Louis had been hired to take charge; he was going to do it.
“Joan. Give the cop a blanket.”
“Doctor, we haven’t inventoried—”
“Give it to him anyway. Then check on that candy-striper.” He looked at the other girl, who still held her end of the hard stretcher.
She was staring at Pascow’s remains with a kind of hypnotized fascination. “Candy-striper!” Louis said harshly, and her eyes jerked away from the body.
“W-W-Wh—”
“What’s the other girl’s name?”
“W-Who?”
“The one who puked,” he said with deliberate harshness.
“Juh-Juh-Judy. Judy DeLessio.”
“Your name?”
“Carla.” Now the girl sounded a little more steady.
“Carla, you go check on Judy. And get that blanket. You’ll find a pile of them in the little utility closet off Examining Room One.
Go, all of you. Let’s look a little professional here.”
They got moving. Very shortly the screaming in the other room quieted. The phone, which had stopped ringing, now began again.
Louis pushed the hold button without picking up the receiver off its cradle.
The older campus cop looked more together, and Louis spoke to him. “Who do we notify? Can you give me a list?”
The cop nodded and said, “We haven’t had one of these in six years. It’s a bad way to start the semester.”
“It sure is,” Louis said. He picked up the phone and punched off the hold button.
“Hello? Who is—” an excited voice began, and Louis cut it off. He began to make his calls.
14
Things did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis and Richard Irving, the head of Campus Security, made a statement to the press. The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his fiancée. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women’s Gymnasium toward the center of campus at an excessive speed. Withers’s car had struck Pascow and driven him head-first into a tree. Pascow had been brought to the infirmary in a blanket by his friends and two passersby. He had died minutes later. Withers was being held pending charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicular manslaughter.
The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Pascow had died of head injuries. Louis, thinking of that broken window through which the brain itself could be seen, said he would rather let the Penobscot County coroner announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the four young people
who had brought Pascow to the infirmary in the blanket might not have inadvertently caused his death.
“No,” Louis replied. “Not at all. Unhappily, Mr. Pascow was in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck.”
There were other questions—a few—but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Louis sat in his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour before, immediately following the press conference—to catch himself on the evening news Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of the day—or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it. He and Charlton were going over the cards in the
“front file”—those students who were pushing grimly through their college years in spite of some disability There were twenty-three diabetics in the front file, fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics, and assorted others: students with leukemia, students with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle-cell anemia, which Louis had never even seen.
Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left. Charlton came in and laid a pink memo slip on Louis’s desk.
Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.
“Carpet?” he had asked.
“It will have to be replaced,” she said apologetically. “No way the stain’s going to come out, Doctor.”
Of course not. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal—what his first med school roommate had called Tooners. “Hop up on the Toonerville Trolley, Louis,” he’d say,
“and I’ll put on some Creedence.” More often than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and that was maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third semester and had ridden the Toonerville Trolley all the way to
Vietnam as a medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured him over there, stoned to the eyeballs, listening to Creedence do “Run Through the Jungle.”
But he needed something. If he was going to have to see that pink slip about the carpet on his note-minder board every time he glanced up from the front file spread out in front of them, he needed something.
He was cruising fairly well when Mrs. Baillings, the night like doing it—it made him feel like the most rancid sort of gossip
—but Missy would accept no money for sitting, and he was grateful to her for the evening he and Rachel had shared.
Gage was fast asleep before Louis had gotten the mile between Missy’s house and their own; even Ellie was yawning and glassy-eyed. He put Gage into fresh diapers, poured him into his sleeper suit, and popped him into his crib. Then he read Ellie a storybook.
As usual, she clamored for Where the Wild Things Are, being a veteran wild thing herself. Louis convinced her to settle for The Cat in the Hat. She was asleep five minutes after he carried her up, and Rachel tucked her in.
When he came downstairs again, Rachel was sitting in the living room with a glass of milk. A Dorothy Sayers mystery was open on one long thigh.
“Louis, are you really all right?”
“Honey, I’m fine,” he said. “And thanks. For everything.”
‘ “We aim to please,” she said with a curving, slightly saucy smile.
“Are you going over to Jud’s for a beer?”
He shook his head. “Not tonight. I’m totally bushed.”
“I hope I had something to do with that.”
“I think you did.”
“Then grab yourself a glass of milk, Doctor, and let’s go to bed.”
He thought perhaps he would lie awake, as he often had when he was interning, and days that were particularly hairy would play over and over in his mind. But he slid smoothly toward sleep, as if on a slightly inclined, frictionless board. He had read somewhere that it takes the average human being just seven minutes to turn off all the switches and uncouple from the day. Seven minutes for conscious and subconscious to revolve, like the trick wall in an amusement-park haunted house. Something a little eerie in that.
He was almost there when he heard Rachel say, as if from a great distance,”. . . day after tomorrow.”
“Ummmmmm?”
“Jolander. The vet. He’s taking Church the day after tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Church. Treasure your cojónes while you got em, Church, old boy. Then he slipped away from everything, down a hole, sleeping deeply and without dreams.
16
Something woke him much later, a crash loud enough to cause him to sit up in bed, wondering if Ellie had fallen onto the floor or if maybe Gage’s crib had collapsed. Then the moon sailed out from behind a cloud, flooding the room with cold white light, and he saw Victor Pascow standing in the doorway. The crash had been Pascow throwing open the door.
He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian warpaint.
His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.
“Come on, Doctor,” Pascow said. “We got places to go.”
Louis looked around. His wife was a vague hump under her yellow comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Pascow, who was dead but somehow not dead. Yet Louis felt no fear. He realized why almost at once.
It’s a dream, he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible. This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Bangor with the pathologist’s tattoo—a Y-cut stitched back up—on him. The pathologist probably tossed his brain into his chest cavity after taking a tissue sample and filled up the skull cavity with brown paper to prevent leaking—simpler than trying to fit the brain back into the skull like a jigsaw piece into a puzzle.
Uncle Carl, father of the unfortunate Ruthie, had told him that pathologists did that, and all sorts of other random information that he supposed would give Rachel, with her death phobia, the screaming horrors. But Pascow was not here—no way, baby.
Pascow was in a refrigerated locker with a tag around his toe. And he is most certainly not wearing those red jogging shorts in there.
Yet the compulsion to get up was strong. Pascow’s eyes were upon him.
He threw back the covers and swung his feet onto the floor. The hooked rug—a wedding present from Rachel’s grandmother long ago—pressed cold nubbles into the balls of his feet. The dream had a remarkable reality. It was so real that he would not follow Pascow until Pascow had turned and begun to go back down the stairs. The compulsion to follow was strong, but he did not want to be touched, even in a dream, by a walking corpse.