mole. Shooting won’t stop them.”
My mind hurtled off in related directions: heads lopped off hydras,
Metastasizing cancer cells.
“It would stop some of them,” Kenny said.
It was tough to argue that one and nobody did.
“No reason to limit it to Western Health,” Adam put in suddenly. He was “between fumigations,” as he liked to put it, and had stopped on his way over to get a giant drink featuring caramel, chocolate, cinnamon, pumpkin, a whiff of decaf, and a mountain of whipped cream. He was on a lot of steroids just then and hungry all the time.
“Good point,” Kenny agreed. “My wife was watching
“You mean having Western Health machine-gun you?” Molly asked. She had lost a lot of weight and was wearing a wig, now that radiation had zapped away much of her gorgeous blond hair, taking her energy along with it. “What’s the point of that?”
“Well, it works better if I’m the one doing the shooting,” Kenny admitted. “But either one would call a lot of attention to the power they abuse. Still. And it would make me feel better, at least for a minute or two. I’m probably going to be dead in six months anyway.”
“Think positive,” Adam the salesman told him, in a touchy feely, support-group tone that made me want to barf and sob at the same time.
“Wiping out Western Health would be very positive,” Kenny insisted.
“Then why not go all the way and really clean house?” Adam asked idly. “Instant karma. I bet every one of us has a list of people who’ve given us trouble. My grandpa always said, ‘Don’t get mad, get even.’”
I had to admit I could see the appeal, particularly now that I was a firsthand witness to some of the insurance quandaries and medical horror stories I’d only read about before. But there were some potential problems.
“Mass murder is frowned on,” I reminded them. “Also, I don’t know you guys all that well, but I don’t think anybody here is a professional hit man or even has military experience. I bet I’m not the only one who’s never fired a gun. I don’t even like it when my cat kills a mouse.”
“But I bet you like having the mouse gone,” Adam said. “That’s the trouble with liberals. You want results with no personal involvement. Or guilt.”
“It’s got nothing to do with liberalism,” I argued, though in fact he had a point. Both about Gwendolyn’s mousing and my desire to avoid guilt. I’ve always felt guilty about pretty much everything and the only good element of that is that I’m not Jewish, which I suspected would tip the scales so heavily I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.
“Still, Tina has a point,” Kenny said. “Murder is kind of extreme and I doubt any of us would be very good at it.”
“Who knows till you give it a whirl?” Katherine asked. “What are they going to do? Give us the death penalty?”
The five of us kept hanging out at Molly’s pool house after support group meetings as fall moved on and the days grew shorter.
Frequently the concept of instant karma arose, the proactive idea of punishing people now for this life’s moral transgressions, rather than forcing them to wait for an upcoming life in which to suffer. For those among us uncertain about the concept of an afterlife, punishment for its own sake felt both comfortable and sufficient.
The flavor of these conversations varied with the participants; folks with serious illnesses are not always socially available, being prone to all manner of problems related to treatment side effects and opportunistic infections, not to mention the actual deadly disease. And face it, most of the time they’re not feeling at their best to start with. It was hardly surprising, then, that the focus was almost always on players from the health care industry. This was a group of really sick people, with health care at the core of their current lives.
Katherine, the deceptively prim elementary school teacher, knew a surprisingly versatile catalog of dirty automotive tricks.
“I have brothers who love cars,” she explained with a shrug, “and I guess I picked it up from them.”
Picked it up seriously, it would seem, since she drove a red 1968 Mustang convertible, and drove it with panache. I’d followed her in and out of Rancho Santa Fe on dark winding roads several times on nights we gathered at Molly’s, watching her whip around the curves.
“It mostly depends on whether you want to hurt the driver or the car,” she went on. “If it’s the car, then it’s easy enough. There’s all kinds of things you can do. Sugar in the gas tank, nails in the tires, a couple of cans of that gunk that expands and gets hard down around the gas pedal. Shove a potato into the exhaust pipe.”
“Remind me to stay on your good side,” Kenny said.
Molly, a champion shopper during her L.A. legal days—“It was the only social life I had,” she told me once— liked the idea of ordering things in people’s names. Like a few dozen magazine subscriptions from blow-in cards, the kind that say,
“Nice one,” I said. “Or how about this? Mr. Big’s secretary opens the box and an inflatable lady pops open ready for action, like a lifeboat. Or even better, the kid in the mail room opens it and everybody gets to see and hear about it as he carries it down the halls.”
“You could go devious too,” Molly suggested. “Send something that’s allegedly a gift from somebody else. Like,
