, please no!

  She nods. "Go ahead. You'll be fine."

  "Uh ... you want to turn off the music?"

  Yes! Yes, turn it off.

  "Is it bothering you.

  Yes! It's bothering him! It's fucked him up so completely he thinks his patient is dead!

  "well . . ."

  "Sure," she says, and disappears from my field of vision. A moment later Mick and Keith are finally gone. I try to make the humming noise and discover a horrible thing: now I can't even do that. I'm too scared. Fright has locked down my vocal cords. I can only stare up as she rejoins him, the two of them gazing), down at me like pallbearers looking into an open grave.

  "Thanks," he says. Then he takes a deep breath and lifts the scissors. "Commencing pericardial cut."

  He slowly brings them down. I see them ... see them ... then they're gone from my field of vision. A long moment later, I feel cold steel nestle against my naked upper belly.

  He looks doubtfully at the doctor.

  "Are you sure you don't-"

  "Do you want to make this your field or not, Peter?" she asks him with some asperity.

  "You know I do, but-"

  "Then cut."

  He nods, lips firming. I would close my eyes if I could, but of course I cannot even do that; I can only steel myself against the pain that's only a second or two away, now steel myself for the steel.

  "Cutting," he says, bending forward.

  "Wait a sec!" she cries.

  The dimple of pressure just below my solar plexus eases a little.

  He looks around at her, surprised, upset, maybe relieved that the crucial moment has been put of-I feel her rubber-gloved hand slide around my penis as if she means to give me some bizarre handjob, safe sex with the dead, and then she says, "You missed this one, Pete."

  He leans over, looking at what she's found-the scar in my groin, at the very top of my right thigh, a glassy, no-pore bowl in the flesh.

  Her hand is still holding my cock, holding it out of the way, that's all she's doing, as far as she's concerned she might as well be holding up a sofa cushion so someone else can see the treasure she's found beneath it-coins, a lost wallet, maybe the catnip mouse you haven't been able to find-but something is happening.

  Dear wheelchair Jesus on a chariot-driven crutch, something is happening.

  "And look," she says. Her finger strokes a light, tickly line down the side of my right testicle. "Look at these hairline scars. His testes must have swollen up to damned near the size of grapefruits."

  "Lucky he didn't lose one or both."

  "You bet your ... you bet your you-knows," she says, and laughs that mildly suggestive laugh again. Her gloved hand loosens, moves, then pushes down firmly, trying to clear the viewing area.

  She is doing by accident what you might pay twentyfive or thirty bucks to have done on purpose ... under other circumstances, of course. "This is a war wound, I think. Hand me that magnifier, Pete."

  "But shouldn't I-"

  "In a few seconds," she says. "He's not going anywhere. She's totally absorbed by what she's found. Her hand is still on me, still pressing down, and what was happening feels like it's still happening, but maybe I'm wrong. I must be wrong, or he would see it, she would feel it.

  She bends down and now I can see only her green-clad back. with the ties from her cap trailing down it like odd pigtails. Now, oh my, I can feel her breath on me down ther
e.

  "Notice the outward radiation," she says. "It was a blast wound of some sort, probably ten years ago at least, we could check his military rec-"

  The door bursts open. Pete cries out in surprise. Dr. Arlen doesn't, but her hand tightens involuntarily, she's gripping me again and it's all at once like a hellish variation of the old Naughty Nurse fantasy.

  "Don't cut 'im up!" someone screams, and his voice is so high and wavery with fright that I barely recognize Rusty. "Don't cut 'im up, there was a snake in his golfbag and it bit Mike!"

  They turn to him, eyes wide, jaws dropped; her hand is still gripping me, but she's no more aware of that, at least for the time being, than Petie-boy is aware that he's got one hand clutching the left breast of his scrub gown. He looks like he's the one with the clapped-out fuel pump.

  'What ... what are you. . ." Pete begins.

  "Knocked him flat!" Rusty was saying-babbling. "He's gonna be okay, I guess, but he can hardly talk!' Little brown snake, I never saw one like it in my life, it went under the loadin' bay, it's under there right now, but that's not the important part! I think it already bit that guy we brought in. I think ... holy shit, Doc, whatja tryin' to do? Stroke 'im back to life?"

  She looks around, dazed, at first not sure of what he's talking about

  ... until she realizes that she's now holding a mostly erect penis.

  And as she screams-screams and snatches the shears out of Pete's limp gloved hand-I find myself thinking again of that old Alfred Hitchcock TV show.

  Poor old Joseph Cotton, I think.

  He only got to cry.

  Afternote

  It's been a year since my experience in Autopsy Room Four, and I have made a complete recovery, although the paralysis was both stubborn and scary; it was a full month before I began to recover the finer motions of my fingers and toes. I still can't play the piano, but then, of course, I never could. That is a joke, and I make no apologies for it. In the first three months after my misadventure, I think that my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. Unless you've actually felt the tip of a pair of postmortem shears poking into your stomach, you don't know what I mean.

  Two weeks or so after my close call, a woman on Dupont Street called the Derry Police to complain of a "Foul Stink" coming from the house next door. That house belonged to a bachelor bank clerk named Walter Kerr. Police found the house empty ... of human life, that is. they found over sixty snakes of different varieties. About half of them were dead-starvation and dehydration, but many were extremely lively ... and extremely dangerous. Several were very rare, and one was of a species believed to have been extinct since mid-century, according to consulting zoologists.

  Kerr failed to show up for work at Derry Community Bank on August 22, two days after I was bitten, one day after the story ("Paralyzed Man Escapes Deadly Autopsy," the headline read; at one point I was quoted as saying I had been "Scared stiff") broke in the press.

  There was a snake for every cage in Kerr's basement menagerie . . .

  except for one. The empty cage was unmarked, and the snake that popped out of my golf bag (the ambulance orderlies had packed it in with my "corpse" and had been practicing chip shots out in the ambulance parking area) was never found.

  The toxin in my bloodstream-the same toxin found to a far lesser degree in orderly Mike Hopper's bloodstream-was documented but never identified. I have looked at a great many pictures of snakes in the last year, and have found at least one that has reportedly caused cases of full-body paralysis in humans. This is the Peruvian Boomslang, a nasty viper that has supposedly been extinct since the I920s. Dupont Street is less than half a mile from the Derry Municipal Golf Course. Most of the intervening land consists of scrub woods and vacant lots.

  One final note. Katie Arlen and I dated for four months, November I994 through February of I995. We broke it off by mutual consent, due to sexual incompatibility.

  I was impotent unless she was wearing rubber gloves.

  STEPHEN

  KING

  Blind Willie

  UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME

  STEPHEN

  KING

  L.T.'S THEORY OF PETS

  My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she's probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him. He does it with just the right roll of the eyes, as if to say, "She fooled me, boys-right, good, and proper!" He'll sometimes tell the story to a bunch of men sitting on one of the loading docks behind the plant and eating their lunches, him eating his lunch, too, the one he fixed for himself - no Lulubelle back at home to do it for him these days.

  They usually laugh when he tells the story, which always ends with L.T.'s Theory of Pets. Hell, I usually laugh. It's a funny story, even if you do know how it turned out. Not that any of us do, not completely.

  "I punched out at four, just like usual," L.T. will say, "then went down to Deb's Den for a couple of beers, just like most days. Had a game of pinball, then went home. That was where things stopped being just like usual. When a person gets up in the morning, he doesn't have the slightest idea how much may have changed in his life by the time he lays his head down again that night. 'Ye know not the day or the hour,' the Bible says. I believe that particular verse is about dying, but it fits everything else, boys. Everything else in this world. You just never know when you're going to bust a fiddle-string.

  "When I turn into the driveway I see the garage door's open and the little Subaru she brought to the marriage is gone, but that doesn't strike me as immediately peculiar. She was always driving off someplace - to a yard sale or someplace - and leaving the goddam garage door open. I'd tell her, 'Lulu, if you keep doing that long enough, someone'll eventually take advantage of it. Come in and take a rake or a bag of peat moss or maybe even the power mower.

  Hell, even a Seventh Day Adventist fresh out of college and doing his merit badge rounds will steal if you put enough temptation in his way, and that's the worst kind of person to tempt, because they feel it more than the rest of us.' Anyway, she'd always say, 'I'll do better, L.T., try, anyway, I really will, honey.' And she did do better, just backslid from time to time like any ordinary sinner.

  "I park off to the side so she'll be able to get her car in when she comes back from wherever, but I close the garage door. Then I go in by way of the kitchen. I cheek the mailbox, but it's empty, the mail inside on the counter, so she must have left after eleven, because he don't come until at least then. The mailman, I mean.

  '"Well, Lucy's right there by the door, crying in that way Siamese have - I like that cry, think it's sort of cute, but Lulu always hated it, maybe because it sounds like a baby's cry and she didn't want anything to do with babies. 'What would I want with a rugmonkey?' she'd say.

  "Lucy being at the door wasn't anything out of the ordinary, either.

  That cat loved my ass. Still does. She's two years old now. We got her at the start of the last year we were married. Right around.

  Seems impossible to believe Lulu's been gone a year, and we were only together three to start with. But Lulubelle was the type to make an impression on you. Lulubelle had what I have to call star quality. You know who she always reminded me of? Lucille Ball.

  Now that I think of it, I guess that's why I named the cat Lucy, although I don't remember thinking it at the time. It might have been what you'd call a subconscious association. She'd come into a room-Lulubelle, I mean, not the cat-and just light it up somehow.

  A person like that, when they're gone you can hardly believe it, and you keep expecting them to come back.

  "Meanwhile, there's the cat. Her name was Lucy to start with, but Lulubelle hated the way she acted so much that she started calling her Screwlucy, and it kind of stuck. Lucy wasn't nuts, though, she only wanted to be loved. Wanted to be loved more than any other pet I ever had in my life, and I've had quite a few.

  "Anyway,
I come in the house and pick up the cat and pet her a little and she climbs up onto my shoulder and sits there, purring and talking her Siamese talk. I check the mail on the counter, put the bills in the basket, then go over to the fridge to get Lucy something to eat. I always keep a working can of cat food in there, with a piece of tinfoil over the top. Saves having Lucy get excited and digging her claws into my shoulder when she hears the can opener. Cats are smart, you know. Much smarter than dogs.

  They're different in other ways, too. It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs. Did any of you pork-packers ever think of that?

  "Lulu bitched like hell about having an open can of cat food in the fridge, even one with a piece of foil over the top, said it made everything in there taste like old tuna, but I wouldn't give in on that one. On most stuff I did it her way, but that cat food business was one of the few places where I really stood up for my rights. It didn't have anything to do with the cat food, anyway. It had to do with the cat. She just didn't like Lucy, that was all. Lucy was her cat, but she didn't like it.

  "Anyway, I go over to the fridge, and I see there's a note on it, stuck there with one of the vegetable magnets. It's from Lulubelle.

  Best as I can remember, it goes like this:

  " 'Dear L.T. - I am leaving you, honey. Unless you come home early, I will be long gone by the time you get this note. I don't think you will get home early, you have never got home early in all the time we have been married, but at least I know you'll get this almost as soon as you get in the door, because the first thing you always do when you get home isn't to come see me and say, "Hi sweet girl I'm home" and give me a kiss but go to the fridge and get whatever's left of the last nasty can of Calo you put in there and feed Screwlucy. So at least I know you won't just go upstairs and get shocked when you see my Elvis Last Supper picture is gone and my half of the closet is mostly empty and think we had a burglar who likes ladies' dresses (unlike some who only care about what is under them).