“Can you help me with the—” He gestured at the ironmongery encasing his leg.
I lifted the leg with the fixator, and when it was stretched out, he sighed again and asked for a couple of pills from the Dixie cup on his night table. I gave them to him, poured some water from his pitcher, and down they went, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his wrinkled neck like a monkey on a stick.
“They switched me from the morphine pump to this,” he said. “OxyContin. The doctor says I’ll get hooked, if I’m not already, and I’ll have to kick the habit. Right now that seems like a fair trade. Just walking to the bathroom feels like a fucking marathon.”
I could see that, and the bathroom at his house was further from the roll-out. He might be needing the bedpan after all, at least to begin with. I went into the bathroom, wet down a washcloth, and wrung it out. When I bent over him, he pulled back.
“Here, here! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting the sweat off you. Hold still.”
We never know when the turning points come in our relationships with others, and it was only later that I realized that was one for us. He held back a moment longer, then relaxed （a little） and allowed me to wipe his brow and cheeks. “Feel like a fucking baby.”
“You’re paying me, let me earn my fucking money.”
That made him chuckle. A nurse peeked in the door and asked if he needed anything. He said he didn’t, and when she was gone, he told me to close the door.
“This is where I ask you to stand up for me,” he said. “At least until I can stand up for myself. And Radar, too. You ready to do that, Charlie?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Yeah, maybe you will. It’s all I can ask. I wouldn’t put you in this position if I didn’t have to. A woman named Ravensburger came to see me. Have you met her?”
I said I had.
“Hell of a name, isn’t it? I try to think of a burger made out of raven meat and my mind just boggles.”
I won’t say he was stoned on the Oxy, but I won’t say he wasn’t. As gaunt as he was, six feet tall and surely no more than a hundred and fifty, those pink pills had to pack a wallop.
“She talked to me about what she called my ‘payment options.’ I asked her what the damage was so far and she gave me a printout. It’s in the drawer there…” He pointed. “… but don’t bother about that just now.
“I said that’s mighty high and she said good care is mighty expensive, Mr. Bowditch, and you have gotten the best. She said if I needed to consult a payment specialist—whatever that is when it’s home and dry—she’d be happy to facilitate a meeting, either before I leave or after I’m home. I said I didn’t think that would be necessary. I told her I could pay in full, but only if I got a discount. Then we got down to the dickering. We finally settled on twenty per cent off, which comes to about a nineteen-thousand-dollar discount.”
I whistled. Mr. Bowditch grinned.
“I tried to get her down to twenty-five per cent, but she wouldn’t budge off twenty. I think that’s the industry standard—and hospitals are an industry, in case you wondered. Hospitals and prisons, not much difference in how they run their businesses, except with prisons it’s the taxpayers who wind up footing the bill.” He wiped a hand across his eyes. “I could have paid the whole thing, but I enjoyed the dickering. Been a long time since I’ve had a chance to do any. Yard sales in the old days; bought a lot of books and old magazines. I like old things. Am I rambling? I am. Here’s the point: I can pay, but I need you to make it possible.”
“If you’re thinking about what’s in the flour cannister—”
He waved that away as if eight thousand dollars were petty cash. In terms of what he owed the hospital, it was. “Here is what I want you to do.”
He told me. When he was done, he asked me if I needed him to write it down. “It’s okay if you do, as long as you destroy your notes when the job’s done.”
“Maybe just the safe combination. I’ll write it on my arm, then wash it off.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t imagine not doing it, if only to find out if what he was telling me was real.
“Good. Repeat the steps back to me.”
I did, then used his bedside pen to write a series of numbers and turns on my upper arm, where the sleeve of my tee-shirt would cover it.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see Mr. Heinrich, but you can get ready tonight. When you feed Radar.”