Blood Trade

CHAPTER 2-1

January 24th, 2002

Thursday

Chapter 2

“Were you born or have you ever lived in or received medical attention in any of the following countries since 1977: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, or Nigeria?”

Sean Coleman glared in irritation over the narrow, neatly kept desk at the woman who had asked him the awkward question. She was a large, top-heavy individual in her sixties. Her hair was short and nearly as white as the short-sleeved shirt she wore. Thick, black, wing-tipped glasses rested upon the edge of her round nose and her deadpan eyes suggested that she was in no mood for whatever guff she predicted from the man now silently judging her.

“Jesus. Are you kidding me?” asked Sean. His big body shuffled around uncomfortably in the orange fiberglass chair that would have been too small for even an average-sized adult. “I was just in here two days ago. You asked me these exact same questions then. Do you really think that sometime in the past two days I visited a witch doctor in some half-assed, bamboo hut in Africa?”

The woman’s eyes rose to the ceiling and she folded her thick, flabby arms in front of her chest. His rant wasn’t the first agitated outburst she’d had to contend with in her line of work. She sank back into a heap in her towering metal swivel chair. It let out a painful growl from the movement. Though she was short, her chair let her hover about six inches above Sean.

She replied in a restrained, seemingly rehearsed tone. “Mr. Coleman, it’s our policy. We have to ask the same questions every single time you donate. I don’t like it. You’ve made it clear that you don’t like it. But that’s the policy, and you should know that by now.”

He slowly gave a curt shake of his head, a grunt escaping his lips. He scoffed at what he considered nothing more than a waste of time inside a building he would have rather not been in in the first place. He lowered his gaze to his right hand as he peeled a cotton ball from the tip of his index finger. The inside of it was stained crimson from where his skin had been pricked to draw a blood sample. He’d passed his test for an adequate protein level.

“Fine,” he said abruptly. “Next question.”

“I still need you to answer the last one.”

“No! I’ve never been to any of those places!”

His raised tone stole the glance of a young man in a lab coat who negotiated his way through a tight hallway behind the woman. The man eyed Sean’s appearance, taking note of the large, silver badge that hung proudly on Sean’s gray uniform shirt.

“Hi. How are you?” Sean said loudly with wide, mocking eyes.

The man looked away and continued on by.

The woman behind the desk took a breath, leaned forward in her chair again, adjusted herself, and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of her. The reflection in her glasses let Sean see a line of green text change on the small computer monitor that fed her questions. He could also see his own face in the reflection. It revealed that he needed a shave.

She proceeded with the questioning. “Have you ever had s*x with another man, even once, since 1977?”

Sean’s eyes narrowed and his face twisted into a sneer so sharp that it could have been mistaken for a symptom of physical pain. “Why the hell would you even ask me that? Do I come across as gay to you?”

Her shoulders dropped as if she were a puppet whose strings had just been cut. An exhausted sigh spewed from her, followed by a low mutter of something to herself. She removed her glasses, planted her elbows firmly on her desk, and eclipsed her face with the palms of her hands.

Minutes later, Sean was back in the building’s intensely lit lobby, seated among a motley crew of men and women that ran the spectrum of age, ethnicities, and hygiene practices. His large body was positioned tightly between a short Hispanic woman who was knitting and a thin boy dressed in a raggedy t-shirt and jeans who couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Sean looked like a giant beside them. His six-foot-five-inch frame and broad shoulders towered above the others, forcing both the woman and the boy to tilt their bodies away from him at unnatural angles.

Sean was largely oblivious to the sporadic conversations that carried on around him as he contemplated the significance of the year 1977 from the scripted interview he had just endured. That specific year was used in a number of the questions, which left him to ponder what kind of global epidemic must have went down back then. He filed that mystery away in a mental cabinet of the things he’d one day look up on the World Wide Web—if he ever scraped up enough money to pay for an Internet service.

After selling his blood plasma at the bank for several weeks, he still hadn’t quite gotten used to the stench in the air—a mix of iodine and bleach. The smell emitted from all corners of every room.

He noticed a new donor being processed at the front desk. She was an older Arabic-looking woman with a younger woman, apparently a daughter, who was translating instructions from the receptionist into whatever foreign tongue they spoke. Both women wore burkas that covered their hair and bodies.

Sean felt some tension in the air from a few people in the waiting room. Cautious stares. Whispering. Only a few months had passed since the September 11 attacks, so the sight of a couple of individuals clad in Muslim attire in a public area didn’t go unnoticed. He wasn’t sure if the blank expression the mother’s face wore came from the inability to understand what she was being told or from despondency over a misfortune in life that brought her to where she was now.

He understood such misfortune. Less than a year ago, he would have never envisioned himself sitting in such a place—a purgatory-like holding dock where people were forced to contemplate their financial failings before being strapped to a bed and drained of a liquid component in their blood for cash. A lot had happened in a year. A sober year, at that.

The money was good, though, as everyone sitting in the lobby knew. Forty dollars for the first donation of the week, fifty for the second. He was often amused that he was labeled a “donor” and that he was there to “donate” something. These were terms that implied he was giving something away for free, purely out of the kindness of his heart. He wasn’t. Still, it was wording that the employees there were clearly trained to use and use often, probably as a way to help the clientele feel more positive about themselves.

No one was setting aside two hours of their life to come there and donate anything. Despite all of the posters decorating the lobby that educated participants on how their plasma was used to save lives, people were there for the money. All of them.

For Sean, the practice had become a lifeline to help his fledgling security business stay afloat. Up until six months ago, he had merely worked as a contracted guard for the company. At that time, his uncle, Zed Hansen, owned it. Hansen, however, had been killed back in July. An unfortunate encounter with an unhinged drug dealer, believed to have also killed two U.S. border security guards years earlier, ended Zed’s life. Much to Sean’s surprise, his uncle had left the company’s assets to him in his will. The company wasn’t some fancy home-security outfit where a guy strapped to a headset monitored alarm systems from his computer and alerted the police when necessary. No, Hansen Security was hands on, meaning a little roughing up might be required when the moment called for it. Typically, jobs consisted of walking the grounds of a property or serving as some intimidating muscle at an event.

Sean could have sold off the assets and shut down the business, but he felt that carrying on the company was not only an opportunity for him to move forward in his life but also a way to honor his uncle, whom he deeply missed. Zed Hansen was a good man, like a father to Sean, whose real father abandoned him when he was a child. Even though Sean didn’t always have faith in himself, his uncle had always had confidence in Sean. Zed kept him on his payroll, even during the dark days when Sean struggled with alcohol and his inner demons. Sean’s reputation as a town drunk who engaged in the occasional public fistfight had cost Zed potential business, but his uncle had always stood by his side. He was a loyal supporter.

Sean’s demons from those days hadn’t all left, but he managed to keep them at bay. He hadn’t had a drink since Zed’s funeral. It wasn’t always easy to stay on the wagon, but he hadn’t fallen off yet.

What he didn’t know at the time of his inheritance was that Hansen Security hadn’t been doing as well as he had believed. Profits were razor-thin and his uncle owed the bank a good amount of money. Sean’s name was a detriment to the business. In a small town, reputation and associations were magnified. Several loyal customers just didn’t trust him, and with good reason. He was the black sheep of his hometown of Winston, Colorado, a small, rural community deep within the Rocky Mountains. It was more than just his label “town drunk.” People knew Sean to be a mean-spirited bully, an unreliable lush with a security badge, a man who couldn’t “keep his s**t together.”

It didn’t help matters that he was also the brother-in-law of Winston’s Chief of Police, Gary Lumbergh. Because of that, the standards were set higher for Sean than for most residents.

While his uncle had managed to earn the respect of just about everyone he had ever met, few people respected Sean Coleman. Longtime clients went elsewhere for their security needs.

When 9/11 hit and the economy tanked, the situation had only worsened.

Still, Sean managed to generate some work since Zed’s death, usually in spurts, but he often had to travel farther than he liked for jobs. On lucky days, he’d pick up stints in Lakeland—a thriving gambling town that sat about seven miles north of Winston; that’s where he was now. Most jobs, however, were way outside of Winston. He knew he couldn’t afford to hire extra help, so he filled all duties himself, a laboring task even for a company as small as his. Diana, his sister, helped when she could. She did the accounting work for free when she wasn’t playing the role of caregiver for their mother.

Their mother was another area of Sean’s life where he had dropped the ball. At the time of her stroke, he was deemed too incompetent by the rest of family to look after her. Diana and Gary uprooted their lives in Chicago and moved to Winston to pick up the slack. Sean was grateful for what his sister and her husband had done, though he had never actually told them that. It was a bigger sacrifice for Gary than anyone. He gave up a prestigious career as a big-city police lieutenant to become a small-town police chief. Sean suspected that Diana secretly enjoyed living the slower-paced, Winston lifestyle that she’d grown up in, but her days were about to get much busier in the upcoming months. Thus, Sean was thankful for whatever bookkeeping help she could lend him in the meantime.

When the sound of his name grabbed his attention, he stood and made his way through the maze of occupied, interlocked seats and entered the long familiar hallway. At the end of the bright corridor hung a long, vertical mirror, which he interpreted each time as a cruel joke, a way of forcing people to take a thorough, pensive look at themselves before it was their turn to take the needle.

He couldn’t help but notice that the man staring back at him looked different than he used to—healthier. He had lost some weight in recent months. His once protruding gut had shrunk and the outline of his body no longer looked like he was wearing a spare tire around his waist. His pants were now looser and he even had to wear a belt. Had he realized sooner how much weight his habitual drinking added to the scale over the years, he might have given up beer earlier.