Chapter 7
Hector slouched down in the rigid plastic chair and splayed his legs as if he didn’t give a shit. At least that was the vibe he was trying to put out. In reality, he was more than a little scared. The specter looming in his mind was peeking around corners, making its presence known. He’d tried several times on the ride over to quell his damning thoughts, but they had refused to leave him alone. They had tenterhooks, barbs that sunk in. Claws.
[Rabies]
That’s what it boiled down to: fuckin’ rabies. Even while telling himself all of yesterday afternoon and evening that the scratches on his back were probably nothing (How the hell am I supposed to know where they came from? I was piss-assed drunk, passed clean out in my Jeep, for the love of Jesus.), the intermittent bouts of nervous diarrhea had said otherwise.
[Don’t forget about the bite marks.]
Shut the fuck up!! Hector screamed at his subconscious. He jerked upright in his chair and sneered at the other occupants of the waiting room. Two seats to his right, his mother sat reading a cheap, frayed paperback, her legs tautly crossed—so much so that Hector glimpsed the faint, blue rivers of veins running down her left thigh and calf, ending somewhere below the sock line. No wonder the whole town thinks you’re a slut. What are you wearing tomorrow, Ma? Daisy Dukes?
Debbie licked the middle finger of her right hand and turned the page. Hector saw the muscular, shirtless beefcake printed on the cover and looked away.
Opposite them, along another bank of connected, plastic seats, the other occupant of the Greenville Emergency Clinic waiting room wheezed thinly into a yellow silk handkerchief, which he palmed over his nose and mouth. Unabashedly the sick, sick man leered at Debbie Graham’s restless legs. Now, not only were they crossed, but the right one was pumping a jackrabbit’s pulse over the left, approaching, but not quite reaching, Hector’s own frantic heartbeat.
Hector squinted at the old man squinting at his mother. If eyes could shoot, Hector was sending gramps the ocular equivalent of sustained machine gun fire. But the man failed to notice the fat kid shooting him with his eyes, for he was busy firing his own gun, so to speak, and was using heavier artillery. Missiles, perhaps.
[It foamed at the mouth, remember? It writhed on the ground, because you threw a spark plug and hit its head…]
SHUT UP!!! SHUT UP!!! SHUT UP!!!
[Then when you got home, you had to clean up your puke. That’s when you noticed the hair…]
SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! GODDAMN IT!!! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
Hector got up and began walking circles around the quiet room. Debbie set the book on her knee, looked up. "What’s wrong, sweetheart?"
Hector glanced first at the receptionist’s silhouette in the frosted glass window, then at the dying geriatric ogling his mother’s legs. He replied with a grunt and a pitiful "I wanna go home" before plopping back down in his seat.
Sotto voce, Debbie replied, "We’re not going anywhere until we see the doctor." Then, grabbing her son’s arm, pulling him close, she whispered loudly into his left ear. "Don’t you dare make a scene here, you hear me? You’re going to sit in that chair and act like a gentleman till the nurse calls us in." She was about to let go of his arm, when she pulled him closer still. "We’ve got to get you checked out. Everything will turn out fine—just watch."
But did she really believe that? No, she didn’t. She was just as scared as Hector—no, more scared. She was his mother, and it was her duty to look out for her son, to worry about him and to worry for him. In this case, though, she was terrified. It was Sunday afternoon. The news of what was going on on Peach Street had reached her earlier that morning. Even in the boonies, news travels fast. Her mother had called it hearing such and such "through the grapevine." Any way it was put, it added up to the same: a bunch of yokels with too much time on their hands and not enough discretion to get to the truth behind a matter before passing it along as such.
Yet this didn’t prevent her from yanking Hector out of bed at ten a.m., forcing him to get dressed (those hideous long scratches still bright red on his back) and pushing him—no easy task—outside and into the idling Monte Carlo.
"Hold on, Ma. I gotta feed Lola," he had said.
"You can feed her when we get back," she’d responded, guiding him into the passenger’s seat.
"But—"
She’d slammed the door shut before he could finish his protest.
They took Highway 71 to Greenville. If Hector was aware of this, he didn’t show it as he peeled the foil off a package of Pop-Tarts and greedily inhaled the blueberry pastries. Crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and down the front of his shirt, but he didn’t care. He was mostly asleep anyhow, the scratches and bites on his back temporarily forgotten. The last thing Hector remembered thinking before fully waking was that he needed a glass of milk to chase the Pop-Tarts with. His mouth was so dry.
Then he saw it. And that was when Hector completely lost it for the first time.
The strange part was that it was a tree that spurred his reaction, not the dog. How he had recognized a tree—just a plain, run-of-the-mill slash pine on the edge of a forest—he didn’t know. There must have been something unique about that particular pine (a slight bend in the trunk or a bare patch in the limbs), something glaring enough to stir him from his waking dream and reenter the nightmare of reality. Seeing that special tree, he immediately knew what lay on the asphalt past the curve, just out of view.
At once, Hector slammed his fists on the dashboard and let out a high-pitched girl’s scream. The still-moving car wobbled on its cushion of shocks.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
That was what it sounded like, anyway. His wail grew so shrill and out of control that it broke in a breathy chirp.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
Debbie stomped on the brakes. A Kleenex box smacked the back of her head as the car skidded onto the shoulder. When she turned to her son, he was struggling to escape through the locked door. He squirmed and thrashed and pulled at the chrome door handle until it broke off in his hand.
"Hector! What’s wrong?"
She was stunned, paralyzed. Not knowing what to do but knowing she had to do something, she tried moving her arm (to do what, she wasn’t sure), and after a delay it did move, but it moved with the jerkiness of a silent movie actress.
"I WANNA GO HOME!!! NOWWWW!!!"
"HECTOR!" Somehow she found a way to lower her hand onto his shoulder. The gesture seemed to calm him somewhat, for his gasps subsided and his thrashing ceased. Hector covered his eyes with his hands and planted his elbows on his knees. In the post-tantrum car, the only sounds were the short, irregular jags of Hector’s labored breathing. Openmouthed, Debbie stared at him. She just didn’t know what to do. Finally, she reached around for his right shoulder and lugged his gigantic mass of humanity over to her significantly smaller mass of humanity and rocked it back and forth. The way she hugged him, he could have been five.
When she was semi-sure he wouldn’t detonate again anytime soon, she pulled the Monte Carlo back onto the road. Not a single car had passed while they had been parked. Highway 71 in southern Alabama had to be the least used thoroughfare in North America, and as far as Hector and Debbie were concerned (especially Debbie), it could stay that way forever. And if people had driven by and seen Hector acting the way he had been acting, what would they have thought? That she had no control over him, that’s what. And, God help her, it would have been the truth. I have failed so much as a parent, she thought for the first time that day but hardly for the first time in her life. Yet something else, other than her failures, knocked around inside her head as she winded the long, graceful curve in the road. Then as the adrenaline triggered by Hector’s outburst began disintegrating into trillions of smaller molecules, it finally hit her. It hit her hard, a realization and dread unlike any other she had experienced in her thirty-six years on the planet:
Rabies.
She shook her head defiantly. No way. Too so
on. It doesn’t show up that fast. It takes weeks, sometimes months—I read that somewhere. Before she could prepare for its punch, a second round of adrenaline exploded through her body, scrambling her stomach and shooting pillars of ice down her arms and legs. To keep from blacking out, she tightened her grip on the steering wheel. Her knuckles went white; the tendons in the backs of her hands popped out. Wincing, she felt a slickness came over her palm. Looking down, she saw a red line trickle down the left side of the steering wheel. She didn’t mind the blood. Nor did she care about the pain. She had been through worse.
She then looked up and glimpsed the ragged hide spread across the empty two-lane road. Tire tracks zigzagged over and through the carcass. She tried thinking of the whole mess as spilled oil—just a darker black on an already black road.
"Animals," she whispered, swerving around the lumps.
Hector didn’t see it. He couldn’t. His hands were still over his eyes, his elbows still on his knees.