The Hunt Club (18 page)

He sat on a roller chair at the far end of the room, in front of him a wall lit up, clipped all the way across X ray after X ray. Then he turned, still in the chair, rolled toward us.

“Brother Cray,” Unc said, and put out his hand.

“Another membership drive?” Cray said, and shook Unc’s hand hard. “You know I won’t come back to your godforsaken Club Med for the blueblood bubba set. I don’t work at the medical university
anymore. Got my own digs now, got my own practice. Gave up that teaching stuff when I gave up my membership.”

He stood, took the cigar out, slapped Unc’s shoulder. “Good to see you, Leland.” He was heavy with black hair disappearing on him, a beard, round wire-rimmed glasses, and it seemed strange to see him here, when the only place I’d ever seen him was out to Hungry Neck, him in his camos and orange cap like everybody else.

“You too,” Unc said. “Though it looks like you been puttin’ on a few since last you been down.”

He jabbed at Cray’s middle, made him flinch.

“That’s what happens,” he said, sitting back down and rolling himself back to the lighted wall, “when you don’t get out and exercise regular like I used to down to Hungry Neck Hunt Club.” He reached into his lab coat, pulled out a little thing looked like a monocular, pressed it up against one of the X rays. “What I need’s a strict regimen like the one I used to get out your way: bacon and eggs before daylight, then piling into a pickup, then hopping out, sitting on a stump shivering my butt off, then picked up three hours later for a lunch of fried chicken and biscuits and gravy.” He brought the thing down, moved to the next one. “Used to break a sweat just looking at those piles of bacon.” Then he wheeled around to us again, said, “But enough about me. Tell me, what do
you
think of me?”

“I think we miss you down there.”

“Maybe
you
do,” he said, and now he scribbled something on the clipboard, looked up at the next X ray down. “But I know nobody else does. Except maybe for Tonto here. The silent one.”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, went back to scribbling.

“You’re the only one pulled in a fourteen-pointer in nine years,” I said. “That counts in my book.”

I looked to Unc, wanted to see if it’d been all right for me to talk to the man, if I hadn’t disobeyed in this.

He was smiling at me, shaking his head.

“My bon voyage,” Cray said. “My farewell performance. And do you think one of those turds could come up and congratulate me?
Not on your life.” He looked at another X ray, scribbled, then at another. “And now you want me to be a mole.”

“A what?” Unc said. He hadn’t moved. I looked around for chairs, saw none. This was his room, and his only, I figured. I leaned against the doorjamb.

“A mole,” he said. “Don’t you read?”

“Haven’t been able to get my hands on anything good lately,” Unc said.

Cray laughed again, said, “That’s a bad one. But a mole. Like in those John le Carré books. A mole is somebody on the inside willing to give info so long as nobody knows who he is.”

He turned, took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned back, all in the near dark of the room, so that I wasn’t quite sure whether he was smiling or not, silhouetted by the light behind him.

“Then I guess you’re a mole,” Unc said.

“Yes, I am,” he said, and now he put his hands behind his head. He bit down on the cigar, made it angle up, like in that picture of FDR. “And do you know why it doesn’t bother me a bit to be a mole?”

“Why?” Unc said.

“Because of what I delightfully refer to as the barium ceiling.” He looked from Unc to me to Unc again. “You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, that point on the corporate ladder of American business beyond which women can’t go? The barium ceiling is the point on the ladder of corporate medicine beyond which the radiologist cannot go. I found it over at the medical university, and realized with that fourteen-point buck and the fact not a single one of those turds even congratulated me that I’d met it. No hard feelings, Leland, but the whole reason I joined Hungry Neck in the first place was because everybody of any importance on the upper echelon at the medical university was a member, and I had my eye on the prize, so to speak: a seat on the board at some point. But no. A radiologist is not a real doctor, see? A radiologist looks at films all day, nothing more than a glorified copyboy to everyone on the board over there, no matter it took me eight years past med school to learn all I needed to learn
about MRI and nuclear and all else. That doesn’t matter. What matters is do you have a monogrammed scalpel and a striped bow tie? It doesn’t matter you turn in billable accounts of over a million a year for eleven years straight, keep all those board members in their Lexi—is that plural for Lexus?—and when I took out that fourteen-pointer and you and Tonto were the only ones put up a fuss over there, I decided then and there to bail. Tendered my resignation January third from the South Carolina Medical University, surrendered my tenured associate professorship. And here we are.”

He pulled the cigar from his mouth, spread his arms wide, looked at the place, then gave himself a spin in the chair. “Now what gets billed gets paid to me.”

He stood then, leaned against the counter, crossed his arms. “And the irony of it all is the sword of Damocles over at the Med U is about to fall. That fine little hair is raggedy as all getout, frizzed to the max, and it’s about to fall. And do you know who it’s about to fall on?”

“Who?” Unc said. He was smiling, nodding, eating this up. He hadn’t even had to run a thing up the flagpole.

“It’s about to fall on the board itself. Because there’s been an investigation going on for over two years now, an investigation into the ethics and finances of the University Medical Consortium, which is about to get nasty, because now there’s been a senate committee set up in Columbia to explore the possibility that things stink in Charleston. Which they do.”

Cray turned to the wall, found on the desktop a Magic Marker, and started drawing, right onto the glass. “It’s like this,” he said, and drew a triangle. He stopped, took a step back from it, took the cigar from his mouth, put it back in. “No,” he said, “it’s like this,” and he rubbed out the triangle with his lab-coat sleeve, drew a square. “No, it’s not like that either,” he said, and then Unc cut in.

“Just say it, brother. We’re listening.”

Cray turned. His face’d gone blank, and it looked for a moment like he didn’t recognize us. He let out a breath, then sat down, elbows on his knees, hands loose between his legs.

“It’s not like I’m holding a grudge or anything,” he said, and looked up at Unc. “It’s just that I hate the sons of bitches. That whole crew.”

He looked at me, took the cigar out. “You see the news the other night, that footage they ran about Charles Middleton Simons?”

I nodded. Of course I did. I’d watched it with the man’s wife.

“That whole head table,” he said, and pointed the cigar at me. “That whole crew there is what it’s about. Every one of them sons of bitches is about to fall flat on his ass and out of money, or at least out of money like they’ve been used to making.”

“How’s that?” Unc asked. His head was tilted now, him listening. He’d sensed something in Cray now, this turn. Something was coming.

Cray took a deep breath, put his hands on his knees. “It works like this: you join the faculty at the medical university, you have to join the University Medical Consortium. But being on the faculty at a medical university isn’t like being on one at a regular school. You don’t go in, talk to your class, and go home. No, you’re a doctor, and your students are interns following you around while you handle your patients. And those patients, like everybody else, have to pay. Simple as that. They pay. To be precise, their insurance pays, or Uncle Sam, one.” He sighed again, shook his head. “And they pay the University Medical Consortium. That’s who takes in the money. My million-plus a year for eleven years. Reading films and billing over a million a year, all billed to the consortium.”

He smiled, took out that cigar again, looked at it. “Reason I never light these up is because this way I get all the pleasure of smoking a cigar, without any of the pleasure of smoking a cigar.” He looked up at me, smiled. “Figure that one out.”

I glanced at Unc, who stood frozen, leaned toward him just the slightest way. “Keep going,” he said.

“Don’t worry.” He tossed the cigar into a wastebasket beneath the desk, reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out another. “But the thing of it is, you’re still a faculty member. And you’re still on salary. Assistant professor, associate, full. You get your raises, everybody
gets a bonus. When I quit I was pulling in a hundred fifty a year, got a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus.”

“Sounds like plenty to me,” I said, and as soon as I’d said it I was sorry. Unc turned toward me, his mouth closed tight: this was the kind of talk he didn’t want me giving.

Cray looked up at me, gave a single
ha
, shook his head. “Greed is an ugly thing, I’m here to tell you, Tonto. You make that much, and you’re right, you ought to be happy. You ought to. But then. Then you see the big dogs on the porch. Those boys—that whole head table, Carter Campbell, Buddy Rose, Franklin Cooper, Trey Morrison, Judd Bishop, Cleve Ravenel, Trey Royall—all those boys are pulling down around eight hundred grand a year. All of it because they’re the directors of the medical university.
And
because they’re the directors of the University Medical Consortium.” He paused, shook his head. “Coming and going they’re getting it. On salary, and senior partners in an association you got no choice but to join if you want to be employed at the medical university. And it’s all about to fall. The senate committee starts its hearings, and the boys up in Columbia find out there’s this skimming of millions to a handful of bluebloods, and that sword is going to fall. Something’s rotten in Charleston.” He looked up at Unc. “What it looks like to me, too, if you want my considered and professional opinion, is that Hungry Neck Hunt Club’s very own Charles Middleton Simons has already taken his fall. For what reason I’m not sure, and probably not as he’d envisioned it might occur. But he’s taken it. He was in the thick of that gang. Don’t forget,” he said, and turned to me, “that file footage was of a dinner honoring the late Doc Simons himself, everybody at that head table a member of the consortium.”

He looked back at the lighted wall, at the square he’d drawn there. “And now here I am, pulling down two-fifty a year, but I get weekends free and I’m my own boss.” He reached to the desktop, pushed a button there, and the row of X rays started up, the lighted wall rolling into the wall itself, and now here came another row of X rays from beneath, already clipped into place. “No barium ceiling here,” he said. “Sky’s the limit!”

He pulled out the monocular, said, “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” and leaned up against the first row. “Too bad I’m here till eleven most nights, and my daughter is going to Yale without a scholarship, and I’m still paying off my own student loans, and my lovely wife won’t let me hang a set of fourteen-point antlers in the house, afraid they might carry Lyme disease, no matter how much I try to dissuade her of this ill-founded fear. And yes, we too have a Lexus. Otherwise I’d join you boys on whatever expedition you’re on. Whatever fact-finding mission you’re on.” He leaned away from the X ray, looked at me, then Unc. “Ahh, greed,” he said. “It’s an invigorating but lonely drug.” He put the monocular to the next X ray, leaned in.

I pushed myself away from the doorjamb, went to Unc, hooked my arm in his. Cray was done.

But Unc wouldn’t move, only stood there, facing Cray, leaned in just like he had for the whole thing. Listening.

He turned to me, on his face the same look as Cray’d had when he’d turned from his drawings: it seemed he didn’t know me, as though the touch of me on his arm were something brand-new, and he was scared.

And I was, too. Mom was out there.

“Unc,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

He swallowed, took a breath, and reached, touched my cheek with the back of his fingers, in his fist the stick. It was next to nothing, that touch, and I could smell the wood of the stick in just that second. Then his hand was down. “Yes,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

He was struck by this all, I could see. Struck by something I wasn’t able to see. Not yet.

He started for the door, and I turned, looked back at Cray, close up on the screen. I said, “Thank you, doc.”

“Yes,” Unc said, though quieter. He paused, half-turned to Cray, but I could see he wasn’t thinking on manners, on thanks and goodbye. “Thank you, Brother Cray. You have been of the utmost help.”

“Think nothing of it,” he said, still with his eye to the screen. I
watched him a moment longer, wondered if he’d look at us, wave, something. But he didn’t.

And Unc was already gone, out to the front office.

I caught up with him in the waiting room, and we headed out the front door. The sign,
IMAGING NETWORK SERVICES
and the man lying flat inside a circle, was lit now, the sun down and gone, the sky above us blue and purple and orange. No stars yet.