Diamond in the Rough

by Peter Canning

  “Recognize that house?” she said.

  I did. It was the house on Ridgefield Street. It had a fresh coat of light robin blue paint. The grass was a thick green and a giant oak tree grew in the yard that was surrounded by a white picket fence. “It’s Miss Broadbent’s house,” I said.

  “It’s the Broadbent family’s house,” she corrected me. “Mr. Broadbent’s at work at the typewriter factory. His wife’s in at the Wadsworth Museum attending a lecture. That’s me in the kitchen, preparing the dinner—I was employed there for nearly twenty-five years, and up in the bedroom there...”

  And the next thing I knew I could see right into the bedroom. “There’s young Terry Broadbent. Look at that smile on her pretty face.” She lay on her freshly made bed, staring at the ring on her finger, a big diamond engagement ring. “She’s twenty-three years old.” She had such a beautiful clear complexion. She looked like she was in a trance.

  “Doesn’t she look like she’s the happiest girl in the world?” my escort said. “Young man took her out last night, proposed, gave her that ring, and, well, gave her a little bit more than her mommy and daddy know. Young people today aren’t any different from what they were back then. They all have those needs. I did myself at a time, if you can believe that. Look at her staring into the diamond. What do you think she sees?”

  “What happened to her fiancé?”

  She chortled, and then said, “We’ve got more stops to make, grab on again.” And whoosh, we sped toward downtown. I was holding on to her ankles. We stopped at a bar on Main Street and rolled right through the front door. There in the bar, several young men laughed raucously as the waitress brought them another round of drinks.

  “So you gave her a ring,” one said.

  “Yes, I did, and that was it. She couldn’t say yes soon enough after all these evenings of saying no, if you know what I mean.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I did.”

  “A ring, isn’t that a lot just to get there or are you really going to marry her?”

  “I told her I had to get my business up and going, and of course I have my business trips.”

  “You are a cad. What did the ring set you back?’

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I went to see a client. No one answered the door. It was open so I went in calling her name. Found her dead on the living room floor. Cold and stiff. Eighty-seven, she just dropped. I saw the ring there nice and shiny and thought, ‘Hey now, there’s my ticket.’ She didn’t have any relatives so I knew no one would miss it.”

  “That’s too much. That’s evil.”

  “Well, she’ll never know. And I tell you, if there’s evil in me, there’s some devil in her. She was no lame kitten.”

  “What a snake,” I said to my escort.

  “That’s right, and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”

  “He gets struck by a bolt of lightning.”

  “You read this story before?”

  “No, I was just guessing.”

  “Let me do the telling.”

  “Was it a bolt of lightning?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head. “He went to jail for twenty years for theft.”

  “For the ring?”

  “No, they never found out about that. He was embezzling company funds. They sent him to jail, and he died there of electrocution—accidental in the kitchen—not state sanctioned.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “Yes, she does, but all she’ll tell people is he died in a horrible accident before they could marry.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No, people believe what they want. The good part of their souls believes in the good part of other people’s, in the possibility of their redemptions. You see, the heart wants to be loved. The heart wants always to be believed. That’s why it’s so easy for a heart to be stolen.”

  I woke up vomiting again. My head was exploding. The phone rang.

  It was a wrong number. An oddly familiar young female voice asked for me, but she hung up saying she had the wrong Tim.

  Then there I was again, back in dream hell, my mouth full of sand. I was facedown in the hot desert. “Up, boy!” A gangbanger kicked me in the ribs. He wore a Chicago Bull’s jersey and had gold chains dangling around his neck. “Yo, I ought to just put you down for what you did, stealing my hard earnings like that. I got four kids could have used that change. I was their only provider.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. Everybody knows. Grab on to my Nikes, I got some things to show you.”

  I touched his red shoes and the next thing I knew I was whistling through the air as Air Drug Dealer flew me over housetops, and treetops, and judging from the roads I saw where we were headed—Carrie’s.

  We went right through the walls—into the bedroom. I saw a badged uniform and gun slung over a chair. “That woman likes cops, don’t she?” he said. “Why’d she hang out with you? You’re just a petty thief.”

  “Please, do I have to see this? I’m going to be sick,” I said, and I threw up.

  “What do you think she’s looking for? A good time? Or true love? Wipe your mouth now. I personally think it’s true love. But life ain’t about the finding. You found my money and you thought you’d found the answer. You didn’t find nothing but a load of trouble.”

  “Can we go?”

  “Yes, but we ain’t done. We got another stop.”

  And I rode back into Hartford on his red heels and we landed on the roof of Miss Broadbent’s house on Ridgefield Street, and we hung upside down looking in the window. I saw her there in bed. She lay there and cried. She cried and she cried. She looked lost in her mind.

  “Take that in, young fool, take that in. No repair for that pain.”

  My head was pounding when I awoke. I did not know whether it was day or night. I was spinning.

  I saw a specter at the foot of my bed. I knew I was just having some crazy Ebenezer Scrooge hallucination, but it was what was in my head and I couldn’t wake up out of it. The specter was an old man from whom I had stolen fifty dollars. He looked at me somewhat kindly and that surprised me. “Come, young man,” he said. “Take my hand. I have a place to take you.” But we didn’t go anywhere. The room changed though. The paint peeled from the walls. There were cobwebs on the walls like it was a forgotten attic. I looked at my hands. They were old and veined. The man held up a mirror and it was me, but I was eighty years old, bald, wrinkled. My joints hurt, I was short of breath. I felt tightness in my chest. I looked over at the desk and saw ten pill bottles and saw I was on a medical bed with the side rail up. I felt my penis. I had a catheter in me. By the bedside there was a faded picture. It was my picture of Carrie, but she didn’t look old. She looked just like she did today. The door opened and I saw two EMTs saunter in.

  “He’s cold,” one said, touching me. “Some rigor in the jaw.”

  They put electrodes on me. “Asystole. All three leads. What time is it?”

  “10:42.”

  The other one wrote it down on his pad. “10:42 it is. What a fucking place to end up. No family, I’d guess. I wonder where he keeps his dough? Check under the mattress.”

  I tried to move, to wake up, to startle them, but I couldn’t. I was dead. Stone cold.

  Chapter 31

  I heard them come into the room. They hovered over the bed. “Dude, you’re burning up.”

  I groaned.

  “We’re going to have to take you in.” It was Fred.

  “Just take me home,” I said.

  “You are home. Do you know what day it is?”

  “Tuesday,” I said.

  “Man, you are out of it. You didn’t come to work today. Third day in a row. That’s not like you. I thought we were going to find you dead.”

  “I told them I was sick.”

  “Yeah, two days ago. I could cook a steak on your he
ad. You’ve got puke all over the floor. I hope you didn’t shit yourself.”

  “I’ll get the stair chair,” I heard a voice say.

  “You’re going to clean this place up?” my landlord said.

  “Maybe when he gets out of the hospital. Can’t you see he’s sick?”

  “Rent’s due today.”

  “He’ll pay you. How long has he lived here?”

  “Three years.”

  “Don’t you know this man’s a recognized hero? He’s good for it. Right now he’s sick, so back the fuck off.”

  I felt his hand on my wrist. “You are tacking out. Are you in any pain?”

  “No, I’ve just got a headache. What are you doing here? I told them I was sick.”

  “Don’t you remember what I said? This is the third day you’ve been out. Ned sent me over here to check on you. Your phone is off the hook.”

  I vaguely remember them lifting me out of bed and into the stair chair. “Just don’t hurl on me,” Fred said.

  They carried me down the narrow stairs and out to the ambulance. I looked up at the dirty ceiling as we went to the hospital. I could hear the sirens, felt the bumps in the road. They had an oxygen mask over my face. I felt a sharp stick in my arm, then felt a coldness running into me. I heard the crackle of a radio a voice saying, “Go ahead, hospital’s on.” And then the words, “Burning up, heart rate 172, BP 80/30, running saline wide open.”

  Looking at the ceiling, I saw the faces of my patients, my escorts looking at me, shaking their heads. I’ve done the best I could, I whined. I never meant to hurt anyone. I never meant to cause harm.

  I woke up a day later in a hospital bed with two IVs still running into me, and a gaggle of medical students staring at me while a doctor was droning on about staphylococcus something or other. It seems I had gotten an infection in my bloodstream that had almost killed me.

  There were flowers and a Teddy Bear from my mom and little sister. Fred and Tom came by and left me some porno magazines hidden inside People magazine covers.

  I had to stay for ten days while the IV antibiotics did their work. I was able to go outside in my hospital pajamas, hauling an IV pole around. I’d sit out on the benches and smoke. If ambulances were in the loading area, some of the crews would come over and talk to me.

  I was emaciated. All the muscle I’d built up looked worn away. People probably thought I had HIV, TB and diseases not yet discovered. The doctor said the staph infection I had was a common disease everyone had on their body, it was just when it got in the blood stream it became virulent. It was a mystery why it happened. Maybe I didn’t have enough good cells in me to fight off the evil cells from without. If they hadn’t found me, I would have for certain died.

  The whole experience was very humbling for me. I had a vague memory of being summoned to a very bright place and kneeling before a kind but harried large man with a long ungroomed white beard in a Hartford Whalers hockey jersey and teal green sandals who asked me if I thought I deserved another chance.

  And I had just cried, cried like a baby. And he just snickered at me like I was nothing.

  Along about the sixth day of my stay, I broke down and called Carrie.

  “I’m in the hospital,” I said. “I don’t know if you heard, but I got an infection and almost died.”

  “I did hear you were sick. What kind of infection?”

  “A blood infection. It’s staphylococcus.”

  “Can it spread to someone else?”

  “Yeah, but not easily. They don’t need to wear masks and stuff. I just got a high fever and was delirious, but I’m better now. I just have to keep getting IV drugs for another four days.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I should be out by Saturday. They said I need to rest for another week, and then should be well enough to go back to work.”

  “That’s good. I’m sorry to hear that you were sick. Some people were talking at the bar. I thought about sending you a card. I know we haven’t been close lately; I still care about you.”

  “Me too… How are you doing?”

  “I’m all right. It’s been busy at work.”

  “Carrie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to tell you that I am sorry if I didn’t treat you right.”

  “Huh?”

  I was fighting back the tears. “I just wanted you to know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I know you and I had our fights, and I wanted to apologize if I wasn’t everything I should have been.”

  “That’s all right. I enjoyed our time together. You… you made me feel special at a time when no one else did, and I will never forget that.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ve got to go, but… it was good to hear from you. I hope you feel better.”

  After we hung up, I wondered if there was still something there. I felt maybe there was, but at the same time, I knew I was delusional, and if there was, I lacked the confidence to believe it.

  Chapter 32

  I had been saving money over the course of the last year. My rainy day fund. I feared that a time would come when I would need cash and not have any, and that crisis would precipitate me toward even more dangerous thieving. Who knows? In desperation, I might even throw a ski mask over my head and run into a bank with a toy gun, or knock a Brink’s truck driver over the head with an oxygen cylinder, or paint my face black and wear a ninja outfit and try cat burglary. I was worried that the bad seed in me would spread and multiply, traveling throughout my body like a metastized cancer—that my end was already foretold—that I was terminal.

  As insurance against desperation, once I had paid off the garage, I started to put fifty dollars a week into a savings account. I had dipped into it only twice, during dry thieving spells, but replenished it later. On one occasion when I struck another lode with a dead drug dealer, I made an eight hundred dollar deposit. With other bonus deposits, I had run the balance up to nearly three thousand dollars. However, being sick again and missing nearly three weeks of work, in addition to accumulating some serious medical bills, put a hurt on me. I tried to apply for worker’s compensation on the grounds that I had caught the fever on the job, but they just laughed at me. My claims were rejected. Prove it, they said. Well, I couldn’t.

  Tom, who was a steward in the union, told me to forget about it. “This fight has been fought and lost before. It’s best to just not even try. There’s a guy from downstate got hepatitis, and he needs a liver transplant now. He was carrying a guy down the stairs and that guy had diarrhea on him. His arms were all scratched up from clearing shrubbery and the shit got on his arms. The guy had hepatitis and died a few weeks later. The medic filed a case. They rejected it. And he’s got three kids. Wrenching your shoulder carrying someone down the stairs—that you can prove. Getting shit on or bled on, and catching hepatitis or AIDS, you’re out of luck. The insurance companies don’t give a shit. Anything to save them money.”

  Some health care system this was. We were working our tails off, taking people to the hospital, many for nothing serious at all, many who could have just as easily walked or taken the bus to the hospital or better yet a doctor’s. In the winter we were often sicker than our patients, matching them cough for cough. You wouldn’t believe the number of EMTs who need breathing treatments or even IV fluids during the shift just to get through. Partners treating partners. Why? Because no one could afford to be out of work, and with our shitty insurance, no one could afford doctor’s bills. On one shift I gave Tom two liters of fluid (he showed me how to do the IV) and two doses of Phenergan. He kept the IV lock in his arm and would lie down in the back and hook himself up in between calls. Meanwhile we are both coughing up lungs while having to carry people down three flights of stairs because they were “sick.” In the back of the ambulance, the patients would whip out their state card like it was a Visa or MasterCard—only the card never came due for them. We, on the other hand, worked hard just to pay our bills, and if it wasn’t one E
MS person, it was another, getting sick, going out of work and being stuck with bills honest people had trouble paying. Jan Dempsey got breast cancer, lost her house. Jason Roberts woke up one morning with his legs paralyzed, and almost died from Guillain-Barre Syndrome as the disease spread to his chest before it stopped. Even the smallest medical problem put a hurt on a person. And we had insurance. What was the point in working? You had to just hope you stayed healthy.

  The hospital was willing to put me on a repayment plan if I gave them one thousand dollars right off the top. I decided to just pay it all at once. I had been through that payment-with-interest route and did not want to go there again. I figured I would just start from scratch, hope that luck worked in my favor. After I emptied my account, I had just fifty dollars to my name. I went in and signed up on the schedule for sixteen-hour days five days a week, and two twelve-hour days on another two.

  I was worried the thieving, which I had sworn off, was going to start back in earnest. I just had to hope I was strong. It didn’t take long before I learned the answer to that question.

  “40 Billings Road for the high fever,” Dispatch said.

  Billings Road was the Ellsworth, one of my most fertile lifting grounds. Rich old people living in fine apartments with Persian rugs and antiques, and cash spread randomly about on tables and dressers like pennies and nickels were spread out on mine. Their wallets and purses were often stuffed with fifties and hundreds while I had only crumpled ones in my billfold. The only problem with Billings from a thief’s perspective was that the on-duty nurse had usually been called to the apartment and was there with the patient, giving us the story and writing up the patient’s medical history and medications for us. The silver lining of course was the nurse was often too busy doing that to keep her eyes on the angel of mercy who was grabbing a quick bill off the bureau or riffling a purse. Sometimes a cop was there if they had called 911 and the local ambulance had been unavailable, but having a cop there also added another layer of protection. You’re saying I stole money? Who would even think of stealing with a cop right there the whole time? Give me a break!