How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,77
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 threatened to reach through the phone and rip this hick doctor's eyeballs out of his skull, ask him how he liked that for a double-blind study, but now he is content to hide out in his windowless office behind these three-foot-thick walls and let some other fucker find the cure for cancer. “Thank you very much, Doctor,” McClarty finally says, cutting the old geek off in midsentence.
Emma announces the next patient, Peters, the MoonPie-loving diabetic, then slams the door in parting. A fat man with a jellylike 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 this morning?”
“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 shoes or the knife or the 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're 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 and 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 Marcia De-Vane full of the Demerol she craved so very dearly less than an hour before she drove her car into the abutment of the bridge.
Terri calls just before lunch to report that the caretaker thinks the brown spots on 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.
Toward the end of the day, McClarty goes over to Block D to check the progress of several minor complaints. He is buzzed into the block by Santiago. “Hey, Doc, what you think about Aikman straining his ankle? Your Cowboys, they gonna be hurtin' till he come back.” Santiago labors cheerfully under the impression that McClarty is a big Dallas Cowboys fan, a notion that apparently developed after the doctor mumbled something to the effect that he really didn't pay much attention to the Oilers. McClarty has never followed sports, doesn't know Cowboys from Indians, but he is happy enough to play along, amused to find himself at this relatively late stage in life assigned to a team, especially after he heard the Cowboys referred to on television as “America's team.” Like eating at McDonald's, it makes him feel as if he were a fully vested member of the republic.
“Hey, Doc—that strain? That, like, a serious thing?”
“Could be,” McClarty says, able at last to offer a genuine opinion on his team. “A sprain could put him out for weeks.”