“As long as you realize,” Leo said, “you start looking for that kind of excitement again there’re only two ways you can end up. The one you know all about and the other way, Jack, is on this table. Like your friend here has found out.”
“I’ll go to Carville tomorrow.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Leo said. He looked down and touched the sharp end of the trocar to Buddy Jeannette’s belly, the point indenting soft flesh an inch or so above the navel.
Jack said, “Wait. What time should I go?” He saw Leo hunch over the instrument and said, “Leo, wait. Okay?” He said, “Oh, shit,” turning away.
ONE OF THE BARTENDERS at Mandina’s, Mario, a young guy Jack Delaney knew pretty well, said, “You stick the thing right into the person, like you’re stabbing him?”
“How else you gonna do it?”
“You poke the guy all over?”
“No, once you put the trocar in it stays in the same place. You change the angle. See, what you’re doing is aspirating the viscera. You hit the liver and it doesn’t give, you know the guy was a boozer, had cirrhosis.”
“I could never do that. Jesus.”
“You get used to it.”
“You want another one?”
“Yeah, with three olives. Then I’ll switch.”
“Man, I could never do that.”
“There free-lance embalmers that come around, trade men, they get about a hundred a job. What do you think? Make thirty to forty grand a year.”
“Not me,” Mario said, moving off.
Saturday afternoon the plain, high-ceilinged café was nearly empty, too far up Canal Street for tourists. Mullen & Sons was only a block away. After a funeral Jack and Leo would come in still wearing their dark suits and pearl-gray neckties, sit at a table, and gradually begin talking, polite to each other until, oh, man, the relief that would come with that first ice-cold vodka martini going down.