Leland said, "What's your doctor's name? I want to talk to your doctor. What's your room number, so we can send flowers."
I said, "Man, I'm feeling good all of a sudden. This is nice. I could use a milk shake and a baseball game. And an umbrella. I told the guy I didn't want a catheter. I didn't get a catheter, and that's good."
At least this is how Leland Dees said the conversation went. Me, I don't remember. Evelyn says I called her up in 519 and tried to run down the periodic table of elements, that I was intent on getting through it all. She said I professed love not only to her, but to her older sister and parents back in Water Valley.
I got her room number and said, "That was you in the recovery room, right? Evelyn. This is Jamie Hinson. So you remember me?"
Evelyn might've said, "I want to take my life much like a martyr." Later on I realized that her words came out as such. I heard at the time, though, "I want to be your wife and birth your daughter."
I said, "Yes, yes. From back home. I can't believe we both ended up here, in a hospital. Not far from my boss's wayward brother's store."
I couldn't make out what "I give up, come on down to 519, it doesn't matter, obviously," could've meant otherwise. I couldn't. I thought, at the time, that she could mean it without sarcasm. I made sure my IV bag hung on a rolling tree. I made sure that my hospital gown almost attached in back.
For safe measure I punched the nurse call button in order to keep anyone from entering my room for another thirty minutes.
"Excuse me if I don't get up," Evelyn said. She wore one of those fife-and-drum head bandages. "I'm taking it that you've stalked me forever. I guess the last time I saw you was the Ole Miss—Tennessee game. I stood on top of the pyramid. You had a sign that read MARRY ME, EVELYN. Don't think I didn't notice. I pretended not to notice, but couldn't help it. How'd you do that? Was it a neon sign? Did you have sparkles attached to it or what? I've always wondered."
I rolled past a hardback chair and a Naugahyde lounger built for overnight guests in ICU. I said, "That wasn't me, Evelyn. Lord, think about all of your admirers. When I left for college I pretty much left Water Valley for good. For what it's worth. For better or worse. I didn't think I could go back and hear our classmates speak in clichés for the rest of my life. To each his own, I guess."
"It wasn't malignant," Evelyn said. She pointed toward her scalp. "The size of an orange, they're saying, but not malignant. You have to believe me."
"That's good. Oh, that's lucky. I mean, I've heard about people with lumps the size of lemons, limes, grapefruit, and kumquats. It doesn't matter the size. If it's malignant, it's trouble. I saw a woman on either 60 Minutes, 20/20, or Dateline one time with a tumor the size of a cantaloupe. She's fine, because it was benign. Rhyme—ha, ha! Maybe it was on that other channel."
My side hurt and my mouth could've held a convention for bedouins and their dromedaries. Evelyn said, "Nothing right's happened since I moved to South Carolina. I came here only to be close to my niece and nephew. That's why I'm here. Does that make any sense?"
Outside of the weird headband, Evelyn looked the same as I'd seen her at Oxford's crawfish festival. She picked up the television remote and turned it on to one of those entertainment news channels. A host talked about upcoming situation comedies, PG-13 movies, what fashions the stars had been spotted wearing lately. I said, "I remember your sister. Why is she here?"
"Her husband," Evelyn said. "He's upper management at Fujifilm. They got a big factory here. Treesa and he moved here ten years ago when he got a job. Normally I hate him, but he's the first person who noticed I might've had a problem. I mean, a lump. I got to give him that."
I rolled two inches closer. My IV stretched. "I bet he's in the optics division. They notice everything. There was probably a reason why you moved here. If you stayed home, I'm betting no one would've noticed your lump until it got bigger than a watermelon. They say that when a tumor gets to the point where it can't be compared to a fruit, then you're in trouble."
What was I saying? Evelyn smiled, lifted her knees beneath the sheets. She said, "My head doesn't hurt like I thought it would. I wonder where my sister is."
I told Evelyn I knew how to use the telephone. I rolled over to the nightstand, pretended to mash in the numbers she called out, then said it was busy. "Were you working here? God, I hate to bother you, Evelyn, but I can't get over running into you under these circumstances."
A nurse walked in and said, "How you feeling, hon?" To me she said, "I can tell by your skin color that you're not supposed to be getting up and about. Or bothering this lady."
After I'd gotten back to my room, after it took the nurse ten minutes to get me back in bed, and long after she left, I thought to say, "Oh, don't worry—I'm an albino." It never failed. One time on the road I had stopped in at a little Asheville boutique run by the Greenspoon family. They said that they weren't Orthodox, but that they didn't see a need to test Yahweh's patience. Twenty miles down the road I thought how I should've promised some as-yet-unblown glass dreidels, yarmulkes, candleholders.
I thought about how a glassblowing salesman without an appendix wasn't probably the most enticing prospect for a Mississippi ex-cheerleading woman with nieces and nephews who loved her. I turned on CNN. Our soldiers lured in more American-hating, probable terrorists by offering them a bag of flour, a bottle of water, a handful of kernel corn.
Why was it so easy elsewhere? I wondered in my Demerol haze.
The first sign of my first wife's deterioration occurred when, for the fiftieth time, she insisted that swans, cranes, hawks, and geese wiped her after each bathroom visit she took. "A tiny gander visited me this morning, and took care of everything," she would say. This happened while we tried to conceive children, when we took her temperature, vitamins, ate Chinese herbs, and kept me off the booze. I understood my ex-wife's behavior as pre-postpartum depression—hell, I'd read about the syndrome in more than a few women's magazines, usually two or three columns across from post-premenstrual syndrome items.
We separated soon thereafter. From what I understand, she's applied for jobs at Kicking Glass and Taking Names! more than once, wanting to work in an advisory capacity.
My own nurse walked in and handed me a photocopied sheet of everything that would occur post-op, everything that I had already done whether I knew it or not—most of which involved shaving—and what I could expect in years to come should I make the right choices that involved the urge to defy a dentist's orders involving extractions or crowns, eating unprocessed meat, riding motorcycles, smoking cigarettes, drinking booze, not wearing a seat belt, and so on. I was told that I shouldn't live in a town with smog or undue violence, that I should drink purified water always, and that I should wear a condom. There would be problems should I overuse a cellular phone, visit countries south of the United States, shoot up heroin, drive a riding lawn mower barefoot, golf during lightning storms, handle venomous snakes, or forget to check out open sores on my feet. I wasn't to own a firearm over a BB gun or eat fish hatched near a paper mill. There may or may not have been something about operating heavy machinery while under the influence of drugs and/or booze.
I looked over the document and wondered what it would be like to reach two hundred years old. "Thanks," I said.
My nurse stared at the television. Men and women alike wore gas masks. "They need to add more warnings," she said. "But this'll be a start."
Leland Dees's brother Victor—owner of V.D.'s Army-Navy Surplus store in nearby Gruel—popped in wearing camouflage. I'd forgotten and thought about Evelyn at least three times. In and out of sleep I couldn't recall what was real, what was odd hope. My boss's brother said, "I brought along a couple few MREs in case you didn't take to the hospital food. I got a connection down at Fort Jackson. Over at Fort Benning. Fort Stewart. Everywhere. Lookie here." Victor Dees opened his shirt to show off a hand grenade duct-taped to his chest. "It's real, baby. I like testing out all these public places to see how security's workin
g. It ain't, here, obviously. I got a fake permit and all, should I ever get stopped on the other side of a metal detector."
Peripherally I noticed that my nurse call button wasn't within a sneaky, imperceptible reach. I said, "They told me I couldn't eat solids for a while."
"They know right at nothing," Dees said. He looked exactly like my boss: broad-faced, happy, strawberry blond, and fidgety. He looked like the love child of Alfred E. Neuman and David Letterman.
I groaned but didn't mean it yet. "Leland told me he had a brother. I guess I don't see him that much, really. I'm on the road about fifty-two weeks a year."
Victor Dees walked to the window, opened the blinds, then closed them. "I wouldn't have come visit if you were on the third floor. That's where they keep the nutcases. You wouldn't believe all the boys I've sold bayonets and Don't Tread on Me flags to who ended up on the third floor of this hospital. Canteens. Helmets. Military police armbands. Decals. Gas masks, especially gas masks. Bayonets—did I already say that?"
I actually thought about saying, "There weren't any rooms left on the third floor," but didn't. I said, "Were you in the military, sir?"
"My brother asked me to go fetch your van. He said there might be upwards of five thousand dollars' worth of samples inside. I said I'd do it. So what I'm doing is, I've driven over here and left my Humvee. Then I'm going to get a cab over to wherever you left the van. Where'd you leave the van?"
On the television, a throng of Arabs burned photographs of Nixon, Reagan, the first Bush, and George Washington. The commentator said, "I don't know if it's fortunate or unfortunate that these people don't know America's current president." I said to Victor Dees, "Bric-a-Brac and Things. Over on Main Street between Slide Rule City and the Afro-Sheen Outlet."
"I got you," Victor Dees said. "I know the area. Across from that carbon paper joint and map shop."
The map place had atlases that still portrayed a forty-eight-state America. I went in there one time trying to push the Kicking Glass and Taking Names! solar system series—I'd sold this glorious chandelier to about every middle school science class in the southeast—only to have the store's manager ask what those balls were past Saturn. I would've been better off bringing in a flat windowpane and saying it stood for Earth.
"That's right," I said to Victor Dees.
"I'll need about twenty dollars and the keys to the van," he said. "You can get the money back from my brother. Or I'll get you a receipt if you want, for tax purposes. Either one. This or that."
My innards panged, throbbed, and seared. I told Leland Dees's brother that I needed more painkiller, and reached for the nurse call button. About the time my hand got six inches from it, though, he stopped me, reached into his flak jacket, and pulled out a syringe.
At the time it seemed like a good idea. I said, "Okay. But could you get me in a wheelchair right after, then push me down to 519? It's a long story that involves a woman I need to know again."
I woke up hopelessly shoved into Evelyn's room closet. Who knew that my keys were gone, that my samples were on their way to being sold at an army-navy store, that my van would never be found again? I yelled for help. I heard people running down the hallway, the squawk of walkie-talkies, someone yelling, "He looked like some kind of survivalist."
There's a museum of sorts in the lobby of Graywood Memorial, flanked by the old white smoking and black smoking areas. Visitors come through the wide automatic doors, ask a receptionist for patient information, maybe veer behind her to the gift shop where, sadly, no Kicking Glass and Taking Names! products line the shelves. Off to the left of patient information, though, is a conglomeration of ancient bone saws, tongs, knives, and nurse's caps. There are electrical devices once used only on the third floor. It's like a torture chamber. The best display, four three-by-three-foot pedestals covered only with Plexiglas bonnets, follows the career of one Dr. Holloway and his personal history of odd extractions. Written out in perfect cursive on three-by-five note cards, there's "Sewing Needle in Child's Esophagus," "Buttons in Child's Esophagus," "Locust in Child's Esophagus," and so on. "Bullets Extracted from Feet" seemed a major theme in the 1930s through the late 1950s. Many children of the area, for one reason or another, found it necessary to snort peas into their lungs.
And there were silver dimes and quarters. "Were," said the security guard who dislodged me from Evelyn's hospital room closet. "Somebody just stole all the change. They ain't cataloged everything yet. There was some Civil War surgical devices down there they think are missing. A collection of sharp sticks, mostly. Somebody said there was a rare penny down there worth ten thousand dollars."
I said, "I don't know how I got here. I must've been delirious with pain. You can check me out, though. I didn't go downstairs and steal anything."
Evelyn slept. Renoir couldn't have made her look more glorious. "If you can't remember nothing from the pain, who's to say you don't remember stealing all them Mercury heads?" The guard read my wristband. He said, "I'mo push you back to your room. Then we're going to get a male nurse to check you out. I used to work in the prison system, Bubba. I can direct him to all the hiding places."
"Evelyn!" I yelled out. "Evelyn, I'm in 592. When you get back on your feet, come on down there." About halfway back I looked up and behind me. I said, "Do y'all have one of those Crime Stoppers phone numbers around here? I got an idea. As a matter of fact, I'd make some bets as to your perpetrator downstairs."
The guard pulled up outside of the laundry room. He rechecked my bracelet. "If you was on the third floor I'd give it to you for schizophrenia. I don't know what your defense is going to be now."
After I convinced the security guard that I would sue anyone outside of a proctologist for examining me for polyps, and seeing how I had good, full insurance, why didn't they merely take X-rays and/or an MRI?—I called Leland Dees collect. "I have reason to believe that your brother tried to kill me, then went downstairs to steal a large amount of silver coins plucked from the inner organs of small children originally."
My boss said, "So they're giving you the good stuff, huh? They're giving you the morphine. Maybe I should get me one of those appendiciti."
In the background I heard the thrum and roar of an open furnace. "He took the keys to the van, and I'd be willing to bet we'll never see it again. I'm serious, Mr. Dees. I have reason to believe that your brother—and you called him 'wayward' yourself—shoved me inside Evelyn's closet, then went downstairs to the museum they got here in the hospital, and stole a bunch of silver. The guard thinks he might've taken some sharpened sticks from the Civil War, too."
My boss might've said something about how it was time for me to take an extended vacation. He might've said that I should consider a career change. I didn't listen. Evelyn walked in. I hung up.
"A long time ago you and I went out only because God might be watching me, I thought," Evelyn said. "And I'll be the first person to admit how maybe I led boys on back then. There's only one way to explain how we ended up all the way out here. God. You know, the words God and Good aren't so close for no reason. There's a reason why God and Good are almost spelled the same with just an o in between. It's not my idea, though. I read it in Dear Abby back when I took a religion course in college. Our professor had us read Dear Abby and grade her decisions."
I said, "I'm a good person, I promise."
Evelyn shuffled farther into my room and sat down on the edge of my bed. She wore a veil of gauze still wrapped around her scalp. I turned the television channel from the sad, sad news to one of those situation comedies that involved diverse teenage characters living under the same roof. An actress held her hands to her face and drawled out in a fake southern accent, "Please tell me you didn't drink with him," like an idiot, to another actress who must've been twenty-five but played a sophomore in high school. Evelyn said, "I'm beginning to think that my sister and her husband, and my niece and nephew, don't really care about me. How long have I been here? I might need to go back to Mississippi. At
least Daddy's catfish will surface up and look at me."
I tried not to think of my father facedown dead in that same pond while catfish aired their whiskers. No, I only lifted my right hand and stroked Evelyn's shaved head. "I always thought I'd be a public defender," I said. "I thought I'd work for the Department of Social Services, or run a United Way, or get a permanent position with the Red Cross. I meant to do something that helped people. I didn't."
Evelyn said, "It might be malignant. Don't touch my head." She leaned down and hugged my neck. "Does this hurt?"
I scooted over. It hurt like hell. "No, not a bit," I said. "Crawl under these covers."
Evelyn got off the bed. "Maybe you were meant to be a preacher. Maybe you were destined for politics. No—a psychologist."
My surgeon came in the room for the first time. He said, "Mr. Hinson, how're you feeling?"
I said, "I'm sore, but fine. I'm alive. I don't feel up to robbing banks or anything, but I'm fine."
The doctor nodded to Evelyn. He said, "Do y'all know each other?"
I wanted to go into vivid detail about karma and fate, long-lost love, catfish farms, and pity dates. I said, "We haven't seen each other in fifteen years. We're from the same town all the way over in Mississippi."
Dr. Stevenson hit the nurse call button. I figured he only wanted to order me up more painkiller or a blood pressure test, maybe my temperature. He said to Evelyn, "You put quite a scare into us yesterday. I talked to Dr. Amick a little while ago. He thinks you'll be ready to go back down to your regular room later this afternoon." To me, Dr. Stevenson said, "Have they had you up and walking around yet?"
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