Sidecar (12 page)

“What is the whole condom thing about?” Casey asked irritably. “I’m pretty sure he’s not going to knock me up!”

Rufus was pulling on Joe’s arm, but Joe took a moment to stop still and turn to Casey, who was squinting at the dim path through the pine trees and red dirt. “Kid, have you not heard of VD? Did you think that’s just for girls with itchy cooters?”

Casey’s confusion was heartbreaking. “But Joe, you had me get all sorts of shots after the social worker said I could stay. One of those would have taken care of the clap, you think? And Dev’s a…
was
a virgin. I mean, what’s to worry?”

Joe closed his eyes, seeing the daily workweek that he kept from Casey flashing behind them. Curtained units, places where people wore hazard masks all day long and picked up extra pay to work. Skin with crackling lesions; haunted eyes, miserable with loneliness; and the patina of fear so thick it filled the nostrils with something even worse than hospital stink.

“Look,” Joe said, knowing Rufus was getting more and more frantic with every passing moment, “you, me, and Dev, we’ve got to have a talk, okay? And it’s not going to be one any of us is going to be comfy having, so just throw on your bulletproof Underoos and we’ll have at it. But not now.” And with that, he gave in to his inner stirrings of unease and trotted after Rufus as the poor dog whined and pulled his way to Ira’s disintegrating cabin.

Apparently the cabin wasn’t just disintegrating, it had
disintegrated
, with Ira in it. When they opened the front door—which no one ever locked—Ira called faintly to them. Rufus whimpered and ran through a plain living room decorated with piles of newspaper and old dusty furniture, and into the back bedroom.

Ira had been married. His bedroom was actually neat and clean, with little rugs on either side of the bed and a woman’s vanity dresser, still laid out with a small mirror, comb, and matching brush, just like they’d been when Ira’s wife had died. But past the bedroom was the bathroom, and Joe turned on the light and steeled himself for what he’d see next.

“Fuck me stupid!” Casey muttered, and Joe winced.

“Help me,” Ira whimpered, but Joe wasn’t sure he could.

The hallway floor under their feet felt creaky with dry rot, and Ira’s bathroom had apparently had enough. It had given out under Ira’s feet, and as Ira had flailed backward, his old bones had given out too. He lay there, scrawny, wrinkled, and naked, his bathrobe flopping around his skinny body, both of his legs obviously broken at the tibia and submerged in the subflooring of the bathroom.

“Oh fuck,” Joe muttered. “We’re gonna need some fucking help.” Rufus was licking Ira’s face in comfort, and Joe hoped that worked.

The first thing he did was call an ambulance,
and
the fire department, and then he got some blankets and made Ira more comfortable and less exposed. The old man wasn’t particularly coherent, and he mumbled for Dotty, his late wife, as his gnarled hand dug itself into Rufus’s ruff. His white hair—a bird’s nest under the best of times—was lank and sweaty on his tanned forehead, and Joe made sure he had a pillow under his head as he wrapped blankets around his chest, waist, and upper legs.

Then he and Casey grimly analyzed the problem.

“We gotta move his feet up,” Casey said, his voice husky. “Looking at it that way—it’s just wrong.”

And Joe feared that Ira having his legs bent like that around his fractured bones was more than wrong. The flesh was mottled and swollen—Ira could be bleeding internally at the fracture site from the way it looked. Besides, the paramedics couldn’t care for him any better than Joe could when he was stuck halfway through his floor.

Joe sent Casey to his garage to bring back the circular saw and a dolly, and had the kid crawl under the house to support Ira’s feet as he sawed around the cracked wood. At first he thought Casey was going to argue. The crawl space under the house was dark, especially in the middle of the night—dank, muddy, and there were spiders and other crawlies down there. Even if you weren’t a girl in a pink dress, it still wasn’t a picnic, and not everybody had the stomach for it. But Ira moaned in pain even as Casey was wrinkling his nose, and then the kid took an unhappy look at Joe and went to work.

He kept up a running monologue of “Ick! Crap! What’s that! Oh, fucking ew! Jesus! Oh crap—is that a black widow? Oh gross! Oh God—something shit down here. I’m gonna need to sit in the bathtub for a fucking week!” but he did it, and he did it well. He never wavered while holding the dolly steady so Ira’s bones didn’t break through his skin, and he was gentle and steady as he pushed the dolly up so Joe could back Ira up and lay him flat, his legs lying on the piece of plywood, supported by the rolling wheels.

By the time the paramedics got there, Ira had gone into shock, and Joe backed off as they wrapped the old man’s legs in pressure casts and administered fluids before dropping the gurney and lifting him on.

Joe knew one of the guys, and Derrick clapped him on the shoulder as they were wheeling Ira out.

“Nice work there—you want to do some ride-alongs?”

Joe rolled his eyes. “I just want to know the old guy’s gonna be okay,” he said sincerely, and Derrick grimaced.

“Gotta tell you, Joe, it’s not looking great. Whatever happens, I don’t think he’s going to be able to come back here to live.”

Joe looked around the place, with the floorboard popping up and the drywall falling down, and sighed. “He’s got a son who lives in SoCal. I’ll give Richard a call and see if he can come get him settled someplace else.”

Derrick nodded. “That would probably be a good idea. He’s going to be in the hospital for a while—if nothing else, he might like a visit.”

“We’ll visit him,” said Casey, coming up behind them, and Joe turned and ruffled his hair.

“You’re a good kid,” he said, feeling tired. The sun had risen in the last couple of minutes, and he found himself squinting into the red light. The temperature had dropped too, and the shorts and T-shirt he’d worn to bed were suddenly not nearly enough.

Casey shrugged and grinned, and then a sudden look of panic crossed his face.

“Oh shit! Dev!” and without another word he whistled for Rufus and went trotting down the path that led to their houses.

Joe smiled a little. “D’you see that? Just took the dog, no questions asked. That’s my boy.”

Derrick was looking at him with considerable warmth. “That’s the kid you took in, right?”

Joe nodded and smiled a little. And then blushed. Derrick had light-brown hair with reddish tints, especially in the russet light, and light-brown eyes. He was a little younger than Joe, and apparently, he swung that way on occasion too.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “We’re sort of roommates.”

Derrick’s grin cranked up a notch. “Would your roommate mind if you took a night off for dinner?”

Joe blinked. He was not used to being come on to. Usually there was a gentle sort of waltz before he ended up having dinner. But Sharon had
not
taken the news of the social worker well
at all
and, after slapping his face (a surprise!) and yelling that Joe loved Casey more than he loved her (well,
duh!
), had marched off into the sunset. She’d actually quit the floor at Auburn and was currently working at the railroad as their on-call nurse, just to get away from him. It had been a long time since someone had shown Joe the sort of interest looking out from Derrick’s eyes right now.

“Uhm, okay,” he said, feeling awkward. “You… uhm, I think you took my number when your partner was getting my info. Give me a call.”

Derrick winked and promised he would, then hopped into the ambulance. The bus rattled down Ira’s road, which was as out of repair as the rest of the house, and Joe wandered back down the path between the trees, thinking that he was going to need a couple of hours of sleep before he got up to go to work.

Then he saw Casey and Dev cozying up in front of Dev’s little four-banger motorbike, and he sighed. One more thing to do before he slept.

He walked up to them and rolled his eyes when Dev turned bright red and buried his face in Casey’s shoulder.

“Very cute,” Joe said dryly. “But ineffective. You two—tomorrow’s my day off. We’re gonna take a little field trip and have ourselves a little discussion. No sex until then, okay? You hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Daniels,” Dev said, his face still tucked into Casey’s shoulder. Casey put his hand protectively on the back of Dev’s head and rolled his eyes at Joe.

“You done intimidating him?” Casey asked mildly, and Joe grinned at him.

“Nowhere near. Now I gotta go call Ira’s son and let him know what happened. I work today and tomorrow we’ve got a date, but I’ve got a feeling we’re spending the rest of our spare time up at Ira’s place, getting his shit in order, so don’t make any plans, okay?”

Casey nodded. “Yeah, I got it. We keeping Rufus?”

Joe’s lips quirked. “I’d lay odds. Let’s act like we’re gonna, okay? He’s going to be confused enough as it is.”

And with that, he left the babes in boyland to have their sweet nothings while he dialed the number he’d gotten from Ira’s drawer while he’d been waiting for the paramedics to wheel Ira out. An hour later, after a conversation that involved Joe listening to Richard yell at his wife a lot for his suitcases and then complain bitterly about time he couldn’t afford to lose from work, Joe tramped back up his own stairs for a little shut-eye.

God, tomorrow was going to suck.

First he cleared it with his supervisor at work, who had looked at him with a combination of admiration and revulsion. “The kid’s getting it on with his
boyfriend
,
and this is your idea of an intervention?”

“I just want him to remember to use a rubber, okay?”

“You can’t make him remember to screw girls?”

“Hell, I couldn’t remember that half the time in college!”

A digestive silence while Donna, his supervisor, rearranged what she was about to say. Joe watched her do it, gave her time, and when she finally looked up, she had a serene smile on her face as she tried to convince them both that she wasn’t about to say something really bitchy.

“Well, thank heavens you’ve seen the light,” she tried. She had a broad face, the kind that blotched easily, with cheeks the texture of risen dough.

He just looked at her levelly without saying a thing until those cheeks blushed a patchy scarlet, and he walked away. He didn’t
have
to tell her he swung both ways, but holy God was it ever satisfying.

It didn’t matter. Donna gave it her approval, and Debbie… well, Debbie was so lonely, he didn’t see her
not
wanting visitors.

It turned out he was right.

He took Casey and Dev out to eat first at The Oar Cart, because they grilled a hell of a burger and because he wasn’t sure they would want to eat later. They talked like kids—car phones and how amazing it would be to have one, movies and which one they
really
wanted to see, movie stars and which one they
really
wanted to kiss. Tom Cruise from that fighter pilot movie Joe and Casey had watched on the VCR was a big favorite, closely followed by the blond guy from
The Princess Bride
. Casey considered, though, after Dev threw out that choice.

“I don’t know,” he said, throwing Joe an inscrutable look. “I kind of liked that Inigo Montoya guy. I thought he was pretty hot.”

“Yeah, but he’s old!” Dev complained, and Casey kept his eyes on Joe.

“Not that old. Only a few years older than Joe.”

Joe raised an eyebrow and Casey went back to playing the game with Dev, but the moment sat heavy. The problem with those moments was that although they were few and far between, Casey seemed to mean them wholeheartedly whenever they occurred. The kid was not forgetting his first crush, nor was he apparently
ever
forgetting that he would eventually be old enough for it to mean something.

But they finished their burgers happily, and Joe took them to Auburn General through the front door, and not the employee entrance that he usually used. He walked them down the gently colored taupe corridors with the muted red lines that gave directions, and made a sharp left into a unit marked ICU.

In the future, patients like the one they were about to visit would change the face of the intensive care unit. In the future, every ICU patient would have his own cubicle with clear Plexiglas partitions that would give doctors a view of the goings-on but also give patients privacy. In the future, there would be a station for nonlatex gloves and a sink in every cubicle, as well as hand sanitizer with moisturizer so the medical staff didn’t spend their lives with cracked, bleeding fingers. In the future, there would be a special box for needles or any other object that had touched blood and that people worried about and a place for face masks, should they be necessary. But that was in the future.

At the moment, there were four tiny cubicles in a row, each one big enough for the bed and a couple of people, all of them divided by the big sheets on rollers that had been used in the ER. There was no sink, no privacy screen, and no chairs or real room for a visitor to sit. There was just a bare floor, a floating cloth wall, and the smallish woman lying in the center of the bed.

Joe had actually been there on the day Debbie had first walked into the hospital, about two months before he’d seen Casey on the side of the road. She’d wanted to get rid of the Karposi’s sarcoma lesion that had developed on the side of her face. She’d been tall and chesty and a little bit plump, especially in the ass and thighs, but Joe had always been an ass and thigh man, so he’d thought she was damned attractive. She’d had toffee-brown hair and big brown eyes that had laugh wrinkles at the corners. And she’d had a full mouth that she’d tried not to press together in worry.

She’d gotten the lesion on her temple removed and had some blood work done, and that had been a year ago.

Joe had seen a lot of her since then.

They’d stopped removing the lesions when her recurring bouts of diarrhea got bad and every incision they made for the sarcoma got infected. At the moment, cervical cancer was the thing that was killing her.