What did they talk about? Nothing much (thanks, Christa, for asking) — the woods, which for all she could get out of him, seemed to be full of trees; her latest victimization by the System; Stateline, Nevada, and Tahoe, did he like Tahoe? And giardia, of course. Giardia and shit. There was a cherry pie she’d bought in a moment of weakness yesterday and she set that out in front of him, and he seemed interested, but then the stomach pains got to him and he disappeared into the bathroom. After a moment she pushed the pie away from her so as to resist temptation but then slid it back and had just the tiniest sliver, licking the sweet congealed cherry filling off her fingers before getting up to put on a CD and start cleaning up.
He was in there forever, doing what she couldn’t imagine, though it came to her that he was maybe just slumped over the toilet, in real pain, and she was remembering that time in Mexico with Roger when she’d got the turista and felt as though somebody was alternately running a screwdriver through her and pumping her gut full of swamp gas. When he did emerge, finally, he was naked and dripping with water from the shower, his second shower, and he had the Ziploc bag in one hand. Which he held up in front of his face and shook once or twice to make sure she was focused on it. “You got to take me to the doctor,” he said in his soft, soft voice, and he wouldn’t look at her, as if he was embarrassed by his own weakness.
“The doctor? I don’t know any doctor. And they wouldn’t be open now, anyway.”
“The emergency room. They have to like take anybody, right?”
Of course there was the whole rigamarole of insurance and who’s your primary-care doctor and fill out this form and this one too, but the surprise was that Adam actually had insurance through his father and they had his name and information in the computer from a previous visit or visits he’d made, one time apparently after he’d gotten bloodied in a scuffle at Piero’s and another after he’d driven his car through the fence at the playground, something he didn’t want to talk about but kept mentioning all the time, as if he’d padlocked it away and couldn’t remember the combination. The waiting room was packed to the walls with people who didn’t have health care, illegals, white trash, working stiffs who couldn’t afford rent let alone seeing a doctor because their two-year-old was vomiting blood. It stank worse than any stable she’d ever been in and she had to thank her lucky stars she’d never been sick or she didn’t know what she would do. If things were the way they should be, the way they once were, with freemen on the land associating with each other on a by-need basis, then she could have just bartered with some doctor who kept horses and eliminated the middleman, the tax squeezer and the accountant and the whole shitty bureaucracy that had brought her here tonight. With Adam. Because he had giardia and they really didn’t have any other alternative.
They sat there for three and a half hours, him running to the bathroom every ten minutes and her paging through the magazines that were two years out of date and so encrusted with filth she’d be lucky if she didn’t get tetanus or something just from touching them, until, finally, they called his name and he went into the back room with the nurse and she watched the clock and got angrier by the minute. Or not angry, exactly. It was more like disappointment. She didn’t want to be here with the screaming babies and the old men with the bloody bandages wrapped around their bleached-out skulls and the illegals so sick with whatever it was they were like walking bags of infection. No, she wanted to be home. In her own house. With Kutya. And Adam.
Forty-five minutes more — they had to run his stool sample under the microscope to confirm the diagnosis he’d already made, and yes, it was giardia, very common in these parts, and that was the danger of drinking unchlorinated water, even from the purest-looking mountain stream — and then he was walking right by her in the waiting room as if he didn’t recognize her, locked in one of his trances, and she scurried across the room to catch up with him and take him by the arm and lead him out the door and into the parking lot. And that was where things got interesting.
Because there, right in front of them, pulled up neatly to the curb and with its gumball machine idly spinning, was a police cruiser, just sitting there, the engine running and the gasoline the wage slaves had paid for — she’d paid for — cycling through it and spewing out the tailpipe as carbon monoxide to pollute the atmosphere even more than they’d already polluted it. There was no one in the cruiser. No one in sight. And what she was thinking, despite Adam and her hurry to get home, was that a chance had presented itself to her out of nowhere, a chance to get back at them, if not to get even, because she’d never get even. Adam walked right by it, the prescription they’d given him clutched in one hand, the bag of shit in the other, and why he didn’t just dump it she didn’t know.
“Adam,” she called. “Adam!”
He stopped, turned, gave her that maddening look as if he’d never seen her before in his life.
“Why don’t you get rid of that bag — there, in the trash receptacle.” She’d come up even with him now, the pavement like a dark lake spreading open before them. “Come on,” she said, “snap out of it,” and he let the bag drop from his fingers, where it would lie undisturbed till the gardeners came in the morning with their rakes and blowers.
“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “Okay, yeah.”
“Listen,” and she pulled in close to him, lowering her voice, “there’s something we got to do. It’ll take like sixty seconds, that’s all. Can you drive?”
He shrugged, an elaborate gesture under the yellow glaze of the streetlamps along the walk. Then he grinned, or tried to. “What you got in mind?”
What she had in mind was very simple, nothing as complex or radical maybe as what a Jerry Kane would have come up with, but a plan nonetheless: she was going to fuck up that cruiser, whether it was the one the lady cop had used to cage her up in or not, and she was going to do it by putting something in the gas tank and destroying the engine so that when the cop came out of the hospital he — or she—would be going nowhere. But what? Dirt? Sand? Or no, and now the solution came to her fully formed: sugar water. It just happened that in the backseat of the car was a present she’d got at the hardware store for Christabel, a kiss-and-make-up present. A hummingbird feeder. Christabel had been commenting on the hummingbirds last time she was over, the two of them sitting out on the porch and watching them hover and feed and shear off again, as greedy as vultures, and when she saw the feeder on sale at the hardware store she bought it and then went home and made up the sugar water, one cup sugar to four cups water, and left the thing in the back of the car so she wouldn’t forget it when they got together again.
All right. She didn’t know the mechanics of it, but she’d heard this was a good way to really fuck up an engine or maybe even blow it up if that was possible, and why not? They’d screwed her over enough, that was for shit sure. She and Adam had reached her car now and she steadied herself a minute before unlocking the door and handing him the keys. Giving the parking lot a quick scan to be sure no one was watching, she pulled open the back door and reached in back to unscrew the cylinder from the feeder. “Listen,” she said, straightening up and looking him in the eye to be sure he was with her, “just start up the car and wait here — just wait, and no craziness now — till I get done with that cop car over there, and then I stroll away and you pull up and we drive out of here, easy as you please.”