Dr. McClarty tells Donny that they can’t tell the commissary any such thing, that would be a restriction of Peters’s liberty — cruel and unusual punishment. He’d fill out a complaint and they’d spend four hours in court downtown, where the judge would eventually deliver a lecture, third-hand Rousseau, on the natural Rights of Man.
Then there’s Caruthers from G, who had a seizure and claims he needs to up his dose of Klonapin. Ah, yes, Mr. Caruthers, we’d all like to up that and file the edges right off our day. In McClarty’s case from 0 mgs a day to about fifty, with a little Demerol and maybe a Dilaudid thrown into the mix just to secure the perimeter. Or, fuck it, go straight for the fentanyl. No — he mustn’t think this way. Like those “impure thoughts” the priests used to warn us about, these pharmaceutical fantasies must be stamped out at all cost. He should call his sponsor, catch a meeting on the way home.
The first patient, Cribbs, a skinny little white kid, has a bloody black eye, which, on examination, proves to be an orbital fracture. That is, his eye socket has been smashed in. And while McClarty has never seen Cribbs before, the swollen face is familiar; he saw it last night in his sleep. “Lock ’n sock?” he asks.
The kid nods and then winces at the pain.
“They just come in the middle of the night, maybe five of them and started wailing on me. I was just lying there minding my own business.” Obviously new, he doesn’t even know the code yet — not to tell nobody nothing. He is a sniveler, a skinny chicken, an obvious target. Now, away from his peers and tormentors, he seems ready to cry. But he suddenly wipes his nose and grins, shows McClarty the bloody teethmarks on his arm. “One of the sons-of-bitches bit me,” he says, looking incongruously pleased.
“You enjoyed that part, did you, Mr. Cribbs?” Then, suddenly, McClarty guesses.
“That’ll fix his fucking wagon,” says Cribbs, smiling hideously, pink gums showing above his twisted yellow teeth. “I got something he don’t want. I got the HIV.”
After McClarty cleans up the eye, he writes up a hospital transfer and orders a blood test.
“They won’t be messing with me no more,” Cribbs says in parting. In fact, in McClarty’s experience there are two approaches to AIDS cases among the inmate population. Many are indeed given a wide berth. Or else they are killed, quickly and efficiently and without malice, in their sleep.
Next is a surly, muscled black prisoner with a broken hand. Mr. Brown claims to have smashed, accidentally, into the wall of the recreation yard. “Yeah, playing handball, you know?” Amazing how many guys hurt themselves in the yard. Brown doesn’t even try to make this story sound convincing; rather he turns up his lip and fixes McClarty with a look that dares him to doubt it.
So far, in the year he has worked here, McClarty has been attacked only in his dreams. But he has been threatened several times, most recently by an inmate named Lesko, who was furious when McClarty cut off his prescription for Valium. Big pear-shaped redneck in for aggravated assault, Lesko took a knife to a bartender who turned him away at closing time. The bartender was stabbed fifteen times before the bouncer hit Lesko with a bat. And while Lesko did threaten to kill McClarty, fortunately it wasn’t in front of the other prisoners, in which case he would feel that his honor, as well as his buzz, was at stake. Still, McClarty makes a note to check up on Lesko; he’ll ask Santiago, the guard over on D, to get a reading on his general mood and comportment.
Dr. McClarty makes the first official phone call of the day, to a pompous ass of a psychopharmacologist to get an opinion on Caruthers’s medication, not that McClarty doesn’t have an opinion himself; he is required to consult a so-called expert. McClarty thinks diazepam would stave off the seizures just as effectively and more cheaply — which after all is his employers’ chief concern — whereas Caruthers’s chief concern, quite apart from his seizures, is catching that Klonapin buzz. Dr. Withers, who has already talked with Caruthers’s lawyer, keeps McClarty on hold for ten minutes then condescendingly explains the purpose and methodology of double-blind studies, until McClarty is finally forced to remind the good doctor that he did attend medical school. In fact, he graduated second in his class at the University of Chicago. Inevitably they assume that a prison doctor is an idiot and a quack. In the old days McClarty would have reached through the phone and ripped this hick doctor’s eyeballs out of his skull, asked him how he liked that for a double-blind study, but now he is happy to hide out in his windowless office behind the three-foot-thick walls of the prison and let some other fucker find the cure for cancer. “Thank you very much, doctor, McClarty finally says, cutting the old geek off in mid sentence.
Emma announces the next patient, Peters, the Moon Pie loving diabetic, then slams the door in parting. A fat man with a jelly-like consistency, Peters is practically bouncing on the examining table. Everything about him is soft and slovenly except his eyes, which are hard and sharp, the eyes of a scavenger ever alert to the scrap beneath the feet of the predators. The eyes of a snitch.
McClarty examines his folder. “Well, Mr. Peters.”
“Hey, Doc.”
“Any ideas why your blood sugar’s up to four hundred?”
“It’s the diabetes, Doc.”
“I guess it wouldn’t have anything to do with that stash of candy found in your cell yesterday?”
“I was holding that stuff for a friend. Honest.”
Another common refrain here in prison, this is a line McClarty remembers fondly from his drug days. It’s what he told his mother the first time she found pot in the pocket of his jeans. The guys inside have employed it endlessly; the gun in the shoe or the knife or stolen television set always belongs to some other guy; they’re just holding it for him. They never cease to profess amazement that the cops, the judge, the prosecutor didn’t believe them, that their own court-appointed lawyers somehow sold them out at the last minute. They are shocked. It’s all a big mistake. Honest. Would I lie to you, Doc? They don’t belong here in prison, and they are eager to tell you why. With McClarty it’s just the opposite. He knows he belongs in here. He dreams about it. It is more real to him than his other life, than Terri’s breasts, than the ailing lawn outside these walls. But somehow, inexplicably, every day they let him walk out the door at the end of his shift. And back at Live Oakes, the guards wave him through the gate inside the walls of that residential oasis as if he really were an upstanding citizen. Of course, technically he is not a criminal. The hospital did not bring charges, in return for his agreement to resign and go into treatment. On the other hand neither the hospital administrators nor anybody else knew that it was he, McClarty, who had shot nurse Tina DeVane full of the Demerol she craved so very dearly less than an hour before she drove her car into the abutment of a bridge.
Terri calls just before lunch to report that the caretaker thinks the brown spots in the lawn are caused by cat urine. “I told him that’s ridiculous, they’re not suddenly peeing any more than they used to — oh, wait, gotta go. Kiss kiss. Don’t forget about the Clausens, at seven. Don’t worry, they’re friends of Bill.” She hangs up before McClarty can tell her he might stop off at Unity Baptist on the way home.