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 off 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?
Skunk:
Not yet, no... no. Keep talking though, just keep talking...
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.
Pause.
deleted name: Still
awake?
Skunk
(voice heavy with congestion): I can’t get my mind to shut down
sighs
Skunk:
and I think I want to sleep too much,
or I’m trying too hard or something
and
then following a quiet growl at his own frustration
Skunk:
Maybe you can tell me if this is true
or not.. Did you ever hear about, I think I heard this at school or,
maybe it was from some kid that’s just come back from a holiday somewhere, I
forget I forget, but I heard about these swimming pools where the ehm, the...
the pool owners were getting so frustrated at the, they must’ve been doing
checks on the water, and finding at the end of the day that there was a a
dispro-
stumbling
over the word, and leaving it
Skunk:
the levels of urine in the water were way too high, and people were just using
the pool as some kind of vast toilet, okay?
deleted name drained
the last of his beer, laughing.
deleted name:
Sure. Sure.
Skunk:
So these guys decided what they would do, they would ehm... they would mix, not
mix, what? They’d alter the chlorine solution in the pool to include some
chemical that, it it it, that you wouldn’t know it was there, but that, the
chemical reacted with urine, like litmus paper, you know, with acid? So that if
anyone took a pee in the pool, the urine would turn red in the water
deleted name
(outburst): Ho God!
and
laughing.
Skunk:
Actually, that doesn’t, that really doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, because
once someone had pissed, they’d, well, since everyone would know what’d
happened, unless, no, if nobody knew yet about the the chemicals, they’d all think it was, that someone was
pissing blood, or menstruating or whatever, but that wouldn’t, I mean,
everyone’s still going to get out of the pool, and they’re still going to have
to
deleted name: Well,
yeah, that’s if the story’s true, but
the logic there is that once word gets around about that pool, you can
guarantee nobody’s going to be using it as a toilet again.
Brother Skunk rolled about
and sat upright in the chair, still laughing.
