John Abbott - Scimitar

Tomás was talking about a head floating in a toilet bowl.

This had been years ago in Houston, in the building where he’d lived. They’d heard yelling upstairs and he’d gone up with his sister and his brother-in-law, this shabby little walkup where they were living at the time, climbed the stairs with the smell of rancid oil and stale cooking in the hallway, a whiff of marijuana drifting from one of the apartments, knocked on the door to 3C, and a woman opened the door and told them in Spanish that her husband had just suffered a heart attack. But there was a bloody cleaver in her hand.

“He’s in the bathroom,” she’d told them in Spanish.

In the bathroom, the man’s decapitated body was lying alongside the tub, and his head was floating in the toilet bowl.

“Gross,” BJ said.

Pudgy and short, with blue eyes and straight brown hair styled at a barber’s college, BJ looked like a Georgia redneck farmer. Actually, he was a preppy WASP, born and bred in Connecticut, a product of Choate and then Yale where — to hear him tell it — he’d learned not to pee on his hands, although graduates of Harvard also claimed that singular distinction. He peppered his speech with teenage colloquialisms, sometimes sounding more like a Valley Girl than a man with a medical degree. He was now rolling his baby blues in bug-eyed horror at the very thought of a severed head in a toilet bowl.

Tomás relished his revulsion.

Like a dedicated sadist, he described in meticulous detail the woman in the blood-stained slip, her hands dripping blood, strings of blood in her hair, flecks of blood on her face—

“Barphsville!” BJ shouted.

— and then went on to describe the appearance of the bathroom, which to Tomás resembled the chicken market back home in Houston, Texas, where birds with their throats slit and their feathers drenched with blood hung upside down on hooks and flapped out the last minutes of their lives against white-tiled, blood-spattered walls. The pièce de résistance of his gory tale was the severed head itself, wedged into the toilet bowl, the bald scalp intersticed with chop wounds, the throat ending in a jagged tatter of torn and lacerated flesh where it had been severed from the body.

Sonny was enjoying both Tomás’s story and BJ’s discomfort.

The singles bar was in downtown Los Angeles, not too distant from the hospital, but far enough away to make it seem safe. Safe from what, he didn’t quite know. Safe to get drunk, he imagined. Safe to indulge profligately, without any of the teaching staff accidentally wandering in to cluck collective tongues over the unseemly behavior of doctors in residence.

The Doctors Three, they called themselves.

Sonny himself, BJ, and Tomás, whom they sometimes called Tomasito because of his diminutive stature. Small-boned and thin, with straight black hair and eyes as black as midnight, Tomás moved with the grace of a butterfly, his slender fingers floating on the air now as he described in more intimate detail the anatomy of the long-ago woman in the pink slip, who kept insisting that the two-piece corpse in the bathroom had achieved its present bipartite condition via a heart attack.

“That was when I knew I wanted to be a doctor,” he said.

The Doctors Three.

All of them in their second year of residency at what was known in the trade as “a busy hospital,” or “a hands-on hospital,” meaning a hospital with more than its fair share of broken heads and bullet wounds. Come next June, they would each and separately venture out into the wide, wide world of internal medicine. They had met at the hospital as strangers with Doctor of Medicine degrees. They were now fast friends, albeit somewhat drunken ones, BJ already half in the bag, Little Thomas not far behind him, and Sonny trying to stay sober long enough to determine whether the leggy blonde at the bar was in actuality tossing her lilting laughter exclusively in his direction.

Tomorrow would be Saturday, the twentieth day of June. Tomorrow night, the beast that was Los Angeles would bellow and roar once again, and the citizenry of this fair city on the Pacific would begin flooding into the Emergency Room, complaining of a wide variety of fractures, contusions, and wounds. Normally, the Doctors Three were on rotating duty in various and separate parts of the hospital, the better to see you, my dear. But on the weekend, all three of them were needed downstairs to breach the tide and stanch the flow of blood. This Friday-night respite was a necessary part of the process, Sonny guessed, a time to regroup and recharge, a time of merriment in anticipation of a good night’s sleep before the—

The blonde’s lilting laughter floated his way again.

He turned to face the bar.

Their eyes met.

No question about it. I’d Like To Know You Better, her eyes said. His said the same thing. Hers were blue, his the color of tarnished brass, an admixture of his father’s brown and his mother’s blue, the genes tangled over centuries of invaders in two different lands. His complexion was the color of California sand.

“See you guys later,” he said, and pushed back his chair.

BJ whispered something to Tomás. Tomás laughed.

As he crossed the floor toward the crowded bar where the blonde was still in apparently delighted conversation with a girl at her left elbow, Sonny was aware of his own good looks and the stir, the buzz — or so he imagined — that accompanied his very passage through a room. His looks were what most women considered exotic, this mingling of East and West, the dusty complexion and green-grey eyes, the brown hair with its lustrous shine, the aquiline nose and sensuous mouth he’d inherited from his father, the tall muscular body that was a legacy from his mother’s side of the family. The blonde turned on her stool as he approached, swiveling away from the girl on her left, welcoming Sonny by crossing outrageously long legs sheathed in an extremely brief, blue-leather mini. Blue stockings. He loved blue stockings. Pantyhose, actually, he guessed. Blue, high-heeled, patent-leather pumps. Her eyes flashed. A paler blue than the pantyhose. She was wearing a white silk blouse with little pearl buttons down the front. Long blond hair hanging loose around the perfect oval of her face. Red, red lipstick, you expected a more orangey color on a blonde. Blue eyeliner. A dazzling smile that could have kleig-lighted a Hollywood premiere.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m Sonny,” and extended his hand.

“I’m Corrie,” she said.

“Okay to join you?”

“Sure,” she said.

He took the stool beside hers. She swiveled to face him. She smelled of spring flowers in bloom, he wondered what perfume she was wearing. The bartender waddled over. He was a big fat man wearing green suspenders. He looked jolly and eager to please.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Beefeater’s on the rocks, please,” Sonny said.

“Lady still okay?”

“Corrie?”

“Please,” she said, extending her glass. “It’s...”

“Corona and lime, right,” the bartender said, and smiled, and waddled off again.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

“Is Sonny your real name?”

“Are you ready?” he said.

“That bad, huh?”

“Try Krishnan Hemkar.”

“Say what ?” she said.

“Krish...”

“Yeah...”

“Nan...”

“Okay...”

“Hem...”

“Uh-huh...”

“Kar. Krishnan Hemkar. It’s easier when you break it up.”

“That’s what you think,” she said, and laughed. “What is it, anyway? Russian?”