M*A*S*H Goes To Maine

by Richard Hooker

  “He does, does he? So what’s this about going to bed with George Cogswell?” Lucinda asked.

  “I’m going to con George into a golf match with my uncle, Lew the Jew, and if George loses he’s going to give us the two hundred grand Trapper needs to get in action. George can beat Lew, easy, so’ I’m arranging some distractions, one of which is you. I want you to caddy for him and I want him to think that if he loses you’ll give him a roll in the hay. George is a pretty horny guy. I figure if you’re there in the least clothing the weather allows, George may think too much to hit the ball.”

  Lucinda looked at Hawkeye as though he’d slapped her in the face. “You want me to be a howah?” wailed Lucinda.

  “No, honey,” said Hawkeye. “I’ll keep you out of bed with George if you’ll just go along with the idea.

  Think of what you’d be doing for the hospital and you know damn well that Trapper won’t come without the two hundred grand. Of course you might catch Trapper even if he doesn’t come here.”

  “I don’t want him unless he comes here,” said Lucinda.

  In early May Hawkeye casually invited George Cogswell to the Wawenock Harbor Golf Course for a round of golf with Lew the Jew Pierce. The day was sunny, the south wind was warm, the fairways were drying out and George ate Wawenock alive. Seventy-two. Lew shot eighty-eight. Later George told Hawkeye that Lew the Jew’s golf swing reminded him of Sugar Ray winding up for a bolo punch.

  Over drinks at home in Crabapple Cove, Hawkeye said: “Hey, babe, you kind of clocked the Jew today. Do you think you could do it for two hundred grand?”

  “I knew it. I just knew it, you son of a bitch. You’re setting me up for something.”

  “It’s very straightforward. I want a shot at the two hundred grand. I understand your position. But, will you give it a go? Eighteen holes, head to head, against Lew the Jew. If you win, Parsonsville gets the dough.

  If you lose, we get it for the cardiovascular unit and, to sweeten it, you get to spend the night with Lucinda Lively.”

  “What?” said George, nearly choking on his drink.

  “Simple. Lucinda’s interested in you. I’m going to test your mettle. Your handicap is if you win you lose a great piece of tail, at least for that night. After that, of course, you can make your own arrangements. George, I look upon this as a real character builder for you.”

  “Do you seriously think,” asked George, “that I’d blow a golf match and make a decision about two hundred grand just for a piece of tail?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hawkeye, grinning, “but I want to find out.”

  George, who wouldn’t have been employed by the Hamilton Foundation if he weren’t a very straight arrow, was quite incensed at this proposition. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking seriously of dumping Parsonsville, but you just made up my mind. Sure, I’ll play Lew the Jew and I’m just likely to get the loser’s bonus after I’ve won. Hawkeye, you’re never going to see that two hundred grand.”

  “Okay if Doggy Moore and I play along with you and the Jew? Maybe give us a few blows, me and the Jew’ll play you and Doggy a buck Nassau. Oh, did I tell you Lucinda’s going to be your caddy?”

  “Anything you say. Do we eat tonight or just drink?”

  When the great day came George Cogswell showed up at Wawenock Harbor Golf Course full of confidence. He’d had a date, the night before, with Lucinda Lively, who had been very congenial.

  Lucinda Lively, George’s caddy, brought Little Eva, and explained that, should the usually accurate George stray, Eva would find his ball. Half A Man Timberlake, an experienced caddy, had been hired to work for Lew the Jew. Jocko Allcock, a prominent local sportsman, was Hawkeye’s caddy and Doggy Moore rode his peculiarly equipped golf cart.

  On the first tee Hawkeye Pierce watched Lucinda Lively, scantily clad in the shortest shorts and with just a token strip across her bosom, and, wondering if he could swing the club, was assailed, momentarily, by self-doubt. Never doubt, he told himself. Onward. Balls in the air. Hawkeye, Lew the Jew, Doggy Moore hit routine; safe drives on Wawenock’s fairly easy first hole, a 340-yard par four from an elevated tee. George Cogswell teed up his ball, asked the half-naked Lucinda, who stayed closer than the average caddy, to ask Little Eva not to hang quite so close and topped his drive. He didn’t complain, but he was aware that a flock of nearby seagulls had greeted the start of his swing with loud cries and squawks.

  “You’d have made a great conductor,” Hawk told his uncle, as they walked down the fairway.

  “Ayuh,” agreed Lew the Jew, who halved the hole with George Cogswell. On the second hole he showed the expertise which old-time Maine golfers knew about but which George Cogswell hadn’t seen. The second, a long, difficult dogleg to the right, called for two carefulIy placed shots if one hopes to be on in two. Lew the Jew’s second shot was a four wood, which nestled in ten feet from the pin. George, hitting a seven iron, was ten yards short of the green. Just as the golfers and perhaps a dozen interested followers approached the green, all heard a shrill whistle. Out of nowhere a big gray seagull swooped down on Lew the Jew’s ball, took it in his beak, flew toward the ocean and dropped the ball in a sand trap.

  “By the Jesus,” exclaimed Lew the Jew.

  There was hurried consultation and everyone reached the same conclusion. You play them where they lie, and Lew’s ball quite obviously lay in a sand trap to the right of the green.

  “That ain’t fayuh,” commented Lew, who blasted out and two-putted, but George had chipped in close so his opponent was one down.

  The third hole, a long par three, was halved when George missed a tricky four-footer for his par. As the group walked to the fourth tee, which had a densely wooded area behind it, Dr. Doggy Moore announced, “I got an appointment. I gotta sigmoidoscope Zeke Simmons. I won’t be long.” Doggy drove his golf cart down the bumpy path behind the tee and soon the athletes and their entourage heard: “Goddamn it, Zeke, get your ass up on that rock and bend your legs up onto your chest. I told you if you couldn’t get to the office, don’t complain. I got a match to play. I ain’t got all day.”

  On the tee, Little Eva stared balefully at George Cogswell who, one up and still confident, was annoyed that he’d missed a short putt but soothed by Lucinda Lively who hung close and exuded warmth and the promise of things to come. There was a sudden corn-motion behind the tee. Jocko Allcock appeared, half-leading, half-dragging Half A Man Timberlake, who was jumping up and down and saying over and over:

  “Me too. Me too!”

  “What the hell’s going on?” asked Hawkeye.

  “No problem. Half A Man thinks he wants to get sigmoidoscoped but hell be okay in a minute.”

  “Son of a howah,” observed Lew the Jew.

  The fourth is a par five, a long dogleg around a tidal inlet which at high tide is full of water and at low tide is a big mud flat. A drive to the right side of the fairway followed by anything from a five iron to a three wood across the inlet, depending on the wind, will get a good golfer home in two and set up an easy bird. George Cogswell put his drive in position and had only to decide whether to hit a three or four iron to the green. Lew the Jew, short off the tee, elected to play safe, so his second shot was calculated to set up a six or seven iron third shot.

  Little Eva and Lucinda Lively watched their herd as he pondered the three or four iron. “Miss the shot, George,” suggested Lucinda Lively. “I need you and I don’t want to wait.”

  Before the match Lucinda Lively had told Hawkeye she’d try to psyche George out of the match and if he lost she would have to depend on Hawkeye’s promise. Therefore Hawkeye watched George’s caddy on the fourth hole and his thought was that George, whether he went for a three or four iron, would be lucky to hit the ball. George did hit it, but it went into the drink.

  “Oh, honey, I can’t wait,” said Lucinda Lively.

  George and Lew the Jew halved five and six, and were still all even after eight holes, partly because the Jew was o
n top of his game and partly because Lucinda Lively and Little Eva distracted George just enough to keep Lew in contention. Hawkeye had debated whether to save operation amputation for the ninth or the eighteenth hole. Finding a group of slow-playing summer complaints on the ninth tee, Hawkeye quickly decided that now was the time to shake George Cogswell and provide the Jew with a one-up lead at the end of nine.

  Hawkeye, the suave, engaging surgeon, approached the summer complaints, a pair of middle-aged married couples, explained that an important match was in progress and asked their permission to go through.

  Permission was granted gracefully. Just as George Cogswell went into his waggle and was about to start his backswing, there was a loud cry of “Help” from the left side of the narrow tree-lined fairway. Continuing to yell “Help,” Wooden Leg Wilcox, who can go fairly quickly for a few yards, burst from the woods and started across the fairway, perhaps forty yards in front of the tee. Behind him, in hot pursuit, were Spearchucker Jones and his brother-in-law, a defensive tackle with the Forty-Niners, who was carrying a chain saw.

  “What on earth is going on?” demanded a male summer complaint.

  “Hard to tell,” answered Hawkeye. “Five bucks says the coons nail him before he gets to the other side of the fairway.”

  “Somebody do something,” suggested George Cogswell.

  “I don’t believe we should interfere in a private quarrel. Of course, George, if you’d like to do something, go right ahead,” Hawkeye said.

  Within five yard’s of the woods to the right of the fairway, Wooden Lag Wilcox was caught by Spearchucker, who pinned him to the ground while his brother-in-law, to the tune of “Help, murder, save me,” applied the chain saw to his right leg.

  “My God, my God,” wailed a female summer complaint, and echoed George’s suggestion: “Somebody do something.”

  “Somebody be,” Lew the Jew informed her. “Them two niggahs is sawin’ that fella’s leg off.”

  “Probably some sort of civil right’s disagreement,” said Hawkeye. “Shouldn’t take long. Looks like a new chain saw.”

  “Now you mention it,” Jocko Allcock chimed in, “we’re pretty goddamn lucky round heah. Goddamn little racial tension.”

  “Call a doctor,” screamed a female golfer.

  “At your service, ma’am,” offered Doggy Moore. “I’m a physician. In what way may I be of help?”

  The female golfer fainted and Doggy took appropriate therapeutic measures while Spearchucker dragged his dismembered Victim into the forest. His brother-in-law disdainfully threw the amputated leg into the woods, set the chain saw to rest on the edge of the fairway, and approached the golfers.

  “Awfully sorry if we disturbed your game,” he said apologetically. “I play myself and I realize that this sort of thing may be upsetting. Hope we didn’t hold you up too long.”

  “Perfectly all right,” said Hawkeye. “I presume you know what you’re doing, but there is one thing. If this ever happens again, I hope you’ll have your victim yell ‘fore,’ rather than ‘help’ or ‘murder.’ Whether you realize it or not, there are very strict rules of etiquette on the golf course, and in my opinion you have broken several of them. Were you a member. I would bring you before the grievance committee.”

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” said the defensive tackle, who departed with a hangdog air.

  “Now,” said Hawkeye, “I hope that satisfies everyone. You heard me tell him where to head in. Hit the ball, George.”

  George barely hit it for the next two holes, but he managed to win the eleventh and twelfth, pulling even again with Lew the Jew. When they’d played the fourth hole the first time around Doggy’d done a sigmoidoscopy and the cove had been half full of water. Now the tide was gone and Lew, instead of aiming down the fairway, took dead aim at the green, two hundred and fifty yards of fairway, bushes and mud flats from the tee.

  “Great Baldheaded, Unrevised, North American Protestant Jesus Christ! What’s that foolish bastard figurin’ to do?” asked Jocko quietly.

  “He’s trying to hit that sand bar in the middle of the cove. It’s not out of bounds, and he could get on from there with a wedge. I’ve seen him do it before.”

  Lew the Jew hit the ball a ton, maybe a hundred and eighty yards, and whistled as the ball landed on the elevated ridge of sand. The big gray gull swooped down, picked it up, flew to the green and dropped it two feet from the cup.

  “Son of a howah!” said Lew the Jew.

  “Great drive, Jew,” said Hawkeye. “I never seen you so long off the tee.”

  George Cogswell stood on the tee, gulping like a frog. He knew from here on in be didn’t have a chance.

  “Okay,” said George. “I’m not stupid. I’m tired of golf. Hawk, you got the two hundred grand. Lucinda and I have some business, don’t we, honey?”

  “Oh, yes, George, Let’s get it going.”

  As George, Lucinda and Little Eva left for the clubhouse, Hawkeye said to his uncle, “I hadn’t anticipated such a sudden conclusion. That Jewish duck of yours has a lot of talent.”

  “By Jesus, Hawk,” said his uncle, “they got a nice ’49 Caddy in to Strong’s garage for only four hundred dollar. You know I been thinkin’ of gittin’ me a mobile home and givin’ the Solid Rust Cadillac to the gulls.”

  “Go get it, Jew,” said his nephew. “I’m buying.”

  Before the golf game, Hawkeye had given Lucinda a large black capsule and said, “After the match, George will probably take you to the Spruce Harbor Motel for drinks and dinner. Swallow this before your first drink and don’t have over three.”

  The next morning George Cogswell stopped at the hospital to see Hawkeye.

  “How was it, George?” asked Hawk. “Pretty good?”

  “Lucinda Lively has the wrong name,” said George.

  “Her name should be Sleeping Beauty, and you, Pierce, are a low-down, cheating fornicator of swine.”

  8

  HAWKEYE Pierce had no interest in contributing to the morass of medical literature, to what he called the Journals of Unnecessary Research. But, now and then, he spent three consecutive nights writing about a case that interested, helped or hurt him. He wrote for fun, to reinforce his psyche, or to escape the reality of people dying of cancer, maybe somehow to find some sense in it, somewhere.

  The Maine Medical Journal, like all minor and most major medical journals, is devoted to distillations of other medical writing, cloudy, meaningless investigations of subjects discussed clearly elsewhere or scientifically suspect analyses of rare cases. Therefore, Hawkeye was not surprised to get a letter from Hank Manley, Secretary of the Maine State Medical Society and Editor of the Maine Medical Journal, asking if Hawkeye would be interested in doing a paper on cancer of the trachea or windpipe.

  One week later Hawkeye wrote Hank Manley a note and sent a story with it. The note said:

  Dear Hank:

  If there are two cases a year of carcinoma of the trachea in the State of Maine, I’d be surprised. So, I don’t think a “paper” on this subject would be a major contribution. However, I just happen to have had a case of carcinoma of the trachea. What I’ve written ain’t a paper. It’s the story of Moose Lord. What little there is to know about carcinoma of the trachea you can look up, and good luck to you. I don’t expect you to print the story of Moose Lord in the Maine Medical Journal, nor would I want you to, but I thought you might like to read it. Here it is.

  THE SOUND OF THE MOOSE

  Everyone who’s lobstered in Muscongus Bay in the last thirty-five years has heard the Sound of the Moose. On still, Doggy mornings out in the bay the silence is punctuated by a variety of familiar sounds: the cry of seagulls; the murmur of surf as gentle morning swells meet rocky island shores; the whack-whack of make-and-break engines in lobster boats, and, when I was a boy, the Sound of the Moose, which came rolling across the water and through the fog like a voice from another world. It was a deep, booming, but lulling call, a welcome, happy, comforting so
und. If one listened carefully, he could make out the words:

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful river,

  Gather with the saints at the river

  That flows by the throne of God.

  When my father Big Benjy Pierce and I heard it, we’d pause for a moment, smile and go back to work. Sometimes the old man would say, “The Sound of the Moose is heard on the sea,” and usually add, “I wish Moose would pay more attention to lobsterin’ and less to hymn singin’.”

  The Moose was Jonas Lord. Jonas lived in a one-room shack on Indian island on the south side of. Crabapple Cove. Only at high tide is it a real island. At low tide a reef of mud and rock connects it to the mainland. When I visited Jonas as a kid, I walked, swain or rowed Big Benjy’s skiff, depending on the tide, the time of year or the mood l was in. Jonas was a big, tall, bull-necked guy with wide, sloping shoulders. He had an expressive, happy face, which reflected humor, kindness, understanding and love for everything. Sometimes confusion and blankness seemed to take over but never for long. The physical sum of Jonas Lord was a man who had to be nicknamed Moose. Moose particularly loved kids, and all kids loved him.

  The Moose lobstered and clammed. He read the Bible, but not too well. He couldn’t read anything too well. He played the fiddle and sang at Saturday-night dances. He sang in his shack on Indian Island and in his lobster boat and in church every Sunday. Some of his scant income was spent on food and some on gasoline for his boat. The little left over was spent on kids. For five years he bought me a book every month.

  Thinking back, I can’t be sure that Jonas Lord thought any more of me than he did of the others, but I hung around him more and required more of him. He taught me secrets of lobstering and clamming that some people in the business still don’t know. I sat in his shack for hours while he carved ship models and told me stories of the sea and Crabapple Cove. When I graduated from high school he gave me a model of a clipper ship. As I sit here and write I can look up and see it on my mantelpiece.