Chapter 12
THREE DAYS LATER BELLE STOPPED AT SARAH'S PLACE.
Sarah was surprised to see her but she invited her in. Belle stood by the door.
"Are you glad to see me?"
"Well, sure."
"I brought a bottle of gin."
"Yeah?"
"Ken is in the hospital, you know. He didn't run out on me after all. That terrible man you went to bed with threw him out a window."
"Is that so. He never should have tried anything with that one. That was one mean man."
"Poor Ken. I haven't even been to see him, though. After the other night I don't think that I want to have any boy friends, Sarah. The other way is ... better."
Sarah sighed. She took a cigarette from the table and lighted it. Belle put the cheap gin down. Sarah was considering what to say. She blew smoke.
"Belle...."
"Aren't you glad to see me?"
"Honey, I'm not that way."
"I don't understand...."
"I'm not a Lesbian!"
"But, the other night...."
"Sure, once in a while. That was fun. It's something different for a change. Neither one of us had a man to sleep with and that was something to do. But that's as far as it goes. I never would have started with you if I thought you were going to like that so well. You better go back to Fee."
Belle looked startled, and said nothing. She bit her lip.
"I'm sorry, honey. You can't stay here now, though. A friend of mine is coming around. A man."
"I didn't understand."
"Sure. It was my fault."
Belle went to the door. Sarah brought the bottle of gin and gave it to her. She smiled and Belle smiled sadly back. Then Belle left. Sarah shook her head. I should have known better, she thought. You can't go pulling that stuff with a stupid girl like Belle. She just didn't understand.
It was fun, though, Sarah thought.
And she sat down to wait for the man who was going to go to bed with her.
Belle was confused. She walked around for a while trying to figure out what she wanted to do. After a while she shrugged. No setback bothered Belle for very long.
She went to the hospital.
When they had brought Ken Fee in the night nurse thought that he had been hit by a car. That was why she let him in. If she had known that it was not an insurance case she would never have admitted him without proof that he was wealthy, because that's how hospitals are. And if he had looked any worse she wouldn't have admitted him because she would have thought that he might die and nurses know that hospitals are not the place to die in. They are too busy to bother with death.
But Ken fooled them, by looking as though he would live but had been run over by an insured driver, and so he was in the hospital.
He was in a ward with twenty other people. His leg was in a cast and his ribs were taped. Belle came in and looked around and saw him in the far corner of the room. She walked down to him. One or two of the patients whistled at her, and she smiled and swung her hips a little more.
"Where you been?" Fee asked.
"Gee, I just found out where you were."
"Yeah?"
"I brought you a present," she said.
She offered him the gin. He snatched it greedily and hid it beneath the covers. He looked around to make sure that the nurse hadn't seen. The man in the next bed had been brought a bottle of brandy the day before and the nurse had seen it and confiscated it. The man had been very dejected. The nurse, a bit later, had been very drunk. She had been so drunk that she gave him the wrong injection and he died. So everyone knew that it was a very bad thing to sneak alcohol into the hospital.
Belle sat on the edge of the bed. A television was blaring in the corner, keeping all the sick patients from resting and the well patients from contentment. But the nurse was watching it. Fee reached out and pulled the curtains around his bed closed so that they could have some privacy.
"How are you?"
"I'll live. It was a trap. He had seven friends waiting and they got me. I put up a fight but I couldn't take all seven of them."
That wasn't quite how Belle had heard it, but she figured it wasn't worth mentioning.
"When can you get out of here?"
"Pretty soon. I'll have to wear this cast for quite a while though. Until my leg heals up. I'll have to have the leg massaged and things, too."
"I'll massage it for you," Belle said, feeling needed. It was nice to feel needed now that Sarah had rejected her. She reached beneath the covers and started to massage his leg. But, since there was a cast on it, she couldn't massage very effectively. She let her hand move along his leg, to where there was no cast. She was able to massage much more effectively, but since there were no broken bones there it did little good. Fee reached out and took her hand and guided her to where massage could still be effective. But he didn't guide her close enough. She began to massage the gin bottle. Her eyes widened.
"Oh," she said. "Isn't it wonderful what hospitals can do for a man nowadays."
"That's the bottle."
"Oh," she said. She sounded disappointed. She continued to rub the bottle, pretending that he had had some wonderful plastic surgery. But he took her hand away and placed that again. She rubbed obediently in small circles. Her hand moved and he jumped a little beneath the sheets. Belle frowned, comparing him to the bottle of gin. Massage, she had been told, could do wonders for one.
After a while she reached with her other hand and placed both on him. Fee began to squirm desperately. His hands dug and twisted in the bedclothes. He slobbered a little. Belle caressed him and just as his mind broke free of consciousness, the nurse stood glaring at them.
The nurse pulled the covers off. The proof of their guilt was evident. So was the gin bottle, and that was more important. The nurse took the bottle and Belle to her office. She was going to have Belle arrester!, but first she thought she had better make sure that it really was gin.
She took a sip.
"Tastes like gin," she said.
She took a swallow to make sure.
"Gin," she said.
She took a gulp. Belle waited nervously. It took the nurse an hour to make sure that no gin was left in the hospital and by then she had forgotten why she was going to have Belle arrested. She called the police but the only charge that she could think of was entering a hospital without hospitalization insurance. The police agreed that this was serious, but said that it was not up to them. So the nurse had to let Belle go. Belle had nowhere to go but couldn't stay in the hospital and so she went out and wandered around, wondering what she was going to do until Ken Fee was released from the hospital.
Later she got picked up by a man with glasses who needed to be mothered, and that was all right.
Fee lay, ginless but satiated, in his hospital bed. The nurse was much too drunk to come and change the sheets. She had fallen asleep in the operating theater. Later a doctor came in and took her appendix out. The operation was a success but the patient who was supposed to have his appendix taken out died in his room. The doctor didn't like that because he didn't get paid. He tried to make the nurse pay for having her appendix out but she wouldn't. Then they found out that the nurse did not have hospitalization insurance and they fired her and black-listed her from every hospital around the country. She couldn't get a job nursing and so she had to become a hustler. But, as it turned out, she was suited better for this, and she never regretted the change.
All this was later, however. After Fee got out of the hospital. In the meantime he lay there and waited to be released and planned his revenge on Peter Trask. He was going to tell Max Arnold what had happened. He knew that Max would send his boys around to avenge him. Fee smiled happily as he thought of what they would do to Trask. The first thing he did when he got out, even before he looked for Belle, was to pay a call on Max Arnold in The Golden Parrot.
Arnold looked rather glum, but Fee didn't notice this. He asked Max if he would have Trask beaten. Arnold looked at him peculiarly.
"I know that you don't let anyone mess with your boys and get away with it!" Fee said.
And Arnold, who had no one left to beat Fee up, sighed and gave him a drink.