Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  In the Bredforets' air-conditioned summer porch, Dr. Deeds was listening to Dr. Scaper describe his dilemma with a plodding voice and quick, irascible gestures. His dilemma was a similar peculiarity of symptoms among an increasing number of his Dingleyan patients.

  He told her first of the cluster of unconnected people, beginning with Vincent Canopy, who had died of some odd virulent strain of brucellosis. And how that series of deaths had been followed after a few years by periodic groups of other equally unsatisfactory terminal illnesses.

  "All terminal illnesses are unsatisfactory," Ruth said. "All deaths are unnatural."

  "You're young," he told her. "You'll feel different fifty years from now."

  "I don't think so."

  "I know you don't." But by unnatural deaths Dr. Scaper meant a growing list of heart attack victims who were developing endocarditis much too rapidly to suit him. The town had lost more than twenty people in the past year, and at least five in the last five days.

  "Heart attack is the biggest killer in the country," she said. She saw nothing unusual in the number of deaths.

  But he told her that these heart collapse victims had symptoms that were more like those of viral infections: fevers, sweating, chills, malaise, headache, prostration. Then all of a sudden their hearts gave out. The old doctor jabbed his finger through shelves of smoke stacked in the cooled air and cursed whatever was killing his patients. Finally he nestled his chins down on his chest and looked up at Ruth. "I never made any claims about diagnostic know-how," he grumbled. "Was always the sort of fellow that just did the best I could for the patient there in front of me. But I've seen enough to know when something's way out of kilter. This Center for Disease place of yours is out of my league, I'm the first to admit it, so you tell me what you make of all this. Because I've got some good people I'm seeing right now running these flu-type symptoms and crap showing up on lung X rays. So when I start picking up bad heart murmurs on them, hell's bells, I get scared I'm going to lose them, too."

  Dr. Deeds had been leafing slowly through Dingleyans' medical charts, among them Judith Haig's and Winslow Abernathy's. Now, seated on the floor, her legs crossed yoga-style, she began to question Scaper, who slumped, fat and slovenly, in one of Mary Bredforet's cushioned wicker rocking chairs. "First of all," she said afterwards, "like I told you, this isn't really my field. But from what I can tell, I agree it looks peculiar. I mean it looks viral but doesn't seem to be contagious, at least it's not clear how. And you've got X rays indicating pneumonia, but then there's no record of really serious respiratory problems."

  "Some of it looks like Rocky Mountain spotted fever, don't you think?"

  "No rashes. But listen, it does sound like something like that, doesn't it? That's what I'm thinking. A rickettsia. You know, there're some guys at CDC, an epidemiologist friend of mine, we ought to let him take a look at some of this data."

  "Why? You thinking something in particular?"

  Dr. Deeds walked over to lean against the glass wall of the porch.

  Across the grounds her grandfather and Mary Bredforet stooped together in the humid heat, working their garden. She turned around, staring at Scaper as intensely as if she were about to answer a proposal of marriage, though in fact she didn't even see him. "Q Fever," she said.

  "What?"

  "Well, maybe not, but I know that sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes, Coxiella burnetii can spread through the blood to the heart.

  But endocarditis would be very uncommon. Q Fever itself's pretty uncommon. Nobody seems to know that much about it. Well, I don't know. There's a lot that wouldn't fit. I mean, Q Fever should respond to tetracycline. But you say you've tried several of them with no results.

  Which is weird. And your blood cultures are negative. But I still bet that's where we should start. Maybe it's some new strain of Q Fever.

  Maybe you're right, maybe it's being passed through pets." Dr. Deeds spread out the charts on the coffee table and began to read them again.

  Dr. Scaper had only vaguely heard of the old strain of Q Fever, which had first been identified in Australia in 1937, long after he finished medical school. His ignorance surprised Dr. Deeds, and his willingness to confess it surprised her even more. They discussed all the other information there was to seek. Blood and sputum and stool tests and chick embryo cultures needed to be done so that specialists could look for what they'd been trained to recognize if they saw it, as Dr. Scaper had been trained to recognize measles and whooping cough. Dr. Deeds argued with the old man that he should not yield to Jack and Peggy Strummer's refusal to have an autopsy performed on their daughter, Joy. It was crucial to examine the lungs and the heart valves; especially since complete autopsies had not been carried out on any of the similar victims.

  But he said no. "The Strummers refused at the time, and they just aren't going to feel any different now. And I'm not about to browbeat them into accepting what feels to them like mutilating their girl."

  Here the two physicians differed in their priorities. Dr. Scaper wanted not to lose Winslow Abernathy or Judith Haig or Sammy Smalter or anyone else in his care. Dr. Deeds wanted to discover the truth. As a child she had thrilled when Mary Bredforet had read her the stories of Florence Nightingale's ruthless courage, her willingness to toss overboard peace of mind, even lives, in order to ensure the safety of a voyage to the greater future good.

  Finally Scaper agreed to drive her over to Glover's Lane so that she could talk with the Strummers herself. The couple heard her arguments politely, but they would not listen to reason. They apologized for their refusal, they asked forgiveness for the trouble they must be causing, then repeated mildly that they could not help how they felt.

  Otto Scaper changed the subject. He cradled Peggy Strummer under his huge arm and asked about Joy's little golden spaniel. But the girl's father in his soft, dead voice said that Joy's spaniel's heart, like that of his mistress, had stopped. The Strummers, feeling guilty that they had denied the doctors their daughter, allowed them to dig up her dog to hand over to science.

  Across the street, A.A. Hayes, on his front porch jacking up a step with bricks, watched the bearish old physician, carrying a small bundle, get into his car with a young black woman. A private nurse for Peggy Strummer, Hayes assumed.

  Back inside, hiding on the toilet until dinner was ready, the editor found his clandestine place in a novel in which a tough, cynical, idealistic loner had to choose among facing a court-martial for helping a noble German officer to escape, allowing Goring to succeed in kidnapping Stalin, reconciling a breach between the British and American high commands, or minding his own business and finding somebody to love. Finally, by page 420, he had done all four. Hayes grunted and threw the book in the trash can. He pulled another off the toilet bowl lid. A tough, cynical, idealistic loner was going to rescue a brilliant female geneticist from a Communist stronghold in the Alps. True, Hayes did not find these stories very interesting. But he did prefer them to his own.

  chapter 50

  The first traders to invade the area that would become Dingley Falls set up their Dutch posts along the Connecticut River from New Amsterdam to Plymouth Colony and trafficked in the exchange of trinkets for animal skins. They were pursued by the English. Later the Irish came, and later still, French Canadians. Then the Italians and Russian Jews, finally the descendants of African slaves and Spanish speakers. Connecticut grew crowded and rich among the states. Maynard Henry's people had made their homes here since the days of the Royal Charter. They had never been rich, and they had felt increasingly crowded. They were periodically resentful. Maynard himself had no specific knowledge of his American heritage, would not have known his grandmother's maiden name, or cared, or taken particular pride in learning by how many generations his family had been native-born. Yet it might be said that his blood insisted on his prior rights by rising up against the crowding trespasses of all later invaders than those pre-Revolutionary War ones who had spawned him. And this prejudice was
in direct proportion to the chronology of the immigrants' intrusion: he had only the mildest instinctive antipathy to Joe MacDermott, whereas Raoul Treeca prickled his skin.

  Henry felt not only trespassed upon but passed over by Carl Marco, who (objecting to his military discharge) had refused to hire him; not only crowded but crowded out by old Tim Hines, with whose refuge into madness he had been forced to cope. He sometimes felt that because of Hines's black brothers and Treeca's brown brothers, and all the people with names like Marco and Grabaski, and the rest, a man with a name like Maynard Clarence Henry could not find work doing construction in a rich state like Connecticut, but was forced to the degradation of accepting government handouts. As long as there had been room for everyone, everyone had been welcome, but America wasn't building many more Grand Central Stations or railroads from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1976. It was not girding its loins with steel anymore, but tightening its belt. It was as big as it would ever be and could no longer take care of itself.

  The public schools had taught Maynard that, apart from a little digging up the earth for iron and tobacco, Connecticut had by and large manufactured its wealth in the nineteenth century, when it filed more patents than any other state. Henry's people had helped the state grow rich. They had hammered together the hulls of the clippers that skimmed like birds on the water out of the port of Mystic. They had turned the mills and laid the red bricks for factories where they, and their children, could labor to produce the weaponry invented by local geniuses like Eli Whitney and Samuel Colt and Oliver F. Winchester. Connecticut had thrived on the guns and ammunition that won the West, and on the artillery, submarines, planes, and helicopters that had made the world safe for those who had not been killed by (or in) them. Connecticut had helped to manufacture some of that advanced equipment that had taken Henry, the Grabaskis, Bobby Strummer, Juan Treeca, and the rest, into battle in Vietnam as the most expensively outfitted fighting force in the world.

  Henry was thinking of that expensive abundance now, as he walked angrily along the highway from Argyle to Dingley Falls.

  Fields full of jet planes, mountains of M-16s. Everyone at the prison had been complaining of the heat today. Heat? He thought about standing off beside the roadway near Da Nang while somebody tried to fix an M-48 tank the VC had mined; a soldier near him had gone crazy with sunstroke. His flushed, dry skin having reached 109 degrees, he had collapsed into a coma and had died before the medics could land their helicopter, much less try to get his temperature down. They had said it was just as well; his brains had already burst.

  In the end the tank had to be abandoned anyhow. Like the rest. All that shining metal superfluity of affluence that by our willingness to spend it should have subdued any enemy, littered in the bright, hot, orange and green landscape; machinery lost, thrown away, used up as fast as Connecticut, among other builders, could make it—as if shooting up useless flares in manic frustration, or firing clip after clip at dead Viet Cong out of the sullen boredom of despair, would rid everyone of the war and so of guilt that much sooner. Henry had not known how many thousands of dollars it cost to support and supply him each day in Vietnam, nor would he have cared. It was all to him bullshit, a total waste. He still wore the boots. They had lasted.

  As soon as he was released on bail arranged by his brother's lawyer, Henry had left to look for his wife, Chin Lam. There was no way to reach her except to find her. He had left on foot because his truck was parked at a station in Madder, and there was no one he cared to ask to come get him. Besides, a seven-mile walk was nothing to him. He moved without thinking. He wore his boots and green fatigue pants and a white T-shirt and carried a folded grocery bag packed with his other belongings. The sharp, thin planes of his face (that face that had reminded A.A. Hayes of the young male invaders moving west to trade trinkets for land and gold), the tan, creased lines, the hard mouth and cold-colored eyes were tense with anger. Henry was angry at everyone, at Hawk Haig and Raoul Treeca for putting him in jail, at his brother, Arn, for buying him out, at his wife for not being there when he was released, at Connecticut for stopping the highway that paid his wages, at everyone who found jobs when he couldn't, at prices for being too high, at himself for not being able to make it and for being alive when so many he had known briefly in the jungle had by the mischance of standing so many feet to the front or rear or side of him been blown away and burned away into death. He was angry at the government for making him a piece of that superfluity spent and discarded. Henry took a cigarette from his pants pocket and lit it without pausing in the rhythm of his march.

  Tracy Canopy, returning to Dingley Falls from the train station (where, with the brave smile of a mother sending a daughter off to the Peace Corps in a jungle someplace she couldn't pronounce, she had said good-bye to Beanie), slowed her car when she saw the hitchhiker, his arm patiently raised. Six years earlier, in New Haven, Mrs. Canopy had been robbed of her purse at knifepoint by a young hitchhiker, who had then gratuitously hit her in the face with his fist.

  Afterwards she had promised her friends never again to pick up a stranger, even if he lay moaning in a ditch beside the road, for muggers were known to play such ploys upon the innocent. The problem was you couldn't tell who anyone was from their clothes anymore: this young man with his boots and funny pants could be a state surveyor, or a hippie with a sack full of marijuana, or he could have his bathing suit in that bag, or a lug wrench to crush her skull.

  No, pleasant as it was to meet the young and hear of lives so different from her own, she couldn't take the chance anymore. She remembered how the fist had hit against her cheek, and speeding up, she passed by Maynard Henry.

  He was thinking that he would trade in his trailer, take the cash and his truck and his wife and leave Connecticut, travel to the Southwest where the money had gone. He'd settle things with Haig and Treeca first. If he had to, he'd jump his brother's bail. There were still jobs some places in America for a man who didn't mind hard work and high risks. He could pay Arn back in the end. But there was no way he was going inside that jail again. As he gestured his thumb at cars whooshing past him, Henry kept walking at a steady pace. If someone stopped, fine. If not, he'd be home in another hour. Henry had been trained, at considerable expense, to walk long distances efficiently.

  Judith Haig stood in the trailer park and pressed her hand hard against the pain in her chest until it went away. She had forced herself to walk there from the Tea Shoppe. She wanted to find Chin Lam. For all her thoughtfulness, she could not have told herself why.

  Judith, because she was never insensitive to how she felt, was not aware that she was far less sensitive to what she felt, or why she felt it. But the desire had been strong enough to overcome her terror of the place where the dogs lived. Now one of them, with a mammoth orange-brown head, lunged out at her as she went carefully past him, but he was roped to a junked car and jerked to a stop, whining.

  Two strays had jumped to their feet and started to trot toward her when a child running past kicked out at them until they retreated.

  The child ran on as if he had kicked out at air in a dance. Mrs. Haig did not see Chin Lam or Night anywhere in the area. It had been senseless to come. From what was she trying to protect Chin? She should leave. Coming from the trailers, she could hear the noises of air conditioners and televisions and babies and dishes, of men and women yelling angrily at children and each other. She could smell cooking grease.

  A young boy and girl were walking toward her; each had an arm around the other and a hand in the other's jeans pocket. Mrs. Haig recognized Jimmy MacDermott. The girl, then, must be the Puerto Rican Sarah was so opposed to. Now, while the girl watched them with patient distrust, Jimmy pointed out for Judith Maynard Henry's trailer. The two teenagers in their flimsy, garish clothes looked very frail to her as, in rhythmic step like a dance, they moved away.

  Sinuous autographs in wide curling colors had been scrawled along the sides of the trailer's new white siding. Crumpled beside a ci
nder block was a piece of paper the graffitist had torn with random destructiveness from the door. Judith did not see the paper, though if by chance she had, its message, in Vietnamese, would have meant nothing to her, or to anyone else in Dingley Falls except Maynard Henry and his wife, who had written it to let him know that if he did return, he should call her at one of two numbers, that of the Tea Shoppe or of Prudence Lattice's home. Despite the padlock, Judith knocked on the door. But when a dog's growl rumbled from somewhere beneath the trailer, she pulled quickly back and hurried away to Long Branch Road. From there she had intended to turn onto Goff, cross the bridge, and be home before dark to start dinner for her husband's return. Sarah MacDermott, however, carrying groceries up her front steps, saw her and called Judith over with the yelled demand that she explain what she was doing in the neighborhood. Knowing that Sarah was irritated by her interest in Chin Lam, Judith said merely that she was on her way home.

  "Honey, from where? Fred's bar? Jesus bless us, you shouldn't be trooping all over Madder in this heat. Tell you the truth, when I first saw you, I thought you'd had a stroke and were wandering around in a daze. Here, would you just grab this bag for me so I won't have to make another trip? Judith, listen to me, don't ever have kids 'til they make it legal to kill them. My oldest son delivers groceries for a living, if you can believe that, and he trots right past me down these steps like he would have thrown a quarter in my tin cup if I'd had one to poke up in his face." Mrs. MacDermott butted the door open with her behind and held it for Judith. "Anyhow, he's not fooling me.

  I know exactly where he's rushing to. That little painted whore and him both are going to get hauled in to see Father Crisp and get the riot act read them, if not worse and he has to marry her. Sit down, have a Coke, how are you? I'm just so on edge about you after what happened to Alf and Sister Mary Joseph." On and on from there went Mrs. MacDermott with an exuberant necrology that included a fellow A&P clerk's sister, who had been born without either her arms or her legs from thalidomide and lived strapped to a tilting board in the family room. Like a Foxe's Book of Martyrs for the modern world, she detailed news of all the latest local sufferings, and not even after Judith had heard far too much about Jack and Peggy Strummer's private sorrows was Sarah willing to release her. "Besides, you know Bobby wasn't even really Jack's son because Peggy was married before. Used to live right here in Madder, I think he was an alcoholic, anyhow she dumped him. So Jack adopted Bobby. They both took after Peggy, Bobby and Joy, God bless her. Oh, he was so good-looking, well, you saw him. Sort of like a cross between Tab Hunter and Burt Reynolds. I used to keep my eye out for him when he was working at Hope Street Cinema, even if he was only eighteen or so, but still. You can't go to hell for looking. Anyhow, honey, have one of these beers before I drink them all, I already had two at Holly Brejinski's when I picked Francis and the baby up. I always did like Bobby, it gives me the creeps to think about him dead somewhere in a jungle or having bamboo shoots stuck up under his fingernails in a Communist prison camp. I don't know. He just had the build and that kind of sexy eyes that just about made me wet my panties. Well, Judith, you'll just have to excuse my expression, but between men and women these things are only natural."