Stephen Dixon: Love and Will: Twenty Stories

“What about our rabies?” I said, giving the admitting man our completed forms. “For all we know we can be getting it now, and once you do you’ve had it I understand.”

“Excuse me.” He took the form from Jack and told him to take the man who was shot into the examining room. Jack and his friend helped the man in and then left.

“Now,” the admitting man said to me, “were either of you bitten on the head or face?”

“No.”

“Splenius, sternocleidomstoid, anywhere near the larynx or voice box?”

“I was bitten twice on the calf and the Hungarian man once on the ankle. And the skin broke in all three bites and the dog’s saliva got in.”

“The incubation period for your types of bites is rarely less than fifteen days and I guarantee you’ll be in the examining room by then.”

I asked the Finnish woman to tell Milos what the man had just said. She again left her father in the care of a stranger sitting beside him and spoke to Milos. He shook his head and began repeating something to her.

“He’s apparently saying the incubation period might be for fifteen days. But you have to take virus injections in the stomach for fourteen days starting from the day you were bitten, which leaves you both with only one day left, he says, and conceivably he about ten minutes fewer than you.”

I told the admitting man what Milos had said.

“So you have one day left. You still won’t be waiting here that long. Even the chances of a dog getting rabies in this city are practically nonexistent, so please sit down.”

We waited another hour. The child with the swollen belly and the man with the cut face and the father of the Finnish lady were taken before us. Then the beebite lady and Milos and I were called. We sat in one of the examining rooms with four other patients, all on stools in a circle, my knees touching the knees of the Finnish man whose daughter, standing behind him and holding his hand, said he’d come in to get a splinter removed that she had dug and dug at but couldn’t even reach. A woman was telling a man with a bad cough of the beautiful mad golden retriever that had bitten her this morning.

“That’s a coincidence,” I said, “for I was bitten too.”

“Same here,” the beebite lady said.

“Both of you by golden retrievers?” the woman said.

“No, a pack of bees.”

“Mine was a mutt. But yours couldn’t have been on Broadway in the eighties, was it?”

“Connecticut.”

“I wish I only got bit by a dog in Connecticut,” the beebite lady said, “or at least only by one bee. But hundreds. Right on West Fifty-first in the heart of the restaurant district when I’m out dumping my garbage bag.”

The woman said she was driving in on the thruway when she saw a car ride off the road right in front of her and turn over a couple of times before it came up on its wheels. “I parked. A few cars got there before me and someone said the driver looked dead but that there was a dog on the seat who wouldn’t let them open the door to help the man. All the windows were shattered. I tried coaxing the dog out. I’ve a way with them and especially retrievers — I’ve two myself. When it wouldn’t come with words I held a strip of beef jerky through the window to get him to sniff it and eventually follow it out of the car with me, but he bit my hand.”

A nurse asked each of us our medical problems and assigned the beebite lady and the cut man to special rooms. The man with the cough was given a throat swab and a prescription and told to come back tomorrow for the results. A doctor came in, gave the rest of us tetanus shots, washed our wounds and while the nurse prepared the Finnish man for minor surgery, bandaged us up and asked about the dogs that bit us.

Mina, the woman, said she’d phoned Connecticut just before and was told the retriever was licensed, had had all his shots and was now quarantined, and the doctor said the vets there will know if the dog shows any clinical signs of rabies within seven days. “What about your dogs?” he asked Milos and me.

“It has no license and probably never had any shots or will ever be found,” I said and he told me if the dog isn’t confined in two days we should return to this hospital and begin taking our fixed virus shots.

“I hear they can be very painful,” I said.

“And possible severe reactions to the treatment can happen, so in actual fact we don’t recommend them.”

“But if we get rabies we can go into convulsions and die.”

“There hasn’t been a reported case of rabies bite in the city for over thirty years.”

“Maybe this is the one. Or the man and his dog were from out of town and only visiting here for the day.”

“There weren’t a hundred reported cases in the entire country last year and most of those attacking rabid animals weren’t dogs.”

“What would you do?” I asked him.

“I’d take the injections,” Mina said.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “Though in the end that comes down to a personal and not a professional decision, so I know how tough it must be for both of you.”

“I’ll make up my mind in two days.” I got Milos’s phone number and said to the Finnish woman “Tell him I’ll call in two days to report if the dog’s been found. If it hasn’t, say he’ll then have to speak to his own people and make up his own mind on whether he wants to go through with the virus shots.”

Mina, Milos and I went to a coffee shop nearby. I told Mina I’d like to take her out for dinner one night this week and she said “I don’t think it’d be too good an idea as I’m sort of seeing someone now.”

“But we’ve had too inauspicious and eventful and coincidental a beginning not to see what develops next.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But I don’t suppose a single dinner with you can matter that much and we can also learn how we all made out with our bites.” She gave me her phone number. The three of us shook hands and took separate buses home.

I called the police station the next day and the man at the desk said the first address Jersey gave was fake and they’re now trying to run him down at either his own apartment or where he said his friend lives.

“This is a real emergency,” I said. “As even the injection treatments for rabies can sometimes be fatal, so this other man and I want to avoid them at all costs.”

I called the station the next day and the policeman said “All three addresses were fake and we don’t know what else to do for you now.”

“I know where Jersey and his type hang out.”

“You one of them?”

“No, I just live in the neighborhood and walk around a lot. And I see that on the island across from Loews 83rd is where a lot of the transvestites like to hang out these days, though every other month or so they switch to another island a block or two north or south.”

“If you see him let us know,” and he gave me a special number to call.

I went to the island on Broadway. One of the transvestites of two days ago was sitting alone on a bench.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but do you know where I can find your friend Jersey?”

“I’ve no friend Jersey. She a friend of yours?”

“Jersey’s dog bit me the other day and I’m trying to find it to see if it has rabies.”

“Oh sure, now I remember. Bad scene. Too many police.”

“Can you tell me where Jersey is?”

“She and her dog are dead.”

“No, really.”

“No, really, dead. Hit by a car.”

“Both killed by the same car? Around here?”

“She didn’t die, just her dog. Ballpark, she called him. The dog. Jersey went to California. Picked up on this very comer here by some new queer who stops his car and says ‘I love you, darling, what’s your name?’ And they made it — just like that.”