Quit Monks or Die: A Novel

DREW DEVERAUX was in his mid-forties. Wiry, bandy-legged and ferret-faced, he moved even now with the macho grace of a cowboy, a man who has met and overcome rampaging cattle, invading coyotes and blown down fences. He woke on Easter Sunday morning in his apartment on Quincy Street, a scythe-shaped sweep of three rooms over a bodega and a flower shop on one of Napara's quieter downtown corners. No bars, no furtive sales of controlled substances taking place under the sodium lights.

    St. Vincent's Hospital stood cattycorner to the bodega. The wails of ambulances coming in at all hours punctuated Drew's nights. Since he slept only fitfully, he found the throbbing notes oddly comforting. Others were in equal or worse pain. Others, too, were looking death in the teeth.

    He got up slowly, rubbing at the bone aches along his spine, where new tumors were doubtless erupting like baby teeth. Three years ago the surgeons had lifted a fat loop encrusted with tumors out of his intestine and sewn the pieces back together. Three months of chemo, of puking and lassitude, had thrust him back into the misery of his childhood, a long, lonely road.

    Always, though, he put up a good front. "Just keep that fucking priest out of my room," he'd said to Joanna during the first hospitalization.

    Joanna Hammerling, a highly regarded sculptor in metal, who was, come to think of it, his best friend, unwrapped a stick of Juicyfruit gum with her big knobby fingers. Drew bit down on it gratefully. Gum and quartered lemons; they were as much as he could tolerate.

    "He gives me the creeps tiptoeing around in here. Preparing me to meet my maker. If I'm gonna die, I want to do it my way."

    "What's your way?"

    "I don't know yet, do!? But no mumbo jumbo."

    "Kicking and screaming, you mean." She had marched into the nurses' station, he could hear her command growling all the way down the hall. "Mr. Deveraux does not wish to be absolved, confessed, forgiven, or saved. No clergy to be admitted, is that understood?"

    Once the treatments were over he gradually came back to himself. He could taste food again, appreciate the sweat on the outside of a good cold beer. The surgeons had done a clever job of resectioning. Thank God he didn't have to wear a bag.

    He was back to work and in the clear for almost two years before the crab bit into his liver. They took half of it out. Livers were amazing; they could regenerate. The blood tests every six weeks for invasive cells were negative. Life, even without another swallow of beer, now forbidden, began to seem possible again. He'd left Graysmith and gone to work at Joanna's, helping with the welding now that most of the animals were gone and he was off stable duty. He fussed around the studio, kept the grounds tidy, but she could see that everything was an effort. He wasn't sorry when she decided to hire a kid to help out.

    Before he'd taken the custodial job at Joanna Hammerling's ranch, Drew had been head maintenance man at the Graysmith Lab. He'd wetmopped miles of tile floors, scrubbed urinals and toilets, scoured graffiti off stall doors and performed a dozen minor repairs to stuck windows and broken chair legs. When the top floor was converted to animal research, blood began to appear in Drew's stools. And when he went on sick leave after the surgery, his boss found an excuse to replace him with this spic Manuel something, a greaser he could put on the payroll for two bucks less an hour than Drew had been pulling down. Man-well; even the name was a reproach. Not that he gave a rat's ass that the guy was Mexican and spoke with an accent. He himself was Cajun, though the only French he had retained was merde and foutoir. But it was lousy this poor slob was getting screwed just so the rich Jew director could put more gas in his new BMW.

    That rich Jew director, though, had been better to his mother than he had been. Every time he came home to make a fresh start with Lottie she ended up hitting the bottle again. She knew it was poison, she said so whenever she was sober and sometimes she was sober for long stretches. But she couldn't keep it up. Hadn't he beaten her up a couple of times when she was crazy drunk out of her mind? And wasn't Lottie drunk a circus act gone to hell?

    For that matter, when he got a couple of beers in him, didn't he go a little crazy himself? Only spics use knives, he'd said once to some faceless guys in a bar; he had no respect for that kind of brawling, preferred his fists in a fair fight. Well, that was long ago and far away, when he'd been a real working stiff, not this broken down herring-gutted fool.

    Even before the kid she'd hired was in place afternoons and weekends, Drew moved out of Joanna Hammerling's bunkhouse to the apartment in Napara. He told Joanna he needed to be close to St. Vincent's since he planned to die there. But he promised her that he would come by often, that he was on call whenever she had something for him to do.

    In the beginning he would have said she was the kind of rich-bitch eccentric he despised. Rich enough to buy her way into the best breeding stock, rich enough to summon the priciest vets, pay top dollar for the fanciest frozen semen. But there wasn't anything she wouldn't do for her animals, and, as time went on, for him. She was the salt of the earth. If he could have said the word adore, he would have said it about her. The only time that word got used in his experience was in church, where you adored the Almighty. If you went to church. He'd given it up years ago.

    Now, though, he was pissing blood. He'd been pissing blood all week, unwilling to face further tests. The doctors had told him the most likely site for a reappearance of the cancer was in his testicles. He was goddamned if he'd let them cut off his balls; he'd die first. Now, watching the toilet bowl turn gently pink again, he gave a short sardonic bark. He would die first. He was going to die.

    By habit, he looked out the bathroom window to the alleyway. Was his truck still there? The rate cars got stolen these days, he was wary. He did a lot of cruising around lately, driving with the bench seat pushed back as far as it would go to ease the nagging pain in his gut; he had to stretch to reach the pedals. There wasn't an east-west, north-south cowpath within a forty-mile radius that Drew hadn't investigated. He knew the inhabitants of every paddock: every donkey, quarter horse, Texas longhorn steer, ostrich or emu — these monster birds were getting popular with ranchers desperate for a quick killing — he noted the condition of stockades and barbed wire fences, the presence of antennae and dish satellites, the peelings of paint from otherwise sound houses, the presence or absence of hay stored in pavilions.

    When nothing else came right for him, he got behind the wheel and drove. With the worsening discomfort in his midsection he cruised around a lot at night, just to pass the time. Into Montandino, up and down the ever-so-discreetly tended tree-lined streets that seemed to him to ooze contentment through pores in the blacktop. Up into the foot-hills of the canyons in the blackest nights, across and through the desert, skimming it like a great bird of prey. He wore a goddamn map of the area inside his skull.

    He leaned a little ways out the bathroom window. The old black pickup was in its slot. Not that it was worth diddley squat, but it ran, it got him where he had to go.

    Which today was to Joanna's, a forty-five minute drive to the desert. They'd have Easter dinner together, former employer and former employee, two solitaries who'd been through several griefs together. The mystery virus that wiped out her llama herd. The wrangle over old Hammerling's estate, which was mercifully settled in her favor. His own mother's final alcoholic decline on the streets of L.A., the sad final trip to identify her body in the morgue.

    Drew knew he looked like shit. The mirror gave back a jaundiced face, a deep haggard look about the eyes. But he could count on Joanna not to pry. She knew he was hanging on by his fingernails. Meanwhile, there would be baked ham with pineapple. There would be Louisiana yams caramelized the way Lottie used to make them in the good old days. There would be sweet New Orleans jazz piping through the artfully concealed speakers as two old friends partook of a meal together.

Copyright © 1999 Maxine Kumin. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-885266-77-4