Basket Case (13 page)

"Don't you worry. I'll deal with Abkazion," I venture brashly.

"It's not just him," Emma grumbles. "Mr. Maggad has taken an interest, as well. He went to see the old man at Charity and believes he's delirious, in addition to terminal."

Exultantly I tell Emma there must be a misunderstanding. Race Maggad III, who despises me, would never recommend me being assigned to a story as important as Old Man Polk's obit.

Emma drums her fingers on her knees. "Abkazion is baffled. I'm baffled. You're baffled. Yet here we are."

I stall, racking my brain. "I get it. Maggad, that conniving yuppie fuck, he's setting me up."

"For what, Jack? Setting you up for what?"

There is a tender note of pity in Emma's question, implying that I've already been so thoroughly shafted by management that there's no place left to fall. My chin drops. Scrutinizing the sparse, south-running trail of hair on my belly, I notice a few shoots of gray.

Emma says, "I'm sorry, Jack. Now go put on some clothes."

I lift my eyes to meet hers and say: "Jimmy Stoma for Old Man Polk."

"No deal." She shakes her head vigorously.

"Emma, do you know how much sick leave I've piled up?"

"Don't threaten me. Don't you dare."

"Tomorrow you will receive a letter from a prominent board-certified health care provider," I say, "attesting to the seriousness of my condition, namely chronic colorectal diverticulosis. By the time my recovery is complete and I am deemed able to resume a full work schedule, Mr. MacArthur Polk will be worm chow, darling. An intimate of maggots, to steal a phrase."

Emma stands up, fuming and spectacular. "You're unbelievable, Jack, getting a doctor to lie for you!"

Murkily I confide to having heavy connections in the gastrointestinal field. "But give me ten days on Jimmy Stoma," I say, "and I'll go see Old Man Polk at once."

"A week. That's all you get," Emma relents. "And we never had this conversation, understand? I was never here."

"Right. And you never ogled my bare alabaster calves. Hey, I'm about to pulp some oranges—stay for juice."

"Rain check," Emma says curtly.

At the door I hear myself thanking her, for what I can't imagine. She pockets the reading glasses in favor of snazzy blue Ray-Bans, new driving shades. "Look," she says. "I really am sorry about that a-hole remark."

"Nonsense. We're bonding, that's all. We're a work in progress."

"Juan says you keep a lizard in your kitchen freezer. Can that possibly be true?"

"An extremely large lizard, yes. Would you care to see?"

"Under no circumstances, Jack," Emma says with a guarded smile. "Though I wouldn't mind hearing your version of the story."

"Maybe someday," I say, "when I'm not feeling so puny."

11

When Anne moved out of my apartment, Carla gave me a baby Savannah monitor lizard. She said I wasn't responsible enough to take proper care of a puppy or a kitten, or even a parrot. Lizards require no companionship, only grubs, water and sunlight. "Even you can manage that," Carla assured me.

I named him "Colonel Tom" because he joined the household on January 21, the anniversary of the death of Colonel Tom Parker, the man who made a king of Elvis Aron Presley. Carla provided a terrarium and a starter bag of mealworms, which Colonel Tom the lizard gobbled down in three days. Quickly he advanced to crickets, palmetto bugs and beyond—hunger incarnate, a perpetual eating machine. Before long he outgrew the terrarium, so I moved him to a fifty-gallon dry tank with a bonsai tree, a water dish and a vermiculite beach.

Lizards are not strung with the high emotions of, say, a cocker spaniel. On a good day Colonel Tom's mood ranged from oblivious to indifferent. Only at mealtimes would he respond approvingly to a human presence, blinking a cold eye while cocking his knobbed saurian head. The rest of the time he skulked inside a toy cave that Carla had found for him.

One evening, after a few beers, I took him out to show Juan, who sensibly armed himself with a mop handle. We watched a baseball game on television, and Colonel Tom lay across my lap for five innings without so much as twitching his tail. "He looks parched," Juan observed. "Fluids, Jack, ahora!"

I poured the lukewarm dregs of a Sam Adams into an ashtray and raised it to the monitor's scaly mandibles, and to my wonderment he gingerly extended a tongue as pink and delicate as a Caribbean snail. My lizard, it turned out, had a thing for beer. Inspired, I offered up the remnants of a Key lime pie, which Colonel Tom inhaled savagely. The frothy dollop of meringue clung to his chin like a jaunty white goatee. Juan and I were both drunk enough to be enthralled.

From then on I brought the lizard out on TV nights for beer and dessert. Sometimes Juan would drop by on his way home from work, and a few times he even brought dates to see Colonel Tom in action. The young monitor grew rapidly, soon surpassing three feet in length. The unnatural diet began to soften his prehistoric countenance and bloat his once-chiseled flanks to droopy saddlebags. In retrospect I should have recognized the transformation as plainly unhealthy, though Colonel Tom's disposition had never been rosier. Juan swore the lizard manifested a fan's appreciation of baseball; the fundamentals, if not the finer points. Certainly Colonel Tom was most attentive and bright-eyed when draped across my lap, but I always suspected his spirits were elevated not by the heroics of the Marlins' bullpen so much as the promise of more pastry and distilled hops.

Late one Saturday night, as the Marlins played the Dodgers on the coast, Colonel Tom came down with a brutal case of what I diagnosed as lizard hiccups. Symptoms appeared shortly after he downed a cold Heineken and a slice of rich German strudel that Juan had brought from a renowned bakery in Ybor City.

By my wristwatch I timed Colonel Tom's shuddering burps at eight-second intervals. Discomfort was evident in his lethargic demeanor and blotched, blackening cheeks. Juan had already gone home, so it was left to me to soothe the tremulous reptile. When I tried stroking his corrugated shoulders, Colonel Tom wheeled and snapped percussively. Then, for good measure, he raked a hind claw across my cheek, drawing blood.

"You ungrateful little shit," I muttered, too harshly.

In response the monitor balefully reared his brick-sized noggin and displayed a well-armored maw, featuring rows of fine needle-sharp teeth. A large opalescent bubble of lizard saliva appeared, then popped moistly on the ensuing hiccup. From the TV set rose a hometown cheer as Gary Sheffield hammered a hanging curve into the left-field bleachers, sinking the Marlins in the bottom of the ninth. Colonel Tom promptly fluttered one eyeball and flopped over dead in my lap.

I didn't move for fifteen minutes, frozen partly by shock and partly by the fact that the lizard's glistening jaws had come to rest two centimeters from the crotch of my boxer shorts. A death-spasm chomp of those fangs would have sent me to the emergency room (where, I knew, no innocent explanation would be accepted for a deceased lizard affixed to one's scrotum).

Once it was evident that the colonel had drawn his final breath, I pondered my options. The balcony offered a clear shot at the Dumpster, but that seemed a cold and indecent goodbye. This was, after all, a gift from Anne's daughter. So I resolved to give the lizard a fitting send-off as soon as arrangements could be made. In the meantime I endeavored to preserve his mortal remains, which, given his bulk, wasn't easy. The only way to fit the beast into the shallow freezer compartment of my refrigerator was to pretzel the long limp corpse into the shape of an ampersand.

To this day there he sleeps, Colonel Tom, frostily coiled beneath my ice cube trays and chocolate Dove bars. Every time I think about burying the poor bastard I get depressed.

Out of guilt I lied to Carla and told her the monitor broke out of the tank and escaped. Only Juan knows the truth, and I'm surprised he spilled it to Emma. I suspect she was pumping him for inside information to use against me in the annual employee evaluation. Even though Juan is my best friend, he'll tell Emma whatever she wants to know if he thinks there's a chance she'll sleep with him. At least that's how /always operated in the early stages of a relationship.

Maybe it's better that she knows about the dead lizard in my freezer. Maybe it will upend her set notions about me, and make her wonder what other distasteful secrets I've got.

MacArthur Polk looks like death on a Triscuit. "He can't speak," the nurse informs me.

"Then what am I doing here?" I ask reasonably.

"I meant, he can't speak normally. Because of the tracheostomy."

The old man points gravely to a surgical opening in his throat, to which has been attached a plastic valve that resembles a demitasse cup. A clear polymer tube leads from the valve stem to an oxygen contraption beside the bed.

For the interview MacArthur Polk has been moved from the hospital's intensive care ward to a private room. He aims a bloodless finger at the door, signaling the nurse to scram.

"Keep it short and sweet," she whispers to me. "He's not well." She throws up an elbow in time to deflect a plastic bedpan that would have otherwise beaned her on the forehead. "He can be a pill. You'll see," she says.

As soon as we're alone, MacArthur Polk begins fiddling with the throat valve, which enables him to speak by drawing air across the vocal cords.

"Little gizmo goes for fifty-two bucks on the Internet," the old man rasps. "Guess how much the hospital charges—three hundred a pop! Fucking bandits."

The voice lacks for volume but not vitriol. I step closer to listen.

"Sit down, you," Polk snaps. "Where's your damn notebook?"

Obediently I withdraw it from my pocket.

"Open it," he says. "Now put down that I was a fighter. Put down that I was all heart and gristle. I never gave up, no matter what those worthless quacks said." He jabs the air. "Put it down now! In your notebook, Mr. Obituary Writer!"

As I'm scribbling, the old man has second thoughts. "Hold on now. Scratch 'worthless quacks.' My luck, one a those pricks'll slap my estate with a libel suit. See what it's come to? They'd sue a dead man with a hole in his throat, I swear to Christ."

MacArthur Polk is shriveled and fuzzy-headed, with a florid beaked nose, stringy neck and papery, pellucid skin. He looks like one of those newborn condors that zookeepers are always showing off on the Discovery Channel.

After another drag of oxygen, he croaks: "Mr. Race Maggad didn't want you on this story. Why is that, you suppose?"

"I gather he's not a fan."

The old milky eyes sparkle with overmedicated mischief. "I heard you called him some nasty names at a shareholders' meeting. I heard you shook things up, Mr. Tagger."

"Why are we talking about this?"

"Because—" Old Man Polk emits a tubercular wheeze. "Because the reason Maggad didn't want you on this story is the precise reason I insisted on it. What'd you call him exactly? I'm just curious."

"An impostor," I say.

When Polk laughs, his dentures clack. "Him and his father both. What else?"

"I might have mentioned his trust fund. The fact he never worked an honest day in his life. How he knows more about shoeing polo ponies than putting out a decent newspaper."

The old man rattles a wet sigh. "God, I wish I'd been there. I believe I was in the hospital that day."

"Dying," I say. "That's what Mr. Maggad informed the shareholders."

"Hell, I wasn't 'dying' that time, or any of the others. I was just resting. Screwing with their heads."

"You dying now?"

Polk nods abjectly. "Unfortunately, this one's for real, Mr. Tagger. I wouldn't call you here to waste your time."

I almost believe him, he looks so ghastly. For some reason I think of his wife, age thirty-six, and wonder what in creation the two of them talk about. The old man volunteers that she's holding up like a champ. Considering her future net worth, I don't doubt it for a moment.

"Mr. Race Maggad himself came to the hospital to visit me. Why is that, you suppose?" Polk asks, hacking feebly. "To see how I was getting along? Read me a bedtime story? Or maybe to apologize for ruining my family's newspaper."

Polk will get no argument from me. I hear myself asking: "So why'd you sell out to Maggad-Feist? Them, of all people."

The old man turns away with a snort. "More on that later."

"A lot of us in the newsroom felt… betrayed."

Polk's head snaps around. His eyes are hot. "Is that so. Betrayed?"

"It was a good little paper, Mr. Polk, and we were proud of it. Those people are raping its soul."

"You're not the most sensitive fellow, are you? Did I mention I was dying?"

Suddenly he sounds forlorn. Me, I feel like a shitheel.

"I didn't think it was possible to feel any worse," Polk gasps, "until you showed up. Hell, I'd hang myself with this goddamn oxygen tube if I could reach the curtain rod."

"I'm sorry. I honestly am."

"Aw, what the hell—you've got a point. But more on that later. Now, Mr. Obituary Man, "the old man says, with renewed spunk, "put down how I turned the Union-Register into a first-class outfit. And don't forget to say 'award-winning.' Write that down! I got a list somewhere of all the prizes we won… "