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“What kind of question is that?” I asked.
Stan shrugged.
“What? You think the kid did it? You think my girlfriend’s kid somehow gave me a heart attack? Slipped me a roofie or somethin’?”
Stan leaned his head back and took his eyes off the road to give me the kind of side-long glance that twists the nose unpleasantly. In the meantime, our car veered towards a woman walking a large black poodle in a coat and booties. I grabbed the wheel, swinging the car away from the lady and her pampered pooch. Stan tipped his hat to the lady and returned his eyes to the road.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Stan. “No, Len, I don’t think the kid gave you a heart attack. How the hell would he do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you were implying something.”
“Geeze, you’re on edge,” Stan said. “Relax a little. Or you might give yourself another heart attack.”
“Well what kind of question is that? ‘Why exactly do you think you had a heart attack?’ What was that supposed to mean?”
“It was just a question! What else?” Stan said. “I’m curious about your health. I asked, ‘Why exactly do you think you had a heart attack?’ I wasn’t being facetious. Maybe you have a family history; I don’t know. Maybe you really think it’s your diet. If you really think you need to change to a low cholesterol diet in order to prevent heart attacks, then I want to know. Personally, I like pork steaks. They make my stomach feel warm, you know? These days, that’s sometimes the only warmth I get, hear me? Pork steaks. But if it’s going to make you keel over, well then, I’ll make you some nice boiled chicken breasts or a relish plate, whatever. We’re partners, aren’t we? I’m trying to look out for you. Alright, Lens? I’m on your side. Okay? You’re no good to me dead. Not yet.”
“Not yet, huh?” I grunted. I slouched into the car seat.
“Come on, Stash! Lighten up! You lose your sense of humor in that heart attack? Huh?”
I ignored him, staring out the window. Girls in short dresses and heels tottered by, clutching at the arms of broad-chested and dead-eyed bros in button-ups, or clinging to each other in threes and fours, pale limbs and black dresses and bright purses like wet autumn leaves clumped in a gutter. A portrait of ruin, except their bright smiles.
Ah, to be young. Enjoy it, I thought, rubbing at my sore chest.
My thoughts turned to the kid, and then, almost simultaneously, to Carol. The kid had her smile, a young smile, full of hope and oblivion. On the chick it was charming, but the kid when he smiled just looked like a shit-eating idiot. But then again, I had been something of a shit-eating idiot at that age, too. Maybe not so much as the kid, but an idiot all the same.
If you had asked me then where I thought I would be now, I sure as hell wouldn’t have said that at 46 I’d be crammed into a twee little silver VW bug with Stan like we were driving a clown car through a circus big top, maneuvering between the unpredictable sways of intoxicated kids in the darkened streets of a Midwestern college town at bar close to shake down trust fund babies for their coke money and iPods; I wouldn’t have said I’d be slumped in the passenger seat weak from an untreated heart attack feeling indifferent to the thousands in cash spread out haphazardly at my feet; I wouldn’t have said I’d be trapped out here past the world’s largest truck stop and the world’s largest corn fields in the world’s largest expanse of fly-over nothingness that is the state of Iowa or anywhere away from the great windy second city of Chicago or anywhere near the company of such crooked and inscrutable characters as the Mad Dentist that Stan had gotten us mixed up with. But then again, I was an idiot. Maybe I should have know.
The idiot kid I was then would have said that at 46 I’d be a cop, a good one, one of the ones on top, with the shiny badge and pressed uniform and heavy gun on my hip, maybe with a nice house in the suburbs, a little lawn to keep up, a nice little lady inside. My kid brother growing up, Al, and I used to stare up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above the twin we shared and talk back and forth about what kind of wives we’d get ourselves. Maybe it was our dad’s ever-changing line-up of step moms for us that got us thinking about it: the night nurse with the menthol cigarettes and creased make-up, the Polish lady who would make us strange foods and dote on us in a way we didn’t mind too much except that she was the meanest when we acted up, the chesty yet somehow anemic-looking exotic dancer whose expression never changed from an eerie blankness that would sometimes give me nightmares. I knew I never wanted to make anyone anything like any of them my wife ever.
“My wife,” I said, “will buy really cool stuff for our house. Including all of my favorite foods, like pizza, waffles…”
“Popeyes fried chicken?” Al asked.
“Popeyes isn’t my favorite food,” I said. “But if you’re coming over, she’ll have it.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“When we’re grown-up, I can come over to your house?” Al asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “All the time. And she’ll have Popeyes fried chicken for you and all of my favorite foods and they won’t ever run out. If we run out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch she will go to the store and get some more of it before I have to go to work. And she will do all of the dishes because I will be a really good cop and she will be proud of me and not want me to have to do things that I don’t like. And she won’t ever die,” I said. We were six and eight at the time.
“Why do you want to be a cop, Lenny?” Al asked me.
“To catch bad guys, “ I said. “So they can’t ever get my wife.”
Back then, “protect and serve” was written on practically all of my things except my underwear.
Al stared at our ceiling for a long time.
“I want my wife to be an astronaut,” Al said.
“That’s not good,” I said. “If she is in outer space, then how will she make your dinner?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Al said. “I want her to be smart.”
“Smart doesn’t matter,” I said. “A wife just needs to be pretty and cook good, like the moms on TV.”
Which might be the only way that Carol resembles any of the “potential wives” I had dreamed up back at age 8, or even at 30. Not to say that I was unhappy with Carol. In fact, I was happier with Carol than I could have known about being back when I was the idiot kid’s age. Back when I was 19 I pictured a simple and flawless female mate and I imagined myself as as flawless, smooth and hard as a rock on the beach, before I knew to imagine myself as a thing that needed things, scarred and pocked with holes that a woman like Carol, with her gullible smile and girlish love of pop stars and her own experience going around the block a few times, could plug.
I missed her.
“Hey, Lens.”
Somewhere far away I heard Stan’s nasally parroting. A hand wrapped around my thick shoulder and shook me.
“Yo, Lenny, wake up,” Stan said. “You care so much about your health, here you go.”
We couldn’t have gone more than a couple of miles, but somehow I had fallen asleep. I opened my eyes like the lids were made of lead and they slowly focused onto a red neon “EMERGENCY” sign.
“Let’s pick up some of that cash and get that old ticker looked at,” Stan said. He bent over me, pocketing a few hundreds and shoving the rest of the dough under the seat.
“This is in a book,” I said, staring up at the sign.
“Book? What are you talking about?” Stan asked. He glanced up at the sign and then back down at me. “You feeling okay?”
“This hospital is in a book,” I said. “There are dead bunnies.”
“Dead bunnies?”
Again Stan made the sidelong glance that twisted his nose unpleasantly. He shook his head and clucked his tongue.
“That’s why I don’t read books,” he said. “Bad for the brain. Listen to you. I hope we aren’t here too late. You’re talking like you don’t have enough oxygen getting to your brain cells.”
Stan got out, came around to the other side of the car, and opened my door. Watching the little compressed inch of flesh on my right side spring back gave me the impression of a tube of biscuits being opened. I made a mental note to actually get to the gym sometime and maybe put some real thought into my diet after all this mess was taken care of, after I was back home.
Though I don’t usually care much for hospitals, I was glad to finally see the white sterilized hall waiting beyond the automatic doors. I moved toward them like a quarter getting sucked up by a metal detector on the beach, letting the irresistible force of medical attention pull me heart first into the dazzling white.
Then I heard a car start behind me.
