David Ohle - The Devil in Kansas

“I’m all ears.”

“I got this idea for a family business.”

Ray says, “Tell him, Junior, about Wendy.”

Lorna pipes up with a mouthful. “They did Wendy.”

Mickey stops tapping the ketchup bottle against his thumb. “Excuse me?”

“I said they did Wendy. Junior and Ray. They used a pillow.”

“We had to,” Ray explains. “She was costing us a fortune. With absolutely no hope of recovering…and, she had a policy sitting there, waiting.”

Mickey shakes his head, is speechless. “That’s what Vickie said. I thought she was crazy.”

“It makes perfect sense, Mickey. Listen to your brother. It’s the fucking world that don’t make sense. Dogs get better treatment when they’re dying. You take them to the vet and have ‘em put to sleep. Tell him about the business, Junior.”

“We offer the service to the public, privately. We charge a lot, and none of us has to get a job.”

Mickey gives this some thought. “What service?”

“You know, putting people to sleep…sick people…people that’re dying anyway but they just won’t go. Clingers, like Wendy was.”

Lorna gets up. “All that good money down the tubes.” She heads for the ladies’ to purge.

Mickey thinks it over a bit more. “If this thing works, we’re gonna need a dummy company to funnel the money through. A laundromat, a pawn shop, a restaurant…something that handles a lot of cash.”

Junior is confident they’re light years ahead of everybody else on this.

But Mickey introduces a discordant element. “What about Vickie?”

Junior assigns the task to Mickey. “You’re gonna hafta make her see things the way we do.”

“And if I can’t, which is likely, then what?”

Junior says things could get pretty unpleasant.

Ray announces that he’ll be flying down to Florida for a couple weeks to get some fishing done.

Junior says, “Don’t forget. Eyes and ears open. Word of mouth. That’s the vision. And, Mickey, you gotta talk to Vickie. You gotta bring her around.”

Outside the Golden Bough Nursing Home, Junior strides toward the entrance in a suit and wingtips, his hair conservatively coiffed, carrying a briefcase. Families visit their health-challenged loved ones. A group of bikers clusters around a brain-damaged, paralyzed comrade.

I guess you could say that’s how the “business” got started. Junior had suddenly found his calling. He was a natural if there ever was one. It was like in his blood. He had insight I guess. He could pick the right customers every time. And he knew exactly how to dress and where to go looking for business.

Junior enters the Golden Bough solarium grinning like a rat in a dumpster. He says to himself, “Look at this, man, the mother lode.” The sick and dying and their visitors are luminous in the bright sunlight. Kids play among the wheelchairs and gurneys. Nurses adjust drips, rearrange pillows, change urine bags.

Junior smiles, nods, tries to look professional, walks among the sick and their visitors, reading situations, looking for the right group to approach. He becomes interested in an elderly man in a wheelchair, asleep, hooked to drips, a heart monitor, an oxygen tank. In a chair next to him sits a trim, attractive businesswoman in her early thirties, reading the Wall Street Journal and speaking on a cell phone. On a nearby table is a laptop with the latest stock trading figures displayed. She glances at it often as Junior circles dingo-like around the businesswoman, who says to someone on the phone: “You’re on your own, Dick. I can’t help you with this one. It’s a marginal call. You could win, you could lose, you could come out even-steven. Flip a coin.” Now she sees Junior dragging a chair toward her. “Hold on, Dick.”

Junior sets the chair next to hers. “Hi…I wonder if I might have a few minutes of your time?”

She eyes him suspiciously. “You’re not going to try to sell me something, are you?”

“No, no. My name is Matt. I’m with the American Deathbed Alliance, the ADA. We represent the hopelessly ill and the dying. My card.”

She glances at the card. “Thanatek Services. You said you were from the what, the Deathbed something. What’s this Thanatek Services?”

“The Alliance has numerous members. We’re just one. We’re like an action-oriented think tank. We think it out, then we act it out. In the near future we’ll be doing some incredible things. Give me three minutes to tell you about it.”

“All right. Just a second.” She ends her phone call: “Dick? Look, I gotta go. There’s some guy from some help-the-dying outfit. Yeah. See ya.” She wipes drool from the elderly man’s chin. “Okay, Matt, talk to me. Three minutes.” She checks her watch.

“We’re a brand new startup organization with an even newer and bolder concept.”

“What’s your nut? What kind of service is this?”

“At Thanatek, we approach the end-care business from an out-of-the-box perspective. Way over the top. Right now, we’re doing some market research, so I’m out in the field talking to people.”

“Talk, then.”

Junior collects his thoughts. “This is a nursing home, right?”

“Duh.”

“You try to nurse them back to health, but sometimes you can’t.”

The businesswoman looks at her watch again. “You going somewhere with this?”

“Is this your father, ma’am?”

“Great Uncle.”

“Who’s the primary caregiver, you?”

“Unfortunately, yes. He’s ninety tomorrow. Outlived everybody. They just kept passing him down. I’m the last one in line. He was a homeless drunk. Nobody knew where he was for twenty years, till he had a stroke and they found him in the gutter.”

“It costs a lot to keep him here, doesn’t it?”

“It’s scary how much. And I barely know the guy. I saw him, what, three times in my life.”

“That’s exactly what Thanatek is all about. We’re gonna provide relief to people like you. We’re gonna make money…and you’re gonna save money…a lot. It’s a good deal. Everybody benefits. Even your uncle there. I think I can offer you a situation where he can get the best possible care at half the price they’re charging here.”

She’s interested. “Okay. You still got a minute and a half.”

Junior pulls his chair to within whispering distance of the businesswoman and begins the hard sell with a soft voice. “The whole process takes a while. First, you check him out of here and get him home. A week after that, Thanatek starts the ball rolling. I pay you and your uncle a visit and we discuss the particulars and arrive at a fair, income-adjusted price.”

“Price?”

“And then, a few days after that, I come in to resolve the problem and end the suffering.”

“I get it now. I get it.”

In a townhouse living room with a view, the lights are low, candles lit. The businesswoman paces, drinking wine. The stock quotes show on her large-screen TV. Something by the Kronos Quartet plays on the high-end stereo. She looks at her watch. The chimes ring. She lets Junior in. “Would you like a drink before you visit Uncle Jack?”

“Maybe after. I like to get it done, you know. Where is he?”

“Down the hall, second door on your left.”

The businesswoman stares at the stock quotes as Junior tiptoes down the hall. When she hears the door close, she opens an antique escritoire, withdraws ten bundles of hundreds from a pigeonhole, drops them into a manila envelope.

She can hear the faint, muffled gasps of the uncle being smothered.

A shooting gallery at a roadside carnival, a moonlit night. The attendant sets out gaudy prizes and listens to a radio. An uninflected academic voice drones on: “We’re urged from every page of every newspaper and on every TV wavelength to buy all manner of goods which, in fact, we are quite happy without. This constant barrage of advertising, with its emphasis on owning this or that in order to be happy, healthy, or more attractive, has given America the reputation of being dreadfully…”