The Evening Hour (18 page)

“That's what my granddaddy used to say. That and fast women,” Cole said, and Leona snorted with delight.

Then she said she had something for him, which was what she always said. Her movements were slow and deliberate; he watched to make sure she didn't fall.

“I don't know why they give me so much,” she said, handing him a crumpled sack.

He took the meds and handed her the cash, which she would use for food and bills. Usually, this was his signal to go, but she stood there looking at him, her eyes wide and still, like a fish's.

“You okay?”

“I got to ask you something.”

“What's wrong?”

“I heard about that doctor getting arrested a few months back. Now, I believe it's none of the government's business what I do, but I don't want to be doing nothing wrong.” She swallowed. “I ain't done nothing wrong, have I?”

“No, no way,” he said. “It's your business, like you said. And, Leona. I mean, nobody even knows I come out here.”

She looked at him and nodded, but he could not decide if she believed him or not. “It was just on my mind,” she said apologetically.

“It's not wrong. Don't worry.”

Most of the old people probably knew more than they let on. Like old T-Bone, cutting him out. He'd never reveal their names, no matter what, but if the cops pressured them, would they turn him in? He didn't think so. These old people were true to their word. They were old-timey, the kind to give you the shirts off their backs. They weren't the ones he had to worry about.

Still, he left her place feeling unsettled. Usually whenever he saw Leona, or any of the old people, he felt better. But now everything felt mixed up. The pills and cash were locked in his glove compartment. What could he do about it now?

When he pulled into the parking lot at work, a text came through on his phone. This was about the only place where he got service. Reese Campbell. Cole looked at the name for a second, then turned off his phone. Ruthie had passed away a couple of weeks ago. When Reese called Cole to tell him, he'd sounded stoned out of his head. He had ended up taking her to the hospital after all, where she died on arrival. He could not give her the extra morphine, he'd told Cole, could not bring himself to carry out her last wish, to die at home. There was no funeral or viewing; she was cremated and he was holding on to the ashes, hoarding them like money, like pills.

“We got a meeting in an hour,” Ellen told Cole.

“What about?”

“I don't know. I'm sick of all these meetings. I wish they'd just let us do our job.”

Linda passed by, clipboard in hand, and told them there was no time for breaks. Cole slurped down coffee, then walked down the long and familiar hallway.

He felt like he was here all of the time. Linda had been juggling his schedule to compensate for the high turnover rate—new aides were hired and then quit a couple of weeks or months later, fed up with the low pay and the high demands. Or they were fired. One woman had tried to stir things up with union talk. Another was busted for stealing OxyContin, taking entire bottles to feed her habit. Ellen's fiancé had showed up to arrest her, and Cole stood with the others at the window, watching as she was led away in cuffs. He felt sorry for her, but wasn't worried.

In the lounge Mabel Johnson was knitting. “I'm still working on that scarf for you.”

“Is that what this is?”

“No, this is gonna be a blanket for one of my grandbabies.” She held up a light blue square. “Every year, my family gets bigger and bigger.”

“Is that right.”

“You're going to have to get married,” she told him.

“Me? Why?”

“You've sowed your wild oats. It's time for you to settle. Time for you to figure things out.”

He flashed a smile, but her expression did not change—she stared at him with steady, loamy eyes. “I'm late, Mabel,” he said, patting her hand.

She stared at him for another moment, then looked down at the yarn in her hands.

The door to the conference room was closed. He was the last one to arrive. There were no more chairs, so he stood in the back, leaning against the wall. The janitor was there, three other aides, Ellen, and Pete Andrews, the head of the home. Pete was short and chubby, and always wore pleated pants and golf shirts. He didn't seem to particularly like the old people, but he had a twangy voice that put them at ease.

“I'm going make this short and sweet, so y'all can get back to work. I called this meeting because we've run into some problems. Real bad problems.”

Cole jacked one foot up behind him, glanced around the room. Nobody looked very worried. The janitor, an old man called Jefferson, caught Cole's eye and winked. Pete leaned back in his chair, his hands resting on his stomach.

“As you all know, we had an aide who was stealing meds. Well, there's been more stuff. Belongings. It's been going on for a while, before that woman was ever hired. Watches, jewelry, petty cash. Someone stole three hundred bucks from old Lester. Old crazy Lester, someone took his money, that's what his daughter said.”

Cole managed to look bored when Pete turned his eyes on him. “If anyone knows anything, anything at all, I want you to tell me. We won't hold anything against you, just say what you know.”

Nobody said a word. Pete got up and paced the room and told them that changes would be implemented. He wanted to be able to trust his staff, he said, but somebody had ruined that. From now on all of the patients' belongings would be locked in a safe; only he and Linda would know the combination. There would be random locker searches and bag searches until all of this blew over.

“I'd hate to think it was any of you. Whoever it is, you better be prepared to lose your job, you better be prepared to go to jail, just like that goddamn pillhead.”

They filed out of the room; nobody spoke. Cole picked up a stack of charts and tried to look busy. He felt like people were looking at him, but he wasn't afraid. He felt protected by the old people. They knew things, the old people. Like Mabel Johnson. Even the ones who babbled senselessly, or who screamed at him, or who threw things, hating their own bodies and fearing death. When they looked at him, they saw something deeper.

For the rest of the day, as he checked on patients, he also rummaged through drawers. This might be his last shot. He slipped fifty dollars in his shoe, filched a half-empty bottle of Vicodin. His hands were shaking and he almost returned all of it. But he didn't. He didn't return anything.

After his shift ended, he went out to his truck and checked his phone for messages. There were four calls from Reese, one from Lacy asking him to pick up a six-pack on his way over, and a short, barely audible message from Charlotte Carson. He had not heard from her since the night he saw her with Terry Rose. The sound of her voice startled him, and he felt a sudden rush of longing. He called her back and it rang eight times. No answer. He hung up, called Lacy. She'd rented a movie for them, she told him, and Sara Jean was at her sister's.

“I'm running late,” he said. “I'll be there soon.”

At Reese's two pickups were parked in the driveway, the house blazing with light. Cole sat in his truck, the vents kicking out hot air on his face, and watched the house for a while, but nobody went in or out. Now that Ruthie was gone, her prescriptions would be cut off. Maybe Reese didn't care; maybe now he only wanted crank. But he must have needed something, to call so many times. Something felt wrong. Cole tried to call Charlotte again, but now he wasn't getting any service. He turned his truck around. There was a pay phone at the Exxon. He pulled into the parking lot and grabbed a handful of quarters from the collection of change that was piled up in one of the cup-holders. It was blustery and cold, the wind smacking against him. Six rings, then Charlotte picked up.

“God, I'm so glad you called.”

“What's going on?”

“Cole, I need to borrow a little. I'll pay you back, I promise.”

“Ask Terry Rose.”

“That's who it's for.” The connection was not good. Charlotte talked fast, her words speedy, wild. Cole only heard bits of what she said. He asked her to repeat herself.

“It ain't for me, it's for Terry. He's afraid to ask you, Cole, but he's in trouble.”

Cole was shivering, the phone freezing in his hand. “There's nothing I can do.”

“I'm afraid he's gonna do something stupid. He owes people, people owe him.”

“Well, then he should tell them to pay up.”

“That guy, you know the one.”

“Who?”

“That guy, that fag.”

“Reese.”

“He owes Terry. He owes him.”

“I was just about to head over there. Look, I'll talk to him. He's been upset, you know, Ruthie and all. He'll pay up.”

“No, don't go over there now.”

“Why not?”

The operator cut in, and Cole dropped in more change. “There's something you ain't telling me,” he said. “You better tell me.”

But she jumped around with her talk, confessing how nervous she was and how she should have gone to New York like she said, until after a while she wasn't making any sense and he'd run out of quarters and the wind was biting his face. He said he had to go, and she began to cry, and though he'd never heard her cry before, he knew she was not crying out of sorrow but that she was strung out and had hit some wall of paranoia, and he gently set the phone on the cradle and zipped up his jacket and got in his truck. He should just drive up the mountain, where Lacy was waiting for him. There would be no trouble. Movie, beer, sex. It was right there in front of him, a shining light.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Reese said. “Goddamn, I was wondering when I'd get to see your face.”

“Here I am.”

“Check you out, doctor.”

Cole entered the smoky room, nodding to the others. He felt stupid and conspicuous in his scrubs, and wished he'd brought along a change of clothes. Three tough-looking country boys and a woman who had the gaunt, collapsed face of a speed freak were passing around a bottle of Rebel Yell. An old Bon Jovi song, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” was playing on the stereo, rock stars who wanted to be cowboys. Reese sat in the rocking chair, cigarette in hand, eyes heavy. He wore jeans and a western shirt with pearl snaps and a cowboy hat. He was barefoot, wiggling his toes.

Cole patted his shoulder. “How are you, man?”

“I told you, you should have done it. You should have helped me out, helped Ruthie. It was bad, man. Real bad.”

“Sorry.”

“It's over now. Fucking over.” He sighed. “Go grab yourself a beer.”

Cole navigated his way through the mess of the kitchen. Empty liquor bottles and beer cans sprouted from the counters like kudzu. The refrigerator was bare except for a nearly empty bottle of ketchup and a case of Miller. He wondered when Reese had last eaten. A bitten-into piece of toast on a saucer, a box of saltines. How many kitchens had he been in over the last year that were not stocked? Homes that were not heated. The dark and cold and empty.

He sat next to Reese and lifted the beer to his mouth and listened without interest to the talk; the two younger men, his age, were arguing about some girl they knew, if she lived around here or not, until the third man, who looked old enough to be their father, with a receding hairline and pale blue eyes, told them to shut the fuck up. The woman sat on his lap, and his hand twitched nervously on her knee.

“Settle down there, Everett,” Reese said, grinning. “This is Everett,” he said to Cole. “That's Laura. And that's Tommy and Wes. This here is Cole.”

“You from Dove Creek?” Everett said.

“Yeah. Up at Rockcamp.”

“He's all right,” Reese said. “Don't worry about old Cole.”

Everett stared at him intently, then reached into his jacket and took out a small bag of crank. He used a razor blade to cut up the lines on an old
National Geographic
. When Cole passed, Everett said, “I thought you said he was cool.”

“He is. He's cool, man.”

Everett looked at Cole suspiciously, then snorted a line. There was nothing worse than hanging out with crankheads. Paranoid and temperamental and stupid. They'd get some crazy idea in their head, and you couldn't convince them otherwise. Cole wished he'd never walked through that door. The woman wanted to know why he was wearing a doctor uniform. When he told her, they all began to laugh. Cole took a long pull on his beer. The one named Tommy, with speedbumps all over his face, said he was sick of this music, and he searched through the pile of CDs. “All your shit sucks,” he said, then finally decided on Lynyrd Skynyrd. “Honky-tonk.”

“Turn it up,” said Wes, a squat, chunky guy sporting a classic mullet. Tommy hit the volume and Laura yelled, “Fuck yeah.”

Reese turned to Cole. “I need a new direction in my life.”

“I hear you.”

“I never knew how much of my time I spent taking care of Ruthie. Now there's all this extra time to kill. I might take off, go somewhere else.”

“Where to?”

“Down south, maybe. Somewhere new. Start over. Don't you ever just want to start over?”

“I don't know if I'd know how to.”

“I'm sick of spending my time with fuckers like this,” Reese said, getting loud. “Stupid fucking rednecks.”

“Take it easy,” Cole muttered.

But they heard and they glared at Reese, like they'd been waiting for this. “Listen, you piece of shit,” said Everett. “Let's get this taken care of.”

“I already told you I ain't got it. Terry said he'd give me another day. I'm good for it.”

“But Terry owes me. And guess what? I don't want to wait another day.” Everett nudged Laura, and she sighed and climbed off his lap. When he stood up, Cole saw that he was much bigger than he'd thought. He was over six foot, his arms bundled with muscle. “Terry Rose should be doing this himself, but he's a pussy,” Everett said.