Ray

XXII

“EILEEN left you?” I hadn’t been listening too good.

“For a month now. She didn’t like my friends. She used to be nothing but love. Now she’s just complaint and fury. What happens to women, Ray?“

My clinic is on a small offstreet. Through the window I can see the trees waving back and forth as the thunderstorm comes on. Linda Ronstadt is on my tape deck. I turn her down. I was listening more to “Blue Bayou” than to Charlie DeSoto, honestly. One afternoon I saw a gorgeous stag raise his head out of the hedge of yellow flowers. Right here in the middle of the city. There is a creek that runs down to the Black Warrior River and there is a thick swamp as it meets another creek, where there are deer and immense snapping turtles. It’s a haunted place, full of tales. Sister may be there now.

“What?” I light up a Vantage.

“I don’t understand what happened to her after we got married.”

Charlie had acute gastritis over a peptic ulcer. Lots of buttermilk, if you can stand it.

“Look, Charlie. I’m going to stick you with some morphine and I’ll drive you home. Drink the buttermilk and sleep as long as you can. But this is the only time. Morphine is dangerous.”

“Don’t tell me. They used it in Nam.”

“Okay. Let us not use the Demerol or any of the other shit after this. We’re just going to have to wait and see if your belly comes back for you. It should. A belly does.”

“I got a raise. I’m the plant manager now. There’s a girl at the office who’s twice as good-looking as Eileen. She wants to lick my dick. I don’t know what to do. I’m sick.”

“Your blood pressure is up. Knock off the salt. Buy yourself some garlic pills.”

“Garlic?”

“Trust me. We’ll get them at the drug on the way home. You’re the last patient today and i want out of this office. Catch ‘*A*S*H’ and make love.”

“Why do women change after you marry them? She hates all my friends and is always tired when I try to get it on.”

“You want to go fishing soon? My son and I have been catching some nice bass.”

“You haven’t told me a damned thing about women.”

“I tried to write a paper on the subject once. Pick up a Cosmopolitan magazine at the drug. Women read it to find out who they ought to be and then that’s who they are. A guy whips his pudding when he sees the new look in bathing suits. If Jackie Kennedy sucked you off, your ulcer would go away.”

“Can you get her to do it?”

“No,” I say. “For doctors, they have Claire Bloom and Lee Remick, but simple street shits like you just have to buy Penthouse.”

Charlie smiled.

It is always a sign of health when the smile can rise. His eyes are brighter. This handsome bastard will outlive me, and I resent it.

The nurse comes in with the needle. She’s trained in the great med center at Birmingham and she is a knockout. Her hair is blond and curled. She’s about five-nine, a tall girl, twenty-six, and her legs are an amazing long event. Beyond that, she’s just a straight honest slut. I never had her. It is a perversity, but I hired her just to tempt myself and resist, as a man who’s quit smoking keeps a pack of Luckies on his desk just to see what he won’t do anymore.

Rebecca puts the needle in him. When Charlie phases out, he lifts his hands in prayer. She looks at me quickly. She takes down the top of her uniform. The large dark-nippled breasts are there. Charlie is lying in the leather chair and she lowers herself to him.

Certain things are private and it is tacky to witness them.

In three weeks his ulcer was cured. He came by the office to tell me how delightful it was to be healthy. He told me he paid Rebecca for a week, but all the rest was free. Eileen was still in Georgia, waiting it out, knowing she was hurting Charlie. Women enjoy revenge more than the worst Apache.

Then sabers up and we knock the fuck out of everybody. With the cherished dream of Christ in our hearts. Basically, the message is: Leave me the hell alone or give me a beer.

Yes, I have seen the rain coming down on a sunny day. I have seen the moon hot and the sun cold. I have seen almost everything dependable go against its nature. I have seen needless death and I have seen needless life. One old mule of eighty came into the emergency room who had abused three wives, beaten his youngest son, twelve, with a tire tool, and had borrowed from everybody in Gordo. He had a heart attack and he was in intensive care, all hooked up to the machines and the monitors. He wanted to talk to me.

“When I get out of here, I’m going to kill all those sons of bitches, Doctor.”

I’d brought Rebecca with me. She can bring a man back. She can bring a woman back. A lesbian on Methadone came in wanting to die one afternoon. Rebecca put the bottle up and I straddled her, looked down her throat, opened it, and eventually got a pint of buttermilk down her. Then she was fighting and weird and we had to get the heavy stuff in her. After she was calm, Rebecca took her skirt off and sat on her face and the girl licked her wide hairy organ. I watched this one because I thought the girl might die.

But Ray confesses he deliberately lost the bastard who was eighty. I told everybody to get out of the room and I bent down my face and looked him straight in the eye.

“What are you going to do when I get you on your feet again?”

“Kill the sons of bitches!”

I yanked out the connections and shut down the monitors and let him pass over the light into hell. By the time the crew came in, I had all the stuff going again.

“I lost him!” I screamed.

Rebecca saw me in the hall. We lit cigarettes.

“You killed him,” she said.

“Well, hell,” I said.

“You want to get it on, Doctor Ray?”

“I can’t. I have a wife. Westy.”

She said, “I want you to screw me, darling.”

“Yeah. But I killed the old guy. Never did that before.”

“He deserved it. Let’s go dance and fuck.”

“I forgot how to dance about twelve years ago.”

“Yeah. But we could just go to my place, and fuck. You ever hear Jimi Hendrix? You and I could’ve saved him, poor old genius nigger.”