by Larry Karp
“Shut the hell up, you old futz,” Oscar roared back. The men looked like two angry bears, working themselves up to a pitched battle over a loaded garbage can. “Rockefeller makes a fortune in the last war and nobody says boo. Henry Kaiser, that pig, he gets fatter every day from every goddamn ship he sells, never mind half of them sink before they even get outa the harbor. You want to fuck with somebody, go fuck with Kaiser. The Jews in Germany and Poland are there, I’m here, an’ that’s just the way the goddamn world works. Anyway, who says we’re sellin’ stuff to the wrong people?”
While Oscar talked, two little girls on bicycles rode through the junkyard gate. One cut a turn a little too sharp on the hard-baked dirt. Her bike skidded sideways, she screamed, and down she went. I took off toward her, but surprise, Oscar was ahead of me. Ezra Shnayerson barked, “You want me to prove, I can prove,” but he was talking to empty space.
Oscar dropped down on his knees over the little girl, crooned, “Hey, hey, honey. Don’t cry, okay?” He stood her on her feet, looked over her arms and legs, then pulled off his red neckerchief and brushed dirt off her knees and elbows. “Hey, see, you’re awright. Ain’t even no blood.” He tweaked her nose. The girl smiled tentatively. Oscar swabbed tears off her face. “Tell y’ what.” He put the neckerchief back on, reached into his pocket, came out with a coin. “Here’s a dime. You and your friend there, go on over to Corry’s, get an ice-cream cone.” The girl’s face lit. Her friend clapped her hands, jumped up and down. “Gee, thanks, Mister,” the friend shouted. “Thank you,” added the girl who’d fallen. She dropped the dime into a pocket on the front of her dress, then picked up her bicycle. “Ride them bikes careful,” Oscar called after the girls. “Don’t go gettin’ hit by a car.”
As the girls rode onto the sidewalk outside the gate, Oscar turned, saw me. “Jesus H. Christ, Miss Pussy! You really are a fuckin’ bad penny, ain’t you. Hey, you’re always wantin’ to learn somethin’—well, I just showed you how to get nice fresh young stuff, ain’t nobody ever messed with it before an’ left you a dose of clap. It’d work just as good for you with li’l boys.”
I couldn’t decide who was more disgusting, Oscar or Ezra Shnayerson, so wrapped up in his righteous indignation he couldn’t manage to help a little girl who’d fallen off her bike. At that point, Murray strolled through the office doorway, fastening his belt buckle. He glared at Shnayerson. “God damn, Ez. You’re still here.”
“I’m not finished with what I have to say to you,” Shnayerson rasped, but there was no wind in his sails. Oscar gave him a stern glance. Murray’s expression was nothing less than dangerous. “You’re done, all right,” Murray growled. “You know where’s the gate, the same one you came in through. Now get your fat ass out before I do what I said I was gonna, an’ keep it out. I don’t come fuckin’ around in your synagogue, I don’t want you fuckin’ around in my junkyard. Kapeesh?”
Shnayerson tried to look dignified but he trudged away, a thoroughly whipped bear. “Can’t stand that goddamn plaster saint,” Murray muttered. “But hey, Dockie—music box comin’ along okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “I heard yelling, then a little girl screamed, so I came to see what was going on. I’ll get back to work now.”
“Yeah, us too.” Murray clapped me on the shoulder. As I walked away, I heard him say to Oscar, “Maybe we oughta shut the gate, y’know? Least while we’re unloading.” A few seconds later the iron gate clanged.
Another three hours, two loads of aluminum later, I was finished with the music box. I could barely see straight, but not a squeak in “Sweet Bye and Bye,” not a squawk in “Beautiful Dreamer,” not a chirp in “Camptown Races.” “Gaudeamus Igitur,” clean and stately. “O Susanna,” “Home Sweet Home,” both perfect. I flashed back to Harmony’s expression when I played the box in her basement the evening before, her smile after I kissed her over Jonas’ grave. I swept Mr. Hogue’s tools into the paper bag, picked up the music box, started for the gate.
Murray, Oscar and George were standing over the latest pile of aluminum, wiping their faces, drinking Cokes. Murray’s eyes widened as he saw me, mouth bent into a grin. “All done, Dockie? Finished?”
I nodded. “Want to hear?
“Goddamn straight.”
Oscar looked the other way, drank Coke, belched. I set the box on the ground in front of Murray, opened the lid, started music playing. Murray squatted, listened to the entire program, then stood and shook my hand gravely. “Successful operation, Young Doc Malone. Patient’s alive and singing.”
I thanked Murray, said goodbye to George, got onto my bike, pedaled up Wait Street. I was done with the music box, but my business at the junkyard was still unfinished. I’d need a new excuse to hang around, either that or pay the yard an off-hours visit. I thought of stopping to return the tools to Mr. Hogue, but it was already five o’clock, and Harmony’s smile shone in my head like a beacon.
I rode straight home, parked my bike, followed a slow, soulful “I Can’t Get Started” across the driveway and through the cellar doors, set the music box on the washing machine, turned it on. Harmony put down her sax and listened, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, barely breathing. Six tunes, not a word. When the music stopped, I asked, “Worth waiting another day for?”
“I love it.” She took off her glasses, set them next to the sax, put her arms around my neck, kissed me. Briefer than the night before, but soft and on the lips, more than a thank-you. “I’ll keep it in my room,” she said. “Play it before I go to sleep every night. Oh, Leo…” Both arms around me again, a tight hug. “You worked on it all day?”
“All afternoon. I was hoping for a chance to sneak into the office and find out what Oscar’s got in that strongbox. But someone was out front every minute.”
She brushed hair away from her eyes. “Oscar? Strongbox? Leo, what’re you talking about?”
“Didn’t I tell you yesterday? About some sort of evidence Oscar says he’s got on Samuel?”
“Not unless I forgot all about it.”
She pulled free of my arms, reached for her glasses, slipped them back on, then listened like a cat at a mousehole while I told her about Oscar’s threat, the strongbox in the desk drawer, and how I watched all afternoon for an opportunity that never knocked. When I held up the hacksaw and lock, she started to laugh. “Leo, you’re such a dope sometimes. It’s easy. We’ll just go out again tonight, over the junkyard fence, into the office, take the box and maybe a few other little things so it looks like a robbery. Then we’ll bring the box home and open it. Anything inside we shouldn’t keep, like, say, money, we can wrap up and mail to Oscar from New York. We’ll wear gloves all the time. He’ll never be able to trace us.”
Sounding like Nancy Drew, Girl Detective, but making a lot of sense. No razor wire on junkyard fences then, no alarm systems. Some junkyards had dogs, but Murray said dog food would cost more than they’d save on stolen merchandise, and he didn’t want to be stepping in dogshit all day. It would be easy to go over the top, into the shack, grab the box…but wait a minute. “That strongbox is heavy. I could carry it, or pedal with it in my bike basket. But I’d never get it and me over the fence.”
Didn’t stop her for an instant. “Could you pitch it up and over the fence?”
I pictured myself swinging the strongbox back and forth, building momentum, finally letting go. I shook my head. “Fence’s about ten feet high…hold on. At the gate, it’s only eight feet, maybe a little less. I think I could manage that.”
“Okay! I’ll go back over first, make sure the coast is clear, and give you a whistle. You’ll toss the strongbox, climb the fence, and we’re on our way home to open it up. Bet we won’t be at the junkyard more’n five minutes.” She clutched the music box, looked lovingly at it, then at me. “You’d better sleep over…” Her lips moved, no words came, but then she managed, “Come hear how it sounds in my bedroom.” Then she was gone, up the wooden stairs into the kitchen.
&nbs
p; Back home, Ramona told me Samuel was at Steinberg, doing an emergency appendectomy. He didn’t come in ’til after eight. All through dinner he went on about the stupidity of the surgical consultant who’d wanted to watch the patient overnight. “They’d have watched him straight down to the morgue,” Samuel fumed. “His appendix was ready to blow. Another hour, he’d’ve had a belly full of pus, gone into shock.” Samuel was like a bulldog with a bone who doesn’t notice that no other dogs are trying to take away his prize. Finally over cake and coffee, I broke. “What if you’d been wrong?” I asked. “After a surgical specialist said wait. What if you’d gone in and operated, and it wasn’t the appendix?”
Ramona slammed down her spoon. “Leo!”
I don’t think Samuel even noticed. He was up from the table like a shot, down to his library, back within seconds carrying three books: Chambers’ Textbook of Surgery, Martin’s Handbook of Pathology, Adams’ Advanced Differential Diagnosis. He set them on the table, opened them, motioned me to his side. By all three references, his forty-two-year-old patient represented a classic case of acute appendicitis, with nausea, vomiting, constipation, low-grade fever, pain gradually localizing to McBurney’s point on the lower right abdomen, abdominal rigidity and rebound tenderness, and an elevated white blood cell count. Rupture of the appendix is a virtual death sentence, Dr. Chambers declared in bold italics. Therefore, a doctor is to be condemned, not congratulated, if every patient he operates on for appendicitis does in fact have the disease, because without doubt many of his unoperated patients died of appendiceal rupture.
I must have read those goddamn sentences ten times before I could make myself look up. Samuel’s face was chiseled, all sharp edges, early-evening golden stubble over his chin and cheeks. “Well, Leo?”
I nodded. “But if it was so obvious, why did you call a consultant, then not listen to his advice?”
“I did listen,” Samuel said. “I just didn’t take it because it was wrong. And I didn’t call him. That idiot Carlisle’s the last surgeon I’d ever call into a case, but the patient’s wife wanted a second opinion and her neighbor told her Carlisle talks to God every morning before he makes rounds. I told the family they could go with Carlisle’s advice or mine, or they could get a third opinion, by which time it’d probably be too late to do any good. The patient finally gave the go-ahead, said he was in so much pain he’d rather die fast on the operating table than slowly in his room. He’ll be fine, though. Take him a few weeks, but he’ll recover.”
My father was Babe Ruth, pointing his bat toward the bleachers for all to see, then hitting a home run. But the Babe did it only once, and quit while he was ahead. Samuel did it every time he came to bat, upping the ante with every pitch. “Go for eight!’”
“All right,” I said quietly.
He gathered up the books. I was just about to excuse myself to go to Harmony’s when the phone rang in the kitchen. Samuel leaped from his chair, ran inside, rushed back within a minute. “A stat over at County,” he barked, then charged into the living room, grabbed his Panama off the back of the chair where he’d thrown it when he came in. “Come on, Leo. Move it!”
Chapter 14
“County?” I asked.
Dad nodded. “Passaic County Hospital for the Insane and Mentally Retarded—great big ugly gray stone building behind a twelve-foot iron picket fence. When I was a kid, the goddamn place always gave me creeps. Half of me wanted to run like hell, the other half had a mind to tiptoe up to the door and snoop around inside.”
Dad sipped Manhattan, swallowed with a harsh “Ahh,” then turned eyes on me as haunted as the old P.C.H.
I couldn’t tell Samuel I had other plans for the night, certainly not the plans I happened to have. Couldn’t say I was tired, sick, or anything else. I took a step toward the phone to give Harmony a quick call, but Samuel shouted, “Leo, come on.” He already had the front door open. “Didn’t you hear me say stat? That’s an emergency, right?”
I turned around, followed Samuel outside and into the Plymouth. We were half a block down Roosevelt before I got the car door shut. “Four-year-old with congenital hydrocephalus,” Samuel shouted. “Blocked cerebrospinal fluid, head like a giant water balloon, brain crushed flat before she was ever born. Most babies like that die during birth or right after, but this one was born by Cesarean and she’s still here. No higher brain function, seizures more or less controlled with phenobarb and a ketogenic diet, but she’s gone into status epilepticus, one convulsion right on top of the last one. If we can’t stop them, she’ll die.”
I took a moment to think about that. “Samuel,” I said, slow as a Mississippi senator. “You said she has no higher brain function. She’s a veg…” I caught myself on the brink. “She’s permanently unconscious?”
“Think of it as nonconscious. Never been conscious, never will be, never can be. And what you’re really asking me is—”
I wasn’t going to let him put my question for me. “I’m asking why the emergency? Why we shouldn’t just let her go.”
“Does the Hippocratic Oath make any provision for that? Does the law of the land?”
A street lamp momentarily illuminated Samuel’s face. Was that a little smile at the corner of his mouth, or a grimace of pain? Or was it just my imagination? “How about the law of human decency?” I said, very softly. “Or the law of common sense.”
Samuel turned his head my way, and now, no question, he was smiling. “Good, Leo,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”
What an operator. The sincerity and respect in those six words melted my heart. “I think you’re beginning to get it,” he said. “Watch, when we get there. Listen.”
We rode all the way out McBride Avenue, past the Veterans’ Hospital. On a huge boulder out front, white letters glowed in moonlight, and if the painting job was clumsy, uneven letters with drip lines, the message was clear, V-USA. One block short of West Hobart, Samuel parked at the curb. I followed him past an iron picket gate, up a concrete walkway. Dark. A breeze came off the river, through Peterson Park, and as a towering oak tree to our left creaked and groaned, I ducked away as if from a punch.
Samuel put a hand on my shoulder. “First time at County’s tough. Just don’t try to pretend any of it’s not real.”
A guard in a gray uniform opened the front door, greeted Samuel with a deferential nod. “Doc.”
Samuel pumped the man’s hand. “Doin’ all right, Clarence?”
Clarence was in his early seventies, thin white hair combed straight back, cheeks faux-rouged, probably a severe hypertensive. Once, he might’ve been a tough cookie, but a huge bay window suggested stein-lifting was the most exercise he’d taken for a long while. He stared, straight-faced, at Samuel. “Right’s a person can be in this place, Doc.”
Our shoes on the marble floor of the long hallway made us sound like horses. We stepped into an unstaffed elevator. Samuel pulled the inner cage-door closed, then pushed a black button with a barely visible gold 3. The outer door slid shut. I wondered whether Samuel could hear my heart. The ancient elevator clanked and grunted. I tried to steel myself against what was coming.
As we got off the elevator I choked, gagged. Urine, stool, disinfectant, unwashed bodies—how did people work eight-hour shifts here, day after day? Samuel glanced at me, stopped just long enough to say, “Get hold of yourself.” I nodded, followed him down the corridor.
From both sides of the hallway came moans, groans, cries, shrieks. Mostly inarticulate, but as we went past one room I heard, “Help me, nurse. Nurse, help me. Help me, nurse. Nurse, help me.” From another room, “Yahhhh, they’re on my face, they’re on my face!” Rats, bugs? Hallucinations? I hoped so.
I hurried after Samuel, into a room near the end of the corridor. A round nurse with Dutch-pageboy hair stepped away from the crib, looked at Samuel as if he embodied the Second Coming. “Oh, Dr. Firestone, she just won’t stop seizing.”
Samuel was to the bedside. “Let�
�s see what we can do.”
I bent around him to get a clear view of the patient. Tiny body, lost in an adult-sized hospital gown, legs and arms like sticks, every bone visible beneath thin, bluish-white skin. An intravenous bottle dripped fluid into the right arm. Face shadowed below a gigantic dome, scalp stretched to the limit, hair reduced to small scattered tufts. Veins ran across the bulging forehead like long blue worms. A blood-stained tongue blade rested between colorless lips. Worst were the eyes, wandering here, there, jerking one way as the trunk and limbs tightened, then another as the body relaxed. I struggled to accept this as a human being, a little girl. Stick a needle into that head, I thought, and pop, gallons of fluid would blast in every direction. Then I noticed tiny pink and white scars and a few fresh scabs over the cranium, and realized they did stick needles into the head, to drain fluid. I found myself gripping the bed rail for support.
Samuel lowered the rail, then called my name, a little sharply I thought. “Leo—open the bag. Let’s give her some Amytal. If it works, it’ll work fast.”
I threw the catch, held the big black bag out to Samuel. He took a syringe and needle, then drew fluid from a small brown vial and injected it into the intravenous tubing. Arms, legs, gigantic head kept right on jerking and twitching. He might as well have injected saline.
I scanned the room, saw no phone. Not that I could’ve made the call I needed to make from there. I caught the nurse’s eye. “Men’s room?”
An odd mixture of compassion and contempt came over her face. “Down the hall past the elevator, on your left.”
