Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  He had seen the question in the doctor’s eyes—how could he have not known something like this might happen? The actuarial tables were available online. Common sense rendered them superfluous anyway. The school certainly knew the liabilities, and they’d been very careful to limit their exposure. Arnold had to sign away his right to sue them before Nat could even be fitted for a uniform.

  Somehow he found himself walking past Fenway Park. Nat had such disdain for baseball. He had never shown the slightest interest in Little League. Only football had ever mattered to him, staying up late on Sunday night after two other games, when he was only eight years old, falling asleep in front of the television, no matter how hard he tried to keep his eyes open.

  No doubt there was a football metaphor that summed up this situation. Nat could find it for him. That was how his mind worked—“Time to punt it, Dad” when a sale at the store wasn’t drawing customers. Or when he’d let Nat run the store last Memorial Day weekend, and then showed up unexpectedly, just as things were getting out of control—“Ah, I get it! The old flea-flicker!”

  Well, Arnold was on his own forty-yard line today, two minutes left in the fourth quarter, and a touchdown behind. A wild card game that could put them into the playoffs. “They’re controlling their own destiny,” that’s what the announcers liked to say. He had to take control of his own destiny somehow. He needed a Hail Mary—a long bomb into the end zone, and then a try for the two-point conversion. They could still win by one point! Eli could do it, he’d done it before. Two minutes was plenty of time.

  Sixty-five hundred dollars. There had to be a way to scrounge sixty-five hundred dollars. It wasn’t even that much money, really. If he finally gave up and sold the old ’91 Volkswagen Vanagon, rusting in the backyard for lack of a new exhaust system, he could probably get twenty-five hundred, even with the coolant leak. People loved those vans. His own mechanic had offered him two grand for it, the last time he worked on it. Call it two thousand, then. What else? He had priced Carol’s antique Gorham Chantilly Service for eight—four-piece place settings. A few years ago it been worth nine hundred dollars. So, maybe a thousand, now? There was no monogram, the appraiser said that was a good thing. So that made three thousand dollars with the van—thirty-five hundred to go. He had some Stephen King first editions, a signed copy of some J.P. Marquand novel, and a copy of the 1930s Moby Dick with Rockwell Kent’s woodcut illustrations. It was only worth five hundred dollars on Etsy, but it was priceless to Arnold. His father had bought it the day it came out. Arnold had slipped it out of the house before the bank assessors could find it. The creditors took everything else, including the Steinway piano and the statuettes of Napoleonic generals (Ney, Turenne, de Saxe, Massena) that had stood guard on the mantelpiece for as long as Arnold could remember.

  Arnold yanked himself back to the present. The rest of his rare book collection—he might clear another thousand there, if he got lucky. So, four thousand dollars. They could have a yard sale, but it was the wrong season and most of their stuff was junk anyway.

  He was still twenty-five hundred dollars short. They kept a pathetic thousand dollars in the savings account—that would take the bill down to fifteen hundred.

  That was where he hit the wall.

  There was his family, and Carol’s family. But her parents had their own medical expenses and Carol’s sister was always asking Arnold for loans. It was tough making ends meet as a social worker, and although she was running a program now, it didn’t seem to make any difference. Philadelphia was an expensive city.

  His parents were dead and the whole estate, such as it was, had been sucked up by the creditors. All but the Melville! And Arnold’s brother, Ted, had helped them dodge the credit card vultures. “Those are unsecured loans. Just ignore them,” Ted had scoffed. And he was right. They threatened court action, but Ted showed up for the hearing, and the lawyers had folded when he asked for documentation. Of course there was no documentation—those debts had been bought and sold so many times they were just names on a spreadsheet. “I should run up some new credit card debt and do this again,” Ted had gloated.

  Now Arnold was wishing he had. Instead, Ted had made reckless investments—hydrogen-fusion energy companies, outer space tourism start-ups. He was always “ahead of his time,” but that wasn’t going to help Arnold right now. When they last spoke, Ted had been looking for seed money to develop a product that, as far as Arnold could tell, was basically an “all food groups” hard candy for people who didn’t have time to eat.

  Worst idea ever, and it certainly hadn’t made Ted into a millionaire with fifteen-hundred dollars to spare. Or fifteen dollars. Or fifteen cents. So, family was out.

  He thought about his friends. Why didn’t he have more of them? Why didn’t he have any rich ones? Rich people were stingy, rich friends were reluctant to cross the “charity line,” as Ted called it (his own rich friends had never ponied up a dime). But Arnold was willing to beg. The money wasn’t for him. It was for his son. That had to make a difference. But there was no one to ask. Everyone he knew was scrambling, just the way he was.

  A credit card advance? He was maxed out.

  A scratch ticket? Make me laugh.

  A smash-and-grab convenience store heist? But he knew he could never pull that off. He was a coward, and a bumbler. There were other crimes, though, white-collar crimes. He considered embezzlement but the sad fact stared him down. He’d be caught. Jackson Blum’s computers kept track of every transaction at the store, down to the penny, and Blum studied every day’s take, marked down in a big ledger he kept in his desk with the words “BEAT YESTERDAY” embossed on the cover in gold. Arnold cashed out the store every evening—if he was ten cents off calculating the receipts, he’d hear about it. He supposed he could skim some money off the top if he were smarter, but were he smarter he wouldn’t be in this position. No, he was stupid and shortsighted and he’d been functioning on some kind of crude day-to-day survival terms, only paying his taxes after every extension expired, taking out a third mortgage to pay off a fourth credit card, ducking, dancing, dodging, waiting for something to change.

  Well, something had changed at last—a very small something: the cruciate ligament in his son’s knee. Not exactly the change he’d been hoping for.

  Waiting at a red light, he added up his financials.

  He still needed fifteen-hundred dollars.

  And he needed it fast.

  “The sooner we can perform the operation, the better the chances for a positive outcome,” Kuhn had said before Arnold had blurted out his money woes. “Ideally, we would have had your boy on the table the afternoon of the incident. Of course there’s nothing to be done about that now. But every moment counts.”

  And how long was a moment, exactly? Ten seconds? A minute? Five minutes? And how many of these moments remained before Nat’s injuries became inoperable? Arnold wanted to know. The clock was ticking, the little red digital readout in his head blinking its way to zero. He could see the digits so clearly, the prissy engineer’s efficiency of them, only the necessary little dashes changing, one at the bottom swinging up to turn the zero into a nine, a single replacement turning the nine into an eight—no wasted pixels, smooth and elegant where his life was a mess, but counting down just the same.

  How did fund-raisers raise funds? They talked to rich people. Nantucket was squirming with rich people, bulging with them, but that didn’t help Arnold. He didn’t sip Dark ’N’ Stormies at their cocktail parties, or eat lunch at their clubs. He didn’t sail, he didn’t play tennis, he didn’t fish. He never played golf or bocce or croquet. There were paddleball courts somewhere mid-island but that was another club he had never joined, along with the health club and the garden club.

  He was a clerk. He took those people’s money and wrapped up their bathing trunks or their baseball mitts and handed them the change. He wasn’t even human to them. If Blum replaced him wi
th a robot, no one would even notice. Or they might actually prefer it! And Blum would do it if he could.

  Blum! If you like irony, here was a good slice of it: the only authentically wealthy individual he’d ever known well enough to ask for a loan was Blum himself—his boss, who wanted him to work Christmas Day and hadn’t given him a raise in two years. Still, what could fifteen-hundred dollars mean to Blum? Nothing. But it could help Arnold so much; it could rescue an innocent boy’s future. That had to be a different category of expenditure—true charity in the season that celebrated it. The Santas in front of department stores collected for the Salvation Army. The New York Times had its Neediest Families donation drive. That was the Christmas spirit at work.

  Well, this year the Sprocketts were one of Nantucket’s neediest families. How could Blum not see that? How could he not want to help, when helping would cost him so little? He was always holding forth about efficiency and cost-effectiveness—what could be more cost-effective than this?

  Fifteen-hundred dollars for a boy’s future.

  Arnold stopped walking, leaned against a parked van, and let the crowds jostle past him. This was a bad idea. This was a worse idea even than his brother Ted’s all-food-group candy. Anyway, he had one more possibility, one more shot to take.

  No time like the present.

  He pushed his full weight onto his feet and starting walking back to the hospital.

  ***

  Althea Rose McCandless was the deputy administrator for Ambulatory Registration and Financial Counseling at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Arnold had spoken to her on the phone several times, but she had been brusque and impatient, listing forms he needed to fill out, websites he needed to visit, documentation he was required to obtain, before they could even have an intelligent conversation about the disposition of his son’s medical treatment.

  The whole process had begun to feel like some distorted nightmare version of The Wizard of Oz—from “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” to “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” to “If I Only Had a Brain”…followed alarmingly by “Bring me the Broomstick of The Wicked Witch of the West” and “Surrender Dorothy.”

  He had pretty much given up on “There’s No Place Like Home.”

  Still, he had completed the forms and gathered the necessary documents. He had turned them in and waited. He had made phone calls and left messages and waited for answers. He knew the suitable quotation for this phase of the process: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

  Enough. It was time to confront the man behind the curtain, or in this case the lady. He was going to make his final plea in person.

  He didn’t have an appointment and he wound up sitting for two and a half hours in Althea Rose McCandless’ big uncomfortable waiting room, perched on a plastic chair, leafing through old issues of Golf Digest and Field & Stream, reading articles on fly-fishing and putter technology. His mother was right—she used to say he’d read anything just to keep his eyes moving, scooping up the words. “You’d read the back of the U-Haul truck that ran you over,” she said once. And he had read plenty of them, sitting in traffic—“Mom’s Attic—Extra Space! Secure Tie-Downs, Rub Rails, EZ Load Ramp!” Why did he remember stuff like that? Though he had to admit, the phrases had a certain rhythm, a certain swing. He was chanting the U-Haul truck copy to himself, like a mantra, when they finally called his name.

  He stood up stiffly—the chair had strained his back, and using his rolled-up sweatshirt as an improvised lumbar support had proved only partly successful.

  Inside her cramped office, Althea Rose McCandless loomed above a cluttered desk strewn with forms, binders, an out-of-date computer monitor, and the remains of her lunch in a plastic box. Her hair was braided into tight perfect cornrows, which together with the matching hoop earrings and silver necklace and sharply tailored blue business suit jacket and white blouse, belied the air of disorganization broadcast by her desk. Arnold had read somewhere that a messy workspace was actually more productive. In any case you wouldn’t question Althea Rose McCandless about it. Borderline obese, she carried her weight with authority and style. It was a provocation, a threat—like a Sumo wrestler’s belly. You knew he could knock you on your ass with it—a blow from a medicine ball. Althea’s bulk was armor, too, all the fashionably swathed heft of her, an unbreachable redoubt, her narrowed eyes the gun slits in a bunker. By contrast, the fat white women waiting with Arnold on the plastic chairs had just seemed baggy and defeated.

  Arnold felt old and flimsy as he eased himself down into the chair across from her.

  “So what is the problem, Mr.…Sprockett?”

  “Arnold Sprockett, yes.”

  “Your insurance forms are all in order. I see you’ve been paying your premiums in a timely manner. That’s more than I can say for some people.”

  “Yes, right—thanks…but it’s the deductible. I was hoping—”

  “Mr. Sprockett, I’ll be frank with you. Insurance is just a form of legalized gambling. You bet you’ll get sick. The carrier bets you’ll stay healthy. We load the dice with actuarial tables and research. We analyze rates of disability, morbidity, mortality, fertility, and other contingencies, along with the effects of consumer choice and the geographical distribution of the utilization of medical services and procedures, and the utilization of drugs and therapies.” She smiled to soften the jargon. “It’s not unlike the way racing touts study the horses. The result, for insurance carriers, has been the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale. It’s a lot of number-crunching and statistics, but it works. That’s how these companies stay in business! By contrast, all you have to go on is your bank book and a hunch. You just roll the dice, close your eyes, and pray.”

  “Yes, well—”

  “And this time the dice came up snake eyes. Am I right?”

  “Um, I—yes, I guess so. That’s one way to put it.”

  “Yes, indeed. And it looks to me like you have to lay your hands on some six thousand, five hundred dollars.”

  “That’s the thing, Ms. McCandless. I think I can get all but fifteen hundred dollars of it, and I was hoping that we could find some—accommodation, some plan, I guess, some payment plan where I could—”

  She was shaking her head as he talked. “That’s just not possible, Mr. Sprockett. I think you know that. The terms are stated quite clearly in the policy. The deductible must be paid in full in advance of treatment. That’s just the rule.”

  “But I—”

  “Most people set aside their deductible as part of their savings plan, so they’ll be prepared for these eventualities.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “Clearly.”

  “So, I mean…there’s no credit option…like the Care Credit card that dentists offer, or—?”

  She turned sideways to him, clicking away at her computer keyboard. “I see you abused your privileges with Care Credit. Your account was turned over to collections fourteen months ago.”

  “I paid that off!”

  “Well, congratulations, but once the lender has sold the debt, the eventual disposition of the liability makes no difference to the offender’s credit rating.” She smiled. “That ship has sailed, Mr. Sprockett. But the good news is, your standing doesn’t make any difference today, since no such remedies are available in any case.”

  “Great.”

  She shrugged. “One less thing to worry about.”

  “So, there’s nothing I can do?”

  “You could borrow the money.”

  “I can’t. I’ve already borrowed every penny I could possibly—”

  “Or sell something. Some family heirloom. You must have something of value you could bear to part with.”

  “How do you think I scraped up the five thousand dollars? I’m tapped out, Ms. McCandless. I’m selling everything—and I can’t bear to part with any of it.”

&n
bsp; She sighed. “Well, then. Let me suggest this. Set aside a small amount from your weekly paycheck—say fifty dollars? Simply by doing that, you could have the whole amount saved in roughly ten months’ time.”

  “But I don’t have ten months! Nat needs the operation now.”

  She settled herself in her chair. “I’m not sure what you want me to do for you, Mr. Sprockett.”

  “Could you lend me the money?”

  “If I could, I’d have been doing that very thing for years, and today I’d be as broke as you are.”

  He realized he was sitting forward. He eased back and blew out an exhausted breath. “It’s just…it seems so…so arbitrary, somehow. I mean, if I had the money I’d just have it, you know? I wouldn’t even think about it.”

  “But you don’t. So you think about nothing else.”

  “Yeah. It’ so random, and yet…There’s nothing you can do, everything’s like—set in stone.”

  “Tell me about it, mister.”

  “Hey, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you meant. And that’s all right. We all got to do the best with what we was given. When my boss tells me I got to do this and do that, I tell him I don’t got to do nothing but stay black and die.”

  “I wish I felt that way. My life is just a big pile of all the things I have to do.”

  “Then do the most important one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get up out of here and go to the place you most don’t want to go and do the thing you most don’t want to do. I don’t know where that place is or what that thing is. Only you know that. But you best find it and do it, and do it right quick. Your son needs you and time’s wasting.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”