“Smoke it later, my friend, outside,” El Rojo was saying. He lowered his voice. “After.”
“After what?”
El Rojo kept his voice low. “After you get laid for me.” A burst of crow laughter followed, was quickly throttled.
“Get laid for you?” asked Eddie, looking into the maple-syrup eyes, aware of complexity in their depths, beyond his understanding.
“It will make me happy just to think about it,” El Rojo replied.
Eddie shrugged, took the cigarette, and put it in the pocket of his green shirt. El Rojo removed his hand from Eddie’s shoulder, extended it for shaking.
“Adios.”
“So long.” That was the truth, given El Rojo’s sentence and the fact that Eddie wasn’t coming back.
Eddie went in. He smelled a piney smell and thought of Christmas. The director of treatment, sitting at his desk behind a sign saying “Floyd K. Messer, M.D., Ph.D.,” had the right body type for the Santa role. He had fat cheeks, reddened by the sun-photographs of him posing beside hooked game fish hung on the walls. He had curly graying hair and a trim gray beard that, grown out, might have looked just right. All he needed was to learn how to make his eyes twinkle.
Dr. Messer was gazing at a computer screen, his fat white fingers poised over the keyboard. “Take a pew, son,” he said, without looking up.
Eddie sat down on the other side of the desk. The piney smell was stronger. “What kind of treatment program you putting him on?” Eddie said.
Dr. Messer looked up. “Who would you be talking about, son?”
“El Rojo, or whatever the hell his name is.”
Dr. Messer gave him a long stare. “Is that any business of yours?” Dr. Messer waited for an answer. When none came, his fat fingers descended on the keys. “Nye,” he murmured, tapping slowly. “Edward Nicholas.” There was a pause. Then he put on a pair of glasses and bent closer to the machine. From where he sat, Eddie couldn’t see the screen; he watched the tiny green letters reflected in the doctor’s glasses.
“You’ve done a long stretch,” Dr. Messer said, still murmuring but a little more loudly now, so that Eddie wasn’t sure if he was still talking to himself. “Comparatively,” the doctor added. He looked puzzled. For a wild moment, Eddie thought that something had happened, that they weren’t going to let him go. The pores in his armpits opened; a drop of sweat rolled down his ribs, under the new green shirt. Dr. Messer tapped at the keys. “You should have been out in less than …” Tiny words scrolled down his lenses. Dr. Messer searched for their meaning in silence. Eddie realized that everything was all right. It was just that Dr. Messer didn’t know who he was, didn’t remember.
How many years had passed since he had last been in this office? Eddie wasn’t sure, but he recalled the occasion clearly. It was during the period of Dr. Messer’s enthusiasm for soliciting inmate volunteers for drug-company tests. Eddie had agreed to take one little red pill a day for six weeks. At the beginning, someone from the drug company had given him a local anesthetic and taken one gram of muscle from inside his forearm. At the end, another gram was required, for comparison. By that time, Dr. Messer had been trained in the procedure. He took the gram himself, but something went wrong with the anesthetic, although Dr. Messer hadn’t believed Eddie about that, and then, with the big square-ended instrument dug deep in his flesh, it was too late for Eddie to do anything without making things worse. The arm had been useless for months. The drug company paid Eddie ninety dollars-forty for each procedure and ten for taking the pills. He’d spent it at the canteen, mostly on Pepsi, ripple potato chips, and cigarettes.
Dr. Messer said: “Ah.” He nodded to himself, removed his glasses and turned to Eddie. Christmas-tree smell wafted across the desk. “Well, son. Got any plans? Thirty-four’s not old, not in this day and age.”
Eddie said: “What were the results of the experiment?”
Dr. Messer blinked. “Experiment?” His forehead creased in a way Santa’s never would. “I asked you about your plans.”
“Plans?” said Eddie.
“Like what you’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next year,” Dr. Messer explained impatiently.
“Steam bath,” Eddie said.
The forehead creases deepened. “You want to work in a steam bath?”
Eddie was silent.
Dr. Messer took a deep breath and said: “What did you do before?”
“Before?”
“Before here.” The impatient tone was back, beyond the control of deep-breathing techniques.
Eddie considered his answer. What had he done? There’d been swimming, of course. And Jack, Galleon Beach, Mandy, the Packers, the whole fuckup. “Not much,” Eddie said. The names, their syllables strange and familiar as returning to the house you were born in, stayed in his mind. “But as a friend of mine says,” he added, “you can’t expect to take up where you left off.”
“Your friend sounds wise.”
“For an ax murderer,” Eddie said, stretching the truth a little.
