The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
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“Oh, yeah?” Hoxie said, his voice almost a growl. “Why’s that?”
“He’s got it in the lymph glands,” Lewis explained. “I seen on his chart that he’s getting megavolts that go three inches under the skin. That means it’s prob’ly spread too far to stop. I read up on all this cancer stuff at the library. Even money he ain’t got six months left.”
Hoxie started to say something, reconsidered, and looked away. His fixed, dark countenance seemed to soften a little, and he blinked rapidly several times. Potts sat up straight instead of slouching. Lewis chewed on the inside of his mouth. Alan Lampley’s mortality had somehow synchronized with their own.
None of them said anything further until the young prisoner’s treatment was over and his guards brought him back out. Lewis and the others then looked at him with new interest; he was a person now, with a story as well as a dread disease.
When Potts rose to go in for his own treatment, he impulsively paused at the door and asked, “How long you fellers got after your treatment before you get sick?”
Lewis shrugged. “I got about three hours.”
“ ’Bout four for me,” Hoxie said. “Why?”
“Well, I don’t get real sick, you know, but I start to lose my taste after two or three hours. So what I do is, I go down Harrison Street ’bout three blocks, toward the lake there, and around the corner on Ashland Avenue is a little bar called Billy Daly’s Place. I like beer, see — nice, cold, draft beer. An’ I only have a little while to drink it before my taste goes. So I was just thinking, if you fellers want to mosey on down when you get done here, I’ll buy you a pitcher of beer. What d’you say?”
Lewis and Hoxie exchanged looks. Lewis sensed that it was up to him to speak first; Hoxie’s expression was again almost hostile.
“I wouldn’t mind.” Lewis said. He and Potts looked at Hoxie, who glared back at them. “Come on, man,” Lewis said quietly. “We’re all the same inside — especially now.”
Hoxie nodded curtly. “I be there.”
Billy Daly’s Place was one of those Chicago neighborhood taverns that opened at eight A.M. to accommodate people who had to have one or two drinks to steady their morning shakes so they could go to work. Those who worked nearby were back in at lunchtime to steady their afternoon shakes.
When Lewis arrived, Potts was at a small table in the back, almost finished with his first pitcher of cold draft. By the time Hoxie got there, Potts was well into his second pitcher, and Lewis was working hard on his first. When the bartender put a glass and pitcher in front of Hoxie, he reached for his wallet, but Potts held up a hand and said, “Hey, no, I already paid for one pitcher apiece for you fellers. After that, you’re on your own.”
As men who drink together for the first time invariably do, they got around to telling each other about themselves. Potts, who had drunk the most, got around to it first.
“I come up to Chicago from a little town in Tennessee to find work. I had a good job down there in a paper mill, but some Japanese land group bought up all the property and closed down the mill. They was supposed to be going to develop some kind of industrial complex: said there’d be good jobs for ever’body. That was two years ago; they ain’t developed nothin’ so far. I went on unemployment for six months, then picked up odd jobs here and there for another six. But with a wife and three kids to take care of, things just kept gettin’ tighter and tighter, so finally I got on the bus and come on up here. Got me a pretty decent fac’try job with Motorola. Moved into a ratty little kitchenette so I’d be able to send home enough money ever’ week to take care of my family. I was riding the bus down twice a month to be with ’em for a weekend. Ever’thing seemed to be going along fine — then I started having what they call focal seizures, where my arms and legs would start shaking like I was freezing to death. Fac’try doctor sent me for a MRI scan and they found a brainstem glioma. They put me on a anticonvulsant drug and started radiation. I collect disability pay, but it ain’t enough to send anything home. So me and my wife worked it out for her and the kids to go on state welfare by saying I’d abandoned my family. Now they get along pretty good — but I can’t come around in case somebody was to see me there. So here I am: got no job, got no family, got no hair, and ain’t got no future to speak of.” He grinned crookedly. “Like the feller once said: Life’s a bitch — and then you die.”
“Man, ain’t that the truth,” Hoxie enthusiastically agreed. “A year ago, I had it knocked, you know? Me and my old lady had just got divorced after thirty-two years of marriage. It had got down to the point where we couldn’t stand being in the same room with each other. I tell you, she had turned into the meanest damned woman that ever drew breath. Never happy. Nothing pleased her. She could find things to complain about before they even happened. Like she’d say, ‘I know what you’re gonna do next Wednesday. You gonna go out with those no-good friends of yours.’ Next Wednesday she’s complaining about, and it ain’t even here yet.
“Anyway, I finally had enough of it; I moved out and we got divorced. I took early retirement from my job at the post office, and that was when I really started living. I got a little place of my own, got a new TV, new stereo, new set of wheels, and — best of all — I started running around with this little fox in her second year of college. She had one of those father-complex things, you know; had to have an older man in her life. ’Course, everybody said I was having a midlife crisis; tru’f is, I was having a ball. Only thing was, I started getting these damned sore throats all the time, and my voice would go hoarse.” Hoxie smiled widely. “This young fox of mine, she say it sounded sexy. After a while, though, it didn’t feel sexy. When I went to the doctor about it, I found out why.”
Hoxie sat back and sighed wearily. “Now the young fox is gone, the apartment’s gone, the new wheels are gone, my daughter and her husband have the TV and the stereo, and I got a room in their basement where I’m welcome to stay as long as they’s the beneficiaries on my life insurance.” He raised his beer glass in salute. “Like you said, life is a bitch.”
Hoxie fell silent then, and he and Potts sat looking at Lewis with expressions that said: Okay, man, what’s your story? It took Lewis a few moments but he finally caught on. All he could really say, however, was that the only effect cancer had on his lifestyle was that he had to get his Thursday bets down early, and he’d begun to brood about dying in a cold climate.
“That’s it?” Hoxie said incredulously. “Hell, you might as well not even have cancer.”
“That’s fer sure,” Potts agreed. “I’ve knowed people with the flu had their lives more messed up than you.”
“Well, excuse the hell out of me,” Lewis said, annoyed. “Sorry I don’t have something worse to tell you. Hope I ain’t ruined your day.”
Potts and Hoxie exchanged glances and then suddenly burst out laughing.
“You know what this reminds me of?” said Hoxie. “The day I tol’ my daughter and son-in-law about my diagnosis. Know what my fool son-in-law said? He said it was too bad I couldn’t have a respectable disease like sickle-cell anemia. Said cancer was a white person’s disease!”
“You think that’s bad,” Potts told him, “listen to this. I was feeling kind of down about a month ago, so I went to see this Baptist preacher, thinking maybe he could console me a little, jack up my spirits, you know. Guess what the idiot said. He told me to thank God I had a disease like cancer instead of something impure like AIDS. Said AIDS was the Lord’s way of punishing the homosexuals of the world, but that cancer was for decent folks. An’ he was serious, too!”