Paperback(First Trade Paper Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802140227 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2003 |
| Edition description: | First Trade Paper Edition |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Good Remains
By Nani Power
Grove Press
Copyright © 2002 Nani Power.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8021-1720-1
1.I expect this is the end my kind friends so let it be known:
C.R. is dead. Wounded, locked, and deserted. Though, mind you, no autopsy would be appropriate on these ruddy bones, such hair and epidermal generosity. Lifeless in his office, this posh tomb. Littered war zone of desk, bookcase, taxidermied fox on a mount, hundred-year-old Turkish Belouche rug (burned by a Salem in one corner), and a picture of ex-girlfriend (Eleanor, brunette, tan). Add to that debris bourbon, a box of Triscuits, an oily geodome of hacked cheddar cheese upon a pile of papers. The window, with its industrial fillip of poly-blend curtained swag, hints at late afternoon, of darkening clouds pulling across sky. Note his working jaws of worry, the stale odor of failure, and lastly, a portrait on the wall, to which he speaks:
Ah, my good Colonel. Friends, this stately fellow in a velvet chair, stump of leg beside him like a faithful dog, is my esteemed companion and ancestor, Colonel Benjamin "Shrub" Harrison Ash. A physician as well, from the bloody fields of the Civil War.
God save C.R. Bring on the vale of tears.
Call the man in question here, Dr. Carroll Randolph Ash (Hell, you can call me C.R. That's what my friends say, C.R., you son of a bitch. Yessir), Corpse Reviver, Confirmed Rebel, what have you. There's a full glass ofVirginia Gentleman Bourbon in his little silver tumbler, he wears a tattered sheepskin vest of his father's (old Doc Carrie, bought things and never gave them up), his feet are on the desk, his elegant tanned ankles (my best part, thoroughbred) entwined. A famed doctor of neonatology; you may have heard of him. If you are the parents of a too-early-born baby the size of a remote control in this part of Virginia, no doubt you'd know him well, the easy banter of his speech, his white coat slumped on a lanky frame during rounds. You'd regard the man as a form of demigod if your child now played and laughed in the backyard, or a dark shadow in your mind's chifforobe, a reminder of your infant's last days.
A podium-leaning, loafered soldier in the realm of bililights and nasogastric tubes who invented the cross-venous-nutrient plan (or CVNP, some call it, I'd be happy to update you, later, to my field, if you like. Fascinating stuff). A clutter of Plexiglas awards lies on the second walnut shelf in his office, gathering dust.
Fond of history, of antique things.
Old letters, retro wars, specifically the Civil War (buff, you could say. Love that stuff, just love it). And the last couple of years he's been drawn and fascinated by the ultimate hobby, the reenactment of battles from the Civil War, though he's never done it, but he longs to (I'm real fascinated with Ball's Bluff, here in Virginia, probably because we own some land right up to it, to the edge, probably because our own people died on that field), has subscribed to Reenactor's Journal, even bought some period clothes (I got this, this old jacket, a shirt and such, a belt, just a start, you know), and really thinks one day he'll join up with those folks and try it out, give it a shot (I mean I don't know what kind of freaks they might be and all, but it seems like it may be a hoot, you know, out in that canvas tent, feeling like you're really there).
Don't particularly care for firearms myself. A six-month internship in the ER singed any interest there, the massive rechiseling of flesh by bullets throughout the night, mingled with alcohol and the stale-tobacco stench of trauma-induced nicotinic acid, pretty much offered distaste, despite the fact he'd enjoyed wild turkey hunting as a boy with his father. Yet, thank you, no. (My great grandpa's shotgun, hand-carved of walnut and brass, lays upstairs. Any of you that cares for that stuff may try it out. I enjoy some good doves, wrapped in bacon.)
But, he thinks: What's it like to flare nostrils in the hazy attar of gunpowder freshly shot in the air, all sharp and spicy—mixed with human sweat, blood, entrails, crushed grass, amoebic mud—O, he wonders about real life fisted in his face as opposed to the tang of that scrubby iodine brush he uses every day, pale coffee, nurses' deodorant, the goddamned Lysol, that sweet perfume on everything, that vanillic whiff of a new baby with a leg like a pigeon's plucked wing, that's the odor in his clothes, his hair, his boxers even, not acrid sweat or burned cornmeal from a cast-iron pot, but this rosy pomander of life, the smell that singularly makes him feel old. That and those candy stripers.
More bourbon.
(Aah, shoot, what I wouldn't do for some Brunswick stew. Like my mother used to make). Knocks off his shoes and lays his feet back on the desk. Tosses the empty Triscuit box in a slow lob across the room, missing the trash can and spilling a soft cracker dust.
Damn.
A tentative cause for his demise:
Above his fine head of hair, in room 233G, on the second floor, a woodsy conference room for mucky-mucks, they are meeting, discussing Dr. C.R. Ash with furrowed brows, talking of a certain Baby Hodges, and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC, in the doctor talk), and the various protocol of feeding, and C.R.'s blatant misconduct and out-and-out irresponsibility. Therefore, unbeknownst to most of the hospital, but not C.R. himself, nor his secretary, they are drawing up excuses to fire the man.
Immediately.
C.R. is impatient. Half sad and half happy, half drunk, half a hard-on thinking of a young candy striper (her thighs, Shrub, soft as melon meat). He has written, scratched out a letter on a piece of parchment paper he found in a specialty paper store (it looked good, like it coulda been Lee's own type of paper, Mosby might've had that type of paper, it works, you coulda, Shrub), written in pen and ink and sealed it with wax, and the letter says:
Dear Sirs and Madam:
Having received communications from your office and elsewhere, and being desirous of knowing what my rank really is, have the goodness to enlighten me accordingly and oblige,
Very Respt yrs obt svt C.R. Ash Commanding 1st Specl Batt Bali's Bluff Babies Hospital
C.R. copied this directly from a journal on the battle of Bali's Bluff he was reading. It seemed important-sounding and he liked the jokiness of it and also, C.R. did not give a hoot if those mastodons choked on their own upchuck. He waited, drank, and drew up another letter with the pen and ink:
Dear Sirs and Madams,
Being in arrest awaiting charges I respectfully request that the arrest may be suspended and I may be permitted to serve in some capacity as a candy striper's assistant. I believe the uniform will suit my willowy frame. I am sure you gentlemen will appreciate how important a candy striper is to this fine establishment.
Very Respt yrs obt svt, Dr. C.R. Ash
It gave him momentary pleasure to imagine those grayed old creatures in the wooded room reading that and saying What? and how, fast as buttermilk poured across a linoleum floor in that hot sticky Virginia air, it would spread to everyone in that hospital, full of bleach-washed bloody smocks and hacked limbs and cancerous globs and hypodermic needles and crying children and steamed green beans the color of army fatigues, soon everyone that worked there would say What? It was only, though, a flickering pleasure. Like satisfying himself in the executive men's room as he heard his longtime friend and comrade, Dr. Pendleton Compton, washing his hands while he thought furtively of the patient who turned him on, it was a fleeting thing, over in a second, a brief quiver which left him flattened with regret.
2.
His birdish secretary for sixteen years now with shaking hands because she knows there is something gravely wrong, first, a certain issue with a candy striper and now, well, the bourbon, this weird letter, poor Dr. C.R. all bleary, talking to the painting (You know Betty, don't you, Shrub?), mumbling about his old dog. She sits outside the room, poised in feline expectancy for the tiniest sign.
Of what to do. Hands in her lap. Her computer screensaver awhirl with cats. She waits.
This is Betty Owens, native of the area, faithful aide-de-camp.
She's been a good secretary these sixteen years, out of love, not job responsibility. Fifty, a tiny puckered mountain wren, bones with a skin crust, her figure almost adolescent, wraith in silhouette but for the papery crook starting in the shoulders, up close her eyes, wide and brown, still seem to belong to a smudge-faced imp, she wrests them around the room, flitting, searching for a place to land. Her hair, short brown bob held in place by a single hairband of grosgrain, very simple cotton Talbots clothing and her mother's pearls, a brooch of a cat with pearled eyes given as a gift by a patient, Betty saves things, like lace remnants, rubber bands from the mail, like C.R.'s whole career, she scoots around and puts out fires.
It would be stated, if Betty were doing so, that she is also the proud owner of three cats, my pride and joys, oh, they are quite unique little personalities, I mother them, I care for them like a mother would, Charlie, Mariah, Dunny. Dunny is the rascal, the baby of the lot. He rips up my good chairs, pulls out my needlepoint, they get heavy cream in the evening for their coats. She reads Thackeray, she'd say, and Dickens and Thoreau, though her bedside table reveals Jude Deveraux, and so she consumes those novels se-cret-ly.
C.R. is in a bleary mood, the type of mood liquor brings on, the kind that doesn't care for the moments to come, but focuses in a mopish way on the past. It's getting dark outside his large window in his office in the hospital, the night wintery amidst the background of plush evergreens, and it may snow, it has that crisp stillness in the air. It's a good night for all, working with the usual diligent patter, the green-smocked padding around. Clumps of pastel-draped workers around the various sectionals created for the admittance of patients and bulletin-boarded updates. The ill in the various examining rooms, some silently staring, others entombed in plastic devices. The sweet shudder of the automatic doors swish to the moving feet, the beds, the mourning, the celebrating, the afraid. All lies in normal pace in the electrified cacophony of beeps and clicks, the technological backdrop of a hospital murmur, yet there exists a promise of frivolity, for tonight, at 7:30, will be the holiday party over in the huge main conference room of the Lord Fauquier Wing, the invite lays propped on many of the hospital's cubicled offices, the holly-patterned card, with the scripted Good Cheer to All! A Dickens Christmas! All interns, all fellows, all orderlies, all nurses, all physicians, gravely suture and insert and snip and inject, yet smile in anticipation: a grog, a grope. Holiday parties can be fun.
Tosses more bourbon, talks out loud, his eyes up to Colonel Shrub.
You remember Candy Striper? Hell, you ought to, saw her in here, right? Am I not out of my mind for wanting her or would you've been as strong in those, freaking conditions, a young girl, a sweet thing, blond, and you know I got a thing for blonds, a really big thing for sweet, creamy, buttery blonds with pink cheeks. Oh, shit.
He pauses and Shrub still looks down admiringly.
* * *
Shrub, my friend, a cc is a small amount, a very small amount, barely a soupcon, so to speak, a dash, a piffling substance, why, I've just drunk down about a thousand ccs just now of sour mash, yet to these babies, Shrub, a cc is a hell of a lot. You start with a half a cc, see, of breast milk that is, tube-fed of course, just a bleep of milk, and sees how it goes. See if they can handle it. That's the art. Knowing how much and when. Because that Baby Hodges had been on an IV since Saturday, a nine hundred grammer and doing OK, that girl not even named him, that's no good, we're saying, come on, now, give him a name, but her eyes all bleary just staring, so we call him "Tuffy," so Tuffy, see, seems ready for a dash of milk, ready for his supper, so to speak, so I order the dose, one cc, one damn cc, but I don't know, Shrub, I don't know.
Bourbon required.
Back to the one cc, after making this choice I proceeded to instruct Nurse to gavage him, you know, Shrub, we stick a tube down his esophagus to the stomach and hook a syringe on there and just let, you know, let him have the drop, no big deal though I sure as hell wouldn't like that done to me, but you know, Shrub, this is what we do, sir, it's all for the best of the child, and the little ones don't seem to have a gag reflex so, uh, that's that. Then I do a check on the residuals, check out the contents of the stomach by doing a gavage tube suctioning, unfortunately encountered bile and the kid gets all bloated, bad sign, therefore had to decompress the child's stomach activities—
Performed a series of X rays and noted a serious thickening and a few air pockets in the baby's intestinal walls which indicated to me, a serious state, a very bad complication of necrotizing enterocolitis, basically you see, sir, circulation to the intestines is cut off, sorta, and maybe during hypoxia or chronically poor circulation from, say, an open ductus in the heart or something, the normal bacteria goes haywire and just eats on itself, see, and they invade, then they cause gas bubbles that swell up and the whole thing can break up and perforate and cause all kinds of hell in there, a civil war of the personal body, see, Shrub, and in this case, a disastrous case, a bloody one, a Gettysburg. In this case, morbidity, my man.
Now you see, morbidity is the deal around here. Once a month we get together in that big office up on the seventh floor, they got all sorts of catered victuals, paltry ham sandwiches, potato salad, brownies, all that stuff brought in stretched out in Saran Wrap, yeah, I notice that stuff for some reason, anywho, we sit in that room, have a working lunch, munching sandwiches and chitchatting. That would surely annoy the French, wouldn't it? So then, we talk of morbidity, in vague, nonhuman tones. Case #3—Hawkins: Morbidity caused by sepsis, further aggravated by shutdown of vital organs. Twenty-five weeks, 790 grams. We discuss the doctor's actions with Hawkins. Had an aggressive treatment of antibiotic intravenous been followed? (Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins loped in that Saturday, from Warrenton, at 6:10 because of the call of the doctor, they carried a plush purple bunny for Jake, their firstborn, there was a steady calm inevitability in the doctor's voice, a worsening of conditions, a graveness, he explained, they had gone to BuyBuy Baby yesterday and bought a navy blue stroller—Should we get the green? they had discussed, No, I think Mom mentioned she'd be getting that snowsuit in the blue fleece, you know, the one at BabyGap.) Had an expedient set of bloods been done on the baby as apnea worsened? Naturally, said Steadman, physician on the case, who leaned back in his suede chair, nurses checked the levels and saw the decline, he said in his even factually enunciated voice, we did procedure down to the nth on this one, it was just, as they say, one of those things (I think a border, well, this one, hon, this one of giraffes would be cute, around the edge of the room, did you manage to get that shelf up, because I need the space for his lamp here, is that the phone? Mike, get the phone, honey).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Good Remains by Nani Power. Copyright © 2002 by Nani Power. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.