by John Farris
They stared at each other. Her eyes were red with pain. Tears dripped from her rumpled jaw.
"Even with the world gone berserk, choking on blood, there can be no such thing. God would not permit it. There must be something left we can hold fast to. Safe, familiar. How difficult it is already to heal the sick, to bring comfort into the lives of the incurable. It taxes me to the utmost. I'm not entirely well myself. I beg of you. I haven't the strength to accept responsibility for his death. Such a meaningless thing—claws, bone, a few feathers. It was a bomb. My lord? Wasn't it?"
The lag set in, the vital sense of mission thwarted by circumstances beyond his control. His pulse idled; he sighed. "Yes, Mary. It was a bomb. So I shall report to the Department of Scientific Research."
She nodded dumbly, then unselfconsciously dried her face on the sleeve of her coat. There was a knock at the door. Sir John opened it. Medwick stood outside.
"The young lieutenant, m'lord. Says it's urgent."
Luxton turned to Mary Burgess and excused himself. He left the examining room. Mary Burgess closed the door again. She went directly to her autoclave, took out a sterilized hypodermic syringe. From the drug safe she obtained a quantity of morphine, and shakily prepared an injection. She peeled back her left sleeve, but then put the syringe aside. After turning off the lights she raised a blackout shade and just stared through the window at the rooftops of Nuncheap, the faint brew of northerly stars.
Within a couple of minutes Lord Luxton returned and knocked. She glanced at the syringe, hesitated, grimaced, rolled her sleeve down and joined him in the waiting room.
"I'm afraid I must leave at once," he said.
"There's a bomb?"
"Something with a new type of fuse I've been keen to have a look at. This is only the second one that's survived intact."
She didn't know whether to feel relieved or apprehensive, but suddenly she was in control of herself. They walked outside together.
"Thank you so much for your time, Mary."
"I'm glad we talked. Dispelled the nonsense."
"Yes, reckon we've cleared the air."
'We're not children, after all, to be frightened by shadows, boggles or omens. How far must you travel tonight?"
"Portsmouth. Rather a lengthy drive."
"If it's wanting immediate attention, shouldn't you fly?"
He smiled sheepishly. "Oh, no, I never fly. Petrified at the idea of leaving the good old terra firma."
She smiled, too, skeptical but fond. "You're a most unusual man, my lord. Should you come this way-again—"
"By all means."
"I'll say a prayer."
"Well, goodbye."
She thought she had seen the last of him, but as she was about to open the front door and go back in he came hurrying from the gate, not using the shielded flashlight.
"Mary, by the way—"
"Yes, my lord?"
"The young man? Jackson Holley. Can you tell me what's happened to him?"
She felt an irrational charge of cold fear. "Yes, he—he became a physician himself. But I'm afraid he's quite removed. He practices in one of the western provinces of Canada. Or is it the U.S.? I could look up his address for you."
Luxton thought about it. Mary Burgess said, "From the tone of his letters he seems to have achieved peace after many, years of living rootless, shifting from place to place. Perhaps he's married now, settled in. News of the death of his father will come as a shock, of course. But I'm certain that if Jackson can accept his death as another tragic consequence of the war, then that shock will pass quickly, and there'll be no tormenting aftereffects."
Moonlight was meager, and because of the blackout there was no light from the house behind them. Mary Burgess couldn't read the expression in his eyes as Lord Luxton lifted his head.
"Yes. Does make sense. Well, it was a notion I had—actually no need for me to contact
They said no more goodbyes. Mary Burgess watched as he climbed into the passenger compartment of the long Rolls Phantom. When it was gone she bolted the door and thought instantly of the waiting hypodermic, her mouth sticky-dry from longing. Her body pained, every inch of it, her nerves were shreds of hot wire dangling from old bones. It would only be twice today—no, she wouldn't lie to herself, that was demeaning. Admit it; three times. But she needed it, the limpid twilight, the deceptive bliss. She knew what she was doing, so—no. Definitely no, she had to establish firm limits or all would be lost. She could get along without that third injection. Her head nearly splitting from anxiety. If she went upstairs immediately to lie down she could get by. Till morning clinic. The worst over now. Wasn't it? Just till morning, dear Lord. Her head coming apart in a long rip of agony, front to back.
At 2:15 the next afternoon Mary Burgess was in the garden dusting her roses with lead arsenate to kill the chafers when Lieutenant Kellow arrived at her gate. Mary straightened and took off her gardening gloves, narrowing her eyes against the bright sun reflected from the windscreen of the lorry as the bomb-disposal engineer approached her.
"Dr. Burgess?"
"Good afternoon, Mr. Kellow. Still grubbing for devices in the park of Hawkspurn?"
"No, we've packed it in. We're returning to Driffield, but it occurred to me that—perhaps you haven't heard the news."
"It was on the BBC this morning. Dreadful."
"Yes. A tremendous jolt. He was a hero to all of us."
"The report was sketchy at best. How did it happen?"
"An unexpected patch of fog in the Chiltern Hills, a cow in the road. Lord Luxton's driver managed to avoid the animal, but we can speculate they were traveling rather too fast for the road, so he lost control and smashed into a tree. His lordship died just before dawn of a broken neck in Radcliffe Infirmary."
"I had a feeling—such an awful feeling—shortly before he left here. But I thought it would be the bomb, you see, the one he was anxious to inspect."
"A sad twist of fate," Kellow said, with a look of distance in his eyes, as if his own fate had come into view and he was finding it rather lacking in swagger, shabby and unfitting. A cow in the road. He licked a corner of his mouth; he was at a loss. Mary Burgess let him off with a placid smile and a nod of thanks.
Then she put her gloves back on and kneeled to study more closely a developing case of chrysanthemum fasciation. She carefully removed the infected plant with a trowel and set it aside. Foolish, she thought, to be so fond of flowers when she ought to be raising cabbages on her plot of ground. But no one could hope to endure without an extra dimension to life, something frivolous to beguile the senses. There was no joy for her in a neat row of cabbages. She had her needle and her flowers and they represented peace of a sort, even comfort. And now Eustace was protected forever. A cow in the road. No damaging inquiries. No slurs on his competence. The lilac was splendid this year, having come back bountifully from the rigorous pruning of the previous fall. Looking around, she planned again the tribute for his bier: dozens of the scarlet peonies which he'd looked upon with favor, and lots of wallflowers. Then mums and roses for the gravesite, every three days till fall. What she would do this winter without him she simply didn't know. Interior blooms, the nightlong winter, prick of the needle, Eustace gone. She found a green worm about to invade a tender young rosebud, foul thing to grow fat on another's heart, and then take wing—she dislodged it, crushed it methodically with a rock against a rock, lifting, striking. Her wide-brimmed gardening hat fell off with the jerking motion of her head. The sun was hot on her uncovered brow. Sweetness all around. She hummed quietly to herself as she pounded her rocks together.
III
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
August 2-3, 1944
They brag about their heat waves in this heartland city, but the last of July and the first days in August were something out of the ordinary. At six o'clock in the morning it was nearly as hot as it would be all day. Clouds rimmed the horizon all around, swelling fat as eunuchs on the midday humors of the sun.
Toward dark they turned lushly blue with rain but kept their distance and there was no rain, only a crumple of thunder now and then, a rattled pane of glass. The daytime streets lay drenched in asphalt; children played tamely in the shade, but even the shade of a deep side porch came to weigh a ton. Weekends their fathers had beer breath before noon. It was so hot. Seemed hotter than '36, they said. And that was a record year. The river was down, lacking current and eddy. In the fashionable parts of town there was a charnel taint of stockyards, of sunburnt Kansas prairie. The sun gave dogs running fits and struck down those men who were overdrawn at the heart. People stood in long lines to get into refrigerated movie houses and avoided the' touch of each other's skin. Everyone felt overripe, punky as melons. They seemed passionless but, paradoxically, in the steeping night, in flyblown neighborhoods raddled with neon, there were constant outbreaks from bad blood, razors trimmed their pounds of flesh, guns flashed rimshot to a tempo of screaming sirens.
Nevertheless Kansas City wasn't what it used to be. Now it was a cleaned-up town, reduced in scoundrels, somewhat moral and far less jaunty, no longer in love with its epic badness, its great jazz musicians banished for lack of steady employment. Occasionally, when the Negro jazzmen came back to KC, passing through north to south on jalopy tours or just indulging spells of homesickness, some of them gathered briefly and memorably; they played all night in drab roadhouses in the sticks south of Grandview, just over the line in Cass County.
Jackson spent most of his afternoons at Union Station, though he wasn't going anywhere, and three or four nights a week at such places as Starr's Turquoise or Buster's Roxy Club (where the crawdads were especially tasty), listening to those artists who happened to be in town: He caught Big Joe Turner and Billy Eckstine's new, barnstorming band featuring Sarah Vaughan and Diz, and a husky homegrown kid called Yardbird who was the most amazing alto sax player anyone had ever heard. On those nights when he was sleeping alone, Jackson made his way back to the house where he'd rented a room for the summer. In bed at 4 A.M., he would sleep until the first streetcar came up the line at 6:24 and passed beneath his windows, moaning northbound to the huge railroad terminal on Pershing Road.
By 6:45 Mom Trutler was up and around, but she was so quiet he seldom heard her. At seven o'clock Dad Trutler came thunderously awake and spent half an hour in the bathroom trying to clear his sinuses, which particularly bothered him when the humidity was high. He was followed most mornings by his brother Rawley, a fifty-year-old bachelor with high blood pressure and a liquor problem. The Trutler brothers were druggists. They owned a pharmacy, on Locust Street below Hospital Hill, that grossed better than seventy-five thousand dollars a year.
Shortly before eight o'clock, everyone was at breakfast and the front of the house was quiet, except for the nowfrequent streetcars; Jackson could doze again if he wished.
He was in Lindy's' room. Lindy, the youngest boy, had enlisted in the marines after his graduation from high school a year ago and was now somewhere in the Pacific. Mom and Dad Trutler had three other sons, all in the service. Bob was a flying instructor at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Kenyon was stationed at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. Donnie Trutler, who was good enough at baseball to pitch in the American Association in 1941 and 1942, had seen combat in Italy. He was now in the General Army Hospital in Memphis. He had lost his eyes when a clip of cartridges exploded in his face, detonated by a hit on the chamber of his M-1 rifle.
The bedroom, smallest of the five on the second floor of the house, was just as Lindy had left it last year. Mom Trutler had offered to clean out the closets and take down all the high-school memorabilia, but Jackson wouldn't hear of it. He was just renting for the week, he said. He was just passing through. That was in June. Now, he was very much a part of the family. Three weeks ago they'd all gone south to visit Donnie, leaving him alone in the house with Sirje the maid, who was getting up there in years and more like a permanent houseguest than a servant. Jackson had the run of the kitchen and the use of the family's C-card Pontiac Six when he wanted it. They were completely trusting, but Jackson was accustomed to immediate and uncritical acceptance by total strangers.
Dad Trutler had asked around and come up with a couple of likely situations for him. A packinghouse baron's widow wanted a live-in physician. She was in the early stages of Parkinson's, the rigid kind, and had a few other, minor problems. Little would be required of him: Take her blood pressure several times a day, test her reflexes, dole out medication and inspiration in equal parts and try to avoid dying of ennui. Jackson had met with the woman and genuinely liked her—there was immediate rapport and probably he would end up in her will. But he'd also met Son and Daughter, a draconian pair of guardians, and was made aware of their implacable hostility. They weren't about to let some limey outsider get cozy with their mum. They would examine his life with a microscope. If nothing deleterious turned up they'd rig something to discredit him; they looked the type.
Then there were the eminent doctors Meadow and McShane who owned a prosperous clinic but wanted a third, younger man to shoulder some of the load. Good young doctors were scarce in wartime. Jackson was wanted for general practice, some light surgery, all of which he could handle with ease. He became well acquainted with Meadow and McShane, while they scrutinized him and tested his knowledge, which was all it should have been considering his certificates: Royal College of Physicians, St. Bartholomew's, Edinburgh Medical Faculty. Jackson was invited to each of their homes and introduced to friends and colleagues, who also looked Jackson over closely.
For that part of what had become a familiar initiation rite he was always at his best. Jackson was nearly forty-one years old, but appeared ten years younger. Blessed with a compact and athletic build, he stood just under six feet in height. He was like nothing the ladies were used to, an oddment in town, to their eyes mildly dandified; they were impressed with his poetic curls and blue eyes, his bittersweet humor and unmannered manners. They couldn't hear enough about his formative years on the Dark Continent. Jackson, also charmed by the pleasant company, decided that KC might not be the worst place he could choose, granted that he had a minimum of choices left. It seemed to be all set. He not to think about his dwindling cash reserve and awaited the bid of Meadow and McShane to join them.
Then a gruesome scene at the best country club in Kansas City made it clear that the hoped-for situation was far from ideal.
Meadow, the distant, patrician partner, the master of the studied impertinence, went haywire in the locker-room shower while the two of them were lathering up after several spirited sets of tennis. He couldn't have been drunk and there was nothing calculated or remotely sophisticated about his advances; perhaps he'd mistakenly judged Jackson's post match exuberance to be flirtatious. They were alone in the shower at the time. Suddenly it was like being penned up with a bull. Both men were bruised as Jackson fought to avoid being screwed on the slippery floor, under the needle spray. When Meadow ejaculated on the tiles, instead of calming down, he became obscenely hysterical. He accused Jackson of having a clandestine relationship with the portly McShane. He followed Jackson at a jog into the locker room, not caring how loud he was. Several members of the club got a sizzling earful. Meadow made a pathetic attempt to improve himself in Jackson's eyes by assassinating McShane's character. He claimed that his longtime associate and lover was guilty of grossly unethical practices.
While Meadow disinterred all the bodies, Jackson grimly pulled on his clothes, then departed with what dignity he could still preserve. He already knew he was finished in Kansas City; ultimately his reputation would suffer, not Meadow's. This shouldn't have dismayed him—what was Kansas City to him, after all? Just the last stop of a train he happened to catch in a hurry. But he got drunk three nights running, and when he didn't take excellent care of himself the dormant malaria organisms in his blood brought him down with chills and fever.
There was no effective medicine for his chronic condition. This time he spent two d
ays in bed, too sick and discouraged to raise his head or go to the bathroom.
An angel looked after him while he lay muttering of chattering, manufacturing despair between episodes of nervous sleep. The angel, a ten-and-a-half-year-old stripling named Nellie Trader, emptied the bedpan, spoon-fed him bland soups and cherry-flavored Jell-O), added blankets or ice bags as required and sponged his face often. Nellie, was a shag blonde, rubbery-faced, slightly popeyed girl, a comedy-beauty with a disarmingly rational mind and a crush on him which they could both manage quite well. She maintained a menagerie in coops and pens under the elm trees in the backyard, and there was a constantly shifting population of dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, turtles, coons and undeodorized skunks. More often than not Nellie came to his bedside with animal dander clinging to her skimpy summer clothing, but she always remembered to wash her hands.
His fever broke on the third of August, a Thursday, and soon it was as if the attack hadn't occurred, except for a certain listlessness and tremor of the hands. Jackson mustered enough interest in life to sit up on the side of the bed and shave, using a pan of warm water placed on a whatnot in front of him, and a hand mirror. The evening light outside was bronze and dying rose. A blue spark from a streetcar flashed in his mirror as he scraped away with the straight razor. Children chanted skip-rope cadences and neighborhood radios were tuned to the war news, to Bing Crosby. The Trutlers had eaten overdone rib roast for dinner, and the odor would linger in the torpid air of the house for hours. After a curt quarrel with his brother, Rawley Trutler went out to a bar.
Nellie came in damp from play, her cinnamon-flake cheeks turned ruddy, half a dozen mosquito welts aglow on her bare skin. She had gathered a mason jar of lightning bugs to amuse him. She crawled across the end of the bed to set the jar on a windowsill, then slumped in a chair to watch him shave, her long legs outstretched, idly flipping a torn sandal on one foot to see if it would break all the way.