The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [110]
“I got phlegm,” the Bat informed me. He looked around my apartment. Then he sat on a chair and gave me a look in which cheerfulness and meanness were mixed equally. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Snows get into my lung cavities and I can’t get ’em out.” The coughing started up one more time. When he stopped, he said, “It’s bad. Don’t really know what it is. Don’t want to know.”
“You should see a doctor,” I said.
“You think so? All they have is bad news and bills you can’t pay. No, I’d rather see myself in hell first,” he told me. He tried to lean back, and when that didn’t work, he leaned forward. He smiled at me. “Here, you want this beer for your party?” He handed me the tallboy and reached into his shirt for a cigarette, which he proceeded to light. “You want to know what I do? For the lungs?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I go to a healer. We got this healer in our church. He lays his hands on me.”
“Does it help?”
“Wish I knew. I couldn’t say. I’m neither dead nor alive. You got an ashtray?”
I brought over a dish I kept under the sink and handed it to him. “There.”
“Thank you,” he said, fingering the ashtray and then peering at me. “I reckonized it. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to get to know you. A little, anyways. You don’t know me. For like an example, you don’ know I’m a Christian man. Go to a church, go to a healer.” He crossed his arms, holding the cigarette, and touched his forehead. I was watching the snow on his cap and his shoes. I was waiting for it to melt.
“No, I knew that. The church part.”
“How come?” He looked at me, squinting his eyes.
“Oscar told me.”
He shook his head, and water dripped down from his hair, but the snow remained on his shoes. He laughed. “I was born in Kentucky where we had a healer living on the same street. Old woman named Gladys — there was a scary and amazing power she had, so I’ve always believed in it more than medicine. She happened to be a great-aunt of mine. She called me Little Mac.”
“Like the hamburger.”
“Hunh?”
“You know. The Big Mac.”
“Oh, right.” He turned his eyes upon my apartment. He looked long and hard at the window. “Did you ever happen to come to Jesus yourself?”
“No, actually, he came to me. At a party. He asked me for directions.”
He stared at me for several moments. He stood up, went to the window, then sat down again. “That’s blasphemy. Well, I forgive it. Where’s your parents that you said was coming?” He scratched at a scar above his left eye. I couldn’t help it: I was watching him closely.
“They’re late.”
“I can see that. It must be they had trouble on the road. Weather reports give, I dunno, five-six-seven inches of snow.”
He threw me a look, the very same one I saw him give me when I walked past him out of Oscar’s bedroom into the hallway. I couldn’t say for sure, but I thought he was calculating his chances.
“Now you tell me about yourself,” the Bat said. “Let me hear your story. I’d like to hear that, where you come from and everything.”
I talked for ten minutes, yakking away, hoping my parents would arrive to get me out of this mess. But they didn’t come and didn’t come, and meanwhile, in the middle of my life story, the Bat went to the refrigerator and found himself a beer, not the tallboy he had bought but another one, which he opened and drank in about five seconds. I remembered that he wasn’t supposed to drink, that he had sworn it off and was supposed to be clean. Then he opened another beer and brought it over to his personal chair. He was, like, proportionating me all over again, his eyes like lizards crawling up and down my arms and legs. The phone rang once more and I ran to answer it. It was my dad, calling from his car phone, saying the axle was bent and they couldn’t drive it, seeing as how the car had gone into the ditch and the front end was broken open. I didn’t want to sound desperate so I just went uh-huh, uh-huh. My dad