Willnot (5 page)

“You got the touch, Doc,” he said when we were done. “I’ll be looking for that bill, now.”

Somewhere between eighty-two and ninety (he wasn’t sure himself) and with an annual income in the low three-figure range, Cleveland had never received a bill from me and never would, but we kept up the pretense.

It was growing dark by the time I’d seen the other patients and written everything up, Maryanne long gone. Out my west window an orange sun held on, flattening itself crablike against the horizon to gain a few more moments.

Saturday. Early rounds at the hospital, especially to check in on Mr. Patmore, then, after breakfast back home,
not
the slow-mo weekend day we always hoped for, but sports physicals. Twenty-plus kids from high school who like me would ransom body parts to be doing anything else. There they sat in the waiting room, a salad of T-shirts, shorts, slogans, torn jeans, pressed khakis, tattoos, long hair, no hair, iPads and smartphones, Walkmans, sweat, tobacco smell and cologne.

Weeds, honeysuckle, tall grass, jimsonweed, briar.

I never see this many kids in congress, especially males with their ritual one-liners, posturing and studied indifference, without thinking
Crowds and Power
, adaptation and mimicry, shibboleths, how the gravity of the group pulls one away from center and self. There’s a yob inside every one of us, a yob we have to struggle against.

Sometimes I’m able to snag a third-year student from the med school at the capital to come out and help me, but this year it was not to be. The boys and I had only our disgruntled selves. That’s a lot of throats to peer into, a multitude of ears, an abundance of
abdomens. And even settling for the briefest of histories, a couple of hundred questions. But soldier on we did, and by two in the hastening afternoon our many-legged task was done.

“All that’s required is the old bend-and-cough,” Richard said. “You could just …” He grinned a silly-boy grin—meaning him, or me? “No. You couldn’t.”

We were in one of our periodic shutdowns, what Richard calls fasting, when news of the world gets held at bay, all the vying for position among politicians, headlines of disasters, hourly updates on wars new and old and unending. The whole parade of foolishness, hunger and pain. I had a simple gauge: if I tear up during commercials, have a catch in my voice when calling about car insurance and meeting not resistance but outright courtesy, I’m in overload.

So for a time we’d watch no TV, read no newspapers, remain reassuringly out of touch. Cultivating our garden. Governments turned outrageous lies, legislation and water cannons against their citizens, cities collapsed as though on time delay into refuse heaps, twelve-year-olds learned the finer points of armed ambush.

And we, Richard and I, were out for a ride. He’d been waiting at home for me to finish with the blockers, sprinters and leapers.

“Interesting how these complaints come up only when I’m a captive audience,” I said, “usually in a car.”

“Like on, what was it, our second date?”

“Third, maybe. You started going all serious on me—”

“Luckily I’ve gotten over
that
.”

“—and I asked if you were about to inquire what my intentions were.”

“Pushy, pushy. Even then.”

“Turned out, of course, that you just had the flu.”

“Which I freely shared.” As we approached the Greenville turnoff, Richard looked to the right. “There she blows.”

You always heard the orange VW before you saw it. It had been around forever, passed down, everyone says, from generation to generation. Some claim it’s not the same car at all, that a mystery mechanic keeps rebuilding new ones in the image of the original, sneaking in under cover of night and replacing it.

Big Orange has poor brakes, remarkable presence, and implicit right of way, so I slowed as it ran the stop sign. As ever, the driver’s hand shot through the sunroof waving wildly.

“Gotta love tradition,” Richard said. Moments later he glanced at me. “The sign back there said
CAUTION: CHURCH
.”

One of Richard’s great pleasures is misreading signs. Billboards that say
FIENDS ARE FOREVER
, fence signs announcing that the property is
PASTED
, warnings to
WATCH OUT FOR FALLING CROCKS
, that sort of thing. I’m never quite sure if the misreadings are actual or fanciful.

“Yeah, churches are all through here, every half mile or so.”

“Like hazardous-material warnings.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t see many three-story houses in these parts,” he said, still looking right, toward a house set well back from the road.

“Actually, if I remember correctly, it was four the last time we came this way.”

He made a show of thinking it over. “Good they built it like that, then. Still have three good ones.”

“Must be all the rain we’ve had.”

“Sinkage.”

“Slippage.”

“Defining force of the universe.”

He sat quietly, looking out at the trees and soybean fields. Back our first year together, we’d taken a road trip to Galveston. Having seen a bumper sticker that read
TECHNICALLY THERE
WOULD ONLY NEED TO BE ONE TIME TRAVELER’S CONVENTION
, we stayed on the lookout, and somewhere around Fort Worth, we both saw this license plate:

RVLTN

“Revolution,” Richard said.

“You forget what part of the country you’re in? More likely Revelation.”

We’d stopped for coffee not long after, and as we sat on black cement benches outside the yellow Bzzzy Bee Café, Richard, no doubt still thinking about that license plate, asked me what I really believed in.

We got back in the car, drove on.

“The ability of mankind,” I told him, “with tremendous struggle, to be minimally better than its base instincts and inclinations.”

I heard the code being called as I walked into the hospital that night, to ICU, and felt cold run up my spine.

But it wasn’t Mr. Patmore.

Judy Donovan, our nurse practitioner, looked up as I came through the doors. “Respiratory failure. Extubated early this morning.” She had it under control, so Gordie and I stood around while she ran the code and reintubated.

“Here to check on your guy from the site?” Gordie asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“Emergency appy. Weintraub called me at home, flushed me away from a perfectly fine martial arts movie.”

Minutes later Judy handed me blood gases.

“May want to—”

“Just did. Rate to twelve, dropped the O’s and kicked the PEEP up a notch. I’ll keep him under till tomorrow morning, see how it looks.”

“All shiny, then,” Gordie said.

“Thanks, Jude.”

“You bet.”

Mr. Patmore was fine, watching from his cranked-up bed across the room as the curtains parted and nurses, techs and carts pulled away. Within minutes our night RT, Joseph, was alone at the bedside, securing the ET tube, checking his vent, and setting alarms, getting together paperwork as he waited to draw new gases.

“Guess it can get pretty exciting in here,” Mr. Patmore said.

“We keep telling them not to party, but you know how kids are.” I looked over the IVs and blood as I stood there. I’ve been known to be obsessive about such. “How are you feeling?”

“Like someone tied me behind a truck in Omaha and didn’t cut me loose till Dallas.”

“Any pain?”

He held up the demand button. “I’ve got my little squeeze-me, don’t I?”

“Don’t hesitate to use it. We want the pain to come—pain’s important, your body talking to you—but we want it to come on slowly. Day or two from now, you’ll be okay with that. The rest takes longer. Up to a year for most people to recover from major surgery.”

“I’ll give it three months.”

My kind of patient. I had a momentary urge to hug him, not the best idea with someone who has a freshly stitched abdomen.

An occupied car sat beside mine in the hospital parking lot, a midsize, dun-colored GM. Not a rental, from the look of it and license plate, and not local. The driver ducked his head to watch in the rearview as I came out the ER entrance, followed my progress across weathered asphalt I had trod so many times that it felt as though I were stepping in my own footprints, sinking infinitesimally deeper. His door swung open as I approached. A man of forty or so, well over six feet and so preternaturally thin
that his knobby, knotlike joints—elbows, knees, wrists—looked as though they should belong to a much larger man. He’d have passed his childhood being called Ichabod, Spider, Highpockets, or worse. He wore old jeans and a short-sleeve, untucked blue dress shirt. The parking-lot lights gave his skin a yellow cast. An open, active laptop sat on the passenger’s seat.

“Doctor Hale? Can we talk?” His attention deflected; he spoke as much to himself as to me. “Why do I keep doing that? Dialog from some crappy script.” Waited a beat. “Sorry.”

“What is it that I can do for you?”

He held out a hand and we shook. “Joel Stern. I’m with
Loose Leaf
.”

“A reporter.”

“Yes sir. You know the
Leaf
?”

“I’ve seen it. But I’m afraid you’re off course. I really have nothing to do with the excavation, know less about it, I’m sure, than you do.”

“That story would be more for major papers, the networks. We’re more like … on the edge? Looking in?”

He glanced back into the car as a new page rolled up on his laptop, lingered a moment, wiped.

“Bobby Lowndes, Doctor Hale. He was your patient. I’m here for background on him.”

“My question has to be why in the world you’d be wanting background on Bobby. Not that I can say much.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“The public has a right to know?”

“The public is a great beast, Doctor, far more interested in why some bimbo broke into tears on yesterday’s chat show, a politician’s most recent ‘indiscretions,’ or Suzie Q’s wardrobe malfunction.”

“If you believe that, then why do what you do?”

“I like asking questions. The answers are never as important as the questions.”

“Read any Lenin?”

“Ask who benefits, and from whom? Yes sir. Or what science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said: Ask the next question.”

I flashed on Ted Sturgeon sitting across the coffee table at a party in someone’s suite during a convention when I was eight or nine. Sturgeon had this tadpole of a typewriter, so small it looked like a toy, and he was typing away the whole time he talked to me and the party surged around us. Always wondered what it was. He wasn’t publishing an awful lot those days.

“It’s not from recalcitrance,” I told Joel Stern. “I can’t say much because there’s not much.”

I offered the abstract: Bobby’s sudden appearance, his sphinxlike remarks, his departure. How he’d stopped out on the street to speak with Old Ezra and given him money.

“Did he know this man?”

“Couldn’t have.”

“Interesting.” Stern glanced again at his computer. Photos were streaming. A desert landscape, an Asian- or African-looking city saturated with off-plumb buildings.

“Have you spoken with an FBI agent by the name of Ogden?”

He nodded. “As you’d expect, on the record she was not forthcoming. Off the record she wanted me to understand, all of this expressed quite politely, that if I got in her way, if I did
anything
to impede her investigation, she’d kick my ass into next Tuesday.”

“A free press is so important.”

“Everybody knows. So, nothing else you can tell me?”

“Call-me-Bobby that walked into my office is a stranger. And ethics preclude discussing my patient Brandon Lowndes.”

“Understood.”

We shook hands. He climbed back in his car, shut the top of his computer, then, driver’s door still open, swung back around to look up at me.

“Do you know what your old patient did in the service, Doctor Hale?”

“Marines, is all.”

“He was a shooter. A scout sniper.”

With that, Joel Stern shut the door, fired up an engine that needed work, and pulled away, swimming back into the mainstream, heading for the next edge.

“I was eight, maybe nine.” Our favorite time of day, light slowly fading but not yet forgone, time itself slowing, the moment like a held breath. Wittgenstein: If eternity is timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. “I got home from school and found it on the windowsill outside the kitchen. Hunched back against the glass unmoving, its bright orange kernel of an eye alive with what I recognized as terror. It had been hurt somehow. Damaged. It couldn’t fly.”

We were sitting outside, a project and mission, or perhaps an altruistic dinner offering, for hordes of mosquitoes who appeared to be quite fond of the smoking candles guaranteed to repel them.

“I kept going out there all afternoon and night, checking up on it. Took food and water out, some dry cat food that it ate. When I went out after dinner, this had to be the fifth or sixth time, it was gone.”

“What kind?”

“Magpie, my old man said.”

“Cats got it?”

“Cats, dogs, a hawk. Probably so. But in my mind—in my mind, it flew away.”

You live with someone year after year, you think you’ve heard all the stories, but you never have.

Richard slapped at a mosquito on his arm. “Three thousand five hundred species of these wee wonders, and only the females suck blood.”

Accustomed as I am to such sidelong pronouncements, I simply smiled.

So that’s how it came about, my partner’s troth for rescuing animals.

When I was twelve, wholly without prior sign or indication I fell into a coma. My parents came into my room late one morning and found me: not visibly ill, no fever, no rash, breathing slowly and easily, unresponsive. Most of that year I spent in the hospital, my sister at my bedside every possible chance and often allowed by parents and staff to stay overnight, sleeping in a chair by my bed. Katherine was what I first saw when months later, again without prelude, I opened my eyes. She rushed to me and took the hand I vainly attempted to lift. Signals were going out, move, move, but wouldn’t catch. Like a battery almost gone, a sparkler that won’t stay lit. “What did I miss?” I finally said.