THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

Hunt cut him off. “Yeah. I think so.”

  Chuck Osterwald emerged from the maintenance services administrative office and held up his hands for silence. “The news isn’t good. Steve is in a coma,” he announced. “They don’t know right now whether or not he’s going to live. He has a ruptured spleen, a pierced lung, internal bleeding and severe head trauma. He’s been through surgery, but even if he survives, they don’t know how long it will be before he comes out of the coma. Or if he will. Len Rojas will be acting as temporary manager, and he called from downtown to say that everyone’s to get their ass in gear and get to work. This week’s schedules will remain as is. Len will decide what’s doing next week. Let’s roll.”

  The milling employees began splitting off into crews and teams, heading toward their particular equipment.

  Jorge thought for a moment. “Steve wasn’t the only one threatening our jobs,” he said quietly.

  “I know.”

  “Other people wanted to contract us out.”

  “I know.”

  “The board of supervisors—”

  Hunt looked at him. “I know.”

  The orgy was the top story on the news that night.

  No details were given, but even a general overview of the situation was titillating enough that reporters were stationed outside of the normally staid and visually uninteresting county administration building, breathlessly commenting on “the scandal that has rocked a government institution to its very foundation.” The story ran at five, then again at six after the national news, and once more at ten o’clock.

  Apparently, an intern from the U of A had been working late last night, trying to impress the office to which he’d been assigned with his diligence and commitment, when he opened the door to the board of supervisors’ deliberation chambers, the room where they went to discuss matters in private session. There he had found all five of the supervisors as well as two unidentified department heads participating in what the NBC and CBS affiliates referred to as “an orgy,” the ABC station identified as “an after-hours sex club” and Fox called “sizzling hot sexcapades.”

  The intern had gone straight to the chief administrator and then to his parents. All of the supervisors had tendered their immediate resignation, and a special election was going to be called before the end of the month to choose their replacements. The department heads involved had also resigned.

  Hunt had a sneaking suspicion that the two unidentified department heads were proponents of contracting out tree trimming.

  A vindictive part of him hoped that one of them was head of MIS.

  Jorge called while he and Beth were eating dinner to fill them in on details he’d learned from a friend of his in administration. Helen Butler, the lone female supervisor, had been on top of the conference table when the kid walked in, all three inputs in use. Lee Spenser, a gruff, tough ex-marine, was on his hands and knees on the floor, taking it from behind, Reynold Lopez giving it to him joyously. The department heads had indeed been two of the most vocal supporters of outsourcing maintenance services in general and tree trimming in particular. One was stuffing Helen Butler’s mouth, the other was alone in a corner, stuffing a rubber enema hose up himself.

  Hunt could tell that Jorge took a certain pleasure in the comeuppance of these administrators who had planned to do away with his job, but beneath that was horror and fear, a recognition that what was happening went not only beyond the bounds of physics and rationality but also morality.

  “What happens next?” Jorge asked. “Is that it?”

  “Let’s hope so,” Hunt said. “Let’s hope so.”

  SIXTEEN

  1

  “Jorge!”

  He’d been half-asleep, propped up on the pillow that he’d leaned against the headboard, but Jorge was wide awake, out of bed and running for the bathroom the second he heard the panic in his wife’s voice.

  She was supposed to have been taking a shower, but instead she sat on the toilet, naked, skin dry, a stricken look on her face. Between her spread legs he could see blood in the water. “Ohmygod,” he said, the phrase coming out as a single word. It suddenly seemed hard to breathe. “Ohmygod.”

  “Something’s wrong.” Ynez started to cry. “We’re going to lose the baby.”

  “No, we’re not! Stay right there!” He ran back to the bedroom and scrambled through the jumble of items atop the dresser until he found his wallet and insurance card. He grabbed the phone from the nightstand and, with trembling fingers, punched in the emergency number on the back of the card. Thankfully, he didn’t have to navigate an automated answering system but was connected immediately to a real live person.

  “My wife’s bleeding!” he shouted into the phone. “She’s pregnant and she’s bleeding! What am I supposed to do?”

  The voice on the other end of the line was composed and unruffled, the voice of a no-nonsense older woman who had seen situations like this before—as well as things much worse—and in a way that seemed comforting. “Calm down, sir. Just explain to me what’s happened. Start at the beginning.”

  He couldn’t calm down, didn’t even try, but blurted out that Ynez wasn’t due for another five weeks and suddenly had vaginal bleeding.

  “Is it accompanied by cramping?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t know!” He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

  “Go immediately to the hospital,” the woman said. “Bring your insurance card and go directly to the maternity ward.”

  “Are we going to lose the baby?”

  “I can’t tell you that, sir. But they will know what to do at the maternity ward. They deal with this all the time.”

  He wanted more than that, he wanted a definite This is normal, it happens all the time, everything will be fine, but he obviously wasn’t going to get it and he didn’t have time to sit around playing Twenty Questions, so he hung up the phone and ran back into the bathroom. Ynez was almost dressed, and he quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, grabbing his wallet and keys. “They said go straight to the hospital,” he told her.

  “What about the baby? What did they say it is?”

  He decided not to sugarcoat it. “The woman I talked to didn’t know. She just said we need to get to the maternity ward right away.”

  “Oh God!” Ynez was sobbing again. “Why did this have to happen to us?”

  Because we need more insurance, Jorge thought crazily, but he dared not speak it aloud.

  The trip seemed interminable. They’d made a dozen practice runs, trying every possible route until they found the shortest one, but this time they hit almost every red light on the way to the hospital. Ynez was alternately moaning and crying on the seat next to him, and he kept asking her if she was in pain, if things were getting worse, but she just shouted, “No! Keep driving!”

  It was late and he wasn’t sure the main entrance of the hospital would be open, so he pulled around to the emergency entrance on the side of the building and parked in one of the empty twenty-minute spaces next to the door. Ynez had put on a maxipad before pulling on her underwear, but the blood had soaked through, and when she got out of the car, Jorge could see a dark wet stain at her crotch.

  “Shit!” he said, trying not to panic. Holding her arm, he hustled her through the door. The small waiting room was nearly empty. In one corner, underneath a wall-mounted television showing an infomercial, sat a dirty man in a brown shabby coat who appeared to be drunk. In the opposite corner, as far away from the man as possible, a young couple sat anxiously to either side of their pale, lethargic son.

  Jorge took Ynez straight to the admissions window. Behind thick glass, an overweight nurse sat before a computer, typing. She looked up at their approach. Her nametag read: F. Hamlin. “May I help you?”

  “My wife’s pregnant and she’s bleeding!” Jorge blurted out.

  Ynez gripped his arm tightly, as though she were about to fall. “The baby’s not due for five weeks.”

  A metal drawer opened in the c
ounter beneath the thick window, like a teller’s drawer at the bank. “May I see your insurance card?”

  “She’s bleeding! She needs to see a doctor! Now!” But even as he complained, he was taking out his wallet, taking out the insurance card, dropping it in the drawer.

  The drawer closed. On the other side of the glass, the nurse withdrew the card, looked at it, punched in a few numbers on the keyboard of her computer and looked up at them. “I’m sorry,” she said. The drawer slid out again with the insurance card. “We can’t admit you to Desert Regional.”

  “What?”

  Ynez was sobbing again, holding her abdomen. “This can’t be happening!” she screamed.

  “We’re preregistered at this hospital!” Jorge yelled at the nurse. “This is where we’re supposed to go!”

  “I’m sorry, but your provider has been changed.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you have to go to Waltzer Community Hospital. We can’t admit you here.”

  “We’ve been taking Lamaze classes here for the past two months! We just took a tour of the maternity ward last week!”

  “Your HMO is no longer accepted by Desert Regional. If you had a PPO…”

  “There’s… this…” He was spluttering, unable to speak coherently. “This is the emergency room. This is an emergency. You… you have to let us in. We have emergency coverage. It’s… it’s on the card.”

  “We can’t—”

  He pulled Ynez back from the window, pointed at the growing stain on her jeans. “She’s bleeding!”

  “We can’t admit her here.”

  Jorge thought of Mary and Joseph, forced to give birth to Jesus in a stable.

  This was how the other half lived. The uninsured.

  Ynez was crying, and he felt so angry and frustrated that he was damn near close to tears himself. He wanted to pick up one of the chairs in the waiting area, smash it through the fucking window and strangle that bitch. He was literally shaking with emotion, but when he spoke again only a single-word plea came out: “Please?”

  The nurse softened, and for the first time he could see the person behind the job. “I’ll call for an ambulance,” she told him. Her voice was low, and he got the impression that she wasn’t supposed to do this. “They’ll take you over to Waltzer Community.”

  He was immediately sorry for what he’d been thinking. It wasn’t her fault. She was just doing her job, just doing what she’d been told. She was simply a cog in the machine. It was the machine itself that was to blame. The system.

  “Thanks,” he told her.

  Ynez whimpered beside him.

  “Go out the door and to the right. The ambulance’ll be here in a second.”

  Jorge nodded.

  “You’ll be all right,” the nurse said to Ynez. “Your baby will be fine.”

  He didn’t know if that was based on knowledge and experience or if she was just saying that to make them feel better, but it did make him feel better and he hustled Ynez out the door. A moment later, an ambulance pulled up from around the side of the building. Two attendants opened the back door. “Do you want a stretcher?” the older one asked.

  Ynez shook her head.

  “There are bench seats in the back, then. Just strap yourselves in and hold on. We’ll get you to Waltzer.”

  “Are you paramedics?” Jorge asked. “She’s bleeding. Could you just take a look and… make sure everything’s okay?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  The back doors closed, and they were left alone as the two attendants raced to the ambulance’s cab. The sirens and lights went on and the vehicle sped away from the hospital. Through the rear window, Jorge saw his car, still parked in the twenty-minute zone, and he wondered if he was going to get a ticket. Or how they’d get back.

  Small stuff, he told himself. They’d figure it out later. What was important now was getting to the hospital and making sure the baby was going to be healthy and born without complications.

  The ambulance zoomed through city streets, running at least two red lights, and in a remarkably short period of time they arrived. Jorge had no idea where the hospital was located—the view out the back window of the speeding ambulance was confusing and disorienting—but when the attendants opened the rear doors, he was grateful to see that they were directly in front of the emergency room entrance and that an orderly with a wheelchair was rushing out to bring Ynez inside.

  Both Jorge and the orderly helped her into the chair and all three of them hurried through the sighing doors of the hospital, directly into the emergency room. Either Desert Regional’s admissions nurse or one of the two ambulance attendants must have called ahead and explained the situation because the orderly pushed the wheelchair through the ER and out another set of doors into another corridor, and when Jorge asked where they were going, the orderly said the maternity ward.

  Ynez let out a sharp cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Jorge demanded, frightened more than he would have believed possible.

  “I think it’s a contraction!”

  “That’s good,” the orderly said. “That means things are proceeding the way they’re supposed to.”

  Ynez started doing her Lamaze breaths: “Keekee heehee! Keekee heehee! Keekee…”

  They continued forward, moving fast. He didn’t like this hospital, Jorge realized. The corridors seemed too dark, and even though it was late at night, the place seemed less populated than it should have. They passed several rooms that appeared to be completely empty, devoid of even a bed, and nearly all of the rooms that did contain hospital equipment seemed to be missing patients.

  The maternity ward was arranged in a semicircle, with the nurse’s station at the hub and the individual rooms fanned out around it. There were three nurses behind the curved counter, a skinny black woman writing down monitor readings from a series of electronic display screens, and two overweight white women discussing something between themselves in low hushed tones.

  The orderly pushed the wheelchair in front of the nurse’s station, rapped his knuckles twice on the countertop, then headed back down the corridor with a wave. “She’s all yours, ladies.”

  Ynez let out another sharp cry.

  “Keekee!” she breathed. “Heehee!”

  One of the overweight women rushed over. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine. We have a room all ready for you, sweetie.” She expertly helped Ynez out of the wheelchair and led her into one of the empty rooms, turning on the lights as she did so.

  “What kind of hospital is this?” Jorge said, looking around. The room was decorated like a child’s bedroom, with bright primary colors and paintings of clowns on the walls… only the clowns appeared hateful, evil. Arched angled eyebrows lent malevolence to mysteriously deep-set eyes. Painted mouths grinned venomously at the birthing bed.

  “All of our maternity rooms are designed to resemble nurseries. We want both mother and baby to be comfortable here, and we try to make it as much like home as we can.”

  Comfortable? Home? Those were the last things this place reminded him of.

  Maybe his perception was skewed, maybe it was all in his head.

  But no, he saw the look on his wife’s face and knew that she felt exactly the same.

  He glanced toward a fat clown next to the bathroom door, a white-faced demon with a forked tongue protruding from between rows of oversized teeth.

  He felt cold. They were here because they didn’t have enough supplemental insurance. What was it that the agent had said? Additional coverage may be required at substantial extra cost?

  The nurse helped Ynez out of her clothes, wiped up the blood with a damp sponge, put a hospital gown on her, then assisted her into bed. She did a cursory examination, announced that Ynez was dilated three centimeters and that the baby would be born tonight.

  Ynez clutched the nurse’s arm. “But what about all that blood?”

  “It’s not as uncommon as you might think. The do
ctor will be here in a minute, though, to give you a thorough exam. We’ll know more then.”

  The nurse left, and the two of them were alone. As in the rest of the hospital, the lights in here were dimmed, and though Jorge knew it was supposed to approximate night in the twenty-four-hour world of the hospital, though he knew it was done to make patients more comfortable, it made him feel unsettled and vaguely ill at ease.

  “I don’t like this,” Ynez said weakly. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Where? Let me call the nurse back. Does it hurt?”

  “No,” she explained. “I mean this hospital, the way they’re acting, the whole thing. Everyone’s too casual. No one seems concerned that I was bleeding. I should’ve been checked by a doctor in the ER, not just left here—” She broke off in mid-sentence, grimaced with pain, and quickly started breathing. “Keekee Heehee! Keekee Heehee…”

  “Goddamn it,” he said. “Where’s the monitoring equipment? Why aren’t they measuring these contractions? I’m going to get that nurse—”

  The nurse’s bulk filled the doorway. “The doctor is here to see you,” she announced, moving aside.

  And in walked a tall man in a black hospital gown, wearing the mask of a demented laughing cherub.

  Ynez started screaming.

  “What’s going on here?” Jorge demanded. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Shut up!” the doctor ordered from behind the mask, and his voice was high and sharp.

  The voice of one of those clowns, Jorge thought, and the idea chilled him to the bone. He grabbed Ynez’s arm, helped her sit up. “Come on, we’re getting out of here. We’re going to another hospital.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” the doctor said.

  Somehow, while his attention had been diverted, two burly orderlies had entered the room, but they were not dressed in hospital gowns or medical attire. They wore long coats and broad-brimmed hats. At a nod from the masked head, they grabbed Jorge’s arms and held him tight.

  “Let me go!” he demanded.

  “Sedate him,” the doctor said in his manic voice. “He’s hysterical.” And suddenly his sleeve was pushed up and Jorge felt the wetness of alcohol and then a pinprick of pain on his forearm.