“Looks like our agitatin’ boy is still among the living,” averred the horse face.
“I’d speckalate,” said Ricky, “that this’n’s done contracted your jewrish strain of jungle fever.”
“Hey, Ricky-tick, y’ever hear about the jew lady asked her husband to ‘Give me ten inches and make it hurt’?”
“Naw, Adell, I ain’t.”
Adell rubbed his palms at the prospect of a joke his partner hadn’t heard. “He fucked her twicet and threw her down the stairs.”
The laughter this time was more lukewarm on Ricky’s part, who countered, “You know what happens when a jew walks into a wall with a hard-on?”
While Adell pondered, their patient, despite his intense pain and prostration, offered by way of an automatic response, “He breaks his nose.”
The medics exchanged looks, then leaned over Lenny in tandem.
“He seems to be ezibiting vital signs,” was Adell’s studied opinion.
“Better get to work on him pronto, Tonto,” pronounced Ricky. “You know the drill.”
“Look, listen, and feel,” Adell recited by the book, the two of them becoming suddenly all business.
“First clear his airway,” said Ricky, pulling rank. “Head tilt, chin lift, jaw thrust. I’ll do the poopillary.”
Following orders with perhaps more zeal than the situation called for, Adell yanked Lenny’s head into a number of unnatural positions, while Ricky turned the patient’s unbruised eyelid inside out. Lenny struggled against their good offices as best he could given the unyielding snugness of his leather restraints.
“Fucker’s done gone into seizure,” advised Ricky, “prob’ly the result’a nerlogical impairment. Adell,” his partner stood to attention, banging his sconce on the ambulance ceiling, “administer traykl intubation and use your large-bore combitube.” Smiling a bit diabolically, Adell began trying to shove a plastic tube into Lenny’s throat, though his victim whipped his head back and forth to avoid it. Meanwhile Ricky was preparing a king-size hypodermic needle, sparing a wink of his piggy eye for the wounded young man as he gave it a squirt.
At that point the ambulance, its siren blaring, began an uphill climb, the abrupt ascent causing the medics to momentarily lose their footing. They braced themselves against the sides of the van as the trauma lights flickered and a defibrillator fell from the wall. Then the van hit a pothole and the double doors at the rear, which had apparently been inadequately closed, swung open. Regaining his balance, Adell must have assumed that Ricky would tend to the doors, because he persisted in his attempt to stuff the tube down Lenny’s throat; but Ricky grabbed his arm.
“Whoa, bubba,” he cautioned, “we’re headed uphill with the doors wide open.” Adell seemed puzzled that his partner should be thus stating the obvious. “I say,” repeated Ricky more declaratively, “we’re riding uphill with the doors wide open and the stretcher’s starting to slide.” He cut his eyes toward the floor, underscoring the motion with a bobbing chin until Adell, a little slow on the uptake, finally took the hint, releasing the lock on a caster with the toe of his boot. “And,” he added, in harmony now with Ricky’s sham alarm, “the got-dam thang’s fixin’ to roll out the back of the van!”
It didn’t roll quite far enough on its own to satisfy the medics, however, so Ricky shouted to the driver over the screeching siren, “Pedal to the metal, Cooter, we’re ’bout to lose this guy!”
Duly alerted, the driver stomped the accelerator, causing the ambulance to jolt precipitously forward and the gurney with its pinioned patient to shoot out the vehicle’s rear end.
It landed in the street with a tumultuous clattering that nearly jarred Lenny’s bones out of his skin and kicked what wind was left from his diaphragm. Its accordion frame having collapsed to the level of the curb, the stretcher began traveling downhill, gaining speed as it headed west along Madison Avenue, veering into the traffic headed east. Lenny wrestled in vain against the straps that held him, his panic anything but blind, since his good eye — its lid peeled back by the medic — stared helplessly into the oncoming traffic. Then a curious thing: he was launched beyond fear, utterly defeated by the sheer moronic opprobrium of his predicament. Fear was no longer an issue, for so complete was his immobilization that he felt oddly secure, as if bound to a mast in a storm. The cars honked and swerved to miss him, their windshields hurling shards of sunlight, sleek ornaments pointing like warheads from their hoods. But as the stretcher gathered momentum, Lenny experienced only an abysmal shame at how his situation mocked the ill-starred significance of this day. What had he thought he was doing in the first place — a muddy-brained white guy with only the flimsiest claim to a social conscience, or any kind of a conscience at all? Did he think he could dabble in history like he’d dabbled in romance?
The gurney rattled down the avenue at breakneck velocity past an automobile showroom, a rubber die workshop, a YMCA. Keeping pace with it — Lenny thought he observed — was the demon Ketev from the Left Emanation, tumbling alongside with his calf’s head impaling his fetal-curled body on the horn that sprouted from his brow. Cars skidded, one sideswiping another; tires squealed and horns caterwauled; pedestrians looked on balefully, while Lenny’s skull throbbed to the point of rupture with the magnitude of his disgrace. When the gurney careered beneath the turning juggernaut of an A&P truck and jumped the curb, its passenger almost welcomed the yowl of his shattered bones and the Lenny-shaped indentation he anticipated making in the metal foundry’s brick wall.
On returning to the Pinch Jenny Bashrig, formerly La Funambula, found a neighborhood past its prime, its citizens gathered in the park to observe a public enormity. She never paused to question the psychic connection that had drawn her back at that evil hour; there was no time for idle conjecture. Without scrupling she climbed into the branches of the upside-down oak in the forlorn hope that someone might rescue the fiddler while she distracted the mob. But that had not happened. And when she descended to find the crowd dispersing and the sad-sack scribe waiting there with the moon-eyed boy beside him, she knew that she’d already said so long to the circus. It was a fact to which she would never be wholly reconciled.
Taking stock of her old lover’s uncouth condition, she had only this to say: “You look bad enough to make an onion cry.”
For his part Muni endeavored to coax his mouth into speech, but so far no words had emerged. It was frightening out there in the open air without a text to follow, and he seemed incapable of improvisation. He could guess that for Jenny the long absence was perhaps an unbridgeable gulf between them, though for him it was as if no time had elapsed at all. He saw that her dark eyes were brimful of tears, her features (sharper than ever) drawn tight with grieving. Unable to speak he stepped forward to lift the shawl, which dangled from her hand, and drape it over the shoulders that her scanty costume left bare. Then he stepped back swiftly lest the gesture be taken amiss.
“Jenny,” he managed finally, “what should I say?”
She considered. “You can say, ‘I’m a prick with ears.’ Say, ‘I should sicken and remember.’ Momzer, you should be eaten alive!” she shouted. She choked on an effort to release another curse, for want of which she resorted to slapping his cheek. She slapped him forehand and back, his head swiveling left and right with each cuff, so that he had at last to grab hold of her in order to subdue the buffeting. He held her firmly, folding her in his arms for fear she might come apart from her violent sobs. They stood like that for a time, both of them racked by her grief, until Jenny’s body began gradually to grow slack and cease resisting. But even then Muni didn’t let go. With his nose buried in her hair, he sniffed the miscellany of fragrances — pine tar, hibiscus, chimpanzee — that she’d brought back from her travels; while his cheeks, still stinging, were further lashed by the strands of hair working their way out of her bun.