Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 18

Cut to the Quick

"Jesus, man. Jeee-sus, man."

Bennie's leathery skin had gone cocaine-white when Matt staggered back into ConTact.

Bennie ran for the bathroom, and came back, fists full of the crummy beige paper towels they were usually out of.

Thank God for small favors, Matt thought. Maybe prayed.

Blood soaked through the flimsy paper like water. His blood.

"Jezzzzzusss, man."

"My jacket," Matt said, for some reason concerned about blood getting on it.

Bennie worked off the left sleeve, dialing Leon, the supervisor, on the one -button dial key.

"We gotta get you to an emergency room," he was muttering half to Matt, half to his headset, which he had jammed back on, crooked.

Matt found himself noticing details like that as he watched his own actions and Bennie's panic through a numb veil of emotional anesthetic. Nothing hurt. That was the odd part. He didn't feel a thing. Just a disbelieving wonder at all the blood that was pouring out of him.

"Yeah." Bennie had connected. "We gotta close down now. Matt's been mugged in the parking lot. He's bleeding--all over the place. I can take him, yeah, if my damn bug still runs.

Right. We'll go now. If the lines are down, hey, we got an emergency here."

Bennie tore off his headset, looked at the wadded paper towels at Matt's side. "I bring the car around and come in for you. Or, hey! Nine-eleven. They come here."

Matt shook his head. "I think it's . . . slowing. Bennie, I can't go to a hospital. Do you know somebody else?"

"Alternative medicine, man? Now? You're loco. Loco, loco, loco- motive. You need help pronto."

Matt laughed weakly. "Thatsa Italian, Bennie. Pronto. Look, there must be someone in the neighborhood."

"You think I do drugs anymore? You think I'm still some sixties wild and crazy guy. Loco local? I don't know anybody. Well, maybe. Jesus, man. I'm gettin' the car, that's all I know."

Matt waited under the bright fluorescent lights, feeling as if the light itself was draining his color into a blue-white skim-milk pallor. He never knew he had so much blood in him, and so little pain.

Everything felt unreal. Kitty. Her charges. Her attack. His wound. Bennie's panic.

The building door banged open so hard he thought the glass would shatter.

Bennie helped him up and out to the Volkswagen chugging at the curb.

"It's a heap. A junker." Bennie raced around to the driver's seat and put the car into gear.

"No smooth ride. Sorry."

"Better than my motorcycle," Matt got out.

"Jesus, man."

Bennie drove like a demon through the deserted side streets. Matt was relieved to see they were heading north, into the Hispanic area. No nosy big-hospital intake rooms, no sirens and bright lights. He was scared but mostly he was scared of who/what/when/where/why. He couldn't risk the authorities finding out. Not for his own sake, but for his mother's. What was Effinger involved in, that it had come to this?

The small car forced his knees up into a semifetal position. Every jolt made more blood well over his fingers through the damp and reeking paper towels.

Finally the car stopped on a dark street lined with low houses and bristling cactus plants.

Bennie escorted him inside the house, knocking, not ringing a bell. By now Matt was wondering if he'd made a fatal mistake. If he'd killed his first man tonight all right.

He caromed off of door jambs and shuffled through dark cubby-holes and finally was guided to lay down on some hard cold surface. A bright light glared down on him.

An old man leaned over him, skin as sun-seared as the camel-colored leather upholstery in an abandoned junkyard convertible. The paper towels fell away. Gauze pads swabbed the wound. The old guy nodded and squinted, pressing scorched-earth wrinkles into an already time-seamed face.

Matt heard the murmur of Spanish, like prayers, felt a gnawing and pulling at his side as if scavenger animals tore at him.

Bennie's face hovered momentarily before the old man's, smiling like a harvest moon.

"Tape," he was saying, nodding.

Or glue too? They would glue him back together with horses' hooves. Dead horses' hooves.

Wasn't that stuff in gelatin? He would come back as Jell-O-man, maybe lime-green all over, able to ooze into any form.

Bennie lifted Matt's head and forced a white glass bottle neck between his teeth. White fire seared his lips and esophagus, spilled down his chin and neck like antiseptic.

He passed out.

*******************

He awoke to people talking about him in a language he couldn't understand. The rhythm of the speech was like background Muzak, some orchestral samba in an elevator.

He was leaning against the elevator's back panel, its sleek ungiving surface supportive. Too tired to open his eyes, he listened, soothed by the steady basso murmur.

Only gradually did he notice the bundle of scratchy newspapers he was holding at his side, did he feel the burning disagreement of a bad stomachache.

"Mateo," someone said, but that wasn't his name.

"Matt," someone else said, in English.

His eyes disobeyed him and opened.

Light off to the side somewhere and cupboards all around, all he could see as he lay there.

The cupboards with their medical supplies.

No. Kitchen cupboards. What the heck--?

"Get up slowly, man. Let me help."

Bennie spun Matt's legs off the smooth surface while the other man pushed his back upright.

A terrible tearing sensation in his side took his breath away.

"Julio says no pulling those muscles for two, maybe three days. Nada. Not at all. So watch when you sit down and get up, lie down and get up."

Matt nodded instead of speaking. Bennie translated instructions that seemed more practical than medical: take ibuprofen for pain, keep the wound clean, the tapes tight; avoid physical strain. If it breaks open or becomes red and infected, plan to see an establishment doctor. The man kept only two of the crumpled twenties Matt thrust at him.

Bennie helped him out to the tiny Volkswagen, Matt regarding the act of getting in as one of the more demanding of his life.

"Sorry," Bennie said. "Seat don't go no further back. Maybe we should hit an emergency room, after all, huh?"

"Don't you trust that doctor?"

Bennie hovered over Matt. Car engines tuned to a deliberate growl prowled the distance like roaring lions. Dawn leaked like skim milk through the stunted desert trees.

"Listen. He's an illegal. Has been for thirty years. Never learned the English, never had to. He tends people who can't go to regular clinics. He takes you down from highs, patches you up when you've been stuck, he even used to fix the girls when their periods wouldn't come."

"An abortionist? That old man was an abortionist?"

"Not any more. Now there's clinics for that, even if you have to pass the protesters to get there. What's the matter? You sure ain't been in 'Nam, man. There ain't no political correctness in foxholes, or in gook tunnels."

"The same guys who called them 'gooks' would call you 'wet-back.' "

"Yeah." Bennie had come around to pretzel himself behind the Bug's steering wheel. He grinned at Matt under the faint moon-glow of the dome light. "But we're winning this war.

Come the millennium, we wetbacks are gonna outnumber you all in a lot of places."

Matt shook his head, too tired to answer. "What about blood loss?"

"Doc says you lost some, yeah, so take it easy. I'll call you in sick. Told Leon you were mugged, but all he has to know is you were beat up. I'll get you home as fast as Chiquita here can take you."

"Chiquita, huh?"

"The belle of the barrio." Bennie jerked the shift into gear and the car leaped forward like the bug it resembled, a hard-shelled lit-tie booger with no grace.

"So. I'll take you home, but I hope there's someone there to look after you."

Matt received this hint in silence. He now had reason to understand Temple's reluctance to report her assault. He couldn't rely on her, and Electra was just an extension of Temple.

For a moment the bitter aloneness was more cutting than the pain. Then he remembered something--someone--else.

"I'll tell you where to go. It's not too far."

"Hey, Matt. Distance don't matter to me. I just wanta make sure you're okay. I'm a counselor, remember? Can't leave a client in the lurch."

Matt grimaced as the car did just that: lurched around a corner. Every little motion (and the bug didn't have any subtle moves) seemed like teeth tearing at his flesh.

That damn woman, Kitty with claws. Why him? Why this? He shook himself alert. Time to worry about that later. Now he had to guide Bennie, and get ready to explain himself when they got where they were going.

The street was dark, and street lights in this neighborhood seemed placed to aid predators more than victims anyway.

"Our Lady of Guadalupe." Bennie nodded behind the wheel. "I use-ta live near here. Go to church here."

"This is the convent. They're not expecting me."

Bennie's well-worn face added new wrinkles of concern. "We crashin' on a set of nuns at, um--he squinted at the uselessly tiny dashboard clock--five a.m.?"

"Who's more likely to be up for early mass, huh? Can you . . . see me in?"

"Hey, I don't surrender you to just anyone, compadre."

The friendly form of address both reassured Matt and made him aware of how ironic the

"padre" part of it was. Here he was, fresh from the healing hands of an ex-abortionist, wounded by a wild woman, about to throw himself on the mercy of a group of elderly nuns.

"You feelin' kinda green, Matt? Wouldn't blame you. Been a bad night."

"Then it's got to be a better morning." Matt grunted as Bennie worked to extract him from the Beetle's passenger seat. What about the motorcycle? Who could he trust to rescue it? No one. It would just have to survive--or not--on its own.

They made it to the door, Matt nearing collapse.

When Bennie rang the bell, they heard its interior echo, but no one came for a long time.

"In this neighborhood, man," Bennie began.

Matt shook his head. They would answer or not. Meanwhile, what else was there to do, but wait?

But a couple minutes later the big wooden door creaked, then opened a slit. A flashlight probed the predawn dusk and their faces. Then the door swung wide.

"Father Matt!" exclaimed the smallest of the three of them: insomniac Sister Mary Margaret, she of the deaf ear, even to the obscene phone caller. But there was nothing wrong with her eyes, even if her memory was anchored in long, long ago.

"Matthias!" said Sister Mary Seraphina, shocked and angry.

The third woman he had not met.

"Father Matt," repeated Bennie Cordova, beginning to sound both confused and illuminated.

"I need a place to rest," Matt said.

"He's been cut to shit," Bennie put in, not trusting the two negotiating parties to cut to the chase in any decent amount of time. "Mugging at the hot-line parking lot."

"You need a doctor," Sister Seraphina said even as they all swept back before the wide-open door.

"Saw one," Matt managed to say. "Just can't make it home."

"My dear boy, you have."