Joe Lansdale: Bad Chili

“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.”

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.