Age of Consent (22 page)

“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.

“So I guess you made it home okay,” he said. “You going to ask how I've been? Go on, say it. Say, ‘How have you been, Craig?' ”

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?”

“You can
this
time. I'm saying you can. Because it isn't like I'm
with
you. You're just being the postman, picking up a package, so what? What I need is the reefer that's in my closet. It's in the lining of my winter coat. Bring it here quick. That's all I'm asking, bring me the coat. Also, my radio. I'm being soft-rocked to death in this damned hospital and the crappy transistor your mother bought me is a piece of shit.”

“I can't go to your house. They'll see me.”

“Oh Christ, don't be so dumb! It doesn't matter who sees what—”

“I don't want to get in trouble.”

“It's just clothes—”

“But the pot—”

“Cut me some
slack
! It's a coat as far as you know, okay? The pot is in the
lining
, about which you officially know
nada
. It's in the lining because I have to hide it from my roommates. They always steal my good bud. It's hidden, see? Nobody will know a damned thing.”

“But
they'll
see me. Whoever answers the door—”

“—won't care! They won't ask anything. They're assholes. They can
not
think.”

“I can't get there. The police might come.”

“What police? There are no police. I said you could use some of my money. Get a
taxi
!”

“I don't have any of
your
money.”

His heart was pounding; he wanted to yell. He listened as the phone beeped a warning that he was almost out of credit.
Please insert coins if you wish to continue, please insert coins…
“Hang on!” he shouted, then wrenched himself up, causing his pelvis to hurt like hell, and pushed in a couple of quarters.

He heard her say she had to go. “No, don't!” he yelled, a little louder than he ought to have. “For fucksake, Barbara, use the money to get a taxicab, you know what a taxicab is, don't you?” He imagined her with his money, buying all the stupid bullshit she liked—pastel T-shirts and makeup and toe socks, or pet fucking rocks—God, he hoped she hadn't blown half of it already. “I'm not pissed off, okay? I respect what you did; it was almost professional. But you got caught. I caught you. If you want to steal from me, you've got to kill me. And try as you did to make it so, I. AM. NOT. DEAD.”

“I didn't try to kill you!”

“Then I hate to think of what would happen if you
had
tried!” he said. He thought about what to say next, what would scare her. She'd always moaned about who might see them and what she should say and how she should act. She'd always worried about being in trouble that way. Well, he'd show her some trouble. “Listen, missy, you're lucky I'm not talking to the cops—yet—because they
do
want to talk to me,” he said. “I'm not going to tell them you tried to kill me, but I know it, and you know it.”

He paused, letting that sink in. She'd be going crazy with the thought she might be arrested for attempted murder. “It's really very simple. I want the pot—I mean coat—and I want my money, but you can use some of my money for transportation. Isn't that simple? Isn't that easy? So how about it? We'll call it quits after that, no more arguing about you trying to kill me. No point staying mad at each other.”

She didn't say anything and he felt it again, that anger, charging up from inside him. “Oh come on!” He wondered if she'd hung up, actually hung up on him. She couldn't possibly hang up on him; he was the
victim
, the one in the hospital, institutionalized among an army of vicious nurses and remote, untalkative doctors who sleepwalked through their rounds. Besides, she'd never before done anything of the sort. He yelled into the phone, “Goddamn it, answer me! It's not too late for me to go to the police, you know!”

And then he looked up, and there were the two cops that he'd seen before, almost as though he'd summoned them. He had no idea how long they'd been watching him barking orders at Bobbie about drugs, his hand curled so hard around the phone there were sweat marks on the plastic so that he even looked like a junkie. He'd seen these cops before, lurking in the hospital, staring at him through the window of his room: a freckled young Irish-looking one in a crisp dark blazer and a black guy with an open-neck shirt and acne.

“Are you for real, Salt and Pepper?” he said. Though he'd been avoiding them for some time by feigning sleep whenever they came around, he wasn't entirely sure if he'd invented these two. Back when he'd first been admitted to the hospital, when he hadn't really understood what was going on and people were sticking him with needles and prying through his skull and wheeling him down hallways to darker and smaller rooms, attaching him to machines, he'd seen them—or thought he'd seen them. His brain hadn't been operating smoothly for quite some while. He had to admit that he was in an advanced state of fucked up. There had been times over the past week when he would forget words. Not dictionary words but common, ordinary words, words like
pee
, for example. He'd get only so far in a sentence,
I need to…
, and then draw a blank and finish the sentence with
you know!
A nurse would then race from the room to find a doctor, who blared a penlight in his eye and asked questions like whether he knew his own name and what the hell day it was, and he never knew the answer to that one because every day was the same to him now. It could be Tuesday seven times in a row—what the hell difference did it make?

He narrowed his vision on the cops now. “If you
are
real, are you looking for me?” he asked. He hadn't been a hundred percent on that, either, whether the police were seeking him specifically, or whether for some reason they just hung around hospitals. Perhaps they were present in the wards all the time, like fuzzy dice hanging on the rearview mirrors of roadsters. It was hard to tell because time jumbled in his mind so that a day could be super-elastic and last forever or disappear altogether, plucked from his life without his ever having being informed, taken from him as his eye had been. For days, he wasn't sure about the eye—had it really been removed? It had been, he'd finally understood, just as he understood now, as the police came toward him, that these cops were real.