Bad Chili (2 page)

“Yeah. I even overlap a bit. I’ve got insurance from the offshore work that’ll be good for a while, and I have a kind of penny-ante insurance that I’ve been managing to pay for the last few years. I don’t know it’ll do much.”

“Most of this shit insurance, which is what I figure you have, does better you go to the hospital. So give the information to my secretary when you go out, and if it’s anything we’re familiar with, we may be able to get policy information right away. If not, it’ll take a while. I want to check Leonard over too, see if he got scratched or bit. He might have and not even know it. He’s got a bite, you’ll both go to the hospital. Step on out and tell him to step on in.”

“Doc, if we got to send the squirrel’s head in for dissecting, and I’m going to take the shots before we get results, why bother?”

“Could be an epidemic. Squirrels aren’t usually the carriers. Raccoons, foxes — they’re the main culprits. But somehow it may have gotten into the squirrel population. People ought to know. Step on out and send Leonard in. We got to get this show on the road. Oh, before you go, here’s a trash bag. Get the squirrel and put it in the bag and leave it behind the reception desk. I’ll have someone pick it up.”

I gave the insurance information to the receptionist, borrowed Leonard’s car keys, got old Beebo out of the trunk and bagged him and put him in a cooler they had behind the desk. Then I sat in the waiting room and tried to read a nature magazine, but at the moment I wasn’t feeling all that kindly toward nature.

I wasn’t feeling all that kindly toward the brat that was waiting there either. His mother, a harried woman in lace-up shoes designed by the Inquisition, a long black dress, and a Pentecostal hairdo — which was a mound of brown hair tied up in a bun that looked as if it had been baked into place to contain an alien life form — was pretending to be asleep in a waiting-room chair.

Couldn’t say as I blamed her. This kid, who had torn up three magazines and drank out of all the paper cups at the water cooler and stuck his gum on the doorknob leading out of the office, wasn’t someone you wanted to look at much.

He was about eleven, and spent a lot of time scratching his red head as if it were full of lice. He had a nose that ran like an open faucet, and he was eyeing me with an intense look that reminded me of the squirrel’s expression just before it clamped its teeth on my arm. I wanted to ignore him, but I feared if I looked away he might spring.

He asked me some questions about this and that and I tried to answer politely, and in such a way as not to encourage conversation, but the kid had a knack of turning a nod into an invitation. He told me, without my asking, that he didn’t go to school, and that his parents taught him at home, and would continue to do so until LaBorde “built a Christian school.”

“A Christian school?” I said.

“You know,” said the boy, “one without niggers and atheists.”

“What about nigger atheists?” Leonard said, coming into the waiting room.

The kid eyed Leonard’s black skin as if he were trying to decide if it were real or paint. “Them’s the worst kind,” the kid said.

The Pentecostal mother opened one eye, then closed it quickly.

“How would you like me to kick your nasty little ass?” Leonard said.

“That’s child abuse,” said the little boy. “And you used a naughty word.”

“Yep,” Leonard said.

The boy studied Leonard a moment, fled to a chair next to his mother, sat there and glared at us. His mother seemed not to be breathing.

“Come on, Hap,” Leonard said. “I’m clean. Or as the doc said, no little dogs swimming through my blood. I’ll run you over to the hospital. Hey, you, you little shit—”

“What?” I said.

“Not you,” Leonard said. “Red on the head! You, kid! Get that goddamn gum off the doorknob. Now.”

The kid sidled over to the knob, peeled off the gum, put it into his mouth, slid back into the chair beside his mother. If he had been a cobra, he’d have spat venom at us. Leonard and I went out.

As Leonard drove, I said, “You got to feel sorry for a kid like that. Raised with those kind of attitudes.”

Leonard didn’t say anything.

“I mean, he’s off to a bad start. He doesn’t know any better. You talkin’ to him like that, that’s a little much, don’t you think?”

“I don’t feel sorry for him,” Leonard said. “I really was going to kick his nasty ass. I’m kinda hopin’ his mama brought him there to be put to sleep, like a sick cat.”

“That’s not very nice,” I said.

“No,” Leonard said. “No, it isn’t.”

At the hospital they did some routine tests and put me in a cold room wearing what they referred to as hospital gown, which is pretty ludicrous. There you are sitting in the cold wearing a paper-thin sheet split up the back with your ass hanging out, and they call it a gown. You’d think they thought it ought to go with heels, maybe a nice hairdo and a brooch, a dinner invitation.

Leonard sat in the room with me. He said, “You have the ugliest goddamn ass I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, you’ve seen a few.”

“That’s right, so my opinion is worth something.”

“Not to me. And besides, it’s so bad, why’s the doctor always want to put his finger up it?”

“Probably lost his high school ring last time he poked around in there. I figure he pokes a little deeper, he might find an old boyfriend’s rubber.”

“That’s your game,” I said. “Dig in your ass, reckon they’ll find dog hairs.”

We joshed around with that kind of adolescent bullshit for a while, then Leonard started trying to tell me about him and Raul again. About that time, Doc Sylvan came in and Leonard went out.

“That insurance you got,” Doc Sylvan said. “We’re familiar with it. I made some calls to be sure. Sucks.”

“Which policy sucks?”

“Both of them. The oil rig policy will pay more in the long run, but it’s the short run that’s a bitch. The other policy seriously sucks the dog turd. You see, this is what they call outpatient business. You know, give you a shot, then you go home. Come back for an examination, another shot. You go home. But, if you go home, the policy has a five-hundred-dollar deductible.”

“It’s going to cost that much?”

“Time I get through, it may cost more. It’s not that it actually cost that much, but doing the shots here at the hospital makes it more expensive. And being a small city hospital, well, that gilds the lily.”

“Then why didn’t we do it at your office?”

“I told you why. Listen, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna check you in for a few days here at the Medical Hilton.”

“Won’t that be more expensive?”

“Certainly. A lot more, but you do that, the offshore policy will pay eighty percent. The other policy will pay a bit.”

“The one that sucks the dog turd?”

“Right.”

“You mean to tell me the policy won’t pay I go to the house, but it will pay I stay in the hospital and it’ll cost more?”

“Now you got it figured. Between the two policies you come out only owing a few hundred bucks’ deductible. Policies might even overlap so you come out ahead, but I doubt it. You’ll owe something. It’s the way of the insurance and medical professions.”

“I think I’m being snookered a bit so you can make some extra insurance money, that’s what I think.”

“Considering you owe me a few past-due bills for a number of things, maybe you can live with that.”

“How long have I got to be in the hospital?”

“Way the policy works—”

“The offshore or the dog turd?”

“Both . . . I’d say seven or eight days.”

“Ah, hell. You’re kiddin’?”

“No, I’m not. You see, you take a shot now. Then you take one in seven days. That should be enough time to make sure the policy covers things. Those policies, way they’re written, you almost have to be standing on your head and get hit by lightning while trying to pick your nose with a pop bottle up your ass for them to pay. You got to get a better kind of policy, Hap. You know, a real one.”

“I get some real money, I’ll do that.”

“Anyway. One shot now. One in seven days, and one in twenty-one to twenty-eight days. You got a little option on the last shot. But not much. Thing about rabies, you miss those shots, you can kiss your ass good-bye.”

“I go to the hospital, I got to wear this damn gown all the time?”

“You play the game, you suit out.”

A hospital is dangerous to your health. All kinds of disease floats around in there. First day I came down with a cold. Worse than the cold was the boredom. Man, was it boring. And I had to lie there with this needle and glucose tube in my arm and there wasn’t a damn reason for it, but they did it anyway, and the food they fed me explained why someone had written in blue ink above the commode lever in my room’s toilet: FLUSH TWICE IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE CAFETERIA.

So I spent my time lying there, a little mad actually, ’cause my best buddy in the whole goddamn world hadn’t come by once. I hadn’t seen him since he stepped out of the room that day Doc Sylvan came in. I phoned his house repeatedly, but no answer, and he didn’t have an answering machine, so I couldn’t leave a message. The only connection I had to the outside world was the TV set and Charlie Blank.

The TV bit the moose. There were only a few channels and they all seemed tuned to the same stuff, or at least the same sort of stuff. I’d seen enough talk shows involving stupid relationships to last me a lifetime. I could have told those people quick-like why they were having so much trouble with their lives and their relationships. They were dumb shits and proud of it.

I had known people just like them all my life, just because you couldn’t avoid them. They were like shit, always turning up on your shoes. I wouldn’t have given those happily-stupid-by-choice-assholes the time of day, much less want to hear what they had to say on television.

And if that wasn’t enough, at night I had to put up with this political show starring a fat guy in a ritzy suit who spent an hour talking to an audience as mean-spirited and narrowminded as he was. It was a great setup. He liked to show clips from political speeches, then criticize them out of context. And his audience, with the sum of their intellect added together, multiplied by three, it still left them — in defiance of mathematics — collectively half-wits.

I was getting desperate. I longed for something as awful as a Jerry Lewis movie to watch, or maybe an infomercial on makeup.

First evening I was in the hospital, Charlie Blank came in to see me. He had been promoted to lieutenant. Wasn’t that the chief liked Charlie so much he wanted to move him up, but the old corrupt bastard was happy he was rid of Lt. Marvin Hanson, and someone had to get the job, and Charlie, who was also a good honest cop, was next in line, and probably in the chief’s mind a better trade, if for no other reasons than he was an unknown quantity, and was, more important, white.

Hanson and his car had met a tree at high speed on a wet highway and he was now in a coma over at his ex-wife’s house, doing an impression of a rutabaga. Just lying there, being fed by tubes and getting his ass wiped by his ex, shrinking up slowly, flickering an eyelid now and then, moving just enough to give the ex-wife and Charlie encouragement he was going to come out of it and ask for a ham sandwich and an update on pork belly futures.

I figured Hanson came out of it, you might as well plant him in the dirt and hope he grew. Chances were, he awoke, it would be as if he had never been. The world would be new to him. Amazing and beyond his comprehension. If he learned to play a passable game of checkers against himself without cheating and knew better than to shit in the kitchen sink it would be a feat of Olympian proportions.

Charlie was wearing his brown Mike Hammer hat, as I called it. Porkpie, I guess it’s really called, and he had on a blue silk Hawaiian shirt decorated with brightly colored palm trees, parrots, and hula girls. He wore his usual cheap brown suit coat, black plastic Kmart shoes, and his deadpan look. I tell you, there’s nothing better to view from a hospital bed than a Hawaiian shirt flashing out at you from between the lapels of a cheap suit coat, a porkpie resting on top of it all like a rusty bird feeder. He was also carrying a white grease-stained paper bag and another one, brown, minus the grease.

“I hear you had some squirrel trouble,” Charlie said.

“Some,” I said.

“Looks like he gave you hell.”

“Yeah. You oughta see
him
.”

“We’re checkin’ now to see the squirrel had an accomplice. You know, a spotter from the woods. We hope to make an arrest before the week’s out. A few other squirrels or blue jays talk, a possum comes in with a word, we might have the bastard’s partner by nightfall.”

“Hey, make fun. But this mad-squirrel business, it isn’t a light thing. Let me show you where he bit me. Look at that. There’s four stitches there.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“From a squirrel?”

“No. You got me there. . . . You sound funny.”

“I have a cold.”

Charlie opened one of the bags and pushed it toward me. It contained a hamburger, french fries, and a malt. “I’ve spent a day or two in the hospital,” Charlie said, “so I thought you might want this — unless they’ve suddenly started hiring French chefs.”

“Oh, God,” I said, pulling out my sliding table and placing the food on it. “I never thought I’d look forward to a McDonald’s meal.”

“Stay in here a bit,” Charlie said, “you get so the idea of eatin’ out of trash cans is kind of appealing. By the way, I kept the Spider Man toy comes with it.”

“You’re welcome to it.”

“You say that now, but you see it, you’ll want it.”

“Then don’t let me see it.”

Charlie put the other sack on the bed and took off his hat and hung it on the back of the guest chair.

“What’s in the other bag?” I asked.

“Books. A magazine.”

“Whatcha got?”

He took out a magazine titled
Boobs and Butts
, tossed it at me.

“Oh, great,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Read that one?”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Well, at least you ain’t sharin’ the room. You can whack off without anyone seein’ you.”