The Road to Wellville (74 page)

Charlie had no objections. He had nowhere to go and he was in no hurry to get there. He wouldn’t have refused a bite to eat, but the elixir in the bottle had quieted his stomach even as it salved his wounds and stuffed cotton into his skull. He would drink, drink till he passed out. He settled himself down in the weeds. “What did you say this stuff was, anyway?” he asked, squinting at the label.

George stood over him now, ragged against the backlit sky. The hair stood out wildly from the dark globe of his head, his coattails hung in tatters. He looked grim, old, older than Charlie, older than anyone. “Read the label,” he said, and he was already moving, already in action, off to do whatever it was he had to do to bid his proper adieus to Foodtown, U.S.A.—Charlie didn’t ask, didn’t want to know—but he came back a step and paused a moment on the edge of the darkness to add, “Biggest fraud going. They get a buck a bottle for that crap, can you believe it?” And the shadows swallowed him and he was gone.

Charlie propped the bottle on his chest and studied the label:
Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound
, it read,
A Sure Cure for Prolapsis Uteri and all Female Weaknesses
. He was thunderstruck. Stunned and amazed (or at least as stunned and amazed as a three-quarters-inebriated ex-tycoon pursued by the law and wearing a freshly separated and matching
pair of steel bracelets could expect to be). He’d been drinking patent medicine for the better part of the past hour and never even suspected it, but for the faint rooty taste of the stuff, a taste no worse or better than the intimation of charred oak you got from a good Kentucky bourbon.
Contains 15 Percent Alcohol
, he read, tipping back the bottle for another taste.
This Is Added Solely as a Solvent and Preservative
.

Yes. Well. Sure it is. He sipped again. Thirty proof and they floated the stuff on the market as a female remedy—and got a buck a bottle for it to boot. Now there was genius, he thought, as Venus showed herself in the east and the sky roiled to a deep quickening cobalt; there was genius on the order of the memory tablets. He took another long meditative pull at the bottle as night closed in around him, warm as a blanket, and somewhere between the moment his lips locked round the glass aperture and the hot certain stuff relit the hearth in his stomach, he experienced a moment of grace.

Per-To
, he said to himself, and he said it aloud.
The Perfect Tonic
. Celery-impregnated, of course. He wondered if he could call it “peptonized,” too, wondered briefly what “peptonized” even meant, and then dismissed it. Well, all right, maybe it wasn’t peptonized—he’d come up with something else, something even better. It still Made Active Blood, didn’t it? And why settle for thirty proof when it could be sixty—hell, eighty?
Per-To
. He liked the sound of it—it was catchy, unique. Almost irresistible.

Later, when the insects had taken possession of the night and all the familiar stars and constellations lay stretched out before him like jewels in a studded tapestry, the first distant rocket shot out into the nullity trailing a plume of gold. It went high, higher than he thought it could ever go, arcing over the sky like a lash of flame, and when it died, another followed in its path, and then another, and another.

   
Chapter 10   

A
s the shadows lengthened across the South Lawn and the voices of his patients and staff, unified in song, drifted to him through the open window, Dr. Kellogg sat at his desk amidst the usual blizzard of papers, disposing of several small matters he didn’t want to put off till after the holiday. He was no stick-in-the-mud—earlier, he’d led the Sanitarium Marching Band twice round the grounds, pumping a vigorous baton to the brassy thump of “El Capitan,” and he’d inaugurated the picnic supper by tossing the first Protose steak on the outdoor grill while his immaculate chefs looked on and nearly two thousand patients, staffers and townspeople cheered—but time was money, and life, no matter how physiologic, was short. He was taking a brief hiatus from the festivities, that was all, accomplishing something, if only for an hour.

At nightfall, when the sky had gone fully dark, and not a moment before, he planned to meet Ella, Clara and the eight children still remaining at the Res for the fireworks display (child rearing had been a devotion of his earlier days; as he grew now into his middle years, he felt no qualms about reducing the number of youngsters in the house, along with the subdued yet omnipresent level of excitation, noise and dirt they inevitably brought with them). He was looking forward to it.
Fireworks. How he did love fireworks. Though Decoration Day was hardly his favorite holiday, never having been a military man himself (though you couldn’t begin to count the generals, admirals and even secretaries of war he’d numbered among his intimates), the occasion provided him with a marvelous excuse to light up the sky over Battle Creek with a display second to none.

He worked on, his concentration unflagging. He prided himself on his ability to shut out the world no matter where he was, be it in a rattling second-class compartment in Gibraltar or a dhow in the Gulf of Oman, and focus on the matter at hand. Still, he couldn’t resist tapping his foot in rhythmic sympathy with “Mother Was a Lady,” which the two-thousand-voice chorus was even now bringing to a stirring close, and when they launched into “Daisy Bell,” one of his especial favorites, he found himself irresistibly humming along.

As dusk settled in and he labored in the pool of light cast by his Handel desk lamp, he keenly felt the absence of Bloese and, for a moment, just a moment, regretted having given him the day off. But every man needed a break from the routine, particularly one so diligent and devoted as his secretary, and he comforted himself with the thought that, after all, he’d done the magnanimous thing. Thinking of Bloese, he lifted his head briefly from his papers and took a moment to listen to the ticks and murmurings of the great building that rose up above him, savoring its every least rustle and whisper. The Sanitarium was quiet, as quiet as it had ever been—nearly everyone, even the wheelchair-bound, was gathered on the lawn for the sing-along and the pyrotechnics that would soon take hold of their imaginations—and he settled into the feel of that quiet as he might have settled into a familiar chair or a pair of hearth-warmed slippers. Here was his institution, this grand edifice, this tangible representation of his will and his vision, and he had it all to himself for just this briefest sliver of time, while the voices of all those he’d brought together within its walls rose up just beyond the windows in health and jubilation.

It was then, while the Doctor sat there amongst his papers and allowed himself the small indulgence of pride of accomplishment, while his spirit gorged and a sense of the profoundest well-being seeped into his veins
like a restorative, it was then that the smell began to invade his nostrils. A chemical smell, harsh with its load of petroleum distillates, the smell of fuel, coal oil, of old glass-chimneyed lamps and wicks burnt to the nub. And where could that be coming from? Was it some trick of memory, a nostalgic echo? He hadn’t used a kerosene lamp since the days of the Western Health Reform Institute.

Curious, he rose from the desk, shoving back the celluloid eyeshade till it rested on the crease of his hairline, and crossed the room to the door. As he grasped the doorknob, he remarked how much stronger the odor was here, and as he pulled open the door and ventured out into the hallway, he nearly choked on it. But this was odd. The floor, the Italian marble floor he himself had chosen from a design from Favanucci, seemed to be wet, as if the janitors hadn’t finished mopping up, or as if—but he stopped cold. It
was
wet. He bent a finger to the floor, brought it up to his nose: coal oil. Kerosene. He’d know it anywhere.

And then he looked up, puzzled, into the eyes and teeth of the greatest trial of his life, of the
cauchemar
come to life—George stepped out of the doorway of the next office down and leaned insouciantly against the wall.
George
. In his hand, a match. A single thin insubstantial stick of wood with a dab of phosphorus affixed to the fire-red tip of it. There was no manufactured smile this time, no mocking grin. There was only the bristling patchy beard of the boy-man with its grim slash of a mouth and the eyes black as the rim of the universe, so black they seemed to suck up all the available light and extinguish it. And that wasn’t all: beyond him, at the far end of the hall, lay a five-gallon drum of coal oil, dropped casually on its side, bleeding its glistening contents over the surface of the floor. “Dr. Vegetable,” George sneered. “Dr. Anus. Do you know why I’m here?”

All the peace he’d felt in his office, all the beauty of the evening and the sweet sentiment of its songs, all the exhilaration he’d felt over ensnaring that deviate Ossining character and liberating Amelia Hookstratten from his spell, all of it dissolved in that instant. Damn that Farrington, he thought angrily, and he vowed to have him removed from his post—and why couldn’t he and his twelve overfed deputies
have dug George out from beneath whatever rock he’d been hiding under? He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Just kept his eyes focused on George’s, on his son’s.

“Do you?” George’s voice echoed down the oil-slick corridor, that hateful familiar adolescent whine creeping into it for all the twenty useless years of his young manhood.

The Doctor said nothing. He tensed his muscles. Let him talk, let him rave—he was ready to spring, to fight for his life and the life of Battle Creek, ready to do anything, anything it would take to silence this insect, crush him, expunge him once and forever. Anything.

George threw himself back from the wall with a sudden violent thrust, and his eyes exploded with hate. “I’m here to give you a history lesson, Dr. Anus, that’s what I’m here for—I’m here to make your life the cesspool you’ve made mine, here to cram all your zwieback and your enemas and all the rest of it down your throat once and for all.” He lifted the match to his eyes and sighted down the length of it as if it were a rifle. “I’m going to burn this place to the ground,” he hissed, and he was nearly choking on his rage, “—
again
.”

Again
. The adverb dropped between them like a gauntlet, burst howling from the walls, electric, excoriating.

The Doctor came forward then, moving like a somnambulist, blind, goaded, the blood raging in his ears, and George flicked his thumbnail against the head of the match, the quick yellow spark springing up from his fist as if by prestidigitation. “That’s right,
Father
,” he taunted, “
again
,” and as the Doctor rushed him he dropped the match to the floor and the flames fed on it, leaping up with an eager panting grace while George danced among them like some malignant hell-born thing with bituminous eyes and leathery wings.

“It was I!” he shouted, evading the Doctor’s charge even as the flames rushed toward the barrel at the end of the hall, “me, I alone. Not Sister White, not your crabbed, ball-less, half-blind Elders, not a one of them, no.” He was backing up the hall now, spitting it out, cavorting round the sudden churning troughs of fire. “Thirteen years old!” he cried in a hoarse rasping shriek that only seemed to fan the flames higher. “It was I, I, I!”