Nine

Emory Ashworth was a black nursing assistant on Orthopedics and the spinal cord unit. During the day he was studying to be a florist at Dominion College, a diploma mill. He weighed about four hundred jolly pounds and was "queer as a three-dollar bill" in the words of Normal Cane. Everyone liked him a lot, especially the patients. He wanted to sleep with me.

One night I was sitting in the stationery closet on the sixth floor, counting how many drug requisitions we had, when the door closed and the light went off. I didn't see who it was, but it was something large and warm, and it spoke in a seductive voice.

"Let me make you happy," it said.

"Open the door, Emory."

"I can make you so happy."

"Open the door, Emory. Please . . ."

"Or you'll scream? Oh, my dear!"

He opened the door, and I stepped out, virginity intact.

"I could have given you such pleasure," he said, patting his hair with a pudgy hand, but we both knew he was camping it up. His offers were only half serious and partly made as entertainment for the other employees. A number of them were laughing and pointing as we stepped from the closet. By way of seduction, he'd given me a rug for my bedroom, but I was too innocent, or too greedy, to understand the tactic. A couple of weeks later, he rang the bell unannounced and asked to see the rug. When I showed it to him, his eyes yearned for the bed, but that was all that happened.

One of Emory's favorite stunts was to put a sheet around him so he looked just like a nun. Then he'd sit in a wheelchair and have another assistant push him from room to room, where he posed as Sister Bernadetta, hearing the patients' fears and confessions and hold their hands. As the sister, Emory also had a bawdy sense of humor, but nobody seemed to mind. Nor did they notice he was the orderly who had brought a snack tray or removed a bedpan a few minutes later. When they told him about "that wonderful Sister Bernadetta," he'd say what a comfort the sister had always been to him.

It was Christmas Eve when Emory came out of 675 holding a very large pistol with thumb and forefinger, the way you'd hold a wet towel. He had it by the handle, so the barrel pointed down at his foot, swinging as he walked.

"Holder, would you look at this?"

Another nursing assistant came out of the room behind him and said they'd found it in Jack Triplett's locker while they were straightening up. It had fallen out of an open gym bag and landed on the floor.

It was a real gun, all right. Emory put it on the desk, and we all leaned over and stared at it.

"What's Triplett doing with it?" I said. "He's a quad."

"Why don't you ask him?" said one of the nurses.

"OK, I will," I said, "but first we've got to get rid of this."

"How about the narcotics drawer?" said the nurse, getting out her key.

It was fine with me. I picked it up by the handle and placed it next to the vials of morphine. The nurse closed the drawer and locked it, and I told the station clerk to call Security. They were such clowns, they'd probably kill themselves with it on the way downstairs, but it seemed the right procedure.

I headed toward the room with Emory behind me. Jack Triplett was in bed one, the first on the right, in a four-bed ward. Everyone in the room was a paraplegic or a quadriplegic. Jack was a partial quad, meaning he had no use at all of his legs and only vague movement of the arms. While the paraplegics had the run of the hall in their wheelchairs, doing wheelies, having races, and even going out to the movies with special permission, the quads could only lie around on carts, usually on their stomachs. Jack liked to swing his arms around when a nurse was pushing his car and pretend he was pinching her bottom. Most of them would let him have a quick feel, and a couple of others did more than that. Emory said Yolanda, the LPN, would draw the curtains every Tuesday after dinner, flip Jack over on his Stryker frame, and give him a hand job, using the same lotion the nurses used for back rubs. I said I thought quads couldn't get hard-ons. He said it was just the other way around. Sometimes they couldn't get rid of one. It would wave around like a flagpole, even though they couldn't feel it. They couldn't climax either, he said with a sigh, but stroking it down, said Emory, with lotion was a lovely gesture anyway, like sending a birthday card. It wasn't just Yolanda who was giving such favors, from the pleased look on Emory's face, but I didn't want to think about that.

Jack was face down on the Stryker frame when we entered the room, the tray with his half-eaten dinner beneath him. He had curly black hair and a tattoo on one arm. Once he'd been a big man. Now his arms and legs were thin from disuse, so only his torso showed the strength he had once had.

"Jack," I said in a friendly way, "there's a little bit of a problem."

"What's that?" he said to the floor.

"There's a gun in your locker."

"Yeah, what about it?"

"Well, you can't have guns in the hospital."

"You can get about anything else," he laughed.

"Only you can, Jack," said Emory.

"Hey, faggot," said Jack, "turn me over on this thing."

"Only if you're nice," Emory teased, but immediately he loosened a couple wing bolts on the frame and turned the frame so Jack was facing up. Locking the bolts again, he untied the seatbelt-like straps around the chest and legs, and removed a long canvas-and-aluminum piece that Jack had been lying on. Now the frame looked more like a regular bed, although a very narrow one. The catheter bag was still half filled with brown urine, but now it was on the other side of the bed. A large dressing on his hip was stained yellow. Like most of the spinal cord patients, Jack had trouble with bedsores. He didn't get very good care at home, and a bedsore had deepened, like a cavity in a tooth. Since the pain couldn't be felt, the sore grew and grew. It's finally infection that kills such patients, if not kidney disease from urinary problems. A nurse said they were taking pieces of bone from Jack's hip when they changed the dressings.

"That's better. My pecker was getting sore from hanging there."

"We can correct that in other ways," said Emory.

"About the gun," I said.

"It's a gift from my old man. He brought it the other day," he said, lifting his right arm like a wing.

"But why?"

"For protection, why the hell do you think?" He blinked at me as if I were crazy. Didn't I know what a gun was for?

"Why do you need protection here?"

"Louie over there cussed me out the other day, the son of a bitch. He said he was going to fix my ass good." He nodded toward the opposite corner, where a thin black man named Louie Bottoms, completely broken and helpless-looking, was staring at the ceiling.

Jack couldn't pick up a toothpick, much less a pistol. To keep them from atrophying completely, the nurses had braced both his hands with Ace bandages and specially shaped pieces of plastic. This kept them from curling into birdlike claws from sheer disuse, something that occurred when the tendons overpowered the opposing muscles.

"How are you going to use a gun?" said Emory with such tactlessness it became tact again. "You can't even feed yourself."

"I wasn't going to use it, unless he screwed with me. Then I'd figure a way somehow." He began to laugh, which caused him to cough; then he turned red in the face.

Emory waved good-bye and went back into the hall. He had better things to do.

"Tell Holder how you got here in the first place," said the patient from bed two, a paraplegic who rolled over in his wheelchair with surprising finesse. This was Honest John and he was in and out of the unit for simple diabetes. Otherwise, he looked in perfect health. He was a good-looking man, with the slightly sharp features of a Polish aristocrat, and from the waist up he was very well built, because he worked with weights.

"Aw, hell, not that again," said Jack.

"Gunshots," said Honest John. "Go ahead, Jack, tell the man."

"Nothing to tell. I was messing around with this woman and her husband got wise. So one day he laid waiting in some bushes, that's all"

"Jack is at the top of the apartment stairs, knocking on her door, and her old man steps in at the bottom. He shoots all six bullets, bam, bam, bam, just like that, and Jack falls down the stairs and lands on his feet." Honest John gestured the entire scene, holding the gun with both hands, like cops on TV shows.

"And then the lousy bum kicks me," said Jack indignantly, "just for good luck."

"Pretty good, huh?" said Honest John, relishing the story yet another time.

"He was a lousy shot, though," said Jack. "Only one of them shots hit home."

"One's enough, my man," said Honest John, and the entire room seemed to murmur assent.

There was a silence. Then Jack said, "I laid there, thinking this ain't so bad. If I'm dead, I can still look around, and it don't hurt too bad. Never did hurt, by God."

"It's like a pinprick is all," said Honest John, "a little bitty pinprick."

"It's when you try to move," said Jack, "and the phone call don't go through."

"I got mine in a diving accident," said Honest John, "one night in a quarry. A bunch of us was drunk and somebody said we should jump off this cliff about fifty feet in the air, into the water. There was water all right, just not enough of it. Landed right on a big rock that was under the surface."

"Louie got his in a car," said Jack. "Hey, Louie, how're you doing?"

There was no answer. Louie stared at the ceiling as if we weren't there.

"That Louie is on another plane of consciousness," said Honest John. "He is so far into being screwed up, he can't see out again."

There was a fourth guy in the room, but he was turned onto his stomach and didn't say anything. You couldn't tell if he was asleep or listening to all of this.

"That's Wilson," said Honest John. "He doesn't like us much."

"Eat it," said Wilson in a loud clear voice.

Honest John giggled. He was the only one in the room who could move around, and it gave him a certain authority, somewhere between ambassador and talk-show host. He had all the confidence of a weight lifter, but his legs were remarkably thin under the blanket that covered them.

"If you want the gun, Jack," I said, "you can get it when you leave, downstairs in the cashier's office." The security officer would place it there, inside a yellow "patient's valuables" envelope, because that was the rule.

"Sure, man," he said, completely unconcerned. I saw Yolanda, the LPN, standing at the door with a jar of lotion, washcloth, soap, and towel. She was pretty in a horsey way, with a long face to match her long legs. For a moment, jealousy made a sweet ache that started in my chest and ran out to the hands.

"Time for your skin treatment," she said.

"Is this Tuesday?" I said, looking at my watch.

Honest John knew when it was time to leave, and so did I. We went into the hall. Honest John smiled and did a wheelie that was nothing less than spectacular. He reared up in an instant and did a full 360 before dropping lightly down.

"All right!" I said, slapping his open palm.

"Be cool," he said and blasted smoothly down the hall toward the nursing station. He was going down there to flirt with the nurses, as he usually did in the evening. His diabetes was bad, however, what the doctors call "brittle." In time it was going to mean a lot of trouble for him. A cut on his foot would turn gangrenous and he'd have to have it amputated, but for now he was as lively and good-looking as he would ever be.

Around the corner, passing Honest John with imperial dignity, came Emory dressed as Sister Bernadetta. Nicky, the nursing assistant, pushed him in the wheelchair. They headed toward 675, where Jack Triplett was having the time of his life, as usual.

I dropped by Romona's office, where the unit managers often hung out, and found Barbara and Romona. Barbara had obviously been crying, and her hand shook as she wiped her tears.

"Oh, Holder," she said, as if she might start crying again.

"What's the matter?" I asked Romona.

"You know how Janush always wants the hallways clean?" she said. "Well, Barbara was straightening up the carts on Nine South when she saw a used Chux under one of them. She thought she'd do the nurses a favor by tossing it out, but when she picked it up, there was a baby inside."

"Oh," I said with dread, not wanting to hear the rest. Chux were blue disposable pads the nurses put under the patients, in case they soiled the bed.

"It may have been stillborn," Romona said, "and then again . . ." Her voice trailed off, and she rolled a look at Barbara.

Barbara studied the lengthening ash of Romona's cigarette, which was bound to fall any second. "It was a little dead baby, with dead hands and dead fingers," she said. "Somebody must have given birth to her here in the hospital and left it to die."

"Oh, I don't think so," said Romona, concerned about her morbid tone. "I think maybe it was stillborn, Barbara, either here or at home, and the poor mother didn't know what to do with it. She probably thought the hospital was the right place to take it. If it was alive, it would have cried, and somebody would have found it."

I thought about that for a while. The smallness of the room was never more apparent. Though it was mid-winter, the room was stuffy, and a small circular fan throbbed in the corner. It didn't put out much air, however, and only added to the oppressive feeling in the room. Sometimes when the office was crowded, Ed would sit on its sturdy, flat top and pretend the vibrations were "getting him off" as he put it. I gave an involuntary shiver and looked at my watch. It was still two hours until break time, ten o'clock. We had nothing to do but sit here together, thinking of other topics for discussion. Romona sighed and studied her nails. She'd brought a romance novel with her but felt it wasn't the time to drag it out of her purse. Barbara stared fiercely at the wall, wondering why, of all people, she had to find the body. I sat wondering about the same injustice.