The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  All the peace he’d felt in his office, all the beauty of the evening and the sweet sentiment of its songs, all the exhilaration he’d felt over ensnaring that deviate Ossining character and liberating Amelia Hookstratten from his spell, all of it dissolved in that instant. Damn that Farrington, he thought angrily, and he vowed to have him removed from his post—and why couldn’t he and his twelve overfed deputies have dug George out from beneath whatever rock he’d been hiding under? He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Just kept his eyes focused on George’s, on his son’s.

  “Do you?” George’s voice echoed down the oil-slick corridor, that hateful familiar adolescent whine creeping into it for all the twenty useless years of his young manhood.

  The Doctor said nothing. He tensed his muscles. Let him talk, let him rave—he was ready to spring, to fight for his life and the life of Battle Creek, ready to do anything, anything it would take to silence this insect, crush him, expunge him once and forever. Anything.

  George threw himself back from the wall with a sudden violent thrust, and his eyes exploded with hate. “I’m here to give you a history lesson, Dr. Anus, that’s what I’m here for—I’m here to make your life the cesspool you’ve made mine, here to cram all your zwieback and your enemas and all the rest of it down your throat once and for all.” He lifted the match to his eyes and sighted down the length of it as if it were a rifle. “I’m going to burn this place to the ground,” he hissed, and he was nearly choking on his rage, “—again.”

  Again. The adverb dropped between them like a gauntlet, burst howling from the walls, electric, excoriating.

  The Doctor came forward then, moving like a somnambulist, blind, goaded, the blood raging in his ears, and George flicked his thumbnail against the head of the match, the quick yellow spark springing up from his fist as if by prestidigitation. “That’s right, Father,” he taunted, “again,” and as the Doctor rushed him he dropped the match to the floor and the flames fed on it, leaping up with an eager panting grace while George danced among them like some malignant hell-born thing with bituminous eyes and leathery wings.

  “It was I!” he shouted, evading the Doctor’s charge even as the flames rushed toward the barrel at the end of the hall, “me, I alone. Not Sister White, not your crabbed, ball-less, half-blind Elders, not a one of them, no.” He was backing up the hall now, spitting it out, cavorting round the sudden churning troughs of fire. “Thirteen years old!” he cried in a hoarse rasping shriek that only seemed to fan the flames higher. “It was I, I, I!”

  Will Lightbody never said a word as he led his wife across the wide waving field and back out to the road. When they reached the highway, he looped his arm through hers, and they walked silently along the compacted dirt surface of the roadbed, neither hurrying nor dawdling, moving along as if they were out for an evening stroll on the cobbled streets of Peterskill. Will held himself erect, head back, chest thrust out, tie squared and vest buttoned up to the very last button, and he didn’t need any posture coaches or shadowgrams to show him the way. Though his mind was in a ferment, his body was at ease, calm, filled with the sort of peace that follows on great exertion, secure in its own physicality. He strolled up that road like an athlete who’s just vanquished the field and won the prize, and though vehicle after vehicle, from buggies to surreys to motorcars and even a farm wagon, stopped to offer them a lift, he steadfastly refused. It felt right to walk. It felt necessary.

  Eleanor was on his arm, the day was golden, and though the scene he’d just witnessed, the primal scene, stark in its animality and horror, kept threatening to intrude on his consciousness, he fought it down. He would not relive that scene again, never, he refused to, and every time it crept back into his head he drove it out through sheer force of will. Happier times, he thought of happier times, five years ago, six, when the world was whole and the house on Parsonage Lane, with its smell of fresh paint and wallpaper paste, was their adventure. And so they walked, past farms and farmhouses, up and down hills, bisecting the fields on the sunlit ribbon of the Kalamazoo-Battle Creek road. And if Will hadn’t known himself two hours ago, hadn’t known where he was going or what he was doing, if he’d been uncertain and tentative, floating through life like a bit of fluff on the breeze, now he knew exactly who he was and where he was going and why.

  For her part, Eleanor walked along beside him in silence, not daring to glance at him, her eyes locked straight ahead, never protesting. It was as if she’d been awakened from a dream, as if a spell had been broken. They hadn’t discussed it, perhaps never would, but it was clear that she’d gone too far, over the edge, way beyond the bounds of reason and propriety; seeking health, she’d found disease and corruption. She knew it in her heart, he was sure of it. And he was sure, too, that things would be different from now on. Vastly different.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time they reached the outskirts of Battle Creek, and it had been a long and hot journey, replete with dust, sweat and the ravages of pollinosis. Will could feel the moisture gathered round his waistband, and Eleanor, buttoned to the throat and with her hair falling loose and bonnet slightly askew, looked as if she could sit a moment in the shade. The first house they came to—the first city house, with lawns and flower beds and a pair of enormous old elms spread like parasols over the yard—had a well out on the side lawn, and someone had constructed a bench of white paling beside it. Will knocked at the door and asked for a drink, and the old woman who answered, stooped over a cane and looking confused and uncertain, misunderstood him at first. She gazed up into his face, then into Eleanor’s, as if framing them. “They’ve all gone,” she said, her voice too big for what there was of her. “They’re down at the concert for the fireworks.” When Will finally made himself clear to her, she shuffled off into the house and returned with a tin dipper, telling him to help himself and be welcome to it.

  They sat there a long while on the bench beside the old woman’s well, glad to be off the road and out of the sun. Will lowered the bucket, filled the dipper and handed it to Eleanor. She drank, arching her neck delicately, her lips pursed to receive the kiss of the cool tin dipper, and when she looked up at him, her eyes, which had been so cold lately he’d begun to wonder if they’d start to bead with condensation, were liquid and warm. She passed him the dipper and their hands touched. A breeze ruffled the trees. Everything seemed to fall away in the distance, and as he drank he came back to her eyes. “Do you think the gardener remembered to cut back my kitchen roses?” she said, and there was the faintest catch to her voice.

  They went straight to the train station, and Will purchased a second ticket to go with the one he’d been carrying in his wallet for the past week and a half. It was understood that they’d stop a day in Chicago so that Eleanor could get some clothes, and he’d need a change himself—some underthings and shirts and socks at the very least. The next train was scheduled for eight, and since neither of them felt much like walking after the trial they’d been through, they found themselves seated on a bench outside the waiting room at the Michigan Central depot with some two hours to kill.

  The place was all but deserted, the whole town absorbed in family celebrations or gathered round the San for the night’s festivities. Eleanor freshened herself up in the ladies’ room and then sat beside him, lost in her thoughts. Will found he didn’t have much to say, either, and he was content just to sit there with her, but after a while he began to experience a sensation he hadn’t known in so long, he didn’t recognize it at first. It was a pressure in the region of his abdomen, a sort of internal swelling and constricting, as if he were carrying a disembodied mouth inside him, opening and closing on nothing. It took him a moment to identify the sensation.

  He looked up into the sky, scanned the treetops, let his gaze rove from the big proud sign that was the first thing he’d laid eyes on in Battle Creek and out on down the tracks to the distant hazy point at which they grew together and disappeared in the east. And then, as if it were the most natural thing
in the world, he turned to Eleanor and asked, “Are you hungry?”

  George turned and fled up the hall, dashing past the overturned barrel of coal oil even as the flames reached it. Drunk as he was, as crazed, degenerate and congenitally mad, he’d planned it this way, that much was clear. He’d thought to make his escape as the barrel went up with a roar and a pounding thump of concussion that shook the building to its roots, but he hadn’t counted on one thing—John Harvey Kellogg. Agile, quick, physiologically toned and clearheaded, he hadn’t bothered himself with the fire, as the boy had obviously expected he would. No: what George didn’t know or suspect was that the Doctor had built this structure to last an eternity, built it of stone and brick, with asbestos firewalls and beams of steel, built it to withstand tornadoes, floods, fires and all other disasters, natural and unnatural. The fire was an inconvenience, an outrage, but marble wouldn’t burn and brick and stone were impervious. At worst the blaze would consume some of the furnishings in the lower offices and create a noxious stink that would have to be scrubbed out of the walls, pore by pore, but the fire wasn’t the Doctor’s first priority and it didn’t begin to prostrate him in the way the dirty little firebug had calculated.

  And so, instead of escaping scot-free as the wall of flame interposed itself between him and his adoptive father, George turned to watch the explosion, and the Doctor, who’d been right on his heels, hit him in the hips with a flying footballer’s tackle. Down they both went in a roiling miasma of body odor, of filth and grease and the stink of unwashed underclothes and fungus-infested feet. They flailed at one another, the Doctor holding on grimly, more than a match, even at his age, for this obscenity, this ape, this sack of garbage. George lashed out with his fists, kicked away across the floor as if he were swimming in air, but his father came after him, as frenzied and omnipresent as ten men, moiling over him like a pack of hounds, tearing at his clothes and returning every blow with interest. Now, the Doctor thought, now we’ll see what the physiologic life counts for and who wears down whom, the man of fifty-six or the boy of twenty—

  But then the barrel went up and a brutal wind raked the hall and the Doctor somehow lost his grip. He was snatching at the boy, tearing at him, no healer, no doctor, no man of mercy, but one crazed beast of the jungle mauling another, when George, as slick with his grease as a pig at the fair, broke free. On his feet, scrambling, no sneers now, the face gone white in its mask of filth. Quick as a tumbler, the Doctor was up, too, and then they were off again on their desperate panting chase while the inferno roared out black and hot behind them.

  George was running for his life. The Doctor was right behind him now, abbreviated legs pumping, eight hard inadmissible words pounding in his brain, Again, I’m going to burn it down again! “George!” he cried out in his rage, “George!” and it wasn’t an injunction or even a curse, but a war cry, stark, terrible, stripped to the bone. At the end of the hall, George veered left down the stairs instead of taking his chances outside, and the Doctor’s heart leapt—he knew he would run him down, just give him time enough and room. George hit the stairs at a bound and the quick panicky slap of his feet reverberated in the stairwell as he plunged toward the basement, the Doctor bouncing nimbly off the handrail and riding up off his bicycle-hardened knees as if they were carriage springs.

  They took off down the long basement corridor lined with laboratories, an open field without obstruction, and the Doctor would have overtaken him here, run him into the ground, but George suddenly ducked to one side and threw himself across the tiles as if he were sliding under the catcher’s tag in a game of baseball. It gave him a moment’s purchase, as the Doctor, intent on the chase, hurtled on past him. George was up in an instant, reversing field and tearing back up the hallway. “Give it up, George!” the Doctor cried, bracing himself against the wall, swinging round and leaping forward again. “You don’t have a chance!” he boomed, strangely exhilarated, already closing again on the narrow shoulders and the back of that flat greasy hateful fleeing head. He wasn’t even winded.

  But George surprised him. Instead of making for the stairway they’d just negotiated and having to choose between the outdoors and the flames, the boy burst through the door of the first lab on his right—“Fecal Analysis,” the Doctor saw as he charged in after him. But then the Doctor caught himself. He stopped. Right there, right at the threshold of the darkened room. George might not have realized it, but he’d just run himself into a dead end—the room was long and narrow, divided and divided again by shelf after shelf of samples, and it had but one exit, and John Harvey Kellogg was blocking it. He didn’t say a word. Just listened. Then he flicked on the light.

  Nothing. If George thought he was going to play hide-and-seek, he was crazy. All the Doctor had to do was stand here till help came—someone would already have noticed the fire overhead, one of the skeleton staff or the revelers on the lawn. They’d deal with it—they were already dealing with it—and then they’d check the corridors, one by one. He folded his arms across his chest and settled in to wait. He’d almost begun to feel smug when all at once there was a noise behind him, loud as a rimshot, and a jar shattered on the wall over his head. The smell hit him then, rank, fecal, immemorial. It took him a moment to understand, and in that moment a second jar shattered against the wall, and then a third: George was destroying the samples. Desecrating Sanitarium records. Undermining the system at its very fount. He took a jar in the chest and it fell to the floor at his feet, discharging its load in a soft, almost shy, explosion. George was throwing shit at him!

  That was it. That was the end. The Doctor lost all power of reason and threw himself into the room with a shout. It was a mistake. At that moment, George sprang into sight three rows down, and as the Doctor leapt for him he was suddenly confronted with the phenomenon of an entire shelf in motion, a moving wall of canned and encapsulated feces bearing down on him, and in the next instant he was buried beneath it. “Dr. Anus!” George shrieked in mockery. “Dr. Shit himself!” And the high ragged derisive laugh tore at the walls and trailed out into the corridor.

  His jacket was white no more, his samples were destroyed, the lab was ravaged and a whole section of the building awash in flames, but Dr. Kellogg wasn’t defeated, not he, not yet, not ever. He lay there half a moment taking stock of the situation, the odor gaseous and overpowering, the sad exposed secrets of all those autointoxicated bowels spread round him in every conceivable earth tone from raw sienna to ecru to tar black, and then he flung the shelf from him as if it were made of paper. He was back on his feet and out the door in an instant, but there was no one in sight. He stood there a long moment, wiping his glasses on the smear of his ruined coat, his hands black with filth and ordure, all his senses pitched keen. He seemed to be bleeding from a cut over his eye and he’d wrenched his shoulder somehow, but it was nothing. He had one object now, one object only, and that was all there was. He listened. He watched. Had George escaped upstairs? No, he wouldn’t have had time, and there were voices crying out from above, the sound of footsteps, movement, hurry. He was here, damn him, he was here.

  It was then that the Doctor became aware of a steady soft ratcheting sound, a sound he’d been hearing at low frequency for the past minute or so without being aware of it, a biological sound, the sound of air grating back and forth, in and out, across a rigid larynx. And what was it? He knew that sound, didn’t he? He glanced round him warily. And then, from a doorway down the corridor, a shadow emerged. Sleek, lupine, low to the ground: Fauna, the pure white vegetarian wolf. Or parti-colored wolf, more gray than white since Murphy had no need to powder her except for performances—but where was Murphy? And how had she gotten loose? The question answered itself in the next instant as the shambling, loose-limbed, slope-headed form of Lillian the chimp slid out into the hallway beside the wolf: George. He was in there. In the animal lab. He’d freed them.

  “Lillian!” the Doctor barked in his voice of command, “bad girl, back to your cage!” and he advanced
on the animals, his arms spread wide to herd them. The chimp jerked up her head at the sound of his voice, but then she set her knuckles down on the floor and bared her teeth. “Eeeee-eeeee!” she shrieked in defiance, and the sound of it, raw and insolent, took the wolf’s growling up a notch.

  “Down, Fauna!” commanded the Doctor, and he swept up the hall, spectacles flashing, intent on one thing only—the open door and the agent of all his calamity and woe that lurked somewhere behind it. But Fauna didn’t cower. The growl tightened in her throat until it was as if she were garroting herself, and she tensed her muscles to spring. “Down!” the Doctor roared and he threw his arms up over his head—no mere animal was going to intimidate him—and charged into them.

  Still, and for all that, it came as a great disappointment to him when Fauna took hold of his right leg, just behind the knee, with a grip as savage and sudden as death—what had he ever done to hurt her?—and Lillian the chimp simultaneously fell on his throat with a pair of leathery long-fingered hands that could have crushed both of John L. Sullivan’s fists as easily as they might have cracked open a nut. It was a bad moment. One of the very most disheartening moments of the good Doctor’s life. What had he done to deserve this, he wondered, pitching to the floor beneath the combined weight of chimp and wolf, how could George hate him so immitagably and unconditionally, and these animals—didn’t they appreciate him? He rolled instinctively, felt the incisors part and then dig in again, registered the cold wet feel of the Italian tiles against his back as the shit-stinking jacket, shirt and undershirt were torn from him as if they were made of sacking, and for the first time in his physiologic life, he felt his faith flag.