Phoenix Heart (3 page)

Mr. Jackson looked to be struggling with some strong
emotion. He swallowed hard then managed to get a small, “Yes sir,” out.

The four men walked toward Mr. Jackson’s office in the back
of the bank in total silence. Ten pairs of eyes followed until the door closed
behind them.

“What is it?”

“You think he’s in trouble?”

“I bet it’s an audit.”

“It’s always the little quiet ones. I bet he’s been
embezzling for years.”

“He probably gambles...”

“...has a mistress...”

“...drugs, cocaine for sure...”

“...I always thought he was a little too good to be true.”

“Will you guys cut it out?” I said. “This is Henry Jackson
we’re talking about.”

“Come on, Melanie,” said the assistant operations officer, “you
saw them. You think guys like that come in from corporate to talk about how
many buns to order for the company picnic? Something big is coming down.”

“The only thing big that’s coming down around here is your
mouth.”

He grinned at me. “You know, Brenner, we’ve all been
discussing the fact that we are glad you’re quitting to go back to school
fulltime. We’re going to have a party to celebrate. They’ve declared a bank
holiday. All the schools are going to close.”

I laughed and then just as I was about to open my mouth for
a truly withering reply, Mr. Jackson’s door reopened. The four men walked out
and all of us suddenly realized we had a tremendous amount of work to do.   

“May I have your attention?”

All heads popped up in unison. Mr. Jackson stood in the
lobby with the three men at his back. “Could you all come over here? I have
something I have to tell you.”

Mr. Jackson’s expression was bleak, the other men’s,
stony-faced.

“As you know, I was going to call you together this evening
to announce the results of our savings account contest, but I’m not going to be
doing that now.” He swallowed and looked back over his shoulder.

I looked over at Cheryl. She shrugged and shook her head.
I
don’t know
, she mouthed.

“Instead, I’m going to introduce Mr. Richard Champsworth,
our executive vice-president of operations, who,” he turned back to the group
and smiled broadly, “will be announcing the winner in my place. Mr.
Champsworth?”

As the man in the coal-black suit stepped forward, I felt my
heart give a sideways jerk.

“To begin with, I must say that all of our employees
throughout the system put in an exceptional effort.” Mr. Champsworth looked
much less intimidating when he smiled. One of the men behind him stepped to the
side and I noticed for the first time that he was carrying a camera. My knees
began to feel weak. “You should all be very proud of yourselves, just as we are
of each and every one of you. However, one of your group was responsible for
such an exceptionally high number of new accounts that when the results first
came in, we had the numbers rechecked.”

The men chuckled softly and the crew shifted and looked at
each other, and then, as if they’d rehearsed it, they all looked toward me.

It’s really happening. Oh my
lord it’s really happening.

“But, as it turned out, the numbers were absolutely correct.”
He turned toward me. “Ms. Brenner, when you get back from your trip to San
Francisco, you’re going to have to let us in on your secret.”

There was a scream from Cheryl’s general direction and then
a number of hands were reaching out to pat me on the back and push me forward. The
other man of the trio turned out to have a plaque and a fat envelope packed
with tickets and certificates. The camera flash went off time and again as Mr.
Champsworth shook my hand and all the other employees, even the assistant
operations officer, hugged and congratulated me. Mr. Jackson just beamed and
then he broke down, went wild and planted a dry kiss on my cheek.

Later, I couldn’t remember a word of the speeches or the
good wishes. All that I remembered was this little voice inside saying over and
over,
It’s really happening. I did it. It’s
really happening.

As I approached the door to the lab,
I could hear the clink of glassware, the low whirr of a table-top centrifuge,
and a woman’s and at least two men’s voices.

First man: “It’s the new dish soap; I know it’s slowing
their growth.”

Second man: “Maybe
you
just shouldn’t have sneezed on
the plate.”

First man: “Hey, it’s bacteria, isn’t it? What’s a little
more or less on the dish?”

Second man: “So why didn’t it stimulate growth, instead of
stunting it? Huh? Tell me that?”

“Hey, you’re the one who suggested it was the sneeze, not
me. You can’t have it both ways.”

Woman: “Why don’t you children go argue somewhere else and
let me clean this glassware?”

“Just use the old soap, Peg, will ya?”

I came up to the door and peered around the corner. An older
woman with yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows stood at a sink with glass
beakers and flasks piled nearby. Two young men, one of whom was Chuck Benson,
were standing next to her. Chuck looked much as he had outside the interview
room door: hair still uncombed, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, the t-shirt faded
red this time instead of green. He wore a white lab coat hanging open in the
front. The other young man stood at least half a foot shorter than Chuck’s
six-feet, had thick, dark-rimmed glasses, and thin pale hair combed back from a
thin, pale face. The combination of the set of his face, the hair, and the
glasses made me glance quickly down to his white shirt under his open lab coat
to look for a pocket-protector (no) and to his wide black belt for a calculator
(yes, Hewlett Packard scientific). He stood in front of Chuck, almost bouncing
on his toes, looking wound tighter than a rubber-band airplane ready to fly.

It was Chuck pleading with Peg to use the old soap. The
other guy’s lips were pursed with irritated disgust. “Charles, it’s not the
soap,” he said. “You and your voodoo biology. Why don’t you just bring a dead
cat in here and wave it three times over the petri dishes?”

“Did that last night,” Chuck said. “Didn’t work.” He leaned
toward Peg. “Old soap, okay Peg?” He smiled and winked, and the older woman’s
eyes crinkled up.

She patted his cheek gently with one yellow-gloved hand and
I heard the wet sound the rubber made against his cheek. “For you, anything.”

“A queen among women,” he said and took her hand and bowed
over it.

“Soap is not the answer,” the other guy said prissily.

Chuck smiled easily. “Lance, maybe it isn’t, but it doesn’t
hurt to try.” His eyes shifted and he saw me standing in the doorway, clutching
my notebook, a pen, and a piece of paper. “Hey, you survived.”

I smiled nervously. “Barely.”

“Congratulations.”

I shrugged and referred to the piece of paper in my hand. “This
is room 413?”

“Sure enough.”

“I guess this is my first lab assignment.”

“Hey, great!” Chuck said with a broad smile.

“She’s not going next to me,” Lance said. “There’s not
enough room and I’m not going to be stuck with a first year.”

 Chuck turned, his smile fading. “Lance.”

“I wouldn’t think of disturbing you,” I said. They both
looked at me. “I know your work is very important Mr...”

“Parker,” he said.

“Mr. Parker. I’ll do my best not to be a nuisance. Of
course, if you ever should have time, with your experience anything that you’d
be willing to tell me would be invaluable.”

The pursed lips relaxed a fraction.

“I know how difficult it is having someone around who’s
totally ignorant, and I’ll try not to get in anyone’s way.” I smiled my most
winning, yet humble smile.

“Well,” he said. “Fine, then.”

I saw the woman at the sink turn her head and give me a
small wink before smothering a smile and turning back to the soapy glassware. Lance
looked over at Chuck, but Chuck had a most serious expression on his face and
was nodding at my words.

“What’s your name?” Lance asked.

“Melanie Brenner.” I started to add “sir,” figured it would
be too much, and swallowed it.

“Ms. Brenner.” He nodded sharply then turned and headed for
the back of the large room, the heels of his cowboy boots clicking on the
linoleum. Cowboy boots.

“Very good,” Chuck said
sotto voce.

“I worked in a bank for four years,” I said quietly. “If you
don’t learn about the uptight side of human nature in a bank, I don’t know
where you do.”

“Ah, Lance is okay. Takes everything way too seriously, but
we’re working nights to clone him a sense of humor. So, Andrew said we’d be
getting new first year meat in.”

My stomach gave a little jump. “Andrew?” I asked in a choked
voice. “This is Andrew Richards’ lab?”

“Oh, no, you’re not one of them, are you?”

“One of whom?”

He stepped back a pace and eyed me clinically. “The
quivering females who faint at the sight of Andrew Richards.”

I glared at him, ignoring my heart beating calypso time in
my throat. “I don’t faint at the sight of anyone or anything. I just didn’t
know whose lab this was.”

“Yeah, right.”

He eyed me again and I just tried to look as calm and
professional as possible, with just a little irritation showing. I don’t think
I fooled him.

“Come on, there’s bench space back here. They give you a desk
in the basement?”

I nodded.

“Keep it as long as you can. Space is at a premium up here,
and so is privacy.”

I nodded again.

“Peg.”

The woman at the sink looked back over her shoulder. Her
hands were sunk in a sink full of white soap bubbles with the wet, gleaming
tops and ends of glass beakers showing through. Her white hair swept up from
her neck and twisted in a coil on top of her head. Her face was slightly
flushed and perspiring, but her smile was energetic and her eyes full of life
midst the wrinkles surrounding them. Even with the white hair and wrinkles,
though, I had the impression she was no older than mid-fifties.

“Peg, this is Melanie Brenner. She’ll be with us for the
next six weeks. Melanie, Peg Ryan.”

I smiled and nodded.

“Peg keeps us all in line, plus having the wonderful job of
cleaning up after us.”

“Nice to meet you Melanie.”

“You too.”

“Come on, I’ll show you your bench and give you a tour,”
Chuck said and headed across the room.

I sighed and turned to follow him.

“Relax.”

I turned back.

Peg was smiling at me. “In a week it’ll seem like you’ve
been here forever.”

I sighed. “God, I hope so.”

She laughed. “It’s always the same. Chuck was the same way
when he came in. Just a little more of a smart ass about it is all.”

“Chuck, a smart ass? I don’t believe it.”

“Are you coming, Ms. Brenner?”

I turned. Chuck stood in the doorway to a small room on the
other side of a lab counter, arms folded, fingers of his right hand drumming on
his left upper arm.

Peg grinned. “Believe it.”

I laughed then hurried over to where Chuck stood.

He sniffed. “The first thing you have to remember is your
level in the pecking order around here. Bottom. Got it? Bottom.”

“And you sir?” I asked timidly.

“One rung below God.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He took me into the room and showed me a four-foot length of
black lab top and pronounced it mine. He then gave me my first tour of a real, research
biology lab. The layout was fairly simple, and the lab rooms large, but with
the myriad of equipment, supplies, journals, and reference books, I found
myself walking sideways, keeping my elbows tightly tucked to keep from knocking
against something that would start an avalanche that would bury us all.

The lab had four rooms. The large one I’d first walked into
had black lab benches around three sides. The sink where Peg worked lay just to
the right of the main door. At the end of the room opposite the main door,
three glass-enclosed work benches filled the space completely. Glass panes on
steel runners slid down to close off the work area when necessary. Chuck
explained that they were fume hoods with ventilation fans that ran when someone
worked there. The fans would draw air in so that the fumes from anything nasty
would be drawn out through filters and then vented to the outside of the building.
The fans could also push clean air gently into the hood to keep dirty air from
coming in from the room when someone required sterile conditions.

Lance sat at the center hood as we went by, taking covered
petri dishes one by one from a stack and using one hand to carefully open them
a crack. Each dish had a letter and number written on the bottom and top with
black wax pencil. With his other hand he took a length of wire with a small
loop on the end, dipped the wand in a flask containing a yellowish fluid, then
streaked the bubble of liquid caught in the loop across the brownish gelatin in
the bottom of each dish. He’d close the dish, put it on a new stack, and then
repeat the process after sterilizing the wand in the flame from a Bunsen
burner.

“Lance and I are working on different agars trying to find
the best one to grow this strain of
E. coli
.”

I nodded, remembering then that the brownish gelatin in the
dishes was agar, a medium for bacteria to grow and feed on. A little bit of the
microbiology segment in my general biology course was coming back. Bacteria had
not been my favorite subject, but I was regretting now that I’d avoided
microbiology courses during my last two years of undergrad work.

Lance never turned or in any way acknowledged our presence.

Mr. Personality
, Chuck mouthed. The other three rooms
were smaller in size, but may have had as much or more equipment in them. One
had the international radiation warning sign in yellow and red on the door. I
eyed it nervously as Chuck opened the door, expecting to see people in
radiation suits, red lights flashing, all the equipment glowing with an eerie
blue light. Instead it was a room which looked remarkably similar to the other
rooms. Black-topped lab benches and equipment lined the walls. A young woman
was just placing the lid on a water bath. She looked up and smiled. “Chucky.”