Doggy Moore was one of the few serious golfers anywhere whose golf bag and cart carried throat sticks, flashlight, otoscope, ophthalmoscope, stethoscope, injectable penicillin, a selection of oral antibiotics, sterile gloves, a suture set, a sigmoidoscope, a vaginal speculum and the paraphernalia necessary for obtaining and preserving Papanicolaou smears of the uterine cervix. The sixth hole at Spruce Harbor was known as Doggy’s office. There was a shaded, secluded, open but roofed rain shelter with a wide bench which Doggy used for an examining table. It was here that he performed his most definitive golf course examinations. He examined sore bellies, bleeding hemorrhoids and performed occasional pelvic examinations. The Spruce Harbor golfers treated the office with proper respect, but embarrassing situations would or-cur when the summer complaints were allowed on the course. One male summer complaint found Doggy performing a sigmoidoscopy, that is, an examination of the rectum and sigmoid colon. He never played Spruce Harbor again. Another summer complaint, a matronly female, about a forty handicapper, was off her game for a month after Doggy drafted her to chaperone a pelvic exam on a young lady suspected of an inflammatory disease.
The sixth hole bothered everybody but Doggy. His group, usually two down to Doggy by then, would wait while Doggy practiced medicine. Sometimes they’d have to let another foursome through. Sooner or later Doggy would appear, and yell, “Let’s go.” He would tee up his Titleist, take his short Doug Sanders swing, put it out two-forty, and say: “Stiddy. Stiddy, ball.” The bail always remained steady. Right down the middle. His opponents and even his partners were lucky to bit the ball at all off the sixth tee.
The thing about Doggy Moore was that everyone. complained about him, but if they were sick everyone wanted him, any way they could get him. Therefore there were usually five or six patients waiting at the clubhouse when Doggy got in. They didn’t like to have their history taken while Doggy simultaneously collected his golf winnings, but they would hold still for it. If Doggy decided to examine a female in the ladies’ locker room, the ladies all complained, but the loudest complainer was likely to get examined there a week later.
“Why do I have to see you here, Doggy?” was the wail of all female golfers.
“Go to someone else. You don’t have to see me at all. I ain’t particular,” Doggy would say.
The golf course wasn’t Doggy’s only extra office work area. When Doggy fished at Chesuncook, folks came in their boats to consult him. When Doggy was rabbit hunting and returned to his truck or station wagon, he’d find patients waiting for him, Doggy played but he was always on duty.
Doggy watched Hawkeye Pierce very carefully. Because Doggy knew everything, he knew all about Hawkeye, his training, his, friends, his family. Doggy knew that Hawkeye was going to be the best surgeon in Spruce Harbor, but he held off for a few months. He figured that even though Hawkeye was getting a fast start the rube medical scene might drive him off. Hawkeye might get disgusted and go back to the Cardia Nostra. Doggy sent Hawkeye a few patients, but he checked the deluge of surgery which be could have unleashed. A special situation finally broke the ice between Doggy Moore and Hawkeye Pierce.
On a morning in December, five months after Hawk’s arrival in Spruce Harbor, Dr. Moore said to Dr. Pierce: “Boy, do you make house calls?”
“I don’t rule them out,” Hawkeye said, “but there’s not a helluva lot a chest surgeon can do at a house except shake hands and eat unless he gets real lucky.”
Doggy gave him a speculative look and asked, “Boy, are you doing anything the rest of the morning?”
“How about riding out to Hump Hill with me and taking a look at a Finch-Brown?”
“Where is Hump Hill and what is a Finch-Brown?”
“Boy, you may have a big league medical education, but you got a lot to learn. Come with me!”
They rode in Doggy’s beat-up four-year-old Chevy station wagon and Doggy started to talk. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to tell you about Hump Hill. Hump Hill is ten miles north of Spruce Harbor. It’s just a mile or so beyond Hump Flats and it overlooks Hump Pond. It’s a sparsely settled area, populated entirely by one of our oldest Maine families, the Finch-Browns. The Finch-Browns have honored me the past thirtyfive years by making me their family physician.”
“Why do you call it Hump Hill, Hump Pond and Hump Flats?” Hawk asked.
“Because those christly Finch-Browns do nothing but hump, eat and drink, morning, noon and night, and there’s more humpin’ than there is eatin’ and they prefer it anyhow. You may think this is bad, but this community has fewer problems than any other in the state. It may be that the rest of the world should study the Finch-Browns very closely and pattern our civilization after theirs, although I doubt it.”
“What problems do they have?”
“As a general rule, only three: poverty, feeblemindedness and venereal disease.”
When Doggy talked he liked to look at his audience and Hawkeye was a little nervous about the driving.
Nevertheless, he asked another question: “How’d you
get to be their doctor?”
“Well, I’ll tell you.”
“I never doubted it.”
“It was over thirty years ago when I first started practice. I had to go down to Fortin’s Funeral Home on Front Street. My old friend Johny Forth still runs it. I had to sign a death certificate. Johnny was busy when I went in and I didn’t want to bother him so I looked the place over. Out in the back room I found a coffin and I opened it.”
Turning toward Hawkeye and ignoring a pulpwood truck, Doggy asked, “What do you think was in that coffin?”
“Beats me.”
“Well, I’ll tell you! it was a muskrat!!”
Dr. Pierce had no time to react before Dr. Moore continued, narrowly missing a large fuel oil truck. “Do you know what that muskrat had on?”
“No.”
“It had on a goddamn tuxedo. Did you ever see a muskrat wearing a tuxedo?”
“Neither had I.”
“What’d you do then?” Hawk asked.
“Gimme time and I’ll tell you. I gotta get past this friggin’ snowplow.”
He passed it on a blind curve, causing a bulk-feed truck to crash into a snowdrift.
“Well, I went out to the office and I found Johnny and I said, Johnny, what kind of a business you running here anyhow? What are you doing with a muskrat dressed up in a tuxedo in that coffin out back?’
“Don’t be so foolish,” Johnny said. “That ain’t no muskrat. That there’s a Finch-Brown, from out back of the moon, out Hump Pond way.”
“You don’t mean to tell me it was human? I ask him.
“I don’t know about that, but it sure as hell was a Finch-Brown.”
“Well,” I said, I’ve heard about them all my life, but where in hell did he get a tuxedo?’ and Johnny told me it was just the front of a tuxedo he pasted onto him. You ever hear the likes of that?” demanded Dr. Moore.
“No,” was all Hawkeye could say as Doggy skidded into the path of another pulp truck.
“How’d you get to be their doctor?” he asked again, after the truck had barely eluded them.
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you if you’d only keep still!”
“It started,” continued Doggy, “right there in that funeral parlor. A bunch of people and kids came in and right off I knew they had to be Finch-Browns.
They don’t all look like muskrats. Some of them actually more closely resemble chipmunks, but they all have pointed heads with ears that leave at right angles.
These are basic characteristics and when you see them you know it’s a Finch-Brown, no matter what they look like otherwise. Anyway, one of the smaller ones was making so much noise breathing that I took a close look and every time he breathed his nostrils dilated like he had no good way to get air in or out of him.
“I says to one of the larger ones, ‘What ails that one there?’ and the larger one kinda grins but don’t say nothing, so I muckle onto
this kid and I pry his mouth open and look at his throat and he’s got tonsils the size of lemons. Now I know you think I’m exaggerating,” Doggy said as he skidded across the center line and faked a milk truck into the ditch, “but this kid’s tonsils were absolutely as big as lemons, and his adenoids weren’t far behind.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I turned to the bunch of big muskrats and I said, I’m taking this one up to the hospital and I’m going to clean out these tonsils and adenoids before he chokes to death.”
“Well,” Doggy continued, “this didn’t mean anything to them, but I took the kid by the hand and led him out to my car. He was perfectly happy to go. The rest of the muskrats didn’t pay any attention. They had a case of beer and were preparing for the funeral. The next day I took the boy’s tonsils and adenoids out. The day after that when I went in to see him he was breathing normally, probably for the first time in his life. Then, by Gawd, that night the Finch-Browns showed up at the hospital to see the patient, but they were half in the .bag and a lot more interested in looking over the hospital than they were in visiting relatives. When they discovered the flush toilets things got completely out of control.”
Doggy dodged a cat, caromed off the snowbank on the wrong side of the road and continued, “When I say completely, I mean completely. For three hours those Finch-Browns did nothing but flush toilets and laugh and scream and holler. They thought a flush toilet was the most remarkable thing they’d ever seen and there’s no question about it: it was. I couldn't do anything with them. Finally I hired a couple of taxicabs, loaded the dumb bastards into them and shipped them back to Hump Hill. I told them I’d bring the kid home when he was ready to come.
“The next day and the day after that I went in to see that kid and he just grinned at me. He was probably five or six years old but he couldn’t talk worth a damn. After three days I asked him if he wanted to go home and he started to cry. I postponed it another day.”
There was a slight catch in Doggy Moore’s loud voice. He coughed and lit a cigarette and went on, “I’m married to one of the most foolish, and make no mistake, boy, when I say foolish, I mean foolish females you’ll ever run across. She’s just as foolish today as the day she married me. The afternoon before the day I was definitely going to take that kid back to Hump Hill, she went into the hospital and took him some toys. She spent two hours with him. I went in to see the kid after office hours and he wasn’t there.
I asked the nurse, Where in hell is that chipmunk?’
“Judy Lane, you know her, was running the ward, even back then. ‘His mother took him home, Doggy,’ says Judy. I tell you I breathed a sigh of relief. I made a house call and got home just in time for supper. As far as I knew all me and that foolish woman had was two kids, but there were three kids at the supper table. Our two and the christless chipmunk.”
Doggy coughed and seemed, for a fleeting moment, lost for words.
“Good God!” Hawkeye said.
“Whaddya mean by that?” Doggy asked.
“You know what I mean, Doggy. I knew Chipmunk Moore in college. I always wondered what the story was.”
“I thought you must be the kid named Pierce that was Chippy’s friend down to Androscoggin College.”
“Gentle Jesus, I’ll never forget the day he went off to join the air force. Chipmunk Moore and five big rugged football players, and Chippy was the only one who made pilot and the only one who didn’t come back. Missing in action in the South Pacific. Right?”
“Yeah, a month before the goddamn war ended,” said Doggy. He was quiet for a moment and went on, “We raised him just like he was our own. I don’t know whether he was the only Finch-Brown with brains ever produced or whether it was just a change in environment. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, now you know why I’m taking you to a house call on Hump Hill.”
The old doctor and the young doctor rode in silence for two miles and indulged in their memories. They passed squalid shacks with snow up to the windows, smoke coming from the chimneys and ragged children playing in the road.
“This here’s Hump Flats,” said Doggy.
“What’s this house call all about?” Hawkeye asked.
“There’s a kid I want you to look at.”
The station wagon climbed Hump Hill and Doggy pulled up in front of a large barnlike structure which looked as though it might collapse at any moment.
“This,” announced Doggy, “is the ancestral home of the Finch-Browns, and incidentally, the birthplace of the late Captain Chipmunk Moore, of the U.S. Army Air Force. Inside you’re going to meet Elihu Finch-Brown. He’s the Chipmunk’s real father.”
Doggy opened the door and they entered a large barracks with a dirt floor, furnished with three old wood stoves, rickety chairs and a variety of bunks, beds and dirty mattresses resting upon the floor itself.
“Gawd,” said Elihu Finch-Brown, “be that you, Doggy?”
“Who the hell did you think it was, you goddamn moron?” replied Doggy.
“I be some glad to see you, Doggy,” replied Elihu. “You got any be-ah?”
“There’s a case in the wagon. Help yourself.”
“You be a goodman, Doggy.”
A girl about sixteen ran up and jumped into Doggy’s arms. “That medicine fixed me right up, Uncle Doggy,” she said. “When you goin’ to gimme a try?”
Doggy came out of the depression he’d brought upon himself by talking about his adopted son. His red face got redder, he laughed his big laugh, pushed the girl away, and said, “Never, dearie, but I got a young friend here who could take care of you.”
Dearie sort of jumped onto Hawkeye but he shoved her away, a trifle reluctantly. “Forget about me, honey. I’m took,” he informed her.
“Elihu,” yelled Doggy, “where’s that kid with the stove-in chest?”
“Around somewhere,” said Elihu, opening a beer. Doggy opened two beers and handed one to Hawkeye.
“Find the kid. Dr. Pierce wants to look at him.”
While they awaited the arrival of the kid with the stove-in chest, Dr. Moore proceeded to hold sick call for the Finch-Browns. He handed out antibiotics, punctured two bulging eardrums, and initiated. the treatment of two cases of gonorrhea.
Finally the prize patient appeared. A chipmunk. No doubt about it. A chipmunk whose breastbone sort of dove down toward his spine, leaving too little room for heart and hungs. He was a sad specimen.
“Whaddya think of that?” asked Dr. Moore.
“What’s this one to Chipmunk Moore?” Hawk asked.
“Nephew, more or less.”
“Throw him in your wagon. I can fix him,” he said.
Several days later, assisted by Dr. Moore, Hawkeye performed a tedious but successful operation on the young Finch-Brown. After three weeks he wrote the order for his discharge. The boy disappeared from the ward. Two weeks later Hawk met Doggy in the corridor and said, “Hey, Doggy, I oughta see that kid from Hump Hill. Any way to get him in here, or should I take a ride out there?”
“Oh, well,” said Doggy. “That won’t be any problem. I’ll have Emma bring him down to your office. She took him home when you discharged him.”
“Who’s Emma?”
“Boy, you oughta live in town where you’d hear the news. Emma’s the goddamn foolish female I’m married to.” Doggy paused for a moment with a faraway look in his eye, pulled himself erect, pointed his finger at Hawkeye and said, “But I want you to know, if she hadn’t, I would’ve.”
5
AFTER the trip to Hump Hill and his successful surgery on the young Finch-Brown, Hawkeye caught Doggy Moore’s surgical deluge. He was extremely busy and was now a man of substance in the medical community. At one of the daily coffee-shop conferences Tony Holcombe said, “Look, Hawkeye, I know that your office in Wooden Leg’s fish factory is free and that Jocko stole all the equipment from the VA. But isn’t it time for you to get off the waterfront and find a real office?”
“I hate offices. You�
��re right, of course, but frankly, I like where I am. I almost think I’d stay there if Wooden Leg didn’t send every dose of clap in Spruce Harbor for a shot of penicillin. I figured if I taught Shine, that fishscaled clown who works for Wooden Leg, how to give shots I’d drive the trade away, but he’s taken to it, and the sufferers have taken Shine to their bosom. So often, in fact, that Shine needs a shot himself about once a week.”
“Really, Hawkeye,” said Tony, “that’s no good. I tell you what. I’m getting more and more patients from Spruce Harbor and I’ve been thinking of moving in here. Why don’t we open an office together?”
“Okay. Where?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps your friend Allcock could make arrangements. He seems good at that sort of thing.”
“I expect Jocko will take care of us. This reminds me. I’m just about as busy as I want to be. I’ve been thinking about trying to find another surgeon. I don’t really have enough work to keep two guys busy, but the time will come. Frankly, I’m thinking in terms of you and me and trained people we bring in taking this town over. How’s the idea grab you?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, we start slowly and feel our way, but the idea is to have someone in every specialty and hope to provide just about every service available in a university hospital. That may sound grandiose, but I think it’s possible. Something to shoot for anyway.”
“Yes, well, of course. Let’s start by getting a decent office and another surgeon, if you feel you can’t keep up.”
M*A*S*H Goes To Maine Page 4