THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “What it says,” he explained, “is ‘Official Lucky Loafer Penny.’ But what does that mean?”

  A smile of genuine if fleeting pleasure wrinkled Mrs. Obstschmecker’s lips. Rarely was her larger experience of the world appealed to as a source of wisdom or information. “A loafer was a kind of shoe people used to wear, young people mostly. That was before everyone started wearing tennis shoes all the time. And every loafer had a kind of I don’t know what you call it. A slit. And it was just big enough to fit a penny inside of.”

  She ran her fingertip back and forth across the penny.

  “Did you wear loafers?”

  “Goodness no! But Madge did, I remember now. Penny loafers, that was the word for them. Isn’t that strange, I can remember her loafers on her feet with the white bobby socks as plain as if it were yesterday! Brown penny loafers. But she had nickels in the slits, not pennies. Maybe inflation had already started by then, that’s always the hardest thing to remember, what a particular thing would cost in a particular year. There used to be candy you could buy for just one penny. But not anymore.”

  She handed the Official Lucky Loafer Penny back to Billy, who accepted it now with a glow of conscious benevolence. He had to fight against telling her the favor he’d just done for her, or even hinting at it. Grandma O. had a nose for secrets. But he couldn’t resist reading aloud the little poem printed beneath the penny: “Listen to what else it says here:

  ‘With this you’ll be no wealthy man

  But be as healthy as you can!’

  Do you think that that’s really true, Grandma? Can one penny really be luckier for someone than any other penny?”

  “No, no, that isn’t very likely, is it?” Again she smiled. “But I remember how your grandfather, that’s to say my poor late husband Mr. Obstschmecker, he had a silver dollar that he would never part with. It’s hard to believe he’s been dead six years already. It seems like only yesterday. He was buried with that silver dollar.”

  Good health is not a condition like baldness that is immediately recognizable, and so Billy had no sure way of knowing whether the three pennies were having their intended effect. Some weeks went by, and no one in the house came down with a cold or the flu, but who could say that that was his doing?

  27

  His kite had mounted so high that he’d almost run out of string. It was so high you could barely make out what color it was, but that was also because it was pale blue, about the blue you’d get if you poured a little milk into the blue of the sky and mixed them together. It was beautiful, but it was hard to say why. It wasn’t just that it was so high up. Planes fly higher, but you’re not connected to a plane by a length of string. The string felt alive, the way it tugged at you, like a bird on a long long leash, asking to be unreeled to some even more incredible height, or the way it would suddenly take a nosedive and the string would go slack and you’d have to wind it in as fast as you could when suddenly, bing, it would snap tight again.

  Because it was Ascension Day and a holy day of obligation, OLM had the day off but the kids at the public school didn’t, and so Billy had Brosner Park virtually to himself. His was the only kite in the sky. He felt as though he were the center of all St. Paul, the one link connecting sky and city, heaven and earth. He wondered for how many blocks around the park it was possible to see his kite, how many people were looking at it at this very moment and marveling.

  While Billy had been gazing up at his kite, one of his classmates from OLM had come up the path, unnoticed, from the direction of Coughlin Avenue.

  “Howza brain,” Lyman Sinclair said to Billy by way of greeting when he stepped within his field of vision. He smiled a gummy smile at him, which, in combination with his dark sunglasses, did not register as friendly. Ever since he’d broken his first set of dentures, Lyman had taken to pocketing his prosthesis whenever he wasn’t indoors.

  “Hi, Lyman.” Billy tried not to sound afraid. He glanced back over his shoulder to see if Lyman had come up the hill by himself. He had. There was not another person to be seen, not so much as a passing car.

  “Fleyn a cut uhyuh?”

  Billy couldn’t understand a word Lyman had said, only that it had taken the form of a question. Even at school, with his dentures in and making an effort to speak the classroom English Sister Catherine insisted on, it was usually difficult to understand what Lyman was saying. The words all slid together into a mush.

  “I’m flying a kite,” Billy said. It was a dumb thing to say, because obviously that’s what he was doing, but talking to Lyman was like talking to someone who speaks another language. You felt you had to say things as simply as possible.

  “Lemme have it.” Lyman held out his hand. This time there was no difficulty understanding him. He wanted Billy’s kite.

  Billy experienced a moment of genuine doubt. Was Lyman asking to have the kite as his own? Or only to feel it tugging at him from the sky? To feel that tug and then to give it back? Then he realized it didn’t really matter what Lyman wanted: he didn’t want Lyman touching his kite. Period. He shook his head and took a few short steps backwards, away from the pull of the wind. He realized that he was trapped by the kite in the same way the kite was trapped by him. He couldn’t run away from Lyman without surrendering the kite to him. And Billy was not a surrenderer.

  “Juzz fah amminuh,” Lyman said, in a reasonable tone of voice but tilting his sunglass-visored face at an angle that said or else.

  “No,” said Billy quietly, concentrating his attention on the kite string as he began to rewind it around its wooden spool. “I have to get going home.”

  “Gotta do your homewurg, huh?” Lyman said. “Gotta figger how mudge a toof fairy gonna pay fer ma tee?” He was speaking as clearly as he was able, and with a force of rancor that made Billy look up, despite himself, to regard Lyman’s toothless smile and then the nightmarish, slow opening of a pocketknife. Lyman reached up to catch the tense kite string, then quickly backed away from Billy with the kite in his control. He held the knife blade to the string of the kite as to the throat of a hostage. “It wuz you, wuznit? It wuz you wrode thad shit onna blagboar?”

  Billy shook his head.

  “Uh-huh.” Lyman’s lips curled into an expression that would have been a snarl if he’d been wearing his dentures. “It wuz you. Uhnue allatom it wuz you.” He took a tight grip on the kite string and cut the string, but then, just as Billy was about to admit defeat and run away, Lyman, instead of enjoying the spoils of his victory, offered the tense, severed kite string back to Billy.

  High up in the sky and far to the northwest the kite canted sideways and began to dip. Billy took the string in his left hand and, dropping the useless spool, began with his right hand to wind the string as fast as he could about knuckles and palm of his left hand. The string was growing slack faster than he could wind it but then there a gust that pulled it taut again, forming a sudden painful tourniquet about his hand. Billy made a cry of pain, and Lyman an appreciative “Huh!”

  Lyman snatched up the spool with its remnant of string from where Billy had dropped it when he’d been given the kite string. He snapped it in two across his knee and flung the pieces as far as he could. “Seeyuh, brain,” he said, and ran down the hill in the direction he’d come from.

  Billy had no choice, if he was to save the kite, but to keep winding the string about his hand. It was a constant fight against the wind, which wanted to keep the kite aloft. Every new burst pulled the thickening reel of string tighter. Hoping to relieve the pressure on his left hand, he pulled the string back with his right hand to keep it slack, and soon his right hand was bleeding from a dozen thin nicks and slices. Finally the pain in both hands was too much and he decided to give up the fight and let the kite go free.

  But the string had knotted itself into an inextricable tangle about his left hand and he couldn’t get it off. He tried to break the string but that was just as impossible without a sharp edge to bring to bear against it.

 
; The wind picked up. He felt as a fish must feel that’s been hooked and is being reeled in to its death. If only the kite would plummet to the ground, but it was flying perfectly. He got his right foot on the string to create more slack and tried again with both hands to snap it in two, but the string was too strong. It was, in fact, a thin nylon fishline that an article about kites in a magazine in the school library had recommended as being the best compromise between strength and lightness. He’d spent almost four dollars for it, three times as much as the cost of the kite.

  A sudden gust caught him unawares and yanked the nylon line from under his shoe. It sliced into the side of his hand like a wire cheese slicer into a hunk of cheddar. Blood flowed down over the back of his hand and dripped from his fingertips. The blood made the kite string slippery, and when he tried to grip it his whole hand seemed on fire with pain. But he managed, with the help of his elbow and a momentary shift of wind, to get some slack back into the line.

  Like an animal with its foot in a trap, Billy now tried to gnaw his way to freedom. Lifting his left hand, he was able to bite at the slack length of line between his hands. The first bite had no effect. He bit down harder, and just as the nylon thread slipped like dental floss between his new-grown central incisor and the milk tooth beside it, the wind gusted and the line snapped taut, pulling free from his bleeding right hand and yanking out both front incisors with a single deft impulse of energy. The line parted, cut by the very teeth it had extracted, and the kite mounted into a last brief flight of glory before it took its final plunge.

  Billy fell to his knees, shocked beyond screaming. Blood gushed from his torn gums and from the right side of his mouth where the kite string had made a deep incision, but all the pain was concentrated in his right hand. The left hand in its tourniquet of kite string was numb, and when he tried to raise that hand to his mouth to staunch the blood spurting onto his shirt and pants, it was as though his whole left arm had turned into a single block of wood unhinged at wrist or elbow.

  All the way home, the entire ten blocks’ stumbling run along Calumet, spattering the sidewalk with droplets of blood, his thoughts were fixed not on his own pain but on Lyman Sinclair, on how he hated Lyman Sinclair, on the horror of his toothless smile. He didn’t know he’d lost two teeth himself. He knew only that his mouth was bleeding, that his hands hurt, that he had to get home. He kept turning round to look behind him as though he were being pursued and fearful his pursuer would overtake him. Once an older woman trimming the hedge on her lawn tried to make him stop, but he ran by, ignoring her calls of “Little boy!” and “Young man!”

  He got home just as Henry was pulling up into the driveway with the backseat of the Dodge filled with bags and boxes from his weekly shopping expedition to the Country Club Market at Rice and Wheelock. When he saw Billy covered with blood and lurching up the sidewalk toward the house, Henry slammed on the brakes. The old Dodge bucked to a stop, and Henry sprang out of the car and raced toward Billy, who, seeing his father, stopped where he was and simply waited to be taken up in his arms.

  All of Henry’s alarms went off at once. He swept up Billy and ran with him out to the street, looking for whoever had been chasing him, trembling with anger. Then, disappointed of any outlet for that anger, he tried to comfort Billy and at the same time to find out what had happened to him. He made him open his mouth and saw where the two teeth had been torn from the gum. “Who did this?” he demanded. But Billy would only shake his head, refusing speech now that tears were possible. Then Henry discovered the hand trapped in the tangle of fishline, its fingers red and swollen with blood, and he remembered Billy setting off for the park with his new blue kite. “Is this the string from your kite, Billy?” he asked, trying not to sound panicky.

  Billy nodded.

  Henry made a more secure cradle of his arms and carried Billy to the car, then thought better of it and changed course for the front door. “We’ll get you to the hospital right off the bat, Billy, but first I want to cut that string off your hand. Okay?”

  Billy nodded.

  Be calm, Henry told himself. Madge does this every day. But it was hard to be calm when first he couldn’t find any scissors but the old blunt scissors in the kitchen drawer, which wouldn’t do the job at all. He ended up having to use the sharpest of the paring knives, and twice, in severing the last loops of string, he nicked the boy’s hand. When he apologized, Billy said he didn’t have any feeling in the hand at all. But when the last of the string was off and the blood rushed back into circulation, Billy started to howl with pain.

  “What in the world—” said Mrs. Obstschmecker, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Billy had an accident,” Henry said, lifting Billy from the kitchen chair. “I can’t explain now, and in fact I don’t know what happened. He seems to have been in a fight. I have to take him to the emergency room at Ramsay Northwestern. Call Madge, would you? Thank God she left me the car today.”

  “But what do you want me to tell Madge?” Mrs. Obstschmecker whined. But she whined too late, for Henry was already out the door.

  She phoned Madge at the hospital and told her what little she knew—how Billy was in such a state and Henry in a worse state than him, and the blood all over both of them and a whole kitchen towel soaked with it.

  “But why?” Madge insisted, keeping her voice professionally calm. “What happened? Was he in some kind of accident?”

  “No, a fight Henry said. And there’s all this string just covered with blood on the kitchen floor. I wish I understood what was going on! But he did say for you to go down to the emergency room, that’s where he was taking Billy.”

  For the next half hour, while she waited for either Henry or Madge to phone back and tell her what was happening, Mrs. Obstschmecker busied herself cleaning up the blood spattered all over the kitchen. Of late Mrs. Obstschmecker had not concerned herself with housekeeping outside of her own two rooms, but it was less upsetting to mop up the blood than to sit by the phone and stare at it. She’d gone through half a roll of paper towels and still hadn’t begun to deal with the splotches on the living room and dining room carpets when instead of the phone ringing the doorbell buzzed. Mrs. Obstschmecker no longer dealt with visitors in a day-to-day way. When the doorbell rang, she went to her room and let someone else answer it if there was anyone home, and if there wasn’t, she just waited for the visitor to go away. But today, obviously, was not an ordinary day, so she went to the door, which Henry had left standing wide open, and there were two uniformed policemen.

  “Mrs. Henry Michaels?” the taller of the policemen said.

  “That’s my daughter,” said Mrs. Obstschmecker.

  “Is she here? Could we talk with her?”

  “She’s at work. But I’m her mother. Is something wrong?”

  The policemen exchanged a glance that made it clear that something very definitely was wrong.

  “Is the boy badly hurt?” she demanded, unable to believe that Billy could have been seriously injured and still have been making such a fuss.

  “Has the hospital already—” the first policeman began, but was overridden by his partner saying, reassuringly, “The boy is fine. He’s suffered some cuts and abrasions, and he seems to have lost a couple of teeth, but he’s going to be fine. It’s a good thing he had his seat belt on.”

  “There was an accident?”

  There was an accident. It had happened at Snelling and McGill, outside a Lincoln/Mercury dealership. Henry had been speeding. A bicycle veered out onto Snelling from behind a parked semi. Henry braked and twisted the wheel. The right front tire blew, and the old Dodge went careening into the pole that supported the dealership’s revolving sign. The pole was snapped in two by the impact, and Henry, who had failed to secure his seat belt, was thrown headfirst against, and through, the windshield. He went into shock instantly and was declared dead shortly after being admitted to the hospital emergency ward. Which meant, according to Mrs. Obstschmecker, when she would speak of thes
e events in later years, that he’d died a painless death. “And that’s a blessing, isn’t it?” she would always add. “That is a blessing.”

  BOOK THREE

  28

  He was in that in-between state, warmer and more pleasant than any bathtub, of being awake without quite being behind the driver’s wheel of consciousness, when he saw the envelope being slipped under his bedroom door, a pale pink rectangle that appeared and then either disappeared or else he drifted back to sleep for a few moments. Then it appeared a second time (or he awoke) and this time was not taken back. It’s from Judith, he thought. Because only Judith would be using pink envelopes. The duvet suddenly felt much too warm and at the same moment the slanting sunlight spotlighting the dust motes intensified as though he’d taken off a pair of sunglasses. I’ve got to get up, he told himself. The message traveled slowly to whatever part of his mind translated such decisions into muscular contractions. Then, gingerly, with toes and knees he nudged the ungainly duvet sideways, exposing himself to the spring morning air in graduated dosages.

  Only when he was sitting up and positioning his flipper in his mouth did it dawn on him what today was. His birthday. He was thirteen years old, an official teenager. He wondered what sort of official birthday presents he would get, but it wasn’t a wonder keen enough to accelerate his getting dressed. He didn’t think the birthday monster was liable to bring him anything he really ached to have. His mother would buy him a lot of sport clothes with designer labels, and maybe a tennis racket, since she’d been dropping hints about how much fun tennis was and how he ought to get more exercise, and then almost certainly (since at Christmas he’d been given his own “home entertainment center” complete with hi-fi, tape deck, and a twelve-inch TV) a lot of records and tapes. What Winky would give him he couldn’t imagine, but he doubted it would be anything he wanted. Maybe just money, and that would be okay. He’d begun to appreciate money.