Dog Tags (25 page)

“A twitch now and then. Head rolls a little. What happened?”

Benny told him.

“Ah Jesus,” Grentzer said. “I wish I had him here.” Grentzer was an athlete; the new breed, he had doctored in Vietnam, cursing; he wore striped bell-bottoms but had kept his sanitary crew-cut; as if in apology, he wore a peace medallion. “Previous history?”

“Previously,” Benny said, “he only beat his wife. Where is she?”

“Ward six. Bruises. Otherwise all right, I think. Iacino's looking at her.”

“Good. There was blood.”

“Lip and gum.”

“All right,” Benny said. “Take care of the arm. And I want a blood count, and schedule another in six hours. I'll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Bedded, sitting up in a hospital gown, her hair brushed, light lipstick, Rosalie seemed fifteen, and Benny, already glum, grew murderously sad that he was not twenty-five. He sat on the bed and took her hand. Nurses marched, patients gossiped, a janitor swept; those were the snapping twigs, bird calls and soughing breezes of Benny's life. “He's alive, and we'll know a lot more in an hour.”

“Oh thank God for that,” she said, as if she had been taught to say it.

Yes indeed. Thank God for a one-eyed baby with possible brain damage. Benny subdued faint nausea. How old was baby Roland? A year? Fourteen months? The oldest boy in the world: he might be dead tomorrow.

Benny smiled at Rosalie as he had been taught to smile. Her father raised hogs and sat on the school board to keep sex education out of the classroom. He contemplated this piece. Damn Cole. She was not a piece now; wondrous how breasts could vanish beneath a hospital gown, gender itself diminish. And this was a bad day, a worse day than she knew. He saw her old at forty. She would never read a book, and would shop in plastic curlers, and the estimable breasts would sag and wither, and he saw her at sixty in a trailer camp.

A hand touched his cheek and a voice said, “Hello, Benny,” and his heart lifted as he said “Mary” and touched the hand. “You're lucky,” she told Rosalie. “You were late, so we boiled the eggs fresh. They're hot.” Rosalie smiled briefly; Mary Burris made her comfortable and set the tray before her. Rosalie exclaimed in a baby's voice, and carefully set the fork to the left, and the knife and spoon to the right. Benny's glance was neutral, and Mary winced: in the presence of a patient's relatives, no news was bad news. Delicately Rosalie achieved her preparations, and Benny could see her laboring through an article in a young-marrieds' magazine, frowning, her lips stirring, the ponderous, inching effort to accomplish ladydom. He cursed himself for a snob. He had not seen her for a year, perhaps longer. He had known Rosalie for seven or eight years and remembered the adolescent, the pale blue eyes, the precocious bust, the cheerleader. When he was tipsy he believed that a great love affair awaited him, and when he was drunk it looked a bit like her. A pattern it was, a bad habit, and he accepted it as others accepted red hair or a squint.

“That's what started him,” she was saying, talking with her mouth full. “The baby woke him. Then he wanted to make it, but I had to feed the baby and he got mad and made a drink, and then he started to talk, complaining, he's always complaining and all he ever wants to do is make it, and he talked himself into a fit and then he hit me. Then he drank some more and I wouldn't, I hate liquor, and he went and made faces at the baby and then he spit on him—spitted—and then he slapped him. So I hit him and he knocked me down and began hitting the baby. Then the baby—” She sobbed, and cried out.

“Stop it,” Benny said. “Finish your juice. It's all right now.” It was not all right now, but he had treated babies for fifteen years, and parents too. “Then the baby passed out and he got scared and ran off.”

“Yes.”

“You told Frank.”

“On the way. I wish I could have married somebody like you.” A bolus of egg white had lodged in the corner of her mouth; Mary handed her a tissue.

“Sure,” Benny said. “I'm like all the rest.”

The baby was in x-ray and Benny, a bad taste souring his mouth, retreated to the staff room for coffee. “That's a real man,” Iacino said. “Who is he, anyway?” Iacino was a female intern, or a lady doctor, or whatever the approved phrase was; in Benny's presence she was shy and attentive, which pleased him.

“Ah, you're new here,” Benny said. “Walt Coughlin. Scion of one of our oldest families. The last of a long line of cousins.”

Iacino grimaced.

“Possibly the best mechanic in the world,” Benny went on. “Ace stock-car driver. He races. He plows your snow, and sometimes your wife. He drinks. In his own phrase, he plugs a lot of broads. The salt of the earth and the backbone of America. I'm tired.”

“She's pretty,” Iacino said.

Benny wallowed in a leather chair and gulped coffee. “He's got pale blue eyes like hers, and light blond hair like hers, and pale, pale skin. The eyes are flat and his reflexes are perfect and he's a famous hunter. S.S. incarnate, and he's one of us.”

“What's S.S.?”

“Never mind,” Benny sighed. “You young folk. Anyway, he's only medium size. I could take him in ten by leaning. If he was six-four he'd rule the world. How's the Vannep kid?”

“Fine. That's young for a hernia.”

“Hell,” Benny said, “they grow up fast these days. He'll be back at thirteen with the clap.”

Iacino thought that funny, but she was an intern. “Do you want a central venous pressure?”

“Not yet.”

“I've never done one.”

“Don't train on this one.”

Iacino glanced away. “Sorry.”

Benny hauled himself up and kissed her on the cheek. “Stop that,” she said. “Pig. I'm not one of your grateful mothers.”

“You wrong me savagely, ma'am,” he said, and then gravely, “I never in my life touched a patient's mother.”

“I'm sorry.” She was visibly embarrassed. Benny thought she must be sorely ashamed of his maudlin puerility, until she said, “You're just so damn warm and wise, and everybody loves you.”

“That's awful,” he said. “I'm a mess. I'm almost psychotic.” He went on awkwardly, and could not help himself: “That's why I never—the mothers, and all. Everybody needs one absolute. Everybody has to start somewhere. I have to keep it separate. Some people don't eat meat. It's—I—sorry.” He shook his head deliberately, like a man sobering up. “I'm forty-six today. Perhaps I shall run for mayor.”

“Many happy returns,” she said.

“I don't know if I could stand another one,” he said.

“It has to be removed,” Cohn said. “No question.” Cohn was tall and pallid with long straight black hair and a dash of mustache; he reminded Benny of Dreyfus, or for that matter of the Bourbons. “I trust the happy father will be castrated in public. Does the mother consent?”

“We have the release,” Benny said. “Listen, this baby may be dead by tonight. No sense telling the mother about the eye.”

“You're a gentleman,” Cohn said. “Like to meet the father. An eye for an eye, isn't it? Well. I'll calm down. Steady hand. Nerves of steel. Ah, God.”

“I'll prep him,” Bobby said.

“His father prepped him,” Cohn said.

“His father had a bad time in Vietnam,” Bobby said.

“I see. And returned inured to violence. Not his fault. The country's fault.”

“No,” Bobby said. “Merely an observation. I had a bad time in Vietnam too. So did a rather large number of babies.”

“We must be the only species,” Cohn said, “that bothers to produce an equal number of males and females. We'd get along fine if it was about one to twenty. Let's stand by with everything. We may need it. Levophed, plasma, the works.”

Benny left them to their work and made his early rounds, snooping and prying; busybody, he visited all wards. His children sat playing, or lay frightened: poor anemic Hale, with a knot of brown hair like a Seneca chief; poor Wanko, seven years old and freshly deprived of tonsils; poor Amberley, an excess of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, “may be a manifestation of neuroticism,” at five! All of them, a half-dozen, innocents in this torture garden. He clucked and chirruped and grinned. Ah, what one saw, nature's failures! Omphalopagus, he had seen that once, dead, a twin monster joined at the umbilicus. In thine image. Here was Hirschberg, with cystitis: a bladder infection at three. Not to mention simple deformities. Always, on rounds, he thought of Joseph and Sarah, breathed mute thanks: mumps, measles, chicken pox, colds, bruises, scratches—how simple, how peaceful. Though other wounds prevailed: Joseph lost, flailing, fleeing to sulk in college; Sarah living happily with a lout, a bankrupt composer, unpublished, of bankrupt songs, thirty-two and illiterate. That, at any rate, was past; Sarah laughed about it. And himself: forty-six and a vampire. Basilisk and gryphon, potential molester of sweet young things. He paused to cheer Vannep, wan Vannep, snatched from home and mother, dispatched to the dark regions, restored to life neatly hemmed and patched.

He prowled the wards; all was quiet. Many empty beds. At Ward 9, west, he paused: twelve beds for terminal cases. He passed it by. Sufficient unto the day. He went to his office and studied charts. A signature for commitment: Jean Diehl, poor lady, McCook's patient. A note from Taubeneck: can we see you at three. Ah yes, that. A strike tomorrow. What next? Communists. Lysergic acid in the reservoir. He stepped to the hallway and hailed an orderly; it was little Crewe, shiny black, Afro'd. They exchanged good mornings. “Just wanted to know,” Benny said, “you going out tomorrow?”

“Depends on Artie,” Crewe said. “But it looks like yes, you dig? You hear any new buzz from upstairs?”

“No. They want to see me at three.”

“Well you tell 'em no more bullshit,” Crewe said.

“I may do that. Is Artie around?”

“Nope. Be along later, maybe.”

“Thanks. I'll look for him.”

Crewe grinned happily. “He's a
mean
man.”

“He sure is,” Benny said. “Good luck.”

“We could use that,” Crewe said. “A little good luck is about due.”

“It went fine,” Cohn said, “but the poor little Cyclops is half-dead. I tell you, I'm not even angry now.”

“It passes and we forget,” Benny said. “Every day.”

“I just want to go into some other line of work,” Cohn said. “Cop, maybe. In a dictatorship. None of this nonsense about lawyers and trials.”

“All right,” Benny said. “Let's keep him alive.”

“Antigonus Cyclops,” Cohn said, “a Macedonian king, one of Philip's sons, one of Alexander's generals. Lost an eye. Lived to be eighty.”

“The things we know,” Benny said.

“The things we learn,” Cohn said.

“Here's the plates,” Grentzer said, and they huddled to look.

“He's no worse,” Benny told Rosalie, “but you're in for a rough time.”

“Oh Benny,” she said. “Oh Benny.”

“Don't talk about it.”

“No. All right.” She smiled. “I feel better. It's so nice just lying here, and everybody waiting on me. Will it cost a lot? If I stay over it will.”

“Don't worry about that. Just relax.” And prepare for the death of your first-born, and maybe your husband will draw five-to-fifteen, and you can go to the big city and be a call girl and read magazines.

“You're such a marvelous man,” she said passionately.

He dropped in here and there and distributed good cheer. He walked among his people, his troops, and waved and smiled, a pompous fool, Agamemnon inspiring the ranks before Troy, fine figger of a man, glassy smile. He conferred with Mrs. Mackey, supervisor of nurses, almost deaf, who had once, to his knowledge, misheard instructions and caused, or permitted, a death. “She's not to know anything about the baby's condition except from me or Grentzer. Got that?
Nothing
.” He moved on. He blew a kiss to Eleanor Chandler, dietitian, winked at Iacino, goggled at a gaggle of student nurses, and walked a way, hand in hand, with Mary Burris. So strode straight-shafted Benny among the hollow vessels. Melancholic, he drove home for his office hours.

18

He had been unfaithful to Carol a dozen times, at decent intervals, and often this drive from the hospital, rousing memories and skirting landmarks, became in his mind a historical pageant, scenes and acts better forgotten but unforgettable. A public park: here his imminence randy Ben Beer had sat with her prominence dandy Madame X, he growing every moment more prominent, she more imminent. The summer air musky, the shrubs a jungle. Deutero-Benny lapsing and backsliding. And older, thirty-five then. Her husband a selectman. Benny not even ashamed, merely weary. But even now, on his forty-sixth birthday, observing traffic signals, he lusted in memory and cranked up a small smile. Benjamin Beer, M.D., hardened ex-con, and always this deplorable tendency to moon and gargle. Well, bless her substantial shade. Were his needs ignoble? Unlikely; he was, after all, a prince. But he too harbored a hollow that wanted filling, deep within, a spherical hollow, cold and dark, that awaited some finishing touch. The angel of death's meat hook perhaps. Work could not fill it, or card games or bowling or memories. It was perhaps connected to the navel. It was perhaps the skink's lair. That tiny arctic void. In the beginning was the void.

He crossed Huddleston Memorial Bridge. The bronze plaque, dead heroes, flagless today in the drizzle. The Westerdoncks had not yet lost a son in Vietnam and were growing nervous. Everywhere the dead, the dying, Hiroshimas, Biafras, Vietnams: why save Roland? Penny wise, pound foolish. Save Joseph, save Sarah, lose a million elsewhere. Where was Lin? Where was Ou-yang? Should Benny abandon these pampered babes and minister to Asians? Yet he paid his taxes, in sorrow and wincing guilt; signed his returns, affixing Chang's chop—bold gesture!—and killed children. He should go. He knew he should go. God of Abraham and Isaac. Slaughter of the innocents.