Ben Soul

by Richard George

He inclined his bead and waved the doctor in. The slight bow Beau made offered the doctor a more expansive crotch view until Beau straightened up and closed his robe.

  “Who is with Noah now?” he asked the doctor.

  “No one. He said he’d be all right if you’d come. He won’t go to the hospital until he talks with you. Do hurry!” Some urgency in the doctor’s voice penetrated Beau’s night fog. He began to move more rapidly, at a near-normal pace for most of the world, for Beau a real rushing. He dropped his robe, and began to look for his clothing (which he had scattered around his one-room apartment in abandon the night before).

  The first item he found was his white goatee. Dr. Field’s eyes grew larger and rounder. They bulged like a frog’s eyes. Beau found his white mustache, and his hat with the attached wig, and put these items on. Then he went to the drawer for a fresh shirt. He laid it on the rumpled bed. He took a linen suit from his closet.

  Noah came through the door Beau had neglected to close behind Dr. Field.

  “Beauregard LeSieupe,” Noah shouted, “I arrest you for indecent exposure of a friend to near-death on the streets of The City!”

  Beau threw his hands up in the air.

  “Put ‘em down, Beau,” Noah said, and laughed.

  “Noah!” Beau shouted, wrapping his arms around Noah and his portfolio of drawings, “How are y’all?”

  “Doing, don’t you know, just barely doing,” Noah snickered, “but not as barely as you. Put on your pants, Beau.”

  “What kind of doctor are you?” Beau said, turning angrily on the Iowa psychiatrist, who was blushing and teetering on the edge of Beau’s unkempt bed. “What do you mean, scaring me about Noah, here, being poisoned?”

  “Easy,” Noah said, “easy, Beau, he thought I was dying; that’s why he came to get you. I can put on a pretty good act when I want to.”

  “An act!” Now Dr. Field was furious. He jumped off the bed to his feet. He put his left foot on a wine bottle Beau had neglectfully left there by the bed, and his feet went under the bed, heels up. This pushed his nose into the pile of Beau’s fluffy white throw rug. Dr. Field sneezed. Beau seldom shook the rug. Beau reached over and lifted him by his collar.

  “Chester, honey,” Beau drawled in his most syrupy manner, “Y’all seem a mite clumsy for so early in the day. Maybe some o’ that Iowa corn fermenting in your gizzard?”

  The expression on Dr. Field’s face was a comic mixture of shock and rage.

  “I don’t drink hard liquor!” he spluttered. “Not before the dinner hour!”

  Noah was laughing so hard he doubled over. When he did, the drawings in his portfolio slid out on the floor. There were some twenty of them, mostly of a category the Iowa courts would probably deem obscene, if they had been explained by an art expert or a precocious five year old child. Noah was fond of phallic subject matter. Dr. Chester Field was no art expert; he was, however, in his own way a competent psychiatrist, and so knew how to recognize a phallic symbol when he saw one.

  “Mr. Count,” he said, “your jest was questionable.” He was craning and twisting his neck to see Noah’s pictures.

  “Did you hurt your neck?” Noah asked him, suddenly concerned. Noah had heard of lawsuits based on much less provocation.

  “No.” Dr. Field swooped suddenly and picked up several drawings from the pile. “Are all these pictures of similar subject matter?”

  “Yes,” Noah said. “When an artist gets a good model, it’s a good idea to make several drawings. Good models are expensive.”

  “The price depends on how much extra-curricular activity goes with the modeling,” Beau drawled.

  “How much for these seven?” Dr. Field asked. Noah looked at the drawings the doctor had selected. He thought a moment.

  “Well, they’re part of a set of ten, don’t you know,” Noah said. “Take the set for four hundred dollars - I’m giving you a discount, for being so mean to you and playing the joke on you.” Beau stifled a giggle. Noah seldom got more than ten dollars for the best of his pictures, and sometimes couldn’t give them away.

  “Will you take a check?” Dr. Field asked. “I have traveler’s checks, but I’d like to keep them back for places that don’t take a credit card.”

  “You got money in the bank to cover it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll take it.”

  Dr. Field extracted an imitation leather checkbook from his inner coat pocket and began to scrawl figures across the picture of a tractor in a cornfield tastefully executed in sepia ink on a pale green background. Noah and Beau began sorting the pictures and putting them back in the portfolio, except for the set of ten that Dr. Field had ordered.

  “I’ll fill in the name,” Noah said; “I’m uncomfortable about letting my real name out too many places, don’t you know.”

  “How ‘bout some coffee, across the street, Noah?” Beau asked.

  “Only if you put your pants on,” Noah said.

  “I don’t have much time,” Dr. Field said as he handed Noah the check with a flourish. Noah gave him the ten drawings with a grin at the gleam in Dr. Field’s eyes. “I’d like some answers to some questions.”

  “What are your questions?” Noah said in a tinny computer voice.

  “What did you pretend to be sick for?”

  “To see what would happen, don’t you know.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “It’s been profitable to y’all, Noah,” Beau interjected. Noah and Dr. Field ignored him.

  “I’ve got a question for you, Doc,” Noah said.

  “Ask.”

  “What’s a nice shrink like you doing in a place like Iowa?”

  Dr. Field was blank for a moment. Consternation wiped the ruddy good humor from his face. He frowned then, wrinkling the inner corners of his eyebrows ever so slightly toward each other. It was plain to see that the question puzzled him. Perhaps he had never heard anyone question the value of living in Iowa before.

  “I’ve always lived there,” he said.

  “I guess everybody’s got their own troubles,” Noah said.

  “I like it there,” Dr. Field said defensively.

  “Some of us have more troubles than others,” Beau drawled softly.

  “Is that what turned you to psychiatry,” Noah asked with great sympathy, “Living in Iowa?”

  “When I was a child,” Dr. Field began pompously, “my grandfather was a missionary among the Amazon tribes.” Beau yawned, and Noah put on his best “interested-but-I’m-really-not-here” look. Dr. Field took it for engrossed interest.

  “My grandfather,” he went on, sure now of his audience, “used to come home with tales of shrunken heads. Once he brought one home for our church to see. You understand this was when I was a child.” Dr. Field looked at Noah and then at Beau, pleading for understanding in his eyes. They nodded; they understood that this was when Dr. Field was a child.

  “I was fascinated with that shrunken head,” Dr. Field said, closing his eyes. A look of religious ecstasy swept over his face.

  “I wanted to shrink my grandfather’s head. I hated him.” Beau recoiled from the violent spasm of detestation contorting Dr. Field’s face. He reached down and covered his groin.

  Dr. Field continued. “I sublimated my desire to shrink my grandfather’s head into an honorable and useful profession that of psychoanalytically ‘shrinking’ heads. I’ve been psychoanalyzing my grandfather ever since.”

  The gleeful satisfaction on Dr. Field’s face looked like an orgasm to Noah; surreptitiously he checked the doctor’s trouser fly for a telltale wet spot; there was none. Dr. Field opened his eyes suddenly.

  “Also, it’s a good living and easy to make.” Noah nodded appreciatively.

  “You’re a regular chap, don’t you know,” he said, and clapped Dr. Field on the back. “I like you,” Noah said, and held the little doctor
in a tight embrace for a brief moment. Dr. Field blushed even redder. He discovered that he liked the warm feeling of being close. He filed a mental note to investigate the therapeutic values of human touch in a learned paper. When Noah released him, a little shadow of sadness crossed his face. Impulsively, Beau grabbed him. At first Dr. Field was a little disconcerted that Beau hadn’t put on his pants yet, nor even an undergarment, but then he decided that with Beau that was nothing unusual.

  “It was awfully sweet of you to come for me for Noah’s sake,” Beau said, as he patted Dr. Field on the back of the head. “He’s quite a rascal, and often imposes his pranks on the general public this way.”

  “Beau,” Noah said, “put your pants on. Yes, thanks, doctor, for the check, and for coming up. It was a trick, and you played along just fine; I knew you would.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Your name tag from the convention.”

  Dr. Field looked at it with a puzzled frown on his red eyebrows. The little broken veins in his nose wrinkled too, and the tiny scratch from Beau’s shirt stud squeezed out another tiny drop of blood.

  “What?”

  “It says on it, ‘The American Convention of the Helping Professionals’,” Noah said with a grin, “and that says you like to help people, don’t you know.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Field said, staring down at his upturned nametag,

  “I hadn’t thought of that before. I’ve got to be going,” Dr. Field said. “The plenary session should be about finished, and then the fun starts. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you two. Perhaps I’ll be seeing you again.” He walked