THE OFFICE WAS supposed to be for potential voters and volunteers, I guess, but the only people who stopped by were Marie and delivery-men, and there were only so many envelopes to stuff and drawers to rearrange, so to pass the time I ended up reading some water-damaged paperbacks I found under the bathroom sink. There were romance novels like Ruthanne used to read, and self-help books with titles like The Power of Positive Thinking and The Human Connection!: Pt. 2, Inference. The AC was broken so I kept the front and back doors open for cross ventilation. October was hot that year. I was pretty miserable, I guess, and I hadn’t seen Whitey Connors in two whole weeks, so what was the point? I wasn’t infiltrating shit. I was thinking about quitting when one day Marie was sitting at the conference table marking some papers and started peering at me over her glasses. I thought it was to catch me standing still so I tried to look busy. I opened and closed some file cabinets like I was looking for something.
“Stop fooling around and come over here,” she said.
I went over to her. She was looking at me like I had a rash on my face or a big spider crawling across it. She said, “Have you heard of Tom Donaldson?”
“Doctor Tom?”
“That’s right, but I don’t know what kind of doctor he is and I don’t care. He was your congressman for years, but he lost his last bid. Now he’s running for state treasurer.”
“Against Mister Connors?”
“Right. Are you familiar with the phrase ‘know your enemy’?”
“Sure.” I didn’t tell her just how familiar. “You need some info on him? I’m pretty good on the internet. Set me up with a computer and I’ll dig up the dirt.”
“We’ve done that already. We need more. Here’s what I want you to do, if you’re amenable.” What she wanted me to do, she explained, was impersonate a reporter from the high school newspaper in order to interview Tom Donaldson and ask him a bunch of questions about himself. “Should be easy,” she said, “since you’re still in high school, technically. Use your school email address.”
She slipped me a sheet of paper with my name and Pansy Gilchrist email address on it, along with erroneous details about myself: senior enrolling next year at Tech (Donaldson’s alma mater), member of the Young Republicans, political editor at the student paper, etc. I told her I didn’t think The Pansy Eagle Times had a politics beat, but she didn’t care. The sheet also had some of the questions I was supposed to ask him, and they seemed harmless enough.
As instructed, I went to the Donaldson for State Treasurer website and emailed about setting up an interview. I read on the website about what a good doctor Dr. Tom was and how much he got done in Washington despite constant attacks from liberal elites who wanted to take away our freedom. There were photos of him shaking people’s hands, holding babies, shooting baskets with some kids in wheelchairs. He was tall and had thick sculpted gray hair that was about half an inch away from being a pompadour. His face was smooth, and his teeth were white. He looked a lot more like a politician than Whitey Connors did, that was for sure.
Another place on the internet said Tom Donaldson used to be an OB/GYN doctor, which meant he delivered babies, and that he insisted on being called “Doctor Tom” even though he hadn’t practiced in twenty years and his license lapsed. Some internet people claimed he did abortions in medical school, but Dr. Tom said he didn’t. He was a Christian. He believed life started at conception and that the world was six thousand years old. That didn’t sound right to me, but Dr. Tom was a doctor so maybe there was an argument to it.
Somebody at Donaldson for State Treasurer emailed back that Dr. Tom sent his regards but because of his busy campaign schedule he didn’t have time for an interview—Go Tigers! (Ricky the Tiger was Tech’s mascot.)
When I told Marie, she laughed.
“It’s because you’re in Komer,” she said. “This is Whitey’s territory. Ninety percent of high-school kids can’t vote, and those who can, in a place like this, don’t.”
I thought that was the end of it, just a waste of time, but Marie said we were writing the article anyway. She gave me careful instructions.
The first thing I had to do was drive to the city and visit Dr. Tom’s old med school. Marie warned that they were embarrassed he had gone there, because of the thing about the world being created six thousand years ago, so I didn’t expect to have much luck talking to anybody about him. But the receptionist at the Dean’s office called somebody and said what I was there for, and a few minutes later a pretty lady came out, shook my hand, and invited me into her office. She told me she was Associate Dean and asked if I had any questions.
I told her about myself (my fake self) and about the article and how excited we kids were that Dr. Tom, a big famous former congressman, was running for State Treasurer. The lies came easily. It felt good to be lying with permission. I made the article out to be a fluff piece. I said I was tentatively calling it “Dr. Tom: The Teenage Years,” because teens like me were interested in what Dr. Tom was like as a teen.
“Sounds like a neat article,” the Associate Dean said. “How can I help you?”
“Well,” I said, “Doctor Tom likes to joke that he wasn’t a very good student, but I don’t believe it.”
She laughed. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“But Doctor Tom seems like a genius to me. I bet he got straight A’s. Do you know?”
“That was a little before my time, I’m afraid.”
“Could you look at his transcript?”
The Associate Dean seemed surprised by this request, and I felt embarrassed, but then she started typing on her computer. When she got what she was looking for she said, “Yeah, nothing special. I’m not surprised. He gave it up for politics, after all.” She laughed again, and I did too.
“But if you get bad grades,” I said, “do you still get to be a doctor?”
“Yes. Just to pass med school classes and graduate is an accomplishment. If Doctor Donaldson hadn’t gotten so many incompletes, things might have gone quite differently for him. He might have ended up in a more prestigious residency in a different city, maybe even a different state. He might never have run for congress.”
“Wow. That’s a lot to think about. But what’s an incomplete?”
The Associate Dean hesitated, like maybe she hadn’t meant to say that.
“Is it like an F?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I asked her if Dr. Tom had been in any student clubs, that type of thing, and she said she didn’t know. I asked her a few more questions like that and got nothing. This lady was done with me.
When I left I called Marie to say I didn’t get anything good, but Marie disagreed. She said the incompletes were a big deal, almost as bad as F’s. Then she gave me the office phone number of Dr. Tom’s old buddy, an OB/GYN in Komer who went to school with him. She told me to call this doctor and set up an interview.
The doctor’s name was Dr. Matthews and his receptionist told me in a heavy accent that Dr. Matthews could see me any time I wanted. I guess Dr. Matthews didn’t have many patients. I set up the interview for the next day, then I called Mom to tell her I was in the city on business. The idea that I was anywhere “on business” was confusing to her, but she was glad to hear from me. She gave me their address and told me to come right over.
Driving in the city was kind of scary, but I tried to be stone-faced in case Grandpa’s truck gave away that I was a hayseed from Komer and people were watching me. I was on the north side of town in the ritzy neighborhood where the med school was and I had to get to the south side. I was afraid to take the expressway because I didn’t like merging in traffic, so I drove the whole way through neighborhoods.
There were lots of nice ranch style houses with lawns and tall trees, parks with little playgrounds, strip malls where all the storefronts had stores in them. I enjoyed the drive. But as I approached downtown the traffic thickened. It was rush hour. The street I was on turned into a one-way the wrong way so I tried to tu
rn and get on another street, but the street I wanted to turn on was one-way the wrong way too. I ended up circling downtown four or five times before I got spat out on a random street I never heard of before. The sun was on my right so I knew I was headed south, but that was about all I knew, unfortunately.
South of downtown, the houses got smaller and the strip malls more dilapidated, sort of like Komer but better paved. It stank a little too, and eventually I passed what looked like a chicken parts factory. I was starting to think I might have gone too far, but then I came to the street I was looking for. I turned onto the street and drove past fast food restaurants and tire shops, then I turned onto another street and pulled into the blacktop parking lot in front of Mom and Ruthanne’s apartment.
The apartment was a horseshoe-shaped, two-story brick building with outdoor entrances. It looked a lot like our old apartment in Komer, actually: the same little square windows, the same rust stains under the guardrails on the second floor, the same big, sad American cars. The only difference was a scummy pond in the middle of the horseshoe, where two Mexican kids were floating a milk carton boat. But if it was a duck pond, like Mom said, the ducks had flown somewhere better.
When I rang the doorbell Mom came to the door in tears, she was so glad to see me. She looked the same, which I was glad about, since I was worried she had gotten fatter. She invited me in and I was happy to see that the apartment had the same features as the one in Komer: the same TV, the same blue microfiber loveseat, the same watercolor of a bridge someplace in Italy, which was the only thing on the walls besides pictures of me and Ruthanne. Everything looked more crowded, though, because the apartment was smaller. It must have been cheap.
I asked where Ruthanne was, and Mom said she was working.
“At the library?” I asked.
“At a Burger Brothers down the way.”
I was surprised. Ruthanne never worked a day in her life, let alone someplace greasy like a Burger Brothers.
Mom said Ruthanne worked two or three shifts a week to help with rent. “Your daddy lost his job again,” she said, “and this city is expensive.”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t like the idea of Ruthanne spending half her time in a Burger Brothers when she should have been studying. I wished there was something I could do.
I fell asleep on the couch before Ruthanne came home, but she woke me up to talk. She kept hugging me and saying how glad she was to see me. She smelled terrible.
I told her about my job and she seemed impressed.
“But what about school?” she asked.
“It’s an internship so it takes the place of school,” I lied. “You could do one too, you know, and stop wasting your time flipping burgers.”
“I do the register.”
“For real?” I had a hard time imagining Ruthanne smiling at customers. She disliked old people, in particular. Nothing annoyed her more than standing in line behind an old lady fumbling through a coin purse.
“And what’s it to you what I do with my time?” Ruthanne asked. “I’m getting good grades, which is more than you can say.”
“Isn’t there more to college than that? You know, like clubs and stuff?”
“Oh, yeah, the glee club.”
“There you go.”
“And the recycling club, and Amnesty International, and Chi Omega, and Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow.” She kept listing clubs until I knew she was jerking my chain. “It’s a community college, Ben. Don’t be an idiot.”
We stayed up late talking about her classes and about my boring weird days at the campaign office. It was good to talk to her. It made me wish I hadn’t waited so long to visit. When I left the next morning, after a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and white bread toast, I was sad to go. They wanted me to stay another night, but I told them I had a meeting back in Komer with a prominent gynecologist.
Dr. Matthews’s practice was in a ratty old shingle building near the hospital. The waiting room was empty so the receptionist, a middle-aged Latino man wearing all denim, showed me right to Dr. Matthews’s office.
Dr. Matthews had his chair swiveled around and was staring out the window at a parking lot. His face was reflected in the window, and his expression was somber, but when he heard us he spun in his chair and smiled real big. He had a grease spot on his necktie. He said, “Sit down, young man, sit down,” and I sat down across from him.
While I told him about my article he kept smiling and nodding and sinking deeper into his chair. His body had a sort of looseness about it, like it was deflating. His eyes glistened with mirth or nos talgia, what Grandpa called Irish eyes. He said, “Tom is a dear friend, young man, a dear friend.”
“Was he a leader?”
“Pardon?”
“Student government, that kind of thing?” Dr. Matthews laughed. “Heck no.”
I feigned surprised. “Really? We kids thought he was a born leader.”
“A leader of revelry!” Dr. Matthews told a series of increasingly ribald stories about med school, where he and Dr. Tom used to cruise the city for girls by saying they were doctors instead of just students. “And we were barely even students. We were flunking!” He laughed.
“But y’all didn’t flunk, right?”
“Well, I didn’t.” He winked. “It was easier back then. Med school was more like college. There were fraternities for gosh sakes. What mattered was who you knew. Me, I didn’t know a soul. I was a country boy. Born right here in Komer, like you. But a professor took me under his wing.” Dr. Matthews told me the story of this professor. It started off like his other stories, jokey and good natured—the professor was a coot, he said, an old country boy after his own heart—but then the story took a surprising twist. This professor had taken it upon himself to make sure all the future OB/GYNs learned to perform abortions. He did it at a clinic away from school, since it was a dicey thing and not everybody cared to learn, but most did, and if you wanted a letter from this old professor, you had to learn. “Because sometimes it was necessary,” Dr. Matthews said, “a matter of life and death.”
“He sounds like a good teacher,” I said.
“He was.” Dr. Matthews ran his big hand over his face. I thought he might be crying, but it was hard to tell; his eyes had been moist from the start.
“Did Doctor Tom know him too?” I asked.
“Everybody did. Knew him and loved him.”
I felt sleazy asking the next question, but abortion was one of the target words on my sheet from Marie. “Did y’all feel bad about performing abortions?” I asked.
“Queasy at first,” he said, “but not bad. Never bad.” Dr. Matthews paused. He eyed me over his fingers, which were tented in front of his nose and mouth.
I knew I should ask more questions about abortions and whatnot, but I felt guilty. Dr. Matthews was a nice old man. If he wasn’t a lady doctor I would have wanted him for my own doctor. I decided to change the subject: “Are y’all still in touch?”
He shook his head gravely. “We had a falling out.”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know much about life, but I knew that friends were harder to come by the older you got. I didn’t want to upset Dr. Matthews any further, even if it meant I had to stop digging up dirt on Dr. Tom.
“We joined the same practice after school was through,” Dr. Matthews said, “but Tom kept getting in trouble.”
I tried to stop Dr. Matthews by thanking him for his time, but he seemed lost in thought.
“There were young women about,” he was saying. “That was the nature of the practice. And Tom, well, he always had a colt’s tooth.”
“A what tooth?”
“We were in a poor part of town and lots of the girls didn’t have husbands. Tom wasn’t even sly about it. He’d just ask them if they wanted to get a drink after he got off work. Sometimes they were flattered. He was a charming man, and handsome—still is, so you can imagine what a figure he cut back then, not even thirty—but lots of these girls were
scared, you know. They weren’t in the mood for that sort of thing. And sometimes they had their mothers or fathers in the waiting room and would tattle on Tom. It got to be a real problem. The doctor who owned the practice scolded Tom in front of the rest of us, which rubbed Tom the wrong way. He was a prideful person. Still, he would have stuck on if it weren’t for the complaints of inappropriate touching.”
I wanted to say “enough! enough!” but Dr. Matthews kept going. It was like he couldn’t control himself, like he’d been waiting since Tom Donaldson first got elected to be interviewed, or uncorked, on the subject of good old Dr. Tom. Eventually he got to talking about an orthodontist in town who went to jail for groping women while they were “gassed out.” He winced, as though embarrassed by his own story. After a pause he said, “I wonder why I said all that. He’s an old friend, you know.”
“The orthodontist?”
“Tom. That orthodontist was a scoundrel.” He sighed. “I suppose I said it as a lesson. Yes. You see, young man, while I disagree with Tom on many fronts, there is no doubt he’s a great politician and a powerful man. He’s a verifiable celebrity, I suppose, which might be why young people like yourself look up to him so. I suppose I said all that to remind you he’s human. He’s just a man, and maybe a less decent man than most. I suppose I don’t feel quite comfortable with him being celebrated in print. Why not celebrate someone like Bob Bilger?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, thankful for the opportunity to change the subject.
We had a long talk about Bob Bilger. It turned out Dr. Matthews was a year behind Bob Bilger at Jeff Davis, which is what Pansy Gilchrist used to be called. They played on the football and basketball teams together. I told him I read The Highest Mountain three times, which was true, and that Bob Bilger came and talked almost every year at school. Dr. Matthews laughed. He said he went to see Bob Bilger talk at the VFW, hoping to get a moment alone with the man to relive old times, but Bob Bilger hadn’t remembered him. “Can’t blame him,” Dr. Matthews said ruefully, “with his memory beclouded by such glorious adventures, why would he remember a small-town doctor like me?”
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