He pressed the call button at his bedside. “Someone gonna come help me with this thing?” he called out. “Someone going to give me a little help here?” But all that happened was a nurse stared at him through the window, saw what he was doing, and walked away. Was he surprised? No. They seemed to enjoy taunting him. They probably liked watching him struggle with the letter.
Writing it was hard, but folding was worse. Folding was a bastard. It turned out you needed two hands to fold a letter. He struggled, stuffing the letter into an envelope, and spending extra time on the address so it was legible. Task completed, it was only a matter of convincing one of the nurses to help him mail it. He got a hold of a weekend staffer who didn’t know him and told her that the letter was for his mother. Could she get a stamp for him and post it? His old mother, dying in Kentucky of emphysema, smoking those Salems—could she be a nice girl and post this letter to the dying old woman?
“Emphysema, huh?” the nurse said. She had one of those whiny sympathetic voices that spoke every sentence with pain and reluctance, as though all of life’s communications were bad news. He thought she should quit her job as a nurse and work in a mortuary. With her long face and big teeth, she looked half vampire; a mortuary job would suit a girl like this.
“You’d be good with the dead,” he said. It just came out like that before he had time to think. She squinted at him and showed the big teeth again, so he said, “I meant the dying.”
“Oh, thank you!” She smiled. She had a yellow incisor that reminded him of a rat’s tooth.
“My mother would love you,” he said. “She’s dying.”
“Your poor mom, emphysema is just a nasty one, huh?” she said, drawing back at the word emphysema as though at spiders in a garden shed.
He said, “Oh yeah, hell on earth. Coughing all the time, spluttering, nearly drowning in her own spit—”
“Oh dear!”
“That’s how my old mother spends her time. She should call it a day—it’s that terrible—but she wants to carry on, to struggle through all the terrible pain. Bravery? Madness? You decide. What’s your name tag say there? Cheryl. That’s sweet, Cheryl. A pretty name for a pretty girl.”
Cheryl blushed, then said, “I think she sounds brave. Very brave, bless her.”
“Maybe, but it isn’t as though she is doing it willingly, is it? She didn’t stare into the face of hideous disease and say, ‘I’ll take that on!’ So how is that brave?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Kirtz—”
“Craig. You call me Craig, sweetheart. And I’ll tell you what, you wouldn’t find me gurgling away like that at her age, my lungs full of water. She’s tough, that’s for sure. I wanted to be with her at the end, but look at me.” He nodded down at his body with all its plaster and bandages. “Not much use to her, am I? Woman reaches an age when she needs to rely on her grown son, her only child, and look at this. Damned shame, isn’t it?”
The girl looked sad now and he regretted that he’d caused her to put on a sad face because she looked even more like a rodent with her mouth twisted down like that.
“Don’t go crying on me,” he said. He knew he’d overstepped the mark. Not by inventing a mother, or even a dying mother, but by describing the loneliness of the old and the dying. Nobody wanted to hear about that, not even him. Not even when it wasn’t true.
“Oh, no. It’s just that…” the girl began, her buck teeth resting on the dry ledge of her lower lip, her eyes seeming suddenly larger and wetter than before. She was one of those hugely tall girls, a kind he especially did not like, stretched out like Gumby, with a narrow oval face and a helmet of bobbed hair. Hard to imagine a woman like that had tits, he thought, but he’d seen it—and this was true—women exactly as ugly as this with nice tits, some with real nice ones, though admittedly you wouldn’t ever think it. “I wish there was something I could do,” she said, finally.
“Well, there is one thing, if you don’t mind,” he said. He nudged the envelope her direction. “I have a birthday card here for her. Would you mail that for me, Cheryl?” he said. “Cheryl, would you do me that favor?”
“Of course I will.” She took the envelope from him. It was only a slim half sheet of paper, with none of the size or bulk of a birthday card, and he watched as she felt it carefully in her fingers. He sensed her confusion at how light it was, almost as though the envelope were empty.
“I couldn’t get out to buy her a real card,” he said, looking ashamed. “So I drew her a picture.”
“Oh.” The girl was holding the envelope carefully, as though it were the envelope they use to announce the Miss America pageant winner. She looked down at it, then at Craig, her face earnest. “Well, that will mean even more to her,” she said finally, though he sensed the strain in her voice. She didn’t really think his pretty picture would please his mother at all. Surely Cheryl was lying.
“Do you think so? Really?” he said.
“Oh yes. Mothers love their children’s drawings.”
It was too much; he almost laughed out loud. “Even though I’m fully grown?” he managed.
She hesitated, but then said, “I think so, yes.”
“And it was done with my left hand, which to be quite truthful, is hardly good for writing my own name.”
He watched her face carefully and saw some doubt, either that an incompetent drawing by an adult son in plaster might be so welcome, or that he was fully lying to her. He opened his mouth in a small gasp. “It’s not good enough, is it?” he said, as though this possibility had just occurred to him and was crushing.
“I’m sure it is fine,” Cheryl said, recovering quickly. “Better than fine.”
He needed to get her out of the room before he cracked up. But he couldn’t resist, no he could not. Suddenly he lunged toward the letter. “No, no it’s no good!” he cried out. “Give it back to me. Give it here!”
But she clasped the letter against her belly. “No, let me post it for you. I want to. It would be my privilege,” she said.
He gave her a smile, or as much as he could smile given all the bandages on his face. He thought how his head was like a monster’s head, and his smile was a monster’s smile. “And maybe bring me back a beer?” he said, knowing that she would. “Just a little one. A Michelob, maybe? A Bud?”
She looked sternly at him, so he winked at her. Winked with the one eye, and it kind of freaked her out. “Well, okay,” she said, “but just the one.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. “There’s a thirty-two-ounce bottle at 7-Eleven. You’ll see them there at the bottom of the cooler. Grab one of those big boys for me, darling, okay? You can do it on your break time. I’ll wait.”
She nodded, then backed away hesitantly.
The envelope didn’t even have Kentucky in the address. It was marked with the local zip code, and she could have looked down at any time and called his bluff. In fact, he was kind of hoping she would notice that it was a local letter. He liked the thought of confusing her. If she came back and asked why it was for Maryland and not Kentucky, he’d fuck with her mind and say it had been addressed to Kentucky. It had said Kentucky right there on the envelope, couldn’t she read? That would blow her away, make her think she was taking too many drugs, although she probably wasn’t taking any drugs and that, certainly, was among her problems. He imagined her standing at the blue-and-silver U.S. postal box, the one tacked onto the wall at the entrance of the hospital, sucking on her tooth and being confused by the address, and it made him laugh just thinking about it.
“Thank you,” he said as she slid out the door. And then, wistfully, he added, “I wish I could meet a girl like you.”
—
HE KNEW IT was Bobbie, not June, who got the mail every afternoon from the little silver-and-red mailbox at the end of the drive. The pleading note was to persuade her to come to the hospital in the morning instead of going to school. That, or she could leave school quick at the bell and come to the hospital by four o’clock. He nee
ded her here, then out, before her mother arrived. And he needed some pot.
He thought she owed him at least that much—a little visit and his weed. But nothing happened. He waited for her to turn up but she failed to arrive, day after day, until it began to piss him off, the way she made him wait around for her. She thought she could do anything she liked with him now that he was in the hospital, and that was an insult if he’d ever heard one. It made him so angry that by the end of the week he began growling, actually growling like a dog there in his hospital bed, whenever Bobbie’s face sprang into his mind. He’d been so sweet in his letter, telling her he loved her. He loved her. He’d written it the fuck down and asked—no begged—for his pot. Did he get anything out of all his efforts? Hell no. And now his mood was on permanent pissed off. A few days later, when the rat-toothed girl poked her head through the door and asked if his mother had liked his drawing, he told her to go to hell. Her chin whipped up, as though someone had slapped her on the ass, and she said, “I beg your pardon!”
“She died before she got it,” he said.
“Oh!”
“Sorry I swore. I didn’t mean it. It’s all the drugs.” But Rat Tooth didn’t come around again even though he’d apologized and his mother had died and his body was a like a chest of broken toys.
So he worked on a different one, a candy striper, some do-gooding volunteer, to lend him five bucks in quarters and park him next to the phone where he could get something done.
“I need to call my mother. She’s in Kentucky, dying of lung cancer,” he said. For some reason, mention of dying mothers was surprisingly effective, a master key that turned every lock in a woman’s heart. It got them to break hospital rules, which was surprising because people died all over hospitals and you’d think the employees would get used to it. The candy striper took the bait and said she’d be back in ten minutes, and she was, too, with an orderly in tow. The orderly unfastened him from the machines, slapping the brakes off the bed. She was a good woman, the little candy striper, a volunteer from the high school, still young enough to be unbitchy. She wheeled him through the hall to the pay phone, his lap full of quarters, and he said, “You make me feel so good!”
“Glad to help,” she said.
“I feel just like one of those little handicapped kids being taken to the state fair!”
Her face changed at this remark. “Oh,” she said.
He rang Bobbie on a weekday, just about the time she would walk into the house from the school bus. He could picture her there in the kitchen, its windows darkened by the heavy autumn foliage outside. He imagined the slam of the porch door, then the sound of the metal doorknob and the rattling of the back door as she came in. She’d think the phone was her mother and grab it before thinking.
But just when the phone began to ring, one of the nurses showed up, asking what he was doing in the hall, and he was pulled from his reverie.
“I’m waiting for the orderly to bring me to X-ray,” he said.
It was another of the bitch nurses, not the normal heifer-shaped variety but a slender brunette about his age with a nice face and way too much attitude. “I’m going to check that,” she said, angling her hip away from him and launching her comment over her shoulder.
He watched her walk away. “Is a man not allowed to make a phone call in this place? It isn’t the morgue, is it? You think you’re working in the morgue? We’re still alive up here, you know!”
“No beds in the hall,” she said.
“What do you think? I flew here? I wheeled over with my two strong arms? Listen, sunshine, one of your side put me here. That’s how I got here!”
“And that’s how you’ll get back, too,” she said, flicking her hair, smacking her lips, big bows of pink recently doused with lipstick. She was so confident with that agile body, leaning into the double doors, glancing only briefly at him, looking down her nose. He watched her push through the doors.
“Oh, you are so pretty,” he called, forming the word so that it came out hard. “Pritt-ee,” he said, menacingly.
She held up her hand, fingers outstretched. “I’m coming in five minutes for you.”
By now his reputation had swept through the team of nurses; they all knew about him and gave him a hard time. Ballbusters, the bunch of them, taking advantage of the fact he couldn’t walk. It was the fault of that Esther, with her hard metal face and skinny estrogen-deprived frame, those dirty white stockings on her bark-colored legs, she’d done this to him. Set them all against him.
“Bunch of lesbians!” he called at the nurse. But the nurse didn’t turn around, which was typical, which was exactly what he had learned to expect. “Sadists!” he yelled. Still no reply. Then he remembered he still had the phone in his hand. If Bobbie had answered, she’d have hung up by now. He slammed it back onto the receiver and dug though his pile of coins, dialing all over again. He hung on anxiously as it rang and rang. He made a bitter sound, feeling the vibration deep in his throat. If all he had was five minutes, he’d let it ring for five minutes. But Bobbie didn’t pick up. He waited and waited, until finally the lesbian nurse came through the double doors with an orderly, a look on her face like she meant business.
“We’re rolling,” she said, and despite all his protests, they wheeled him back to the room.
He tried a bunch of other times, whenever he could convince someone to move him. But it was as though Bobbie were avoiding him. This he could not understand. What had he done to her? She’d driven them into a goddamned forest and gotten away with it—he was the one who should be pissed off.
He thought he would have to resign himself to living un-stoned in the hell that was the hospital, but then, one day while the nurses were ignoring him, preoccupied with some old fart who broke his hip falling on pickle juice in his kitchen, June came to see him and it suddenly occurred to him—June! Why hadn’t he thought of her in the first place? She could disconnect him from all the machines they leashed him to, push out the clunky, horrible bed, and park him next to the phone. All he had to do was distract her for a few minutes afterward, send her on a mission somewhere, and he’d have time to get Bobbie on the phone.
“Hey babe, unhook me here, will you?” he said casually, as though this was a routine thing he’d been doing right along.
“You mean, from all the monitors?” she said, as though he were asking for death itself.
“Yeah, it’s easy. I do it all the time.”
“But I don’t know how,” June said. He watched her brow furrow, then a nervous licking of lips. He wished she wouldn’t do that thing with her tongue.
“I’ll talk you through it,” he said gently. “Unhooking is the easy part. It’s the re-stabbing that sucks. We’ll leave that to the death squad.”
She unplugged him, at first cautiously, as though she thought the machines breathed for him, then with more confidence. He talked her through how to prop open the double doors and then, while the staff was preoccupied with the pickle-juice man, June wheeled him into the hall. “How about you call the radio station and give them a progress report for me, will you?” he said. “And use a different phone—I need this one right now. Use one on another floor. And then, how about getting some Burger King takeout? We need some decent food in here. This place is all soup and fruit and shit.”
He watched her walk off. She was so padded out she looked like a piece of furniture you could sit on, but she was very useful, he had to admit. A useful, nice lady who didn’t mean him any harm. Given this, he thought he might grow used to how fat she was. He watched her waddle down the hall and he felt honest gratitude. At least she didn’t give him shit like all the others. She was patient, maternal. She brought him cake instead of kicking him in the ass like the nurses always did.
He dialed the phone, keeping watch on the activities of the nurses on the other side of the ward as he did so. He felt a tide of luck moving his way and, sure enough, Bobbie answered on the third ring. She probably thought it was her mother.
She didn’t say anything and so he said, “Don’t you want to know what it is like being stuck in this hole with tubes everywhere, even in my pecker?”
Still no answer. For a second he thought she’d hung up. Then he heard, “Mom says you’re fine. And that a lot of those tubes are gone.”
“She mention that I’m blind now?”
“Half,” she said.
“Is that not enough for you?” He felt a fury in him, that big panting angry wolf that followed him around. Sometimes he could almost feel it hovering. But he needed to focus. He needed some pot and Bobbie was his only hope. “Look, you going to give me some help here, babe? I’m all broken to pieces, so maybe you can see it in your heart?”
“Don’t you have doctors?”
“Doctors, fuck. What I need is you to take some of my money that you’ve got—I’m giving permission now to use some of my money, do you hear? And you’re going to get a taxi to my house and tell whoever answers the door that you need to get me some clothes, okay? You’re going to get me the stuff I need, then come back here to the hospital.”
She didn’t say anything, and he imagined her standing by the back door in her kitchen, the cord winding around her middle, or crossing her breasts, or curling around her long sun-blushed arms. He’d liked her better when she was younger and he could circle her white belly easily with two hands and when the whole of her breast fit into his mouth, but he liked her now, too.
“I’m not hearing ‘Glad to help you out, Craig, after all you’ve been through.’ Why is that? Why don’t you want to make up to me after ditching me in the car like that? I didn’t tell on you, you know. The police are around here all the time, but I haven’t snitched.”
She took a long breath and he waited for that and then, finally, heard her say, “I can’t go to your house. I’m not allowed to be seen there, remember?”
Age of Consent Page 20
