by T. C. Boyle
“A shame about Hoch,” O‘Kane said after a while, just to say something.
Mart grunted. Mr. McCormick stared up into the sky.
“I liked him, you know what I mean, Mart? He wasn’t so excitable as Hamilton or Brush, if that’s the word I’m looking for. And Mr. McCormick really came to like him too, didn’t you, Mr. McCormick?”
O‘Kane hadn’t expected a response—he and Mart spent half their lives talking right through their employer and benefactor—but Mr. McCormick surprised him. He shifted his head to get a closer look at O’Kane, his eyes shrinking into focus. “Dr. Hoch?” he echoed, his voice high-pitched and unstable. “Wh-what happened to him?”
“You remember, Mr. McCormick—it was just yesterday, yesterday morning. Dr. Brush gave us the news.”
There was a pause. A reflective look stole over Mr. McCormick’s features. After a while he said, “No, I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. You were very upset at the time—and I don’t blame you. All of us were upset.”
Dr. Brush had returned from the War a month ago, in August, just in time to take the baton from Hoch, who was fading fast. If anything, the rigors of the Western Front had left the good doctor fatter and heartier than ever, and with a raft of platitudes and a whole shipload of for-the-main-and-simple-reasons he’d explained to Mr. McCormick that Dr. Hoch had passed on early that morning of congestive heart failure—a weakness that ran in his family. But Mr. McCormick shouldn’t feel too badly, he said, because Dr. Hoch was an elderly man who’d lived a full and rich life and made innumerable contributions to the field of psychiatry, including the manuscript of a new book—Benign Stupors—which he’d been able to complete before his heart gave out.
Mr. McCormick was sitting over his breakfast at the time, fastidiously dissecting two fried eggs and a thick pink slab of ham with a soup spoon, the only implement available to him. “How elderly?” he asked without looking up.
“Hm? What?” The question had caught Brush by surprise.
“Dr. Hoch,” Mr. McCormick said in the small probing voice of the rhetorician, “how-how elderly was he?”
Brush produced a stub of cigar from somewhere and jammed it in his mouth. “Hoch?” he repeated. “Oh, I don’t know—in his sixties, anyhow.”
“Fifty-one,” Mr. McCormick corrected, still without looking up. “And do you know how old I am, Dr. Brush?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be forty-five in November. Am I an elderly man too?”
“Why, of course not, Mr. McCormick—Stanley,” Brush boomed, all his flesh in motion as he shimmied round the room on his too-small feet, “you’re a young man still, in the flush of health and vigor, for the main and simple—”
Mr. McCormick had waited until the breakfast dishes had been cleared and he’d got dressed and made his way to the theater building before he gave vent to his feelings on the subject. In a roaring stentorian voice that drowned out the hypnotic tick-tick-tick of Roscoe’s projector and nullified the antics of Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler, he announced: “I don’t want to die!
Brush’s voice leapt out of the darkness: “You’re not going to die, Mr. McCormick.”
“I am !”
There was movement now, O‘Kane and Mart positioning themselves, Brush rising mountainously from his folding seat in a swirl of shadow. Up on the screen, Charlie Chaplin spun round and booted a policeman in the rear, and O’Kane laughed aloud despite himself. “Now, now,” Brush was saying, looming over the slouched form of their employer, “you’re a healthy mean, Mr. McCormick, in the peak of health, and you know it. Why, you’ve got the best of everything here, the most salubrious possible environment—
Mr. McCormick’s voice, pinched thin as wire: “He’s a stinking rotting corpse, with—with things coming out of his eyes, because that‘s—that’s the part they eat first, the eyes, and you know it!”
“I know no such thing, for the main and simple reason that that is just too morbid a thought for me to hold.” Brush was waving his arms now in the flickering light, the lower half of the Little Tramp’s face appearing fitfully on his shoulder as if in some ghostly manifestation. “Think of him in heaven, in the arms of God—”
“God’s a fraud,” Mr. McCormick spat, wrenching his neck angrily round. “And so are you.”
And then there was the inevitable roughhousing, the collapse of the chairs, the curses, shouts and whimpers, the fumbling for the light switch and Dr. Brush’s intimate presentation of his persuasive and salvatory flesh to the recumbent form of their employer and benefactor.
Understandably, O‘Kane didn’t want to push the subject now—he was burned right down to the wick after that footrace round the property and up that damned hill, and he’d had enough exercise for the day, thank you. “Well, anyway, at least we’ve got Dr. Brush back,” he said, lamely. “And he’s all right. I guess.”
Mr. McCormick didn’t seem to have an opinion on the subject. He just stared up into the sky as if he might find Dr. Hoch up there somewhere, seated on the edge of a cloud. And Mart—Mart was no help. His arms dangled over the sides of the bench and his breathing slowed till he began to snore. O‘Kane lay there a while, hands cradling his head, enjoying the silence and the glory of the day, until he began thinking about the one thing that sustained him lately—booze, or more specifically, the pint bottle of bourbon whiskey he’d sequestered in the reservoir of Mr. McCormick’s toilet. It was past noon and there was no reason they should be lying in the grass when they could be inside making themselves presentable for lunch—and other activities. He saw himself slipping into the bathroom as Mr. McCormick spooned up his meat loaf and gravy, saw the bottle all striped with water and felt the cork twist out of the neck of it and the swallowing reflex of his throat that was the nearest thing he had to an orgasm lately, since he’d sworn off women, anyway. “Well, and so,” he said with as much cheer as he could muster as he pushed his weary parched self up off the grass, “what do you say, gentlemen—time for lunch?”
And that would have been all right, because Mart woke with a start and Mr. McCormick found his legs and began mechanically brushing off his jacket preparatory to slipping it back on—if it weren’t for the gopher, that is. O‘Kane didn’t even know what it was at first. A little thing, like a rat, only pale and yellowish almost to the color of a butter-nut squash, and it suddenly popped its head out of a hole in the ground and tore twice round the patch of lawn before vanishing down a second hole like water down a drain. Mr. McCormick was dumbstruck. At first. And then he got excited. “Did you see that?” he said. “Did you? Did you see it?” And by now he was down on his hands and knees, probing into the thing’s lair with his right hand and forcing his arm in up to the elbow. “What is it?” he kept saying.
“Beats me,” O‘Kane said with a shrug. “A weasel?”
Mart came over and stood there looking at the hole and Mr. McCormick ruining his cuffs and the sleeve of his jacket. “That’s no weasel,” he said. “Are you nuts or something? A weasel’s long and skinny. ”
“So what is it then?” O‘Kane demanded. He didn’t really give a good goddamn one way or the other, but he hated for Mart to show him up.
Mart scratched his head. “A groundhog,” he said, but he didn’t sound too sure of himself.
By this point, Mr. McCormick had got his whole arm in the burrow, right up to his shoulder and he was scooping out dirt with his bare hand. “It’s in there, I know it is,” he said, and then he got to his feet and collapsed that portion of the burrow he’d already excavated, falling once again to his knees and thrusting his arm into the new opening. He looked up, perplexed. “It‘s—It’s going for the daphnes,” he said.
“Nothing to worry about, Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane assured him, sensing an episode coming on, “I’ll get the head gardener to take care of it right after lunch. And say, speaking of lunch,” pulling his watch out with a flourish, “if we hurry we’ll be just in time.”
Mr. McCormick ignored him. He w
as digging furiously now, with both hands, crouched over the expanding burrow like a fox terrier. Already his nails were ruined and you could see the blood like a tattered ribbon moving beneath the scrim of filth on his right hand. Mr. McCormick was distracted. He was obsessed. He was being sick and pathological. O‘Kane didn’t want any violence, not now, not today—all he wanted to do was go back to the house for lunch and a drink sneaked in the toilet—but he would have to intervene, and soon, he could see that. He signaled to Mart, but Mart wasn’t paying any attention—Mart was standing over Mr. McCormick’s shoulder and peering down into the excavation, saying, “I think it goes this way, yeah, that’s right, through the flowerbed and then maybe under those bushes over there—”
O‘Kane took him by the arm. “Maybe Dr. Brush will know what it is,” he said in a falsely hearty voice. “Mart, why don’t you go get Dr. Brush?” And then he tightened his grip and dropped his voice, adding, for Mart’s benefit only, “Right now. Right this minute. You understand me?”
When Mart returned ten minutes later with a wheezing, puffing and blustering Dr. Brush in tow, Mr. McCormick had already excavated a looping twenty-foot furrow through the daphne bed and back into the lawn, where he was working furiously with a stick he’d found beneath the oleander bushes (the very bushes O‘Kane had been repeatedly warned to keep him away from, as their flowers, leaves and branches were all highly toxic). “Mr. McCormick,” Brush bellowed, even as he was fighting to catch his breath, “what is this? You’re ruining the flower beds! And the beautiful lawn Mr. Stribling has worked so hard on.”
Mr. McCormick never even glanced up. It was his estate and he could dig the whole place down to China if he wanted to. Its—its a—a—a groundhog,“ he said. ”It lives here. Under the grass.“
“Yes, yes,” Brush said, bending over him now, “I have no doubt of that, but what’s it to you, Mr. McCormick, really? I’m sure the creature isn’t doing any harm, and if it is, well, we have the excellent Mr. Stribling and his professional gardeners to see to it. Now come on, come out of there and let’s get cleaned up and have some lunch. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”
“No,” Mr. McCormick said, digging, and the dirt was flying furiously in the direction of the doctor so that Brush had to back up to avoid having his cuffs filled with it. “No. I want this, this thing. I want to k-kill it. It’s destroying the, the flowers, don’t you see?”
There was no use arguing with him, not when he was like this, and nobody really wanted to get down there in the dirt and restrain him, not after the free-for-all in the theater house yesterday, so Dr. Brush did the politic thing and sent Mart to fetch Stribling.
Stribling was a standoffish sort of fellow for a gardener—or landscape architect, as he liked to call himself—and on the few occasions O‘Kane had run into him, usually while jogging from one end of the estate to the other behind Mr. McCormick’s bobbing and weaving form, the man had been brusque and uncommunicative. He was in touch with Katherine by post and while he did submit all major plans to her for approval, he pretty much had free rein to continue the work of his predecessor, a famous wop whose name O’Kane could never remember, and he always had his team of laborers, truck drivers and manure spreaders under the gun. If they weren’t shoveling silt out of the reservoir or constructing a water tower, they were building stone bridges over the creeks and repairing and extending the roads, not to mention clipping every leaf of every shrub like a horde of overzealous barbers. It took no more than five minutes and Stribling was there, another man in tow—a gaunt tall Irishman with a wandering eye—the kind of man O‘Kane’s mother would have called a long drink of water. If O’Kane recalled correctly the man’s name was O‘Hara, or maybe O’Mara—the day laborers came and went like the weather and there was no way to keep track of them, not unless they turned up at one of the saloons, that is. Both Stribling and the Irishman had shovels slung over their shoulders.
“Ah, there you are, Mr. Stribling,” Brush hollered, “and I see you’ve brought one of your, uh, associates along too, and all the better. You see, we have a problem, for the main and simple reason that some sort of groundhog has got under the lawn here and Mr. McCormick is very concerned about it, isn’t that right, Mr. McCormick?”
The dirt flew. Mr. McCormick said nothing.
Stribling and his man stepped up to examine the trench through the flower bed, the ravaged lawn, the uprooted oleanders. “It’s a gopher,” Stribling said matter-of-factly, and he was so burned by the sun you would have thought he was a spaghetti twister himself. He laid a finger alongside his nose and gave Mr. McCormick a look. “We’ll get him, don’t you worry,” he said. “But here, Mr. McCormick, you don’t have to do that now—a trap’s the thing, that’s what we need.”
The Irishman, his nose peeling and his eye wandering, began to shove) dirt back into the hole, but Mr. McCormick would have none of it. “Step away from there,” he said, glaring up at the man, and dug all the more furiously, every stitch of clothing on him ruined beyond washing or repair. The knees of his trousers glistened with compacted mud, his collar was a sop, his tie a rag.
“It’s past one, Mr. McCormick,” Brush remonstrated, “—you know you’ll miss lunch now if you don’t hurry, and we’ve got to allow time to clean up.”
O‘Kane put in his two cents then: “That’s right, Mr. McCormick. Lunch.”
For the next hour, as the sun roved overhead and they shifted from one foot to another, the five of them stood there watching Mr. McCormick at his work. He’d made his way through the oleanders and across the gravel walkway beyond and into another flower bed, this one of impatiens, fragile gawky things that drooped and fell over if you looked at them twice, and all the while Stribling saying things like “It’s no use, Mr. McCormick, he’s got a burrow a hundred yards across at least” and “There’s literally scores of the things out there and even if you get this one another one’ll move right back in—trapping’s the thing, I tell you.”
Finally, and they were well into the third hour by now, Mr. McCormick got up from the convoluted trench he’d managed to gouge out of the earth with his two bare hands and a stick of oleander, and looked Stribling in the face, no more than two feet from him. Bleeding in half a dozen places, his hair hanging in his eyes, their employer was all but unrecognizable behind a film of sweat and filth. “And what am I paying you for?” he suddenly snapped, pushing up against Stribling with his chest thrust out and spitting the words in his face. And then, trembling and gritting his teeth, he jerked his head round on the Irishman. “And you?” he said. “What am I paying you for? To stand around and, and watch? Dig, I tell you!” he shouted, his voice rheumy and dangerous all of a sudden. “Dig! Dig or you‘ll—you’ll be looking for another j-job! Both of you !”
Stribling gave Brush a sour look, but turned away from Mr. McCormick without a word and leaned into his shovel, and so did the Irishman. Dr. Brush, who’d kept up a steady stream of bluster and remonstrance for the better part of this ongoing charade, suddenly started in on a new tack, assuring Mr. McCormick that the task was in good hands now and that that was all the more reason to head back to the house and clean up—yes, and see what Sam Wah could put together for a late lunch. Because Mr. McCormick must be hungry after all that prodigious exercise, just the sort of thing to build an appetite, for the main and simple reason that the body needed fuel, didn’t it?
But Mr. McCormick merely stood there, filthy and bleeding, watching the men dig. Stribling kept his head down, and he dug steadily, but O‘Kane could see that he was concentrating on the doomed flower bed, trying to cut his losses and confine the scope of the excavation. It was past three and both Stribling and his assistant were up to their hips in a trench you could have flooded and rowed a boat across when Mr. McCormick folded his arms and said, “That’s it. That’s enough.”
They all looked up hopefully, all five of them, Stribling and the Irishman in a sweat, Brush all blustered out, Mart half comatose and O‘Kane bored to tea
rs and desperate for a drink.
“You can bury him now,” Mr. McCormick said.
They all looked at one another. It was O‘Kane who finally spoke up. “Who—the gopher?”
Mr. McCormick slowly shook his head and looked up at the sky. “Dr. H-Hoch, ”he said.
When the year turned—‘19 into ’20, that is—O‘Kane’s worst fears about the Katherines of the world were confirmed. Riding in on the skirts of Petticoat Rule, the Drys and the Bible-thumpers got the Volstead Act passed, prohibiting “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors,” and before women even got their vote (a proposition about which O’Kane was dubious to begin with) he was denied his God-given right to drink himself into a stupor—even in the privacy of his own antiseptic room. January 18, 1920: that was the day of infamy. The day of doom. The day every last shred of joy went out of his life. He watched in shock and disbelief as the saloons of Spanishtown boarded up their doors and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union paraded through the streets, pouring out good whiskey in the gutter. Menhoff’s was still open, but only as a restaurant, and Cody would serve you a beer with your steak if you were foolish enough to ask for one—near beer, .5 percent alcohol, less than you’d find in a can of sauerkraut.
Oh, O‘Kane had stocked up, of course, stashing six cases of beer and two of rye whiskey under his bed and secreting the odd bottle of bourbon in his wardrobe and ten pints of sloe gin in the steamer trunk he kept in Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s attic—he even buried half a dozen jugs of wine just inside the front gate at Riven Rock—but he was bereft without the conviviality of the saloons. So what if he’d spent half his adult life considering various positions on God, immortality and Ford transmissions as expressed by one drunken halfwit or another? What else was there to do? He tried reading. He bought himself a Victrola. Rain beat at the windows and every day brought news of some fool going blind and deaf drinking antifreeze or rubbing atcohot—and how about that fireman in Pennsylvania who bought up all the lilac hair tonic in town and drowned in a sea of his own vomit? O’Kane went steadily through his stock, mostly alone, but sometimes in the company of Mart or Pat or one of the lost souls who used to inhabit the front room at Menhoff‘s, and as the bottles turned up empty, he felt like a condemned man marking off the days until his execution.