I met Ralph Francis McKenna in the chemo room of Oncology Partners. His was prostate, mine was colon. They gave him a year, me eighteen months, no guarantees either of us would make it. We had one other thing in common.
We were both widowers. Our kids lived way across the country and could visit only occasionally. Natural enough wed become friends. Of a kind, anyway.
We always arranged to have our chemo on the same day, same time. After the chemo was over we both had to take monthly IVs of other less powerful drugs.
Ralph said he’d had the same reaction when hed first walked into the huge room where thirty-eight patients sat in comfortable recliners getting various kinds of IV drips. So many people smiling and laughing. Another thing being how friendly everybody was to everybody else. People in thousand-dollar coats and jackets talking to threadbare folks in cheap discount clothes. Black people yukking it up with white people. And swift efficient nurses Ralph Francis McKenna, a skilled flirt, knew how to draw in.
Once in awhile somebody would have a reaction to the chemo. One woman must have set some kind of record for puking. She was so sick the three nurses hovering over her didn’t even have time to get her to one of the johns. All they could do was keep shoving clean pans under her chin.
During our third session Ralph said, “So how do you like flying solo?”
“What’s ‘flying solo’?”
“You know. Being alone. Without a wife.”
“I hate it. My wife knew how to enjoy life. She really loved it. I get depressed a lot. I should’ve gone first. She appreciated being alive.”
“I still talk to my wife, you know that? I walk around the house and talk to her like we’re just having a conversation.”
“I do pretty much the same thing. One night I dreamed I was talking to her on the phone and when I woke up I was sitting on the side of the bed with the receiver in my hand.”
Flying solo. I liked that phrase.
You could read, use one of their DVD players or listen to music on headsets. Or visit with friends and relatives who came to pass the time. Or in Ralph’s case, flirt.
The nurses liked him. His good looks and cop self-confidence put them at ease. I’m sure a couple of the single ones in their forties would probably have considered going to bed with him if he’d been capable of it. He joked to me once, shame shining in his eyes: “They took my pecker, Tom, and they won’t give it back.” Not that a few of the older nurses didn’t like me. There was Nora who reminded me of my wife in her younger years. A few times I started to ask her out but then got too scared. The last woman I’d asked out on a first date had been my wife forty-three years ago.
The DVD players were small and you could set them up on a wheeled table right in front of your recliner while you were getting the juice. One day I brought season two of The Rockford Files with James Garner. When I got about two minutes into the episode I heard Ralph sort of snicker.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. I should’ve figured you for a Garner type of guy.”
“What’s wrong with Garner?”
“He’s a wuss. Sort of femmy.”
“James Garner is sort of femmy?”
“Yeah. He’s always whining and bitching. You know, like a woman. I’m more of a Clint Eastwood fan myself.”
“I should’ve figured on that.”
“You don’t like Eastwood?”
“Maybe I would if he knew how to act.”
“He’s all man.”
“He’s all something all right.”
“You never hear him whine.”
“That’s because he doesn’t know how. It’s too complicated for him.”
“‘Make my day.’”
“Kiss my ass.”
Ralph laughed so hard several of the nurses down the line looked at us and smiled. Then they tried to explain us to their patients.
(Chemo dosage is so strong she loses fifteen pounds—and was thin already—and the docs are very concerned about the vomiting and the diarrhea. Both sons and their families visit. Ted, the youngest, collapses into his father’s arms, sobbing.)
A nurse named Heather Moore was the first one. She always called us her “Trouble Boys” because we kidded her so much about her somewhat earnest, naive worldview. Over a couple of months, we learned that her ex-husband had wiped out their tiny bank account and run off with the secretary at the muffler shop where he’d been manager. She always said, “All my girlfriends say I should be a whole lot madder at him but you know when I’m honest with myself I probably wasn’t that good of a wife. You know? His mom always fixed these big suppers for the family. And she’s a very pretty woman. But by the time I put in eight hours here and pick up Bobby at daycare, I just don’t have much energy. We ate a lot of frozen stuff. And I put on about ten pounds extra. I guess you can’t blame him for looking around.”
Couple times after she started sharing her stories with us, Ralph made some phone calls. He talked to three people who’d known her husband. A chaser who’d started running around on Heather soon after their wedding day. A slacker at work and a husband who betrayed his wife in maybe the worst way of all—making constant jokes about her to his coworkers. And she blamed herself for not being good enough for him.
Then came the day when she told us about the duplex where she lived. The toilets wouldn’t flush properly, the garbage disposal didn’t work, both front and back concrete steps were dangerously shattered and the back door wouldn’t lock. Some of her neighbors had been robbed recently.
The landlord was a jerk—lawyer, of course—named David Muldoon. Despite the comic book surname he was anything but comic. Ralph checked him out. A neo-yuppie who owned several income properties in the city, he was apparently working his way up the slumlord ladder. Heather complained to the city and the city did what it did best, nothing. She’d called Muldoon’s business office several times and been promised that her complaints would soon be taken care of. They weren’t. And even baby lawyers fresh from the diploma mills wanted more than she could afford to take Muldoon on.
We always asked her how it was going with Muldoon. The day she told us that the roof was leaking and nobody from his office had returned her call in four days, Ralph told her, “You don’t worry about it anymore, Heather.”
“How come?”
“I just have a feeling.”
Heather wasn’t the only one wondering what the hell he was talking about. So was I. He said, “You got the usual big night planned?”
“If you mean frozen dinner, some TV, maybe calling one of my kids who’ll be too busy to talk very long and then going to bed, yes.”
“Maybe watch a little James Garner?”
“Yeah or put on Clint Eastwood and fall asleep early.”
“Glad you don’t have plans because we’re going on a stakeout.”
“I go to bed at nine.”
“Not tonight. Unless we get lucky. Maybe he’ll get laid and get home before then.”
“Who?”
“Muldoon, that’s who.”
“You know for a fact that he’s got something going on the side?”
“No. But I always listen to my gut.”
I smiled.
“I say something funny?” Sort of pissed the way he said it.
“Do all you guys watch bad cop shows before you graduate? Your ‘gut’?”
“Most of these assholes cheat.”
I thought about it. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Kid, I’m always right.” Grin this time.
Turned out it was the secretary in the law firm on the floor below Muldoon’s. Not even all that attractive. He was just out for strange in the nighttime.
We waited leaning against his new black Cadillac. “Who the fuck are you two supposed to be?”
“We’re supposed to be the two guys you least want to hear from.” I was happy to let Ralph do the talking.
“Yeah?” All swagger.
“Yeah. You’re taking advantage o
f a friend of ours.”
“Get the fuck out of my way. I’m going home.”
“It’s a bitch getting rid of that pussy smell on your clothes, isn’t it? Wives like to pretend they can’t smell it.”
Dug out his cell phone. Waggled it for us. “I don’t know who you two assholes are but I’ll bet the police won’t have any trouble finding out.”
“And your wife won’t have any trouble finding out about the snatch in that apartment house behind us, either.”
I didn’t realize what had happened until I saw the counselor bend in half and heard him try to swear while his lungs were collapsing. He fell to his knees. Ralph hit him so hard on the side of the head Muldoon toppled over. “Her name’s Heather Moore. She’s one of your tenants. She doesn’t know anything about this so don’t bother trying to shake her down for any information. You’ve got two days to fix everything wrong in her apartment. Two days or I call your wife. And if you come after us or send anybody after us then I not only call your wife I start looking for any other bimbos you’ve been with in the past. I’m a retired homicide detective so I know how to do this shit. You got me?”
Muldoon still couldn’t talk. lust kept rolling back and forth on the sandy concrete. He grunted something.
(He wants one good long visit with her before she passes but it is not to be. The sickness seizes her completely and she turns inward, alone in the darkness of her own death. There are smiles sometimes, even a weak joke or two when she can summon a few fleeting moments of strength. An hour before she is pronounced dead in the hospice he sits next to her bed holding her hand. He won’t let go of her until the doctor gently insists.)
That was how it started. Heather asked us about it once but we said we didn’t know anything about it. Heather obviously didn’t believe us because two weeks later a nurse named Sally Coates, one neither of us knew very well, came and sat down on a chair next to the IV stand and told us about her husband and this used-car salesman who’d sold them a lemon and wouldn’t make it right. They were out seven grand they hadn’t been able to afford in the first place but they had to have a car so her husband could get to the VA hospital where he was learning to walk again after losing his right leg in Afghanistan. The kind of story you watch on TV and want to start killing people.
All innocence Ralph said, “Gosh, Sally, I wish we could help you but I don’t see what we could do. There isn’t any reason he’d listen to us.”
“I can’t believe it,” Sally said the next time we saw her. “Bob got a call the day after I told you about this salesman. The guy said to bring the car in and they’d get it fixed up right so we wouldn’t be having any trouble with it. And there wouldn’t be any charge.”
“I’ll bet you did a lot of praying about it, didn’t you, Sally?”
“Of course. We have two little ones to feed. Keeping that car running was breaking us.”
“Well, it was the prayers that did it, Sally.”
“And you didn’t have anything to do with it?”
“Ask him.”
I shook my head. “What could we have done, Sally? We’re just two old guys.”
After she left, Ralph leaned over from his leather recliner and said, “The only good thing about dying this way is we don’t have to give a shit about anything. What’re they gonna do to us?” That grin of his. “We’re already dead.”
I developed a uniform. A Cubs cap, dark aviator glasses and a Louisville Slugger. According to Ralph I was “the backup hood. They’re scared enough of me. Then they see this guy with the ball bat and the shades—they’ll do anything to cooperate.” He didn’t mention how old we were.
The nurses kept coming. Four in the next three months. A nurse who was trying to get a collection of family photographs back from an ex-boyfriend she’d broken up with after he’d given her the clap, spurned boyfriend stealing the collection and keeping it for her breaking up with him; the nurse whose daughter’s boyfriend was afraid to visit because two bully brothers down the block always picked on him when he pulled up; and the nurse who liked to sit in on poker games with five guys who worked at an electronics discount house and thought it was pretty damned funny to cheat her out of forty to sixty dollars every time she sat down. It took her four months of playing twice a month to figure it out.
No heavy lifting, as they say; no, that came with a tiny, delicate young nurse named Callie. We noticed the bruises on her arms first then the bruises on her throat despite the scarf she wore with her uniform. Then came the two broken fingers and the way she limped for a couple of weeks and finally the faint but unmistakable black eye. A few of the other nurses whispered about it among themselves. One of them told us that the head nurse had asked Callie about it. Callie had smiled and said that “my whole family is clumsy.”
It was during this time that both Ralph and I realized that we probably wouldn’t be beating the prognoses we’d been given. With me it was a small but certain track of new cancer suddenly appearing on my right thigh; with Ralph it was the return of heart problems he’d had off and on for two decades.
We didn’t talk about it much to each other. There isn’t much to say when you get to this point. You just hope for as much decent time as you can get and if you’ve been helping people here and there you go right on helping them as long as you can.
We followed Callie home one night, found out that she lived in a tumbledown farmhouse as isolated as a lighthouse. The next night we followed her home and when she stopped off at a shopping center we waited for her by her car.
She smiled. “My two favorite patients. I guess you don’t get to see me enough in chemo, huh?” The cat green eyes were suspicious despite her greeting. She’d developed another one of those mysterious limps.
“That’s right. Tom here wants to ask you to marry him.”
“Well,” the smile never wavering, “maybe I should talk that over with my husband first. You think?”
“That’s what we want to talk to you about, Callie,” I said. “Your husband.”
The smile went and so did she. Or at least she tried. I stood in front of the car door. Ralph took her arm and walked her about four feet away.
He said something to her I couldn’t hear but her I heard clearly: “My personal life is none of your damn business! And I’m going to tell my husband about this.”
“He going to beat us up the way he beats you up?”
“Who said he beats me up?”
“I was a cop, remember? I’ve seen dozens of cases like yours. They run to a pattern.”
“Well, then you weren’t a very good cop because my husband has never laid a hand on me.”
“Three restraining orders in five years; six 911 calls; the same ER doctor who said he’s dealt with you twice for concussions; and a woman’s shelter that told me you came there twice for three-night stays.”
The city roared with life—traffic, stray rap music, shouts, laughter, squealing tires—but right here a little death was being died as she was forced to confront not just us but herself. The small package she’d been carrying slipped from her hands to the concrete and she slumped against her car. She seemed to rip the sobs from herself in tiny increments, like somebody in the early stages of a seizure.
“I’ve tried to get away. Five or six times. One night I took the kids and got all the way to St. Joe. Missouri, I mean. We stayed in a motel there for two weeks. Took every dime I had. The kids didn’t mind. They’re as scared of him as I am. But he found us. He never told me how. And you know what he did? He was waiting for us when we got back from going to a movie the kids wanted to see. He was in our room. I opened the door and there he was. He looked down at Luke—he’s eight now; he was only four then—and he said, ‘You take care of your little sister, Luke. You two go sit in my truck now.’ ‘You better not hurt her, Dad.’ Can you imagine that; a four-year-old talking like that? A four-year-old? Anyway then he looked at me and said, ‘Get in here, whore.’ He waited until I closed the door behind me and then he hi
t me so hard in the face he broke my nose. And my glasses. He forced the kids to ride back with him. That way he knew I’d come back, too.”
This was in the food court of the mall where we’d convinced her to come and have some coffee with us. You could reach up and grab a handful of grease from the air. I’m told in Texas they deep-fry quarter sticks of butter. If it ever comes up here this mall will sell it for sure.
“But you always come back.”
“I love him, Ralph. I cant explain it. It’s like a sickness.”
“It’s not ‘like’ a sickness, Callie. It is a sickness.”
“Maybe if I knew I could get away and he’d never find me. To him those restraining orders are a joke.” Then: “I have to admit there’re some times—more and more these days I guess—when I think maybe it’d be best if he’d just get killed driving that damned truck of his. You know, an accident where he’s the only one killed. I wouldn’t want to do that to anybody else.” Then: “Isn’t that awful?”
“It is if you love him.”
“I say that, Tom. I always say that. But the woman at the shelter had me see a counselor and the counselor explained to me what she called the ‘dynamics’ of how I really feel about him. We had to take two semesters of psych to get our nursing degrees so I’d always considered myself pretty smart on the subject. But she led me into thinking a lot of things that had never occurred to me before. And so even though I say that, I’m not sure I mean it.” Then, shy: “Sorry for all the carrying on in the parking lot. I attracted quite a crowd.”
“I collected admission from every one of them.”
She sat back in her curved red plastic chair and smiled. “You guys; you’re really my friends. I was so depressed all day. Even with the kids there I just didn’t want to drag myself home tonight. I know I was being selfish to even think such a thing. But I just couldn’t take being hit or kicked anymore. I knew he’d be mad that I stopped at the mall. Straight home or I’d better have a damned good excuse. Or I’ll be sorry. It’s no way to live.”
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