Walt Bolger had seen patients abandoned to the hospital’s care several times in his nearly forty years at Holt Memorial. Maybe the patient had no family to begin with, or relatives simply stopped coming around when estrangement or dark family secrets exposed an utter lack of interest in their afflicted “loved one.” The families dumped the cost of care on the hospital, which in turn billed the state for as much government assistance as possible. Several balance sheets counted on the infirmed dying sooner than later. Most did.
At the time Walt made his move, the hospital’s B wing, a dreary and crumbling corridor, already hosted two unclaimed patients trapped in perpetual sleep. He convinced himself that if he could slip Larry into a room on the wing, he could fake a file that would disguise his identity.
The only trick would be getting him tucked into a bed. Walt saw a way.
* * *
Almost since the day it opened, the emergency room at Holt Memorial at four o’clock every Sunday morning hosted a swamp of wobbly humans spun loose from what daytime folk considered proper behavior. Even in the best of times, working-class bars in small Wisconsin towns encouraged Saturday night binge drinking that routinely set the standard for an alcohol-abusing nation. The Bush economy had sent the dollar to record lows as the seeds were sown for the economic freefall that would come at the end of the decade. Jobs were going away, and angry and aimless adults suddenly had less money with which to spend more time drinking.
When bar time came, and dizzy, bitter adults were flushed out onto the streets to weave home while dodging their equally bombed children, carnage was as sure as the dawn.
The gamble that Holt City made in building the new hospital had accomplished at least one thing. With the shiny new facility up and running, smaller rural hospitals within forty-five minutes in all directions soon went out of business, taking their emergency rooms with them. Now every carcass pulled from the glass and goo of a drunken car crash, every frowsy party girl whose evening concluded with her tipping over and shattering her skull upon the sidewalk outside her favorite bar, stumbled or was rolled into Holt Memorial’s ER.
Added to this was the growing immigrant and working poor population, which had no choice but to use the emergency room for basic health care. They could be found in the ER throughout the day, waiting for hours to be seen, but it never failed that the direst health crises erupted in the dead of night.
As Walt had gambled, this four a.m. slurry of humanity in the emergency room cleared the way for Lawrence Husted’s return to the hospital he built.
* * *
Larry barely weighed eighty pounds when Walt came for him. With a wheelchair borrowed from the hospital, it was only a slight struggle for Walt to ease Larry from his bed and roll him to the garage, where he laid him on a thick nest of comforters he had stretched out on the backseat of his Cadillac. Even at 3:30 in the morning, it was warm and humid outside; as this was Larry’s first time outdoors since 1985, it was a good night for him to be taken for a ride.
The scrum surrounding the ER entrance was just as Walt needed it to be. The wounded came by ambulance, car, or forms of deliverance they would have no recollection of the next day. Friends and family smoked grumpily out front alongside those who had been treated and released with nowhere to go or no one to take them.
Walt turned off his headlights and drove around back, where the old, abandoned hospital sat silent and spooky. Since 1982, few souls had ventured back here. Overgrown brush in surrounding fields walled off the dead building from the world.
The dark was absolute; Walt grimaced and gasped as he fumbled blindly with Larry, easing him out of the car and into the wheelchair. For one awful moment, the chair began to roll and Larry nearly slipped through his hands to the pavement.
With Larry safely bundled into the wheelchair, Walt rolled him toward the glow of the emergency room entrance. From a safe distance away, figures were already visible in the shadows. They huddled together with a bottle or a smoke; Walt kept moving, careful to not draw their attention. He hoped he was home free when he encountered a young man of about thirty, zipping himself up as he stepped unsteadily from behind a tree.
His clothes were worn and ill-fitting; he looked as if he had gone without a bath for weeks. As he flinched sheepishly at being caught relieving himself, he projected a vulnerability that Walt found encouraging.
“Evening,” Walt said genially.
“Hi,” the man replied. Standing closer, Walt thought he might be in his twenties.
“Everything okay?” the old man asked.
“Yeah,” he said unconvincingly, looking toward the ER. “My girlfriend…” He trailed off worriedly as he lit a cigarette.
“She’s in good hands in there,” Walt said gently. “They’ll take care of her.”
The spindly kid seemed to find some peace with this. He fidgeted as he nodded to Larry, his chin dropped forward onto his chest. “He doesn’t look too good.”
“Yeah,” Walt said with concern. “I need to get him inside.”
He hesitated just slightly, and then produced his wallet.
“I wonder if you’d do something for me,” he said casually as he produced a hundred dollar bill. If Walt had misread this kid, he was about to be mugged.
The kid just stared at the money longingly.
“I need you to roll my friend into the ER,” Walt said. “Once you’re through the doors, there is a row of chairs to the left and then beyond them there’s a corner that is hidden by some plants.
“I need you to park him in that corner. I need you to not be noticed,” Walt said plainly. “Come right back, and this is yours.”
The hundred dollar bill seemed to glow in the predawn darkness. Having lived the hardscrabble life Walt suspected, the kid had probably been in enough dodgy situations in his young life to not question someone else’s crooked scheme. But finding it in such a well-groomed old man at four o’clock in the morning felt like a trap. He studied Walt warily.
“You’ve been in there, right?” Walt asked, gesturing toward the ER. “It’s a madhouse. You’ll be in and out in thirty seconds, and no one is going to give a damn what you’re up to.”
The kid gave Walt one last careful look, and then stepped behind the wheelchair to grasp the handles.
“I’m going to stand right over there,” Walt said firmly, “so I can see you all the way to the front door. Once I lose sight of you, I expect you back here—alone—in no more than a minute.”
The kid swallowed nervously and nodded as he began to push Larry forward.
“Hold on,” Walt whispered sharply, grabbing the kid’s elbow. They both watched as a cop walked out of the ER and pulled out of the parking lot in his squad car. The coast was clear.
“One minute,” Walt repeated, and then moved to watch anxiously as this total stranger took momentary care of the friend he had devoted his life to protecting.