Koontz Dean-2004-Life Expectancy Read online

  "Dad?"

  "Not this, not this," Josef lamented.

  "Dad, what's wrong?"

  As curiosity outweighed her anxiety, the rattled nurse ventured closer

  to the bed.

  A doctor entered the cubicle. "What's going on here?"

  Josef said, "Don't trust the clown."

  The physician looked mildly offended, assuming that the patient had

  just questioned his medical credentials.

  Leaning over the bed, trying to redirect his father's attention from

  his otherworldly vision, Rudy said, "Dad, how do you know about the

  clown?"

  "The sixteenth of April," said Josef.

  "How do you know about the clown?"

  "WRITE IT DOWN," Josef thundered even as the heavens crashed against

  the earth once more.

  As the doctor went around to the other side of the bed, Rudy added

  april 16 after 2005 to the fifth line on the back of the circus pass.

  He also printed Saturday when his father spoke it.

  The doctor put a hand under Josef's chin and turned his head to have a

  better look at his eyes.

  "He isn't who you think he is," said Josef, not to the doctor but to

  his son.

  "Who isn't?" Rudy asked.

  "He isn't."

  "Who's he?"

  "Now, Josef," the physician chided, "you know me very well. I'm Dr.

  Pickett."

  "Oh, the tragedy," Josef said, voice ripe with pity, as if he were not

  a pastry chef but a thespian upon the Shakespearean stage.

  "What tragedy?" Rudy worried.

  Producing an ophthalmoscope from a pocket of his white smock, Dr.

  Pickett disagreed: "No tragedy here. What I see is a remarkable

  recovery."

  Breaking loose of the physician's chin grip, increasingly agitated,

  Josef said, "Kidneys!"

  Bewildered, Rudy said, "Kidneys?"

  "Why should kidneys be so damned important?" Josef demanded. "It's

  absurd, it's all absurd!"

  Rudy felt his heart sink at this, for it seemed that his dad's brief

  clarity of mind had begun to give way to babble.

  Asserting control of his patient again by once more gripping his chin,

  Dr. Pickett switched on the ophthalmoscope and directed the light in

  Josef's right eye.

  As though that narrow beam were a piercing needle and his life were a

  balloon, Josef Tock let out an explosive breath and slumped back upon

  his pillow, dead.

  With all the techniques and instruments available to a well-equipped

  hospital, attempts at resuscitation were made, but to no avail. Josef

  had moved on and wasn't coming back.

  And I, James Henry Tock, arrived. The time on my grandfather's death

  certificate matches that on my birth certificate-10:46 p.m.

  Bereaved, Rudy understandably lingered at Josef's bedside. He had not

  forgotten his wife, but grief immobilized him.

  Five minutes later, he received word from a nurse that Maddy had

  experienced a crisis in her labor and that he must go at once to her

  side.

  Alarmed by the prospect of losing his father and his wife in the same

  hour, Dad fled the intensive care unit.

  As he tells it, the halls of our modest county hospital had become a

  white labyrinth, and at least twice he made wrong turns. Too impatient

  to wait for the elevator, he raced down the stairs from the third floor

  to the ground level before realizing that he'd passed the second floor,

  on which the maternity ward was located.

  Dad arrived in the expectant-fathers' waiting lounge to the crack of a

  pistol as Konrad Beezo shot his wife's doctor.

  For an instant, Dad thought Beezo had used a clown gun, some trick

  firearm that squirted red ink. The doctor dropped to the floor,

  however, not with comic flair but with hideous finality, and the smell

  of blood plumed thick, too real.

  Beezo turned to Dad and raised the pistol.

  In spite of the rumpled porkpie hat and the short-sleeved coat and the

  bright patch on the seat of his pants, in spite of the white

  greasepaint and the rouged cheeks, nothing about Konrad Beezo was

  clownish at that moment. His eyes were those of a jungle cat, and it

  was easy to imagine that the teeth bared in his snarl were tiger fangs.

  He loomed, the embodiment of murderous dementia, demonic.

  Dad thought that he, too, would be shot, but Beezo said, "Stay out of

  my way, Rudy Tock. I have no quarrel with you. You're not an

  aerialist."

  Beezo shouldered through the door between the lounge and the maternity

  ward, slammed it shut behind him.

  Dad knelt beside the doctor-and discovered that a breath of life

  remained in him. The wounded man tried to speak, could not. Blood had

  pooled in his throat, and he gagged.

  Gently elevating the physician's head, shoving old magazines under it

  to brace the man at an angle that allowed him to breathe, Dad shouted

  for help as the swelling storm rocked the night with doomsday peals of

  thunder.

  Dr. Ferris MacDonald had been Maddy's physician. He had also been

  called upon to treat Natalie Beezo when, unexpectedly, she had been

  brought to the hospital in labor.

  Mortally wounded, he seemed more bewildered than frightened. Able to

  clear his throat and breathe now, he told my father, "She died during

  delivery, but it wasn't my fault."

  For a terrifying moment, my dad thought Maddy had died.

  Dr. MacDonald realized this, for his last words were "Not Maddy. The

  clown's wife. Maddy... is alive. I'm so sorry, Rudy."

  Ferris MacDonald died with my father's hand upon his heart.

  As the thunder rolled toward a far horizon, Dad heard another gunshot

  from beyond the door through which Konrad Beezo had vanished.

  Maddy lay somewhere behind that door-a woman left helpless by a

  difficult labor. I was back there, too-an infant who was not yet

  enough of a lummox to defend himself.

  My father, then a baker, had never been a man of action; nor did he

  become one when, a few years later, he graduated to the status of

  pastry chef. He is of average height and weight, not physically weak

  but not born for the boxing ring, either. He had to that point led a

  charmed life, without serious want, without any strife.

  Nevertheless, fear for his wife and his child cast him into a strange,

  cold panic marked more by calculation than by hysteria. Without a

  weapon or a plan, but suddenly with the heart of a lion, he opened that

  door and went after Beezo.

  Although his imagination spun a thousand bloody scenarios in mere

  seconds, he says that he did not anticipate what was about to happen,

  and of course he could not foresee how the events of that night would

  reverberate through the next thirty years with such terrible and

  astonishing consequences in his life and mine.

  At Snow County Hospital, in the expectant-fathers' waiting room, the

  inner door opens to a short corridor with a supply room to the left and

  a bathroom to the right. Fluorescent ceiling panels, white walls, and

  a white ceramic-tile floor imply impeccable antibacterial procedures.

  I have seen that space because my child entered the world in the same

 
maternity ward on another unforgettable night of incomparable chaos.

  On that stormy evening in 1974, with Richard Nixon gone home to

  California, and Beezo on a rampage, my father found a nurse sprawled in

  the hallway, shot point-blank.

  He remembers almost being driven to his knees by pity, by despair.

  The loss of Dr. MacDonald, although terrible, had not fully penetrated

  Dad, for it had been so sudden, so dreamlike. Mere moments later, the

  sight of this dead nurse-young, fair, like a fallen angel in white

  raiments, golden hair fanning in a halo around her eerily serene

  face-pierced him, and he absorbed the truth and the meaning of both

  deaths at once.

  He tore open the storage-closet door, searching for something he might

  use as a weapon. He found only spare linens, bottles of antiseptic

  cleaner, a locked cabinet of medications... Although in retrospect this

  moment struck him as darkly comic, at the time he thought, with grave

  seriousness and with the logic of desperation, that having kneaded so

  much dough over the past few years, his hands were dangerously strong.

  If only he could get past Beezo's gun, he surely would have the

  strength to strangle him.

  No makeshift weapon could hope to be as deadly as the well-flexed hands

  of an angry baker. Sheer terror spawned this lunatic notion;

  curiously, however, terror also gave him courage.

  The short hallway intersected a longer one, which led left and right.

  Off this new corridor, three doors served a pair of delivery rooms as

  well as the neonatal care unit where swaddled newborns, each in his or

  her bassinet, pondered their new reality of light, shadow, hunger,

  discontent, and taxes.

  Dad sought my mother and me, but found only Her. She lay in one of the

  delivery rooms, alone and unconscious on the birthing bed.

  At first he thought that she must be dead. Darkness swooned at the

  edges of his vision, but before he passed out, he saw that his beloved

  Maddy was breathing. He clutched the edge of her bed until his vision

  brightened.

  Gray-faced, drenched with sweat, she looked not like the vibrant woman

  he knew, but instead appeared to be frail and vulnerable.

  Blood on the sheets suggested that she'd delivered their child, but no

  squalling infant was present.

  Elsewhere, Beezo shouted, "Where are you bastards?"

  Reluctant to leave my mother, Dad nonetheless went in search of the

  conflict to see what help he could provide-as (he has always insisted)

  any baker would have done.

  In the second delivery room, he found Natalie Beezo upon another

  birthing bed. The slender aerialist had so recently died from the

  complications of childbirth that her tears of suffering had not yet

  dried upon her cheeks.

  According to Dad, even after her agony and even in death, she was

  ethereally beautiful. A flawless olive complexion. Raven hair. Her

  eyes were open, luminous green, like windows to a field in Heaven.

  For Konrad Beezo, who didn't appear to be handsome under the

  greasepaint and who was not a man of substantial property and whose

  personality would surely be at least somewhat off-putting even under

  ordinary circumstances, this woman was a prize beyond all reasonable

  expectation. You could understand-though not excuse-his violent

  reaction to the loss of her.

  Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the

  homicidal clown. Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the

  creche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the

  crook of his left arm.

  At this close range, the pistol in his right hand appeared to be twice

  the size that it had been in the waiting room, as if they were in

  Alice's Wonderland, where objects grew or shrank with no regard for

  reason or for the laws of physics.

  Dad might have seized Beezo's wrist and, with his strong baker's hands,

  fought for possession of the gun, but he dared not act in any way that

  would have put the baby at risk.

  With its pinched red face and furrowed brow, the infant appeared

  indignant, offended. Its mouth stretched open wide, as though it were

  trying to scream but had been shocked silent by the realization that

  its father was a mad clown.

  Thank God for the baby, Dad has often said. Otherwise I would have

  gotten myself killed. You'd have grown up fatherless, and you'd never

  have learned how to make a first-rate creme brulee.

  So cradling the baby and brandishing the pistol, Beezo demanded of my

  father, "Where are they, Rudy Tock?"

  "Where are who?" Dad asked.

  The red-eyed clown appeared to be both wrung by grief and ripped by

  anger. Tears streaked his makeup. His lips trembled as if he might

  sob uncontrollably, then skinned back from his teeth in an expression

  of such ferocity that a chill wound through Dad's bowels.

  "Don't play dumb," Beezo warned. "There had to be other nurses, maybe

  another doctor. I want the bastards dead, all of them who failed

  her."

  "They ran," my father said, certain that it would be safer to lie about

  having seen the medical staff escape than to insist that he had

  encountered no one. "They slipped out behind your back, the way you

  came, through the waiting room. They're long gone."

  Feeding on his rage, Konrad Beezo appeared to swell larger, as if anger

  were the food of giants. No Barnum & Bailey buffoonery brightened his

  face, and the poisonous hatred in his eyes was as potent as cobra

  venom.

  Lest he become a stand-in for the medical staff no longer within

  Beezo's reach, Dad quickly added, with no trace of threat, as if only

  being helpful, "Police are on the way. They'll want to take the baby

  from you."

  "My son is mine,"" Beezo declared with such passion that the stink of

  stale cigarette smoke rising from his clothes might almost have been

  mistaken for the consequence of his fiery emotion. "I will do anything

  to keep him from being raised by the aerialists."

  Walking a thin line between clever manipulation and obvious fawning in

  the interest of self-preservation, my father said, "Your boy will be

  the greatest of his kind-clown, jester, harlequin, jack muffing

  "Jackpudding," the killer corrected, but without animosity. "Yes,

  he'll be the greatest. He will. I won't let anyone deny my son his

  destiny."

  With baby and pistol, Beezo pushed past my dad and hurried along the

  shorter hall, where he stepped over the dead nurse with no more concern

  for her than he'd have shown for a janitor's mop and bucket.

  Feverishly trying to think of something that he could do to bring down

  this brute without harming the infant, Dad could only watch in

  frustration.

  When Beezo reached the door to the expectant-fathers' lounge, he

  hesitated, glanced back. "I'll never forget you, Rudy Tock. Never."

  My father could not decide whether that declaration might be an

  expression of misguided sentimental affection-or a threat.

  Beezo pushed through the door and disappeared.

  At once, Dad hurried back to the fi
rst delivery room because his

  primary concern understandably remained with my mother and me.

  Still unattended, my mother lay on the birthing bed where Dad had

  moments ago discovered her. Though still gray-faced and soaked with

  sweat, she had regained consciousness.

  She groaned with pain, blinked in confusion.

  Whether she was merely disoriented or delirious is a matter of

  contention between my parents, but my father insists that he feared for

  her when she said, "If you want Reuben sandwiches for dinner, we'll

  have to go to the market for cheese."

  Mom insists that she actually said, "After this, don't think you're

  ever going to touch me again, you son of a bitch."

  Their love is deeper than desire, than affection, than respect, so deep

  that its wellspring is humor. Humor is a petal on the flower of hope,

  and hope blossoms on the vine of faith. They have faith in each other

  and faith that life has meaning, and from this faith comes their

  indefatigable good humor, which is their greatest gift to each

  other-and to me.

  I grew up in a home filled with laughter. Regardless of what happens

  to me in the days ahead, I will have had the laughter. And wonderful