Flamethrower (2 page)

“All Ed thinks about is that damned horse,” Ruby added after a pause.

“But it’s probably not even about the horse,” The Psychiatrist offered.

“Well then what?” Ruby asked. “He’s sick of me, and the horse is an excuse?”

“Not sick of you. But avoiding something.”

“Yeah. Me.”

“Maybe you two need to talk.”

Ruby shrugged. She felt something then. Something crawling down her neck. Maybe someone was walking on her grave. Maybe someone was talking about her. Maybe Ed was talking about her. Or thinking about her. One could only hope. The crawling went all the way down her spine and tucked itself into her tailbone. She suddenly needed to pee.

“I’m sorry, but I have to use the bathroom,” Ruby said, feeling a slight thrill at this announcement. She’d never had to get up in the middle of a session before. This was new turf. Ruby loved new turf.

“By all means, please,” The Psychiatrist said.

Ruby rose from her chair. As she pulled The Psychiatrist’s office door closed behind her, her tailbone began to throb. She stood looking around at the small waiting room. The couch
was in its place. The fish tank rested, as ever, on its low table. Ruby took a few steps toward the fish tank, suddenly feeling guilty over never having cared about the fish. Hailing from a family of borderline personalities who were indifferent at best to fellow humans but obsessively empathetic to creatures great and small, Ruby was supposed to care about fish. But she rarely looked at these or any fish. She made up for this now by staring into the tank. The fish were glorified goldfish. One was white with black spots, like a paint horse. The rest were orange. For some reason, they were all congregating at the bottom left corner of their tank, steering clear of a big
thing
that was taking up a good portion of real estate. Ruby wondered what the
thing
was. It was bluish white and, at its end, where it nubbed up against the bright green fish-tank pebbles, there was something that looked like toes.

Ruby’s spine was on fire.

At the other end of the
thing
, the end sticking
out
of the tank, there was gore. Blood. Ruby blinked and took two steps closer. The fish were in very tight formation, squeezing next to one another as they tried to avoid contact with what appeared to be the lower half of a human leg. It occurred to Ruby that, in spite of the realness of the gore at the end of the leg, maybe this was a plastic leg. A prank by a disgruntled patient—maybe the chatty woman with flowing white hair who often emerged from her appointment with one of the other psychiatrists right when Ruby emerged from hers. Ruby mistrusted chatty people. Their chattiness was either a side effect of psychiatric medication that gave them verbal diarrhea or, alternatively, a sign of profound stupidity. To Ruby, excessive talking
was one of the biggest offenses in the book. Right up there with pedophilia and bestiality. Maybe the chatty white-haired woman had snapped at having no one to chatter at and had put a plastic leg in the fish tank to make the world pay for its collective sin of not listening to her.

Ruby took one more step toward the leg.
This is no plastic leg
, Ruby thought. But it still didn’t seem real.

Ruby reviewed her mental pictures of the previous half hour. She remembered glancing at the fish tank on the way into The Psychiatrist’s office. There had not been a leg in the tank at that time.

Ruby noticed that the big toe of the foot was caught on some decorative coral. She started backing away and bumped up against a wall. She turned around and opened The Psychiatrist’s door. The Psychiatrist smiled at Ruby expectantly.

“Jody,” Ruby said, “something has gone wrong.”

At first The Psychiatrist didn’t move. She knitted her eyebrows and looked concerned. Ruby had to begin gesticulating wildly to get Jody up from her chair and into the waiting room.

Jody Ray’s initial reaction seemed to be the same as Ruby’s. She tilted her head slightly, looking at what she thought was a plastic leg. She started frowning at the bad joke. Ruby thought of things to say. Nothing seemed to fit the occasion.

As The Psychiatrist took a few steps closer to the fish tank, her jaw went slack. She stood gaping ahead for a few very long seconds; then her mouth started opening and closing. Just when Ruby thought Dr. Jody Ray was going to pass out, The Psychiatrist marched over to the fish tank, grabbed the leg, and pulled it out. Pinkness dripped onto the wood floor. The
Psychiatrist’s already pale complexion went whiter than a snake’s belly, and she dropped the leg.

“Oh shit,” Jody said.

Another small victory for Ruby. The Psychiatrist had finally used profanity in front of her.

“Is it real?” Ruby asked even though she knew the answer.

“It’s my husband’s leg,” the Psychiatrist said, casually indicating a birthmark on the side of the calf.

Ruby started wishing she were home, in bed, with the covers pulled over her head. Instead, she was standing there, watching her psychiatrist vomit. Dr. Jody Ray had evidently eaten Chinese food for lunch.

J
ody went into the bathroom to clean herself up, leaving Ruby to stare at the leg and the small pool of vomit near it. Ruby’s body felt very heavy. She wanted to close her eyes and slump down to the floor. Instead, she started looking around the room, scanning for clues. Which is when she saw a piece of paper on the edge of the fish-tank table. Something was handwritten on the piece of paper: “No police. Just wait.”

Again, Ruby felt like the whole thing was a bad joke. Who in his right mind would leave a note like that in the middle of a shared waiting room? What if someone else found it? The leg was real though. Presumably the note was too.

So the leg has been kidnapped
, Ruby thought. No. That’s wrong. The rest of the husband has been kidnapped. The leg is right here.

Ruby felt dizzy. She started riffling through the front pocket of her jeans, looking for a Fireball, which was the only thing other than a cigarette that would help her cope. Ruby kept Fireballs in her pockets for emergencies. This counted.

Ruby popped the bright red candy out of its wrapper and put it in her mouth. It had an odd, perfumy taste.

Ruby looked from leg to note to fish. She hoped the fish
hadn’t been poisoned by leg viscera. She had a stab of self-doubt. This was a crisis, and she was thinking about her Fireball problem and the fish.
But people think strange things in a crisis
, she told herself. Self-involved things. It was only natural. Ruby had been standing on the Brooklyn Bridge when the World Trade Center towers had crumbled. Her first thought had been
I can’t believe I’m actually getting to watch this happen firsthand
. Her first thought had been for her own horrible thrill. At least she admitted it. And anyway, the second thought had been for her friend Patty, who worked in one of the towers. Patty, though a little roughed up, survived.

Dr. Jody Ray emerged from the bathroom. Her face was skim-milk blue, and she looked twenty pounds thinner.

“I’m very sorry, Ruby,” Jody said without looking Ruby in the eyes. “I’m sorry you’ve had to see this. But please go now.”

“There’s a note.” Ruby motioned toward the note, which Jody immediately picked up.

“You probably shouldn’t have touched that. Or the leg,” Ruby said. Before becoming a workaholic horse-trainer, Ruby’s boyfriend had been with the FBI. But it didn’t take having an ex-Fed for a boyfriend to know you weren’t supposed to touch evidence.

Jody Ray kept staring at the note, completely ignoring Ruby.

“Why don’t you let me call the police?” Ruby said.

“No.”

“Then I’ll stay here while you call them.”

“The police will not be called,” The Psychiatrist said.

Ruby thought this was stupid.

“That’s just stupid, Jody.” She had never talked to her psychiatrist like this. She had cursed up a storm, ranted, and raved, but she’d never accused The Psychiatrist of being stupid for the simple reason that she wasn’t. Until now. This was stupid. Ruby sucked her Fireball.

“Are you
eating
something?” The Psychiatrist asked, finally looking at Ruby.

“Fireball,” Ruby shrugged. She’d talked about her Fireball problem in therapy. Had mentioned that even while putting in fifty miles on her bicycle, she sometimes sucked on a Fireball. She had tangentially speculated aloud as to whether Lance Armstrong, the Secretariat of bike riders, had ever had a Fireball. She preferred speculating about Lance Armstrong’s possible familiarity with Fireballs to confiding what was inside her. The pit of dread she woke up with most mornings. The dread that didn’t leave until she either got on her bike or went to take care of Jack, the retired racehorse she kept at a rundown stable in the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn.

“Can you
not
do that?” The Psychiatrist was staring at Ruby’s mouth, genuinely offended that Ruby would suck on a piece of candy at a time like this.

“Sorry,” Ruby said, removing the Fireball. She thought about the times Ed had asked her not to chew huge wads of gum. Ruby had trouble with moderation. She was fairly well adjusted, she had loved her late father, and she cherished her eccentric mother and difficult sister. She had had an alcohol problem and churned through a fair amount of love affairs, but who hadn’t. On the whole, she was friends with herself. She just wasn’t moderate.

Jody suddenly ducked back into the bathroom. Maybe another round of vomiting. Ruby stared at the half-sucked Fireball she was still holding in her hand. The red food-coloring coating was gone, and all that was left was a little white ball.

When Jody emerged, she was holding a garbage bag. Before Ruby could say anything, The Psychiatrist reached down, picked her husband’s leg off the floor, and put it in the garbage bag. Ruby was glad she’d spit that Fireball out.

Ruby watched her psychiatrist tie a knot in the top of the garbage bag, walk into her office, and deposit the whole thing in a Carnegie Hall tote bag. Ruby didn’t know what offended her most, the defilement of the Carnegie Hall tote bag or her psychiatrist’s close-to-cavalier comportment.

Jody marched back out of her office and suddenly grabbed Ruby’s elbow and unceremoniously guided her to the front door.

“Hey!” Ruby said as The Psychiatrist closed the door in her face.

Ruby stood there, blinking into the day. It was still bright under a cheerful, glaring orb of sun, but to Ruby it felt as though the temperature had plummeted. She shivered.

Ruby’s first instinct was to call Ed even though Jody had ordered her not to involve him. She deliberated. Fished her phone out of her bright green backpack. As she stood holding the phone, it started vibrating in her hand. She flipped it open.

“Yeah?” She’d answered without checking the incoming number. Always dangerous.

“It’s Ed.” He sounded harried.

“Hi. You okay?” Ruby tried not to think of Jody or of the husband’s leg.

“I’ll be late,” Ed said defensively.

“Of course,” Ruby said.

“Don’t be like that,” he said.

“I’m not,” Ruby lied. “I was going to cook something,” she added. “I’ll leave some in the fridge for you.” Cooking
something
usually translated into Tofu Surprise. Cubes of tofu sautéed with vegetables and cayenne pepper. It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t good either.

“Thanks,” Ed said. “Everything okay?”

Ruby envisioned the leg.

“I’m just leaving Jody Ray’s,” she said.

“Oh.” Ed never asked about her sessions. Ruby didn’t know if this was due to a general distrust of psychiatry or to the fact that Ruby was seeing Jody in order to deal with the murder of an ex-lover.

“How’s Juan the Bullet?” Ruby tried to sound cheerful, optimistic, anything but what she was.

“I think he’s better,” Ed said. “But I probably can’t tell anymore. I’m worrying so much, objectivity’s out the window. Never mind sanity.”

“I know,” Ruby said.

“I’m sorry,” Ed said. “Sorry for how distracted I’ve been.”

“It’s fine,” Ruby said. “Don’t worry.”

There was an amiable moment of silence. Then Ruby told Ed she was heading out to the barn to do her chores. In exchange for free board for Jack Valentine, the former racehorse who’d been given to her when a small fracture had ended his racing
career, Ruby mucked out stalls, cleaned tack, and groomed the eight horses that lived in a ramshackle barn owned by her friend Coleman.

“I’ll see you when you get home,” Ruby said. “I’ll wait up.”

“That would be nice,” Ed said softly.

Ruby flipped her phone shut. She half expected Ed to call back and ask her what was wrong. He didn’t.

Ruby walked toward the signpost she’d chained her bike to. She preferred riding a bicycle through dense murderous traffic to taking the subway. She did have a car, but driving—which she’d just learned to do—terrified her. So she rode her bike. She sometimes felt like some sort of freak for riding a bicycle everywhere, but bike riding wasn’t just the province of stoned messengers and people who worked in amusement park museums. In fact, thousands of New Yorkers did everything from ride all over the city in massive groups to race eight-thousand-dollar carbon-fiber bikes at the crack of dawn in Central Park. Though Ruby got her share of insults and angry drivers trying to kill her for sport, the bike was better than mass transit.

Ruby put two fingers in her pocket and found another Fireball. She popped it into her mouth then slowly pedaled east.

I
t was close to rush hour, the noise was dizzying, and the air hung thick over the buzzing traffic. A cab tried to kill Ruby, and she hated New York. Everyone who loved New York hated New York and fantasized about moving to Vermont. Some actually did move to Vermont. They pretended to be happy there, but Ruby knew they were secretly cold and bored. So she stayed in New York.

Ruby crossed through Queens to where it nudged up against the ass-end of Brooklyn. Planes flew low, homing in on nearby JFK Airport. Here and there, a seagull cut a path through the polluted sky.