Dog Tags (26 page)

A billboard: porkettes. These existed: porkettes.

He grimaced as the brookless conviction gripped him again, goading, the prick of madness: there was yet love to come, passion, annihilation. He blinked at the blurred road, slowed, halted at a stop sign: his car stalled. He revived it, raced the engine, proceeded. And passed the slave quarters, Suffield's small black enclave, roads without names: Road #1, Road #2, Road #3. Where he had met Sylvester. A better memory if not a happier. A house call, at Mary's request, Benny driving slowly into the compound, Burris waving from the doorway, their first moments of conversation courtly, Oriental, stately honorifics. An old black man with swellings in the groin, nodes. Benny asked, “What have you got on your foot?” and Sylvester said, “My sock,” which sufficed; they laughed and bantered. Benny examined the blistered foot. “Fungus.” He prescribed. “Four a day for ninety days.”

Burris nodded, hmm'd. In the silence Benny swallowed, smiled miserably, wished he were other, elsewhere, a progressive, scientific, humanistic country doctor in Dostoevsky, wringing his hands and polishing his pince-nez. But he was an ancient Hebrew bringing bad news to a clapboard house on Road #3—a house which, he now noticed, smelled faintly of alien meats—and he could only blink, scowl, ignore a twitching muscle in his upper arm and hope that within the next few seconds words spoken by one of them would assemble themselves into decent meaning. Burris obliged. “That stuff costs. Fact is, I have no money.”

Benny said, “That's no problem.”

Burris cocked an eye.

“The drug companies,” Benny said, “give me all sorts of free samples. Advertising. I have cabinets full of the stuff.”

Burris accepted, nodded; a little luck was every man's due. “Can I handle food? I'm trying to make that diner pay.”

“Yes. Just wash after you medicate. Change socks every day.”

“I always do. Now, the matter of your fee.”

“The matter of my fee. It was on my way.”

“No,” Burris said.

“All right. I'll check you once a week, you feed me once a week. What time do you open?”

“About seven. I like that.”

“Sometimes breakfast is a problem,” Benny said. “It would be a help.”

“Done and done,” Burris said. “All frying in butter. Heavy cream.”

“No jukebox.”

“I suppose you want fresh eggs.”

“And back bacon.”

“You'll ruin me,” Burris said.

“I'll give the stuff to Mary,” Benny said. “Ninety days. Don't cheat,” and they moved to the door, chatting, and he left, feeling foolish but not irredeemable.

Now he crossed Bigelow's Creek. Biglow's Crick, b'gosh. In spate, white water, a screen of rain, another spate in another year, repeated attempts, unsuccessful, parents weeping silently, she in curlers, the swimmer-child pronounced dead by Doctor Beer. Farther up, in still another year, he had fished Bigelow's Creek. Bartholomew reclined on the mossy bank and discoursed quietly. “Don't know about color perception, and I don't believe it matters. Trout ain't mammals. The right fly, in the right season, they can't
not
strike.”

Which year? Bartholomew seemed eternal. Now Benny was driving through the rain on his forty-sixth birthday and resisting rushes of mortality, and he thought of a photograph in his desk drawer, a night-club photograph taken, he remembered, by a half-naked female all legs, teeth and business cards: three couples plus Benny in—
where?
—Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the festivities following hard upon a pediatricians' powwow. But the odd man out was not Benny, ah no, it was the owlish drunk beside him, the aged pixie, name long forgotten, freckled and wrinkled, rendered comatic by sour mash. Between him and Benny sat a happy memory.

“Nor will I forget,” a drunken Benny later told an alarmed seatmate at thirty-five thousand feet, “a certain yellow-haired Amazon from Harrisburg, a gorgeously fair-fleshed mountain of custard, a Mont Blancmange for my Matter-horny moments.” He had encountered this blond phenomenon in the cocktail bar; if conventioneer he must be, conventioneer he would be, and the third vodka was cascading down his gullet when she breasted the swinging doors. He glowed; in his finest redskin baritone he spoke: “Time … plant … corn.” “Nasty,” she said, and dashed imaginary ermines to the tabletop. “Bourbon and ginger ale.” He retched briefly and issued commands. “Working girl?” “Sir,” she said severely, but he was grinning; “well, yes.” Drowning in chicken fat, he exulted foolishly. Miserably. Ecstatically. God save us, her name was Laverne. Tawdry! Sordid! Motel! Two squids. Lovely. The old joke: asked to describe in one word the worst sexual experience he ever had, the fellow thinks a bit and then says, “Marvelous.” Deutero-Benny, rooting and snuffling, the truffle king. “Young man,” she says sternly, “would you do that at home?” Benny chokes, cachinnates, roars jubilee. Hee-hee-hee all the way home. Hooting in relief, joy, hilarity, love, yes damn it love, driving sedately, MD plates, a madman at the wheel. For years he glowed at the memory, fingers and toes tingling; as he had tingled and glowed in that happy bed, the two of them like frisky particles in some pornographic atom-smasher, wham! matter and anti-matter! obliteration! The blast was heard in Philadelphia. Later, a littered inscape, soul's trash, remorse; he pondered submission to the proper authorities for commitment, gelding, lobotomy. Anneal one duct, perhaps, dredge out a new gap. A simple paper-clip in the proper place. He had once been charged with “violating a stop sign.”

He swung off the old road now and up the hill, on the gleaming wet year-old blacktop, and a slight skid startled him; he had judged the turn badly. He let the car drift to the grassy shoulder, accelerated, and drove on. To his left the dam loomed; he averted his eyes, as always here, fleeing its faint, massive malevolence, as if hard-hatted witch doctors bestrode its catwalks pointing the bone at unwary strangers. He drove on, ignoring the lake, the submerged old road, suburban Atlantis; what dead sneakers, abandoned kennels, discarded hibachis lay drowned? No more neighbors, only Benny, and he too restless and itchy.

Choices drummed at him. Grentzer thought he should go to Vietnam. All murthers past do stand excused in this, he had said. Children. Hundreds of thousands of them, the unlucky undead, whores and pushers, armless, paraplegics, rickets, beggars, blind, flippers for legs, Grentzer had said, phocomelia americana; he had seen it, done what he could until his own vitals rebelled and he was sent home shaking, gagging, cursing the God he had loved. Choices. Ghetto medicine. Donaldson in Texas, with the public health people, assured by the county medical society that no health problem existed. He looked, he noted, he reported: malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, trachoma, leprosy. “Gentlemen: as doctors in a free society you may choose to ignore this. I simply remind you that these children go to school with your children.” Shock, profanity, disbelief, portly indignation; then a program, clinics, posters, a mobile diagnostic unit, and six months later nothing, nothing, the unit sold, the posters tattered, stout fellows assuring all that no health problem existed.

Like Carol: “No problem. We get along fine. You're just overworked, and you take it out on me.” Possibly. Many nights he veiled mad eyes. Did the children know? They frightened him. They sensed. Mutely they reproached. Mutely Carol reproached. Mutely Benny reproached. “We spend,” he had almost said, “less than a tenth of our lives together.” Beady-eyed, cramped, shuffling, a drop at the end of his nose, he had kept miserly count one year: “Three hundred and thirty nights a year,” he had almost said, “I might as well be sleeping alone.” He knew then that he was sick. “Never,” he had almost said, “do you lean over to kiss me good night.” “Always,” he had almost said, “you edge away from caresses. These empty hands.” “When you kiss,” he had almost said, “you purse your lips and close your eyes.” “Never,” he had almost said, “do you wake me with a lewd surprise.” “We have so much,” he almost said, “and so little; it is all so right, and all so wrong.”

Other things he did say: witty endearments, lascivious parodies, accented invitations. But only once; they were not, it seemed, funny. Long ago, it seemed, they had been funny. “I am getting the hell out of here,” he almost said, but never did, not that. Perhaps he would now. Joseph in college, Sarah God knew where, no longer with her dandruffed composer, officially at college but one never knew now. One was not meant, not entitled, not expected to know. The tide at high stand: marriage over, children grown, house too big. Forty-six. Imagine.

Now the rain fell thicker, in splats and blobs, and his wiper labored. He edged along the ridge and down into what remained of the bowl, the once-green bowl, once glades and glens and apple trees, black willows and alder and choke-cherries, woodchucks and muskrats and foxes, squirrels and chipmunks, and the graceful, vicious deer. Also graveled drives, boxwood, terraces, split-rail fencing, a paddle-tennis court, a paddock. All vanished, drowned. Entering his own drive he slumped, and for an instant again saw double; as he crackled to a halt he let his head bow and shut his eyes and was old. He remembered Bartholomew and said, “Let them die.”

And he said, “I will gird my loins.” He straightened, and only then saw the scrap of paper on the seat beside him, a note. Later; he jammed it into a pocket. He slammed the door behind him and tilted his face to the cold rain, enjoying it. He trudged to the rowboat and tugged at the painter; it was secure. He walked back to the front door, passed gravely between two saluting arborvitae, and attacked the keyhole. The key slipped and scratched, and he bent to peer. Yalu lock, he read. Preposterous. He inserted the key and entered. He trod his own carpeting, admired the halltree, the Victorian looking-glass, the graceful, operatic center staircase, curved above like rams' horns. He stood alone in his wholly owned home, wifeless, childless, unemployed. He fumbled for the note, brought it close. It was a parking ticket. He smiled like a maniac, once more goofy and unhinged, and spoke aloud to the vacant house: “I am guilty of pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth and double-parking.”

Mother Vogel fretted. If he would only look at Michael's tongue. He looked at Michael's tongue and saw the thick, tight frenum. “He has trouble with his l's,” Benny ventured. Mother Vogel was astonished and delighted. This genius. “It's very simple, and not at all dangerous,” Benny said. “I can do it here in the office.” He heard his voice, saw his hand draw the explanatory diagram. Mother Vogel and her Michael swam to and fro. Amenities.

Next. Three patients waiting, three mommies. He chatted, reassured, smiled, distributed a sugarless equivalent of candy, like the packaged pellets expelled by green machines in progressive zoos. Manikins, girlikins. Homely, resentful, growing into sorrow, pain and betrayal. “We want a moratorium,” Bartholomew had sighed. “I save lives against my will. Wonder I haven't gone crazy. Maybe I have.” Benny had been appalled at first. Not now; now he missed the old bastard. “A lie for a lie and a truth for a truth,” the old man said. “In a world of horses' asses, manure is scripture.” Benny heeded, and grew in wisdom.

At eleven he called the hospital and Grentzer said, “The same,” and Benny thanked him. By then there were new arrivals in his waiting room. Lester Rosen, asthma; two minutes with the mother and you knew why. Repeated wounds, inflicted with love. By love. He too had inflicted a few. Lester's problem was simple. “It's called a chalazion,” he spelled it for her, “and Doctor Cohn's your man. He'll do it in his office, fifteen minutes, scary but absolutely no trouble. The eyes are always scary.”

“Doctor Cohn.” Mrs. Rosen sniffed. “He's anti-Zionist.” Benny let his vision blur and she became a dark continental beauty of the '20's or '30's, and the caption always said “disappeared during …” or “now in Harbin.” “Not anti,” Benny said. “Just non. He thinks it's none of his business.”

“Well it
is
.”

“But there's so much,” Benny said gently, “so much wrong,” and rose, initiating the tedious process, the excavation almost, by which he would rid himself of the Rosens' presence and rejoice once more in solitude.

In the performance of homely acts he found footing. Glumly considering Baby Roland, he stacked dishes, looked for a note from Carol, found none, and felt hunger. He spread chopped liver on Portuguese bread and poured milk. The refrigerator hummed merrily. The breakfast nook. From here he could see the rain lashing down upon his private lake. He could see the old maple and the crow's-nest, a man's height now above the surface. He doused the light and sat in the pleasant midday gloom. Solitude had its uses. He fingered a slight swelling on his chin, an ingrown hair perhaps. Perhaps cancer. He must have a checkup soon. Heal thyself. Years of good health, complacency. Strong as a bull. Ox. Only the tight chest. Cigars. He chewed, and found the taste good. He drank off the milk and poured again. Benny lives, he said. Withered and staled, but Benny lives. A rainy noon, minor key. What could he have altered, ever? Knowing that it would come to this, would he have fled at eighteen? And missed it all? 57359. Where was 57359? Pinsky was dead and his delicatessen was a stereo shop. Karp too was dead; nephritis, complications. Jacob thought Benny was on top of the world and made suits for him, elegant, fitted, Italianate. He would call Jacob tonight. Old father, old artificer.

He went to his room and sprawled. He prescribed naps, and saw no reason to except himself. Sometimes he slept. Often he lay hazy, cataloging small patients, reminiscing, seeing Bartholomew again, Ou-yang, Nan. He could not remember Nan's face but that was to be expected. There had been other faces. Others because he did not keep that deep-sworn vow. Benjamin Bull, feeling a feathery tickle now between the legs.