Willnot (12 page)

“Don’t give half a damn what the date is or who the president is,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Just saying, before you ask. Thing’s simple, really, no big mystery to it: Old pipes stink. I should know.”

“Merritt was a plumber.”

The old man didn’t actually snort, but his expression strongly suggested it. “When I had a life.”

“You think that place comes cheap—”

“That’s enough, Mildred.” It was the first time the younger man, Merritt’s son, had spoken. Ceremoniously his wife began investigating the condition of ceilings, paint, and fixtures. “Why don’t we wait out here while you have a look at Dad, Doctor Hale?”

Back in the exam room, Merritt turtled into the chair across from my desk, head and neck jutting forward, thin legs adangle.

“What, no take-off-your-clothes? No cold-steel exploratory devices? Are you really a doctor?”

“Are you a stinkbug?”

His mouth didn’t laugh, but his eyes did.

“How are things going at the care center?”

“Fun place. Full of good cheer, sunny tomorrows.”

I waited.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I couldn’t wait to get to school. Ten minutes after I came through the front door, I’d be packed and ready to go back. Everybody thought I must have gears missing. But school was flat-out a joy compared to what I had at home. Same with the care center. It works.”

“So why are you here?”

He made to sit up straighter in the chair. I saw no improvement and he registered none. But a man’s gotta keep trying.

“Mildred’s a sweet girl, good to my son. And she means well. But change, change for her is scary. Sneaks up from behind, never what it seems, makes a fool of you.”

“And change makes you smelly?”

“Comes back to a woman—like so many things in life. Nellie, my wife, she died over twenty years ago, and there hasn’t been anyone since. Not till now.”

“At the center.”

“Yep. Like me, she gets around just fine. Lot of ’em don’t. Broke her hip, but then worked her butt off to get back. You’d see her all times of the day scooting her walker down to the PT room. Worked in a health-food store till she was fifty-six and got pushed aside to make way for Amber. Amber looked about twelve years old and had green hair.”

Now it made sense. A health-food store. “You’re taking supplements.”

He nodded. “Protein tablets, zinc and minerals, a whole alphabet of vitamins, pills of this and that flower or weed or grass.
Handfuls of the things four, five times a day. When I started taking them, she said before long I’d smell like she did.”

“And you haven’t shared this with your family?”

“None of their business. Don’t see me asking what goes on in
their
room at night.”

We talked a bit longer, then went out to rejoin the family, to whom I said that, save for the arthritis, Merritt was in good health. Diabetes under control, everything working as it should. I did suggest that, as he’d been on the atenolol for some time, he be sure to ask to have new blood work done.

The daughter-in-law opened her mouth but shut it at a glance from her husband, who soundly thanked me. I walked them to the door and asked how they’d found their way to me. One of the nurses that took care of Merritt made the recommendation, the son said. “Said you weren’t like most doctors.”

I told Richard about that when he called minutes later.

“Wow.
Not like most doctors
. You should put that on your Facebook page. If you had a Facebook page.”

“What’s up?”

“Athletics rally. I ditched and got home early. You want I should cook?”

“Seized by a restless urge, are we?”

“More like a notion. A passing fancy.”

“Or we could go out.”

“A peculiar whim …”

“We do, of course, have three days of leftovers.”

“Ah, yes, the world-famous Hale Diet. Leftovers every meal, where
do
they all come from? Point made. I’ll go in the kitchen, see what falls off the shelves.”

“Is that Dickens I hear?”

“Sounds just like him, doesn’t it? His understudy. A
mockingbird who has practiced long and hard and now is ready for his time center stage. He was on the front porch when I got home. Dickens may be in love.”

“He hears himself in the mirror?”

“Or maybe he just wants a snack.”

Days lumbered on, as they will. Miracles happened in the corners of lives, longings slumbered in our hearts. Wednesday night Richard announced that he’d had enough of politicians pissing one another’s doorsteps and CEOs getting retirement packages of millions while workers couldn’t feed their kids or afford health care, and it was time for an embargo on news. Critically so. He was beginning to despise humankind.

Dinner had been a fanciful omelet of andouille, shaved Parmesan and pears, that and a cucumber-tomato salad. More concocted than cooked, he insisted. “Cooking implies some level or pretension of artistry. What you see before you was not created, it was built. Assembled. As from a kit.”

Thursday he was suspended for insubordination when, at a staff meeting, he could not refrain from addressing the principal’s fifth or sixth vapid statement, and on Monday was reinstated, the principal that morning having been terminated for “undisclosed reasons.” The school board asked if Richard might be willing to serve as acting principal.

“I’m a teacher, not an administrator,” he said. “They want to take me away from what I do well, put me at a desk doing something I suck at?”

That no one else cared anywhere near as much about the school or the kids as he did, went without saying. It sounded to me as though they expected him to do both jobs. That went unsaid too.

Periodically over the next few days I spotted Agent Ogden moving about town, stepping onto a porch, sitting fence-post-straight behind the wheel of her rented Hyundai, but we had no further contact. On Monday, about the same time that Richard was meeting with the school board, Joel Stern showed up at the office to let me know he was shipping out.

“The American dream’s moved on again,” he said. “Back the way we came, to the great Midwest.”

“And you’re in hot pursuit.”

“Tepid.” He had elected not to sit, stood poking at a model on the shelf, one of the expensive show-and-tells that drug companies and manufacturers used to hand out by the boxful, a sickly pink foot and ankle with about four inches of leg bones. When you pushed at it, the ankle went out of joint, then moments later popped back in.

“What’s going on in the heartland?”

“Corn. The fifties good life. With an occasional school shooting or tasty mass murder.” He moved from the foot model to framed diplomas on the wall by the shelves. “And some really good people.”

“Good people are everywhere.”

“You’d be shocked how long it took for me to learn that.” He came up to the desk and held out his hand. “I wanted to say a proper good-bye, Doctor Hale. And to ask … Early next year a small press up in Seattle is bringing out a collection of my essays. I’d like to send you one, if that’s all right with you.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“Then you’re number one on the list.” He smiled. “It’s a short, short list. Please tell your friend I wish him the best of luck.”

“Bobby?”

“I meant Richard, but yes, the sergeant too.”

“You know about Richard’s work situation?”

“A large part of what I do consists of hanging around, listening, looking sideways. Much of the rest, the formal interviews, checking public records, all that, it’s three-quarters misdirection. Stirring the pot. Shaking the tree.”

As I watched him go, out of the office and along the street where he stopped to chat for a moment with Old Ezra, it came to me that, without having previously given it much thought, I liked Joel Stern. A man not easily deceived or distracted—not by growls, not by slogans or sound bites, not by white noise. Not even by the scripts running continously in his head, by his own preconceptions.

Graffiti spray-painted on the wall read
JESUS SAVES
. Someone had come along, slashed through the first
S
in
SAVES
and drawn in an oversize
R
above.

“Never underestimate the power of an editor,” Richard said. “Is Jesus the subject, or an adjective?”

Having blockaded news, we sought enlightenment wherever it might be found.

I was dropping Richard off to pick up his car following carburetor work and new brake pads. Which was also revision, as he pointed out. Standing to the left of the garage, the wall with the graffiti had separated it from a drive-through of some sort. That was mostly gone now: a cement foundation, jagged bits of walls, half a roundabout of driveway.

“Thanks for the ride,” Richard said as we pulled in, one hand on the strap of his backpack, other on the door handle.

“Whatever happened to my Creature photograph?” I asked.

I’d had it from childhood, a photo probably shot as a gag on the set, showing the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the female lead passionately embracing. The Creature had her in its
arms, dipping her back; she was in a swoon, leg kicked up and back, as they kissed.

“I believe I may have put it safely away. As I did with that horrid blue dress shirt of yours.”

“Jealous?”

“Do you hear the silence streaming from me?”

“And of which, the Creature or her?”

“Irrelevant, considering that I’m better looking than both. Well, her at least. Lizard guy
was
kind of a hunk, now that I think of it.”

An overhead door ran almost the whole of the garage’s front. With a steady low grind it ascended. The operator secured the pulley chain and waved Richard in.

“Where did you get it, anyway?” Richard said.

“The photo? It was a gift from my mother.”

“Ah, yes. Your mother.”

“She just thought I should have it, she said.”

“You never told me that.”

“It didn’t occur to me till a lot later that it might be a coded message.”

Richard wound the backpack strap in his hand and climbed out. “Isn’t everything?”

It certainly seemed so that day. A patient I’d seen a couple of times before for wide-ranging complaints sitting across the desk from me wondering (as he looked toward the window) if it all might not be in his head, in the office today because (glancing down at the floor) he couldn’t seem to care about anything anymore. A refund check in the mail from a bill I’d neither received nor paid. Writing a script only to learn that I’d used the last page of the last prescription pad; we’d neglected to reorder. Four rings with hang-ups, Maryanne told me, in just over an hour.

Codes?

Indecipherable signals?

Or happenstance—like most of life.

And then there was the the final report from Sebastian Daiche’s team that the sheriff brought over, asking for my help in translating it. A slurry of medical terminology mixed with legal phrases that effectively swallowed their own tails, the first Latinate, the second mandarin, determining somewhere among them that:

There were three to four bodies, all Caucasian, all young-adult males.

All went into the ground at approximately the same time.

Cause of death could not be ascribed.

No identification was possible.

The sheriff and I were standing by the window. An unfamiliar recent-model Ford pickup eased by in the street, two rifles in the rack behind the driver, one passenger. Roy tracked it until it passed out of sight with a turn onto Poplar. I handed the report back to him.

“We’ve reached the end of our knowledge then,” I said. “It’s over. What about the kids, any of them still out there digging?”

“Not so’s I’ve seen or heard.”

“Moving along.”

“The kids are, anyway. Others, not so much. There’s been talk about putting up some kind of memorial.”

“A memorial. We don’t even know who the bodies were. Or why.”

“That’s part of the idea, I think.”

“
Whose
idea? Where did this come from?”

“Beats me. But it’s around.”

Richard told me later that day that the kids at school were
talking about the memorial too, the rumor being that a contest was going to be held for its design.

Just after five I was on rounds at the hospital, playing dodge-it with food carts from hallway to hallway, glimpsing on TV after TV multiple versions of essentially the same news. As I passed a waiting room, Sunil signaled me to hold on, excused himself from the family he’d been sitting with, and moments later joined me. Sunil’s the closest thing we have to a house chaplain. He wore a mahogany-colored corduroy suit the like of which I’d not seen in twenty years. I’d long suspected that Sunil was on first-name terms with a watchful thrift-shop employee.

“Their daughter,” he said. “Last night she got out of bed and started walking into walls. They heard the thuds, found her in her room. She’d back up four or five steps and walk into the wall again. When they tried to talk to her, all they got was what sounded like strings of vowels. Not much that can be done for her here.”

“She needs neurology.”

“Exactly. They’re getting her ready for a transfer to University. Wanted to ask you, who should she see up there?”

“Who saw her here?”

“Dr. Bullard.”

“Dan will refer to the same person I would, Kate Cross. No one better, anywhere. I’ll give her a call.”

“Thanks, Lamar. But …”

I’d started away, turned back. Made room for a lab tech and candy striper to pass.

“That wasn’t all I wanted to see you about. A visitor turned up at the church yesterday, late afternoon, no one else around. I came upon him sitting in the rear pew. Texting, or reading. On what they call a tablet these days, I think. Asked if it was okay for him to be there. We talked, and your name came up.”

“Did his?”

“Bobby.”

“Bobby never struck me as the kind to hang out in churches. Wasn’t much given to religion.”

“I don’t think that’s what he was seeking there. Or what he was bringing.” Which was about as mystical as Sunil’s pronouncements ever got. “He said if I saw you, to be sure and tell you hello for him.”