The Losers by David Eddings Page B

leg.”
    “There’s a difference?” Raphael had asked.
    “You bet your sweet ass there is, Taylor.”
    He considered it now. He could put it into the future since there was no way he could go out and wade around in knee-deep snow. It seemed that it would be a great deal of trouble, and he got around well enough to get by. But in his mind he could hear Quillian’s contemptuous verdict, “Cripple,” and he set his jaw. He was damned if he’d accept that. He decided that he would look up a therapist and start work again—as soon as the snow was gone.
    Most of the time he sat and watched Crazy Charlie next door. He had no desire to know the man’s real name or background. His imagination had provided, along with the nickname, a background, a personal history, far richer than mundane reality could ever have been. Crazy Charlie had obviously once been a somebody—nobody could have gotten that crazy without a certain amount of inspiration. Raphael tried to imagine the kind of pressures that might drive a man to take refuge in the demon-haunted jungles of insanity, and he continued to struggle with the problem of the rituals. There was a haunting kind of justification for each of them, the shaving of the head and face, the avoidance of a certain spot on the floor, the peculiar eating habits, and all the rest. Raphael felt that if he could just make his mind passive enough and merely watch as Charlie expended his days in those ritual acts, sooner or later it would all click together and he would be able to see the logic that linked them all together and, behind that logic, the single thing that had driven poor Charlie mad.
    It was enough during those snowy days to sit where it was warm and secure, to listen to music and the scanner with an open book in front of him on the table, and to watch Crazy Charlie. It kept his mind occupied enough to prevent a sudden upsurge of memories. It was very important not to have memories, but simply to live in endless now. Memories were the little knives that could cut him to pieces and the little axes that could chop his orderly existence into rubble and engulf him in a howling, grieving, despairing madness that would make the antics of Crazy Charlie appear to be profound-est sanity by comparison.
    In time the snow disappeared. It did not, as it all too frequently does, linger in sodden, stubborn, dirty-white patches in yards and on sidewalks, but rather was cut away in a single night by a warm, wet chinook wind.
    There were physical therapists listed in Raphael’s phone book, but most of them accepted patients by medical referral only, so he called and made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.
    It was raw and windy on the day of his appointment, and Raphael turned up the collar of his coat as he waited for the bus. A burly old man strode past, his face grimly determined. He walked very fast, as if he had an important engagement somewhere. Raphael wondered what could be of such significance to a man of that age.
    The receptionist at the doctor’s office was a motherly sort of lady, and she asked the usual questions, took the name of Raphael’s insurance company, and finally raised a point Raphael had not considered. “You’re a resident of this state, aren’t you, Mr. Taylor?” she asked him. She had beautiful silver-white hair and a down-to-earth sort of face.
    “I think so,” Raphael replied. “I was bom in Port Angeles. I was going to college in Oregon when the accident happened, though.”
    “I’m sure that doesn’t change your residency. Most people who come to see the doctor are on one of the social programs. As a matter of fact I think there are all kinds of programs you’re eligible for. I know a few of the people at various agencies. Would you like to have me call around for you?”
    “I hadn’t even thought about that,” he admitted.
    “You’re a taxpayer, Mr. Taylor. You’re entitled.”
    He laughed. “The state didn’t make all that much in taxes from