The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (68 page)

The orderlies (blacks) hate white people. I can tell by the way the short one smiles when I complain about cold bathwater.

You will find out who your friends are. The guys from school. At first they call a lot. Then it’s only one or two. Rick and Brett still come over and play chess. Sally and her friend Elaine will bring over a new album. They always ask for dope to
smoke. Say I am the reefer man. My parents’ friends are not the worst ones. They always try to show they are confronting my “handicap” head-on. They go out of their way to watch me to prove their minds are as broad as their fat asses.

Elaine came over with her friend Patsy. My folks were gone for the weekend. First vacation alone since the accident. A year and a half. Mother calls it “essential.” Elaine’s friend is a big girl but friendly. Pours Dad’s Black Label scotch too easily. I won’t bother with reefer if Elaine’s friend isn’t going to get friendlier. I want to reach down her white peasant blouse and pinch her nipples.

Max finds the diaries extremely satisfying. For one thing, they have enabled Max to begin to piece together details of the crash that had put Trigg in the chair. Trigg had been drunk when another drunk turned left in front of Trigg’s sports car. Both his parents had been corporate lawyers and alcoholics.

Susan is gorgeous. She has long blond hair and big tits. She smiles when she sees me, not like the others who smile but don’t want to look me in the eyes. I see Susan before class, then drop my notebook and feel really stupid because the chair almost tips when I reach down for the notebook. The dumb jock with F on all his quizzes sits and stares at the notebook. After class Susan talks about her fiancé. Two weeks to go to the third anniversary of my accident. In the hospital I had dreams about walking and running. The chair is not me. The chair is not part of me.

Diane, a girl from my language class, walked with me to my van. I wanted to ask her if she wanted to sit in the back of the van with me. But I could see her get nervous. She had to meet her aunt. Something for a birthday.

I don’t know what women really think of me. Even when they start out friendly and interested, I do something wrong. I scare them.

I want women to accept me for who I am and not what I have or do not have. They look down on me in my chair, so why not overlook my feelings too?

I can’t stand people who think they are better, who act superior. Bad day. I miss my swim because the city pool is closed for cleaning this week. I feel the difference in my bowels. Rocky roads as the chair bounces across campus to see if I can swim between collegiate workouts. But after I climb the chair over the curbs and fight the elevator up to the fourth level, the secretary cunt bitch tells me there are no exceptions to the athletic department’s rulings.

Mother won’t have time to see me in Key West over Christmas. The fourth “anniversary” in two more weeks.

My MBA classes look okay. All my friends are in law school. I tell them what I need from life only money can buy. I want to make as much money as fast as I can. Lisa is upset that I am not going to Baltimore for Easter. I can’t tell her I feel like I’m drifting—that I want to date other women again. I want a woman up to my level.

Lisa wants to get married in the summer. I try to explain my dream goal: to walk down the aisle with my bride, not roll in this fucking chair.

Tried to call Diana again today. She quit coming to language lab. I suspect it is because of me, no answer. I embarrassed her at the pool. After class I asked her to come watch me swim. I spat on an asshole crowding into my lane. Diana said she didn’t understand my hostility. I had to laugh.

Lisa calls while I have Diana half-undressed. While I’m on the phone, Diana gets dressed and leaves. Later I find her at the sorority house. She doesn’t want to let me put my arms around her. Goddamn Lisa. Diana says it won’t work out. I ask, can’t we go someplace more private? Diana told me she is dating another guy, but she did not tell me he is black. How does it feel? she wants to know. How does he feel? I ask her back. What do you mean? Aren’t cripples lower than niggers? I say, and I already see tears in her eyes, the kind that used to get my dick hard. I tell her about the orderlies in the hospital. I tell her she doesn’t know anything about them or the hospital.

Dad says Arizona does not have the best MBA program. But the weather is easier here in the winter. In the ice and snow it is easy to fall in the chair. I hate lying there waiting for someone to come over to help me. Time seems frozen while people look at me. I feel all my clothes getting soaked. Finally one of the morons comes over and asks me if I need anything.

All the women in MBA classes are ugly—no—“double uglies” like Rick and Brett and I always called the sows.

The review class is going to be terrible. Boring. Brokerage license, rules and regulations. But I will get rich off this.

Lisa called off our engagement. I try to sound upset. The telephone connection echoed and I couldn’t hear her. I estimate the money I make will more than finance all the costs of the breakthrough technology.

Max skips to the last notebook Trigg had lent Leah.

Breakthroughs in electrochemistry of the human brain. The rewiring of human nerves severed or badly crushed. Money buys anything.

Ike calls from West Germany. Says he’s got a deal over there. They will buy all the blood and bioproducts we can deliver. Blood plasma centers are only the beginning.

I see myself as being superior to the others. I am better than all of them.

Tucson, city of thieves. Third-generation burglars and pimps turned politicians. These alleged human beings, the filth and scum who pass through the plasma donor center, get paid good money for lying with a needle in their arms—an activity they pursue the rest of the day anyway. I could do the world a favor each week and connect a few of the stinking ones up in the back room and drain them dry. They will not be missed.

AS TRIGG BOUGHT MORE AND MORE real estate, he had become paranoid about Mexicans and blacks. He could be rid of his own plasma donor centers anytime he had a hot prospect from the East Coast looking for condominium property in Tucson. But Mexicans and blacks could drift up from the bottom of the cesspool—and it only took a few of those brown floaters to stink up and ruin an entire neighborhood Trigg was “rehabilitating.”

Trigg said he knew right away not to bother bullshitting Leah. Look who her old man was anyway. Rumors went around that Max Blue had never retired.

Trigg wanted to talk about the blood and organ donor business because he had contacts who were developing a whole new market beyond plasma and whole blood. Trigg wanted to use the plasma donor centers to obtain donor organs and other valuable human tissue. Trigg had never known a woman like Leah. He had never found a woman who could listen to descriptions and price quotations for whole blood, human corneas, and human kidneys without turning green. Trigg had seen plenty of big guys faint over an ice-packed carton of cadaver skin for grafts. Trigg liked the way Leah was always thinking. He got ideas off her ideas. Leah was on track about a medical hospital. They could build the facility near the detox-rehab hospital. They would need a regular hospital from time to time for their detox patients. Leah had got the idea for a kidney dialysis machine that would serve the sector of town houses and condominiums that would presumably be bought by kidney patients and their families or by health insurers to house their Arizona dialysis patients.

Trigg had to stop and look in the mirror sometimes to believe his life now, and the new three-piece suit he had just bought. The problem with most of them in wheelchairs was they did not care about their personal appearance. They were ragbags. Many of them smelled ripe. Trigg had always known that to be a success you had to look a success. Money was the measure, and all Trigg had needed was a couple of lucky breaks in a row—a string of winners. Leah was the queen in his ace-high royal flush.

Trigg did not trust employees. Trigg handled all the bookkeeping and banking himself to ensure privacy. Trigg shipped out fresh-frozen plasma and whole blood and took pride in delivering the shipments himself. The Bio-Materials company van had a rear lift system that allowed Trigg to remain in the wheelchair while he was driving. A new Mercedes would not be so convenient. Trigg would have to pull himself in and out of the wheelchair into the driver’s seat and still stow the wheelchair. But the extra trouble would be worth it because the Mercedes he had bought was a beauty—a custom convertible for Tucson’s lovely weather. Trigg imagined speeding along the beaches heading for mother’s place in Palm Beach. He would buy a white three-piece suit for the occasion. All it would take was enough money and his mother would be telephoning to invite him for tea.

Trigg took pride in the strength of his shoulders and arms. He was always pleased when women asked him if he worked out. A stupid question when he was wheeling his body weight and that of the chair around campus eight hours every day before the wheelchair ramps became the law. The worst had been the dumb broad who had said, “Oooh! You really do have a great
upper
body!” Trigg hated the sorority-house piggies, pink and sweating in their bikinis. If they encountered him around the university pool, they invariably shrank back from him as if he were the Boston Strangler.

But when Trigg had finished his laps, if the mood struck, he could always buy himself a quickie with a piggie. All he had to do was offer a coed a joint in the back of the van, and then he’d tell them about his land development corporation and the Mercedes, and the little piggies would shed their tops and bottoms in a flash. Trigg was happy that Leah was a married woman. She could keep her gangster husband and Trigg could keep his panhellenic piggies.

Trigg made it his policy to check the daily ledgers and receipts as well as the contents of the freezer units at each of the plasma donor centers. Luckily Tucson employees were ignorant of the value of blood
and other “bioproducts.” Nurses and medical technicians would steal any drug they could get their hands on. Except for pints of blood or frozen cadaver skin, there wasn’t much to pilfer from a plasma donor center except needles and syringes and the usual thefts of toilet paper and garbage bags by employees.

Trigg had had an idea buzzing in the back of his head for weeks, maybe months; he had not been able to forget the price quotes for fresh whole blood, human corneas, and cadaver skin. Trigg was becoming acquainted with human organ transplant research teams at the university hospital. Someday Trigg would walk again with the aid of their electronic-impulse hookups to his legs and skull. He wanted to help research teams obtain the fresh biomaterials they needed.

TRIGG DIDN’T LIKE THE RECEIPTS for the week from the two new locations. Volume was the name of the game, and no way were the two northwest plasma donor centers pulling in enough donors. The northwest locations had been intended to exploit areas where copper strikers were unemployed. Trigg had placed help-wanted signs in the donor centers because he wanted to find “one of them” to hit the streets and start recruiting plasma donors for him. Trigg could not implement his plan without substantially increasing the number of “resident” donors and donors who could be counted on to return month after month.