The room was quiet; his house
guest’s final night in Canada, the ten days now gone.
Brother
Skunk’s homeward flight boarded on the other side of the next seven hours, most
of which time he had expressed a desire to spend in sleep right where he was,
his legs hanging off the chair’s edge and lulled by the warmth of the fire in
the lower half of the room. The candle in the empty Jack Daniel’s bottle
guttered down over the glass and label, spilling even onto the table whereon it
rested.
They
were drunk again, or damn near.
Skunk
(yawning): Tell me something.
deleted
name: What?
Skunk:
Jesus I don’t know, anything. Just ehm... talk me into sleep. I
His voice retained the broken and exhausted attrition that had not left him since the cremation, only now he was congested too, which served to alienate himself still further from the words he spoke. He could not decide whether increased dissociation through alcohol was a good or bad thing.
Skunk:
I’m still nervous about going back.
deleted
name: You don’t have to go, you know that. I I... what can I say? I’ve
already...
Skunk:
Tell me a story or or, read read some read me something, even the paper,
just
He
sneezed and shivered, collected himself tighter in the chair, then pushed his
face into its back.
deleted
name (as if quoting): “Behind psychology there is better and smarter
psychology.” Okay, I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you a story my father told
to me a long long time ago.
He
paused, looking to Skunk’s back for some indication that he was not speaking to
himself.
deleted
name: Skunk?
Skunk:
Yuh-huh, okay. Proceed.
deleted
name: Well, when my father was a young man, and this would be just before the
time that I was born, so this is going back some ways, because he, he quit the,
well, he quit the job when my mother discovered she was pregnant with me, or at
least... yes, he quit the job when I came along or... Anyway. There was a man
who came to the hospital one day to sell some of his blood, and my father was
the doctor who checked him over. He discovered that this man’s, that this man
had a very very rare blood, the type that might only be found in maybe just a
handful of people in any major city.
He
picked his bottle off the carpet and with a swallow took the dry edge from his
mouth and throat.
Skunk:
I’m listening.
deleted
name: Okay. Well, this blood wasn’t much use to the hospital because, as you
know, blood doesn’t last for more than a couple of weeks to, for it to be, for
it to be...
tapping
together the tips of his fingers as he searched for the order of the words
deleted name: ..back then their storage facilities
weren’t quite what they are now, and the... the records showed that they didn’t
really have a, there was no real need for this man’s blood-type, that’s to say,
that there had been no need for this particular strain of blood in a
long time. So... my father thanked him for his offer but had to tell him that
no, they couldn’t use his blood. But, it was impossible for them to know
when they might need his services, so what they did, what my father
did, was he made a note of the man’s details, his address and where he worked,
so that
Skunk: So that if anyone turned up in A&E needing
a transfusion of that type of blood, they’d be
interrupted by another sneeze.
deleted
name: They’d have it on tap, albeit delayed. Exactly. And they gave this man
instructions about letting them know if he was leaving the city, or thinking of
taking a vacation or or, anything that might render him unavailable for
any period of time. So the man went back to his job, working in a lumber-yard
about four miles from the hospital, and all uh, all was well until one day a
few weeks later a police car came screaming up to the sawmill, the klaxxon
sounding even louder out here in the boondocks, and all the workers came out to
see what was going on. Anyway the police talked to the supervisor, explained
the situation to him, and then the supervisor called the man over, told him
that the police had come to take him to the hospital as some young woman had
“had an accident” was how they told it, and she had the self-same special blood
as this man, or rather, she didn’t have enough of that blood left in
her, and what remained was draining fast. They took off in the patrol car and
luckily they got there in time, and all was well. So... with the money he got
the man went on a three-day bender, and because my father was so grateful to
him for his services, he agreed to write a line to the man’s employer to cover
this absence as a necessary period
of convalescence. Maybe, say six months later, the same thing happened again,
only this time it was an ambulance, and not the police, that arrived at the
sawmill. The weird thing was, however, that it was the same young woman, who
had again “had an accident”, and needed blood and could they prevail upon
him... you know. Same again, rushed to the hospital, and again, crisis averted.
In
the brief silence of his reaching for the bottle, he could hear Skunk’s
breathing, fallen now into the regular aspirations he took for sleep.
deleted
name (quietly): Skunk? Skunk, are you sleeping?
Satisfied
that he was, deleted name pulled his story to a close, for the sense of completion
more than anything else.
deleted
name (smiling now): Well... this was how it went. These “accidents” the woman
kept having were actually suicide attempts, or parasuicide, because in truth
she didn’t want to die, she just had this thing about the man with the
same strange blood as her own, and by getting his blood transferred into
her body, you know, it was... something. The fourth time that
this happened, the hospital sent a taxi out to the mill, but in his attempt to
make time getting back to the hospital, the cabbie drove the car off the road,
and both he and the man were killed. And it goes without saying that the woman
died in the hospital, still waiting on the arrival of the man and the the
the... the transfusion of that unique blood that could have saved her.
He stood up, kneading the stiffness
in his thighs, and crossed to Skunk’s chair.
deleted name (barely audible
whisper): And then, many many many years later, my father found out by accident
that the woman was actually the man’s daughter.
He blew out the candle and
then kissed his fingers and touched them lightly to Skunk’s forehead, before
stepping down into the lower room to check upon the fire, and from there, to
bed.
