Jonathots Daily Blog
(4475)
21.
Onederkind
by Jonathan Richard Cring
Dr. Jesse Kinrod had never done anything wrong in his life. Well, at least nothing to get him arrested by the authorities. At twenty-nine years of age, his vices were limited to failing to wash his clothes, arriving late for his shift at the hospital and allowing his scruffy, curly frock of hair to tumble down into his face.
But no one had ever placed handcuffs on his wrists, toted him away and stuffed him in a jail cell.
Tonight was the night.
Sitting in his beat-up, half-restored Camaro, revving the engine, he pointed the hood at the sheriff’s car and accelerated. They collided head-on at about thirty-five miles an hour, with the most awful screech and crunch imaginable. Shaken a bit, he stared over into the face of the shocked and befuddled peace officer, who had apparently been eating tacos at the time, with all the ingredients now strewn across his chest.
The aging sheriff sat stock-still, trying to get his bearings, then looked over at Dr. Jesse, who was patiently waiting to be nabbed and cuffed. Pulling himself out of his car, the sheriff limped over to the destroyed Camaro and screamed, “Get your goddamn hands on the dashboard, and then slowly—did you hear me?—SLOWLY reach over, open the door and get out.”
Jesse realized his brain was a bit discombobulated from the crash, and decided he should think over the instructions carefully—because the cop was pretty jittery, and had his finger on a big gun, unholstered and pointed in his direction.
Once safely out of the car, Dr. Jesse Kinrod listened carefully as he was instructed to put his hands on the hood and spread his legs. He was searched for a weapon but had none.
The sheriff, still fuzzy, stared at Jesse’s bare feet. Yet another violation.
Neither car could make the short journey to the headquarters of the Peterson County Sheriff’s Department, so a van was beckoned and the sheriff climbed in with the crazy, barefooted crasher in tow, and headed off to the jail.
Once the two men were inside, Dr. Jesse was placed in an interview room, listening to four or five policemen outside his door, whispering frantically and trying to figure out what kind of nut job they had uncovered in the middle of a dark night in the dark town in the desert.
At length, the sheriff entered the room, a bandage on his forehead. He sat down with a plop, exhausted from the ordeal.
He began. “Honest to God, boy, I hope you’re flat-out crazy—because the idea of you having a reason for what you did out there in the middle of the street in the middle of the night just scares the shit out of me.”
It was spoken with such a homespun drawl that Jesse nearly smiled, but caught himself just in time, realizing that this was no occasion for jest.
The sheriff paused, waiting for an answer. Then he probed, “Well? Are you gonna tell me why in the hell you nearly killed us both?”
Jesse drew a deep breath. “I needed to talk to you.”
The sheriff frowned. “We do have telephones, you know. We also have a front door, which opens both ways. You really don’t need to get my attention by destroying my cruiser.”
Once again, the response was so mature and congenial that Jesse nearly laughed. As the sheriff was waiting, the door to the interview room opened and the receptionist stuck her head in, asking, “Does anyone want coffee?”
They both did. She left and returned very quickly with two cups of coffee, neither man in the mood to converse.
Jesse took his first swallow. He leaned back in his chair and said, “I’m sorry. Probably there was a much better way to do this, but I didn’t know how to convey the seriousness of the situation without the drama.”
“I’m not much into drama,” said the sheriff. “I leave that to my little granddaughters, discussin’ their young boyfriends.”
Jesse ran his hands through his hair and said flatly, “I’ve got a story to tell, and I don’t think you’ll believe me. But I do need you to hear me.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Well, legally, I’m not supposed to talk to you. You’re supposed to be shipped off to the hospital, checked over…”
Jesse interrupted, laughing. “Not the hospital—that’s where I work. And I can tell you—because I’m a doctor—that I’ll probably end up with a little whiplash in the morning, but there are no broken bones or contusions.”
“You’re a doctor?” asked the sheriff suspiciously.
“Well,” said Jesse, “when I’m at work I’m a doctor. Tonight, apparently I’m playing the part of a fool.”
At that moment, a deputy barged into the door, whispering something into the sheriff’s ear. The deputy then straightened up, staring at Jesse like he expected him to turn into a werewolf.
The sheriff shooed the deputy out, and when the door was closed, he spoke slowly and clearly. “Well, they tell me you are who you say you are. So for the love of God, son, why would an educated man like yourself decide to throw his life to the wind?”
“Is that a question?” asked Jesse. “I mean, do you want me to answer?”
The sheriff paused. “Yes, I guess so. I mean, I’ve always heard this statement said in movies, but it seems appropriate tonight. This better be good…”
Jesse risked a smile. He took another drink of his coffee and leaned forward, putting his hands in the cuffs on the table. “I was in love with the most lovable woman I’ve ever met. I know that’s a strange beginning. But I want you to understand how this thing came at me…like a freight train.”
He paused. “I was so happy. Shit. I even looked forward to coming home at night and figuring out what to cook for dinner. When we made love, it was total… Well, it was art.”
The sheriff interrupted. “Jesus Christ, boy, I don’t want to hear this.”
Jesse nodded his head. “I know. I just wanted you to understand that there wasn’t any trouble on the horizon. There wasn’t trouble in the living room. And there sure weren’t any problems in the bedroom. I actually had to convince myself that this was the last woman I ever wanted to have in my life when we made love.”
The sheriff just shook his head.
Feeling the freedom to continue, Jesse took a deep breath, trying to gain some sense in his brain. “I think I was gonna ask her to marry me. But here’s where it comes in. She’s a doctor, too. Honest to God—like somebody wrote it for television. Two doctors falling in love in a small town in California.”
He squinted. “But you see, her work’s different. She’s the head of pediatrics over there at the Mercy Clinic—you know, in the middle of that huge forest stuck out there in the sand?”
The sheriff nodded. Everybody knew Mercy Clinic. It had gained national attention, being one of the only hospitals across the country that still offered late-term abortions without any questions. There had been protests and the press corps across the nation and come, asking every man, woman, child and lizard what they thought about the clinic being nearby.
Now that the hullabaloo was over, nobody ever spoke of it.
So the sheriff knew the place.
Jesse continued. “I can tell by your silence that you’re acquainted with Mercy Clinic. But honestly, sheriff, she did the work for just that reason. Mercy. She convinced me. I thought those type of abortions were evil, but she explained to me that complications can come in late in a pregnancy, or there can be dire changes through deaths, divorces, or just a final regret that produces the need for the baby to be aborted.”
He continued. “I didn’t ever believe in it, but I certainly understood her heart.”
Jesse explained, “Well, we were talkin’ about such things, because I took her to San Diego for the weekend, and I was gonna ask her to marry me. I had the damn ring and everything. She stepped out to get us some tamales that she heard were the best in North America, and I was left alone in our motel room, jazzed up, but also kind of curious. I did something I shouldn’t have done. I looked through her briefcase. She had agreed to come on the trip as long as I understood she had some work she needed to do. I thought she was talkin’ about Mercy Clinic—but when I thumbed through the papers, they were all about a man named Dr. Carmine and a place called Onederkind.”
He looked over at the sheriff. “If you’re takin’ notes, there, sheriff, it’s O-n-e-d-e-r-k-i-n-d.”
The sheriff was not scribing anything, but he grabbed a piece of paper from his pocket and a pencil lying on the table and pretended to enshrine the word for all time.
“My girlfriend,” Jesse began, “and by the way, her name is Lacy. Dr. Lacy Sanderson. She stayed away for quite a while. By the time she returned with the tamales, I had read most of the notes in her file.”
“So what did it say?” asked the sheriff, sprouting some interest.
“You see, that was the problem,” Jesse answered. “There were things I read that shocked me, but I was in no mood to be shocked, since I was just about to marry this woman, or at least propose. So I tried to brush it out of my mind. But after I finished off my third tamale, I was unable to ignore my feelings. So I asked her. Well, I didn’t really ask her. I just said the word: Onederkind.”
“She stopped in the middle of her chewing, and slowly but precisely set her tamale on the plastic paper provided. Then she reached over and slapped me across the face. Well, you can imagine, sheriff…I recoiled like a spurned dog. I did not know what to expect, but the violence took me aback. She changed right before my eyes. She said, ‘You goddamn son-0f-a-bitch. How dare you go through my briefcase? How dare you go through my notes? How dare you say you love me and then intrude on my person?’”
“I was wounded but didn’t want to remain silent, so I said, ‘It’s because I love you that I want to know. Why do we have secrets? Why haven’t we talked about this?’”
“Now get this,” said Jesse. “Thinking we were gonna launch into an argument about states’ rights and all, she just looked at me coolly and replied, ‘I didn’t tell you because you’re a child and you’re so locked into the medical system that you could never comprehend anything but your charts and graphs.’”
Jesse went on. “Now, sheriff, this is why I ran into your car. For the next ten minutes, without blinking an eye, she explained to me what she really does for a living. She is united with a licensed, but renegade, doctor named Carmine. He has two missions. The first one is to provide late-term abortions for frantic, conflicted women who find themselves in need of one. But the second mission is to make sure that rather than killing those babies—crushing their skulls or whatever the hell is they do with them—that after they remove them from their mothers’ uteruses, he whisks them away and keeps them alive.”
The sheriff gasped. “Is he some sort of a pro-life freak? Or…”
Jesse interrupted. “Oh, no. No, sir. He isn’t keeping the babies alive to keep them alive. He keeps those babies alive, sheriff, for research.”
“Research,” repeated the sheriff.
“Yes,” replied Jesse. “Because it’s much easier to test medicines, chemicals and treatments on living subjects, Dr. Carmine uses these newborn babies that were going to die anyway, as test subjects for drugs, cures and vaccinations.”
The sheriff sat for a long moment. “Well, it does sound sick. But weren’t the babies gonna be dead anyway? He keeps them alive, uses them for a time…and then, does he adopt them out to families? I suppose that would be a crime.”
Jesse sat up in his chair and spoke angrily. “No. Here’s the crime, sheriff. Because it’s not legal to use human beings as rats or guinea pigs, when the babies reach one year of age—when they’re just about ready to do all their crawling, walking and talking—he gives them a shot and puts them to sleep.”
The sheriff was quiet. Jesse joined him in the silence, allowing for thought to live in the room, to give it a chance to bring meaning.
“So what you’re saying,” said the sheriff, “is that babies that were gonna be aborted are kept alive and used to test new drugs and treatments…”
Jesse interrupted. “Or to harvest their organs. Use their stem cells. Whatever Dr. Carmine feels is necessary to push along the progress of research at a pace that will bring faster results.”
The sheriff sat and shook his head.
“I know what you’re feeling,” said Dr. Jesse. “At first, I was torn—that even though it was unorthodox, or maybe even like Frankenstein, it still had a stream of good in it. But because there aren’t enough women who want third trimester abortions, Dr. Carmine was finding himself needing to advertise, if not encourage, women who were teetering in their indecision, to opt for termination.”
Jesse concluded. “You see, sheriff, there’s nothing good about it. It’s dark. The worst kind of sinister. It makes us believe it might be good.”
“So,” the sheriff asked, “what did you say when she told you all this?”
“Now it gets interesting,” Jesse answered. “While we were sitting in the motel room, suddenly there’s this knock at the door. Lacy gets up, opens it, and there’s these two big, burly fellows. One she referred to as Bruno and Bruno called his buddy Henry. Lacy quickly explained that since I knew, she was gonna have to wrap me up in tape and forbid me to leave the room until it was clear what my intentions were. In other words, what was I going to do with what I now knew?”
“Honest to God, sheriff, I always thought I would be able to protect myself if I was ever attacked, but these two guys just took me over, put me in a chair, pinned down my arms, wrapped me in duct tape, pushed me back and wrapped duct tape around my chest and the back of the chair. I wanted to struggle—but without knowing what to do—they were able to duct tape my legs to the bottom of the chair. They looked over at her when they were preparing to tape my mouth. She said, ‘Wait. Let’s give him a chance to speak, so he can ask questions.’”
“So I did. I asked her—even though it was controversial—what was wrong with working on chimpanzees to do the research. She told me, ‘They’re chimpanzees. They aren’t human.’ I asked her where her moral conflict was. Had she ever questioned it. She replied, ‘I work with pediatric AIDS patients. Do you know what it’s like to watch a little girl die of AIDS simply because she was born to a mother who’s HIV positive?’”
“Of course, I didn’t know what that was like. She continued. ‘Dr. Carmine has made progress in AIDS, childhood cancer, even paralysis. You see—’ she said, her voice turning into a scream. ‘That’s the problem. He makes great progress, but he can’t share it because he would have to reveal how he came to his conclusions. So even though the babies are helpful, and their clean, pure systems make it possible for the tests to register with great clarity, no one the hell can ever find out, because dead babies will resurrect the living babies, who are used to give life to other people…’”
“Well, I interrupted her and said, ‘Yeah, and in doing so are rewarded by losing their lives.’ She slapped me across the face again. By the way, it was at that point I decided that not to ever give her the ring. She said, ‘You’re so goddamn conventional and stupid. It wouldn’t have to be that way. If we really cared about people instead of just caring about babies so we can take pictures, Dr. Carmine could share his discoveries and hundreds—maybe thousands—of lives could be saved.’”
“’Okay,’ I screamed back at her. ‘Let’s follow your logic. So he learns all these things he can’t share while simultaneously stealing babies, which he eventually has to kill because they’re starting to want to live.’”
“Bruno stepped in at this point and asked her if she wanted him to tape my mouth. All she said was, ‘Get him out of here.’”
“And they did. I do not know how they got me down the stairs and through the lobby without somebody noticing that I was in peril, but in no time at all, I found myself in the back end of a pickup truck, just as night was falling.”
“We drove for thirty minutes—into the deepest desert that Bruno and Henry could find. They pulled over, removed the tape from my legs and hands and took off my boots. They confiscated my cell phone and gave me a small canteen of water. Finally I got the courage to ask, ‘Are you gonna leave me here?’ They laughed. ‘Yeah, dope,’ Henry said. ‘If you go east, it’s fifteen miles to a town. North, twenty. South, thirty. And West…hell, I don’t know. Whatever happens, you’re gonna be busy for a while. I would not recommend that you go back to town telling your loony stories.’ So with this final admonishment, he jumped back into the truck with Bruno and they took off, scattering sand in all directions.”
“I stood there for a moment as it grew darker and darker. The sounds of desert life filled my ears. Swishing, croaking and growling…” Jesse shuddered. “I was in trouble. I walked a mile until I found a road. I decided to walk down that road—hopefully until somebody found me.”
“They did. A fellow in a motorhome drove up, and even though he was a little frightened by my appearance I was able to convince him that I was the victim of a crime, and he let me get in and he drove me.”
The sheriff leaped in. “So you came back here, got in your car and decided to hit me so you could tell your story…”
“Well,” said Dr. Jesse Kinrod slowly. “Not exactly. Honestly, I didn’t think there was much need to come back to Fisher, since they probably had planted drugs in my apartment or something to discredit me.”
“So I found out that my friend in the motorhome was willing to drive me to the edge of the forest. You know—where the Mercy Clinic sits.”
The sheriff nodded.
“He let me out. He was willing to give me a pair of shoes, but his feet were as small as a Japanese dancer’s, so I was out of luck. I walked the mile down the driveway to the Mercy Clinic. It was a warm night, so the Clinic had its windows open. I walked around all four sides, listening to conversations floating into the night air. That is, until I heard someone call someone else Dr. Carmine. Just then a car pulled up, parked close to the door and out stepped my never-to-be fiancé, Lacy. She climbed the steps and disappeared inside. Before I ever knew it, she was in the same room with Dr. Carmine. I sat and listened to them talk, as she explained what had happened with me, intruding into her affairs and being knowledgeable of the system. Listening to Dr. Carmine, I was not more impressed with his mission. He had that lilt of superiority that often accompanies maniacs who think they’re Messiahs. Neither one of them wanted to suggest what to do with me, but it was Lacy who finally said, ‘He’s got to disappear.’”
Jesse looked over at the sheriff. “Do you get it? ‘He’ was me. So that’s when I decided to come back and, let’s say, get your attention.”
The sheriff was nearly moved to tears. He stood up and patted Jesse on the shoulder. “Son, I’m sorry. I don’t like what they’re doin’. It’s certainly immoral. It’s definitely illegal. But your testimony against them is incredible—because you just ran into a police car with your beat-up Camaro. Your story wouldn’t go anywhere. If you’re able to cover the damages on the cruiser with your insurance, why don’t we just call it a bad night? Why don’t you go home, forget that girl, and just hope that there is a God and He’ll make everything right.”
Jesse stared up at the sheriff and said, “I don’t think you understand. I’m here to turn myself in.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I told you. That’s not necessary.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” said Jesse. “What I didn’t get the chance to tell you was, before I left Mercy Clinic and hitched back into town, I went in there and stole the scalpel off his tray and killed that goddamn doctor and that bitch who lied to me.”
Dr. Jesse Kinrod raised his hands to surrender to the justice of the county.
The sheriff just shook his head over and over and over and over again.
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