Anything You Want (11 page)

The phone bleated at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. I had been asleep, but I was worried enough about Maggie to zombie roll out of bed and answer. It wasn't my lady friend. It was Mr. Nussbaum. “Would you like a ride to the office, amigo?” he asked.

“You bet your pants,” I said, although I wasn't exactly sure what was going on because I was still half asleep.

“I'll be at your pad in ten minutes,” he said.

“My pad,” I repeated.

I hung up the phone and crawled back into bed. Except instead of drifting back to dreamland, I sat up. This was real. This was not a dream. It was 7:00 a.m., and Mr. Nussbaum was just minutes away from the suite. I don't remember getting dressed. I don't remember brushing my teeth, but I'm sure I did. Fresh breath was a priority for this guy. The next thing I knew, I was riding in Mr. Nussbaum's fine Caddie, and we were cruising to do some law.

“You ready for action?” Mr. Nussbaum asked.

“Going to put a dent in those files for sure,” I said, wishing I was still putting a dent in my pillow.

“Not today you're not. Saturday's my busiest day. We have a full docket of clients coming in. You'll need to meet and greet them, run in some coffee periodically, and maybe run out for some rolls or a sandwich or two. Today you'll be my face, my feet, and my hands.”

I looked at my hand and said, “You are Mr. Nussbaum's hand.”

“Ha-ha!” Mr. Nussbaum shouted. He's a peppy guy.

Mr. Nussbaum parked behind the building a half block off Main Street in front of a sign that read, “Da Hound Dog.” Underneath in smaller letters, it said in parentheses, “(Nussbaum's Spot, Not Yours, Unless You Want to Get Your Butt Bit.)”

“You like my sign?” he asked. “Mallory got it for me last Christmas. She is a funny one.”

“Whacky,” I said.

Mr. Nussbaum slapped my thigh. “You're getting to know all about the world of Nussbaum, aren't you?”

The hall outside his office wasn't nearly as scary in the daylight, although I took note of some major-league spiderwebs in the corners. Mr. Nussbaum opened the office door, and in we went. He headed directly for the majesty of the law file room, and I got a little scared because I hadn't really done anything other than make piles. But he wasn't mad at all. In fact, Nussbaum was the exact opposite of mad.

“Taco! Aren't you an industrious fellow. Were you here all night?”

“Well, until past ten,” I said.

Mr. Nussbaum's eyes got kind of moist. “Everybody told me you're a great kid.” He began to nod. “Now I know it's true. This…” He gestured to the majesty of my stacks of papers. “This would've taken Mallory a week or more.”

In my hour of labor the night before, I had unburdened the coffeemaker from also serving as a bookshelf for more paper. The thing was killer gross, pal. It was moldy and musty, but Mr. Nussbaum showed me where the cleaning supplies were, and I cleaned the coffeemaker. Now it wouldn't kill someone who had coffee from it. Then he showed me how to make coffee.

Four minutes later, coffee brewing, me seated at the reception desk (on a leather chair for maximum coccyx comfort), Nussbaum's first client arrived. Mr. Thomas Wrightman was a gristly seventy-three-year-old dude in dirty khaki pants that were falling off his skinny butt. Wrightman was suing his neighbor because the neighbor's dog would pee in Wrightman's yard so much that his grass, which he loved, started turning brown in patches.

It was a cold December, and all of Bluffton's grass was brown at that point. But I wanted to show my support. “That's a crime!” I commiserated.

“I will be compensated for my loss!” Wrightman cried.

“Big-time!” I said. “Stacks of cash!”

Mr. Wrightman smiled at me. He told me that I was not as pretty as Mallory but a whole lot more fun to talk to.

Every half hour another client visited. It turns out that the majesty of the law mostly involves resolving fights with neighbors, fights between business partners, fights that cause divorces (affairs and money and bad personal hygiene), and people who drink too much and do dumb things, ranging from running over stop signs in their cars to throwing rocks through their neighbors' windows. Fantastic!

I checked in the sad sacks, made small monkey chatter, brewed pot after pot of coffee, bought some sandwiches, ate a sandwich or two, played with a little kid whose mom was after cash from his deadbeat dad. The day rolled by fast.

About dinnertime Mr. Nussbaum shook hands with his last client (college kid who'd whipped rocks through a window) and escorted the sap to the door. Then he turned to me and said, “I got several positive comments about the work you did today, amigo. You're just what this office needs. A little ray of sunshine, aren't you?”

“Every day is the best day I ever had,” I pointed out.

Mr. Nussbaum laughed. He didn't drive me home though. He had to go to the VFW to play some cards. That was a cold-ass walk in the Wisconsin December air, but I felt pretty good. Pretty damn great actually. I felt as if I brought a lot to the table, mostly because Mr. Nussbaum said I brought a lot to the table.

A talented and friendly fellow like me was certain to find work that could support Maggie Corrigan and my baby, right?

I had the weirdest dream, dingus. Maggie and I were naked and leaping from rock to rock on the side of this really steep mountain. We were having fun, and when we'd land on the same rock, we'd totally make out. The valley below us was super green with all kinds of plants and flowers, and there were rabbits wearing those pointy hats you see Vietnamese people wearing in pictures about the Vietnam War. But these had ear holes that let their rabbit ears stick through. Everybody was laughing—all the animals and me and Maggie.

But then there was a crack in the sky, and dark ink started rushing through. The rabbits began to cry, and the plants started wilting. Maggie almost fell off her rock, but I caught her.

And then the Tibet baby (a baby that showed up in my dreams a lot and who might be my mom) floated up the hill, wearing shiny pants and a red hat. The baby motioned for us to follow it like it was trying to save us.

“Keep it away!” screamed Maggie. She swung at it, throwing us both off balance.

The Tibet baby hovered just out of reach. Tears started pouring down the baby's face.

Maggie screamed. “Eat shit, Mom!”

The baby screeched back like a parrot, “What about Darius? What about Darius?” and then Maggie and I fell into blackness.

Oh, dingus! Crazy, right?

I woke up soaked in sweat. This dream stressed me out so bad!
What about Darius?
I rolled out of the muck and stumbled through the dark hall to the top of the stairs. “Darius! You awake? Darius?”

There was no reply.

I stumbled down the stairs into Darius's stink pad, flipped on the lights, but found no Darius in his bed. Because I had a huge burst of adrenaline, I ran up the stairs to see if maybe he'd passed out on the couch, as he'd been doing lately after his late shift at Captain Stabby's, but he wasn't there. I opened the door to see if maybe he was a frozen corpse in the yard, but he wasn't in the yard. And his car was nowhere to be seen. Since he started driving again after his license revocation, he always parked in the street in front of the house because all our extra stuff from the mullet house was jammed into the garage. Darius wasn't home.

I ran into the kitchen to look at the clock I'd set above the stove. It said 3:11 a.m. The dead hour. Where was Darius?

Could there be a girl?
I wondered. Maybe he found a sweet and loving replacement for Kayla.

No, not likely. He'd gone totally antisocial. He wouldn't talk to girls.

Would he be at a coworker's house, drinking a couple brewskis while jamming some video game? Maybe.

When he was in high school, Darius had a pack of friends he stayed out with all night long. But they had all left for college, and Darius stayed for tech school and to help with Mom. And then to help me after Mom died.

What about Darius?

I called his cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. Then I lay down on the hall floor.

At 4:00 a.m., the suite phone made its lonely bleat.

I jumped off the floor and picked up in a blink. “Darius?”

“No, Nancy Goebel down at the police station.”

“What?”

“Is your papa home?” Nancy Goebel asked.

“My dad is at his new life,” I said.

“Oh,” Nancy Goebel said.

“Is this about Darius Keller?” I asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“I'm all Darius has got family-wise,” I said.

“Oh? Okay then. Darius is at Southwest Municipal because he crashed his car into the KFC/Taco Bell.”

“Oh no. Oh no,” I whispered.

“Now he wasn't going real fast, and he only sustained minor injuries. But Officer Peders determined from a general smell test that Darius imbibed quite a few alcoholic beverages, so there are legal charges pending.”

“How many?”

“Quite a few. Lots of damage at the drive-through window.”

“Oh no,” I said. “We can't have any more disasters.”

“I'm real sorry. We'll bring him back over to the station in the morning.” And with that, Nancy Goebel hung up.

I thought about calling Dad to ask him to come home or calling Brad or Sharma for a ride to the hospital, but I decided I'd better just do the best I could. Mr. Nussbaum had said just a few hours earlier that I brought a lot to the table.

Bring what you got. Show Darius you care.

I pulled on my coat and headed west on Kase Street. The hospital was only about a mile away on the other side of Smith Park. I would go there and show Darius I cared with my presence, even though he's a dumb ass and a danger to himself and others and also a criminal.

Boy hell howdy, dingus. That 4:00 a.m. December air cut right through my layers and froze my dolphin body stiff as can be. It took me more than twenty minutes to get to the hospital. And then it wasn't open! Not the regular doors anyway. The front entrance that we always went through when Mom was first sick was totally dark and completely locked. (When she got worse, she ended up in Madison, which has a great hospital.) I yanked and screamed at the door in case there was some kind of password I didn't know about since I was not an adult.

Southwest Municipal is tiny, and all the rooms are on the ground level, so I thought maybe I could find Darius's room if I went window to window and looked inside. Seemed like a good idea. Problem was that the curtains were closed in most of the rooms.
Just knock.
I almost started to, but then I worried how old farts with bad hearts might keel over dead if somebody
knock-knocked
on the window in the middle of the night. Might think the grim reaper had come to take them home. Not a good plan.

I was completely shivering at that juncture. Totally chattering my bones. So I walked around the block to generate a little warmth and to scout for Dumpsters I might use to climb up to the roof so I could slide in through an exhaust vent or something.

Boom! There it was, pal! On the opposite side of the normal entrance to the hospital, I found the
emergency
entrance. What I thought was the back of the hospital was really another front of the building! The emergency entrance was lit up like Christmas with a bright red sign and all kinds of florescent lights.

“Woo! Yes!” I shouted and ran to it as fast as I could because my shivering was ridonculous and likely bordered on deadly.

I shot through the double-wide automatic doors into an entryway pumped thick with sweet heat. I stood there for a few seconds to let that business seep in. The nurse or whatever stared at me from behind a reception desk. But it wasn't a nurse, because after I blinked a bit and my eyeballs unfroze, I realized it was Emily Cook, a cello geek from school, a senior.

“Hi, Taco. I've been watching you on all the security cameras. Are you casing the joint?”

“I was thinking about breaking in through the roof,” I said.

“That doesn't sound feasible.”

“You gotta do what you gotta do. I want to see my brother. I need him to know someone cares.”

“You care,” Emily said.

“Precisely,” I said.

“That's really nice. But you can't see him,” Emily said. “We're not open for visitors until 8:00 a.m.”

“You could just let me go in,” I suggested.

“Behind those doors.” Emily pointed to these gray doors to her left. “You'll find a doctor and a couple nurses checking on patients. And you'll find a giant orderly who used to wrestle for the college. If a visitor goes back there during non-visiting hours, the orderly's job is to tackle the visitor and handcuff him to a wheelchair. So I can't let you go.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don't appreciate violence.” I looked past her at the door, behind which my bro lay bent and broken.

Emily shook her head. “Me either. Violence sucks.” Emily didn't say anything for few seconds. “You look frozen. Do you want some hot chocolate?”

I was trying to figure out how to make a dash for it, get past that wrestler to Darius, but hot chocolate sounded pretty good. “Maybe,” I said. “Is Darius okay?”

“He was really, really drunk, but he wasn't hurt in the crash,” Emily said.

“He has O+ and A- blood, which makes him seem drunker than he is,” I explained.

Emily blinked at me a couple times. “There's no such thing as O+ and A- blood.”

“No, there is,” I said.

“No. Really. There's no such thing. Somebody's giving you a line. His blood alcohol level was .36, which is so far above the legal limit, it's, like, legally dead. Darius was drunk. Straight-up drunk. Way crazy drunk. He has big problems.”

I smiled because Emily was being serious and straight, and those kinds of people remind me of my mom. “You're pretty smart. I like that a lot.”

Emily smiled at me, big and pretty, like a goddess, which only happens when really serious people smile because it's such an awesome surprise. “Thanks, Taco,” she said.

“I'll take that hot chocolate if the offer's still good.”

Ten minutes later I was warm and dead asleep on a little love seat in the waiting room. Emily must've put a blanket on me, which made me cozy. I slept for an hour or so. Then all hell broke loose.

A ringing phone woke me up. Emily spoke. She said, “Yes. Oh no. Okay. We'll be ready.” Emily stood.

I sat up. “What?”

“Sorority girl,” Emily said. She turned and went through the door into the actual emergency room. Like twenty seconds later, an ambulance came screaming up to the doors. The paramedics pulled a girl on a gurney out of the back. She screamed. I could hear her screaming through the doors. Emily burst back into the room, followed by a nurse and a doctor. They tore past me and met the paramedics, who rolled the screaming girl inside.

“She's on something. Can't calm her down. Fell through the picture window at her house,” a paramedic said.

The girl bled through gauze on her face and hands. She screamed, “My heart! My heart! Help me!”

The doctor said, “Shh, honey. We're going to take care of you. Nurse, prick her.”

The girl screamed more. And she wriggled a ton.

“She wasn't freaking out in the ambulance like this,” a paramedic said. “Relax, Dana.”

“Got to quiet down, sweetie, or we can't help you,” the nurse said.

That girl didn't quiet down a bit. She wriggled so hard. She was clearly trying to jump off the gurney, and the wrestler-orderly had to hold her down. The girl screamed more. I walked closer. The girl cried. I walked closer. Then the girl focused on me because I was standing very close at that point, my mouth hanging open. Her mouth dropped open too, and she started saying, “You're here! You're here! Thank you for being here!” She smiled and cried at the same time.

The nurse said, “Can you relax, Dana? He's here, right?”

“You're doing great,” I said. “You're okay.”

She said, “I'm so glad you're here.”

“You know it. I wouldn't be anyplace else,” I said.

The girl totally stopped the wriggle, dingus. She relaxed. The nurse jacked her with a needle. The girl smiled at me and whispered, “Thank you.” Then she went to sleep.

“What the hell was that?” the doctor asked.

The nurse shrugged.

One paramedic said, “Can you get Dana a bed so we can go?”

“Yep, yep,” said the doctor.

They all rolled the girl in back. A few minutes later, the paramedics came back with their stretcher.

“Nice work, pal,” one said to me.

“Who are you?” the other asked.

“Taco,” I said.

“Sounds about right,” the first one said. Then they left.

I sat down and stared at my reflection in the window. “I'm here,” I said. It was beginning to get light. Morning.

Emily came back out a few minutes later. “Magical Taco.”

“Is it eight yet?” I asked. “Time to see Darius?”

“No. But you can come in back if you want. Everybody's pretty impressed with you.”

Emily motioned for me to follow her. I scurried after. She pointed me to a room. “He's in there. Probably not feeling too good. Take it easy on him.”

I nodded and went in.

Darius was hooked up to an IV. That scared me because Mom always got hooked up to that shiz. Darius, who was awake, looked at me and shook his head.

“What's in there?” I asked, pointing at the IV bag.

“Go away,” Darius mumbled.

“Are you dying? Are they not telling me the truth?”

“They're rehydrating me. That's all. Go away,” Darius said.

“Why are you dehydrated? Did you sweat because you were running from the cops?”

“I would've run, but I was passed out. Leave me alone, Taco.”

“No,” I said. “I'm here because I care.”

“Well, I don't,” Darius said.

“That's not the point. I'm scared, and I love you.”

“Aw shit,” Darius said. Then he started crying. “Would you please go away?”

“No. What happened?” I asked.

“I'm stuck,” Darius said. “I'm lost in here.” He pointed at his heart.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I think that can happen.”

“I don't like it,” he whispered.

“We're going to be okay,” I said.

I sat there in his room, and Darius fell back asleep. I guess I fell asleep too. I think I dreamed about that Tibet baby again, and I was definitely startled when there was a knock on the door.

“What?” Darius sat up fast. “Ow! Ow! My head is breaking.” He put his hands to his head, which pulled out his IV. Blood started running from his arm. “Aw shit!”

I jumped up, grabbed cotton balls that were sitting in a dish on a rolling table next to him, and applied pressure to the blood spout.

Mr. Frederick poked his head in the door. “Do you need me to get a nurse?” he asked.

“Hi, there!” I said. “Nurse would be great!”