A Dying Pumpjack

Previously: The sisters visit a tailor so Batya can finally get some new pants. Then a specter from Bat’s past (at first I typed “pants” lol) appears, wanting the money she owes the Hand. She of course doesn’t have it so the guy shoots Mina in the knee.

— 51 —

Batya doesn’t really remember the last half hour. She vaguely remembers making a guttural animal noise, but doesn’t remember trying to decide which of Delfino’s fabrics would act as the best bandage for her sisters bloody shattered knee, and, for some reason, settling on seersucker. She also doesn’t remember putting on her brand new slacks. Nor does she remember using Delfino’s phone to call Hawthorne Grain HQ, or screaming at Margaret, or Margaret telling her what to do and where to go. She definitely doesn’t remember Margaret saying, “This is good timing, actually, I’ve been wanting to see how the good doctor deals with something serious.”

Mostly she remembers the shit-eating look on Vinnie’s face right before he turned tail, and the terrified look on Mina’s face right before she passed out.

Bat carried Mina to the far side of the Crater and is now outside a cramped building featuring a physician’s shingle gently swinging in the breeze. There are no words on it, just a symbol that looks like a triangle stabbing into an upside-down V. The door is steel and unwelcoming and pockmarked with welts from shotgun shells.

With a grunt, Bat moves her sister’s body so it’s draped over her shoulder, then pounds on the door. Eventually she hears a series of metallic squeaks, slow and rhythmic, and then the door opens a crack and a very tall but slouchy automaton peers out. It’s made of copper long since fallen to verdigris and reeks of burning motor oil. Its head looks like it was constructed from a diver’s helmet except the faceplate’s been replaced with a speakerbox and a thick tangle of wiring that looks like it’s being vomited down into a hole near where its heart would be.

“Hello / good morning / I am Champ!” it says, a perky voice coming out of the speaker’s holes, sounding stitched together from several different scratched-up phonograph records.

“There a doctor here?” Bat yells at the thing.

“Hello / good morning / I am Champ / are you here to see the doctor / good afternoon!”

“Yes, dingus! Let me in!”

“Good afternoon / I am Champ / the doctor!”

“You’re the doctor?”

“Hello / good morning / you’re the doctor?” it says, that last part in Bat’s voice.

Then it’s shoved aside by a shadowy figure, his haunted eyes sunk within dark circles, framed by morose black hair. “Who are you,” he says, quiet, rumbly. “What is this.”

“My sister here got kneecapped, you’re gonna fix her up.”

He looks Bat over. “You’re suffering from poison inhalation.”

“Yeah but that’s not—”

“You with the government?”

“What government? Margaret Fadima—I don’t know how to pronounce her name, she sent me.”

“Ah.” He scrapes the door open to reveal a long cluttered corridor behind him. He is wearing what can only be described as a cloak the color of moonless midnight. “Dr. Karl Manz,” he says and starts to shake Bat’s hand but then examines his own and thinks better of it. “Please excuse my assistant,” he says, then turns to the automaton towering next to him. “It is not allowed to answer the door, is it?”

“No sir!” Champ says, putting its arm around the doctor, who shrugs it off.

“Come,” Dr. Manz says.

The passageway is lit by a series of mechanic’s drop lights dangling from exposed pipes, connected by swarms of yellow extension cords. They pass cobwebby shelves of jelly jars containing lumpy masses which Bat hopes is summer fruit. The air is close. Dr. Manz’s cloak flows behind him like a river to hell. Champ sounds like a dying pumpjack.

They emerge into a lab that, in terms of sterility, is the polar opposite of White Clinic. Work tables covered in unwashed surgical instruments, sinks filled with dirty dishes, piles of dusty books and charts. Manz gestures at a dentist’s chair and Bat gently places Mina upon it.

The doctor goes to a sink and vigorously scrubs his hands. “Stab wound to the ear, I’m told?”

“What?” Bat says. “No, bullet to the knee.”

“Of course.” He strides over to Mina and starts peeling away the seersucker. “Very painful. Champ, kindly fetch the patella clamp, the suture passer, the tissue elevator, the orthopedic mallet, and the tibial bone fenestrator.”

Champ perks up, makes a sound like a car being shifted into the wrong gear, then struts toward a refrigerator next to an x-ray viewer. The door looks like it’s been torn off and reattached many times.

Manz flings his cloak from his body, snaps on some latex gloves. “Your sister, you say?”

“That’s right,” Bat says. “And listen, I don’t know if you’re like an alleyway sawbones or dog surgeon or what, but I need you to put gusto in this repair or we’re gonna have a real problem, you and me.”

“How dare you.” His glare is almost lusty in its disdain.

Champ comes over with a bottle of soy sauce.

Manz scowls. “That is not what I asked for. Go sit in the corner.”

“No / thank you / good morning!”

“Champ, go sit and talk to your predecessor, maybe together you can teach each other the basics of instrument retrieval.”

The automaton plays a recording of quiet sobbing, then turns and goes to the corner where an even more beat-up hunk of corroded metal sits, this one just a torso with a couple ear trumpets emerging from its neck. After a complex series of leg joint adjustments, Champ manages to crouch down and start a hushed conversation with the thing:

— do you like fried chicken

— why do you like fried chicken

— why do you think you like fried chicken

— why do you think you like i like fried chicken

Manz gathers a handful of tools from an emergency room crash cart, then jabs his finger at a medicine cabinet on the far wall. “Take a healthy swig of anything on the second shelf,” he tells Bat. “It’ll cheer you up and keep you from irritating me during the operation. Second shelf from the top, mind you.”

Bat stumbles over there and, en route, catches a glimpse of Mina’s knee. She feels sick at the absolute wrongness of the sight. And the wrongness of her sister’s slack, ashen face. Her mouth hanging open. No constant stream of words flowing out of it.

She looks dead, Bat thinks. That’s what dead looks like. And it might as well have been me who pulled the trigger.

She has one of her five-second cries. And the constructs on the floor say:

— i like you do you like me

— i like you do you know why

— do you know why you like i like you

— why do you know why i like i like i like you

+++

This has been Chapter 51 of Chokeville, a novel by Josh Fireland.

Next up: Doctor Juice