the Onion Field (1973) (3 page)

"They have no nervous system," said Ian quietly. He had been standing away from a group of yachtsmen listening. It was unusual for him to volunteer an opinion in a group of strangers, and he reddened when they turned.

"No nervous system, you say?" said the yachtsman.

"That's right, sir," said Ian. "They're missing something that we havS. A nervous system. They don't die of shock. They're not necessarily stupid or savage, they just lack something that we have."

"Well, you can empathize with sharks if you want to," said the yachtsman. "I say they're disgusting beasts who eat themselves for sheer savagery."

The squeal of tires. A skidding black and white police car. Two blue-uniformed policemen held a struggling, handcuffed man. He was moaning grotesquely, not like the physically wounded. Ian watched as he stood outside Unit Three, at Los Angeles County General Hospital with his friend Ray Sinatra and waited for Art Petoyan, who was an intern in Psychiatric Admitting. When the police left they entered.

"Doctor Petoyan, I presume," said Ian to the dark young doctor with the Armenian nose and the sensual jovial mouth.

"Welcome to the snakepit, gentlemen." Art smiled. "Glad you could come tonight." Then they put on the white jackets Art borrowed for them and headed for the open ward to await incoming patients and administer perfunctory physical exams. Between exams there would be time for coffee, cigarettes, and lots of talk, mostly of medicine and music, Ian's and Art's common interests.

"Why an Armenian bagpiper, Art?" Ray asked, knowing about it from stories Ian had told of the old days when Art and Ian were novice pipers.

"I got interested several years ago when I was an undergraduate and Ian was still in high school. I thought I was going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School but I ended up at USC."

"So all that piping was wasted."

"Wasted! Are you kidding, Ray? Listen, you just stick around Ian and me and we'll make a believer out of you. If an Armenian can be a bagpipe aficionado, so can an Italian. You have hairy knees? I've got hairy knees. That's the sign of a good piper. You should see me in kilts and a glengarry cap. And you should've seen Ian and me competing in the Highland Games. Here was this tall, straight, shiny kid, the epitome of Jack Armstrong, and here I was, a greasy slouchy little camel driver. Now who would you have picked?"

"Let's talk about medicine," said Ian. "That's what I'm supposed to be going to college for."

"Did Ian tell you about my pipes, Ray?" Art persisted. "They're from India. Good ivory and ebony, but Pipe Major Aitken, our old teacher, wouldn't go for them. They had to be Peter Henderson pipes, like Ian's. You see, in Scotland, after they drill the holes they point the pipes toward the Orkney Islands and let the cold wind blow through them for three years."

"Ye cannot have the hot winds of Pakistan blowin through yer pipes, can ye, laddies?" Ian said, and he and Art smiled at the old memory.

"Why didn't you get the Scottish pipes?" Ray asked.

"Two hundred good reasons," Art said.

"Scotsmen aren't the only ones who know the value of a buck," said Ian. "Armenians shop around a bit. Tell Ray about all the money you're making now that you're a big shot doctor."

"Oh yeah," said Art dropping easily into another subject. "Know what they pay interns? Seventy bucks a month. Know what the rent is? Seventy-five a month. Know how I support a wife? Selling blood and gastric juices."

"What?" said Ray, and Ian chuckled.

"First I sell my blood like a common skid row derelict, but that's nothing. Every Saturday morning I sell my gastric juices with the rest of the starving interns. I just go in there for about three hours, insert a hose through my nose right down into my stomach and shoot them the juice. I used to almost faint when I did it, now I just drop that old hose right down there. In fact, I got more gastric juice than anyone."

"He's rather proud of it," said Ian.

"They give it to some old geezer who's about ready to croak," Art explained. "For a few days he feels real good. The medicines he's taking orally get absorbed and he gets more nourishment from food. He feels pretty much in the pink before he checks out. I get fifteen bucks for about three hours' work."

"Oh my . . . Oh, God," said Ray dropping his head to his folded arms.

"Even thought about selling my seminal fluid," said Art. "But I chickened out. I figured sure as hell, soon as I go into practice, some broad would come in for a checkup with a little Armenian kid and I'd start feeling responsible without knowing for sure."

Then Art's animated conversation was interrupted by another pair of uniformed policemen entering with a handcuffed man. He was a young man, blondish, very pale, wet beads over the lip and around his temples, the sideburns shaggy, plastered to his scalp by the moisture. He seemed passive enough.

The young man was checked in by a nurse and given a glance or two by the uniformed deputy sheriff on duty. It was Art's job to treat such patients for any obvious organic ailments before they entered the psychiatric wards.

"It's a ruthless type of medicine," Art apologized to Ian as they were getting the patient ready for the exam. "It's trench warfare. Do you have any idea how many patients they bring in here each night? Most or all of them indigent? The hospital can't possibly treat or commit anyone unless he's stark staring nuts, and only then if he's an imminent threat to himself or somebody else. If they've got alcoholic breath or a history of d. T.'s, pow! We kick them out the door tomorrow. Just don't be disillusioned. This isn't the way I'll practice medicine when I finally get out in the world."

"I won't be disillusioned," Ian said as they entered the examining room.

The patient looked up from a chair and started to stand.

"That's all right. Sit down," said Art. "We're just going to have a look and see if you're all right."

"I'm okay," said the young man, looking from Art to Ian. To Ray. Back to Art.

"I'm sure you are," said Art sitting down beside the patient, attaching the sphygmomanometer to a very rigid and muscular arm.

"This is just to test your blood pressure," said Art reassuringly, noticing that the sweating was becoming excessive.

As soon as the first slight pressure was applied to the bulb, the man moved. Without warning he screamed in terror and Art was on the floor and the sphygmomanometer was smashed against the wall, and the uniformed deputy was vaulting into the room on top of the pile of shouting thrashing bodies on the floor.

The young man was quite strong, and almost impossible to control. He threw them off, all the time shrieking for release from his private demons. Finally sufficient help came and he was controlled and led weeping through the double doors.

Art accompanied the patient while Ian and Ray drank coffee and rested, regaining their composure.

"I was talking to the resident shrink back there," Art said when he returned moments later. "He knows that kid. Said what happened to him here was homosexual panic. That's when the awareness of his condition suddenly bursts forth in a repressed homosexual."

"Incredible," said Ray. "I never saw anything like it."

"You can write a textbook after you're here a couple of nights!' said Art wearily.

"Poor guy," said Ian. "I really felt sorry for him when they led him away crying."

"Keep studying. We really need some idealism in this racket," said Art smiling, but without irony.

One of Ian's friends, a floundering Ph. D. candidate in psychology at UCLA, warned Ian he'd never finish college. "Ian, it's an anthropology class!" said Grog Tollefson. "You're supposed to provide a short definition of Homo erectus. The text says he lived half a million years ago in cave communities and was a cannibal. Why go off the subject and spend your time with Kant or Santayana and try to relate them to your course in anthropology? You'll never get through undergraduate school at that rate."

"I appreciate the advice." Ian shrugged. "But grades bore me. And I like philosophy. What am I going to do?"

"Damn, I've already proved my academic instability by dropping out of two colleges, and being on probation here. But psych majors are supposed to be flaky and insecure. I always thought you were too much in control. As much in control as I'm out of it. Now I'll bet youre going to drop out first."

"You're psychoanalyzing again, Grog."

"So what? It's a psych major's prerogative. Now let me help you a little bit. What the hell was your social studies test all about?"

"Don't think I know for sure." Ian grinned. "There was an essay on bigotry."

"Good, did you say something to the point for once?"

"I meant to, but then I got to wondering how a great composer like Wagner could have been such a narrow anti-Semite and I ended up writing about Wagner's music."

"You're hopeless, Ian," said Grog disgustedly. "I think your big problem is your glands are calling and you want to marry Adah. I don't give you another semester."

And Grog was right. Ian suddenly quit, and impulsively joined the Los Angeles Police Department, and married Adah.

Art Petoyan was to say to a fellow piper, "I was shocked to hear that Ian dropped out of college. To become a cop! I just couldn't believe it. And it's changing him fast. He isn't the same guy. Maybe not embittered, but he's at least becoming cynical. Those idealistic dreams of bettering society by being a physician are gone forever, I'm afraid. Police work is changing him. He knows he isn't improving society now. It's just a holding action, he says. I'm sure he's become aware of evil-believes for the first time that it can touch him."

Chrissie listened quietly when Ian first told her he wanted to join the police force. She nodded occasionally and did her best to smile. There had already been many talks about his getting married, and he knew she felt he should wait until he finished his undergraduate work, at least until he was partly through medical school. But now he was telling her there would never be a medical school. Never. And she knew his decision was irrevocable. And so she reassured him, and said she was happy for him if this is what he wanted. If he was sure. And that night, for the first time in many years, Chrissie wept.

"Adah isn't your typical showgirl," was the phrase most often used by those wishing to describe her. The speaker would then invariably add: "I don't mean she's an intellectual or something. She's not. A high school dropout in fact. She took a correspondence course to get a diploma. Very shy. Never opens her mouth. An innocent kid. I'm not kidding you, an innocent Las Vegas showgirl."

But she looked like the others, busty, too slender, bony hips protruding from her costume. Taller than most, six feet one inch in spikes. Not a beauty but attractive, with blue-gray eyes like Ian's that are invariably referred to as hazel. With hair, dark like his, tinted red for the shows.

At first Adah was afraid of him, had never been around a man like him. And the manners he got from his mother intimidated her, but at the same time made him terribly attractive. She was even more terrified of Chrissie Campbell, for she found her too genteel, everything Adah was unaccustomed to in her own family. And she was afraid Chrissie would blame her for Ian's quitting college.

"Ian hated pre-med all along," Adah confessed to a friend.

"Chrissie never knew it. I don't even think Ian knew it for sure. He's antsy. Wants freedom on his job. He likes working nightwatch because of the activity. Sometimes though, he just can't go to bed when he gets off work. He might go to see my old bosses, Jack and Marge. Being show business people they're up all night choreographing. Or he might go see Grog Tollefson, or Wayne Ferber. Or to Chrissie."

After a few weeks of marriage Chrissie asked: "What do you think of married life by now, Adah?"

"Oh, I think it's great except that Ian reads so much."

At first the newlyweds lived in a Hollywood apartment to which Chrissie was often invited. Adah became less inhibited around her, more anxious to talk, although with strangers or in a group of people she was still self-conscious and would usually curl up in a chair and retire from conversation. But she was changing. Becoming less withdrawn and physically more attractive as she toned down her showgirl appearance. She'd been a showgirl only in fact, not at heart. Now she became what she was born to be, a wife and soon a mother.

Ian Campbell would still drive by the Park La Brea Apartments to see Chrissie, sometimes at midnight when he finished night- watch. And if he was disturbed about anything she would know it, and through gentle turns, the conversation would turn to the disturbing thing. It had been that way all his life. After transferring his problem, Ian's face would light up, the brooding look would be gone, the eyes would go more from gray to blue. Then Ian could sleep but his mother would stay up half the night with the problem.

"Ian's always been such a castle builder," Chrissie told Adah. "He was always unrealistic about helping people and always expects more from life than he gets. I'm afraid police work'll somehow awaken a person like him too harshly."

It was hard for Ian to find any time for piping now. The job and court time were making great demands. Sometimes, early in his marriage, while living in the Hollywood apartment, he would in desperation go inside a walk-in closet, close the door and play, for an hour, or as long as he could bear the confinement. Adah would find a cloud of steam and puddle of sweat on the floor when he came out. About all he could do in those days was play the practice chanter, which went from G to high A and sounded like an oboe. It was subdued and didn't frighten small children and didn't disturb the neighbors or his wife. But it wasn't the same. Not to a piper.