The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Nurse Bloethal jumped. “Yes, Doctor,” she barked, and for a moment Will thought she was going to salute him.

  “Yes,” the Doctor said meditatively, speaking to himself now even as he stared Will in the eye, “we’ll scour him out yet.”

  Later that night—it must have been eight or so, the windows black, a hush fallen over the depopulated hallways of the San, bedpans tucked away and enema bags rinsed—Will had another visitor. After a violent irrigation at the hands of Nurse Bloethal, who’d clucked her tongue and scolded him the whole while, he’d taken his meal (such as it was) alone in his room. When the knock came, he was lying there in his agony, staring at the ceiling, the familiar slack-tide taste of seaweed on his palate, seeds expanding in his gut, his bowels washed as clean as the bed of an Alpine stream. The lamp at his bedside was lit, and it focused a sickly yellow light on the hollows of his cheeks and the high ridge of his nose. A pitcher of water stood on the night table, a single glass beside it. The Atlantic Monthly, in its plain brown cover, lay forgotten at the foot of the bed, along with a spine-sprung copy of Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt and the Harper’s Christmas number. “Come in,” he called weakly.

  The door cracked open and a disembodied face peered round the edge of it. A wink. A grin. And then Charlie Ossining was in the room, the door easing shut behind him. “Hello, Will,” he whispered, tiptoeing across the floor to the chair in the corner, which he seized by its physiologic slats and eased up to the bed. “You’re looking—” his voice dropped off as he settled himself in the chair and produced a paper sack from his coat pocket. “I was going to say you’re looking grand, but I’d be a liar if I did. You look awful, friend, plain awful.”

  Will barely glanced up, but he was glad to see him. The last two days had been hellish, a continuum of cranial ache and abdominal pain broken only by the odd visit from a frosty Eleanor, a sadistic Kellogg and a rough-and-ready Nurse Bloethal. Irene, no longer ‘indisposed,’ was keeping a low profile: he’d seen her only sporadically during the eternal hours of his relapse. In short, he was hurting and he was bored. Bored witless.

  Charlie Ossining gave him a knowing look. “Hung over, huh?” he said. “We made a night of it, didn’t we? Hell, I felt like I’d been run down by the 5:05 myself—and dragged half a mile in the bargain.” He let out a laugh.

  The room fell quiet. Charlie was studying him. A question had been put to Will: was he hung over? It was a naive and hopeful question, and he could see the concern on his friend’s face—a hangover was something he could relate to, something quotidian and explicable, a complaint from which the sufferer could logically be expected to recover. How tell him the truth? How tell him he was doomed, condemned, sentenced to die of a balky bowel and hypersensitive nature?

  But Charlie didn’t wait for an answer. His eyes roamed the room, settling finally on the copy of the Burroughs book. “I see you’ve been reading about the president and his bears,” he said. “Rich, isn’t it?”

  Rich, yes. Will concurred.

  Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, brandishing the brown paper bag, “this whole rugged-individualist business is just a bit much for me, Jack London and all that. I like city stories, men and women in society, that sort of thing. Racy stuff, too. What’s his name, Dreiser? You read him. That book about the hometown girl without a scruple in the world? Just like real life. Women.” He tossed his eyebrows for emphasis, then casually withdrew a pint of whiskey from the bag, broke the seal with a twist of his wrist and worked the cork out of the bottle. “You know, I saw that Olga Nethersole in Sappho before they closed it down a few years back. You want to talk about racy, whew! That was it. Boy oh boy.”

  Will’s eyes were fixed on the bottle, liquid gold, sleep and forgetfulness, booze. He sat up.

  Charlie reached for the glass on the night table. “Join me?” he said. “Just a little nip to kill the pain, eh?” He was pouring. Will watched the golden liquid rise in the glass: two fingers, three, four. “I don’t know what ails you”—a significant look here—”but I’ll bet this’ll go a long way toward curing it.” He handed Will the glass, touched the bottle to it in salutation and then tipped back the bottle and drank.

  Frail, throbbing, his stomach plunging like a runaway elevator, sweat standing out on his brow, Will clutched the glass as if he were afraid it would slip through his fingers. His watched his friend’s larynx rise and fall as he lowered the level in the bottle by an inch, and all he wanted to do in that moment was drink. There was no more pain, no more fear, no more tyranny of the elect—there was just the glass in his hand and the bright warm complexion of honey it took on in the glow of the lamp. He held the glass up to the light. Now it was pale as air, now dense as smoke. He lifted it to his nose and smelled all the blossoms of the field, smelled the burnt-oak barrel, the mash, the electric fumes themselves. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Charlie was watching him. He didn’t need any urging. As if in a trance, he lifted the glass to his lips and drained it in three swallows.

  “Hits the spot, eh?” Charlie breathed, trying to settle himself in the Doctor’s orthopedic chair. “Christ,” he swore, twisting his neck and peering over his shoulder to examine the ribs of it, “where’d they get this thing—out of the king of Spain’s torture chamber?”

  Suddenly Will was laughing. And as Charlie made a show of getting up out of the chair as if it were on fire, turning it round and finally lifting a leg over the seat to mount it backward, he laughed even harder, laughed till there were tears in his eyes and he felt his chest tighten. “Kellogg’s—” he choked, “the Great Healer’s idea of comfort.”

  Charlie was laughing with him, a deep belly laugh that ended in a series of hoots and stutters. He leaned forward to refill Will’s glass. “Here’s to Kellogg and his gizzardite chair,” he proposed, holding the bottle aloft, and they drank again, and they laughed so hard the liquor nearly came back up. After a while, Charlie’s look grew serious. “I think this place is killing you, Will—and I don’t care what Eleanor says, no disrespect intended. It’s not natural, eating nuts and sprouts and whatnot. A man needs meat, tobacco, booze. If it’s all so hurtful, then how’d we get here today? Hell, old Adam would have keeled over before he could start on the rest of us.”

  Will had reached a state of equilibrium. Somewhere in his brain a warning bell was going off, but he ignored it. After two days of misery and humiliation, he’d attained tranquillity, and all because of Charlie and the ambrosia that comes packaged in a flat little bottle. “Charlie,” he said, and his voice was thick, “you ought to be my doctor, damn it all—and I mean it. You’ve got more common sense than our little Napoleon here any day—and all his doctors and nurses and dieticians combined. ‘All things in moderation,’ right? All things.” He gestured vaguely. “Give me another little snort of that, will you?”

  Charlie poured. Will drank. The room, which just half an hour earlier had seemed like a mausoleum, was alive now with color and texture. There was hope in the paint on the walls; promise in the grain of the wood; life, spirit and energy in the way the lamps threw their shadows against the chest of drawers. There was no better friend, no better man, than Charlie Ossining.

  “Will?”

  Charlie was addressing him. “Will?” he repeated, and Will looked up from his reverie. Charlie was leaning forward, so close their foreheads were nearly touching, and now he had a warm grip on the back of Will’s neck, pulling them together in a football huddle. Will could smell the other man’s breath, warm, intoxicating. His face blurred. “Do you remember the other night, Christmas Eve?”

  “Sure I do,” Will said, “sure. The Red Onion. Hamburger sandwich. Blind Pig. Best thing in the world for me.”

  Charlie was still there, still huddling with him—as close as anybody could get. It was strange. But right, somehow. There was an aura about it, an intensity, a kind of man-to-man fervor that no woman could know. Will thought of the grassy field, cleats, the canvas ball and the smooth sol
id ashen bat.

  “That’s right,” Charlie said, and now he was the coach himself, “and do you remember this?” He let go of Will and sat back. He seemed to be holding a slip of paper in his hand—a banknote? No, a check. A very familiar-looking check …

  “Is it mine?”

  “Uh-huh.” Charlie gave him a sage look. “The other night, out of the bigness of your heart, Will—and because you’re blessed with the kind of business sense that can’t resist a sure thing—you became one of our stockholders, one of Per-Fo’s select few.”

  “Yes,” Will agreed. “Of course, of course.” He was in a daze. How that whiskey worked its magic, hot in his stomach and cold in his brain—and why couldn’t Kellogg put some of that on the table?

  “You forgot to sign it.”

  “What?” Will took the check from him and examined it under the lamplight. Sure enough, he’d forgotten his John Hancock. He was embarrassed suddenly. What must Charlie think of him? He gave a little laugh and his voice went hollow again. “Don’t think I’m in my dotage yet, Charlie—forgive me, will you? It’s just this damned place”—he waved a hand to take in everything, from the enema bag lying on the counter in the corner to the wheelchair behind the door and the four floors beneath and the one above. “Of course,” he added with a conspiratorial chuckle, “I was in my cups, too, you know. Remember?”

  Charlie’s laugh was high and sharp. He slapped his knee, then leaned forward and refilled the glass. Will fumbled through the drawer of the night table, came up with his Waterman and signed the check with a flourish.

  Charlie thanked him and Will said it was nothing. They sat there in the afterglow of the moment, both satisfied, their troubles behind them. After a while Will ventured to ask how much he’d invested—with a laugh he admitted that he hadn’t thought to look at the amount. “Oh,” Charlie said, and he returned Will’s laugh with a deep chuckle of his own, “it may not seem like a lot to you, but to us at Per-Fo, just starting up as we are, it’s really generous, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and my partners thank you, too.” A pause. Shrug of the shoulders. The voice drops. “A thousand.”

  A thousand. The tiniest coil of doubt gripped Will in his innermost gut, but he lifted the glass to his lips and quieted it. “I’m pleased,” he said, but his lips caught on the p and sounded a b in its place. Charlie didn’t seem to mind. He was beaming at Will, rocking back on the legs of the chair and giving him a look of pure gratitude and unadulterated joy.

  “Well,” Charlie said, rising from the chair, “it’s getting late, Will; and I’ve got to be going—I really do—and I wish you could join me down at the Onion, but listen, keep the rest of the bottle and take a judicious sip now and again to wash down all those bean sprouts, all right?” He was standing in the middle of of the room, just where Eleanor had stood, his smile locked in place. “All right?” he repeated.

  And it would have been all right—everything would have been all right, from the glow in Will’s stomach to the laxness of his limbs and the fine feeling that existed between them—if Dr. Kellogg, the little white dynamo himself, hadn’t chosen that moment to blast through the door like some hurling, whirling meteorological event, words of caution, praise, hope and command on his lips. “—sticks to the dietary regimen,” he was saying, his secretary at his heels, “rest and a good regular cleansing, hourly now, hourly, up to the point of the procedure—” and then he stopped short. For the second time since Will had known him, the saint of health was at a loss for words. “What?” he said, glancing from Will to Charlie and back again. “Who—?”

  “Good night, Will,” Charlie said quickly, “I hope you feel better,” and he made a move for the door.

  “You!” the Doctor suddenly cried, flinging the door shut behind him and pressing himself up against it to bar Charlie’s exit. “I know you, sir, I know you now—the cheapest kind of scoundrel!”

  “Now wait a minute—” Will began, but the Doctor cut him off.

  “Not a word from you, sir,” the little man fumed, pointing an admonitory finger. “Dab”—and his eyes fastened on Charlie’s—“telephone for Rice and Burleigh. I want them here this instant.”

  It was a tableau vivant: Will in his bed, Charlie backed up against the wall, the Doctor at the door and Dab beside him. Then the secretary broke the spell by lumbering across the room to the telephone and calling for the orderlies. There was a silence while Dab’s voice rose in agitation, and then the Doctor uttered a single word, harsh with astonishment: “Whiskey!”

  The bottle of Old Overholt stood there on the night table, incontrovertible, the half-filled glass beside it. Will exchanged a glance with Charlie, and in the next moment the Doctor was in action, catlike in his quickness, springing across the room to seize glass and bottle and smash them over the edge of the table so that the floor exploded with jewels of glass and the jagged neck of the bottle, gripped tight, blossomed in the bulb of his fist. “Here,” he said, his voice pitched high, fighting for control as he sliced at the air inches from Will’s shrinking face, “cut your own throat with it—or would you prefer a surgeon’s touch?”

  No one moved. Dab looked as if he were about to faint. Charlie’s eyes were lit with excitement, a rough insouciant look settling into his features. Will’s head felt as if it were floating free of his body.

  The sequel was brief. The orderlies arrived and escorted Charlie from the San; he took with him the Doctor’s warning not to set foot on the grounds again under penalty of criminal prosecution. A nurse swept up the glass. The Doctor paced back and forth. Will hung his head. Finally, when the nurse had left and the Doctor had had time to compose himself, he ordered Dab out of the room, shut the door quietly, pulled the chair up to the bed and perched himself on the edge of it. “Mr. Lightbody,” he began, and Will could feel the tension in the air as the Doctor struggled to maintain his composure, “as long as you are under my care—and leaving it at this juncture would be purely suicidal, though you don’t seem to give two hoots about your own life—you do want to live, don’t you, sir?”

  Will nodded.

  “As I say, so long as you are under my care, you will not leave this institution for any purpose and you will not be allowed any visitation privileges whatever, save for the visits of a select group of your fellow patients—should your condition allow it. For the time being, however, I am limiting you to this room, the dining hall, the gymnasium and the baths.’ You remain on the laxative diet and you recommence your full exercise regimen the first thing tomorrow morning. Is that clear?”

  It was. Will had been caught red-handed and the fight was gone from him.

  The Doctor gazed at him as if he were a speck of something curious under the microscope. There was a silence. “You know of Sir Arbuthnot Lane?” he said finally. “No? I didn’t expect that you would.” He studied his nails a moment, then glanced up sharply. “Well, sir, he happens to be one of the most eminent physicians in the world, attached now to the Royal College of Surgeons, London, and he has perfected a surgical technique to improve motility and correct the often fatal consequences of autointoxication. To amateurs, the operation—an abdominal section to remove a portion of the lower intestine where stasis routinely occurs—is known as the ‘Lane’s Kink’ surgery. Surely you’ve heard of it?”

  Will could only blink at him. He was drunk still, drunk as a loon, but all the elation had gone out of him. He didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. He was frightened suddenly, and the fiery fist in his stomach took hold of him with a jerk.

  “No matter,” the Doctor said, and he held up his hands to admire the nails again. The nails were smooth, perfect, the fingers lithe and expressive: a surgeon’s fingers. “I’ve located my own ‘kink,’ as it were,” he said musingly, “though no one has taken to calling it ‘Kellogg’s Kink’ yet, to my knowledge, but they will, they will … and my technique has relieved scores of severely autointoxicated and even moribund patients from the symptoms that afflict you. What I
’m saying, sir,” and the Doctor got to his feet and leveled a long, keen-eyed, almost loving gaze on him, “is that I’ve scheduled you for surgery just after the New Year.”

  He leaned over then and reached for the lamp, a serene self-satisfied smile on his lips, and pulled the switch. “Sleep tight,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  From

  Humble

  Beginnings

  It was a basement. Fieldstone and mortar, earthen floor, a smell like the cork in a bottle of wine gone bad on the shelf. There was a clutter of the usual junk—a sagging perambulator, rusted garden tools, a coal scuttle with a broken handle. The dirt was pulverized, grainy, ancient—dust—and the mummified corpse of a mouse lay in a drift of it in the center of the room, a pathetic wrinkle of naked hands and feet. Charlie had to duck his head and compress his shoulders like a hunchback to avoid knocking himself unconscious on the low-hanging beams. He kicked the dead mouse aside in disgust and looked up to where Bender and Bookbinder stood at the top of the steps, framed against a bleak January sky.

  “It’s a basement,” Charlie said.

  “It’s cheap.” Bender huddled in his greatcoat against the wind, his top hat glued to his head, silk scarf wrapped tight round his throat. George crouched on the bottom step, half in, half out of the cellar, a dazed and drunken look on his face. There was a swollen yellowish contusion over his left eye from when he’d fallen—or been pushed—in the street.

  Charlie struck a match and lit one of the candles they’d brought with them. He set it atop a stack of split wood in the far corner and made a slow ambling inspection of the place. It was big, he’d say that for it, but the ceiling couldn’t have been any higher than five feet eight inches, and the place was cold, filthy, a sink of neglect. He heard footsteps overhead, a shuffle and thump, repeated over and over, as if someone were dragging sacks of potatoes across the floor. “Who lives upstairs?” he asked, and he could see his breath hanging in the dank close air.