Willnot (2 page)

“Business? Visiting old friends?” Both parents were dead, the single sibling, a sister, living in Canada, last I heard.

“Don’t have much by way of business these days. Never had old friends. Nothing here but rust and memories.”

“Yet here you are.”

He stood. “Just wanted to come by, tell you hello.”

I got up and said it was good to see him, went to the office door with him and, when I heard the front door close, walked back to the window. He stopped half a block down by Ellie’s resale shop, Rags N Riches. Old Ezra was out there. No one knew much about Ezra. A mountain man, some said, others holding out for plumb crazy, twice a veteran, or all of the above. He showed up from time to time, lived on the streets, never asked for money or food but gratefully accepted what was given. By silent agreement the whole town watched after him.

Bobby stood talking to Ezra, then pulled out his wallet and handed Ezra a sheaf of bills. Ezra tucked the money away in the pocket of the innermost of three shirts he was wearing and shook Bobby’s hand. They walked their separate ways.

Bobby had a limp. All but imperceptible, but there. No drag, so probably not neurological. Didn’t have the stutter and hitch of a bad hip or knee. And deep, permanent, not a simple sprain or torn tendon. An old break maybe, with loss of bone so that one leg was slightly longer.

I watched till he turned the corner onto Mulberry. Then I double-checked to be sure the door was locked and went to make fresh coffee.

That was Tuesday. Wednesday we’re sitting at the table over breakfast and Richard asks, “What happened yesterday? Everybody’s talking about it.”

“Everybody’s talking about it and you don’t know what happened?”

“I don’t mean what they found. What happened?”

I shook my head.

An old song played on the radio,
storms never last do they baby
, and when Richard said “Well yeah, they do,” it took me a moment to realize he was speaking to the radio.

“They were killed?” he said, turning back to me.

“Buried, at any rate. And together. We may never know why.”

“Or who.” He fished the tea bag out of his cup with index and second finger, let it swing and drip. “That will be a sacred place now. Not in the religious sense.” He set the tea bag on his plate. “The kind of place people go, thinking that being there will help them understand things.”

Richard doesn’t see things the way others do. He’s a teacher. “Yeah, that’s us,” he said not long after we met, “a cliché
from old Westerns. Doc and the schoolmarm. Well, except for the marm part.” I often wonder what students make of his sidelong looks and reality reboots. In radiology, we’re told there are no right angles in nature; we see them on X-rays, something’s wrong. In Richard’s world, right and oblique angles are everywhere.

His latest rescue lay at his feet. Actually
on
his feet, since the cat often confused shoes with pillows. Because Dickens looked at you only when you spoke, Richard thought he was blind. And he runs into walls, Richard said. Only once or twice, I maintained. Maybe he’s just slow to learn, or not too bright.

The first save was a bird. Richard came in from school with it, one of his kids had found it on the schoolyard. “So?” I said as he held it out to me. Richard: “You’re a doctor, right? A healer?” I bound the wing and while the bird never flew again, Miss Wrengali had a pretty good life for a year or so in the backyard.

Richard got up and took his dishes to the sink, Dickens indignant at being dislodged. “What’s your day look like?”

“The usual. Save a few lives. Curse the darkness. Eat lunch.”

“Might you find time in there to run Dickens by Doctor Levy, have him checked out?”

“And what, put it on your tab?”

“I could pay you back.”

“In kind, I presume.”

“Or you have my credit-card number.”

“I do. So does Doctor Levy. As does Lands’ End, Best Buy, Fry’s, the Humane Society, Cordon Blue’s, NPR …”

“Funny man.”

“Just an observer. But sure, I’ll take the old boy in.”

“You think he’s old?”

I looked down at Dickens, sound asleep again, feet straight
out in front of him, chin flat on them. “With all his frantic running about? No way.”

“You do know they have claws, right? And can suck the breath out of you as you sleep? I have to get dressed and off to school. Told the receptionist at Doc Levy’s you’d be in around nine.”

“Of course you did.”

He blew me a kiss from the doorway.

“Decided to take the day off, did we? Do whatever it is you young folks do these days?”

I bit into the cookie she’d served with my coffee. It shattered with a thunderous snap, parts thudding onto my lap, others skittering roachlike across the floor. Good bet she’d had the package in her cupboard, to be brought out for visitors, for years. She took no notice.

Intended, I think, as a smile, her upper lip lifted from the center. “Don’t mind me, Lamar. I know where you were.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“More coffee?”—which may not have been of the same vintage as the cookie, but wasn’t far off.

“Thank you, no, Miss Ellie. I was wondering when we could reschedule your surgery.”

“Lord, don’t you think we have enough bodies for the time being?” She laughed, not at her joke, but at my expression. “You shouldn’t take things so seriously.”

“My parents always said the same thing.”

“Along with teachers, a horde of other adults, and friends who were close enough to say such, would be my guess.”

I nodded.

“And here you are, all grown up. Removing bad parts from
people, stitching and stapling them back together, propping them up. Serious stuff.”

“I understand that you were angry, Miss Ellie, and I do apologize.”

“I wasn’t angry, Lamar.” She grew quiet then, and I sat wondering how I’d never before sensed, past all the salty-dog rhetoric and rodomontade, the calm surrounding her. “I was … reminded.” Definitely a smile this time. “A good thing to be reminded. We should hire people to do that for us. A new career choice.”

She stood. Rather spryly, all things considered.

“The South did well by you, young man, but manners have their limits. There’s no need to go on pretending you’ll drink that abominable excuse for coffee.”

I put the cup and saucer down, pushed them minutely away. She walked to a bookshelf threaded with figurines of shepherds, cherubs and carolers, held up a bottle of drugstore bourbon.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be joining me, this time of day?”

“No, ma’am.”

She poured what looked to be precisely an inch and a half of whiskey into a glass that resembled, more than anything else, the holder for a votive candle, and rejoined me. “You lived here as a child, didn’t you?”

“When I was fourteen. But only for a year, before my father moved us on. Moving on was what he did.”

“I was eighteen when I came. Not a cent to my name, stars in my eyes. Two summer dresses and a brokeback pair of saddle oxfords. Five years before that, I’d come home from school, got the sandwich my mother left for me in the refrigerator for a snack, did math and history homework, listened to the radio. Around five, I went out and sat on the front porch to wait for my parents to come home. They never did.

“To this day I don’t know what happened to them. I got sent to a juvenile facility, then to a foster home, Sven and Carey Waters. That’s what they did for a living, but they were good, kind people. They raised me, other kids coming in and out, in and out, all the time. When I was eighteen, I left.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No reason you would.”

“Did you stay in touch with them?”

“Just a postcard or two, those first years. But when I started getting onto what they’d done for me, seeing that, understanding it, I began writing letters. Every week, just about. The two of them had done everything together, and they died the same way, within days of one another, must be better than forty years ago now.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Ellie.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Sven and Carey took good care of me, taught me independence, I’ve had a fine life. Unlike those people out there by the gravel pit. It got me to thinking, is all. People disappearing. Families. How some of us find our way and most never do.

“A friend I had back then, when I heard the Waterses had died, she told me ‘They’ve passed on to their reward, Ellie.’ I looked at her a long time and said, ‘You ever think about what you’re saying, or you just open your mouth and let words fall out?’ Nell never cared much for me after that. But you can’t fix stupid. And you sure as hell can’t kill it.”

She finished off her whiskey, picked up my cup and saucer. “Thinking I’ll wait a spell on that operation, Lamar. Doesn’t seem the time for it just now.”

I told her I understood, we’d talk later. Outside, the air was crisp and clear, still bearing witness to yesterday’s rain, and the
sun was bright. I thought back to my psych rotation as an intern. William Johnson, “Mister Bill” to everyone, fingers twisted like roots, half a leg gone to diabetes, half his mind gone to bad whiskey. “Look up there,” he said to me one day on the yard, hand quivering—left, right, up, down—as he did his best to point, “that old sun’s grinning like a fool.”

Maryanne was not grinning.

“Stephen’s back.” She shook her head. No doubt whatsoever about what she was thinking. “I put him in your office, hope that’s okay.”

“Of course.”

With Stephen you never knew what to expect. He could as easily be sitting quietly staring at the wall, down on hands and knees picking lint out of the carpet, or pacing about the room.

I tapped at the door, took a breath and went in.

Option number one, more or less.

“Close, Doctor Hale. I’m close.”

Stephen was twenty-three. When he was eighteen, his parents and sister died in a car crash, hit and run. He was supposed to have been in the car as well but had begged off. Over the next couple of years we watched Stephen pass from wanting to find the person responsible, to believing that the crash was intentional, not an accident at all, but willful murder.
The boy’s gone gumshoe,
as Richard said, Stephen’s time so given over to his obsession that he’d abandoned friends, personal hygiene, regular meals and health, then lost his job. Almost lost the house as well, before an anonymous benefactor stepped in.

“That’s good, Stephen. And what will you do now?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“We’ve talked about this. Of all the ways it can end, none of them are good. Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors. What you have to do is start taking care of yourself.”

“I will. After.”

Trying for informality, even a bit of intimacy, I’d been standing by the desk; now I sat.

“So why are you here, Stephen?”

His eyes came silently to me and there we were, smack in the middle of our personal version of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

“I won’t give you something to take the edge off. You know that. And you know how uncomfortable I am with being asked.”

“It’s what you do, Doc.”

“No. It’s not. I’m a mechanic, a tinkerer. I fix things, do my best to get them back in working order.”

He smiled, the boy I’d once known surfacing briefly. “That’s all I’m asking. I’m so close, Doc, I have to keep at it. But five, six times a day I look around and don’t know where I am, how I got there. Or my legs start trembling, like I’m about to go down. Have to grab at walls, a table.”

“Standard-issue anxiety, Stephen. Just like pain, loss, sadness, fear. Your body strikes back if you overuse it. So does your mind.”

“Some nights I can feel myself going away, hissing or leaking out of my own body, like gas. Hear my teeth rattling like dice in a cup.”

Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don’t, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so.

Maryanne broke the silence, hurrying through the door to say she was sorry to disturb us. Twelve-year-old Jenny Broyles crowded in behind her, brother Dave behind Jenny.

“There’s a problem.”

Jenny held her hands out as she came up to the desk. “It got hit.”

“We don’t know what kind it is,” Dave said.

“A mockingbird,” I said. Its beak had been torn away, one wing broken. Its eyes were dull. My mother had loved mockingbirds.

“We were at the park. It flew by, then fell.”

“We didn’t know what happened. Mr. Edmonds was there—practicing his swing, he said. One of his golf balls hit it.”

I told them I wasn’t much of a vet but would do what I could and took the bird into an exam room. When Maryanne joined me, I shook my head. Held the mockingbird in my palm and felt, or imagined I felt, the last beat of its tiny heart against my skin.

I went out and told the kids. By the time I got back to the office, Stephen had left.

Sam Phillips was waiting for his yearly insurance physical, so we took care of that: EKG, vitals and medication check, orders for lab work and CXR, followed by my usual recommendation that he schedule a stress test with the hospital and by my annual advice, rather more strident this time, that, given his age and family history, he really,
really
should have a colonoscopy.

A run of quick calls followed. Nancy Meyers, the school nurse, brought in a couple of third-graders to be checked for what she feared might be measles but was a simple rash, probably allergic. Dan Baumgarden came for a two-week checkup and dressing change; I told him he’d soon be able to say good-bye to the drains and catheter. Mary Withers asked if I’d mind whittling her corns down to manageable size again. John Crabbe needed refills on his Tenormin and Zocor. I kept telling him the pharmacy would call me for approval and renew, but he came
anyway, every three months. I suspected I might be his only social contact.

That was, mostly, my afternoon. About four, I started looking through the piles on my desk and found a mass mailing from one of those pay-for-your-funeral insurance things. Mail the tear-off back in and you’d receive full information, a valuable booklet to help you plan, and a journal into which you could record
My Final Wishes
. The mailing came addressed to my mother, who would have had much to say about such folderol, codswallop, hogwash, and bull.