Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

He pretended that he was among the dying and made himself quite sad with the exercise. The doctor enters. I’m sorry to have to tell you this but all of us sometime. I’m afraid it’s. I know, doctor, I know. And the others. Is it known among the others. That I’m to. And the little girls. Will they or would they take in hand the shy item of a man who will not be here?

From his window, which was none too clean, he saw many a scalped tree and sorry palm on an expanse of asphalt. God knows how, but they say you make friends here. Who never forget you. Payne looked around him. My Christ, they’ll drive their expensive steel in my fanny. And at the end I am to pick up the tab. There you are, doctor. All those simoleons for what you have done to me.

Beside Payne, asleep, a certain misshapen person, an object of great curiosity: Clovis. He had made a mess of his bed. Payne — still starched and ventilated in his back-buttoned shift — noticed that. Rumple sheets enough and they appeared to turn yellow. Possibly it was the abysmal light that threw so many soft, upsetting shadows. Payne felt his face had elongated. He knew his voice would not be strong.

But Clovis slept on, his face running all over an immense forearm. He lay on his stomach and pushed forward with his leg, sleeping like a baby.

“Close your mouth on the therm.” Payne could taste the alcohol. The nurse had that flush, clean prettiness that might have been blown from a single bead of thermodynamic plastic; that beauty so illusively distributed among majorettes and Breck shampoo girls that certain Rotarian interests have attempted to isolate as a national type.

Thinking of what was to come, pain appeared to him in a number of guises, the main one being something minute, an itching follicle, that expanded like a sonofabitch. Why me?

The next time the pretty nurse came, she drew Payne’s curtain around him, thus cutting off some incipient conversational gloating between Payne and Clovis on the subject of the bat tower.

The girl plainly came to her profession via the misrepresentations of Nancy Drew. Fulffing pillows. There, doesn’t that feel just a lot better now? Roll over. She used his entire can to drive a column of mercury. He wondered why she took his temperature there, when she hadn’t before. She was building to something.

He rested his head, wan. Around the top of the curtain, a white painted pipe bisected the ceiling. He could hear Clovis next to him fold a newspaper roughly; its shadow jerked on the ceiling.

The nurse laid out her instruments on the cloth-covered tray beside him: the thermometer, some sort of shaving materials, and a dire rubberoid article with chambers, pet-cocks and tubes. Payne ran scared.

On his stomach, his neck cricked upward uncomfortably, he took a fix on the wall and waited in silence for the first touch. In an endless instant, he felt her tentative fingers plucking unsuccessfully at the edge of the shift, cold fingertips grazing his affrighted bottom, then up went the shift and Payne felt the horror of circulating air. He heard the sigh of some escaping pressure, smelled soapy menthol and felt a billow of soft cream smoothed onto his perineum and backside by the peerless hand of the young nurse. Perspiration poured from his face into the absorbent pillowcase.

At the first scraping, which was simultaneous with the first involuntary little noise from the nurse, he turned over his shoulder and looked. He saw her inclined face behind a broad, heart-shaped silhouette; tears streamed down as she manipulated the razor, rinsing it when it overloaded with shaving cream in a bowl on her tray. This was an episode that appeared in no edition of Nancy Drew stories.

Her cheeks were withdrawn and her face was an altogether imploring image of loss, grief, unitemized sorrow and what not. Finally, she gave his glossy stern a wipe of towel and Payne raked down the shift. She pushed his hand away and choked, “No.”

She broke out the rubber heart, swollen with liquid, and buried its nozzle in his fanny. Holding the heavy, swollen bag in both hands, she seemed to proffer it. Payne imagined the unsightly article to contain ice water. He was impaled on a frozen stalagmite and gritted down hard until she withdrew the nozzle. He looked back to see her tears but found instead that she was laughing silently. It was disturbing.

That would have been otherwise a moment for clear and immediate thought. He would have liked to see what happened to a gesture of friendship with the nurse toward who knew what. As it was, though, his feet made a furious, impatient squeaking on the waxed institutional floor. He ran through a couple of complicated maneuvers — ones that would have been illegal in an automobile: reckless U-turns, especially — just to get around the tables to the bathroom where, sitting, he had an utter cathartic letting-go as though chambers, membranes, tiny bulkheads and walls all collapsed at once in a single directional rush.

When he was finished, that careful, Byronic grandiosity that he was inclined to cultivate was completely gone. And he felt, still sitting, like a simple shriveled fly.

“How long have I been asleep?” Clovis asked.

“A long time. I don’t know.”

“How did I act? Did I say anything.”

“You just lay there and twitched like a dog.”

It wasn’t long after dinner that the nurse came again. She drew Payne’s curtain, herself inside, and gave him enough of her unnerving smile-play that he began to fancy trying something. Throwing up his shift behind she whispered in his ear, “You foul your linen, mister, and you’re in Dutch with me!” Payne, thrilled, not hearing the words at all, not more anyway than the airy voice and smelling her fabulous dimestore jasmine, tried to twist around and kiss her.

But she deftly thrust a lubricated nozzle into his rectum, really deflating him, and delivered a column of fluid thirteen feet in length, though certainly not as the crow flies.

A moment later, catching Clovis’ eyes, he cleared out, his feet squealing like wharf rats on the hard floor. This time, his easement of himself was a progressive collapse of his intestines behind their emptying contents.

From the room, he heard Clovis laughing, “Mae West! Man overboard! What are you thinking about in there?”

“Bombs.”

“Bombs!” Clovis said with alarm. “What bombs?”

Then, after the third enema, he didn’t have to void himself. He couldn’t figure it out. Nothing happened. After twenty minutes of studying Payne, Clovis said, “You go yet?”

“No.”

“What’s keeping you?”

“I don’t have to go anymore,” Payne said with irritation.

“You didn’t go after a high colonic?”

“I don’t have to. Is that okay?”

“Jesus, that is something else again. Not take one after a high colonic. Not after he had one. That really takes it.”

Five minutes of silence.

“Want to have a whirlpool bath?” Clovis asked. Payne focused on him.

Payne followed Jack Clovis into a large room. Clovis leaned his crutches up and hobbled and hopped along the high fluorescent-lit walls. The room was a uniform, clean, prison gray and a gutter ran in the concrete around the base of its walls. In the center of the room was a circular drain that held a metal insert like the piece that is on the burner of a gas stove.

In this room were half a dozen identical stainless-steel whirlpool baths. Deferring to possibility, Clovis adjusted the one nearest the door for Payne. They had already located the john in a military way. The bath was now filled with surging water. Payne reached in and felt the agreeable temperature throbbing powerfully against his hand. Clovis went to fill his own a few feet away. Payne got in with an inrush of breath. He felt the maniacal sensuality of the tropical water ply his flesh, reduce him to speechlessness. Clovis climbed into his, holding on, white-knuckled, with the one hand. Payne sank into seizing warmth until only his head remained above the agitated surface.