Cheapskate in Love (32 page)

Donna tried to push Bill off the porch. “Go, before it’s too
late,” she warned him. “If you run down the lawn, you can escape.”

Bill still didn’t feel himself in any peril. He was not
easily intimidated, and he was curious about her boyfriend. He wanted to see if
the boyfriend had something he didn’t. Maybe there would be a way to go out
with Donna again. Besides, if the boyfriend tried to act tough with him, he
would stand up to him, just like he had to Leo. He wasn’t going to be pushed
around or frightened.

“Am I interrupting something?” Frank asked angrily, as he
leaped up on the porch. He stood glaring at Donna and Bill, hyperventilating.

“Frank, relax,”
Donna
said, with a
voice of forced calmness. “Bill is going. I’m never seeing him again.”

“Aw, why not? Isn’t this your old man, who you dearly love?
That was some kiss.”

When Frank called him “old,” Bill’s stomach burned even more
than when Leo had punched him, but he remained silent.

“It was nothing, Frank. Don’t start imagining things.” To
Bill, she said, “You can leave now. Please don’t ever call me again.”

Frank was not placated by Donna’s words, because his mind
was too heated for sense to penetrate. “Hey, pops,” he attacked Bill. “Am I
imagining things, or were you kissing her?”

“It’s none of your business,” Bill replied, getting as hot
as Frank. “And don’t call me pops.”

“What’s the
matter,
pops? Don’t you
like how old you look, pops?”

“I said stop it.”

“What if I don’t, grandfather?”

“I’ll show you something.”

“You’ll show me something, old man?” Frank pushed Bill hard,
and they began to scuffle.

Bill was clearly at a disadvantage, as he had been earlier
in the evening, but this time he wasn’t able to save himself by vomiting. With
little difficulty, Frank forced Bill against the house, grabbed him by his
shirt, and repeatedly threw him against the wall. Bill tried to remove Frank’s
hands from his shirt, but he was too feeble to do more than hold onto Frank’s
wrists.

Since his opponent was not yet subdued, Frank decided to
take further action. He swung his opponent around and began pushing him back toward
the edge of the porch. The width of the porch was approximately twelve feet, so
there was some distance to travel before they would reach the edge.

Donna had been standing aside, hoping that Frank would just
shake Bill up a little and let him go, but when she saw where they were
heading, she tried to intervene. She grabbed one of Frank’s arms and tried to
pull it off Bill. “Stop. Stop it. That’s enough,” she begged. “Let him go.”

Her intervention had the unintended effect of making Frank
think that she still had some feeling for Bill, so he summoned even more
strength to punish his apparent rival. Frank released his hold on Bill’s shirt.
Grabbing him by the shoulders, he shook him as a child would shake a stuffed
toy. Bill put up no resistance, because he couldn’t, and Donna’s attempts to
pull Frank’s arms off him were half-hearted and ineffectual. When Bill was
wobbly and light-headed, Frank stopped shaking him, and for a brief moment, the
lop-sided contest seemed over. Bill tried to stand straight and still, while
Donna let go of Frank. To both of them, Frank seemed satisfied with his
retribution, although he was still glaring at Bill. Suddenly, however, like a
rattlesnake, coiled in watchful waiting, which lunges at its prey, Frank rammed
his hands into Bill’s chest and launched him off the railing-less porch
backwards.

Donna gasped.

Bill flew through the air, his arms flailing like broken
wings. The porch was about two feet above the ground, but the force of Frank’s
push carried Bill away much more than that. With a thud and a groan, Bill
landed hard on his back on the lawn ten feet from the porch. He tried to get
up, but his limbs hardly responded.

“I can’t move,” his piteous voice cried. “My back. My back
is broken. Donna, help.”

Donna and Frank were still standing on the porch.

“Can’t you get up?” asked Donna wistfully, leaning forward,
although she was not about to venture any closer to Bill.

“I’ll help him get up,” snarled Frank, starting to walk off
the porch. “Hey, pops,” he shouted at Bill, “I’m coming to help you. Can you
move yet?”

“Frank, listen to me,” she yelled, raving with emotion to
convey her meaning. “Don’t touch him. If you touch him, you’ll be leaving, too.
I mean it. I won’t have a dead man on my lawn.”

Her words were close enough to a declaration of love for
Bill, and he slipped into unconsciousness from the searing pain in his lower
back with a contented look on his face.

Chapter 34

The next day, Bill was stirred from sleep by an irritation
on his toes.

“Ah, the mummy rises from the dead,” said the doctor when he
saw Bill’s eyelids begin to lift. “Or would you prefer to be known as a zombie?
Those creatures seem to hold more popularity nowadays, although I can’t tell
you why. It might have something to do with people not knowing how to live
anymore.
Or being afraid of life.
Or maybe the economy
is so rotten for so many, that living is like an endless nightmare. I don’t
know. I don’t know why the problems of today seem so much greater than those of
the past, as if time is running out, and something has to be done, although no
one knows what that should be. Maybe that’s how humans always need to view
life, as a problem to be solved. Were you trying to solve a problem, when you
had your accident, or were you just being reckless?”

There was a purpose behind Dr.
Drighteers’s
rambling monologue. He was a clever-looking man in his sixties, with a pitiless
bedside manner, and he wanted to test Bill’s mental state for any signs of
brain damage from his fall. All the while he talked, he repeatedly hit Bill’s
toes with a small rubber hammer. “Can you feel any of that?” he asked.

“A little,” Bill replied groggily, coming to his senses
after his traumatic injury. Gradually, he became aware that he lay in a
hospital bed, nearly flat on his back, wearing a spinal brace, with his entire
torso extending to the top of his neck, wrapped in a cast. He looked like a
mummy, who was waiting for the rest of his body to be covered.

The doctor hit Bill’s fingers on one hand several times with
the small hammer. “Can you feel that?”

“The same,” Bill responded. “A little.”

Dr.
Drighteers
wrote something on
the chart at the foot of the bed. “You’ll be in bed at least six months,” he
told Bill, “before your spine and nerves heal, and you can move normally. I’m
sending you to a nursing home. Do you have any preference for one?”

“I don’t want to go to a nursing home,” Bill objected,
although he was in no condition to disagree.

“Is there someone who can take care of you at home or in
their home?” Really what Dr.
Drighteers
wanted to
know is if Bill knew a saint, because someone who would take care of an almost
totally incapacitated man would have to be a saint. But the doctor thought that
Bill would understand his situation soon enough and accept going to a nursing
home.

As Bill thought hard, his toes and fingers wiggled slightly
but rapidly. “My sister will do it,” he said, more optimistic than certain.
“I’ll ask her.”

“Let me know when she agrees, so I can explain what she’ll
have to do. I’ll send in a nurse to help you make that call.” Confident that
Bill would soon be on his way to a nursing home, Dr.
Drighteers
left the room.

Bill was soon connected to his sister, Marie, via his
Blackberry, which a nurse held for him. Marie refused to take care of him for
six months, or even one day. She didn’t even sound that sorry about his injury.
She reminded him about his unwillingness to help their uncle, and she suggested
that maybe he was being properly rewarded for his previous lack of charity. It
was a short call.

After
Bill had been jilted by his sister
,
he had the nurse call his friend Stan, and within the hour Stan was sitting
next to him. He didn’t expect Stan and his wife to volunteer to care for him,
although if Stan offered to do that, he wouldn’t refuse. Instead, he wanted to
see if Stan had any suggestions for finding free home healthcare. Bill knew
that his insurance wouldn’t cover the expense for a home attendant, and the
thought of paying for such services out of pocket was more terrifying to him
than going to a nursing home, which is saying a lot, because the latter pressed
on his mind with the dread of a grave gaping at his feet. Stan, however, was no
help at all, and he magnified Bill’s misery by making light of his desperate
plight.

“Just think,” Stan said cheerfully, giving Bill’s cast a
friendly smack, “the women won’t be able to get away. They’ll be lining up and
down the corridor, whenever you pass. Women always outnumber men in nursing
homes. They’ll be fighting over you. You’ll have to recover quickly. Otherwise
they’ll take advantage of your situation. Men can be raped too, you know.”

“They’re all old,” Bill remarked with a low, sullen voice.

“Maybe it’s time you raised your standards,” answered Stan,
remaining upbeat, trying to help Bill accept the inevitable.

“I’m not old,” Bill replied glumly, trying to look away from
Stan, as much as his condition allowed.

Stan let Bill sulk. Stan expected this behavior, because it
was the first time that Bill’s delusion of eternal youth was deeply damaged, if
not altogether destroyed. Stan hoped that a period of adjustment would follow
and Bill’s interests in women would mature. To plant the seed that in the
future Bill would look for someone compatible and compassionate, rather than
another stark, indifferent contrast, no matter how attractive and
young-appearing
she may be, he said, “If you had gone after
Helen, as I told you to, this wouldn’t have happened. And if something bad had
happened to you, while you were seeing her, she’d probably help you out. After
all, she lives right in your building. But you blew that chance.”

Bill was silent. He wasn’t glad to hear that name again, but
a tiny, tiny thought began to whisper very softly in his head, although it took
a while to enter his consciousness.

Stan proceeded to deliver more opinions that Bill had no
pleasure in receiving, and the longer Stan offered such pestering advice, the
more visibly morose Bill became. Flashes of anger started showing in his eyes.
Eventually, Stan decided that he had administered enough good medicine for the
day, and it was time to go. He told Bill he would come to visit him, as soon as
he moved to the nursing home. “I’ll bring a box of candy,” he said, “which you
can share with all of your new friends-to-be.”

After Stan left his room, Bill asked the nurse to call his
sister again. He had a wild, frantic delusion that she had relented or could be
softened up with a second plea. Surely, she wouldn’t let her nearest blood
relation in the whole world whither away in one of those places, with the
decrepit and the dying. He wasn’t like them. Although he could barely move at
the moment, he felt as if he was still in his twenties. There were decades of
life before him. He would soon be what he was before. He only needed her help
for a while. Then he would be on his own feet again, free to live as he
pleased.

Marie and their uncle Joe were chain-smoking in her kitchen,
when the nurse reached them the second time. Uncle Joe was a short, thin,
animated man, who didn’t seem much affected by his stroke. There was the
slightest stiffness in his right arm and leg.

“No. I will say it again, no. That is your answer, your
final answer,” said Marie. She was not softened in the least from the previous
conversation with her brother. “Don’t bother asking anymore. Your uncle Joe has
something to say to you.”

She handed the receiver to uncle Joe.

“Billy boy,” uncle Joe’s lively voice crackled into the
phone. “I heard you had a little accident. You should be more careful. You’re
not so young anymore. An old stallion like you doesn’t belong on a racetrack
with the fillies.”

That call, which ended soon after his uncle’s unwanted pearl
of wisdom, was a crushing blow to Bill and left him literally flat on his back.
When he was alone in the hospital room again, as much as he could, which wasn’t
very much at all, he tossed and turned in his cast, trying to think of a way
out of a six-month stay at a nursing home. He didn’t belong there. He didn’t
want to go there. He wouldn’t go there.

His fingers almost clenched into a fist, as he cursed
Donna’s boyfriend for pushing him off the porch. That cretin, he raged.
“Calling me pops,” he said to himself. “I should have popped him. I would have
popped him, if I was feeling better.” Although the idea that he could have
defended himself against Frank some other day was satisfying to think, it was
not believable to him after a moment’s reflection. So instead, he excoriated
Donna for dating such a mentally challenged muscle head. “What does she see in
that moron?” he asked, roiling in anger at her. “As good as she looks, she must
be a nitwit. That guy’s a zero. The only thing he has going for him is his
age.” Bill broke off this train of thought, because he was suddenly mindful of
someone else, who had always wanted to date younger people. Unintentionally, he
might be incriminating himself, which was intolerable, so he changed the
subject.