THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  When Madge came down the stairs to make breakfast an hour later, he was still on his hands and knees by the fireplace, sifting the ashes, for a second time, through the largest of the kitchen sieves.

  “Henry,” she said sleepily, “what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. I made a fire last night and I was just taking out the ashes. Go back to bed.”

  “But I have to get ready for work. What are you doing? You’re filthy.”

  “I’m looking for Billy,” he said, as the tears returned in force. “I’m looking for my son Billy.”

  “Have you spent the whole night sitting down here drinking?” Madge demanded.

  Henry shook his head and wiped at his tears with the soot-blackened cuffs of his pajamas. But there was nothing he could say, no way possible to explain.

  She sighed. “Well, I can’t really say I blame you. After what we all went through yesterday. Go get cleaned up and I’ll make some coffee. God, what a madhouse.” She turned her back dismissively and went into the kitchen.

  Henry, admitting defeat, went to the upstairs bathroom, washed his hands and face, and began to shave. But all the while he shaved the tears would keep trickling down into the shaving foam. Something terrible was going to happen and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He knew it sure as hell.

  25

  “Your great-grandfather Olaf Hagerup,” his mother said brightly, after Billy had been strapped into his seat with the seat belt, “which is to say, my mother’s father, had to be the stubbornest-minded man there ever was. One time the whole family went to a circus that had come to Brainard, just a little circus of course, nothing on the order of what we’ll see today.” She turned on the ignition, and the factory-fresh Electra’s V-8 engine came on like a light bulb. “But it was big enough to have basic circus animals like lions and tigers and I suppose an elephant.” She backed the car with a crunching sound into a waist-high mound of snow the plows had built up all along Calumet, then lurched forward into the street, spinning the back tires in the snow. “Olaf sat there through the whole performance, and afterward when he was home, he insisted that the animals he’d seen were just people dressed up in costumes! In my grandfather’s universe there simply wasn’t room for lions and tigers. Isn’t that amazing, he could see them with his own eyes, but he refused to admit they were real.”

  Billy nodded. Half his mind was on his mother’s story, but the other half was worried about her driving. His father was always making remarks about what a bad driver Sondra had been, and after a two-day thaw followed by a medium-sized blizzard, the streets were at their most treacherous. Henry had tried to argue them into taking a bus downtown, but Sondra had laughed and said Henry was suffering from sour grapes, meaning that it was only because he couldn’t drive that he was in favor of the bus. In fact, though he didn’t bother correcting her, Henry could drive again. His license had been restored just after the new year, and he and Madge had celebrated by driving all the way to Mankato and back to go to the funeral of a cousin of Henry’s whom Henry hadn’t seen since he was fifteen and the cousin was twelve.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Sondra said, glancing sideways. At the same moment the back end of the Electra fishtailed turning off Calumet onto Johnson at the corner of Brosner Park.

  Billy held his breath till the car had corrected course. Then he said, “I was thinking you must not know Dad’s got his driving license back.”

  “Has he? That’s nice. It should certainly make your lives a lot easier. Personally, I can’t imagine getting along without a car. Not living in Willowville. But I’m not surprised Henry didn’t say anything. He’s become so… private lately. I hope he’s been feeling all right.”

  “He’s fine, Mom. Everyone is fine.”

  Sondra made a grimace of skepticism, and Billy took a deep breath and braced himself for the interrogation he could see coming. Each time his mother managed to get him to herself she would start in with the questions. It was almost as though she’d written them down on a list, like groceries: “How is poor old Mrs. Obstschmecker?” and “Is Henry still working at the bar on Lake Street?”

  “How is poor old Mrs. Obstschmecker?” Sondra asked.

  “She’s fine.”

  “And her hair? Has it started to grow back?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, it’s been how long? Almost four months. The last couple times I stopped by at the house I haven’t seen her. That’s why I asked if she was well.”

  “She doesn’t come out of her room much anymore. I guess she feels funny being bald.”

  “Does she come to meals? Does she watch TV?”

  “She’s got her own TV in her room, and Madge brings her her meals on a tray.”

  Sondra digested this information till they’d reached Snelling, where she had to stop for the traffic light.

  “Madge has been having some problems too, I understand.”

  “She’s okay now. She found out that when she drinks alcohol it makes her throw up. It’s some kind of allergy. I’m not even supposed to know about it, so don’t say I told you.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  Now, Billy thought, she was going to ask him about Henry’s bartending job on the weekends. But instead she said: “It seems your school has been in the news.”

  “Really? On TV?”

  “No. Just a small notice in the Minneapolis newspaper. Ben pointed it out to me yesterday. It seems there’s some kind of ‘dental emergency’ at your school and another public school nearby.”

  “Oh, there were only two kids from OLM that had that happen. The other kids are all at Weyerhauser. They sent us home with pink cards that we had to take to the dentist to show we’d had him look at our teeth. And mine are all okay except for one little cavity that was in a baby tooth that’s loose anyhow.”

  “You wouldn’t know any of the children involved, would you?”

  “One’s in our class,” Billy confirmed, smiling at the thought of the goofy way Lyman Sinclair looked since the Heath bars had done their job on him. Either Lyman had managed to pocket some candy from the bowl before heading for the movie in the gym or else he was a friend of the kids from Weyerhauser and had shared some of what they’d stolen.

  “A friend of yours?” Sondra asked.

  “No, he’s a colored kid. All the kids that happened to were colored. It’s probably because they don’t brush their teeth the right way. You have to move the brush in a circle. Like this.” Billy imitated the movements of the ideal toothbrusher, as seen in the long dull film about dental hygiene that everyone in the school had had to sit through on the day the pink cards had been distributed.

  Sondra smiled. The pantomine of toothbrushing was somehow reassuring. But she felt obliged to say, “The fact that the boy is colored doesn’t mean he couldn’t be your friend. I had a colored friend in high school, and that was back when there were many fewer colored people in the area.”

  “Yeah, but Lyman Sinclair is a real bully. He’s older than most of the other kids, and bigger, and Sister Catherine has told him in front of the whole class that he’s probably going to end up in reform school if he keeps on acting like he does.”

  “Still,” Sondra said, with a virtuous tightening of her hands on the steering wheel, “it’s a terrible thing for anyone at any age to lose all their teeth all at once.”

  “Oh, for sure,” Billy agreed. But he couldn’t resist adding, “But it does make him look funny, and he can’t talk the same way he used to either. There must have been something wrong with the false teeth he had. And then he got in a fight, like he always does, and his teeth got broken.”

  Sondra shook her head. “The poor boy.”

  Billy grinned. “And then, last week, someone wrote this math problem on the blackboard. It said, ‘Lyman Sinclair had thirty-two teeth. On Halloween he ate five candy bars and all his teeth rotted and fell out. If the tooth fairy pays twenty-five cents for each tooth that Lyman
leaves under his pillow, how much money must she pay Lyman?’”

  Sondra smiled. “And you wouldn’t know who the someone was who wrote that on the blackboard, would you?”

  Billy shook his head, all innocence. “It had to be someone who came back to the classroom during lunch hour. But they never found out who. Sister Catherine was pretty mad about it.”

  “Well, whoever it was, I expect he’s sorry now. That boy must have gone through terrible suffering and—”

  “Mom!” Billy warned. “Watch out for the—”

  Too late. The Mercury Comet sedan she’d pulled out alongside of at last decided to pass the pickup that had been dawdling along ahead of it. As the Comet moved left into Sondra’s lane its left back fender slammed into the side of the Electra, sending it spinning across the ice-slicked surface of the street.

  Sondra closed her eyes and gripped the steering wheel reflexively, not with any thought of controlling the spin but talismanlike in the hope it would protect her.

  Billy, as he’d been told to do if he was ever in an accident, curled forward as far as the seat belt let him and covered his head with his arms. He didn’t look up until the car had come to a full stop, having slid into the snowbank on the opposite side of Snelling, facing in the opposite direction to which they’d been driving.

  “Oh God Jesus, Billy—are you all right?”

  Billy uncovered his head. “I’m okay, Mom. Are you?”

  Sondra began to cry. Then, as far as both their seat belts allowed it, she hugged him. A city bus lumbered to a stop beside the Electra, and the driver got out and knocked on the window and asked Sondra if she was all right. “Yes,” she shouted through her tears. “I’m fine! Thank you!” The driver got back in his bus and drove away. Across the street there was no sign of the Mercury that had slammed into them.

  “It’s a miracle,” said Sondra. “A miracle we’re both alive. That idiot, pulling out without even looking. And there’s no sign of him now, and Lord knows what he did to the car.”

  She tried to move the car ahead, but they were solidly lodged in the snowdrift. The back tries had no purchase and spun about futilely. Sondra sighed. “I’m going to have to call for a tow, Billy. You can come with me or stay in the car, whichever you like.”

  “I’ll stay here. If a policeman comes, I can tell him what happened. It really wasn’t your fault, Mom, I could see that.”

  “Thank you, darling.” She gave him a kiss and went to find a pay phone.

  During the ten minutes she was gone, Billy’s mind was a tennis match of panicky decisions to do one thing and then to do the opposite. He’d acted so calmly right after the accident, but now alone in the car it was as though the accident were still happening, the car still spinning around in the middle of Snelling out of control and the only way to stop it was to tell his mother everything. Why Grandma O. had gone bald. Why Madge couldn’t drink any kind of liquor anymore without throwing up. Why all those kids—and Ralph Johnson’s father, too—had lost their teeth.

  But then there was Ned, lying upstairs in his endless coma, and if he began to explain about those other things, he’d have to explain about that too. And he couldn’t do that, not ever.

  And he didn’t want to give up the caduceus, especially now that it was so charged up. Ever since Halloween it was like grabbing hold of a live electric wire. If he could only think of the right way to use all that power, a way to help his father and mother, and Madge too, all the people he really loved, and to help them in a way that wouldn’t backfire like what he’d done for Madge had backfired. Because Madge did not seem at all happier as a result of not being an alcoholic anymore. Sometimes she got gloomy in a way she never used to, and she was cranky more often, and she seemed to have a fight with Henry almost every night about something or other. So the next time he did anyone a favor, he had to be sure of what he was doing.

  Sondra returned to the car with a paper bag from which she produced two Styrofoam cups, one leaking milky coffee, the other leaking watery cocoa. There was also a box of candy-coated popcorn called Scrunchies, which promised, like their more famous competitor, Cracker Jacks, “A Free Gift in Every Box!”

  It was when Billy had dug halfway down into the candied popcorn and discovered the free gift that he realized that nothing that had happened that day had been an accident—because it had all been leading to this. His problem was solved, and it was as easy as looking up the right answer in the back of the teacher’s special copy of the arithmetic workbook.

  The free gift came wrapped inside an inch-square envelope of translucent paper. It was a single shiny new penny wedged into a slotted piece of cardboard. Above the penny it said, “Official Lucky Loafer Penny.” Under it there was a little poem:

  With this you’ll be no wealthy man

  But be as healthy as you can!

  “Gee thanks, Mom!” Billy said, leaning across the seat to kiss his mother. “You sure picked the right box. This is a super prize.”

  Sondra thought he was overdoing it, but she was touched by what seemed to be his deliberate effort to make her feel better about the accident and the likelihood of their missing the first half of the circus. It broke her heart, it really did, that she could only have him a few hours at a time on weekends and holidays. He was such a sweet kid. She wanted a bigger share of him. Really, she wanted him all.

  26

  He could tell, after he’d touched it to the third penny, that all the caduceus’s power had been used up. In a way he was pleased. Though it meant he would have to wait a while before he could do for Sondra what he was doing for Henry and Madge, he reasoned that the benefit he was conferring must be great, since before he’d used it on the three pennies the caduceus had had such a lot of energy in it and now it was empty.

  The first penny went to Henry. “Hey, Dad,” he said, just after Henry had got up from the sofa at the end of the Nightly News, “this change dropped out of your pocket.” He pretended to pick up four coins from where Henry had been sprawled and then went over to him and put them in his hand—first the original bright new penny that had come as a prize with the candy and then, just because it seemed more convincing, two dimes and a quarter. Henry smiled and said thank you and pocketed the change, marveling a little at Billy’s honesty. He was certain that when he’d been his age he’d have acted on the philosophy that finders are keepers.

  The second penny went to Madge. Billy waited till Saturday, which was her cleaning day, and when she’d started mopping the kitchen linoleum with the O’Cedar sponge mop, he went into the bathroom and put the penny on the floor beside the toilet. She always mopped the bathroom right after the kitchen. And sure enough, when the bathroom floor was dry enough for Billy to be allowed to go back in, the penny was gone from the floor. He knew she’d taken it because she was the one who always repeated “See a penny, pick it up, and all that day you’ll have good luck” whenever she saw a penny lying on the ground.

  Getting the third penny to connect with Grandma O. was more of a problem. Because he couldn’t be sure if this penny had the same full zap of health that the first two did, he hadn’t wanted to give it to his mother. There’d be time, later on, when the caduceus was charged up again, to do it right. But he figured that Granma O., being as old as she was, wouldn’t have the same long-term health requirements: he’d heard his father and Madge discussing the old woman’s potential for longevity and Madge had said five years with luck. Indeed, if Billy hadn’t had misgivings about the full effectiveness of the third penny, he probably wouldn’t have thought to do Grandma O. a good turn at all. If there’d been a pet in the house he’d more likely have blessed that hypothetical dog or cat with whatever power the third penny had. But there wasn’t a pet, and he did feel a little guilty about what had happened to Grandma O.’s hair, and finally he simply was curious as to what being “as healthy as you can” would represent in Grandma O.’s case. Would her memory improve? Would she be less cranky? Would she be able to move around more easily
? He considered it an interesting scientific experiment.

  The problem was, since Grandma O. almost never left the house anymore and so had very little practical use for money, how could he get her to touch the penny? If she saw a penny on the floor, she certainly wouldn’t stoop to pick it up. And he couldn’t say, “Hey, Grandma, isn’t this your penny?” because she’d just say no, it wasn’t, and give him one of her suspicious looks. But finally he figured out a way to do it. He put the third penny into the slotted square of cardboard that the original Official Lucky Loafer Penny had come in, and one afternoon when he was home from school and both Madge and his father were out of the house, he knocked on the door of Grandma O.’s room. Only after a second knock did Grandma O. say, “Yes, what is it?” Billy said he had a question he wanted to ask her. By then she’d come to stand on the other side of the door. “What is the question?” she asked.

  Billy said, “I can’t ask you till I show you what is it I want to ask you about first.”

  Reluctantly Grandma O. took the hook out of its eyelet and opened the door. She was wearing a wig that looked more or less like the hair she used to have, but she still didn’t believe it fooled anyone. When people looked at her, she felt that they could see through the wig with X-ray vision and were secretly laughing at the spectacle of her baldness. “Well, what is it?” she demanded, standing in the doorway to keep Billy from coming into her room, as though he were a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness.

  “What’s this supposed to mean?” He handed her the square of cardboard with the penny in it.

  She held it up in front of her nose and squinted at it. “The print’s too small,” she said. “I can’t read it.” She tried to hand it back to him, but he’d put his hands in his pockets.