Part 5 (1/2)

He said he felt very strange. Far away. A nice fast walk on the beach, a swim, some exercises, a shower, a steak, and he'd be just fine, he said. But when we walked up the slope of the beach after swimming, he stopped and looked at me and said, ”I think I...”

I waited for the rest of it. He smiled, rolled his eyes up, and pitched onto his face in the soiled sand above high tide. He is as broad as a bear and as hairy as a bear. You think of heart. You think of something going bad inside that big chest. I eased him over. He had sand in nose, mouth and eyes. I laid my right ear on his wet, hairy chest and heard the engine going. tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM. Too fast? But he'd been swimming hard. A fat, gentle woman filled a kid's sand pail with fresh water and cleaned the sand off Meyer's face while we waited for the ambulance. Ambulance service to the beach is very good. Four minutes this time. Resistance to my riding along, until I said I could tell the emergency room just how he had acted before he pa.s.sed out and when he pa.s.sed out.

Fast ride. Deft handling. Too d.a.m.ned cold in the emergency area. They got a blanket over him, steered me to the admissions desk, wheeled him away somewhere. I was a conspicuous figure, walking around in there in swim trunks. A tiny blond nurse, almost a midget, found me an XL robe before I froze. I upset several people in my search for Meyer by appearing in places I was not supposed to be. The medical industry is never ready for inquiry. They never used to like to answer questions. Now they have the excuse they could be sued. They overwork the excuse.

A saturnine, leathery doctor named Kwaliy was supervising the workup on Meyer. I answered the questions I thought he ought to be asking and had to a.s.sume he heard what I said.

He wrote something on a form and gave it to a gray-headed nurse. An orderly wheeled Meyer away, with the nurse keeping pace.

”Where is he going now?” I asked.

”What is your relations.h.i.+p to the patient?” Kwalty asked coldly.

”I'm his sister.”

Kwalty pursed his lips and stared up at me. ”If you start trying to muscle the staff, fellow, you won't find out one d.a.m.n thing.”

”Would you like to put a little money on that, Doctor?”

He tilted his head. ”Maybe not. Your friend has a temperature of almost one hundred and five degrees. And some fluid in the lungs already. It's a virus infection. He goes to Intensive Care. When the lab puts a name on the bug, we'll go the antibiotics with the best record against it. It can kill him, leave him in bad shape, or he can recover completely.”

I took a cab home to the Busted Flush and got clothes and money and drove back in my blue Rolls pickup and parked her five blocks from the hospital. That was as close as I could get and legally leave it there for a long period.

I did not mind hanging around. I had nothing pressing to do. I was sick of going to the places I had been going to. The hidden compartment in the hull of the Flush was stocked with enough cash to afford six or more months of very good living. So the hospital was fine. It was a project. Infiltrate. Ingratiate. Learn the kind of protective coloring that gets you past the places where they stop the civilians, and learn the kind of behavior which keeps the staff from using their authority to toss you the h.e.l.l out.

There is no reason why a person cannot buy and wear a white, long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt-jacket. It does not look at all like a medical smock. A person can keep things in the pocket, pencil flashlight, several pens. A person can carry an aluminum clipboard. The pace is important-steady and mildly purposeful. Smile and nod at every familiar face because that is the way you become a familiar face. Do little favors. Look up the nice folk who took such good care of you the last time you were in. And the time before.

By the time they let Meyer out of Intensive Care, after four rough days and nights, I had goodies all lined up. I had a fine private room a.s.signed to him, 455, on Four South, ten easy paces from the nurses' station. And that was a most agreeable station indeed because, rarity of rarities, the nurses on all s.h.i.+fts were cheery, competent and funny, and half of them were pretty.

I had become friendly with Kwalty after our bad beginning. He said that if I wanted to throw away my money, a private nurse just for the span from eleven at night to seven in the morning might be helpful, as Meyer was still a sick and a weak man. The day-s.h.i.+ft gals on Four South put their heads together and came up with Ella Marie Morse, RN, thirty-something, tall, dark, graceful, husky and highly skilled, a lady who had married a wealthy patient who had died in a plane crash on a business trip to Chicago, leaving her financially comfortable and bored.

They wheeled Meyer to 455 and eased him from bed to bed at four in the afternoon of the day after Christmas, Wednesday. I had looked in at him in Intensive Care several times. He looked worse at closer range. The infection had eaten him down. He looked shrunken in every dimension. His hair was dull, and his face looked amber and waxy. After they took pressure and temperature, and got his four o'clock medication into him, they left us alone. Meyer gave me a slow, thoughtful, heavy-lidded look.

”Christmas... is really gone?”

”So rumor has it.”

”The medication... fogs my brain. I can't handle... word games.”

”Yesterday was Christmas.”

He kept his eyes closed for so long I thought he had gone to sleep. He opened his eyes. ”How was it?”

”Christmas? Well... you know... it was Christmas.”

After he closed his eyes again, I gave him a chatty account of McGee's Christmas, about decorating the tree in the nurses' lounge on Christmas Eve, about bringing in a batch of presents for people on Christmas Day, about attending three different staff parties in the hospital Christmas afternoon and evening. When I was through I realized he was snoring softly, but I did not know when he had dropped off. I decided he had not missed anything of great moment.

Nurse Ella Morse arrived early, a little after ten. She was taller than I had pictured her, not quite as pretty as described, and had an unexpected-and attractive-flavor of shyness in her manner. It made her seem less mature than she obviously was. After she had checked her sleeping patient out and had greeted the girls on duty, she and I took coffee into the small visitors' lounge at the end of the corridor. She asked about Meyer. A semiretired economist living alone aboard his dumpy little cabin cruiser over at Bahia Mar. That doesn't cover it. Meyer is something else. She would find out. Meyer is a transcendent warmth, the listening ear of a total understanding and forgiveness, a humble wisdom.

I explained that Doctor Damon Kwalty had suggested that she be the judge of when Meyer could get along adequately without her help. With a trace of officiousness, she asked me how come I was able to remain in the hospital so long after visitors' hours. I said they had given up asking me to leave, probably because I was handy to have around. Maybe it has a certain emotional importance, or significance, that all this was on the night before I got Pidge Brindle's letter. Or perhaps I am straining at a gnat, or, once again looking for some way to make myself into a better person than I am.

At any rate I hung around until just before the s.h.i.+ft change and then, following a lady's detailed instructions, walked down the corridor and around the corner and shoved the stairwell door open and, without going through it, let it hiss shut to the point where a folded piece of cardboard kept it from closing all the way and latching. Just beyond the doorway, I slipped into the treatment room through another door and pushed it almost shut. I sat on the treatment table and waited. The reflected glow of streetlights came into the room, glinting and glimmering on the gla.s.s and stainless steel of the medical equipment.

I could not tell exactly how long it would take her, because if someone went down with her on the elevator, then, instead of getting off at three and walking to the stairwell and climbing one flight, she would ride all the way down, fake a trip to the rest room, and climb the three flights back up to four.

I waited about five minutes before Marian Lewandowski, RN, pushed the door open silently, slipped into the treatment room and carefully closed the door. The latch clicked and the bolt made a tiny grating sound. She was a slender white shape in the darkness, a whisper of professional fabrics coming toward me, a barely audible ”Hi, darling” as she came into the clandestine embrace, to be held and kissed in the stolen darkness.

She had little body tremors of nervousness, and her whisper-voice had little edges of anxiety, and she had a talking jag. On the afternoon before Christmas, she had come to the lounge three times for a few minutes each time, to make sour jokes about being stuck on the three-to-eleven on that day Christmas day and the day after. Lots of nurses were sick with the bug. A woman with a lovely, lively body, tons of energy, a face more worn than the body, blond hair tied tightly back, blue eyes a sixteenth of an inch too close together, lips a millimeter too thin.

She kissed and trembled and said, ”You know, I figure we were both kidding, talking a good game, neither of us going to show up, but all the time it was happening, you know, like getting carried along. It's just kidding at first. Then it's like a game. Like playing chicken.”

”I know.”

”Well, I talk a good game, but the way it is with me, Norman is on pipeline work in Iran, no place I would want to take my two babies, and so here I am living with Norman's mother again, and I wouldn't really have to work except it would drive me out of my tree trying to live in her house with her, and that rotten old woman is holding a stopwatch on me right now, you can bet your life on it, figuring I'm late because I took time on the way home to get laid. When somebody bugs you and bugs you and bugs you all the time about something you haven't been doing, you end up doing it, right?”

”I guess you do.”

”I wouldn't know about this being a good safe place except for Nita, she's on vacation, my best friend practically-she sneaks in here with a cardiologist she thinks is some day going to get a divorce and marry her, but it never happens.”

”I guess it doesn't.”

”Mostly what is wrong with me, McGee, it isn't just that Norman is away for such a long time and the old lady bugs me so, and if I know Norman he's set up a shack job for himself, what is wrong with me, I guess, is... somehow the work is different being a nurse now. There are so many old ones coming in, coming in and dying all the time. It makes you think about time going by you, like you're on a train that never stops and you look out the window at things streaming by that you'll never see except that way. Dying isn't scary because they come in here and they are so confused and kind of dim they don't really know what is happening, and then all of a sudden they're in a coma and they got an IV going, and a catheter and a bag, and an oxygen clip on their nose, and they don't know a d.a.m.n thing about living or dying anymore. That's going to be me and you sometime, bet on it.”

”But not yet.”

”Feel how I'm shaking? I don't know what's wrong with me. Nita says don't try to use the table, it's so high and narrow you could fall off and break somebody's back, she said there's a rollaway in here... there it is, I can just make it out, and the thing to do is open it a little ways and pull the mattress out and put it on the floor. Look, this is weird, the way I feel. I'm a nurse, d.a.m.n it, and you know the reputation we got, and I like you a lot. I really like you, and I've been excited for hours thinking about you, but would it be a mean, rotten, dirty trick if-if I asked if we just skipped it? Would you get really sore?”

”No, I wouldn't.”

”Maybe it's his mother there waiting and waiting. Why should I make such a big thing? It isn't a big thing anymore in the world. We've got the rights that only men used to have. Well, just hold me like this and kiss me like you did before, for a little while, and then I better be going, and I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”

And in about ten minutes we were on the mattress together. Her flesh was cool, and as pale in the darkness as the uniform had been. Her thick curls had trapped odors of medication and asepsis. I heard the m.u.f.fled bong of the corridor call bell, a night shriek of city brakes, the thunder-roll of a jet, fast and high, and soon the more immediate b.u.mpity-thud, b.u.mpity-thud of Mrs. Norman Lewandowski's pale, pretty and earnest hips against the compressed kapok of the thin, hard, rollaway mattress. Thus we exorcized our private ghosts, leaving old and dying far behind as sensation rushed forward in the rich, frictive celebration of life and living.

I dozed after she was gone and awoke with a start, chilled to the bone by the air conditioning, which had dried the sweats of effort while I slept. It was only 12:11 by the little red Pulsar digits. I b.u.t.toned my s.h.i.+rt wrong on the first try, and when I did it wrong again on the second try, I seriously considered sitting down on the floor and crying a little.

I drove stately old Miss Agnes home through the tropic night, sitting at the big wheel in one of the deepest, saddest, most dismal postcoital depressions I have ever known. I was an absolutely trivial, wasted,. no-good son of a b.i.t.c.h. I wanted to moan, tear my hair out and gnaw my hands raw. This had really been one great December. Point with pride, you dumb h.o.r.n.y old scavenger. You zapped Pidge just because you missed her the first time around, and you're trying to make a perfect score, right? And since you got back, there have been a halfdozen casual availables, and if you put your mind to it you can remember four out of six of their names and maybe three out of six of their faces. And now this lonely nurse person. Like shooting fish in a barrel. No. More like using a shotgun to kill a minnow in a teacup. What is wrong with you this year, fellow? Should you be married, for G.o.d's sake? Should you look in the yellow pages for your friendly neighborhood monastery? Should you sign up for a double orchidectomy? You have to do something, because something is definitely wrong with a grown man who spends the idle hour ramming his rigid self into chance acquaintances, no matter how willing they might be, no matter how far away Norman is.

When have you been like this before?

I locked Miss Agnes and walked the empty dock to Slip F-18 and boarded the Flush. Tired as I was, I went through the motions of checking the little panel in the bulkhead to see if any uninvited visitors had been aboard in my absence. I cut the switch with the special key, let myself in and remembered to use the key again on the inside switch. That is where most security systems fail. Thieves wait for you to deactivate it on the outside, then jump from cover and make you take them inside. If you have a double switch on the alarm circuit, with a sixty-second delay, it can be wired so that if the inside one isn't deactivated in time, you get sirens, bullhorns, calliope music, anything you might want to hear.

I remembered when I had been like this the last time. The last time it had been a defensive reaction. I had suspected a far deeper involvement with a lady than I had wanted. And so I had tried to cure it with warm poultices of other ladies, or at least to m.u.f.fle it, blur it, diffuse it.

Pidge? Lou Ellen? Oh, no, McGee! She's just a kid. Well, not quite. She used to be a kid, and not too long ago. She's not at the bottom of all this cutrate Lothario routine. Couldn't possibly be. Use the acid test on her. Okay. Would I, Travis McGee, bring thee, Linda Lewellen Brindle, aboard this houseboat to live herein and hereon, with me, happily, so long as we shall all remain afloat?