The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Jay McInerney Con Doctor from Playboy

They’ve come for you at last. Outside your cell door, gathered like a storm. Each man holds a pendant sock and in the sock is a heavy steel combination lock which he has removed from the locker in his own cell. You feel them out there, every predatory one of them, and still they wait. They have found you. Finally they crowd open the cell door and pour in, flailing at you like mad drummers on amphetamines, their cats’ eyes glowing yellow in the dark, hammering at the recalcitrant bones of your face and the tender regions of your prone carcass, the soft tattoo of blows interwoven with grunts of exertion. It’s the old lock’n sock. You should have known. As you wait for the end, you think that it could’ve been worse. It has been worse, Christ, what they do to you some nights.

In the morning, over seven grain cereal and skim milk, Terri says, “The grass looks sick.”

“You want the lawn doctor,” McClarty says. “I’m the con doctor.”

“I wish you’d go back to private practice. I can’t believe you didn’t report that inmate who threatened to kill you.” McClarty now feels guilty that he told Terri about this little incident — a con named Lesko who made the threat after McClarty cut back his Valium — in the spirit of stoking her sexual ardor. His mention of the threat, his exploitation of it, has the unintended effect of making it seem more real.

“The association is supposed to take care of the grass,” Terri says. They live in 3 community called Live Oakes Manor, two to four bedroom homes behind an eight-foot brick wall, with four tennis courts, a small clubhouse and a duck pond. This is the way we live now — walled in, on cul de sacs in false communities. Bradford Arms, Ridgeview Farms, Tudor Crescent, Wedgewood Heights, Oakdale Manor, Olde Towne Estates — these capricious appellations with their diminutive suggestion of the baronial, their vague Anglo-pastoral allusiveness. Terri’s two-bedroom unit with sun-deck and jacuzzi is described in the literature as “contemporary Georgian.”

McClarty thinks about how, back in the days of pills and needles — of Percodan and Dilaudid and finally fentanyl — he didn’t have these damn nightmares. In fact he didn’t have dreams. Now when he’s not dreaming about the prison, he dreams about the pills and also about the powders and the deliquescent Demerol mingling in the barrel of the syringe with his own brilliant blood. He dreams that he can see it glowing green beneath the skin like a radioactive isotope as it moves up the vein, warming everything in its path until it blossoms in his brain stem. Maybe, he thinks, he should go to a meeting.

“I’m going to call this morning,” Terri continues. “And have them check the gutters while they’re at it.” She will, too. Her remarkable sense of economy and organization, which might seem comical or even obnoxious, is touching to McClarty, who sees it as a function of her recovering alcoholic’s battle against chaos. He admires this. And he likes the fact that she knows how to get the oil in the cars changed or free upgrades when they fly to St. Thomas. Outside of the examining room McClarty still feels bereft of competence and will.

She kisses his widow’s peak on her way out and reminds him about dinner with the Clausens, whoever they might be, God bless them and their tchatkes. Perversely, McClarty actually likes this instant new life. Just subtract narcotics & vodka and stir. He feels like a character actor who, given a cameo in a sitcom, finds himself written into the series as a regular. He moved to this southeastern city less than a year ago, after graduating from rehab in Atlanta, and lived in an apartment without furniture until he moved in with Terri.

McClarty met her at a Mexican restaurant three months ago and was charmed by her air of independence and unshakable self-assurance. She leaned across the bar and said, “Fresh jalapenos are a lot better. They have them, but you have to ask.” She waved her peach-colored nails at the bartender. “Carlos, bring the gentleman some fresh peppers.” Then she turned back to her conversation with a girlfriend, her mission apparently complete.

A few minutes later, sipping his Perrier, McClarty couldn’t help overhearing her say to her girlfriend, “Ask before you go down on him, silly. Not after.”

McClarty admires Terri’s ruthless efficiency. Basically she has it all wired. She owns a clothing store, drives an Acura, has breasts shaped like mangoes around an implanted core of saline. Not silicone, she announced virtuously, the first night he touched them. If asked she can review the merits of the top plastic surgeons in town. “Dr. Milton’s really lost it,” she’ll say. “Since he started fucking his secretary and going to Aspen his brow lifts are getting scary. He cuts way too much and makes everybody look either frightened or surprised.” At forty, with his own history of psychological reconstruction, McClarty doesn’t hold a few nips and tucks against a girl. Particularly when the results are so exceptionally pleasing to the eye.

“You’re a doctor?” Instead of saying yes, but just barely, he nodded. Perched as she was on a stool that first night, her breasts seemed to rise on the swell of this information. Checking her out when he first sat down, Dr. Kevin McClarty thought she looked like someone who would be dating a pro athlete, or a guy with a new Ferrari who owned a chain of fitness centers. She was almost certainly a little too brassy and provocative to be the consort of a doctor, which was one of the things that excited Kevin about her; making love to her, he felt simultaneously that he was slumming and sleeping above his economic station. Best of all, she was in the program, too. When he heard her order a virgin margarita he decided to go for it. A week after the jalapenos, he moved in with her.

The uniformed guard says, “Good morning, Dr. McClarty,” as he drives out the gate on his way to work. After all these years he gets a kick out of hearing the honorific attached to his own name. He grew up even more in awe of doctors than most mortals because his mother, a nurse, told him that his father was one, though she refused all further entreaties for information. Raised in the bottom half of a narrow, chilly duplex in Evanston, Illinois, he still doesn’t quite believe in the reality of this new life — the sunshine, the walled and gated community, the smiling guard who calls him Doctor. Perversely, he believes in the dream, which is far more realistic than all this blue sky and imperturbable aluminum siding. He doesn’t tell Terri, though. He never tells her about the dreams.

Driving to his office he thinks about Terri’s breasts. They’re splendid, of course. But he finds it curious that she will tell nearly anybody that they are, as we say, surgically enhanced. Last time he was in the dating pool back in the Pleistocene era, he never encountered anything but natural mammary glands. Then he got married and, suddenly, ten years later he’s back in circulation and every woman he meets has gorgeous tits but whenever he reaches for them he hears: “Maybe I should mention that, they’re, you know…” And inevitably, later: “Listen, you’re a doctor, do you think, I mean, there’s been a lot of negative publicity and stuff…” It got so he avoided saying he was a doctor, not knowing whether they were genuinely interested or just hoping to get an opinion on this weird lump under the arm, right here, see? Well, actually you do know. Despite all the years of medical school and all the sleepless hours of his internship, he never really believed he was a doctor, he felt like a pretender, although he eventually discovered that he felt like less of a pretender on 20 milligrams of Seconal.

The weather, according to the radio, is hot and hotting up. Kevin has the windows up and the climate control at 68. High between 95 to 98. Which is about as predictable as “Stairway to Heaven” on Rock 101, the station that plays all “Stairway,” only “Stairway,” twenty-four hours a day — a song which one of the MD junkies in rehab insisted was about dope, but to a junkie everything is about dope. Now the song makes McClarty think of Terri marching righteously on her Stairmaster.

After a lifetime in Chicago he likes the hot summers and temperate winters, and he likes the ur-American suburban sprawl of franchises and housing developments with an affection all the greater for being self-conscious. As a bright, fatherless child he’d always felt alien and isolated; later as a doctor he felt even further removed from the general populace — it’s like being a cop — which alienation was only enhanced when he also became a drug addict and defacto criminal. He wanted to be part of the stream, an unconscious member of the larger community, but all the morphine in the pharmacy couldn’t produce the desired result. When he first came out of rehab, after years of escalating numbness, the sight of a Burger King or a familiar television show could bring him to tears, could make him feel, for the first time, like a real American.

He turns into the drive marked MIDSTATE CORRECTION FACILITY. It’s no accident that you can’t see the buildings from the road. With homes worth half a million within a quarter mile, construction was discreet. No hearings, since the land belonged to the State, which was happy to skip the expense of a new prison and instead board its high-security criminals with the corporation that employs Dr. Kevin McClarty. He drives along the east flank of chain-link fence and triple-coiled concertina wire.

These guards, too, greet him by name and title when he signs in. Through the bullet-proof plexi he sees the enlarged photo of an AirNike sneaker a visitor just happened to be wearing when he hit the metal detector, its sole sliced open to show a .25-caliber Beretta nesting snug as a fetus in the exposed cavity. Hey, it musta come from the factory that way, man, like those screws and syringes and shit that got inside the Pepsi cans. I ain’t never seen that piece before. What is that shit, a 25? I wouldn’t be caught dead with no 25, man, you can stop a roach with that fucking popgun.

Dr. McClarty is buzzed through the first door, and, once it closes behind him, through the second. Inside he can sense it, the malevolent funk of the prison air, the dread ambience of the dream. The varnished concrete floor of the long white hall is as shiny as ice.

Emma, the fat nurse, buzzes him into the medical ward.

“How many signed up today?” he asks.

“Twelve so far.”

McClarty retreats to his office, where Donny, the head nurse, is talking on the phone. “I surely do appreciate that… Thank you kindly…” Donny’s perennially sunny manner stands out even in this region of pandemic cheerfulness. He says good morning with the accent on the first syllable, then runs down coming attractions. “A kid beat up in D last night. He’s waiting. And you know Peters from K block, the diabetic who’s been bitching about the kitchen food? Saying the food’s running his blood sugar up? Well, this morning they searched his cell and found three bags of cookies, a Goo Goo Cluster and two Moon Pies under the bed. I think maybe we should tell the commissary to stop selling him this junk. Yesterday his blood sugar was four hundred.”

Dr. McClarty tells Donny that they can’t tell the commissary any such thing, that would be a restriction of Peters’s liberty — cruel and unusual punishment. He’d fill out a complaint and they’d spend four hours in court downtown, where the judge would eventually deliver a lecture, third-hand Rousseau, on the natural Rights of Man.

Then there’s Caruthers from G, who had a seizure and claims he needs to up his dose of Klonapin. Ah, yes, Mr. Caruthers, we’d all like to up that and file the edges right off our day. In McClarty’s case from 0 mgs a day to about fifty, with a little Demerol and maybe a Dilaudid thrown into the mix just to secure the perimeter. Or, fuck it, go straight for the fentanyl. No — he mustn’t think this way. Like those “impure thoughts” the priests used to warn us about, these pharmaceutical fantasies must be stamped out at all cost. He should call his sponsor, catch a meeting on the way home.

The first patient, Cribbs, a skinny little white kid, has a bloody black eye, which, on examination, proves to be an orbital fracture. That is, his eye socket has been smashed in. And while McClarty has never seen Cribbs before, the swollen face is familiar; he saw it last night in his sleep. “Lock ’n sock?” he asks.

The kid nods and then winces at the pain.

“They just come in the middle of the night, maybe five of them and started wailing on me. I was just lying there minding my own business.” Obviously new, he doesn’t even know the code yet — not to tell nobody nothing. He is a sniveler, a skinny chicken, an obvious target. Now, away from his peers and tormentors, he seems ready to cry. But he suddenly wipes his nose and grins, shows McClarty the bloody teethmarks on his arm. “One of the sons-of-bitches bit me,” he says, looking incongruously pleased.

“You enjoyed that part, did you, Mr. Cribbs?” Then, suddenly, McClarty guesses.

“That’ll fix his fucking wagon,” says Cribbs, smiling hideously, pink gums showing above his twisted yellow teeth. “I got something he don’t want. I got the HIV.”

After McClarty cleans up the eye, he writes up a hospital transfer and orders a blood test.

“They won’t be messing with me no more,” Cribbs says in parting. In fact, in McClarty’s experience there are two approaches to AIDS cases among the inmate population. Many are indeed given a wide berth. Or else they are killed, quickly and efficiently and without malice, in their sleep.

Next is a surly, muscled black prisoner with a broken hand. Mr. Brown claims to have smashed, accidentally, into the wall of the recreation yard. “Yeah, playing handball, you know?” Amazing how many guys hurt themselves in the yard. Brown doesn’t even try to make this story sound convincing; rather he turns up his lip and fixes McClarty with a look that dares him to doubt it.

So far, in the year he has worked here, McClarty has been attacked only in his dreams. But he has been threatened several times, most recently by an inmate named Lesko, who was furious when McClarty cut off his prescription for Valium. Big pear-shaped redneck in for aggravated assault, Lesko took a knife to a bartender who turned him away at closing time. The bartender was stabbed fifteen times before the bouncer hit Lesko with a bat. And while Lesko did threaten to kill McClarty, fortunately it wasn’t in front of the other prisoners, in which case he would feel that his honor, as well as his buzz, was at stake. Still, McClarty makes a note to check up on Lesko; he’ll ask Santiago, the guard over on D, to get a reading on his general mood and comportment.

Dr. McClarty makes the first official phone call of the day, to a pompous ass of a psychopharmacologist to get an opinion on Caruthers’s medication, not that McClarty doesn’t have an opinion himself; he is required to consult a so-called expert. McClarty thinks diazepam would stave off the seizures just as effectively and more cheaply — which after all is his employers’ chief concern — whereas Caruthers’s chief concern, quite apart from his seizures, is catching that Klonapin buzz. Dr. Withers, who has already talked with Caruthers’s lawyer, keeps McClarty on hold for ten minutes then condescendingly explains the purpose and methodology of double-blind studies, until McClarty is finally forced to remind the good doctor that he did attend medical school. In fact, he graduated second in his class at the University of Chicago. Inevitably they assume that a prison doctor is an idiot and a quack. In the old days McClarty would have reached through the phone and ripped this hick doctor’s eyeballs out of his skull, asked him how he liked that for a double-blind study, but now he is happy to hide out in his windowless office behind the three-foot-thick walls of the prison and let some other fucker find the cure for cancer. “Thank you very much, doctor, McClarty finally says, cutting the old geek off in mid sentence.

Emma announces the next patient, Peters, the Moon Pie loving diabetic, then slams the door in parting. A fat man with a jelly-like consistency, Peters is practically bouncing on the examining table. Everything about him is soft and slovenly except his eyes, which are hard and sharp, the eyes of a scavenger ever alert to the scrap beneath the feet of the predators. The eyes of a snitch.

McClarty examines his folder. “Well, Mr. Peters.”

“Hey, Doc.”

“Any ideas why your blood sugar’s up to four hundred?”

“It’s the diabetes, Doc.”

“I guess it wouldn’t have anything to do with that stash of candy found in your cell yesterday?”

“I was holding that stuff for a friend. Honest.”

Another common refrain here in prison, this is a line McClarty remembers fondly from his drug days. It’s what he told his mother the first time she found pot in the pocket of his jeans. The guys inside have employed it endlessly; the gun in the shoe or the knife or stolen television set always belongs to some other guy; they’re just holding it for him. They never cease to profess amazement that the cops, the judge, the prosecutor didn’t believe them, that their own court-appointed lawyers somehow sold them out at the last minute. They are shocked. It’s all a big mistake. Honest. Would I lie to you, Doc? They don’t belong here in prison, and they are eager to tell you why. With McClarty it’s just the opposite. He knows he belongs in here. He dreams about it. It is more real to him than his other life, than Terri’s breasts, than the ailing lawn outside these walls. But somehow, inexplicably, every day they let him walk out the door at the end of his shift. And back at Live Oakes, the guards wave him through the gate inside the walls of that residential oasis as if he really were an upstanding citizen. Of course, technically he is not a criminal. The hospital did not bring charges, in return for his agreement to resign and go into treatment. On the other hand neither the hospital administrators nor anybody else knew that it was he, McClarty, who had shot nurse Tina DeVane full of the Demerol she craved so very dearly less than an hour before she drove her car into the abutment of a bridge.

Terri calls just before lunch to report that the caretaker thinks the brown spots in the lawn are caused by cat urine. “I told him that’s ridiculous, they’re not suddenly peeing any more than they used to — oh, wait, gotta go. Kiss kiss. Don’t forget about the Clausens, at seven. Don’t worry, they’re friends of Bill.” She hangs up before McClarty can tell her he might stop off at Unity Baptist on the way home.

Toward the end of the day McClarty goes over to Block D, to check the progress of several minor complaints. He is buzzed into the block by Santiago. “Hey, Doc, what chew think about Aikman’s straining his ankle? Your Cowboys, they gonna be hurtin’ till he come back.” Santiago labors cheerfully under the impression that McClarty is a big Dallas Cowboys fan, a notion that apparently developed after the doctor mumbled something to the effect that he really didn’t pay much attention to the Oilers. McClarty has never followed sports, doesn’t know Cowboys from Indians, but he is happy to play along, amused to find himself at this relatively late stage in life assigned to a team, especially after he heard the Cowboys referred to on television as “America’s team.” Like eating at McDonald’s, it makes him feel as if he were a fully vested member of the republic.

“Hey, Doc — that sprain? That, like, a serious thing?”

“Could be,” McClarty says, able at last to offer a genuine opinion on his team. “A sprain could put him out for weeks.”

Santiago is jovial and relaxed, though he is the only guard on duty in a cell block of twenty-four violent criminals, most of whom are on the block this moment, lounging around the television or conspiring in small knots. If they wanted to they could overpower him in a minute; it is only the crude knowledge of greater force outside the door of the block that keeps them from doing so. McClarty himself has almost learned to suppress the fear, to dial down the crackle of active malevolence which is the permanent atmospheric of the wards, as palpable as the falling pressure and static electricity before a storm. So he is not alarmed when a cluster of inmates moves toward him, Greco and Smithfield and two others whose names he forgets. They all have their ailments and their questions and they’re trotting over to him like horses crossing the field to a swinging bucket of grain.

“Hey, Doc!” they call out from all sides. And once again, he feels the rush that every doctor knows, the power of the healer, a taste of the old godlike sense of commanding the forces of life and death. This truly is the best buzz, but he could never quite believe it, or feel that he deserved it, and now he’s too chastened to allow himself to really revel in the feeling. But he can still warm himself, if only briefly, in the glow of this tribal admiration, even in this harsh and straitened place. And for a moment he forgets what he has learned at such expense in so many airless smoky church basements — that he is actually powerless, that his paltry healing skills, like his sobriety, are on loan from a higher power, just as he forgets the caution he has learned from the guards and from his own experience behind these walls, and he doesn’t see Lesko until it is too late, fat Lesko who is feeling even nastier than usual without his Valium, his hand striking out from the knot of inmates like the head of a cobra, projecting a deadly thin silvery tongue. McClarty feels the thud against his chest, the blunt impact which he does not immediately identify as sharp-instrument trauma. And when he sees the knife he reflects that it’s a damn good thing he is not Terri, or his left breast implant would be punctured. As he falls into Lesko’s arms he realizes, with a sense of recognition bordering on relief, that he is back in the dream. They’ve come for him at last.

Looking up from the inmate roster, Santiago is puzzled by this strange embrace — and by the expression on McClarty’s face as he turns toward the guard booth. “He was smiling,” Santiago would say afterwards, “like he just heard a good one and wanted to tell it to you, you know, or like he was saying, ‘Hey, check out my bro’ Lesko here.’” Santiago told the same thing to his boss, to the board of inquiry, to the grand jury and to the prosecutor, and he would always tell the story to the new guards who trained under him. It never ceased to amaze him — that smile. And after a respectful pause and a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, Santiago would always mention that the doc was a big Cowboys fan.