Friday, Reynard had asked him if he had considered retiring. It was a complete surprise to the doctor, and Reynard had to calm him down. No one was forcing him out, any action was voluntary, any decision his. Reynard had asked to be the one to ask him, usually they sent a formal letter. The budget crunch was on, across the board, and Reynard was feeling people out on his own. He didn’t want to let anyone go who wasn’t prepared.
“Who else have you approached with this?” Doctor Markham asked.
“Understand, I have to come to you first.”
“Why?”
“Why,” Reynard said, “because you’re seventy-six years old, Bill, why the hell do you think?”
Doctor Markham hadn’t had to remind Reynard that he wasn’t far behind him.
He couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. Yet it had to be something he’d done, or not done, the way he’d handled a patient maybe.
The girl screaming at him the other day was nothing out of the ordinary. He’d done it himself, alone in his office at home, raging at the flimsy test result —and at sixty-five. He was worried she would give up too soon, and was relieved when she blew up at him. Her file said she’d been through it before, but that was no guarantee. It seemed to him that people nowadays, as opposed to when he was a young man, simply didn’t have as much gumption. Hardly a week passed when the clinic didn’t have at least one case of nervous exhaustion. At first meeting, the girl seemed the type, thin as a rake, hair dyed, make-up troweled on. (Lithuanian nationalists sustained heavy casualties in the ongoing battle for Vilnius, the radio quoted Tass.) Was that her? His memory had been playing tricks on him lately. It was the reason he’d asked for more tests on the girl: he couldn’t be sure the first set were actually hers. There could have been some confusion with the patient roster, either that or the prints had gotten mixed up in processing, because a second set for her permanent file showed nothing. That might have been enough for someone internal to lodge a complaint.
He blamed Reynard. They were Easties when that had meant something in Tindalls Corners. As boys, they had chased each other through the gap in Mrs. Haabestaad’s hedgerow, winging rocks and crab apples at each other. His entire schooling Reynard was a year behind him, a chum but a hothead, and countless times Bill Markham had come to his aid on the playground, glowering, arms folded, daring the West End tough who’d been ready to plant Rey to give it a try. At Colgate they drifted apart, found different crowds to run with, Rey’s wild, engineers aiming for the Army Air Corps, his the more genteel medical students, but even as upstanding interns Rey would punch him in the arm as he passed in the hall. Rey drew the South Pacific, Doctor Markham Fort Sill, and after they saw each other seldom. Forty years, yet when the doctor called five years ago, Rey hadn’t forgotten.
He hadn’t now either, he was only being fair to the young people. The doctor shifted on the bench seat, both hands on the wheel. How had he become so old?
The road twisted up a hill. In the hollow below to his right shone the bright swatches of an auto graveyard. The Imperial could use a new odometer. It was illegal, but the stuck one bothered him. He’d stop in next Saturday, make a day of installing it in the garage. Ahead of him, a coal truck pulled half onto the berm to let him pass, but the doctor couldn’t see around him. A pickup behind him honked. Why hadn’t he noticed the junkyard before? He drove the road every day. Coming home he might not see it down in the hollow, but in the morning it would be hard to miss. The pickup honked; Doctor Markham waved. It was a double yellow line, they were going uphill and the road was all curves.
Really though, it was something that would catch his eye, especially in winter, that burst of color. How would the Imperial look in red or lemon yellow? The pickup honked again and shot into the left lane, the driver, a man with a dark mustache, turning to look at him and giving him a look as he passed, then gunning around the coal truck, spraying cinders.
“Nut,” the doctor muttered.
He had never seen the auto graveyard before, he realized after clearing the rise and waiting for the coal truck to turn into a fenced depot, because it was not Route 17 he was on but some other road. He had missed a turn, maybe taken a wrong turn shadowing the truck. How far he had gone on the new road he could not tell, but the surroundings were completely foreign. “Shawcross,” the trucking company’s sign read, the word ominous, as if whispered. A sense of déjà vu came over him. The radio was going to say, “under the new coalition government,” just as it said, “the new coalition government,” and the road sign which assured him he was on Route 17 slid past with the woods behind it as it had for years, months, days. It was only 7:20, he couldn’t have gone far past the turnoff. He would T-bone some other road, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what road that would be. He was on 17 and he wanted to be on 17 before the turnoff, that’s all he knew. Driving straight ahead, he felt he was getting himself more lost. He would stop at the next place to stop and check a map.
The speed limit changed to 40, and a group of buildings formed in the distance, a gas station, he would stop there. A tree of signs said it was the junction of 17 and 27. He pulled in short of the station and, in park, shuffled his maps. There was one of Pennsylvania, one of New York, and one of New Jersey. He did not know which one he was in.
“Curious,” he said. He got out and checked his license plate, got back in and found 17 on the New York map, and when he saw the yellow blotch of Utica remembered hesitantly who he was and where he was going and realized what had happened.
He found a red Flair and marked his route on the map, and to make sure, wrote his name. He propped the map on the dash, remembering at the last second to fasten his seat belt, and turned onto 27, heading for Utica, still on time.
Fugue. He’d seen all kinds. Medics rotated back to Fort Sill to be demobbed and ended up taking a bed, lying silent for weeks then suddenly asking for a cigarette. A woman they found wandering outside Hecla thought she’d died and gone to another world; her boyfriend made his own wheat beer and a batch of mash must have had ergot in it–LSD. Stroke, the thin wall popping, brain tumor, epilepsy, there were any number of ways to explain it. His little episode didn’t seem serious. But he could not deny that he had had one.
Friday, Reynard had asked him if he’d thought of retiring. They’d grown up together, and this was the way the man treated him. How many times had he saved his hide when they were flyers that one summer, shuddering over the unlit washboard roads through farms, bottles clinking fit to bust because the Canadians gypped them on excelsior. But there came a time, the doctor had to admit. Television, murder mysteries. He killed the news.
He was on time, which meant he would be the first one in. He felt fine now, the connections sparking from the clinic’s windows, the clock tower opposite, the tamed shrubbery leading to the doors. The security guard wore a name tag but Doctor Markham knew Keith Coles. In uniform, a toothpick sticking out one corner of his mouth, Keith looked like a sleazy movie sheriff. He’d been studying for the civil service exams for months, taking them over and over, never giving up. His persistence reminded the doctor of Susanna’s ex-husband Darcy, not knowing when to quit with his music. He’d spend the rent to record a demo tape without asking her. The man was in his thirties and hadn’t had a real job in his life. But every letter Sue sent made it clearer that she regretted the divorce.
“What’s going on, Doc?” Keith asked.
“Monday.”
“Tell me about it.”
Thursday morning Keith had been talking about going ice-fishing up at Echo Lake. The doctor asked, testing.
“What are you, kidding me? Go up this time a year you’ll be swimming.”
“Anyone in?”
“Yeah, right,” Keith said, “you’re the only crazy one.”
Alone in back, Doctor Markham read the nameplate on the desk of the work-study girl and in his office wrote it down on a Travenol pad. His desk calendar said he had a full slate, the morning splitting walk-in with
Doctor Kennedy, the afternoon handling paperwork, some dating from last year. It was a solid day. No matter what the university said, he was needed; Reynard would see that.
Doctor Markham took the first patient, a girl complaining of dizziness, nausea, and when it appeared that Doctor Kennedy was late, saw the second, no feeling in the fingertips, the third, vomiting, cramps, and by 9:30 Doctor Kennedy had called in sick and the waiting room was filling up with students who had waited all weekend to come in. There was a flu going around, and a chest cold brought on by a sudden temperature change. The doctor took them in order, cutting short their explanations, keeping the seats half-empty. Even with the automatic diagnoses of cold and flu, he was losing ground. He skipped break, later between flu victims bought an awful cup of coffee and leaden danish from the machines.
It would be then that Reynard Vaught chose to come out of his office to see how things were going. He caught Doctor Markham in the hall, chewing. “I hear you’re minding the store yourself,” he said. “If you need a hand, I can assign someone.”
At 1:00, when Doctor Markham turned the walk-in over to Reynard and Doctor Downes, there were five people waiting. “If you need help,” he said, “I’ll be in my office.”
He was only starting in on the mass of forms and memos that had built up when, hours later, he woke up in a nest of papers, one stem of his glasses cutting into his temple. Before leaving he had another cup of coffee, and that night went to bed early, dropping off in the middle of the Geographic article. The next morning, refreshed, he found the magazine closed on his bed stand, leafed to the page he had stopped on, and dog-eared it.
Half the staff were out with the flu, Reynard among them. Doctor Markham called him at home to see how he was doing. Reynard said he felt fine, then all of a sudden couldn’t keep anything down. The doctor prescribed clear fluids and rest, told Reynard not to worry, he was minding the fort.
“Who’s in charge?” Reynard asked.
“Someone with experience,” the doctor said.
He fell asleep again Wednesday afternoon because he forgot to look at the index card in his pocket that said, “Eat Lunch.” It was somehow worse than blanking out completely, the insidious erosion. Like the confusion of papers before him, his daily life was overwhelming him. He needed a guide like the map propped on the Imperial’s dash, like the little yellow notes Mrs. Railsbeck stuck to the fridge —“waxed paper” or “nutmeg.”
Exactly. She’d gotten hers from him. He raided the supply cabinet, and by the end of the day his blotter bore a fringe of messages, among the clutter invisible to all but him. One said, “Thurs. 11 A.M. Term Girl.”
The next morning, Reynard was in. A formal letter had come. The university was cutting its facilities staff 3 percent across the board. They were offering their older employees retirement bonuses, trying to cut down by attrition so the layoff numbers looked better in the paper. The trustees were asking Reynard for one name.
“A week’s pay for every year,” Reynard told him. “Heck, I’m even tempted.”
“I’m new, Rey.”
“And you keep your benefits.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
“Westmoreland always needs people.” Reynard folded the letter. “You’re not making this easy, Bill.”
“Nope.”
“Consider it, for me, please. It’s the best deal you’re going to get.”
“Things happen.”
“Why are you doing this to me? You know I’m not going to kick you out in the street. Why can’t you take what they’re giving?”
“Rey, go ahead and can me, I won’t think badly of you.”
“I don’t want to can you, Bill. I don’t want to can anyone. But understand, I don’t have a choice. Someone is going to go, and from all evidence it’s you. I’m just telling you the truth. You’ve been here five years and you’ve done good work, but I can’t keep a place open for you anymore.” He slapped the letter against his knee. “Bill.”
“Is that it,” the doctor asked, “can I get back to work now?”
“You have the rest of the semester to come to your senses.”
The door hadn’t closed when the work-study girl poked her head in —he could never remember her name —and told him there was a Janice Toth waiting.
It did not go well. She was more composed than before, or perhaps he was more distraught. He paced the perimeter of the office, gabbling, it seemed to him, out of control, while she sat in the chair Reynard had been in, watching him with the patience of a snake. Munson Hall’s clock refused to strike the half hour. Telling her of the switched tests, he avoided any mention of his recent problems, and each time he turned to her, using the desk as a barrier, a prop, he would come face-to-face with “Eat Lunch,” and the urge to confess set him off on another circuit of the room. At one point he knocked a sheaf of papers to the floor, laughed, and horrified, tried to cover it with a diatribe on the risk of swelling. Finally the bells chimed. Unfathomably hungry, he walked her out to Scott and left the two to set up a lab date.
Even a tuna melt couldn’t keep him awake. He would never catch up on his paperwork. Maybe Reynard couldn’t fire him until it was done. It wasn’t Rey’s fault, it wasn’t anyone’s. He’d had his day, no sense being a bad sport about it. He couldn’t imagine Rey would go any easier. He’d always had to drag him off his opponent, or vice versa, grappling in the dirt outside the tent set up for dancing. Rey was a wild man then. It was the war, or maybe just the speed of his youth that took it out of him. He married, settled down in the city. The doctor had visited a few times but never felt comfortable. Then Helen, a new life, Susanna.
Wouldn’t it be something to punch old Reynard Vaught smack in the kisser? For old times’ sake. Boof —ha-ha —right in the jaw.
Driving home that night, the Imperial’s right headlight burned out, leaving a single beam angling off into the ditch. He greeted Mrs. Railsbeck by demanding a yellow tab, which he filled out, “Junkyard 17” and stuck to the fridge.
“I’m taking the Rabbit tomorrow,” he told her over dinner.
“I have shopping to do.”
“The car does not bite,” he said.
While she did the dishes, the doctor went into his office and emptied his briefcase. The terminal girl, for all his fear and pity of her, he considered his only real patient. He had asked her for her family doctor’s file after the first scan, but it must have slipped her mind, for her folder held only two slips from the lab, both positive. The negative CAT plates were locked away in the clinic’s files, evidence of his failing mind.
The girl was going to die, he had no doubts. How much agony or hope his mistake was putting her through he could not imagine. Helen had gone so quickly. It was irresponsible, it was malpractice —and yet he could not be sure it was his mistake or a mistake at all. Because he was rooting for her, a worse mistake, one he had problems with so many times in the past five years he did not want to recall. He was supposed to be beyond such hope, but with every new one it returned. The families invited him, he sent a card. Who would Reynard get for a job no one could do?
He finished the Geographic article in bed, pausing before the heaps of bloodied tusks, the government wardens with semiautomatics held across their chests. Everything was becoming extinct, the natives, the savannah, the elephants; it was every Geographic article he had ever read. Lying there in the dark, the steel finial of the overhead fixture aimed at him, Doctor Markham decided to cancel his subscription, but with nothing to write with or on, he knew he would forget, and annoyed, he rocked himself out of bed to find a pen and paper.
He did not want to wake Mrs. Railsbeck. Hands out before him, he navigated the upstairs hall, the bump of the runner under one slipper. He found the corner at the top of the stairs and, counting the vinyl treads, creaked down to the living room. Mrs. Railsbeck had vacuumed, and though it hadn’t meant a thing at the time, the doctor remembered she had forgotten to slide the ottoman back against his
chair. It wasn’t in his way, but to prove a point he snuck toward it, taking baby steps, until it met his shin. The doctor sat down. The house was black, dark as the night beyond the porch, starless. In the garage, his Imperial sat half-blinded beside the Rabbit, and all through the crosshatched streets of Tindalls Corners and out into the countryside, darker, maybe snow moving in from the lake, those he had ministered to slept, young and old, some no more, in St. Leo’s or Grace Church Cemetery, among family, in other towns alone, following work or love or, in Utica or Syracuse, Buffalo or New York City, dreams. Lives, lifetimes. The doctor sat for a second on the ottoman, his bathrobe falling open, legs chilly, and wondered if he should have become a doctor, if he should have married and lost his wife, if his daughter was happy or like her father, confused but willing. He wondered if Mrs. Railsbeck had expected more of him and if Reynard Vaught knew he forgave him, and after a bit he remembered that he had to go to work tomorrow, and in the dark, treading light and sure as a man on a high wire, he climbed upstairs and into bed.
He woke to the light of snow. He could never get back before nightfall; he was stuck with the Rabbit. Getting breakfast, Mrs. Railsbeck knocked a handful of yellow tabs off the fridge and said, “I knew someone was going to do that.”
The county trucks had been out, but Doctor Markham held the Rabbit back. For its box of a shell it was surprisingly quick. Hugging the hilly curves above the junkyard, he thought of his Imperial, how if he did retire, they would need only one car. The Rabbit was a fine car but it was small. It was somehow not them while the Imperial was. But to sell the newer car to fix up the old made no sense.
In the Walled City Page 10
