Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “I don’t want to around your mom,” she whispered.

  I nodded. She walked off, disappearing into the bathroom. I turned back to my mother and rolled her up the ramp and into the rear of the van. I braked her into place, slipped the ramp back into the undercarriage, and bent down to pet Snapper. The little devil was face-first into a bowl set on the hot asphalt, lapping like a camel who had just crossed the Gobi.

  Remembering Jack’s condition, I got back on my iPhone, called Fresno information and asked for the number of a hospital close to the dental clinic. They gave me the address of St. Agnes Medical Center, which I punched into the GPS under destination #2. As luck would have it–and we weren’t having all that much recently–St. Agnes was only a few miles from Yang’s office.

  “All right, Jack,” I said, climbing back into the driver’s seat, “I found this place where they’re going to take a look at your swollen Johnson. If they recommend you go into the ER and get your dick lanced, that’ll be your call, okay? But I need you on this fucking trip. I can’t drive all the way to Wisconsin by myself.”

  “I’ll make it,” he said. He chugged some ale, refreshed his glass, then glowered at me with an expression suggesting that if I even so much as chortled he would cold-cock me. “All right, Miles, thanks.”

  “I’m sure it’s no big deal. There’s got to be an anti-Viag med that redirects the blood back to where it’s most needed. Which in your case is…”–I tapped my temple with a forefinger.

  “Hilarious, Homes, hilarious.”

  “I’m just trying to lighten the mood. You were the one who took the–I still can’t believe it–300 milligrams, not me.”

  “Yeah, but you were the one who gave ‘em to me,” Jack growled.

  “Don’t blame me, motherfucker,” I snapped, temper momentarily flaring. “I was just as drunk, but I only took a half.”

  Jack shook his head disgustedly–at himself or me? I couldn’t tell–and sat staring out the front windshield, no doubt regretting his decision to accompany me on this trip. The collective mood was quickly deteriorating.

  After my mom had relieved herself, Snapper had hydrated, Joy had had her med Mary Jane fix and Jack and I had sandpapered our hangover grumpiness with a couple more cups of ale, the five of us got back on the road. We continued on the 198 and headed north, the arid scenery broken up now and then by beautiful orchards, beautiful as long as you were traveling in an air-conditioned car and didn’t have to stop and step out into the now stifling 110-degree heat.

  Past Caruthers we started seeing the first signs of urban civilization, evidenced by subdivisions erected on the outskirts of Fresno, a city of nearly half a million residents. Soon, we had forded the 99 Freeway and were in the city proper.

  The Rampvan’s navigation system worked wonders. The electronic woman’s voice guided us confidently and faultlessly through the labyrinth of the unfamiliar city. Dr. Yang’s clinic was a single-story beige stucco structure with a red-clay tile roof, a few miles from the downtown nucleus. Parking on the street, I killed the engine and punched in the address of the St. Agnes Medical Clinic.

  “Look, Joy,” I started, trying to sound casual, “Jack’s got a bad stomach. Might be an ulcer or something, so while I’m with my mother getting her tooth worked on, I want you to accompany Jack to the hospital, okay?

  “Okay.”

  I produced my wallet from my back pocket and handed her five twenties. “I’m sure you guys’ll be done before us, so here’s some cash. Get lunch somewhere.”

  She took the bills from me with reluctance, as if she was too proud to accept handouts. She slipped the money into her handbag and clasped it shut.

  Jack turned around and, rooting deep for the humor that had abandoned him, joked, “Good luck, Mrs. Raymond. If you don’t come out of surgery, it was great knowing you.”

  “Oh, don’t joke me,” my mother said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Jack reassured her. He clamped a hand on my shoulder. “See you in a bit, brother.”

  “Good luck, big guy. Both of you.”

  I wheeled my increasingly anxious mother up a concrete path to a door decorated with six shingles advertising the dentists and periodontists headquartered within.

  Inside the polar-cool office complex, styled on a Southwestern theme, replete with soft adobe tones and framed reproductions of black-and-white aerial photos of Fresno in its infancy, we followed the arrows down the hall to Dr. Yang’s suite.

  I opened the door and wheeled my mother backward into the small waiting room. The office manager, plump and in her thirties, with a helmet of dyed blond hair, swiveled in her chair at the sound of the door opening. Her prefabricated smile instantly transmogrified into one of alarm when she got an eyeful of the two of us. “Can I help you?”

  “We have an appointment at two,” I said, leaving my mother to approach the reception window. “I’m Miles Raymond. I’m the guy who called from the road and said we had an emergency situation. My mother has what appears to be an abscessed tooth.”

  “Uh, yes, but, uh…” she started, but found her speech hobbled by what I surmised was her alarm at my stroke-addled mother, now slumped slightly forward in her wheelchair, her Gilligan’s Island hat making her look like some refugee from a war her side had lost.

  I leaned my elbows on the desk and tried to cut the helmet-haired woman off at the headwaters. “Look, we’re kind of desperate here. I’m taking her across country via Oregon to be with her sister in Wisconsin. Her tooth’s killing her. Could the doctor please just take a look at it and see what we’re dealing with?”

  “Just a minute,” she said nervously, no doubt fearing the imminent wrath of Dr. Yang for her having failed to ascertain fully the patient’s condition. She swiveled in her chair and rose cumbrously from it. Her ass was Kansas-wide and she had to shift it sideways in order to wedge it through the doorway into the adjoining suite of examination rooms. By a surprising feat of adroitness, she was able to accomplish this without pivoting her shoulders or twisting her knees.

  I turned to my mother and bounced my index finger on my lips. “Not a word, okay? I’ll get you a nice glass of cold Chardonnay when we’re done.”

  She brightened. “I’ll be a good girl,” she said.

  Becky–in white letters on her nameplate–returned, shoehorned herself back into her chair, and said with an unwelcoming look on her face, “Okay, we’ll need you to fill this out.” She handed me a clipboard bearing two Xeroxed pages of medical history questions.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked.

  Flustered, she fumbled for one on her cluttered desk, handed it to me and said in an unfriendly voice, “Here you go.”

  I sat down wearily in an uncomfortable fiberglass chair and filled out the ridiculously long form with a conspiracy of prevarication. When I was done I handed it back to her. Her foreboding expression had not changed; dark clouds had scudded across the wide sky of her hideously made-up face. As she opened the door and held it so that I could push my mother in I espied her exchanging dagger looks with the dentist.

  Inside the fluorescent lit treatment room, Dr. Yang, a small man with a receding hairline, blinking behind small, round horn-rimmed glasses, greeted us defensively, as if we were the IRS. Next to him stood a statuesque woman I pegged as of Eastern European descent. She, too, wore a baleful expression. I introduced my mother and myself and Yang and I shook hands. Summoning all the professional sang-froid he could muster, given the predicament he suddenly faced, Yang bent down and took my mother’s hand in his briefly, smiling through pursed lips. I think he felt sorry for her, but the inconvenience of having to deal with a handicapped person, a stroke victim on his lunch hour no less, dismayed him to the quick of his being.

  Exchanging nods with his technician, he said, casting his eyes away from my mother, “We’re going to have to get her up in the chair, otherwise…” He chopped himself off and held up his hands as if saying he wouldn’t be able to do anything to remediate her dental
woe. I think he hoped that would be the end of it, apologies would be exchanged and he and his technician and Becky could race off and chow down on some Mexican combo plates and wash them back with stiff margaritas, libations they now all desperately desired.

  “No problem,” I said, springing into action. I stepped across to the dental chair. “Does this armrest come up?”

  Dentist and technician exchanged quick looks of petulant annoyance but, trapped in our itinerant freak show, worked up a response. The technician came forward, wordlessly depressed a lever and raised the padded armrest until it pointed ceilingward.

  “Does the chair lower?” I asked.

  Again, the technician wordlessly accommodated my request, then stood back, arms folded across her prodigious chest, waiting to see what would happen next, her countenance signaling that she expected the worst.

  “Thank you,” I said sarcastically. I wheeled my mother adjacent to the dental chair and braked it tight. I circled around so I was facing her. “All right, Mom,” I said. “Here we go. We’ve done this a hundred times. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. Bravely, she raised her right hand and I clutched it with my right. Using all my strength, I hoisted her to a wobbly standing position. Behind her the dental clinic trio–Becky had joined us–exchanged wide-eyed looks of horror at what they were witnessing.

  “Okay, Mom, let’s turn you this way.” I stepped to my left, as if leading a grotesque dance of the paralytic, and managed to get her ass balanced precariously on the edge of the adjustable examination chair. With both hands, I pushed her lower body until her backside was fully planted on the hard cushion. Then, employing both arms, with a great heave, I lifted her legs up and swiveled them onto the chair, which in turn simultaneously rotated her upper torso so that she was now lying perfectly supine. Hooking my hands under her armpits, I hoisted her up so that she was sitting properly in the chair, concluding a feat of comic maladroitness. I wheeled around to face the three of them, whose collective alarmed expressions underscored their disbelief, and said jocularly, still a little high from the Sierra Nevada and hoping to lighten their disheartened mood, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, let’s drill and fill!”

  They looked at me like I had lost my mind in the Central Valley heat. I probably had. But my mother was in the chair now and there was no alternative but to go through the motions of a preliminary examination. I was silently gleeful, confident I had them by the short hairs.

  Dr. Yang breathed deeply in and out of his nose like an anxious animal, then turned to his statuesque technician–I caught the nametag, Deidre, and assumed Slovenian, or Transylvanian, the pale expression she wore! They shared ominous looks.

  Becky handed him the medical history chart I had filled out and he dropped it to his side without looking at it. He shifted over and gazed gravely down at my mother. “Where does it hurt, Mrs. Raymond?” My mother patted the right side of her mouth. “On the bottom?” She nodded once. “Could you open your mouth for me, please?”

  My mother tried her best to open her mouth but, because of her full left-side paralysis, she had trouble complying. Yang pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and pried her mouth open as he might that of a recalcitrant dog. He inserted an instrument with a small mirror attached at one end and took a closer assay of the problem area. He visibly winced.

  “Doesn’t look good,” he muttered. He turned to Deirdre–whom he was almost certainly banging (the image appalled me!)–and said, “Let’s X-ray it.”

  She shot him a look like, Are you fucking out of your mind, pencil dick?

  “Let’s do it,” he commanded.

  A reluctant Deidre dutifully disappeared for a few minutes to get the equipment she needed for the X-rays. She returned and stood over my mother, speaking in, yes, a thick Slavic accent, “Hold your mouth open, please?”

  Once again, my mother acceded to the request as best she could manage. Using dental tongs, and with some finessing, the technician managed to place a slide of unexposed negative where Dr. Yang had indicated.

  “Okay, bite down, please,” she instructed. My mother did as she was told. The technician rotated a flexible metal arm where the X-ray camera was mounted, aiming it where the negative had been planted. Last, she fitted a lead-lined vest over my mother’s chest.

  Dr. Yang motioned for me to step behind the X-ray control machine so I wouldn’t get zapped. Deirdre pressed a button on the X-ray machine. The device emitted a sharp buzz. Done, the technician came forward and removed the film from my mother’s mouth.

  I waited by my mother’s side while the dentist and his technician developed the slides in the adjoining room. I eavesdropped on them as they conferred over the pictures. Deirdre was saying something in a harsh undertone I couldn’t make out.

  “I’m scared,” my mother said.

  “It’ll be all right. Hell, you’ve almost died four times and you’re worried about a damn tooth?”

  She chuckled at the mordant observation.

  Yang finally rematerialized, Deirdre towering over him from behind, both their expressions even darker, if that were possible. He glanced at the chart, finding it difficult to meet my desperate gaze. “Your mother has an abscessed lower molar. All the way up the roots. You’ll want to have it extracted.”

  “Well, let’s do it,” I said, growing impatient, itching for resolution and a drink.

  “Your mother’s taking a lot of medication,” he started, scanning the chart on which I had filled out her medical history, including the cocktail of meds she was dosed on daily. I sensed in his deliberate avoidance of my beseeching gaze and his solemn tone that his heart was not really in the procedure. “I’m particularly concerned about the Coumadin, the blood-thinning medication for her clotting. This is a very high dosage.” He stabbed the chart accusingly with a forefinger.

  I crossed my arms and waited for the verdict.

  Suddenly, he grew animated, as if all the energy he had expended to suppress his disconcertion with the appalling series of events that had ruined his lunch hour had unleashed a different personality. “This has to be done in a hospital under proper medical supervision,” he said in a rising tone. “She could bleed to death,” he concluded, practically screaming at me.

  “We’ll take that risk,” I said gently.

  “I won’t,” he said sharply. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to risk a med-mal.” Now, he had me by the short hairs.

  I sucked in air as deep as my lungs would expand and released it. “Look,” I started, in a placating tone, “could you just give her something? A shot of Novocain? Some kind of antibiotic? Anything that might hold her over for a week until I can make arrangements with a hospital?” He stared at me blankly, in an inchoate state of rage. I thought he was going to go psychotic on me like one of those Korean assembly members who break out into fistfights if they don’t agree on budget cuts or whatever. “Please,” I said. “We’re in desperate straits here.”

  Now that I had relented a little and it looked like he was going to make that lunch after all, his tone changed just a shade, back to the humanitarian he had been before he was born. “Okay, I’ll numb her up a little, inject an antibiotic, give her a prescription for a painkiller. Then I suggest you just rinse it out periodically with warm salt water. It might buy her a week.”

  “Okay, Doctor, I appreciate it. I’m sorry I barged in on you like this.”

  “But this molar is going to have to come out sooner or later,” he admonished. “She’s got an open wound in there.”

  “All right,” I said, growing exasperated.

  I leafed absently through a magazine in the waiting room while the dentist shot my mom up with some Novo and gave her some painkillers to swallow. We left with prescriptions for Vicodin and clindamycin in my mother’s hand and me $350 lighter in the wallet.

  Back outside the sun was blazing. The fiery way it reflected off the streets and buildings was blinding. Even the darkest sunglasses didn’t shield me from its malevolence. Jack and J
oy weren’t back yet so I wheeled my mother back into the lobby of the dental clinic to escape the heat. I parked her wheelchair next to a couch and slumped down into a chair. The antiseptic room felt like an oasis compared to the outside.

  My mother was working her numbed jaw around as though she had a throbbing pain she couldn’t ameliorate.

  “How’re you feeling, Mom?”

  “Better,” she mumbled, barely able to form words. Then she raised her good right arm, crooked her index finger and pointed it at some numinous being who was responsible for all her miseries. “I told you they would say you have to hospitalize me.”

  Fear struck me like a thrown dagger. We couldn’t afford to hang around Fresno five days for a tooth extraction! This was absurd. Naturally, I deprecated myself, as I’m inclined in moments of stress to do, for even concocting such a trip as this. What the hell was I thinking? I berated myself. Fuck! Fuck! I inhaled deeply and let it out. “We’re going to make it, Mom. I’m not going to let them hospitalize you.”

  “That’s good news,” she said, still staring at that spectral presence she saw in her damaged mental theater. Then she slowly swiveled her head in my direction. “Don’t ever let them put me in the hospital, Miles.”

  “I won’t, Mom. We can’t. I’ll go to a hardware store and buy a pair of pliers and do it myself.”

  “Oh, no,” she chuckled. Then her expression changed. She was seeing and feeling something I wasn’t. “No, I mean if something happens… don’t let them hospitalize me, okay?”

  “Okay, Mom,” I said. “We’ll find another dentist who’ll do this. In this screwed-up economy someone’s going to take a grand, have us sign a release of liability. We just went to the wrong guy,” I said to reassure her.

  “Don’t let them hospitalize me. Please.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “I don’t want to die in a hospital.”

  I nodded, irritated by her repeated exhortations. “Okay,” I said, “I promise.” Then I placed a hand on her rounded shoulder. “You’re not going to die, Mom. You’ve survived a pulmonary embolism, a massive stroke, a full-frontal heart attack and a congestive heart failure where you had technically died. You’ve got the proverbial nine lives of the cat.”