"Straightjacket" is the title of Richard
E. Sall's debut novel. To find out more about the author, you can visit our Richard E. Sall
page.
A small excerpt from "Straightjacket":
We stopped in front of the nurses’ station. Her
blue-green eyes were burning a hole through me again, and my heart palpitated,
causing me to cough involuntarily. I sat down to look at Thurston’s
chart, but she fluttered closer. I could feel the heat of her body as she
brushed upagainst me. She tightened her long white skirt across her
thighs, and I felt the warm outline of her legs.
I was no match for this woman, this much was certain.
“What do you know about Elmer Alcazar?” I asked, hoping to
deflect some of her passion.
She stepped back. “You mean the sweet old man with the
pancreatic tumor?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said sheepishly. What I thought was an
interesting case study had been a person to her.
“I was off duty when he died,” she said sadly. “A male
Filipino nurse named Carlo took care of him the night he died. I guess he
went into cardiac arrest and died. Probably for
the best. He did have cancer.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe he had been spared a painful,
drawn-out death. Then again, maybe not. I had never met this Nurse
Carlo. Maybe he could tell me more.
I looked back up at Linda. She was still smoldering.
I had always felt sorry for those poor slobs who had been roped into
marriage. Now I wasn’t so sure. If women
were hunters and men were their prey, I didn’t feel trapped. I felt
enticed.
“So where are we going for dinner tonight?” she asked.
“I know a place,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s small, out of the way. You’ll like it.
I hope.”
I left for rounds, but I have no memory of what happened
between then and dinner. I was floating. I was in a fog. I
was certain that, had anyone watched the exchange
between Linda and me, they would have seen the little blue charges pulsing and
flickering between us.
Linda Marie Jablonski was high voltage.
#
After work, I met her at a little Italian bistro in a recently
gentrified downtown neighborhood near the waterfront. In the past few
days, we had flirted dangerously with becoming the
subject of hospital gossip, courtesy of the network of spies lurking in the
corridors, a creepy scenario not unique to Detroit
General. Hospitals often employed mercenary hacks for the sole purpose of
watching their fellow employees. Fortunately, there were no prying eyes
here, just a few small tables in a cozy, dimly lit joint.
Having worked with Linda for a few years now, I had always
found her striking, but our paths hadn’t crossed much until recently. In
the past few months, I had come to trust her
professional judgment. I had also warmed to her in other ways.
Admittedly, a good dose of my admiration for her was chemical. The
closer we got – literally – the more inevitable a romantic relationship between
us seemed. The tension between us was accelerating everything and had
taken on a life of its own.
Dressed in faded denim jeans and a black turtleneck and
wearing her long, wavy hair down, she looked different, and suddenly I felt
uncomfortable, like she was a stranger. But the feeling
passed, and the more we talked, the more at ease I became. She was still
the
same woman, even without the white uniform.
“So tell me about your family,” I said.
“Ugh,” she said while rolling her eyes. “Trust me.
You’re not ready for the gory details.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, at least tell me about your last
name. Is it Hungarian? Lithuanian?”
“Nice try. It’s Polish. My father was a Polish
immigrant. An illegal one, actually, until he married my mom.” She
coughed quietly and took a sip of her water. “But
I’m not talking about my family.”
“What’s it mean?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation
going.
“What’s what mean?”
“Jablonski.”
“Oh, that. Something about apples. Jablon means
apple tree in Polish. We’re the keepers of the apple trees. Or
something like that.”
Now I understood why she seemed straight out of the Garden of
Eden.
I had hoped to avoid talking shop, but that, like the
attraction between us, was inevitable. I told her about Trick Edwards and
the letter from Arthur Williams to Rizzo.
“I’ve got thirty days to complete ten major procedures,” I
said, “or Little Hitler cuts me loose without my certification.” I
stopped to do the arithmetic. “Technically, I’ve
got twenty-five days after today. And nine procedures to go.” I
sighed. “All this for not knuckling under to a
fool.”
She frowned thoughtfully. “It might be smart to go along
with the program. That way, everyone gets what they want, including you.”
She laughed her goofy laugh. “You might
want to lead a normal life someday.”
I could tell she only partially believed what she had just
said, so I didn’t belabor the point. Much. “I don’t mind following
orders from someone who knows what they are doing,” I
said, “but it’s hard to cooperate with a nitwit.”
I looked up from the menu and found her watching me intently.
I met her gaze, but she was good. I looked away first.
Something, though, made me look back, and when I
did, I found her still staring at me. She had gained the upper hand.
“Are you ready to order now?” the portly, middle-aged waiter
asked. His voice sounded like it had come from another room, and it was
all I could do to break free from Linda’s hypnotic
spell.
We filled up on pasta and Tuscany bread dipped in olive oil
and, after washing it down with a bottle of Chianti, left for her place.
As soon as we were inside her apartment, she pulled me to her
and brought her lips to mine, the front door still open and the lights off.
The setup was awkward, even a bit clumsy, but the
delivery itself was enough to make me forget for a moment where I was.
She stepped back, clearly taken aback by the fire between us.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
While I tried to recover from the lingering effects of our
first kiss, she lit a collection of candles on the coffee table and then
clicked on the stereo, inserting a Coltrane CD and
setting the volume to low. She then turned to face me, one side of her
face lit by the glow of the candlelight, the other in
the shadows.
Her moist and lovely mouth opened, and she said softly, “I’ll
do anything for you, Joe.”
As she spoke, her blue-green eyes softened, and I willingly
entered a temporary refuge away from the nightmare of residency, a
responsibility that left me perpetually on-call and that,
before tonight, had never interrupted anything important, for my adult life had
been spent at the service of my ambition. I ate, slept, and breathed
Detroit General. The long and crazy hours, the slavish work ethic, the
monkish lifestyle – all were part of the package deal I had dedicated my life
to. But tonight, I was answering to another siren, one that fed my heart
more than my ego.
The freefall ended abruptly when my cell phone rang. I
fumbled for it in my coat, which she had been in the process of hastily
removing, and answered breathlessly, “Hello?”
It was the hospital.
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