by Peter Straub
“Okay this morning, Red?” Roehm asked.
“Right as the dew, man.”
Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.
Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting, and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and covered with two coats of paint.
Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. “Something wrong?”
“Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?”
Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. “You little red-haired fuck, you telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are? I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.”
The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? “Hey, his kid took those pictures, man,” he said.
“A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.”
“Oh, shit.” Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.
“Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies of his pictures—you asshole.”
“I knew Cotton,” Conor said. “I was with him when he bought it.”
“I don’t care who took the pictures—I don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance in my eyes, man.” Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping fury and misery in him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. “You hear me? I was in a firefight for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.”
“We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all—”
Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.
“PUSSY!” he screamed.
“I thought you liked pussy,” Conor said.
“I’m a good taper!” Woyzak shouted.
Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot in her hand, Mrs. Daisy hovered behind the contractor.
Woyzak smiled weakly at her.
“That’s enough,” Roehm said.
“I can’t work with this asshole,” Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in the air.
“This guy was edging me on,” Conor protested.
“Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,” Mrs. Daisy said nervously. “He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.”
“Who’s the taper, anyhow?” Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His eyes looked normal again. “I only want to do my job.”
“But look how he’s doing it, man!”
Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.
He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs. Daisy, who giggled.
In the morning room, Ben stepped over the holes in the floor and slumped back against a bare wall. “That boy is my niece Ellen’s husband. He had a lot of bad experiences overseas, and I’m trying to help him out. You don’t have to tell me he tapes like a sailor on a three-day drunk—I’m doing what I can for him.” He looked at Conor, but could not meet his eyes for long. “I wish I could say something else, Red, but I can’t. You’re a good little worker.”
“I suppose I was on a picnic the whole time I was in Nam.” Conor shook his head and clamped his mouth shut.
“I’ll give you a couple extra days’ pay. There’ll be another job, come this summer.”
Summer was a long time coming, but Conor said, “Don’t worry about me, I got something else lined up. I’m gonna take a trip.”
Roehm awkwardly waved him away. “Stay out of the bars.”
2
When Conor got back to Water Street in South Norwalk, he realized that he could remember nothing that had happened since he had left Ben Roehm. It was as though he had fallen asleep when he mounted the Harley and awakened when he switched it off in front of his apartment building. He felt tired, empty, depressed. Conor didn’t know how he had avoided an accident, driving all the way home in a trance. He didn’t know why he was still alive.
He checked his mailbox out of habit. Among the usual junk mail addressed to “Resident” and appeals from Connecticut politicians was a long, white, hand-addressed envelope bearing a New York postmark.
Conor took his mail upstairs, threw the junk into the wastebasket, and took a beer out of his refrigerator. When he looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink, he saw lines in his forehead and pouches under his eyes. He looked sick—middle-aged and sick. Conor turned on the television, dropped his coat on his only chair, and flopped onto the bed. He tore open the white envelope, having delayed this action as long as possible. Then he peered into the envelope. It contained a long blue rectangle of paper. Conor pulled the check from the envelope and examined it. After a moment of confusion and disbelief, he reread the writing on the face of the check. It was made out for two thousand dollars, payable to Conor Linklater, and had been signed by Harold J. Beevers. Conor picked the envelope up off his chest, looked inside it again, and found a note: All systems go! I’ll be in touch about the flight. Regards, Harry (Beans!)
3
After Conor had gazed at the check for a long, long time, he replaced both it and the note in the envelope and tried to figure out somewhere safe to put it. If he put the envelope on the chair he might sit on it, and if he put it on the bed, he might bundle it up with the sheets when he went to the laundromat. He worried that if he put it on top of the TV he might get drunk and mistake it for garbage. Eventually Conor decided on the refrigerator. He got out of bed, bent to open the refrigerator door, and carefully placed the envelope on the empty shelf, directly beneath a six-pack of Molson’s Ale.
He splashed water on his face, flattened his hair across his skull with his brush, and changed into the black denim and corduroy clothing he had worn to Washington.
Conor walked to Donovan’s and drank four boilermakers before anyone else came in. He didn’t know if he was happier over getting the traveling money than miserable about losing his job, or more miserable about losing his job because of that asshole Woyzak than happy about the money. He decided after a while that he was more happy than miserable, which called for another drink.
Eventually the bar filled up. Conor stared at a nice-looking woman until he began to feel like a coward and got off his stool to talk to her. She was in training to do something in computers. (At a certain point in the evening, about sixty percent of the women in Donovan’s were in training to do something in computers.) They had a few drinks together. Conor asked her if she would like to see his funny little apartment. She told him he was a funny little guy and said yes.
“You’re a real homebody, aren’t you?” the girl asked Conor when he turned on the light in his apartment.
After they had made love, the girl finally asked him about the lumps spread across his back and over his belly. “Agent Orange,” he said. “I sort of wish I could teach them to move around, spell out words, shit like that.”
He woke up alone with a hangover, wishing he could see Mike Poole and talk to him about Agent Orange, wondering about Tim Underhill.
1
“Well, here it is,” Michael said. “There’s a medical conference in Singapore next January, and the organizers are offering reduced fares on the flight over.”
He looked up f
rom his copy of American Physician. Judy’s only response was to tighten her lips and stare at the “Today” show. She was eating her breakfast standing up at the central butcher-block counter while Michael sat alone at the long kitchen table, also of butcher block. Three years before, Judy had declared that their kitchen was obsolete, insulting, useless, and demanded a renovation. Now she ate standing up every morning, separated from him by eight feet of overpriced wood.
“What’s the topic of the conference?” She continued to look at the television.
“ ‘The Pediatrics of Trauma.’ Subtitled ‘The Trauma of Pediatrics.’ ”
Judy gave him a half-amused, half-derisive glance before taking a crisp bite out of a piece of toast.
“Everything should work out. If we have any luck, we ought to be able to find Underhill and settle things in a week or two. And an extra week is built into the tickets.”
When Judy kept staring silently at the television set, Michael asked, “Did you hear Conor’s message on my machine yesterday?”
“Why should I start listening to your messages?”
“Harry Beevers sent Conor a check for two thousand to cover his expenses.”
No response.
“Conor couldn’t believe it.”
“Do you think they were right to give Tom Brokaw’s job to Bryant Gumble? I always thought he seemed a little lightweight.”
“I always liked him.”
“Well, there you are.” Judy turned away to place her nearly spotless plate and empty coffee cup into the dishwasher.
“Is that all you have to say?”
Judy whirled around. She was visibly controlling herself. “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I allowed to say more? I miss Tom Brokaw in the mornings. How’s that? In fact, sometimes Old Tom kind of turned me on.” Judy had ended the physical side of their marriage four years before, in 1978, when their son Robert—Robbie—had died of cancer. “The show doesn’t seem as interesting anymore, like a lot of things. But I guess these things happen, don’t they? Strange things happen to forty-one-year-old husbands.” She looked at her watch, then gave Michael a flat, sizzling glance. “I have about twenty minutes to get to school. You know how to pick your moments.”
“You still haven’t said anything about the trip.”
She sighed. “Where do you suppose Harry got the money he sent to Conor? Pat Caldwell called up last week and said Harry gave her some fairy tale about a government mission.”
“Oh.” Michael said nothing for a moment. “Beevers likes to think of himself as James Bond. But it doesn’t really matter where he got the money.”
“I wish I knew why it is so important for you to run away to Singapore with a couple of lunatics, in search of another lunatic.” Judy tugged furiously at the hem of her short brocade jacket and for a second reminded Michael of Pat Caldwell. She wore no makeup, and there were ashy streaks of grey in her short blonde hair.
Then she gave him her first really honest glance of the morning. “What about your favorite patient?”
“We’ll see. I’ll tell her about it this afternoon.”
“And your partners will cover everybody else, I suppose.”
“All too gleefully.”
“And in the meantime, you’re happy about trotting off to Asia.”
“Not for long.”
Judy looked down and smiled with such bitterness that Michael’s insides twisted.
“I want to see if Tim Underhill needs help. He’s unfinished business.”
“Here’s what I understand. In war, you kill people. Children included. That’s what war is about. And when it’s over, it’s over.”
“I don’t think anything is ever really over in that sense,” Michael said.
2
Michael Poole had killed a child at Ia Thuc, that was true. The circumstances were ambiguous, but he had shot and killed a small boy standing in a shadow at the back of a hootch. Michael was not superior to Harry Beevers, he was like Harry Beevers. There was Harry Beevers and the naked child, and there was himself and the small boy at the back of the hootch. Everything but the conclusion was different, but the conclusion was what mattered.
Some years ago Michael had read in an otherwise forgotten novel that no story existed without its own past, and the past of a story was what enabled us to understand it. This was true of more than stories in books. He was the person he was at the moment—a forty-one-year-old pediatrician driving through a suburban town with a copy of Jane Eyre beside him on the car seat—in part because of the boy he had killed in Ia Thuc, but more because before he had dropped out of college, he had met and married a pretty education major named Judith Writzmann. After he was drafted, Judy had written to him two or three times a week, and Michael still knew some of those letters by heart. It was in one of those letters that she said she wanted their first child to be a son, and that she wanted to name him Robert. Michael and Judy were themselves because of what they had done. He had married Judy, he had murdered a child, he had drunk it down, drunk it down. Judy had supported him through medical school. Robert—dear tender dull beautiful Robbie—had been born in Westerholm, had lived his uneventful ordinary invaluable child’s life in that suburban town his mother cherished and his father loathed. Robbie had been slow to speak, slow to walk, slow in school. Poole had realized that he did not give a damn if his son went to Harvard after all, or to any other college either. He shed sweetness over Poole’s whole life.
At five, Robbie’s headaches took him into his father’s hospital, where they found his first cancerous tumor. Later there were others—tumors on his spleen, on his liver, on his lungs. Michael bought the boy a white rabbit, and the child named it Ernie after a character on “Sesame Street.” When Robbie was in remission he would haul Ernie around the house like a teddy bear. Robbie’s illness endured three years—years that seemed to have had their own time, their own rhythm, unconnected to the world’s time. In retrospect, they had sped past, thirty-six months gone in at most twelve. Within them, each hour lasted a week, each week a year, and those three years had taken all Michael’s youth.
But unlike Robbie he lived through them. He had cradled his son in the hospital room during the quiet struggle for the last breath: at the end, Robbie had given up his life very easily. Michael had put his dear dead boy back down on his bed, and then—again, nearly for the last time—embraced his wife.
“I don’t want to see that damned rabbit when I get home,” she said. She meant that she wanted him to kill it.
And kill it he nearly had, even though the command was like that of a vain evil queen in a tale. He shared enough of his wife’s rage to be capable of the act. But instead he took the rabbit to a field at the northern edge of Westerholm, lifted its cage out of his car, swung open the little gate, and let the rabbit hop out. Ernie had looked about with his mild eyes (eyes not unlike Robbie’s own), hopped forward, and then streaked off into the woods.
As Michael turned into the parking lot beside St. Bartholomew’s hospital, he realized he had driven from his house on Redcoat Park to Outer Belt Road and the hospital, through virtually all of Westerholm, with tears in his eyes. He had negotiated seven corners, fifteen stop signs, eight traffic lights, and the heavy New York-bound traffic on the Belt Road without properly seeing any of it. He had no memory of having driven through the town. His cheeks were wet and his eyes felt puffy. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
“Don’t be a jerk, Michael,” he said to himself, picked up the copy of Jane Eyre, and got out of the car.
A huge irregular structure the color of leaf mold, with turrests, flying buttresses, and hundreds of tiny windows punched into its façade, stood on the other side of the parking lot.
Michael’s first obligation at the hospital was to look over all the babies that had been born during the night. As he had once a week for two months, the period of time Stacy Talbot had been confined to a private room in St. Bartholomew’s, he made this duty last as long as he could.
When the last baby had been examined and after a quick tour of the maternity floor to satisfy his curiosity about the mothers of the infants he had just seen, Michael got on the elevator to go up to the ninth floor, or Cancer Gulch, as he had once overheard an intern call it.
The elevator stopped at the third floor, and Sam Stein, an orthopedic surgeon of Michael’s acquaintance, got into the car with him. Stein had a beautiful white beard and hulking shoulders and was five or six inches shorter than Michael. His massive vanity allowed him to convey the impression that he was peering down at Michael from a great height, though he had to tilt his beard upward to do it.
A decade ago, Stein had badly botched a leg operation on a young patient of Michael’s and then irritably dismissed as hysteria the boy’s increasing complaints of pain. Eventually, after disseminating blame amongst every physician who had treated the child, especially Michael Poole, the orthopedist had been forced to operate on the child again. Neither Stein nor Michael had forgotten the episode and Michael had never referred another patient to him.
Stein glanced at the book in Michael’s hand, frowned, then glanced up at the lighted panel above the door to see where he was going.
“In my experience, Dr. Poole, decent medical men rarely have the leisure for fiction.”
“I don’t have any leisure, period,” Michael said.
Michael reached Stacy Talbot’s door without encountering another of Westerholm’s approximately seventy doctors. (He figured that about a quarter of these were not presently talking to him. Even some of those who were would think twice about his presence on the Oncology floor. This was just normal medicine.)