Three days after the election of John F. Kennedy, Coot and George, with George jumping, kicking, and braying, charged into Wooden Leg’s wharf, just below the Finestkind Clinic. Coot jumped out and tied up. George jumped out and kicked his heels and threatened everything in sight.
“You get that christly jackass the hell off my wharf, you crazy old bastard,” yelled Wooden Leg.
“I gotta git George to Doggy Moore. He’s got the colic.”
“Oh, my sweet holy Jesus,” exclaimed Wooden Leg. “I gotta see this. Stick that jack in the back of my truck. I’ll take you to the emergency room.”
At the emergency room, Coot Yeaton ran in and demanded: “Git Doggy. My ahss is sick.”
“We’ll call Dr. Moore, sir,” the nurse assured him.
“May I ask you a few questions?”
“Showah,” agreed Coot. “Whatcha wanta know?”
“May I have your name and address?”
“Whatcha want that for? I ain’t sick. It’s my ahss is sick. George.”
“What?” asked the nurse.
“George,” repeated Coot. “My ahss. He’s sicker’n hell. Prob’ly got the christly colic.”
One can only speculate about where this conversation might have led had not Dr. Doggy Moore and Mr. Wooden Leg Wilcox arrived simultaneously.
“Coot,” said Wooden Leg, “your ahss is kickin’ the ;shit out of my truck. Hurry up and get him a bed, will you?”
“Coot,” said Doggy Moore, “did you bring that colicky jack in here again?”
“Damn it, Doggy, you told me not to bring him to your office no more. You said bring him to the hospital. That’s what I done.”
Doggy, with his years of experience, didn’t argue with Coot or bother to point out, as younger men might have, that he was not a jackass doctor.
“George got insurance yet, Coot?” Doggy asked. “I am tired of treating him for nothing.”
“I could let you have some lobsters. Just take care of George. Please, Doggy.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Soon after George began to respond to an enema, which Doggy administered with the help of a garden hose, a northeaster blew up, making the return trip to East Haven impossible for Coot and George. George was given a private room at Wooden Leg’s wharf and Coot, knowing no other recreation, headed for the Bay View Café. Hawkeye, aware of what had happened, sent word to his uncle, Lew the Jew Pierce, that Coot could use company. Coot and Lew were old friends, so Lew mounted his Cadillac and drove to Spruce Harbor.
By midevening Coot and Lew the Jew had made significant progress. They relived the days when they’d run booze from Saint Pierre arid Miquelon in a schooner named Sarah Pierce after Lew’s wife, who’d died in childbirth. They fascinated the customers with the tale of the schooner, heavy with Cutty Sark, hitting an iceberg in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and four days later leaving a Coast Guard cutter hung up on Thrumbcap Ledge while they slipped, in darkness, into Otter Island Cove.
Reminiscences over, their conversation turned to politics. This had always been a sensitive subject with Lew Pierce, a lifelong Republican who, even in 1960, felt that, as menaces to society, mad dogs and Democrats were neck and neck. Lew, although aware that his friend Coot was eccentric, was not prepared for Coot’s statement: “By the Jesus, Jew. I done somethin’ I never done afoah. I voted the straight Democratic ticket. Son of a howah.”
“Son of a howah,” agreed Lew the Jew, too overwrought to think of a more poignant comment.
At this point in the political dialogue Doggy Moore arrived at the Bay View to discuss, with Bette Bang-Bang, Mattress Mary and Made Marion, a particularly virulent strain of Neisseria gonococcus. This organism, resistant to the usual antibiotics, had so curtailed the girls’ business that for three days their only customer had been Half A Man Timberlake. Even Half A Man—who, according to Dr. Moore, was immune to venereal disease—was slacking off from plain old fatigue, a previously unrecorded phenomenon. Doggy, having obtained cultures and antibiotic sensitivity tests on the girls, arrived with a new oral antibiotic, which he hoped would make them sweet and clean. He recalled the exhortations, two days earlier, of Wooden Leg Wilcox, who had said: “Chrissake, Doggy, if you don’t clean up them howahs, the President’s gonna have to declare Spruce Harbor a disaster area.”
While Dr. Moore gave meticulous instructions to Bette, Mary and Marion, Lew the Jew and Coot Yeaton stood at the bar and continued their political debate. With very few preliminaries, the debate dwindled to invective. For example, Mr. Lewis Pierce made this statement: “Democrats sleep with snakes, run rabbits, bark at the moon and they get so jeezly tired they gotta pay somebody to go pick up their relief check. By the Jesus, Coot, I got a mind to muckle onto you.”
“You ain’t got no call to be so nasty,” wailed Coot. “And you better not muckle onto me, if’n you know what’s good for yuh. I guess not, by the old Billy Bejeezus.”
“If’n I was to muckle onto you,” declared Mr. Lewis Pierce, “I’d throw you fifteen, maybe twenty foot, lust time I took aholt.”
Ace Kimball, the bartender, had been monitoring the Great Pierce-Yeaton Debate. Ace felt that the situation was deteriorating so he reached for the forty-five pistol he kept behind the bar for riot control. He was prepared to shoot at a two-foot-square area in the ceiling which was specially reinforced for just this purpose. One shot had always quelled violence in the Bay View Café.
It all happened very quickly. Lew the Jew muckled onto Coot. Doggy Moore, too late, left the booth he shared with his patients, hoping to intercede. Ace Kimball tried to get off a shot at the ceiling, just as Coot
Yeaton, in orbit over the bar, hit his right shoulder Ace missed the ceiling and shot Doggy Moore in the chest.
Doggy fell in his tracks, was momentarily stunned, but within seconds he took full command. “Call Trapper John,” he ordered Ace. “He’ll call Hawkeye and Duke. Do that first, so they’ll be on their way. Then call the ambulance. Then call the emergency room and let me talk to whoever’s on duty.”
After getting Trapper and the ambulance, Ace called the emergency room and held the phone for Doggy who said: “This here’s Doggy. I been shot. I want a dozen pints of blood. I gotta be operated on tonight. Get Me Lay. The other fellers are on their way.”
The local police arrived just as Doggy was being placed on a stretcher by the ambulance crew, all of whom were more nervous and scared than usual because they’d all been delivered by Doggy Moore.
“What happened, Doggy? Can you gimme a statement?” asked the Chief of Police.
“It was an accident. No one to blame. Don’t arrest anybody for this.”
Doggy Moore then became unconscious, because, as it turned out, there was a small hole in the apex of the left ventricle of his heart. Every time his heart beat, blood was forced out through this tiny hole into the pericardium, the membrane which contains the heart.
Lucinda Lively and Trapper John were waiting when the ambulance arrived. Trapper ordered an immediate chest X-ray, inspected the wound, and took Doggy’s blood pressure, which was 80/65.
“I don’t need to see the X-ray,” he said. “Get the pump ready, hon. We may need it.”
In the year since her marriage, Lucinda had become Trapper’s cardiac bypass expert. Progress was such that, instead of the horde of Filipinos which Big Charley in Phily had employed a few years earlier, one bright blond could run an effective, if unsophisticated, extracorporeal pump, a machine which, for short periods, did the work of the heart.
Duke and Hawkeye arrived just as Trapper got the first pint of blood running into Doggy and was exposing a vein in his groin to start another.
“What’s the score?” asked Duke.
“It bit his heart. He’s bleeding into his pericardium. I figure we go as soon as the OR is set up.
Me Lay’s here. We can’t screw around with this one.”
“What else is hit?” asked Duke.
“Christ only knows,” said H
awkeye, inspecting the hole in Doggy”s back from which the bullet emerged. “There’s lots of things it could have hit, but the heart’s the word for now. Let’s fix that, load him with antibiotics and bide our time. He can’t stand a whole night of surgery. Either way, though, we’d better check his spleen.”
“Right,” said Trapper.
At this stage of the game there was no apparent need for Dr. Spearchucker Jones but he appeared in the dressing room as the other surgeons changed into scrub clothes. He changed, too, saying: “I’ll just be handy, in case one of you guys faints from the sight of blood.”
“Anybody got a butt?” asked Trapper.
“I thought you’d quit,” said Hawkeye.
“I want a butt,” insisted Trapper.
Spearchucker found cigarettes and they all smoked.
“Just like MASH all over again,” said Hawk.
A few minutes later, while Lucinda stood ready to run the pump if the need arose, Trapper made an incision between the left fourth and fifth ribs, cut across the breastbone, and extended the incision between the same ribs on the right. He put in a big retractor, turned its handle and the membrane which surrounded the heart, bulging, obviously full of blood, protruded into the wound.
“You gonna stick him on the pump?” asked Duke.
“Shut the hell up. Honey,” he said to the nurse, “have 2-0 silk sutures ready—those swedged on jobs.”
“I figure it’s just one hole,” Trapper explained, “maybe two, but we should be able to control the bleeding long enough to close them.”
Trapper opened the membrane and blood gushed out. Trapper scooped clot with his hands. At the apex of the ventricle, where the bullet had grazed the heart, there was one small hole. Two stitches closed it.
Everyone sighed. “The spleen,” said Hawkeye.
“Open the diaphragm.”
“Yeah,” said Trapper.
The spleen was bleeding merrily.
“Rip it,” said Hawk.
“Yeah.”
A three-minute splenectomy was followed by a hasty inspection of the area, which revealed no obvious damage to the other organs. At the end of the procedure, Doggy’s blood pressure was 100/60, and all seemed well.
“You guys still have it,” said Me Lay. “Good job.”
“We haven’t heard the last of this one,” said Duke.
“No,” Hawk agreed, “but we can handle the rest of it on our terms, not the bullet’s.”
Doggy Moore was taken from the OR to the intensive-care unit with a catheter in his bladder, a tube through his nose leading to his stomach, a tube coming out of each side of his chest and emptying into separate bottles, partly filled with water, and with two blood transfusions running. Two hours later when he regained consciousness, Doggy assessed his situation and asked a nurse: “Whatsamatter, honey? Can’t you find something to stick in my ear?”
The surgeons did not leave the hospital that night. With the exception of Spearchucker, they all canceled the next day’s surgery. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” proclaimed Duke, “till that Yankee doctor is out of the woods. Besides, he’s got blood in his urine. You guys maybe don’t know it but I saw Doggy a year ago because of some kidney trouble. His right kidney isn’t the best and I figure he’s shot in the left one. We gotta try to save it.”
“You got any other good news?” asked Me Lay.
“Let’s get some sleep,” suggested Hawkeye.
At 7:30 A.M. the surgeons, unshaven, unwashed, sleepy, entered the intensive-care unit. They’d said nothing to each other. They were nervous. The night before they’d had the adrenalin running but now they feared a variety of complications. Secretly, each knew that being objective about this particular patient would require a great and willful effort. To each came the thought: Let’s unload him, send him to Boston. And, to each came a second thought: No, by Jesus, we can’t trust those bastards. We’ll take care of him.
Of the six patients in the intensive-care unit, two belonged to Doggy Moore. The surgeons found their patient sitting on the edge of his bed, writing orders on a chart. Their patient was saying to the patient in the next bed, “Goddamn it, Rufus, you don't get out of bed till I tell you to. You hear me?”
“Sure, I guesso, if you say so, Doggy,” agreed Rufus.
“How they goin’, Doggy?” Hawk asked, sort of timidly.
“I got blood in my urine,” said Doggy.
“Considering the broads you were out with last night, you could have worse than that in your urine,” said Hawkeye. “Wait’ll I tell Emma.”
“We’re gonna watch the urine, and we’re gonna X-ray your kidneys, Doggy,” Duke explained. “If worst comes to worst, we’ll have a look at that left kidney but I don’t want to whack it all out. If you’ll bother to remember, your right one ain’t a winner.”
“I remember,” said Doggy. “What else?”
“Well,” said Hawk. “Your left lung caught a little but that’s no problem. Also stomach, colon, even small bowel were potentially in the line of fire. We didn’t take time to look carefully. We just let Trapper fix the hole in your heart and called it a night, except for grabbing your spleen.”
“I can tell,” said Doggy. “I’m the picture of health.”
The surgeons consulted, wrote orders and went to the Bay View Café for breakfast, which was a mistake. Even riding the two miles to the Bay View, they sensed something. Hawkeye was reminded of Moose Lord. Passing cars stopped and waved them down.
“How’s Doggy?” everyone asked.
“Okay for now, but keep your fingers crossed,” was the answer they kept repeating.
They found Wooden Leg Wilcox in the Bay View nursing a beer. Early in the day, even for Wooden Leg.
“Hey, Leg” asked Hawk, “where are Coot and the Jew?”
“I sent them both out to East Haven at five thirty, along with George before they got lynched.”
“Good idea,” agreed Hawkeye. "Maybe we oughta lynch George. If that jackass didn’t get the colic every two weeks, life around here would be easier.”
Reluctantly, the surgeons all appeared at their offices that afternoon. At three o’clock Hawkeye received a call from the intensive-care unit.
“Dr. Pierce?”
“Yes.”
“We wonder if Dr. Moore should be seeing patients. He’s terribly tired.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Doggy is holding office hours in the intensive-care unit.”
“I’ll be there,” said Hawkeye.
Half an hour later, Dr. Pierce, now shaven and washed, stalked into the room where Doggy was holding court, told everyone to get the hell out and gave Dr. Moore the word.
“Okay, Doggy. Trapper operated on your hearts Duke may have to work on your kidney. God knows what else may come of this. You get this through your thick skull right now. I am running the show. You are going to be a patient, not a doctor, and you and everybody else are going to do what I say. Right now I’m ordering one hundred milligrams of Demerol and I want you to lie in the weeds for a while. If you give me any bullshit, I’ll ship your ass to Boston. Any questions?”
“Gawd,” said Doggy, “you don’t have to be so ugly.”
“I’ll be any way I have to be to get you well.”
“Okay. Maybe I could use some rest.”
That evening, before going home, Hawkeye and Trapper both checked Dr. Moore. This time he was asleep and breathing quietly. His pulse was slow and steady. As the surgeons left the hospital, they saw a strange group of people milling around on the lawn which separated the Spruce Harbor General from the Finestkind Clinic and Fishmarket.
“Hey, Hawkeye,” said Trapper, “I think it’s a Pierce family reunion. Get a load of that bunch of grunts.”
Hawkeye, in a glance, discovered that the smaller members of this group looked like chipmunks and tie larger ones like muskrats. “They’re more Doggy’s family than mine,” he told Trapper. “Those are the Finch-Browns.”
“Always open season on them. Why don’t you take one home to Lucinda. She likes pets.”
Before Trapper could consider this suggestion, a large, graying muskrat, Elihu Finch-Brown, yelled, “Hey, Hawkeye.”
“How they goin’, Elihu?” Hawk inquired solicitously.
“Piss poah,” asserted Elihu. “We come to be with Doggy.”
“Elihu, I know Doggy will be pleased but he can’t see anyone right now. In the morning I’ll tell him you were here.”
“I’ll tell the rest of em to go home,” said Elihu, “but me and Bessie is stayin’ till Doggy gets well. We can sleep in the pickup.”
“Okay, Elihu,” said Hawkeye. “Send the rest of them home. I’ll get a room for you and Bessie at the Spruce Harbor Motel.”
“Nossuh,” wailed Elihu. “We ain’t never been to no motel.”
“You’re going to one, Elihu. Doggy’d want you to be near and comfortable.”
Given the word from their leader, the chipmunks and muskrats evacuated the area and then Elihu and Bessie Finch-Brown, in their dilapidated pickup truck, followed Hawkeye and Trapper John to the Spruce Harbor Motel. Hawkeye discussed a few things with the management, led the guests to their room, explained the plumbing and TV set and left them so dazzled by the grandeur of their surroundings that, for a few minutes, they forgot their grief.
In the motel bar, Hawk and Trapper had a drink and Trapper said, “How do you explain this?”
“You’ve seen that plaque over the entrance to the pediatric ward, haven’t you?”
“The one that says ‘In Memory of C. Moore, Captain USAAF’?”
“Yeah.”
“The C. stands for Chipmunk. Doggy raised him. He belonged to Bessie and Elihu. He went to college with me. He was a fighter pilot.”
“I guess I’ll have another drink,” said Trapper John.
In the morning there was trouble. Dr. Moore’s speech was slurred and his left arm and leg were weak. He was aware of his problem and explained that in recent months he’d had similar transient episodes, none this severe. He asked for Spearchucker Jones. His urine was, still, very bloody.
M*A*S*H Goes To Maine Page 16
