Selected Stories (57 page)

“You was drunk.”

“Well, some,” I said.

We walked together quietly, happily. Out of Kelley’s sight, Milton thumped me gently on the ribs. It was eloquent and it pleased me. It said that it was a long time since Kelley had laughed. It was a long time since he had thought about anything but Hal.

I guess we felt it equally when, with no trace of humor … more, as if he had let my episode just blow itself out until he could be heard … Kelley said, “Doc, what’s with the hand?”

“It’ll be all right,” Milton said.

“You put splints.”

Milton sighed. “All right, all right. Three fractures. Two on the middle finger and one on the ring.”

Kelley said, “I saw they were swollen.”

I looked at Kelley’s face and I looked at Milton’s, and I didn’t like either, and I wished to God I were somewhere else, in a uranium mine maybe, or making out my income tax. I said, “Here we are. Ever been to Rudy’s, Kelley?”

He looked up at the little yellow-and-red marquee. “No.”

“Come on,” I said.
“Tequila.”

We went in and got a booth. Kelley ordered beer. I got mad then and started to call him some things I’d picked up on waterfronts from here to Tierra del Fuego. Milton stared wall-eyed at me and Kelley stared at his hands. After a while Milton began to jot some of it down on a prescription pad he took from his pocket. I was pretty proud.

Kelley gradually got the idea. If I wanted to pick up the tab and he wouldn’t let me, his habits were those of
una puñeta sin cojones
(which a Spanish dictionary will reliably misinform you means “a weakling without eggs”), and his affections for his forebears were powerful but irreverent. I won, and soon he was lapping up a huge combination plate of beef
tostadas,
chicken
enchiladas,
and pork
tacos.
He endeared himself to Rudy by demanding salt and lemon with his
tequila
and dispatching same with flawless ritual: hold the lemon between left thumb and forefinger, lick the back of the left hand, sprinkle salt on the wet spot, lift the
tequila
with the right, lick the salt, drink the
tequila,
bite the lemon. Soon he was imitating the German second mate we shipped out of Puerto Barrios one night, who ate fourteen green bananas and lost them and all his teeth over the side, in gummed gutturals which had us roaring.

But after that question about fractured fingers back there in the street, Milton and I weren’t fooled any more, and though everyone tried hard and it was a fine try, none of the laughter went deep enough or stayed long enough, and I wanted to cry.

We all had a huge hunk of the nesselrode pie made by Rudy’s beautiful blond wife—pie you can blow off your plate by flapping a napkin … sweet smoke with calories. And then Kelley demanded to know what time it was and cussed and stood up.

“It’s only been two hours,” Milton said.

“I just as soon head home all the same,” said Kelley. “Thanks.”

“Wait,” I said. I got a scrap of paper out of my wallet and wrote on it. “Here’s my phone. I want to see you some more. I’m working for myself these days; my time’s my own. I don’t sleep much, so call me any time you feel like it.”

He took the paper. “You’re no good,” he said. “You never were no good.” The way he said it, I felt fine.

“On the corner is a newsstand,” I told him. “There’s a magazine called
Amazing
with one of my lousy stories in it.”

“They print it on a roll?” he demanded. He waved at us, nodded to Rudy, and went out.

I swept up some spilled sugar on the table top and pushed it around until it was a perfect square. After a while I shoved in the sides until it was a lozenge. Milton didn’t say anything either. Rudy, as is his way, had sense enough to stay away from us.

“Well, that did him some good,” Milton said after a while.

“You know better than that,” I said bitterly.

Milton said patiently, “Kelley thinks
we
think it did him some good. And thinking that does him good.”

I had to smile at that contortion, and after that it was easier to talk. “The kid going to live?”

Milton waited, as if some other answer might spring from somewhere, but it didn’t. He said, “No.”

“Fine doctor.”

“Don’t kid like that!” he snapped. He looked up at me. “Look, if this was one of those—well, say pleurisy cases on the critical list, without the will to live, why I’d know what to do. Usually those depressed cases have such a violent desire to be reassured, down deep, that you can snap ’em right out of it if only you can think of the right thing to say. And you usually can. But Hal’s not one of those. He wants to live. If he didn’t want so much to live he’d’ve been dead three weeks ago. What’s killing him is sheer somatic trauma—one broken bone after another, one failing or inflamed internal organ after another.”

“Who’s doing it?”

“Damn it, nobody’s doing it!” He caught me biting my lip. “If either one of us should say Kelley’s doing it, the other one will punch him in the mouth. Right?”

“Right.”

“Just so that doesn’t have to happen,” said Milton carefully, “I’ll tell you what you’re bound to ask me in a minute: why isn’t he in a hospital!”

“Okay, why?”

“He was. For weeks. And all the time he was there these things kept on happening to him, only worse. More, and more often. I got him home as soon as it was safe to get him out of traction for that broken thigh. He’s much better off with Kelley. Kelley keeps him cheered up, cooks for him, medicates him—the works. It’s all Kelley does these days.”

“I figured. It must be getting tough.”

“It is. I wish I had your ability with invective. You can’t lend that man anything, give him anything … proud? God!”

“Don’t take this personally, but have you had consultations?”

He shrugged. “Six ways from the middle. And nine-tenths of it behind Kelley’s back, which isn’t easy. The lies I’ve told him! Hal’s just
got
to have a special kind of Persian melon that someone is receiving in a little store in Yonkers. Out Kelley goes, and in the meantime I have to corral two or three doctors and whip ’em in to see Hal and out again before Kelley gets back. Or Hal has to have a special prescription, and I fix up with the druggist to take a good two hours compounding it. Hal saw Grundage, the osteo man, that way, but poor old Ancelowics the pharmacist got punched in the chops for the delay.”

“Milton, you’re all right.”

He snarled at me, and then went on quietly, “None of it’s done any good. I’ve learned a whole encyclopedia full of wise words and some therapeutic tricks I didn’t know existed. But …” He shook his head. “Do you know why Kelley and I wouldn’t let you meet Hal?” He wet his lips and cast about for an example. “Remember the pictures of Mussolini’s corpse after the mob got through with it?”

I shuddered. “I saw ’em.”

“Well, that’s what he looks like, only he’s alive, which doesn’t make it any prettier. Hal doesn’t know how bad it is, and neither Kelley nor I would run the risk of having him see it reflected in someone else’s face. I wouldn’t send a wooden Indian into that room.”

I began to pound the table, barely touching it, hitting it harder and harder until Milton caught my wrist. I froze then, unhappily conscious of the eyes of everyone in the place looking at me. Gradually the normal sound of the restaurant resumed. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“There’s got to be some sort of reason!”

His lips twitched in a small acid smile. “That’s what you get down to at last, isn’t it? There’s always a reason for everything, and if we don’t know it, we can find it out. But just one single example of real unreason is enough to shake our belief in everything. And then the fear gets bigger than the case at hand and extends to a whole universe of concepts labelled ‘unproven.’ Shows you how little we believe in anything, basically.”

“That’s a miserable piece of philosophy!”

“Sure. If you have another arrival point for a case like this, I’ll buy it with a bonus. Meantime I’ll just go on worrying at this one and feeling more scared than I ought to.”

“Let’s get drunk.”

“A wonderful idea.”

Neither of us ordered. We just sat there looking at the lozenge of sugar I’d made on the table top. After a while I said “Hasn’t Kelley any idea of what’s wrong?”

“You know Kelley. If he had an idea he’d be working on it. All he’s doing is sitting by watching his brother’s body stew and swell like yeast in a vat.”

“What about Hal?”

“He isn’t lucid much any more. Not if I can help it.”

“But maybe he—”

“Look,” said Milton, “I don’t want to sound cranky or anything, but I can’t hold still for a lot of questions like …” He stopped, took out his display handkerchief, looked at it, put it away. “I’m sorry. You don’t seem to understand that I didn’t take this case yesterday afternoon. I’ve been sweating it out for nearly three months now. I’ve already thought of everything you’re going to think of. Yes, I questioned Hal, back and forth and sideways. Nothing. N-n-nothing.”

That last word trailed off in such a peculiar way that I looked up abruptly. “Tell me,” I demanded.

“Tell you what?” Suddenly he looked at his watch. I covered it with my hand. “Come on, Milt.”

“I don’t know what you’re—damn it, leave me alone, will you? If it was anything important, I’d’ve chased it down long ago.”

“Tell me the unimportant something.”

“No.”

“Tell me why you won’t tell me.”

“Damn you, I’ll do that. It’s because you’re a crackpot. You’re a nice guy and I like you, but you’re a crackpot.” He laughed suddenly, and it hit me like the flare of a flashbulb. “I didn’t know you could look so astonished!” he said. “Now take it easy and listen to me. A guy comes out of a steak house and steps on a rusty nail, and ups and dies of tetanus. But your crackpot vegetarian will swear up and down that the man would still be alive if he hadn’t poisoned his system with meat, and uses the death to prove his point. The perennial Dry will call the same casualty a victim of John Barleycorn if he knows the man had a beer with his steak. This one death can be ardently and whole-heartedly blamed on the man’s divorce, his religion, his political affiliations or on a hereditary taint from his great-great-grandfather who worked for Oliver Cromwell. You’re a nice guy and I like you,” he said again, “and I am not going to sit across from you and watch you do the crackpot act.”

“I do not know,” I said slowly and distinctly, “what the hell you are talking about. And now you
have
to tell me.”

“I suppose so,” he said sadly. He drew a deep breath. “You believe what you write. No,” he said quickly, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You grind out all this fantasy and horror stuff and you believe every word of it. More basically, you’d rather believe in the
outré
and the so-called ‘unknowable’ than in what I’d call
real
things. You think I’m talking through my hat.”

“I do,” I said, “but go ahead.”

“If I called you up tomorrow and told you with great joy that they’d isolated a virus for Hal’s condition and a serum was on the way, you’d be just as happy about it as I would be, but way down deep you’d wonder if that was what was really wrong with him, or if the serum is what really cured him. If on the other hand I admitted to you that I’d found two small punctures on Hal’s throat and a wisp of fog slipping out of the room—by God! see what I mean? You have a gleam in your eye already!”

I covered my eyes. “Don’t let me stop you now,” I said, coldly. “Since you are not going to admit Dracula’s punctures, what are you going to admit?”

“A year ago Kelley gave his brother a present. An ugly little brute of a Haitian doll. Hal kept it around to make faces at for a while and then gave it to a girl. He had bad trouble with the girl. She hates him—really hates him. As far as anyone knows she still has the doll. Are you happy now?”

“Happy,” I said disgustedly. “But Milt—you’re not just ignoring this doll thing. Why, that could easily be the whole basis of … hey, sit down! Where are you going?”

“I told you I wouldn’t sit across from a damn hobbyist. Enter hobbies, exit reason.” He recoiled. “Wait—
you
sit down now.”

I gathered up a handful of his well-cut lapels. “We’ll both sit down,” I said gently, “or I’ll prove to your heart’s desire that I’ve reached the end of reason.”

“Yessir,” he said good-naturedly, and sat down. I felt like a damn fool. The twinkle left his eyes and he leaned forward. “Perhaps now you’ll listen instead of riding off like that. I suppose you know that in many cases the voodoo doll does work, and you know why?”

“Well, yes. I didn’t think you’d admit it.” I got no response from his stony gaze, and at last realized that a fantasist’s pose of authority on such matters is bound to sit ill with a serious and progressive physician. A lot less positively, I said, “It comes down to a matter of subjective reality, or what some people call faith. If you believe firmly that the mutilation of a doll with which you identify yourself will result in your own mutilation, well, that’s what will happen.”

“That, and a lot of things even a horror story writer could find out if he researched anywhere else except in his projective imagination. For example, there are Arabs in North Africa today whom you dare not insult in any way really important to them. If they feel injured, they’ll threaten to die, and if you call the bluff they’ll sit down, cover their heads, and damn well
die.
There are psychosomatic phenomena like the stigmata, or wounds of the cross, which appear from time to time on the hands, feet and breasts of exceptionally devout people. I know you know a lot of this,” he added abruptly, apparently reading something in my expression, “but I’m not going to get my knee out of your chest until you’ll admit I’m at least capable of taking a thing like this into consideration and tracking it down.”

“I never saw you before in my life,” I said, and in an important way I meant it.

“Good,” he said with considerable relief. “Now I’ll tell you what I did. I jumped at this doll episode almost as wildly as you did. It came late in the questioning because apparently it
really didn’t matter
to Hal.”