by Bret Lott
He sat all the way up now, hands in his lap, his chest still going. “This is going to be the hardest six percent I ever come by,” he said, his eyes right on Unc. “But it’s coming, Leland Dillard. And when it comes, I’m going to be the signing agent, whether you give a damn or not.”
Unc turned to him, broken out of whatever thought it was going on in him with the news Yandle junior’d been disowned.
Unc whispered, “Over my dead body.”
Yandle chuckled, touched at his throat. The pink button-down collar’d lost a button, the tie all twisted and pulled. A suspender’d popped off his pants, too, for Unc on top of him.
He chuckled again, said, “You just never know, now, do you?”
The door burst open then, and in came the woman. “Oh,” she chirped again, and “Oh, oh, oh.” She knelt to Yandle, touched at his collar, his shoulder, his tie, then looked up at Unc, said, “Sue the bastard, Del. Just sue this cracker white-trash cripple. Assault and battery, Del. Sue him.”
Unc nodded at her. “Ma’am,” he said, and headed for the door.
But there was something about the two of them, there on the floor, and in the way she’d talked to Unc that made me want to finish this. It was a temptation, I knew, but I gave in to it.
I looked at them, shook my head. “Won’t look good in the papers,” I said. “You having Unc arrested. TRAILER SALESMAN WITH HELMET HAIR BEAT UP BY BLIND MAN.” I shrugged. “It just won’t look good.”
Yandle chuckled again. “You ain’t as stupid as everybody says you are,” he said, and rubbed at his throat again.
Then Unc had hold of my sleeve, pulled me through the doorway, and we were gone.
“Disowned the boy,” Unc said. He took a sip off his drink, set it between his feet on the floorboard, then found the burger where he’d set it on the dash, took a bite. “I wonder if he even has anything to do with this.”
We were on 64 headed out of town, had stopped at a Hardee’s, where a black girl took our order: a Frisco Burger, a small fries, and two Mr. Pibbs.
I wasn’t eating, though Unc’d told me I needed to. My stomach was gone, Mom somewhere. Somewhere. And I wondered what that Hardee’s girl would think of the story I could tell her: murder, kidnapping, suicide.
And now Unc was thinking maybe Yandle wasn’t a part of the story we couldn’t tell anybody.
I said, “But Unc, he was there at the hospital.” I took a sip of my Mr. Pibb, set it in the cup holder hanging from the window well. “Pointed at me like he was shooting me.”
“So he’s an idiot. So what? Thinks he’s Chuck Connors as the Rifleman.” He took a few fries from the box wedged between his legs. “Likes to hang out with the big dogs, hoping someday they’ll throw him a bone. Maybe let him wear one of their windbreakers.”
He chewed, said, “These need salt,” and slapped open the glove box. He reached in, moved around napkins, a map, an old history paper I’d gotten an F on and didn’t want to show to Mom.
Mom.
I looked at my watch: three-thirty.
“Gotcha,” Unc said, and pulled out one of those salt packets they give you when you ask for them. He held it between his thumb and second finger, carefully broke it open by bending the top down with his first finger, then tipped it over, shook it out.
But he missed the fries, instead salted the seat above the box.
The packet empty, he dropped it in the empty Hardee’s bag on the floorboard, then took up another couple of fries.
“Much better,” he said. “On to Beverly Hills South: Mount Pleasant.”
I shook my head. Even Unc missed the mark now and again. And, I knew, he was missing it with Yandle.
Walterboro to Mount Pleasant is a little over sixty miles one end to the other, and once we were through Parker’s Ferry and Rantowles and Red Top, houses and shops and car dealerships picking up and picking up, we were there, right there: stopped at a light beside the Amoco station where a black woman in a red smock with an orange wave in her hair hadn’t seen a thing.
Then we were at Citadel Mall, tooling right back up the Mark Clark in the opposite direction I’d come only last night, and I drove on up the ramp and onto the freeway north like it was my own, because in a way it was. I’d survived this, lived to tell the tale.
But it wasn’t over yet. No way.
And then, maybe a mile farther on, I slowed down, looked across the median for some sign of where that yellow Ford pickup’d been rolled by Thigpen in his scab-roofed Plymouth. Just last night.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all, no evidence of those two rednecked peasants.
Two of them. Pigboy and Fatback?
Unc said, “What is it?”
“This is where Thigpen rolled them off. Those two bubbas.”
“Maybe that’s Fatback and Pigboy.”
I turned to him, said, “There’s hope for you yet.”
He gave a small smile, nodded.
Then we crossed over I-26, and here we were, my neighborhood, just trees from up here, a glimpse now and again of asphalt shingles, a lawn, a car on blocks, all of it forty feet below and looking as simple and homey as can be.
But down there was Marie Street, and an empty house that smelled like dog shit when the wind blew right.
Marie Street, and my house. Mine and my mom’s, and now, for the first time I could ever remember, I thought of it for a second as my home.
Empty. Mom nowhere I knew. Me on my way somewhere else.
I didn’t even slow down. There were things to do.
We came down off the Mark Clark, there where it ended onto Old Georgetown Highway, and even me, a fifteen-year-old kid who had reason to be over here to Mount Pleasant maybe once or twice a year, remembered when Old Georgetown was a two-lane nothing, trees heavy down around it, dogs sitting on the shoulder and scratching.
Now.
Now there was a Super Lowe’s hardware warehouse, a Wal-Mart with a McDonald’s inside, a Piggly Wiggly the size of our high school, not to mention the Harris Teeter and Food Lion and Publix just as big. Art galleries, golf courses, a tenplex movie theater, twenty or thirty restaurants.
And Old Georgetown: five lanes, all those oaks taken down for it.
We turned off Old Georgetown at the first light and onto Bowman next to the big K mart, and here we were, where Unc’d led me with his directions: Imaging Network Services.
It was a low brick building, had a sign out front, IMAGING NETWORK SERVICES and the logo of a man lying on his back inside a circle, beneath that DR. JOE CRAY, M.D.
He hadn’t told me who we were going to see, and I hadn’t asked, only followed where he told me to go. But I knew who this guy was as soon as I saw his name: the fat radiologist with the unlit black cigar he was chewing on all the time. I knew his name because of how Unc picked on him and that cigar every deer-hunt Saturday morning, after breakfast was over, Miss Dinah and Tabitha cleaning up the paper plates and what have you, preparing already for fried-chicken lunch. That was when the men’d gather around the fire in a circle, then I’d usher Unc into the circle, and he’d ask for a count-off. Each time he came to Dr. Cray he’d say, “Now, don’t get any big ideas on lighting up that cigar out on the stand, you hear, Brother Cray?” and he’d answer, “Yes, Pappy,” or some such as this.
He was a good one, far as any of them went, in that if he talked to me he made eye contact, smiled. Most all the others I was lucky if I got a grunt out of when I helped haul in the deer they got.
I’d always wondered, too, if that cigar, even if he never lit it, ever gave off enough smell to scare a deer. But then he’d shot that fourteen-pointer New Year’s Day of this year. End of that concern.
And then he’d quit the club.
“This one know we’re coming in?” I asked. “Because it seems like you caught Mr. Yandle back there a little off guard.” I cut the engine. “And that was a nice job, too, of getting him to volunteer what he didn’t think he was volunteering. A stick to the throat. Who would
suspect a thing?”
“Called Dr. Cray this morning,” Unc said, and climbed out. “When I was at Miss Dinah’s. While you were off sleeping and dreaming on a sweet little black girl.”
He knew.
How? What had Tabitha told him?
I climbed out, slammed shut my door. “There a problem with that?”
“Not if you don’t get a skillet to the head by her momma. And don’t think for a minute she won’t try.” He reached in, got the stick. “No momma wants her daughter to marry beneath her. So get to studying for that SAT, Huger.” He nodded, smiled.
“Married!” I said, too loud. “All I did was kiss her!”
“You did?” he said. He stood across the hood from me, looking at me. “I didn’t know that.”
“But you said—”
“I floated an idea at you. Run it up the flagpole, see if someone salutes. Damned if you didn’t salute. In full dress uniform, no less.” He paused, turned for the building. “Thanks for volunteering.”
I watched him start up the steps of the place, tap out the ground with the stick. The steps were a couple feet deep, only rose the width of a brick on each one. He was having trouble, his steps small, a little fearful.
I wanted to make him do it himself, but I quick walked up to him, took his arm.
“Don’t be expecting any tip,” he said, and we started up.
“Brother Cray?” Unc hollered out. He’d pulled open the frosted glass panel, the waiting room empty, nobody in the reception area.
“Back here, you old fart,” came Cray’s answer.
I brought Unc into the office space back there, the walls on either side lined with color-coded files. At the end of the hall was a door standing open, the room it led into dark.
“Keep going,” he called, and I could hear he was chomping down on a cigar, his words squeezed down tight. “Geez, you’d think you were blind or something,” he said, and Unc laughed.
He sat on a roller chair at the far end of the room, in front of him a wall lit up, clipped all the way across X ray after X ray. Then he turned, still in the chair, rolled toward us.
“Brother Cray,” Unc said, and put out his hand.
“Another membership drive?” Cray said, and shook Unc’s hand hard. “You know I won’t come back to your godforsaken Club Med for the blueblood bubba set. I don’t work at the medical university anymore. Got my own digs now, got my own practice. Gave up that teaching stuff when I gave up my membership.”
He stood, took the cigar out, slapped Unc’s shoulder. “Good to see you, Leland.” He was heavy with black hair disappearing on him, a beard, round wire-rimmed glasses, and it seemed strange to see him here, when the only place I’d ever seen him was out to Hungry Neck, him in his camos and orange cap like everybody else.
“You too,” Unc said. “Though it looks like you been puttin’ on a few since last you been down.”
He jabbed at Cray’s middle, made him flinch.
“That’s what happens,” he said, sitting back down and rolling himself back to the lighted wall, “when you don’t get out and exercise regular like I used to down to Hungry Neck Hunt Club.” He reached into his lab coat, pulled out a little thing looked like a monocular, pressed it up against one of the X rays. “What I need’s a strict regimen like the one I used to get out your way: bacon and eggs before daylight, then piling into a pickup, then hopping out, sitting on a stump shivering my butt off, then picked up three hours later for a lunch of fried chicken and biscuits and gravy.” He brought the thing down, moved to the next one. “Used to break a sweat just looking at those piles of bacon.” Then he wheeled around to us again, said, “But enough about me. Tell me, what do you think of me?”
“I think we miss you down there.”
“Maybe you do,” he said, and now he scribbled something on the clipboard, looked up at the next X ray down. “But I know nobody else does. Except maybe for Tonto here. The silent one.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, went back to scribbling.
“You’re the only one pulled in a fourteen-pointer in nine years,” I said. “That counts in my book.”
I looked to Unc, wanted to see if it’d been all right for me to talk to the man, if I hadn’t disobeyed in this.
He was smiling at me, shaking his head.
“My bon voyage,” Cray said. “My farewell performance. And do you think one of those turds could come up and congratulate me? Not on your life.” He looked at another X ray, scribbled, then at another. “And now you want me to be a mole.”
“A what?” Unc said. He hadn’t moved. I looked around for chairs, saw none. This was his room, and his only, I figured. I leaned against the doorjamb.
“A mole,” he said. “Don’t you read?”
“Haven’t been able to get my hands on anything good lately,” Unc said.
Cray laughed again, said, “That’s a bad one. But a mole. Like in those John le Carré books. A mole is somebody on the inside willing to give info so long as nobody knows who he is.”
He turned, took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned back, all in the near dark of the room, so that I wasn’t quite sure whether he was smiling or not, silhouetted by the light behind him.
“Then I guess you’re a mole,” Unc said.
“Yes, I am,” he said, and now he put his hands behind his head. He bit down on the cigar, made it angle up, like in that picture of FDR. “And do you know why it doesn’t bother me a bit to be a mole?”
“Why?” Unc said.
“Because of what I delightfully refer to as the barium ceiling.” He looked from Unc to me to Unc again. “You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, that point on the corporate ladder of American business beyond which women can’t go? The barium ceiling is the point on the ladder of corporate medicine beyond which the radiologist cannot go. I found it over at the medical university, and realized with that fourteen-point buck and the fact not a single one of those turds even congratulated me that I’d met it. No hard feelings, Leland, but the whole reason I joined Hungry Neck in the first place was because everybody of any importance on the upper echelon at the medical university was a member, and I had my eye on the prize, so to speak: a seat on the board at some point. But no. A radiologist is not a real doctor, see? A radiologist looks at films all day, nothing more than a glorified copyboy to everyone on the board over there, no matter it took me eight years past med school to learn all I needed to learn about MRI and nuclear and all else. That doesn’t matter. What matters is do you have a monogrammed scalpel and a striped bow tie? It doesn’t matter you turn in billable accounts of over a million a year for eleven years straight, keep all those board members in their Lexi—is that plural for Lexus?—and when I took out that fourteen-pointer and you and Tonto were the only ones put up a fuss over there, I decided then and there to bail. Tendered my resignation January third from the South Carolina Medical University, surrendered my tenured associate professorship. And here we are.”
He pulled the cigar from his mouth, spread his arms wide, looked at the place, then gave himself a spin in the chair. “Now what gets billed gets paid to me.”
He stood then, leaned against the counter, crossed his arms. “And the irony of it all is the sword of Damocles over at the Med U is about to fall. That fine little hair is raggedy as all getout, frizzed to the max, and it’s about to fall. And do you know who it’s about to fall on?”
“Who?” Unc said. He was smiling, nodding, eating this up. He hadn’t even had to run a thing up the flagpole.
“It’s about to fall on the board itself. Because there’s been an investigation going on for over two years now, an investigation into the ethics and finances of the University Medical Consortium, which is about to get nasty, because now there’s been a senate committee set up in Columbia to explore the possibility that things stink in Charleston. Which they do.”
Cray turned to the wall, found on the desktop a Magic Marker, and started drawing, right onto the glass. “It’s like this,�
�� he said, and drew a triangle. He stopped, took a step back from it, took the cigar from his mouth, put it back in. “No,” he said, “it’s like this,” and he rubbed out the triangle with his lab-coat sleeve, drew a square. “No, it’s not like that either,” he said, and then Unc cut in.
“Just say it, brother. We’re listening.”
Cray turned. His face’d gone blank, and it looked for a moment like he didn’t recognize us. He let out a breath, then sat down, elbows on his knees, hands loose between his legs.
“It’s not like I’m holding a grudge or anything,” he said, and looked up at Unc. “It’s just that I hate the sons of bitches. That whole crew.”
He looked at me, took the cigar out. “You see the news the other night, that footage they ran about Charles Middleton Simons?”
I nodded. Of course I did. I’d watched it with the man’s wife.
“That whole head table,” he said, and pointed the cigar at me. “That whole crew there is what it’s about. Every one of them sons of bitches is about to fall flat on his ass and out of money, or at least out of money like they’ve been used to making.”
“How’s that?” Unc asked. His head was tilted now, him listening. He’d sensed something in Cray now, this turn. Something was coming.
Cray took a deep breath, put his hands on his knees. “It works like this: you join the faculty at the medical university, you have to join the University Medical Consortium. But being on the faculty at a medical university isn’t like being on one at a regular school. You don’t go in, talk to your class, and go home. No, you’re a doctor, and your students are interns following you around while you handle your patients. And those patients, like everybody else, have to pay. Simple as that. They pay. To be precise, their insurance pays, or Uncle Sam, one.” He sighed again, shook his head. “And they pay the University Medical Consortium. That’s who takes in the money. My million-plus a year for eleven years. Reading films and billing over a million a year, all billed to the consortium.”
