Coldheart Canyon (12 page)

“Come on, m’man,” he said. “We’re gonna take you to get some proper doctoring.”

The noise had woken Marco, who got dressed to drive while Todd held on to Dempsey, who was wrapped in his favorite comforter, a quilt Todd’s grandmother had made for her grandson. The dog lay sprawled over Todd’s knee, all one hundred pounds of him, while Marco drove through the almost empty streets to Sepulveda.

It was five minutes after five in the morning when they arrived at the animal hospital, and there were just two people waiting with their pets to be helped. Even so, it took twenty-five minutes before a doctor could be freed up to see Dempsey, during which time it seemed to Todd that Dempsey’s condition worsened. His shaking became more violent than CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 81

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ever, and in the midst of one of his spasms, he convulsively shat brown gruel, mostly on the floor, but on Todd’s leg and shoe too.

“Well now,” said the night doctor brightly, “what seems to be the trouble?”

Todd gave him an exhaustive run-down on the events of the last day.

He then asked Todd to pick Dempsey up and put him on the examination table—choosing this particular instant to remark what a fan of Todd’s he was, as though Todd could have given a damn at that moment.

Then he examined the dog, in a good and thorough manner, but making asides throughout as to which movies of Todd’s he and his wife had particularly enjoyed and which they hadn’t. After about five minutes of this, seeing the expression of despair and anger on Todd’s face, Marco quietly mentioned that Mister Pickett was really only interested right now in the health of his dog. The doctor’s mouth tightened, as though he’d just been badly offended, and his handling of Dempsey (at least to Todd’s eyes) seemed to become a little more brusque.

“Well, you have a very sick dog,” he said at the end of the examination, not even looking at Todd but talking to Marco. He was plainly embarrassed by his earlier show of fanboy enthusiasm, and was now over-compensating for it wildly.

Todd went to sit on the examination table to cradle Dempsey, which put him right in the doctor’s line of sight.

“Look,” he said quietly, “I’m sorry if I’m not being quite as appreciative of . . . your support of my pictures as I would normally be, Doc. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure we could have a great conversation about it under different circumstances. But I’d like Dempsey comfortable first. He’s sick and I want him better.”

Finally the doctor managed a little smile, and when he spoke his voice had also quieted, matching Todd’s. “I’m going to put Dempsey on a saline drip, because he’s obviously lost a lot of fluids in the last twelve to twenty-four hours. That should make him feel a whole lot happier. Meanwhile, you said Doctor Spenser over at Robertson VCA was doing stool checks?”

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“She said it could be a virus.”

“Well . . . maybe. But looking at his eyes, it seems more systemic to me.

If he were a younger dog I’d say parvo or heartworm, which is a parasite.

But again, we commonly see toxo in pound dogs or strays, and I’m sure he’s had his heartworm medications. Anyway, we’ll see from the stool results tomorrow.”

“Wait, wait. You’re saying it could be parvo or heartworm, but you don’t really think it’s either of these?”

“No.”

“So what do you think it is?”

The doctor shook his head. “I’d say there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance he’s got some kind of tumor. On the brain or on the brain-stem.”

“And if he has?”

“Well, it’s like a human being. You can sometimes fix these things—”

At this juncture, as though to demonstrate that things were not in a very fixable state right now, Dempsey started to shudder in Todd’s arms, his claws scrabbling against the metal table as he tried to stay upright.

“It’s okay, boy! It’s okay!”

The doctor went for a nurse, and came back with an injection.

“What’s that for?”

“Just to calm him down a little, so he can get some sleep.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. It’s a mild tranquilizer. If you don’t want me to give it to the dog, Mister Pickett . . .”

“Yes. Yes. Give it to him.”

The injection did indeed subdue Dempsey’s little fit. They wheeled him away into another room to be given an intravenous infusion, leaving Todd with the quilt.

“Damn dog,” he said, now Dempsey was out of earshot, “more trouble than he’s worth.” Tears very close.

“Why don’t we get a cup of coffee?” Marco suggested. “And we can talk to the doctor more when we get back?”

•

•

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There was a little donut shop in the mini-mall at the top of Sepulveda, and it had just opened. They were the first customers of the day. Todd knew the instant he walked in that both the women serving recognized him, so he turned round and walked out again rather than risking getting caught in a conversation: Marco brought out two coffees and two bear claws in greaseproof paper, still warm from the oven. Though he hadn’t thought he had an appetite, the pastry was too good not to be eaten; so he ate.

Then, coffee in hand, they walked down to the hospital, the eyes of the women in the donut shop glued to Todd until he had disappeared from sight.

They said nothing as they walked. The day was getting underway; the traffic on Sepulveda backing up as it waited to take its turn to get onto the freeway. These were people with two-hour commutes ahead of them before they got to their place of work; people with jobs they hated, houses they hated and a pay-check at the end of the month that wouldn’t even cover the cost of the mortgage, the car payments, the insurance.

“Right now,” Todd said, “I’d give my eye teeth to be one of them, instead of having to go back in there.”

“I can go in for you.”

“No.”

“Dempsey trusts me,” Marco said.

“I know. But he’s my dog.”

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F I V E

Again, there was no news. Dempsey had been hooked up to a saline drip, and looked as though the tranquilizer had taken its effect. He wasn’t quite asleep, but he was dazy.

“We’ll do an X-ray today, and see how he looks,” the doctor said. “We should have the results back by the end of the day. So why don’t you two go home, we’ll keep Dempsey here and see what we can do to get him well?”

“I want to stay.”

“Well that’s going to be very uncomfortable for you, Mister Pickett.

We don’t have a room we can put you in, and frankly you both look as though you didn’t get a full night’s sleep. Dempsey’s mildly sedated, and we’ll probably keep him that way. But it’s going to be six or seven hours before we get any answers for you. We share our X-ray technician with our hospital in Santa Monica, so she won’t even be in to look at Dempsey until eleven at the earliest.”

“I still want to stay. You’ve got a bench out there. You’re not going to throw me out if I sit on that, are you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be.”

The doctor looked at his watch. “I’ll be out of here in half an hour and the day-doctor, Doctor Otis, will be taking over Dempsey’s case. I will of course bring him up to speed with everything we’ve done so far and if she feels there’s something else she wants to try—”

“She’ll know where to find me.”

“Right.”

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The doctor gave up a wan smile, his second and last of the night. “Well, I sincerely hope you have good news with Dempsey, and that by the time I come in again tonight you’ve both gone home happy.”

Todd would not be dissuaded from staying on the bench, even though it was situated a few steps away from the front counter, next to the soda machine, and would leave him in full view of everyone who came through the next few hours. Marco said that he would come back with a Thermos of good coffee and something to eat, and left Todd there.

The parade of the needy began early. About two minutes after Marco had gone, a distraught woman came in saying that she’d struck a cat with her car, and the victim was now in her car, alive, but terrified and badly hurt.

Two nurses went out with well-used pairs of leather gloves and a syringe of tranquilizer to subdue the victim. They came back with a weeping woman and a corpse. The animal’s panicked self-defenses had apparently used up what little energies its broken body had possessed. The woman was inconsolable. She tried to thank the nurses for their help but all she could do was cry. There were six more accidents that rush hour, two of them fatalities. Todd watched all this in a dazed state. Lack of sleep was beginning to catch up with him. Every now and then his eyes would flicker closed for a few seconds, and the scene in front of him would jump, like a piece of film which had had a few seconds’ worth of action removed and then been spliced back together again. People moved abruptly from one place to another. One moment somebody was coming in, the next he was engaged in conversation (often tearful, sometimes accusatory, always intense) with one of the nurses; the next he’d gone, or he was on his way out.

Much to his surprise, nobody gave him more than a cursory glance. Perhaps, they thought, that can’t
possibly
be Todd Pickett, sitting on a broken-down old bench next to a broken-down old soda machine in a twenty-four-hour animal hospital. Or perhaps it was just that they saw him, recognized him, and didn’t care. They had other things to think about right now, more CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 86

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pressing than the peculiar presence of a weary-looking movie star on a broken-down bench. They had a rat with an abscess, a cat that had had six kittens but had got the seventh stuck, a guinea pig in a shoe box that was dead when the box was opened; a poodle that kept biting itself; a problem with fleas, a problem with mange, two canaries that hated one another, and so on and so forth.

Marco came back with coffee and sandwiches. Todd drank some coffee, which perked him up.

He went to the front desk and asked, not for the first time, to see the day-doctor. This time, he got lucky. Doctor Otis, a pale and slight young woman who looked no more than eighteen, and refused to look Todd in the face (though this, he realized, was her general practice: she was the same with Marco and with the nurses, eyes constantly averted), appeared and said that there was nothing to report except that Dempsey would be going for X-rays in about half an hour, and they would be available for viewing tomorrow. At this point, Todd lost his temper. It happened rarely, but when it did it was an impressive spectacle. His neck became blotchy-red, and the muscles of his face churned; his eyes went to ice-water.

“I brought my dog in here at five o’clock this morning. I’ve been waiting here—sitting on that bench—that bench right there, you see it? Do you see that bench?”

“Yes, I—”

“That’s where I’ve been since six o’clock. It is now almost eleven o’clock. I’ve asked on several occasions for you to have the common decency to come out and tell me what’s happening to my dog. Always politely. And I’ve been told, over and over again, that you’re very busy.”

“It’s been a crazy morning, Mister—?”

“Pickett is my name.”

“Well, Mister Pickett, I’m afraid I can’t—”

“Stop right there. Don’t say you can’t get the X-rays until tomorrow because you can. You will. I want my dog looked after and if you won’t do it I’ll take him some place where he can be taken care of and I’ll make sure every damn newspaper in the State of California—”

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At this moment an older woman, obviously the hospital manager, stepped into view and took Todd’s hand, shaking it. “Mister Pickett. My name’s Cordelia Simpson. It’s all right, Andrea, I’ll take care of Mister Pickett from here.”

The young woman doctor retreated. She was two shades whiter than she’d been at the beginning of the conversation.

“I heard most of what you were telling Andrea—”

“Look, I’m sorry. That’s not my style. I don’t like losing my temper, but—”

“No, it’s okay. I understand. You’re tired and you’re concerned about—?”

“Dempsey.”

“Dempsey. Right.”

“I was told he’d be X-rayed today and we’d have the results back this afternoon.”

“Well, the speed of these things all depends on the volume of work, Mister Pickett,” Cordelia said. She was English, and had the face and manner of a woman who would not be pleasant if she were riled, but was doing her best right now to put on a gentler face. “I read a piece about you in the
LA Times
last year. You were on the cover with Dempsey, as I remember. Clearly you’re very close to your dog. Here’s what I’m going to do.” She consulted her watch. “Dempsey is being seen by the radiogra-pher right now, and I guarantee that we’ll have the results back by . . . six.

It
might
be earlier but I think six we can guarantee.”

“So how long before I can take him home?”

“You want to take him now?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll find him rather dopey. I’m not sure he could walk.”

“I can carry him.”

Cordelia nodded. She knew an immovable object when she saw one.

“Well I’ll have one of the nurses come fetch you when he’s ready. Is that his?”

She pointed to the quilt on the bench. Quite unconsciously, Todd had been nursing it while he waited. No wonder people had kept their distance.

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“Yes.”

“Do you want me to have him wrapped up in it?”

“Thank you.”

Cordelia picked up the quilt. “And my apologies, Mister Pickett, for any difficulties you may have had. Our doctors are horribly overworked. And, I’m afraid to say, often people who are wonderful with animals aren’t always terribly good with human beings.”