“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know what you two are up to, but I can make an educated guess. I’ll tell you what’s next. You have three choices: Jimmy goes back to the clinic, he goes to the State Fool Farm or you knock off this foolishness right here and now.”
“Ralph, old boyhood hero,” said Dr. Pierce, “you ain’t gonna send a man with a brain tumor to the Fool Farm?”
Ralph asked Trooper Jordan to leave and assured him that he’d get the situation under control. By this time he was beginning to get the idea and had a drink. Mr. Richards and Dr. Pierce laughed again. Dr. Young got mad. “Hawkeye,” he said, “what’s wrong with you? I know this was your idea. How can you do it?”
“What the hell do you mean, how can I do it?
Whenever anyone in this town gets real sick, the grunts have a Roman holiday. We are just catering to their tastes. Do you realize that, as a result of our labors, a hundred housewives will be happy for a whole week? And their husbands will be happy, and their children will be happy? We are contributing to the morale of the whole county. Criticism from a man of your stature ill becomes you.”
Dr. Ralph Young, although one of the most respected men in Wawenock County, has never been accused of being a stick-in-the-mud. He sipped his drink reflectively, puffed a cigar and asked, “Okay, what’s our next move?”
“Let’s hold off till Jimmy goes to the clinic for his checkup,” suggested Hawkeye. “That’s another couple weeks. We’ll have time to make plans. Taking him back to Spruce Harbor will soothe public indignation and allow for maximum enjoyment of the next attack.”
Two weeks later snow began late Saturday afternoon and continued all night. By morning, eighteen inches had fallen. Mr. James Richards, druggist and golf pro, went to his store at nine o’clock Sunday morning. He arrived on a sled, hauled by a team of huskies. Cradled in his arm was a shotgun. An hour later, Dr. Pierce, having braved the drifting snow and driven up from Crabapple Cove to get the Sunday Telegram, walked into the drugstore. Jimmy grabbed the shotgun. Hawkeye ran down the main street. Jimmy leaped onto the dog sled and took off in hot pursuit. He fired once. Hawkeye rolled in the snow but got up. Jim fired again. Dr. Pierce fell again and didn’t get up. Jimmy loaded him aboard the sled and to the gathering throng he announced, “Got him this time. No question about it.” Jimmy, the dog team and their grisly cargo disappeared into the storm.
A mile down the road the dogs were returned to their owner, and Hawkeye drove Jim to Spruce Harbor.
Again a search was instituted by concerned citizens, who found Hawkeye Pierce ice fishing on Muscongus Lake that afternoon.
“Took two slugs through the heart, but I heal fast,”
Hawk informed them.
The Methodist minister stepped forward. “I demand an explanation of this,” he demanded.
“Well, that’s right neighborly of you, Parson, but I’m not in a conversational mood. If you got a complaint, why don’t you see the chaplain?”
“Dr. Pierce, I want to know what this is all about,” Reverend Fraser insisted.
“Beats me, Dad,” was all the answer he got from Dr. Pierce, who pulled up a big pickerel.
A week later Jimmy came home, off all medication. Further tests revealed nothing that was either diagnostic or frightening. Spearchucker could not explain the previous trouble but hoped, in a doubtful way, that a brain tumor was no longer a possibility. Word ifitered back that Jimmy had undergone dangerous but highly effective treatment and would soon be well.
Hawkeye Pierce was interrogated whenever he appeared locally. “How’s Jimmy?” he was asked one night in the drugstore.
“He’s gonna be okay. The problem’s solved.”
“What’d they do?”
“They found the trouble was all in his umbilicus and removed it. Always works in this kind of case.”
“Will that affect him in any way?” asked the Port Waldo librarian, an authority on medical subjects.
“Sure as hell will, Agnes,” Hawkeye assured her. “If he wants to, eat celery in bed, he’ll have to find another place to put the salt!”
Hawkeye and Spearchucker discussed Jimmy Richards till he came out of their ears and the only answer, in view of negative or equivocal findings and good response to nondescript medication, was: Wait and see. They waited till April and then Jimmy had another convulsion. A bad one. Back to Spruce Harbor General he went and all the tests were repeated. This time the arteriogram was less normal than before but still not abnormal in a definitive way.
The whole gang, Pierce, Jones, Forrest and Holcombe hacked it over in the coffee shop one morning. Spearchucker kept saying, “If I go to where that arteriogram says to go in his brain, I’m going to screw up his golf swing. I have to admit, I just don’t know what to do. Maybe we should send him to Boston.”
“I’ve already suggested that to Jimmy,” said Hawkeye. “His reply, and I quote him verbatim, was, ‘I’m gonna stick with the nigger.’ I’m sure you are touched.”
“Deeply.”
“Perhaps,” offered Tony Holcombe, “we should do a GM test.”
“What is that?” asked Spearchucker, while Hawkeye and Duke pondered the idea.
“A consultation with Goofus MacDuff. He loves to be called in consultation and really gives it his all and invariably comes up with the wrong answer. The trick is to get his recommendation and then do precisely the opposite.”
“I don’t know,” mused Dr. Pierce. “The Goofus test has always worked out pretty well, but we’ve used it as kind of a joke. The idea doesn’t quite grab me in this case.”
“Let me tell y’all something,” said Duke, who’d been very quiet up until now. “Goofus is one-eighth genius and seven-eighths moron. Every now and then the genius part comes out and Goofus touches every base until he comes to home plate, which he misses by an inch. He can, and I wouldn’t believe it at first, be smart for a while before the moron takes over. Let’s do the GM test.”
Dr. Goofus MacDuff was asked to see Jimmy Richards who submitted to this investigation only because of his lifelong friendship with Hawkeye Pierce. Goofus devoted the best part of three days to reviewing the case and the literature on the subject and examining the patient. Then he dictated a four-page consultation.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Spearchucker after two readings. “I just wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Why?” asked Hawk.
“This guy has done a beautiful job of analyzing and defining this case.”
“But in the last paragraph,” said Hawkeye, “I guarantee he blew it. What’d he recommend?”
“Conservative treatment. No surgery.”
“Put Jimmy on the schedule, Chucker. Let’s crack his goddamn head open and get it over with.”
Spearchucker removed a deeply situated benign tumor from the left side of Jimmy’s brain. This stopped the convulsions but left Jimmy partially paralyzed on the right side. Dr. Jones could not predict how much coordination would return but definitely stated that with time, physiotherapy and determination, there was hope of improvement.
But Dr. Jones did not fully understand that Jimmy Richards was on this earth only to play golf. By mid-August Mr. Richards, although still riding the golf cart, could walk from the golf cart to the bail and hit the ball well enough to break ninety. This was a physical and psychic breakthrough for Jimmy. Always a competitor, he wanted to play Hawkeye a buck Nassau if Hawkeye would give him three shots a side.
“I’ll never give a pro strokes,” said Hawkeye. “I don’t care if you had six brain tumors.”
7
AS the opening of the Finestkind Clinic and Fishmarket grew closer, Hawkeye, Duke and Spearchucker did all they could to lure Trapper John McIntyre into the Spruce Harbor web. Trapper, at first, wouldn’t even listen, but he did visit occasionally and there were hints that he could be reached. Late one night, perhaps overcome by nostalgia he said: “You guys find the dough to build a cardiovascular surgical unit into your new hospital and
find me a good-looking broad and I’ll give it some thought.”
Hawkeye figured he had the broad, Lucinda Lively, but how to get enough money to put Trapper in business was something else. He considered the Allcock-Wilcox gambling syndicate but rejected it as a source of cash. Cardiac surgery was still too risky to make book on. One day in March he had lunch with George Cogswell of the Hamilton Foundation, a Boston-based philanthropy which provided money for medical progress in northern, rural New England. George, the foundation’s traveling money-dispenser, had provided a big bundle for the new Spruce Harbor General Hospital because, he told his superiors, Spruce Harbor had several highly trained young specialists and more would come.
George Cogswell and Hawkeye were good friends. George, who had spent one summer as pro at a small club in New Hampshire, always had his golf clubs with hm and usually beat Hawkeye, but Hawkeye didn’t mind because every time he played with George he conned him for more money for the new hospital.
At this March luncheon, Hawkeye said: “George, if you’ll pop for another two hundred grand, we can get one of the country’s best young heart surgeons to come to Spruce Harbor. How about it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said George. “You couldn’t possibly find the oases. You’d need at least fifty a year. Oh, Hawkeye, it’s out of the question.”
“Baby, nothing’s out of the question. I’ll get to you, but let it go for now.”
That evening on his way home to Crabapple Cove, Hawkeye picked up a hitchhiker, his great-uncle Lewis Pierce, a seventy-year-old lobsterman who lived in The Solid Rust Cadillac at the very end of Pierce Road and on the very edge of the Medomak River. In 1959, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Mr. Pierce was the only citizen of the State of Maine living in a 1940 Cadillac. Mr. Pierce had lost his license for drunken driving in 1956 but continued to drive until 1958 when, almost simultaneously, his shack burned to the ground and the Cadillac gave up. Lewis Pierce pushed it down to the shore, at the head of his wharf, and moved in. He shared the Cadillac with selected seagulls. Mr. Pierce and seagulls got along very well.
Most seventy-year-old lobstermen are just seventy-year-old lobstermen, but Lewis Pierce has an alter ego. An eleven handicapper, he is a charter member of the Wawenock Harbor Golf Club where he is known as Lew the Jew. There are several theories about the name. When Hawkeye was very young he theorized that the membership, having no Jews to exclude but nurturing unrequited and at the same time a somewhat guilty feeling of anti-Semitism, had appointed his Uncle Lewis as the Club Jew, thereby serving an emotional need. As time went by, Hawkeye decided that the membership simply liked euphonious names. Whatever the reason, Lewis Pierce was known to the elite of golf throughout Maine as Lew the Jew and to his golfing intimates he was just plain “Jew.”
“Hi, Jew,” said Hawkeye, as his great-uncle settled down beside him. “How they goin’?”
“Finestkind. By Jesus, this weather keeps up we’ll soon be out theah.”
“That reminds me, Uncle. Last year I was giving you three shots every nine holes and I was losing money. You figure I’m rich because I’m a doctor, but nobody in his right mind would give you three shots and this year I’ll give you two at the most.”
“I’ll make a deal with yuh,” replied Lew the Jew. “I’m gittin’ tired of all the talk about how I ain’t dressed like no real golfer. You git me some fancy golf clothes and I’ll play you for just two shots.”
Hawkeye agreed to consider his uncle’s request and Saturday afternoon he found in his attic: a pair of yellow Bermuda shorts, a multicolored striped shirt that may have been made out of a beer joint tablecloth, a pair of purple golf shoes with big anterior flaps (donated by a grateful but misguided patient) and a round tasseled tartan golf cap. In all, an ensemble which might go unnoticed at Kiamesha Lake but would get a man put away at the Wawenock Harbor Golf Course. Hawkeye and Big Benjy Pierce visited Uncle Lewis to deliver the clothes. Big Benjy had a fifth of Old Bantam whiskey to which he and Lew the Jew gave their undivided attention, so Hawkeye left.
That night Port Waldo, a political affiliate of Crabapple Cove, had a town meeting. Town meeting always comes at the end of the winter, when everyone is on edge, and provides the citizens with an opportunity to vent their spleens, disgorge their accumulated cabin-fevered frustrations and make general nuisances of themselves.
Late afternoon had brought clouds, cold and snow, which didn’t reduce attendance at the meeting. Everyone had an axe to grind so they got there. Myrtle Fraser, the Methodist minister’s wife, was a leading annual vocalist. She had a loud, uninformed, but definite opinion on every issue.
After unleashing a tirade against the Superintendent of Schools, who said the town couldn’t afford a course in Bible study, Myrtle sat down. Next to her was a late arrival, Lew the Jew Pierce, clad in yellow Bermuda shorts, a many-striped shirt, a round, gaily tasseled cap and purple golf shoes. Slung over his shoulder was a bag of golf clubs. Lew reached into the bag, came out with a pint of Old Bantam, took a big pull, breathed a sigh of satisfaction and cheap whiskey at Myrtle Fraser and said: “Gawd, Myrtle, I thought I might hit a few but she’s a snowin’ too jeezly ha’hd.”
Then, remembering his manners, Lew held the pint in front of Myrtle. “Shot?” he offered.
Having outraged the minister’s wife with his ungodly behavior, Lew went on to an outstanding evening. Competent observers felt that possibly he’d surpassed his performance of 1927 when he’d attempted to kill the only three Democrats in town. In 1927 the Sheriff had booked him for “failure of attempted homicide” and let him go as soon as he sobered up. In 1959 the authorities were not as lenient and kept him in the county jail until his loving nephew, Dr. Pierce, bailed him out on Monday afternoon.
Hawkeye, over the weekend, devised a plan that included Lew the Jew for squeezing two hundred grand out of George Cogswell. He knew that George had the loot and that he had to give it to someone. A little hospital at Parsonsville, father down east, wanted the two hundred grand and had made an eloquent, superficially reasonable appeal. George really wanted to give the money to Parsonsville, but Hawkeye had shaken him when he said: “George, you’d be doing more for good medicine and for the public if you burned that joint in Parsonsville to the ground and found two young guys to go down there to practice and send their trouble to Spruce Harbor.”
“Don’t you think that rural areas deserve to: have hospitals?” asked George.
“They deserve to have high-class combined nursing home-hospitals and facilities for the care of minor emergencies but, for the very sick, they should be no more than pit stops. Those guys practicing up in Parsonsville are nice guys but they don’t know much. You give them two hundred grand and you put medical care in that area back twenty years.”
“On the other hand,” said George, “you want two hundred grand just so you can get a buddy down here to practice a way-out specialty.”
“True. I don’t deny that cardiac surgery is a wild idea for Spruce Harbor. Think a little, though. Trapper John is a smart guy who is a pro in a very fast league. We’ll find work for him and the attention his act would bring to the hospital would attract money from other sources, like the goverment and the rich old broads who come here for the summer.”
After springing his Uncle Lewis, still dressed for golf, from the county jail, Hawkeye stopped at a grocery, and bought a cold six-pack, knowing that his relative would be a mite parched. “Have a brew, Jew,” he said as soon as they’d passed the State Police barracks. “I hear you had a big night. Your uniform appears slightly rumpled.”
“Son of a howah,” Lew stated.
“Is that a brief, lucid, vivid, terse commentary on things in general, or do you have someone specifically in mind?” asked Hawkeye.
“Huh?” asked Lew, as he drained one can and reached for another.
“Look, Jew. I got an assignment for you. In a month or so I’m going to bring a guy over to Wawenock to play golf and I want you along and I want you to shoot n
o less than eighty-eight or more than ninety-two.”
Lew, of course, wanted to know it all so Hawkeye gave his uncle some idea of what was going on. By the time they reached The Solid Rust Cadillac where a gaggle of cacophonous gulls greeted their master, Lew the Jew had committed himself, body and soul, to the establishment of a cardiovascular surgical department at Spruce Harbor General Hospital.
The next step was to line up Lucinda Lively. Hawkeye realized that this would require a delicate touch. Her participation might be necessary, or it might not be, but it would help. Lucinda, he knew, was happy in her present situation, but she very much wanted Trapper John to come to Spruce Harbor. George Cogswell, a tall, dark-haired, handsome bachelor, liked girls and Lucinda Lively liked men so Hawkeye hoped that he could blend all this into a useful public-spirited plan.
After office hours one day, Hawkeye asked Lucinda Lively: “How was your date with Trapper John the last time he was up? I’ve been meaning to ask but haven’t had a chance.”
Lucinda blushed. “What are you asking?”
“To be specific, I want to know how anxious you are to have him come to Spruce Harbor. I also want to know, quite specifically, if you’d try a little seduction on George Cogswell in order to get Trapper John to come to Spruce Harbor. I also want to know whether, if Trapper comes, you have an idea now, of whether you’d consider marrying him, sooner or later.”
“Is that all you want to know?”
“Yeah. I guess that covers it.”
Lucinda, the lovely blonde, cried. Hawkeye waited for the shower to pass. After a huge sob, she asked, “What makes you think Trapper would marry me?”
“Don’t make me explain, but I know that if Trapper comes, it’ll be partly because he wants you. He knows that you’re the broad I’ve lined up for him and he knows how I feel about you so regardless of his big talk, he won’t come unless he considers marriage a possibility. Obviously, neither of you would be committed but Trapper knows I’ll clean his clock if he treats you like just another broad.”
M*A*S*H Goes To Maine Page 7