First, Do No Harm

by Larry Karp

  Samuel let me drive again. All the way home, I had to fight the whole way to keep my mind on the road. Blonde, blue-eyed Shannon looked as much like Lily’s niece as I did. And what about Aunt Nancy? From the beginning of labor ’til the end, you’d have thought she was having the baby. And what was it Samuel told Shannon when he injected the morphine and scopolamine? “Next thing you know you’ll have had your baby.” Not “you’ll have your baby.”

  “Leo, you’re going to give me whiplash, going from first to second. What’s with you?”

  I should’ve answered his question with mine, but couldn’t, not after my little encounter with Murray. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Guess I’m a little tired.”

  Not tired enough to fall asleep, though. Between the terrible humidity and those questions barreling around in my head, I tossed, turned the other way, stuck to the sheet, didn’t drop off ’til after dawn. Past ten when I woke. As I stumbled into the kitchen in my pajama bottoms, hair over my eyes, Ramona looked around from the sink where she was peeling potatoes. “I can’t keep up with him,” I muttered.

  “Sunday, Monday, or Always?” Crosby crooned his question through the boxy little Crosley on the cupboard next to the refrigerator. Ramona dropped a half-peeled potato, came over to put an arm around me. “No one can keep up with your father,” she said. “And Leo…” Twisting, tugging at her wedding ring. “You don’t have to. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t try.” A weak smile painted itself across her face. “Well, maybe in a few years you’ll have a fighting chance, but right now you need more sleep than he does. You’re still growing.” She pushed me into a chair. “Sit. I’ll make you an omelet.”

  Less than an hour later, I was on my way to the junkyard. As I rode in, I saw George and Oscar Fleischmann across the yard, working at a pile of scrap. I parked my bike next to the office shack, went inside. Murray grinned at me from behind the desk. “Hey, Dockie, you keep banker’s hours. Nice work if you can get it.”

  Behind him, the Atwater-Kent on the window sill played “All Through the Night.” My music box sat on the desk, a small brass object next to it. A man slouched in a chair across the desk from Murray swiveled to take me in. Skinny little character, thin face under a wide snap-brim. Dark blue suit with white pinstripes, straight off a Brooks Brothers hanger. “This here’s young Doc Firestone,” Murray said to the man. “Samuel’s kid, he’s already learning the racket. Leo, Mr. Dexter.”

  Mr. Dexter stretched his thin red mustache into a pencil line. His teeth were dark, deeply tobacco-stained. “Nice to meetcha, Leo.” He flicked the tip of his tongue over his lower lip.

  “Just be a couple minutes, Red,” Murray said. “Gotta take care of the Dockie.”

  Red Dexter leaned back dangerously in his chair. “No rush, Murray. Too damn hot to hurry.”

  “C’mere.” Murray plucked the small brass piece off the table. It looked like a butterfly inside a horseshoe. Behind us, Red Dexter sang in a high-pitched, wheezy voice, “Dirty Gertie from Bizerte, hid a mousetrap ’neath her skirtie.”

  Murray tried not to laugh as he waved the caged butterfly in my face. “Lookit, Dockie, here’s what’s missing—the governor. Only you need one just a little bigger. Gotta fit exactly a hundred percent with that gear at the end of the cylinder. Now—”

  “Filthy Annie from Trapani, stashed a razor up her fanny.”

  Murray chuckled, shook his head. “See, Dockie, power from the spring’s what makes the cylinder turn, and this little governor’s gotta let down that spring power so the music plays just right. Not too slow, not too fast.”

  “Speed control,” I said.

  “Bingo, Dockie.” Murray gave me a solid clap on the shoulder. “You’re learning.”

  “Hey, Leo, lemme ask you a question.” Red Dexter waggled a finger. “Why’re you so interested in fixin’ this thing from outa the last century that nobody cares about no more? Lookit all that metal inside. Uncle Sam could make a lotta bullets, blow a bunch of krauts into pieces.”

  It suddenly occurred to me I might’ve picked a flimsy excuse to play spy in a junkyard. On billboards, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines, everywhere, the question was, “What can I do to help win the war?” Two answers. “Buy bonds.” “Turn in scrap metal.” Downtown, in front of City Hall, a huge banner hung across Market Street, big block letters telling us to SLAP THE JAP RIGHT OFF THE MAP BY SALVAGING SCRAP. Men brought old tools, women lugged frying pans, little kids gave their electric trains, then scrounged empty cigarette packages on the sidewalk. Less than an hour before, as I sat in the kitchen, eating my omelet, I heard a radio group sing, “Scrap, scrap, turn in your scrap. Mash a Nazi, zap a Jap.” Now here I was, telling Murray and Red Dexter I wanted to put together two heavy handfuls of brass and iron so they’d play music. “I…I found it in our attic,” I stammered, then added, “It used to be my grandmother’s.”

  Fortunately, Murray misread the cause of my distress. “Leave the kid alone, huh, Red? He wants to fix up his grandma’s music box, that’s okay. Unk’ll just have to manage with a few less bullets. He don’t exactly get every single chunka metal comes around, now, does he?”

  Red Dexter’s jaw dropped, then he started to laugh. He reached inside his jacket, pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his shirt pocket, tapped the bottom of the pack, stuck a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. Then he flicked a fingernail across the head of a match, lit up, inhaled, blew a long cloud of smoke toward Murray’s face. “You’re a card, Murray,” he said. “But maybe you should watch out just a little bit. Most games, the joker don’t get to play.”

  I kept my eyes on the music box and butterfly-governor.

  “Hey, Red, long’s I put up, you know what you can do.” Murray rested a hand on my shoulder. “You want to fix Granny’s music box, Dockie, you come to the right place. Me and your old man, we’re more alike than you prob’ly think. He patches up broken-down people, I fix broken-down machines. And when the person’s too sick for your old man or the machine’s too sick for me…” Murray swept his arm toward the window, at the heaps of rusting scrap outside.

  “You’re a fuckin’ philosopher, Murray.” Red snickered, then shot Murray another cloud of smoke.

  “First I’m a card, now I’m a philosopher.” Murray’s tone was light. “Keep your pants on, Red. Hey, whyn’cha take a couple minutes, go give your kid a few lessons in the business. He’s what, two already? Old enough to start making some scratch.”

  Dexter looked like a man who’d been pointing a gun at an adversary, then suddenly realized his weapon was somehow no longer in his hand. He shook his head, turned away, took a deep drag on the cigarette. Murray handed me the music box. “Go on downtown, Washington Street just offa Roosevelt. Hogue’s Clocks and Anti-cues. Chester Hogue fixes clocks and music boxes, got a ton of parts. He’ll have the right governor, guaranteed. Come on back with it, and I’ll show you how to make that music box like new.”

  I thanked Murray, then told Red Dexter I was pleased to meet him.

  “Likewise, Dockie.”

  I turned to go but before I could take a step, a brown river rat shot through a crack in the wall, zipped right in front of my shoes, then disappeared through a floorboard knothole. I yelped. Murray laughed. “More a the bastards every day,” he said. “And every day they look fatter and fatter.”

  “Oughta set traps,” Red said.

  Murray waved him off. “Y’ think I don’t? But every rat I nail, seems like there’s two more the next day. Maybe I oughta just live and let live, huh?”

  Red gave him a strange look. I ran out, squeezed the music box into my bike basket, hopped aboard, pedaled crosstown toward Washington Street. I was nearly there when a line from Wentworth’s Toxicology hit me between the eyes: “Strychnine is used primarily as rat poison.”

  I pulled up under a weathered gold-lettered sign, HOGUE’S CLOCKS AND ANTIQUES, leaned my bike against the storefront. When I opened the front door, a little bell tink
led. One step inside, I was swimming in a river of mildew, mold and stale cigarette smoke. Glass showcases head-high on both sides of the aisle, so dirty I could barely make out the merchandise. A few yards inside the door on the left, a woman sat behind a gouged, scratched wooden counter that looked like a swaybacked butcher’s block. Scraggly gray hair, a look on her face like she’d been sucking lemons. Tacked onto the wall behind her was a huge photograph of FDR with his creased gray fedora, big smile, cigarette holder at a jaunty forty-five degree angle. Without looking, the woman tapped a cigarette out of a pack of Camels—the President’s brand—set it into the corner of her mouth, and lit up as if she were performing a patriotic duty. “Whaddaya want, kid?” she snarled.

  “I’m looking for Chester Hogue,” I said, then added, “Murray Fleischmann sent me.”

  The woman blew smoke from the far corner of her lips, then took the cigarette between two fingers and bellowed toward the rear of the shop, “Hey, Chet—someone comin’ back.”

  I thanked the woman and started along the aisle toward Chet. On my left, old tables and chairs, stacked to the ceiling. On my right, display cabinets crammed with glass and pottery. At the rear of the shop, behind a long wooden counter, I saw a hunched figure at a worktable. Around him everywhere, clocks. Clocks hung on walls, heaped on wooden shelves, piled on the floor. As I came up to the counter, the figure turned toward me, pulled a loupe from his eye, blinked, then croaked, “Whatcha got there, Sonny?”

  He stood up slowly. I thought of a turtle trying to extend its head out of foul water to breathe a bit of pure air. White shirt, dark blue vest, trousers held up by blue suspenders. Face like a hatchet, just a few strands of sandy hair running across the top of his head, watery light blue eyes and a disconcerting blinking tic. He looked like a character out of Dickens, some bookkeeper who’d sat fifty years on a high stool, bent over a ledger. On his worktable was a medium-sized clock carcass.

  I laid my music box on the counter. Mr. Hogue lifted the lid, peered inside, blink-blink-blink. Then he shook his head sadly and said, “Tut, tut.” First time I’d ever heard a real person say tut-tut, and I came awfully close to laughing. “Oh, I’m sorry, Sonny. Very sorry. Couldn’t give you much for this, maybe a nickel. Governor’s missing, see?”

  The old bastard. In those days antique music boxes really weren’t worth a lot of money, but a nickel? “I’m not here to sell it, Mr. Hogue,” I said. “I’m fixing it and I need a governor.”

  “Oho, you need a governor, do you? Well, they’re very hard to come by, you see, and—”

  “Murray Fleischmann sent me,” I said, as if I were invoking protection by a patron saint. “He’s helping me fix it, and he said you’ll have a governor to fit.” I paused, then decided to go ahead. “And if the whole box isn’t worth more than a nickel, I guess the governor won’t cost more than a penny.”

  Mr. Hogue looked me up, down and sideways, blink-blink-blink. Then he started to snicker. “Got a mouth on you, Sonny, that’s okay. You’re gonna do all right for yourself.” He waved me to the end of the counter. “Come on back, bring your music box. We’ll go find you a governor.”

  I cradled the music box under my arm, pushed past the wooden gate at the end of the counter, followed Mr. Hogue through a door into a back room bursting with clocks. Battered, broken grandfather clocks, table clocks, wall clocks. Piles of parts on the floor, a waist-high mound of keys to my left. Mr. Hogue motioned me along. “Music box stuff’s in the back.”

  Was it ever. Like walking through some kind of Fort Knox for antiques. Music boxes, all sizes and shapes, practically floor-to-ceiling. Piles of parts, literally tons of metal. Mr. Hogue sure wasn’t making many trips to the salvage center. He pointed at a heap of governors, dead brass butterflies a foot high. “Let’s see your box.”

  I held out the music box. Mr. Hogue opened the lid, whipped a pair of calipers out of his pocket, measured the distance between those two small holes in the bedplate. Then he crouched over the pile, put calipers to governors, occasionally handed one up to me. When I had six or seven, he motioned me back toward his workbench. Go-go-go, blink-blink-blink.

  At his bench, he took the mechanism out of the case, then screwed one governor after another into place on the bedplate and tried to turn the big gear on the end of the cylinder, the one that mates with the governor wheel. The first three governors wouldn’t work. Mr. Hogue shook his head, pointed. “Gears bind, see?” But when he tried the fourth governor, he smiled. Little butterfly wings turned, then the cylinder began to rotate. “That oughta do it. You said Murray’s helpin’ you with the work?”

  “More than helping. He’s showing me how.”

  “Good man, Murray,” Hogue said. “You’ll learn a lot from him.”

  “What do I owe you for the governor?” I asked, very businesslike, I thought.

  That set Mr. Hogue cackling. “Guess a penny.” He held out his hand. I pulled a penny out of my pocket, dropped it into his grease-stained palm. He flipped it into the air, caught it. “You’re gonna do awright, Sonny,” he wheezed. “You’re polite, but at the same time you don’t let people push you around. If you’n’ Murray need any more help, just come on back. Now…” He gestured with his head toward his bench. “I need to get on back to work. See you.”

  Murray laughed when I got back to the yard and told him about Mr. Hogue and the governor. “Christ on a crutch, that Chester. He’d pay his mother a nickel for her solid silver soup tureen if he could get away with it. Glad you didn’t let him jew you…hey, what’s the matter?”

  “Just surprised,” I said. “I mean, especially since you’re Jewish.” Then I remembered what he’d said to Ezra the night before, tried to backtrack. “I mean—”

  Murray waved a hand, no sweat. “Don’t make no nevermind. Just a way of talking, is all. Come on, let’s get you started fixing this thing.”

  I followed him behind the shed to a wooden table, faded, rickety, covered with junk. Murray swept his huge hand across the tabletop; scrap clattered to the ground. He put the music box in the clearing, pulled a screwdriver from a tool belt on his waist, waved it at the music box like a magic wand. Then he looked at me with mock gravity. “Watch close, Dockie. Ain’t just anybody gets to learn my secrets.”

  After we took the mechanism apart, Murray left, and I started scrubbing with a brush and brass polish. I dripped sweat onto my work. My T-shirt stuck to my neck and back. But I saw Harmony’s face as she begged me to give her the music box…thought about Jonas Fleischmann, heart attack, strychnine. Rat poison, junkyard rats, black market scrap metal. I was trying to make some sense when a shadow dropped across my work. “Fuck you doin’, kid?” A growl.

  I put down the piece of brass I was cleaning, and there in all his glory was Oscar Fleischmann. Blue and white bib overalls with no shirt, red neckerchief over nut-brown shoulders, gray chest hairs running riot. His belly shook, biceps bulged. When he bent to see what was on the table in front of me, the stink of cigarettes and garlic nearly knocked me off my chair. “Hell’s this?” he grunted.

  “I’m fixing a music box,” I said, then for the second time invoked the name of my patron saint. “Murray’s helping me.”

  “You get it here?”

  I took the Hogue approach—be polite but don’t let anyone push you around. “It was my grandmother’s,” I said. “I brought it from home and got a governor for it from Chester Hogue. Now Murray is showing me how to fix it.”

  “Huh!” Oscar spat on the ground. His gob curled at the edges, raised a little dust cloud in the light brown dirt. I decided to edge into the real reason I was spending time in that junkyard, see what I might learn. “Sorry about Jonas, Mr. Fleischmann,” I said.

  Oscar gave me a long look. Light flashed in his eyes. “God damn, I thought I seen you before. You’re Samuel Firestone’s kid.”

  I nodded.

  Oscar shook his head, spat again. “What’re you doin’ here, then? Why ain’t you out wi
pin’ your old man’s ass for him, like the other night?”

  No way to answer that without being either inflammatory or candy-assed, so I picked up the part I’d been working on, went back to brushing. But Oscar gave me a slap to the cheek that set my teeth rattling. “Hey, shitface—when I’m talkin’ to you, listen. Don’t go pretendin’ like I ain’t here.”

  I dropped my work, looked up slowly. With fists balled, Oscar put me in mind of a double bazooka, rockets loaded, ready to fire. I jumped and wheeled around, my own fists up and ready. I was a good five inches taller than Oscar, at least fifty years younger, had a longer reach. After a moment’s faceoff, he lowered his hands, then flipped me a derisive laugh. “You’re lucky, kid, I hope y’ know that. You oughta be goin’ home with most of your teeth missin’ an’ blood pourin’ outa your mouth. This here’s my yard.” He pointed at the dismembered music box on the table. “So pick up your shit and get outa here. Murray’s got better to do than waste his time with you. He don’t wise up and do his work, he can go lay down next to his putz brother.”

  Oscar’s back was to the office, so he didn’t see Murray come around the corner. Murray stood listening, his face growing darker with every word. By the time Oscar wound up his speech, Murray was near-black. A blood vessel on his left temple bulged below his thinning hairline. He stomped forward, grabbed Oscar by the shoulder, spun him around. “You ever call Jonas a putz again—”

  “You’ll do what? He was a putz. A solid brass, gold-plated idiot. An’ you’re gettin’ to be one too, suckin’ up to Sammy Firestone. You think you’re in business with Sammy? Well, I got news for you. Wait’ll some shit hits the fan. You’ll be standin’ there with it all over your face, and Sammy Firestone’ll walk away in his white Panama hat, not a spot on him.”

  I jumped forward but Murray waved me back. He was furious. “I say shut it, Pop, I mean shut it. I want to show this kid how to fix a machine, I’ll show him. He don’t need no permission from you to be here. Your junkyard?” Murray turned around, bent from the waist and blasted a loud, long fart at Oscar. “Wasn’t for Mom, you wouldn’t’ve ever set your smelly feet in this yard.”