by Shem, Samuel
“Good work,” Bill said. “Jeez, that’s a tough diagnosis to make, especially when you’re on the spot like that. Damn good work, Orvy.”
“Why all the guns, Bill?”
“What’s that?”
“Why all the guns? Last week that migrant worker got shot right in the hospital parking lot, today this girl. It’s like the Wild West around here, Bill.”
“Yep, it is. Only here they’re not as good an aim, heh heh. Hell, did you see that the First Lady announced on TV the other day that she’s even packin’ a gun now. They say that soon there’ll be a gun for every American—250 million guns.”
“But a nine-year-old with a gun?”
“Wasn’t his, of course. Probably his dad’s. But that age is unusual. That ain’t a trend, nope, nope.”
“Not yet,” Orville said.
Between contempt and compassion doctors run their course. Years ago in New Jersey, the trauma of Orville’s failing marriage to Lily Wolf had affected his work with his patients, tilting the balance toward contempt. He had been trained to keep his practice walled off from his marriage, but the wall began to crumble. His heightened contempt at work—and his self-loathing—had spilled back into his marriage. He would come home a sulking, snarling bear. After a while everything about Lily seemed mean-spirited, tight, and too neat and clean. As did suburban New Jersey. Infertility brought him to his knees. His desperation seeped into his doctoring. To protect his patients from his contempt, the doctor had run.
But shy men carry a secret daring. At sixteen, afraid of heights, Orville had taken a job 158 feet up over the Hudson River on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. At thirty-six, afraid of leaving his wife and suburban medicine, he’d run straight toward the worst medical situations imaginable. Whether in atonement for failing Lily or in nihilistic rage to destroy himself, or in some Hemingwayesque macho-shit testing of himself, or maybe even just wanting—after all those clean guest towels for clean guests—to feel the poverty of dirt, he’d run full blast toward pain and suffering. Black bag in hand, Médecins Sans Frontières as his umbrella, he worked in hellholes like Haiti, Madagascar, Rwanda, Somalia, Lebanon, and East Timor. He’d ended up in sight of Bikini Atoll, in the post–H-bomb test islands in the Pacific, where frogs lacked testicles and lizards had bird wings and birds laid eggs with shells thin as glass and humans had too few fingers or too many or cleft palates or spina bifida, and sat around wondering why a lot of their kids were strabismic or leukemic or dead.
He figured he’d done his part. Nothing much had improved.
And Columbia? he asked himself now, as he eased his dead mother’s floating Chrysler over to Penny’s ranch house to pick up Amy for the parade. Well, ever since he’d started with Bill, Columbia had surprised him. Columbia, in its own way, was about as bad as any of the other places he’d seen. His Sakhalin Island.
Alcohol and violence. Not only gunplay and knife play but ax play and chainsaw play. Murder as grisly as in Angola. Malnutrition as bad as in the Third World. Car crashes as creative as on the Autobahns or the sorry roads of India—whole families of Columbians turned to a mush of metal and blood and bone and brain by a drunken kid in a five-ton truck. Ninety-year-olds driving sixteen miles an hour meeting sixteen-year-olds driving ninety. A cornucopia of drugs to make the East Bronx, and the shamans of Peru, proud. Despite an epidemic of smoking, an epidemic of obesity—“Be glad they smoke,” Bill had said, “think how heavy they’d be if they din’t.”
Sexual violence and perversions, including, in the rural zones out in the county where the hills were made of lush green grasses all alfalfas and timothys and the woods of towering oaks and maples and chestnuts and pines and the streams ran splashing like kids and spilled diamonds over waterfalls to collect in pools of silvery blue and lakes of chill deep purple with names like Bash Bish Falls and Roeliff Jansen Kill and there, always there like good grandparents anchoring it all, were the Catskills and the Hudson, there out in those wondrous rural zones where he captained the Chrysler on house calls to the impoverished farms and trailer parks, he saw daisy chains of brutality, sodomy, rape, pedophilia, and the raw neglect of children so that when they were discovered they were ten-year-olds with the bodies and minds of fives. And in the office, as study after study of doctors had shown, Eighty percent of the patients revolving in that IN-OUT circle of hell had no identifiable physical disease. Eighty percent of the time in our offices, Orville mused, we doctors are treating phantoms.
Why was Bill’s practice so bad? The wealthier, and often healthier, Columbians and New Yorkers had stopped coming to Bill. He was old, half-blind and half-deaf, and his office was outdated and scruffy. He no longer took any insurance payments; he was unwilling to fill out the crossword-puzzles of forms. He accepted cash, check, or barter, and he always carried a big wad of bills neatly ordered in ascending denominations, like a gas station attendant. He wasn’t up on the latest medical technology. He had no receptionist, so you had to wait your turn—the death knell for yuppies. He smoked, and often smelled like an onion.
Another strike against Bill was his increasing reliance on his own special medicine, Starbusol. For decades, he had made the stuff himself. It came in bottles, smelled of pine, and tasted like a cross between cherry cough medicine and Coca-Cola. In extreme cases, it could be injected. No one, not even Orville, knew what was in it. Bill swore by it. He often withheld it as treatment until the crucial moment, when he claimed it would have maximal effect.
“But it’s a placebo, Bill, right?” Orville had asked him the other day.
Bill said nothing.
“It’s just the placebo effect?”
“Whatsamatter with havin’ an effect? And it’s never made anybody worse. Most treatments make people worse. Even antibiotics, in the long run, are makin’ humanity worse. You just wait, son. There’ll come a day when nothin’ll be workin’ for you, and you might just be ready for some Starbusol.”
“For my patients or myself?”
“Yep. Heh, heh.”
And so the better-off people, including Milt and Penny, had stopped coming to Bill. Instead, they drove nearly an hour out to the wealthy enclave of Spook Rock, where a very tall and handsome young doctor named Edward R. Shapiro, who seemed straight out of a TV sitcom about a very tall and handsome young doctor in a wealthy enclave, would serve up a kind of Disney medicine seen on TV as well as fresh coffee, caf or decaf. It didn’t take long for Orville to realize, from Shapiro’s lethal mistakes, that he was as bad a doctor as Bill and Orville had ever seen, a kind of poster boy for both mental illness and medical malpractice. The worst. As was often the case in medicine, the worst charged the most.
The rest came to Bill and, now, Orville. They were mostly poor, native Columbians, often people of color. The walking wounded and the walking worried. For Orville, every day in the hospital and in the endless circle of IN-OUT-IN of the office and every night he was on call, was dispiriting.
Again, he was doing his part. Again, nothing much was improving.
Orville docked the Chrysler at the end of Penny and Milt’s flagstone walk and honked the horn. To him, it sounded ugly and too loud and he was always sorry he’d honked it, afterward. As usual, he was late.
Amy shot out of the door and raced down the walk toward him, a big smile on her face. As always when he saw her, Orville lit up.
At Penny’s “Welcome Home Orvy” party, they had screeched each other’s names and she had rushed into his arms. They had hugged each other so long and hard that the noise of the party went away, and all they heard was their hearts beating in their temples. Drawing back but holding on, they had looked into each other’s eyes with a shared curiosity. Orville saw again those wide-open eyes, just as at her miraculous birth, and Amy saw the dear outrageous uncle who had always been her safe haven. For a moment, then, as they held each other’s gaze, his blue to her brown, they felt safe, two birds caught in an empty pocke
t of the wind. Protected from Penny’s frantic and perfect party. Home.
Penny had assigned Orville Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings with Amy. Sunday afternoons were Ascot Riding Lessons out at the Spook Rock Hunt Club followed by Greenie’s Budapest Drama Lessons in the Opera House down past Fourth followed by dinner with Penny and Milt at Chinese Restaurant, run by two guys from New York who owned Unique Antique next door. Wednesday evenings were Math For Girls Lessons followed by an hour of free time. Amy’s other afternoons were also wall-to-wall lessons.
“Why all the lessons?” Orville had asked Penny. “Don’t kids just go out and play anymore?”
“Too dangerous. A child was kidnapped last year, right on the street in front of her house.”
Orville thought back to Ethiopia. A war zone. Everybody’s hungry. Kids play.
“All the mothers do it now, the lessons. I spend my life in the car—thank God for the tape deck. Lessons are the only way to break their addiction to TV.” She had smiled at him, seeing in him a seasoned doctor with a hard-won measuredness. “It’ll be great for her to be with you, Orvy. She’s crazy about you. Ever since she spent that week with you last year in Paris, she’s thrown you up to us—‘Uncle O. wouldn’t say that, and if he were here he wouldn’t let you say that either.’ It’s all manipulation but still. What she needs from you, kid, is advice. It’ll be great for you, too. Good fun.”
It had been great, mostly. Probably because he never gave her advice. In fact, it was often the other way around. Amy had a self-assurance that was astonishing to him and a voice that could sing the birds out of the trees. Even standing in the horseshit Sunday after Sunday watching Amy ride animals that he regarded as mere paraplegia in horsehide, the burnt-out almost-forty-year-old felt like a young father, a dad at last. From time to time in the oblique October light, the shadow of “She’s not yours” would canter out from his feet toward her on her horse. But it was just a shadow, not the feeling, which threw none.
“Hi, Unc!” Amy said now, slipping into the seat and throwing her arms around his neck, hugging him hard.
“Hi, Ame!” In a glance he took her in—Yankees cap with her auburn hair poking out the back in a ponytail, sweatshirt with a whale logo and Leviathan Players (her drama group), and her long slim legs in jeans and Reeboks—and felt a rush of love.
She drew away. They stared into each other’s eyes for a second—as they always did, a gut check. He watched her brow knit in concern.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Hey, don’t be phony with me. It’ll come back and bite you!”
“Okay,” he said, laughing. “Just being a doc, that’s all.”
“So tell Doctor Amy. Where doth thou hurt?”
He laughed. “C’mon. No more medicine talk for today. Let’s get to that parade.”
She reflexively snapped on her seat belt—a generational difference. She looked over at him frowning. “C’mon, Uncle O. Buckle up.”
He buckled up and started the mammoth Chrysler on its way downtown to Selma’s house on the Courthouse Square, where the speeches would take place.
They arrived just as the Columbus Day parade was grinding to a halt. The lone float was a Chevy gussied up as a ship, representing the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. It carried the mayor’s cousin-in-law, Warsaw Gologpzyk, dressed as Christopher Columbus. The Fish Hawk Marching Band was playing a tentative rendition of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Blinky the Clown, the town drunk, performed tricks that were failing to amuse even the youngest Columbian. Mayor Americo Scomparza stood on the steps of the courthouse preparing to speak.
Orville and Amy could sense a rising tension in the crowd. The native Columbians nervously moved away from any overhanging streetlamps, limbs, and phone lines. The gaggle of New Yorkers, glasses of white wine in hand, chatted to each other noisily, happily.
Americo’s string of platitudes was passing for a speech. Near the end he launched into his “Columbus Day Appeal” for money for “our terrific bankrupt little town” and unveiled the sail-covered “mast” of the Chevy, a large thermometer with a series of ascending colored lightbulbs. This was designed to track the progress of fund-raising toward the goal—what else but $14,920—marked by a gold whale at the top. The thermometer would sit on the square until January 1, 1984.
“And so,” Americo said proudly, “it gives me great pleasure to light the lights to start the appeal.”
He threw the switch. The lights went on, just as they were supposed to. Columbians cheered. But then there was a flash and a soft poof, followed by an extended pfizzzzzzll. The lights went out.
The slumming New Yorkers, seeing the breakage as a quaint quirk in this amusing folk festival, giggled and applauded and raised their glasses and called out “Yes! Yes!” The native Columbians, including Amy and Orville, moved back quickly, seeing the start of another episode in the Columbian Curse of Breakage and fearing the worst.
The mayor, thinking that the microphone had also broken, muttered “Shit. Nuthin’ ever works right in this fuckin’ place,” which boomed out over the square.
The New Yorkers’ sniggers were cut off suddenly by an explosion from the Chevy. Someone cried out, “The gas tank!” In an instant the float was engulfed in flames. Columbus abandoned the Chevy, his robe on fire. He dropped to the ground and rolled. Telling Amy to stay put, Orville rushed to him.
The fire department, which was part of the parade, sprayed everything with foam. Soon the Discovery of America celebration looked less like a heroic appeal for funds and more like an ad for a new-and-improved laundry detergent.
Orville was covered head to toe with foam and had to scrape it off to see the burned man. Reaching for his black bag, he realized that Amy was beside him, also covered in foam. She had already opened the bag and was handing him his stethoscope. With the fire now out, he felt okay to have her there beside him, and smiled at her. He took the stethoscope and called out “Bandages and tape!” She handed them to him. Sometimes on their Sundays and Wednesdays he’d been called away for emergencies, and Amy had come with him, hanging around as he doctored, asking questions, curious about it all. She’d seemed fearless, cool in the theater of trauma, and had learned quickly how to assist him. He soon stabilized the singed Columbian.
The ship was totaled, the Appeal-O-Meter in ruins, and the mayor pissed off.
“It’s the Democrats!” he hissed in Orville’s ear. “An election year and they’re making life miserable!”
Warsaw was not much burned. More dazed and embarrassed than hurt, smelling like a gas barbecue gone bad, he insisted on walking with Orville and Amy to Bill’s office for further treatment. As they walked along, Amy took Orville’s hand. He looked down at her. How tall she had gotten, he thought, lanky like Penny. Her brown eyes were wide-open, ablaze with the excitement of helping. Her ponytail poking through the back opening of her baseball cap flicked as she bounced along, like a foal’s tail. There was, he thought, a dose of Milt in her baby-fat jaw, but mostly there was Penny and the slender Sol. And maybe, just maybe, in her leaning into life a little right now, a touch of her crazy uncle.
· 7 ·
Ever since Orville had arrived home there had been a drought, the worst in living memory. Rain, real rain, had been rare. Not only had it been dry, but hot. Now, at the end of October, apples were withering on trees, cows were melting, chickens were going crazy, rabid skunks and raccoons and an odd red fox were attacking even in backyards, cherries were flaccid, peaches were leathery, and grapes were more raisinlike than otherwise. Farmers, often silent, were sullenly so, and farmers’ wives were appearing in Bill and Orville’s waiting room with the florid trappings of nineteenth-century hysteria and melancholia.
Orville had been fat as a child and by now had pretty much licked it. He had been shocked by how fat Americans had become, the epidemi
c of overweight. His obese patients found the relentless heat intolerable. Their ailments inflamed, and excoriated. Cigarette sales soared. Whole families would walk into the office puffing away like old-time steam engines, a three-hundred-and-something-pound dad with a fake satin jacket reading “Earl,” a wife tipping the scales well over two-forty reading “Marge,” and two teenage fleshballoons reading “Junior” and “Peg,” all revved up on nicotine. Much like, Orville mused as he treated their phantom complaints, what he and Lily had seen at Disney World during the cousin’s wedding in “Wedding Pavilion”—whole tribes of American families dressed like bowling teams, looking like they’d eaten the balls. Nicotine revved them up, but couldn’t bring rain.
Orville and Bill were wilting as well. Orville was a man who loved rain, every kind of rain. Holland had been heaven. He loved living below sea level, pummeled daily by precipitation, taking long walks through the tall, straight evergreens outside of Zeist, where the drizzle served up a pine scent so solid you could almost chew it. Parched skies were hard for him. Bill, corralled by Babette, worked fewer hours, seldom taking night call. His care seemed a few degrees off. Orville was constantly repairing his mistakes.
But Celestina was coming. The day after tomorrow. On Monday the 30th Orville would pilot the Chrysler down to JFK to meet her. Her return ticket was open-ended. In their last phone call, the day before yesterday, she had said she might stay the whole year. What an image, he thought. Celestina among the Columbians? Buckle up!
But first he had a party to get through.
“You don’t go out!” Penny had decided, and Penny decided was Penny not to be denied. He waited for the blow to fall. She had coaxed him to a dinner party that night at the home of Henry Schooner, who lived in another grand old Victorian, restored perfectly and painted gaily in peach with burgundy trim, and resting exactly 134 strides across the Courthouse Square from Selma’s house. The only strange part about his going to Schooner’s dinner party was that Henry had been the sadistic bully who had made a good part of Orville’s childhood a living hell.
