wipe the scrim of mud from the face of it, then I pressed the talk button and held it to my ear.
“Gordon? Is this Gordon I’m talking to?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“Where? Where are you, that’s what I want to know. Because the man we got has been there for ten minutes now, looking for you.
Don’t you realize what’s going on here? There’s a woman’s life at stake—”
“Yeah,” I said, and I was already starting down the hill, my car up to the frame in mud and debris, the police there, lights revolving, somebody with a plow on the front of his pickup trying to make the smallest dent in the mudflow that stretched on as far as I could see,
“yeah, I’m on it.”
The doctor’s voice ran at me, hard as a knife. “You know that, don’t you? You know how much longer that organ’s got? Till it’s not viable? You know what that means?”
He didn’t want an answer. He was venting, that was all, hyped-up on caffeine and frustrated and looking for somebody to take it out on. I said, “Yeah,” very softly, more as an interjection than anything else, and then asked him who I was supposed to hand the package off to.
I could hear him breathing into the phone, ready to go off on another rant, but he managed to control himself long enough to say:
“Altamirano. Freddie Altamirano. He’s on a motorcycle and he says he’s wearing a silver helmet.”
Even before I could answer I saw Freddie, legging his way through the mud, the Harley looking more like a dirt bike in the motocross than a street machine. He gave me a thumbs-up sign and gestured to the trunk of my car, even as I waded through the muck and dug in my pocket for the keys. I was soaked through to the skin.
My back began to signal its displeasure and my arms felt as if all the bone and sinew had been cored out of them. Did I mention that I don’t have much respect for Freddie Altamirano? That I don’t like him? That he lives to steal my clients?
“Hey, brother,” he said, treating me to a big wet phony grin,
“where you been keeping? I been here like fifteen minutes and they are pissed up there at the hospital. Come on, come on,” he urged as I worked through the muddy keys, and the grin was gone now.
It took maybe three minutes, no more, before Freddie had the cooler secured—minutes that were ticking down till the donor organ was just a piece of meat you could have laid out on the stainless steel counter at the market—and then he was off, kicking up mud, the blast of his exhaust like the first salvo in a war of attrition. But I didn’t care about any of that. I cared about the liver and where it was going. I cared about the woman who’d taken hold of my wrist and her husband and the little girl I never did get to lay eyes on. And though I was wet through and shivering and my car was stuck and my shoes ruined and my hands so blistered I couldn’t make a fist with either one, I started back up the hill—and not, as you might think, to watch the lucky man emerge from the hole in the ground or to take a bow or anything like that, but just to see if anybody else needed digging out.
Wild Child
QUESTION 62
She was out in the flower bed, crushing snails—and more on them later—when she happened to glance up into the burning eyes of an optical illusion. Without her glasses and given the looming ob-struction of the brim of her straw gardener’s hat, which kept slipping down the crest of her brow every time she bent forward, she couldn’t be sure what she was seeing at first. She was wearing the hat even though it was overcast because the doctor had removed a basal cell carcinoma from the lobe of her left ear six months ago and she wasn’t taking any chances, not with the hole in the ozone layer and the thinning—or was it thickening?—of the atmosphere. She was wearing sunblock too, though it had been raw and gray all week, grayer than she would have imagined last winter when she was living in Waunakee, Wisconsin, with her
“Gordon? Is this Gordon I’m talking to?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“Where? Where are you, that’s what I want to know. Because the man we got has been there for ten minutes now, looking for you.
Don’t you realize what’s going on here? There’s a woman’s life at stake—”
“Yeah,” I said, and I was already starting down the hill, my car up to the frame in mud and debris, the police there, lights revolving, somebody with a plow on the front of his pickup trying to make the smallest dent in the mudflow that stretched on as far as I could see,
“yeah, I’m on it.”
The doctor’s voice ran at me, hard as a knife. “You know that, don’t you? You know how much longer that organ’s got? Till it’s not viable? You know what that means?”
He didn’t want an answer. He was venting, that was all, hyped-up on caffeine and frustrated and looking for somebody to take it out on. I said, “Yeah,” very softly, more as an interjection than anything else, and then asked him who I was supposed to hand the package off to.
I could hear him breathing into the phone, ready to go off on another rant, but he managed to control himself long enough to say:
“Altamirano. Freddie Altamirano. He’s on a motorcycle and he says he’s wearing a silver helmet.”
Even before I could answer I saw Freddie, legging his way through the mud, the Harley looking more like a dirt bike in the motocross than a street machine. He gave me a thumbs-up sign and gestured to the trunk of my car, even as I waded through the muck and dug in my pocket for the keys. I was soaked through to the skin.
My back began to signal its displeasure and my arms felt as if all the bone and sinew had been cored out of them. Did I mention that I don’t have much respect for Freddie Altamirano? That I don’t like him? That he lives to steal my clients?
“Hey, brother,” he said, treating me to a big wet phony grin,
“where you been keeping? I been here like fifteen minutes and they are pissed up there at the hospital. Come on, come on,” he urged as I worked through the muddy keys, and the grin was gone now.
It took maybe three minutes, no more, before Freddie had the cooler secured—minutes that were ticking down till the donor organ was just a piece of meat you could have laid out on the stainless steel counter at the market—and then he was off, kicking up mud, the blast of his exhaust like the first salvo in a war of attrition. But I didn’t care about any of that. I cared about the liver and where it was going. I cared about the woman who’d taken hold of my wrist and her husband and the little girl I never did get to lay eyes on. And though I was wet through and shivering and my car was stuck and my shoes ruined and my hands so blistered I couldn’t make a fist with either one, I started back up the hill—and not, as you might think, to watch the lucky man emerge from the hole in the ground or to take a bow or anything like that, but just to see if anybody else needed digging out.
Wild Child
QUESTION 62
She was out in the flower bed, crushing snails—and more on them later—when she happened to glance up into the burning eyes of an optical illusion. Without her glasses and given the looming ob-struction of the brim of her straw gardener’s hat, which kept slipping down the crest of her brow every time she bent forward, she couldn’t be sure what she was seeing at first. She was wearing the hat even though it was overcast because the doctor had removed a basal cell carcinoma from the lobe of her left ear six months ago and she wasn’t taking any chances, not with the hole in the ozone layer and the thinning—or was it thickening?—of the atmosphere. She was wearing sunblock too, though it had been raw and gray all week, grayer than she would have imagined last winter when she was living in Waunakee, Wisconsin, with her
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