tongue rises and falls like a dead dog riding the surface of an uneasy waterbed.
“Stop it!” the lady doc snaps at him. She sounds genuinely shocked. Rusty, perhaps sensing this, does not stop but goes gleefully on. His fingers are pinching into my cheeks now. My frozen eyes stare blindly upward.
“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 …
AUTOPSY ROOM FOUR
Page 5 of 15
… 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.