“In your examination room?”
“It’s my examination room.”
“But that seems like a bad idea. Patients will smell it.”
“I spray a little Lysol around.”
“You sure the squirrel had rabies? Could he have just been pissed off about something?”
“Was he frothing at the mouth?”
“Either that or he had been eating whipped cream.”
“And you said he was running about in an erratic manner?”
“I don’t know it was so erratic. He came right for me. He seemed to have a mission.”
“You ever seen a squirrel do this before?”
“Well, no.”
“Did he leave a note? Some indication that it might not have been rabies?”
“That’s funny, Doc.”
“Rabies. That’s what it is. You bring the squirrel’s head in?”
“It’s not in my pocket or anything. Leonard threw the squirrel, still attached to its head, into the trunk of the car. He thought it might be rabid too.”
“Then you’re the only one that doesn’t think so.”
“I don’t want to think so.”
“What we need to do is cut off the squirrel’s head, send it to a lab in Austin, let them do some research, see it’s rabid or not. In the meantime, you could go to the house and wait for symptoms. But I don’t think that’s a good idea. Let me tell you a little story, and let me warn you up front that this one doesn’t have a happy ending. My mother told me this story. In the twenties, when she was a girl, a boy she knew got bit by a raccoon. Kid was playing in the woods, some such thing. I don’t remember exactly. Doesn’t matter. He got bit by this raccoon. He got sick. He couldn’t eat, and he couldn’t drink water. He wanted water, but his body couldn’t take it. The doctor couldn’t do a thing for him. They didn’t have the medicine for rabies we have now. The boy got worse. They ended up tying him to a bed and waiting for him to die, and it was not a pretty thing. Think about it. Watching your son suffer from something like this, and it just goes on and on. Kid got so he didn’t know anybody. Laid there and messed on and wet himself, bit and snapped at them like a wild animal. Chewed off his tongue. The father finally smothered him with a pillow and everybody in the family knew it and didn’t say a goddamn word.”