Bad Chili

  * * *

  I gave the insurance information to the receptionist, borrowed Leonard’s car keys, got old Beebo out of the trunk and bagged him and put him in a cooler they had behind the desk. Then I sat in the waiting room and tried to read a nature magazine, but at the moment I wasn’t feeling all that kindly toward nature.

  I wasn’t feeling all that kindly toward the brat that was waiting there either. His mother, a harried woman in lace-up shoes designed by the Inquisition, a long black dress, and a Pentecostal hairdo—which was a mound of brown hair tied up in a bun that looked as if it had been baked into place to contain an alien life form—was pretending to be asleep in a waiting-room chair.

  Couldn’t say as I blamed her. This kid, who had torn up three magazines and drank out of all the paper cups at the water cooler and stuck his gum on the doorknob leading out of the office, wasn’t someone you wanted to look at much.

  He was about eleven, and spent a lot of time scratching his red head as if it were full of lice. He had a nose that ran like an open faucet, and he was eyeing me with an intense look that reminded me of the squirrel’s expression just before it clamped its teeth on my arm. I wanted to ignore him, but I feared if I looked away he might spring.

  He asked me some questions about this and that and I tried to answer politely, and in such a way as not to encourage conversation, but the kid had a knack of turning a nod into an invitation. He told me, without my asking, that he didn’t go to school, and that his parents taught him at home, and would continue to do so until LaBorde “built a Christian school.”

  “A Christian school?” I said.

  “You know,” said the boy, “one without niggers and atheists.”

  “What about nigger atheists?” Leonard said, coming into the waiting room.

  The kid eyed Leonard’s black skin as if he were trying to decide if it were real or paint. “Them’s the worst kind,” the kid said.

  The Pentecostal mother opened one eye, then closed it quickly.

  “How would you like me to kick your nasty little ass?” Leonard said.

  “That’s child abuse,” said the little boy. “And you used a naughty word.”

  “Yep,” Leonard said.

  The boy studied Leonard a moment, fled to a chair next to his mother, sat there and glared at us. His mother seemed not to be breathing.

  “Come on, Hap,” Leonard said. “I’m clean. Or as the doc said, no little dogs swimming through my blood. I’ll run you over to the hospital. Hey, you, you little shit—”

  “What?” I said.

  “Not you,” Leonard said. “Red on the head! You, kid! Get that goddamn gum off the doorknob. Now.”

  The kid sidled over to the knob, peeled off the gum, put it into his mouth, slid back into the chair beside his mother. If he had been a cobra, he’d have spat venom at us. Leonard and I went out.

  As Leonard drove, I said, “You got to feel sorry for a kid like that. Raised with those kind of attitudes.”

  Leonard didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, he’s off to a bad start. He doesn’t know any better. You talkin’ to him like that, that’s a little much, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t feel sorry for him,” Leonard said. “I really was going to kick his nasty ass. I’m kinda hopin’ his mama brought him there to be put to sleep, like a sick cat.”

  “That’s not very nice,” I said.

  “No,” Leonard said. “No, it isn’t.”

  3

  At the hospital they did some routine tests and put me in a cold room wearing what they referred to as hospital gown, which is pretty ludicrous. There you are sitting in the cold wearing a paper-thin sheet split up the back with your ass hanging out, and they call it a gown. You’d think they thought it ought to go with heels, maybe a nice hairdo and a brooch, a dinner invitation.

  Leonard sat in the room with me. He said, “You have the ugliest goddamn ass I’ve ever seen.”

  “Well, you’ve seen a few.”

  “That’s right, so my opinion is worth something.”

  “Not to me. And besides, it’s so bad, why’s the doctor always want to put his finger up it?”

  “Probably lost his high school ring last time he poked around in there. I figure he pokes a little deeper, he might find an old boyfriend’s rubber.”

  “That’s your game,” I said. “Dig in your ass, reckon they’ll find dog hairs.”

  We joshed around with that kind of adolescent bullshit for a while, then Leonard started trying to tell me about him and Raul again. About that time, Doc Sylvan came in and Leonard went out.

  “That insurance you got,” Doc Sylvan said. “We’re familiar with it. I made some calls to be sure. Sucks.”

  “Which policy sucks?”

  “Both of them. The oil rig policy will pay more in the long run, but it’s the short run that’s a bitch. The other policy seriously sucks the dog turd. You see, this is what they call outpatient business. You know, give you a shot, then you go home. Come back for an examination, another shot. You go home. But, if you go home, the policy has a five-hundred-dollar deductible.”

  “It’s going to cost that much?”

  “Time I get through, it may cost more. It’s not that it actually cost that much, but doing the shots here at the hospital makes it more expensive. And being a small city hospital, well, that gilds the lily.”

  “Then why didn’t we do it at your office?”

  “I told you why. Listen, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna check you in for a few days here at the Medical Hilton.”

  “Won’t that be more expensive?”

  “Certainly. A lot more, but you do that, the offshore policy will pay eighty percent. The other policy will pay a bit.”

  “The one that sucks the dog turd?”

  “Right.”

  “You mean to tell me the policy won’t pay I go to the house, but it will pay I stay in the hospital and it’ll cost more?”

  “Now you got it figured. Between the two policies you come out only owing a few hundred bucks’ deductible. Policies might even overlap so you come out ahead, but I doubt it. You’ll owe something. It’s the way of the insurance and medical professions.”

  “I think I’m being snookered a bit so you can make some extra insurance money, that’s what I think.”

  “Considering you owe me a few past-due bills for a number of things, maybe you can live with that.”

  “How long have I got to be in the hospital?”

  “Way the policy works—”

  “The offshore or the dog turd?”

  “Both . . . I’d say seven or eight days.”

  “Ah, hell. You’re kiddin’?”

  “No, I’m not. You see, you take a shot now. Then you take one in seven days. That should be enough time to make sure the policy covers things. Those policies, way they’re written, you almost have to be standing on your head and get hit by lightning while trying to pick your nose with a pop bottle up your ass for them to pay. You got to get a better kind of policy, Hap. You know, a real one.”

  “I get some real money, I’ll do that.”

  “Anyway. One shot now. One in seven days, and one in twenty-one to twenty-eight days. You got a little option on the last shot. But not much. Thing about rabies, you miss those shots, you can kiss your ass good-bye.”

  “I go to the hospital, I got to wear this damn gown all the time?”

  “You play the game, you suit out.”

  * * *

  A hospital is dangerous to your health. All kinds of disease floats around in there. First day I came down with a cold. Worse than the cold was the boredom. Man, was it boring. And I had to lie there with this needle and glucose tube in my arm and there wasn’t a damn reason for it, but they did it anyway, and the food they fed me explained why someone had written in blue ink above the commode lever in my room’s toilet: FLUSH TWICE, IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE CAFETERIA.

  So I spent my time lying there, a little mad actually, ?
??cause my best buddy in the whole goddamn world hadn’t come by once. I hadn’t seen him since he stepped out of the room that day Doc Sylvan came in. I phoned his house repeatedly, but no answer, and he didn’t have an answering machine, so I couldn’t leave a message. The only connection I had to the outside world was the TV set and Charlie Blank.

  The TV bit the moose. There were only a few channels and they all seemed tuned to the same stuff, or at least the same sort of stuff. I’d seen enough talk shows involving stupid relationships to last me a lifetime. I could have told those people quick-like why they were having so much trouble with their lives and their relationships. They were dumb shits and proud of it.

  I had known people just like them all my life, just because you couldn’t avoid them. They were like shit, always turning up on your shoes. I wouldn’t have given those happily-stupid-by-choice-assholes the time of day, much less want to hear what they had to say on television.

  And if that wasn’t enough, at night I had to put up with this political show starring a fat guy in a ritzy suit who spent an hour talking to an audience as mean-spirited and narrowminded as he was. It was a great setup. He liked to show clips from political speeches, then criticize them out of context. And his audience, with the sum of their intellect added together, multiplied by three, it still left them—in defiance of mathematics—collectively half-wits.

  I was getting desperate. I longed for something as awful as a Jerry Lewis movie to watch, or maybe an infomercial on makeup.

  First evening I was in the hospital, Charlie Blank came in to see me. He had been promoted to lieutenant. Wasn’t that the chief liked Charlie so much he wanted to move him up, but the old corrupt bastard was happy he was rid of Lt. Marvin Hanson, and someone had to get the job, and Charlie, who was also a good honest cop, was next in line, and probably in the chief’s mind a better trade, if for no other reasons than he was an unknown quantity, and was, more important, white.

  Hanson and his car had met a tree at high speed on a wet highway and he was now in a coma over at his ex-wife’s house, doing an impression of a rutabaga. Just lying there, being fed by tubes and getting his ass wiped by his ex, shrinking up slowly, flickering an eyelid now and then, moving just enough to give the ex-wife and Charlie encouragement he was going to come out of it and ask for a ham sandwich and an update on pork belly futures.

  I figured Hanson came out of it, you might as well plant him in the dirt and hope he grew. Chances were, he awoke, it would be as if he had never been. The world would be new to him. Amazing and beyond his comprehension. If he learned to play a passable game of checkers against himself without cheating and knew better than to shit in the kitchen sink it would be a feat of Olympian proportions.

  Charlie was wearing his brown Mike Hammer hat, as I called it. Porkpie, I guess it’s really called, and he had on a blue silk Hawaiian shirt decorated with brightly colored palm trees, parrots, and hula girls. He wore his usual cheap brown suit coat, black plastic Kmart shoes, and his deadpan look. I tell you, there’s nothing better to view from a hospital bed than a Hawaiian shirt flashing out at you from between the lapels of a cheap suit coat, a porkpie resting on top of it all like a rusty bird feeder. He was also carrying a white grease-stained paper bag and another one, brown, minus the grease.

  “I hear you had some squirrel trouble,” Charlie said.

  “Some,” I said.

  “Looks like he gave you hell.”

  “Yeah. You oughta see him.”

  “We’re checkin’ now to see the squirrel had an accomplice. You know, a spotter from the woods. We hope to make an arrest before the week’s out. A few other squirrels or blue jays talk, a possum comes in with a word, we might have the bastard’s partner by nightfall.”

  “Hey, make fun. But this mad-squirrel business, it isn’t a light thing. Let me show you where he bit me. Look at that. There’s four stitches there.”

  “I’ve had worse.”

  “From a squirrel?”

  “No. You got me there. . . . You sound funny.”

  “I have a cold.”

  Charlie opened one of the bags and pushed it toward me. It contained a hamburger, french fries, and a malt. “I’ve spent a day or two in the hospital,” Charlie said, “so I thought you might want this—unless they’ve suddenly started hiring French chefs.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, pulling out my sliding table and placing the food on it. “I never thought I’d look forward to a McDonald’s meal.”

  “Stay in here a bit,” Charlie said, “you get so the idea of eatin’ out of trash cans is kind of appealing. By the way, I kept the Spider Man toy comes with it.”

  “You’re welcome to it.”

  “You say that now, but you see it, you’ll want it.”

  “Then don’t let me see it.”

  Charlie put the other sack on the bed and took off his hat and hung it on the back of the guest chair.

  “What’s in the other bag?” I asked.

  “Books. A magazine.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  He took out a magazine titled Boobs and Butts, tossed it at me.

  “Oh, great,” I said.

  “What’s the matter? Read that one?”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Well, at least you ain’t sharin’ the room. You can whack off without anyone seein’ you.”

  “You can take this back,” I said. “I got enough on my mind without thinking about what I’m not gettin’ and haven’t been gettin’ for a long time.”

  “Hey, I’m married and I’m not gettin’ it. Wife still wants me to quit smokin’ before she’ll give me the business, so to speak. I’m tryin’ to quit, but I haven’t beat it yet. I smoke three or four cigs a day now, but she knows. She’s got like this second sense. She smells smoke, her pussy closes up. So when she ain’t lookin’, I read the magazines. Stay in the bathroom a lot. Run the shower. Wife thinks I am one clean sonofabitch, but I’m in there whacking off.”

  “Perhaps you should try and develop something more than just a sexual relationship, Charlie. You could meld with her mind, her emotions. Really attempt to understand what makes the both of you human beings. Appreciate her more as a woman, less as a sex object.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all right, but I still want to fuck her.”

  “I hear that.”

  “You know, I don’t get it. My wife, she’s into like saying the right thing. You know. I’m not supposed to say pussy ’cause it’s degrading. I call her a pussy, I can see that’s degrading. There’s some women I think are cunts, you know. Some guys that are dicks. I mean, you can have a cunt and not be a cunt, and you can have a cunt and be one. But I don’t get Amy’s reasoning. I say I want some pussy, I’m sayin’ I want some lovin’, I’m not calling her a pussy, I’m callin’ her pussy a pussy. And like, you know, that’s as good a slang for what’s down there as dick or cock is for what we got in our drawers. Someone called me a dick, I might get mad, but Amy told me she wanted a little dick, the reading is different, don’t you think?”

  “When it comes to women, I don’t know which way to go. So you’re askin’ the wrong boy. I haven’t got anything against women or men in general. I just think some of them are assholes.”

  “There you go. You just said assholes. Can you say that, or does that like go on your cosmic record?”

  “Reckon it depends on who’s keepin’ score.”

  “Yeah, that’s another trip, ain’t it. All this religious business. Christians think you got to do good ’cause you want to go to heaven, but if you do good ’cause you want to do good and don’t believe in that shit, then they figure it’s the slow oven for you anyway. They like a god that’s a bully, makes you want to do good ’cause he’s gonna rough you up. Life is just one big mess after another, ain’t it?”

  “It’s funny how sex can make one philosophical, isn’t it, Charlie.”

  “I’ll say, and while we’re being philosophical, that magazine you got there, let me tell you, there’
s a redhead in there would make you write a hot check and rob a filling station pretty damn quick.”

  “Skip the details.” I put the magazine on the bed table. “What are the books?”

  Charlie took out a Harlequin romance and put it on top of the magazine.

  “You’re kiddin’?”

  “Hey, my wife tossed it out. She reads ’em by the handfuls. I don’t have a lot of money, you know. I made do with what I could get my hands on. Millions of readers can’t be wrong. I did nab you this one, however.”

  He handed me a paperback western.

  “We’ll, one out of three isn’t bad,” I said.

  “Got it at a garage sale. There’s a few pages torn out, but it reads pretty good.”

  “You see Leonard?”

  “Nope. Not in a while. I thought he’d be up here nesting in a chair.”

  “Hasn’t even come by. He’s been having boyfriend problems. I figure that has something to do with it.”

  “Raul?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Leonard doesn’t have patience with that boy. Raul is all right.”

  “I don’t like him. I get this feeling there isn’t much to him, and what there is to him isn’t much.”

  “It’s a friend thing, you know. Hard to understand the girls or boys a friend picks. They all seem wrong. I was the same way with Hanson. Though I got to say, this ex-wife of his, Rachel, he shouldn’t have lost her. She’s all right, way she’s takin’ care of him. And she’s a looker too.”

  “I don’t get it, Charlie. They been divorced for years. He throws his head through a windshield, bounces it off a tree, and suddenly she’s puttin’ a pee tube in his shank and feeding him processed green beans.”

  “She ain’t feedin’ him shit. He gets his food through a tube. And maybe that ain’t such a bad marriage. She don’t have to put up with his bullshit, nor he with hers. He may be luckier than everybody. He don’t put up with no bullshit at all. And he gets his dick handled more than I do, and I’m awake. But I was talkin’ about you and Leonard. Close as you guys are, I think you’re kinda jealous of the time Raul steals from you and him. It’s almost like a marriage thing without the fuckin’. Well, actually, my marriage seems to be pretty much without the fuckin’. Still, you need a woman, Hap. Even like, you know, the local poke.”