Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

"Bardlong will have to take care of it," Ronkers said.

  "Raunch," Kit said. "The newspaper photographer was here; he goes out on every ambulance call. He took a picture of the tree and Bardlong's window. Listen, this is serious, Raunch: Does Kesler get a newspaper on his breakfast tray? You've got to speak to the floor nurse; don't let him see the picture, Raunch. Okay?"

  "Okay," he said.

  Outside in the waiting room the woman was showing the Azo Gantrisin pills to Ronkers's receptionist. "He wants me to swallow them. ..." Ronkers let the letter slot close slowly. He buzzed his receptionist.

  "Entertain them, please," he said. "I am taking ten."

  He slipped out of his office through the hospital entrance and crossed through Emergency as the ambulance staff was bringing in a man on a stretcher; he was propped up on his elbows, his ankle unbooted and wrapped in an ice pack. His helmet said JOE. The man who walked beside the stretcher carried his helmet in his one good hand. He was MIKE. His other hand was held up close to his breast; his forearm was blood-soaked; an ambulance attendant walked alongside with his thumb jammed deep into the crook of Mike's arm. Ronkers intercepted them and took a look at the cut. It was not serious, but it was a messy, ragged thing with a lot of black oil and sawdust in it. About 30 stitches, Ronkers guessed, but the man was not bleeding too badly. A tedious debridement, lots of Xylocaine ... but Fowler was covering Emergency this morning, and it wasn't any of Ronkers's business.

  He went on to the third floor. Kesler was in 339, a single room; at least a private death awaited him. Ronkers found the floor nurse, but Kesler's door was open and Ronkers stood with the nurse in the hall where the old man could see them; Kesler recognized Ronkers, but didn't seem to know where he recognized Ronkers from.

  "Kommen Sie hinein, bitte!" Kesler called. His voice was like speech scraped on a file, sanded down to something scratchier than old records. "Grass Gott!" he called.

  "I wish I knew some German," the nurse told Ronkers.

  Ronkers knew a little. He went into Kesler's room, made a cursory check on the movable parts now keeping him alive. The rasp in Kesler's voice was due to the Levin tube that ran down his throat to his stomach.

  "Hello, Mr. Kesler," Ronkers said. "Do you remember me?" Kesler stared with wonder at Ronkers; they had taken out his false teeth and his face was curiously turtlelike in its leatheriness -- its sagging, cold qualities. Predictably, he had lost about 60 pounds.

  "Ach!" Kesler said suddenly. "Das house ge-bought? You ... ja! How goes it? Your wife the walls down-took?"

  "Yes," Ronkers said, "but you would like it. It's very beautiful. There's more window light now."

  "Und der Bardlong?" Kesler whispered. "He has not the tree down-chopped?"

  "No."

  "Sehr gut!" Herr Kesler said. That is pronounced zehr goot. "Gut boy!" Kesler told Ronkers. Goot buoy. Kesler blinked his dull, dry eyes for a second and when they opened it was as if they opened on another scene -- another time, somewhere. "Fruhstuck?" he asked politely.

  "That means breakfast," Ronkers told the nurse. They had Kesler on a hundred milligrams of Demerol every four hours; that makes you less than alert.

  Ronkers was getting out of the elevator on the first floor when the intercom paged "Dr. Heart." There was no Dr. Heart at University Hospital. "Dr. Heart" meant that someone's heart had stopped.

  "Dr. Heart?" the intercom asked sweetly. "Please come to 304.

  Any doctor in the hospital was supposed to hurry to that room. There was an unwritten rule that you looked around and made a slow move to the nearest elevator, hoping another doctor would beat you to the patient. Ronkers hesitated, letting the elevator door close. He pushed the button again, but the elevator was already moving up.

  "Dr. Heart, room 304," the intercom said calmly. It was better than urgently crying, "A doctor! Any doctor to room 304! Oh, my God, hurryr That might disturb the other patients and the visitors.

  Dr. Hampton was coming down the floor toward the elevator.

  "You still having office calls?" Hampton asked Ronkers.

  "Yup," Ronkers said.

  "Go back to your office, then," Hampton said. "I'll get this one."

  The elevator had stopped on the third floor; it was pretty certain that "Dr. Heart" had already arrived in 304. Ronkers went back to his office. It would be nice to take Kit out to dinner, he thought.

  At the Route Six Ming Dynasty, Kit ordered the sweet and sour bass; Ronkers chose the beef in lobster sauce. He was distracted. He had seen a sign in the window of the Route Six Ming Dynasty, just as they'd come in the door. It was a sign about two feet long and one foot high -- black lettering on white shirt cardboard, perhaps. It looked perfectly natural there in the window, for it was about the expected size -- and, Ronkers falsely assumed, about the expected content of a sign like TWO WAITRESSES WANTED.

  Ronkers was distracted only now, as he sipped a drink with Kit, because only now was the real content of that sign coming through to him. He thought he was imagining it, so he excused himself from the table and slipped outside the Route Six Ming Dynasty to have another look at the sign.

  Appallingly, he had not imagined it. There, vividly in a lower corner of the window, plainly in view of every customer approaching the door, was a neatly lettered sign, which read: HARLAN BOOTH HAS THE CLAP.

  "Well, it's true, isn't it?" Kit asked.

  "Well, yes, but that's not the point," Ronkers said. "It's sort of unethical. I mean, it has to be Margaret Brant, and I'm responsible for releasing the information. That sort of thing should be confidential, after all."

  "Turds," said Kit. "Good for Margaret Brant! You must admit, Raunch, if Harlan Booth had played fair with you, the whole thing wouldn't have happened. I think he deserves it."

  "Well, of course he deserves it," Ronkers said, "but I wonder where else she put up signs."

  "Really, Raunch, just let it be.

  But Ronkers had to see for himself. They drove to the Student Union. Inside the main lobby, Ronkers searched the giant bulletin board for clues.

  70 BMW, LIKE NEW ...

  RIDERS WANTED TO SHARE EXPENSES AND DRIVING TO NYC, LV. THURS., RETURN MON. EVE., CALL "LARRY," 351-4306....

  HARLAN BOOTH HAS THE CLAP....

  "My God."

  They went to the auditorium; a play was in progress. They didn't even have to get out of their car to see it: a NO PARKING sign had been neatly covered and given the new message. Kit was hysterical.

  The Whale Room was where a lot of students drank and played pool and danced to local talent. It was a loud, smoke-filled place; Ronkers had several emergency calls a month involving patients who had begun their emergency in the Whale Room.

  Somehow, Margaret Brant had warmed the bartender's heart. Above the bar mirror, above the glowing bottles, above the sign saying CHECKS CASHED FOR EXACT AMOUNT ONLY, were the same neat and condemning letters now familiar to Ronkers and Kit. The Whale Room was informed that Harlan Booth was contagious.

  Fearing the worst, Ronkers insisted they take a drive past Margaret Brant's dorm -- a giant building, a women's dormitory of prison size and structure. Ivy did not grow there.

  In the upcast streetlights, above the bicycle racks -- seemingly tacked to every sill of every third-floor window -- a vast sewn-together bedsheet stretched across the entire front of Catherine Cascomb Dormitory for Women. Margaret Brant had friends. Her friends were upset, too. In a massive sacrifice of linen and labor, every girl in every third-floor, front-window room had done her part. Each letter was about five feet high and single-bed width.

  "Fantastic!" Kit shouted. "Well done! Good show! Let him have it!"

  "Way to go, Maggie Brant," whispered Ronkers reverently. But he knew he hadn't seen the end of it.

  It was 2:00 A.M. when the phone rang, and he suspected it was not the hospital.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Did I wake you up, Doc?" said Harlan Booth. "I sure hope I woke you up."

  "Hello, Booth," Ronkers said. Kit
sat up beside him, looking strong and fit.

  "Call off your goons, Doc. I don't have to put up with this. This is harassment. You're supposed to be ethical, you crummy doctors."

  "You mean you've seen the signs?" Ronkers asked.

  "Signs?" Booth asked." What signs? What are you talking about?"

  "What are you talking about?" Ronkers said, genuinely puzzled.

  "You know goddamn well what I'm talking about!" Harlan Booth yelled. "Every half-hour a broad calls me up. It's two o'clock in the morning, Doc, and every half-hour a broad calls me up. A different broad, every half-hour, you know perfectly well

  "What do they say to you?" Ronkers asked.

  "Cut it out!" Booth yelled. "You know damn well what they say to me, Doc. They say stuff like 'How's your clap coming along, Mr. Booth?' and 'Where are you spreading your clap around, Harlan old baby?' You know what they say to me, Doc!"

  "Cheer up, Booth," Ronkers said. "Get out for a breath of air. Take a drive -- down by Catherine Cascomb Dormitory for Women, for example. There's a lovely banner unfurled in your honor; you really ought to see it."

  "A banner?" Booth said.

  "Go get a drink at the Whale Room, Booth," Ronkers told him. "It will settle you down."

  "Look, Doc!" Booth screamed. "You call them off!"

  "I didn't call them on, Booth."

  "It's that little bitch Maggie Brant, isn't it, Doc?"

  "I doubt she's operating alone, Booth."

  "Look," Booth said. "I can take you to court for this. Invasion of privacy. I can go to the papers. I'll go to the university -- expose Student Health. You've got no right to be this unethical."

  "Why not just call Margaret Brant?" Ronkers suggested.

  "Call her?"

  "And apologize," Ronkers said. "Tell her you're sorry."

  "Sorry?!" Booth shouted.

  "And then come give me some names," Ronkers said.

  "I'm going to every newspaper in the state, Doc." "I'd love to see you do that, Booth. They would crucify you. "Doc ..."

  "Give yourself a real lift, Booth. Take a drive by Catherine Cascomb Dormitory for Women. ..."

  "Go to hell, Doc."

  "Better hurry, Booth. Tomorrow they may start the bumper sticker campaign." "Bumper stickers?"

  "'Harlan Booth has the clap,'" Ronkers said. "That's what the bumper stickers are going to say.

  Booth hung up. The way he hung up rang in Ronkers's ear for a long time. The walnuts dropping on the roof were almost soothing after the sound Booth had made.

  "I think we've got him," Ronkers told Kit.

  "'We,' is it?" she said. "You sound like you've joined up."

  "I have," Ronkers said. "I'm going to call Margaret Brant first thing in the morning and tell her about my bumper-sticker idea."

  But Margaret Brant needed no coaching. In the morning when Ronkers went out to his car, there was a freshly stuck-on bumper sticker, front and back. Dark blue lettering on a bright yellow background; it ran half the length of the bumper.

  HARLAN BOOTH HAS THE CLAP

  On his way to the hospital, Ronkers saw more of the adorned cars. Some drivers were parked in gas stations, working furiously to remove the stickers. But that was a hard, messy job. Most people appeared to be too busy to do anything about the stickers right away.

  "I counted thirty-four, just driving across town," Ronkers told Kit on the phone. "And it's still early in the morning."

  "Bardlong got to work early, too," Kit told him.

  "What do you mean?"

  "He hired a real tree outfit this time. The tree surgeons came right after you left." "Ah, real tree surgeons

  "They have helmets, too, and their names are Mickey, Max, and Harv," Kit said. "And they brought a whole tub of that black healing stuff."

  "Dr. Heart," said Ronkers's receptionist, cutting in. "Dr. Heart, please, to 339?

  "Raunch?"

  But the receptionist was interrupting because it was so early; there just might not be another doctor around the hospital. Ronkers came in early, often hours ahead of his first appointment -- to make his hospital rounds, yes, but mainly to sit in his office alone for a while.

  "I've got to go," he told Kit. "I'll call back."

  "Who's Dr. Hart?" Kit asked. "Somebody new?"

  "Yup," Ronkers said, but he was thinking: No, it's probably somebody old.

  He was out of his office, and half through the connecting tunnel which links the main hospital to several doctors' offices, when he heard the intercom call for Dr. Heart again and recognized the room number: 339. That was old Herr Kesler's room, Ronkers remembered. Nurses, seeing him coming, opened doors for him; they opened doors in all directions, down all corridors, and they always looked after him a little disappointed that he did not pass through their doors, that he veered left instead of right. When he got to Kesler's room, the cardiac-resuscitation cart was parked beside the bed and Dr. Heart was already there. It was Danfors -- a better Dr. Heart than Ronkers could have been, Ronkers knew; Danfors was a heart specialist.

  Kesler was dead. That is, technically, when your heart stops, you're dead. But Danfors was already holding the electrode plates alongside Kesler's chest; the old man was about to get a tremendous jolt. Ah, the new machines, Ronkers marveled. Ronkers had once brought a man from the dead with 500 volts from the cardioverter, lifting the body right off the bed, the limbs jangling -- like pithing a frog in Introductory Biology.

  "How's Kit, George?" Danfors asked.

  "Just fine," Ronkers said. Danfors was checking the IV of sodium bicarbonate running into Kesler. "You must come see what she's done to the house. And bring Lilly."

  "Right-O," said Danfors, giving Kesler 500 volts.

  Kesler's jaw was rigid on his chest and his toothless gums were clenched together fast, yet he managed to force a ghastly quarter-moon of a smile and expel a sentence of considerable volume and energy. It was German, of course, which surprised Danfors; he probably didn't know Kesler was an Austrian.

  "Noch ein Bier!" Kesler ordered.

  "What'd he say?" Danfors asked Ronkers.

  "One more beer," Ronkers translated.

  But the current, of course, was cut. Kesler was dead again. Five hundred volts had woken him up, but Kesler did not have enough voltage of his own to keep himself awake.

  "Shit," Danfors said. "I got three in a row with this thing when the hospital first got it, and I thought it was the best damn machine alive. But then I lost four out of the next five. So I was four-and-four with the thing; nothing is foolproof, of course. And now this one's the tie breaker." Danfors managed to make his record with the heart machine sound like a losing season.

  Now Ronkers didn't want to call Kit back; he knew Kesler's death would upset her. But she called him before he could work it out.

  "Well, well," Ronkers said.

  "Raunch?" Kit asked. "Kesler didn't see the paper, did he? They put the picture right on the front page, you know. You don't think he saw it, do you?"

  "For a fact, he did not see it," Ronkers said.

  "Oh, good," she said. She seemed to want to stay on the phone, Ronkers thought, although she wasn't talking. He told her he was awfully busy and he had to go.

  Ronkers was in a cynical mood when he sat down to lunch with Danfors in the hospital cafeteria. They were still on the soup course when the intercom pleasantly asked for Dr. Heart. Since he was a heart specialist, Danfors answered most of the Dr. Heart calls in the hospital whenever he was there, even if someone beat him to the elevator. He stood up and drank his milk down with a few swift guzzles.

  "Noch ein Bier!" Ronkers said.

  At home, Kit -- the receiver of messages, the composer of rooms -- had news for him. First, Margaret Brant had left word she was dropping the Harlan Booth assault because Booth had called and begged her forgiveness. Second, Booth had called and left Kit a list of names. "Real ones," he'd said. Third, something was up with Bardlong and the infernal tree. The tree surgeons had alarmed him about so
mething, and Bardlong and his wife had been poking about under the tree, along their side of the slatestone wall, as if inspecting some new damage -- as if plotting some new attack.

  Wearily, Ronkers wandered to the yard to confront this new problem. Bardlong was down on the ground on all fours, peering deep into the caves of his slatestone wall. Looking for squirrels?

  "After the men did such a neat job," Bardlong announced, "it came to their attention that they should really have taken the whole thing down. And they're professionals, of course. I'm afraid they're right. The whole thing's got to come down."

  "Why?" Ronkers asked. He was trying to summon resistance, but he found his resistance was stale.

  "The roots," Bardlong said. "The roots are going to topple the wall. The roots," he said again, as if he were saying, the armies! the tanks! the big guns! "The roots are crawling their way through my wall." He made it sound like a conspiracy, the roots engaged in strangling some stones, bribing others. They crept their way into revolutionary positions among the slate. On signal, they were ready to upheave the whole.

  "That will surely take some time," Ronkers said, thinking, with a harshness that surprised him: That wall will outlive you, Bardlong!

  "It's already happening," Bardlong said. "I hate to ask you to do this, of course, but the wall, if it crumbles, well

  "We can build it up again," Ronkers said. Ah, the doctor in him!

  As illogical as cancer, Bardlong shook his head. Not far away, Ronkers saw, would be the line about hoping not to get "legal." Ronkers felt too tired to resist anything.

  "It's simple," said Bardlong. "I want to keep the wall, you want to keep the tree."

  "Walls can be rebuilt," Ronkers said, utterly without conviction.

  "I see," Bardlong said. Meaning what? It was like the 500 volts administered to Kesler. There was a real effect -- it was visible -- but it was not effective at all. On his gloomy way back inside his house Ronkers pondered the effect of 500 volts on Bardlong. With the current on for about five minutes.

  He also fantasized this bizarre scene: Bardlong suddenly in Ronkers's office, looking at the floor and saying, "I have had certain ... relations, ah, with a lady who, ah, apparently was not in the best of... health."

  "If it would, Mr. Bardlong, spare you any embarrassment," Ronkers imagined himself saying, "I could of course let the, ah, lady know that she should seek medical attention."