A Small Matter Read online

  A SMALL MATTER

  by M. M. WILSHIRE

  Copyright © 2010 M.M. Wilshire

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

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  Chapter 1

  Though nothing can bring back the hour

  Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

  We will grieve not, rather find

  Strength in what remains behind.

  It seemed a small matter, Vickie thought, the way Dr. Bienenfeld handed out her death sentence, as though they were talking about somebody else. He was much too young to be the angel of death. At 48, Vickie did not consider herself all that old, but this guy was just a big kid in a white coat. The kid said a lot of things she didn’t really hear, but he finally came out with it.

  “The path report on your biopsy came back positive,” he said.

  "English, please," she said, her voice a frightened squeak.

  “Sorry. It's cancer. A bad one."

  "Where?"

  The doctor broke eye contact briefly and looked down. Always a bad sign. "The pancreas,” he finally announced.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes," the doctor replied, looking up.

  Vickie lost all sense of time, and wondered how long she had been sitting there with the doctor. It could have been 30 seconds or it could have been a day.

  Of course, Dr. Bienenfeld knew what time it was. He had seen more than his share of patients hit with the shock of bad news which instantly separated them from their normal sensibilities. He could judge their strength for the fight which lay ahead by the time it took them to come out of it. In Vickie's case, the shock had been complete, had apparently caused a total disassociation, but as her eyes returned to meet his, she was already coming back after only a few seconds. She was a strong one. She had a chance.

  “Is it because of my dog?” Vickie asked.

  “What?” the doctor said.

  “Was it my dog?”

  The dog question again. Completely baffling the young doctor. He looked questioningly at the brother of the girl, a man who called himself Dalk. The brother stood guard at one side of the table, a stocky, short, muscular blond man in his late thirties who’d ratcheted a few shades paler at the news.

  “Doctor Bienenfeld,” the brother said, “her dog got cancer and died last year. Vickie’s in shock. She’s asking you if the dog’s cancer might have been contagious, if she could have caught her cancer from the dog.”

  Aha, the doctor thought--Dalk had understood his sister’s irrational dog question, had made the complex and creative association missed by himself--the more scientific, left-brained man of the two.

  “No,” Bienenfeld said to her. “It’s not because of your dog.”

  Vickie slid off the examining table. Her eyes went straight past his own, to a point on some distant horizon he hoped he’d never see. With her brother's arm wrapped around her shoulder, she left the office.

  "Christ, I need a drink," she said.

  They exited the Kaiser Hospital compound and found themselves in a late afternoon L.A. windstorm as they made their way to her car, their forward progress hampered by a brisk Santa Ana crosswind. Folded into the cross currents were the crisp stirrings of a deepening October, its smell of dead leaves and photochemical smog quickening their nostrils enough to pick up the scent of Pacific Ocean mist delivered from over the mountains twenty miles away.

  Dalk stopped her and took her by the shoulders. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “It's the end of my world. There is no cure.”

  “You’re in shock. Perhaps I should drive.”

  “I’m driving.”

  They slid down into the cockpit and Vickie eased the classic Z-28 muscle car past the parking kiosk in time to make the green light before heading south on Woodman, the lean red body of the machine slipping easily in and out of the dense pack of lesser surrounding cars, it’s primeval, prominent exhaust rumble blanketing the sonic landscape like a fog. She burned the tires around the corner at Vanowen and locked in to the slow westward crawl through the Van Nuys barrio to Sepulveda, taking the former mule path, now turned major artery, north to The Lamplighter, a small cop bar which shared a strip mall with a liquor store and laundromat.

  They took seats at the bar in the juke-sonic joint and let their souls float a minute on the skyscraping falsetto of the Chilites, doing Hot on a Thing, the lead singer Eugene’s wailing caterwaul soaring over a funky cloud bank of close harmonies. The place was loosely populated, with a couple of cops playing pool, and two old geezers down on the end humping dice.

  Mulroney, the big ex-cop now turned bartender, came over and slapped down two cocktail napkins. “The Chilites lead singer used to drive a cab,” he said. “The usual, Vickie?”

  “Not tonight. We’ll both take Blackjack neat and keep ‘em coming.”

  Mulroney--a hulking, red-faced Irishman who’d spent a former life walking a beat and carrying justice to the punks in the bad neighborhoods all over L.A.--had a good eye and quickly read her face with disarming accuracy. He set the drinks before them and studied her frightened, pinched features intently for another few seconds. “Vickie? Why the face? Who died?”

  Dalk stood off his stool and crushed his shot glass with one electrifying squeeze of his muscled hands, the exploding pop lending force to his words. “She is, Mulroney! She’s got cancer! Our Vickie is dying!”

  All heads turned in the psychic void left by his words.

  “I’ve got pancreatic cancer,” Vickie said.

  Mulroney, in spite of his formidable bulk, seemed to shrink a size or two. He grabbed the revolver on his belt and with a quick, practiced movement, blew off an ear-smoking round into the jukebox. The ensuing silence in the place was palpable, like something to be worked with tools until a suitable explanation appeared.

  Vickie, hands shaking, fumbled a couple of pain pills out of their container and placed them on her tongue before downing half the whiskey. “To love and death and that whole thing,” Vickie cried. She raised her glass high. “And to good cops and good friends.”

  The motley crew surrounding her raised respectful glasses to their friend as the gunsmoke, like a departing soul, drifted slowly upward.

  Chapter 2

  They’d been hard at it for nearly four hours, interrupted only by a time-out to gobble down a couple of Mulroney’s big sloppy burgers accompanied by a large pile of greasy, batter-dipped potato slabs he called his “tombstones”. Vickie, having gone to freshen her face, stood before the mirror in the powder room and took a dazed appraisal of herself while freshening her lipstick, the new one, blatantly sexy, Cherry Crush. Only tonight it didn’t feel sexy, it felt stupid and out of place.

  She was losing it--her face in the mirror blurred and morphed itself into that of her deceased husband Jack. After his death a good 13 years ago--a closed-casket ceremony--he’d caught a round point blank in the face from a 20-gauge during a building search-
-she’d experienced the phenomenon of seeing his beatified face in the oddest places, especially after a drinking bout, but it had been awhile since she’d last made contact. Tonight, his face was young, unlined, righteous, like a Hindu totem.

  “Oh, Jack, I miss you so.” The force of the missing took her by surprise, the depth of her love still strong. She’d had something special with him, a security almost magical, considering the usual types of relationships found in the revolving-mate world of L.A.

  Jack began to speak. “Soon you will see and feel everything--from the Spiral Nebulae to the Stigmata of St. Francis.”

  Vickie shook her head and pressed a cold damp paper towel to her eyes. When she looked again, Jack was gone, returned no doubt to whatever death-without-tears corner of Cop Heaven he inhabited along with the other good guys.

  She returned to her stool. Dalk was passed out--he’d been gamely trying to keep up with her, shot for shot, but he was too young and fit to handle the spirits in the manner her age and experience allowed.

  “Help me get him out to my car,” she said to Mulroney.

  Mulroney commandeered a couple of buff, younger cops who managed to cart Dalk out the front door and harness him safely in to the jump seat of the classic Z-28 without too much trouble, the job made easier by the car’s low proximity to the ground.

  “You look a little toasted, Vickie. You're not thinking of driving," Mulroney said. His concern was genuine.

  “I’ve got a little double vision...and I just saw my deceased husband in the Ladies’ Room...yeah, I can drive."

  She drove off into the perpetual semi-twilight of the quickening Los Angeles October night, prowling the harsh, neon-nighttime gauntlet of strip malls and apartments, her drunken brother slumped forward against the shoulder restraint. She hit the shortcut through the Sepulveda Dam flood control basin, an area of semi-wilderness smack in the middle of the Valley. There was nobody around and she had a clean one-mile ribbon of road ahead. She punched it and the fierce beast exploded in a tire smoking charge, the rear end skipping around a little before the raw speed brought the body down hard over the suspension. She put the needle squarely on 140 for a heart-stopping few seconds before pounding the brakes to re-enter the world.

  The car was well-engineered for just such occasions and came to a smooth stop at the light, where she felt the welcome aftermath of the adrenal body-shot to her system, enjoying the way her embroidered wine-colored silk camisole felt on her skin, and the heavy sensation of her baby braids pulling on her sensitized scalp. She gave herself up to the enchantment of being quite senselessly happy, and her laughter echoed in the confined space of the cockpit. She was riding a wave of delirium, courtesy of road speed, pain pills and Johnny Walker, knowing it would dissolve soon, and probably never return.

  “I’ll always love you, Jack. Make a place for me up there. I’m coming home soon.” The tears began to flow as she turned into the alley behind her home, beamed open the garage door and pulled into the detached garage. She left the car in the garage with Dalk still in it and stumbled across the back lawn, making it up the porch steps without falling before unlocking the back door and heading down the hallway to her bed.

  The sharp pain in her lower back began to burn white-hot. Tomorrow she’d need to get a prescription for something stronger, but not tonight. Tonight, she offered the pain to Jack. It was a pain which drew all things within her to itself, all her joys and all her sorrows, melding them into a single flame firing upwards toward the heavens. She barely got the spread turned back before she pitched headlong into the swelling blackness of the booze.

  Chapter 3

  She awoke angry, still in her clothes from the night before, the fire in her lower back burning ceaselessly hot where the tumor had seemingly expanded its ugly self from its base camp atop her pancreas into a set of nerves along her lower spine.

  Dalk appeared in the doorway, looking somewhat the worse for wear from the prior evening’s drunkfest. “It can’t be as bad as all that,” he said, surveying her face.

  “It’s worse--I feel weak. I suppose this is inevitable. You can’t expect anyone to maintain their toughness forever.”

  “I’ll start breakfast. By the time you’re out of the shower, it’ll be ready.”

  “Don’t. I’m sick to my stomach.”

  “You’ve got to eat,” he insisted, and made tracks for the kitchen.

  Under a needle-hot shower, the muscles in her lower back relaxed a little. Recent events were beginning to force understanding upon her. She traced her path back several months to the slow, but steady encroachment of the nausea, drowsiness, and inexplicable weight loss--from the CT scans to the hideous insertion of the long thin needle which led up to the grand finale--Bienenfeld’s announcement that she was in deep trouble from a malignant tumor attached, of all places, to her pancreas.

  Until these events, she hadn’t even been fully aware of her pancreas. She was now. The thing had betrayed her. The cancer, she felt, had already started to spread from there. To remove it, she figured, they’d have to go in and cut everything out. These events had forced her to confront reality, had taken away any spirit of denial she might have otherwise entertained. She understood fully now, and with no denial, that she was going to die.

  She threw on her favorite ratty white terry robe and sat at the little vanity in her bedroom. She loved the house, small though it was. She’d sold her former home--the one she and her policeman husband Jack had lived in--a year after he died and chosen this place instead. After Dalk’s semi-recent divorce a few years back, he’d moved in with her. It was a dinky, stucco-covered three-and-two in the traditional floor plan, with all the bedrooms on the north side, the kitchen facing west towards Tampa Avenue--a six-lane north-south artery well-stocked with freeway-bound commuters. Once inside, the fact that the property’s automobile blasted frontage was a complete write off didn’t really matter, and she and Dalk had made good use of the spacious living/dining combination enhanced by a wood burning fireplace and a nice set of sliding glass doors opening onto the deep lot with its detached garage serviced by a back alley. It’s true, she thought. There’s just no place like home.

  From the living room the stereo snapped to life--Dalk’s favorite station, K-Earth 101, which played nothing but oldies, at the moment The Four Tops--Bernadette--the fire and passion of Levi White’s robust-lunged love croon taking her back to 1967--she'd only been a little kid.

  Oh, she thought, Was I ever that young? She thought of where Jack might have been in 1967, and laughed at the thought, wondering what turnings in his road took him to the year he’d entered the Los Angeles Police Academy. Fate had brought them together ten years after his rookie year, over a traffic ticket. She’d had the Z-28 for only a day when he’d pulled her over on Laurel Canyon. Jack had been old school--he’d pulled her over--not for speeding--but because she was a cute blonde in a racy car. He followed suit by waiving the ticket in exchange for a phone number. She’d gone through with his offer for an evening of dinner and drinks. They’d wound up at The Lamplighter, and she’d met his partner, Mulroney, in the days when the big guy was still the King of the Streets. A year later, she and Jack, with Mulroney standing in as best man, had tied the knot at Our Lady of Grace.

  She pulled tight her robe, slipped on a pair of furry house mules, grabbed her doctor’s prescription from her bag and wandered to the kitchen, taking a seat at the tiny dinette. Dalk was going whole hog--pancakes, and bacon, accompanied by little fried potato balls and big glasses of orange juice. He set a mug of strong coffee and a carton of heavy cream before her.

  “Almost ready,” he said. “I just need to nuke the bacon for two minutes more.”

  In spite of her nausea, she knew she’d have to eat. She remembered how her own mother had wasted down to a stick from the same disease. The lesson? When you had cancer, you had to eat big--you were “eating for two”--yourself and your tumor. If you didn’t feed it, it ate you. She took a sip of coffee, frowned a
t the bitterness and stirred in several spoonfuls of sugar. Was her desire to eat, even while nauseous, a sign of her wish to fight back against the tumor? She wondered just how well she really knew herself, wondered if she had the guts to simply sit idly by and watch the tumor kill her.

  “After breakfast,” she said, “I’m sending you out to fill this prescription--my back is absolutely burning. It’s like somebody’s poking me with a hot curling iron.”

  “What’d the doctor prescribe?”

  She scrutinized the hieroglyphic the doctor had scrawled. “Something unpronounceable.”

  “I hope it’s non-habit-forming.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I wish you’d let me take you over to see Sensei Toyama,” Dalk said. “Or at least try some acupuncture.”

  “No thanks.”

  “If you’re going to refuse traditional medicine, you could at least look into Toyama's alternative treatments.”

  Vickie had expected this pitch from her brother. Dalk, after their mother’s death, had left the L.A. area to spend a decade in Japan studying a little-known school of the martial arts, which focused on killing a great many people quickly and without a lot of fuss--but which also contained an element of magic and miracle healing. He’d done well and attained a high degree of proficiency before leaving Japan and bringing home with him his Sensei, Master Toyama.

  Together, the two of them had opened a school in Panorama City, a bad business move which quickly turned into a hand-to-mouth operation, during which time Dalk had married, but when his childless marriage of 5 years fell apart under the economic strain of his faltering self-employment, ending in a bitter divorce and leaving him with a need for steady income to handle the alimony payments, he’d left Toyama to run the dojo alone and taken a consultant job with the LAPD as a self-defense instructor, a position he’d held for the past year.

  “C’mon Dalk. You know how Toyama is--he’s going to tell me I’m possessed by the spirit of a fox, or something. I’d have a better chance seeking a cure from Sabrina the teen-age witch.”