“I’m … sorry.”
“Fuck it. The warnings are right there on the side of every pack. I knew what I was getting myself into. Slow suicide. Knowing that these coffin nails would kill me one day made them taste a little better.”
Trout said nothing.
Selma cocked her head and looked up at him. “I won’t pretend that I’m anything but what I am, Mr. Trout, and being a whore and a madam is far from the worst things I’ve done. I’ve lived down in the gutter since the day I was born. Shoved into the life but chose to stay there. My choice. I make no apologies and I’d spit on anyone who said they felt sorry for me. This is my life, and I had some good times, too.” A tear glittered in the corner of one eye and she wiped it away irritably. “I can’t fix anything I ever done. Most of the people I wronged are long dead, so there’s no way to make any kind of amends, even if I wanted to. I don’t regret most of it, but there’s one thing … one single thing that I wish I hadn’t done. Or, maybe it’s a thing that I wish I had done.”
“What’s that, Selma?” Trout asked softly.
“When my sister Clarice got knocked up, she came to me and asked if I’d take the baby. She was really far gone, even then. Her hurt went so deep that she lost herself in her own darkness and she knew — like anyone else knew — that she was never going to find her way out.”
“Who was the father? Where was he in all of this?”
Selma gave a bitter laugh. “He was any one of a hundred ten-dollar tricks. Even if she knew his name there was no way he’d ever do the right thing because nobody ever does the right fucking thing.”
“So she asked you to take the baby?”
Another tear formed and this fell down her cheek, rolling and stuttering over the thousands of seams in her skin. “I had a place and I had a little bit of money. I was running ten whores, and I could have made them take care of the kid in shifts. I could have done that and it wouldn’t have been no skin off my nose. It would have been nothing to me.” Two lines of tears fell together. “But it might have been everything to Homer. Nobody would have laid a hand on him. None of those foster parent fucks would have stuck their dicks in him. No one would have whipped him with electrical cords or burned him with cigarettes or made him kneel on pebbles.” Selma suddenly grabbed Trout’s sleeve. “Homer might have had a chance, you see?”
“Yeah,” he said thickly. “I see.”
“And all the hurt he did to other people. All those killings. The bad things he did to women and little kids. He might not have done any of that…”
“You don’t know that, Selma. He might have had this in him from birth.”
She pulled her hand away from his sleeve and gave a derisive shake of her head. “A bad seed? Bullshit. I don’t believe in that. Babies don’t carry sin.”
“I’m talking a chemical imbalance or—”
She shook her head again. “No. It was the system that made him into a monster. It’s their fault. Theirs and mine.”
They stood in the cold wind, watching the sunny day grow gradually darker.
“So,” Trout began slowly, “bringing him back here…?”
“Homer never had a home,” she repeated. “I didn’t give him anything before. Now … at least I could do that much. A home … and maybe some peace.”
Trout had a hundred other questions he wanted to ask, but he left them all unsaid. They tumbled into the dirt like broken birds as he looked into those lambent green eyes. Windows of the soul, and hers looked in on an interior landscape that was ravaged by storms and blighted beyond reclamation.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
She nodded. Tears streamed down her face, but she set her jaw. Trout watched as she stubbed out her second cigarette and lit the third.
Without another word he turned and walked slowly back along the road to the Explorer. This story was solid gold, no question about it, but he knew with absolute certainty that it was going to break his heart to write it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Dez braked hard and jolted to a stop in front of the emergency room entrance and was out of the car before the ambulance passed her and pulled into the turnaround. Orderlies, nurses, and a doctor were running in a pack and converged with Dez as the back door of the ambulance opened and JT jumped out.
They brought the stretcher down, dropped the wheels, and then the swarm turned and ran with it into the hospital amid a flurry of technical medical jargon neither JT nor Dez understood.
Instead of taking Diviny to a regular curtained bay in the emergency department, they wheeled him into the trauma bay, which was a large semi-operating room intended for a single patient. Dez and JT stood in the open doorway, not wanting to enter but needing to know something — anything — that would make some sense of this.
An argument broke out between the doctor and paramedics over the vitals, and the doctor — an Indian man whose name tag read Sengupta — was loud and condescending. He ordered the nurses to “take a proper set of vitals, goddamn it.”
They did. Or, at least they tried. They cut through Diviny’s clothes and stuck EKG leads onto his chest. They tried taking his temperature by the ear and later rectally. They put him on an automatic blood pressure machine and clipped another oximeter to his fingers. They used a Doppler device to try to take a pulse.
Sengupta was soon yelling again.
“Check the damn machines!” he snarled.
They did. Then he went and checked for himself. New blood pressure machines were wheeled in. New thermometers were used. Half a dozen stethoscopes were pressed against Diviny’s chest and abdomen.
And then the noise and confusion in the room suddenly melted down into a hushed silence as the medical professionals stood around the table. Some stared at Diviny; the rest looked to each other for confirmation or explanations. No one said anything for at least half a minute.
Then the doctor began firing a new set of orders. “I want a CHEM-7 panel. Electrolytes and renal function tests. Do a liver function test, ABG, CBC with diff … serum-urine tox screen. Check for everything: alcohol, Tylenol, aspirin, cocaine, heroin, any other narcotics, amphetamines, marijuana, barbiturates, benzodiazepines. Get me a UA culture and sensitivity, as well as blood cultures, cardiac enzymes. And let’s get a chest X-ray and a CT scan. Get IVs going.”
He turned to the paramedic. “Who brought him in?”
Don pointed to Dez and JT, and the doctor stepped away from the table and headed toward them, herding them outside with wide arms, like a shepherd herding goats. They backed out into the hall.
Sengupta had a dark, scowling face and very intense eyes. He loomed over them, taller even than JT’s six one. “What happened to this man?”
“I don’t know—” began Dez, but he cut her off.
“Then tell me what you do know.”
She nodded and launched in. Sengupta interrupted constantly, digging into the story for little bits of information. Dez could see him becoming more and more frustrated because even though they had a lot of details, none of them seemed to want to assemble into a reasonable picture of any kind.
Sengupta drained them dry and then stood silent, looking from them to the swinging vinyl doors that separated the hallway from the trauma room.
“Doc,” asked Dez, “what’s wrong with him?”
The doctor didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Did you see anything unusual? Containers of chemicals? Unusual poisons? Anything like that?”
“Just the stuff Doc Hartnup keeps in the mortuary,” said JT. “Don’t really know what he has in there.”
