The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Eleanor had lingered in the Grand Parlor with a group of enthusiasts to exclaim over the Doctor’s performance, and Will had left her to wait here alone under the saw-toothed fronds, dipping his boredom into the noxious tea like a crust of stale bread. She came up to him now with a swish of her skirts and emitting a sort of clucking, cooing sound that set his teeth on edge, and already she was gushing on about something—pottery shards, skull fragments, some sort of expedition she was planning with Frank, precious Frank, who stood smiling at her side. “Only for a morning and an afternoon,” she gasped, looking up into his eyes and glancing away again, as if she already knew what she’d discover there and didn’t find it worth examining. “Virginia Cranehill will be going, too. And perhaps Lionel.”

  “Expedition?” he echoed, but she’d already turned away, distracted by a bloated matron in yellow taffeta who just happened to have organized her own deep-breathing club in Milwaukee and would be the happiest thing alive if she could inveigle her way into Eleanor’s group. A further flutter of skirts and they were gone. Will was left alone with Linniman. For lack of an alternative, he gave him a. partial smile.

  Linniman was studying him with a doctorly eye. “Feeling up to snuff lately?” he asked. “Taking to the new dietary?”

  “Food, you mean?” Will said. “Yes. Sure. It’s been proven advisable in the human diet, essential, even, hasn’t it? By all those teams of health professionals and researchers, I mean.”

  Linniman wouldn’t rise to the bait. He just smiled and nodded, his breathing easy, features composed, mind elsewhere. Will had a sudden urge to drive a fist into his physiologic gut and leave him writhing on the floor, but he resisted it. “What’s this expedition Eleanor’s talking about?”

  “Oh, that.” Linniman, who’d been watching someone across the room, came back to him. “My phrenological studies. So much has been done with the modern skull, but hardly anything at all with the ancient. We’ve just found an Indian site—pre-Potawatomi, by all indications—out in the Springfield area, to the west of town. Professor Gunderson—you’ve seen him here, the rachitic little man with the lame leg?—well, he’s been staying with us to combat severe autointoxication, but he’s an archaeologist by trade. He discovered the site. But he’s offered me the opportunity to collect some of the skulls.”

  “And Eleanor?”

  Linniman looked him right in the eye. “I won’t say she’s bored, but it’s been a long winter. I’ve managed to interest her in my work—or hobby, I should say. My proper work is healing, of course.”

  “Of course,” Will agreed.

  “We’re going to determine the intellectual capacities and affective propensities of these bygone Indians as a matter of curiosity—and we’ll preserve the skulls in my collection, that goes without saying. It should be good for her. Fresh air, sunshine.”

  “She’ll be digging, you say?”

  “Oh, no, no.” Linniman let out a tightly controlled little laugh. “Heavens, no. We’ve hired a pair of laborers to do the physical work—neither Professor Gunderson nor Eleanor is in any shape to take on that sort of strenuous activity—not yet, at any rate. Good God, man, you should know that. Do you think I would subject your wife to anything she wasn’t fully prepared for?”

  Will didn’t like the sound of the terminology here: subject your wife. Subject his wife, indeed. He’d like to subject this grinning hyena to some strenuous activity, and it wouldn’t be digging, either. He was rankled, he was irritated, but he let it go. What could he do about it? He could already feel the molten finger poking at the cookie in the frying pan of his stomach, and he wasn’t inclined to physical violence in the best of times. Besides which, Eleanor would do exactly as she pleased, whether he liked it or not. She would go on her expedition, and Will would grit his teeth.

  Of course, if he felt impotent in the current instance, that was the way of the San. Homer Praetz had been right: it was the Doctor’s method to reduce you to dependency, to a second infancy, and if you wanted to get out of diapers you had to put up with his spoon-feeding, with his grapes and sinusoidal currents and his eternal glasses of milk, not to mention his asinine lectures and the rigid segregation of lawfully married couples. But as Will looked at Linniman standing there before him, sinewy and disdainful, symbol and bulwark of everything the San stood for, he felt a surge of independence: Will had a secret. And it had to do with just that—impotence. Not the psychological sort, the sort he’d just suffered at the hands of Eleanor and her dubious “expedition” in the company of three men, at least two of whom were bachelors, or the sort fostered by the pampering, cajoling and browbeating of the San’s staff, but the very real physical impotence he’d inexplicably experienced on that cold November night when Eleanor had invited him to inseminate her.

  It had alarmed him. Terrified him. Made him feel old and used up and deeply ashamed, too. The Great Healer had been no help—he’d thrown it right back in his face, taunted him with it, made him feel depraved and deluded even to think of exercising his marital urges. He had seemed glad that Will was incapable, exultant even. But Will wasn’t glad. Though the condition seemed to come and go in the oddest way and at the oddest times, on the three or four occasions he’d gone back to Eleanor and she hadn’t dismissed him out of hand, he’d had the same problem. He wondered if the whole thing wasn’t connected in some way to his stomach.

  “Care for a cup of Kaffir tea.?” Linniman asked, looking for an excuse to move on.

  “Thank you, no,” Will said, waving the empty cup under Linniman’s nose, “I’ve already had one. And one is plenty—too much, in fact. Way too much.”

  Linniman merely grunted. “Nice talking to you,” he said, already ambling off in the direction of the refreshments.

  What the fair-haired boy didn’t know, or Dr. Kellogg, either, was that Will was striking out on his own. Intrepidly. Courageously. He’d had to overcome his aversion to Sears products and to electrotherapy to boot, but he was desperate, half a man, a eunuch, progenitor of no one and nothing, and one afternoon, browsing through the Sears catalogue in the San library, he’d come across an ad for the Heidelberg Belt. The ad showed a mustachioed gentleman with a decidedly physiologic build, naked but for a pair of undershorts and the electric belt, which he wore just over his navel and which blossomed with bursts of miniature lightning bolts. The lightning bolts—potent, vital, totems of Thor, Zeus, Crazy Horse—were clustered round his front and hips, and, indeed, the product promised relief from “disorders of the nerves, stomach, liver and kidneys,” but what caught Will’s eye was a larger and more detailed representation of the belt at the bottom of the page. Here, one could plainly see the attachment—“the electric sack suspensory”—with its cup for the sexual organs. The same lightning bolts, though drawn more delicately so as not to alarm the potential purchaser, danced round the cup in radiant display.

  Will studied the ad for an hour. Don’t suffer in silence, he read, don’t endure in secret. $18.00 will buy our Giant Power 80-Gauge Current Genuine Heidelberg Electric Belt. $18.00 will bring you health and strength, superb manliness and youthful vigor. Superb manliness and youthful vigor—it was what he wanted, no doubt about it. But the image of Homer Praetz rose up before him, the face distorted in death, the eyes like two poached eggs, the thin useless flap of the severed tongue pinned to his collar like a medal. That was electricity. That was a cure. But it wasn’t so much the current as the medium that had contributed to that tragedy—the water, that is—and there would be no water involved with the Heidelberg Belt; it was hardly a bath apparatus, after all. Will would wear it to bed, removing it at dawn before Irene or Nurse Bloethal could catch sight of it. And it was good for the stomach, too—that’s what the ad said: The Heidelberg Belt, for disorders of the nerves, stomach, liver and kidneys, is worth all the drugs, chemicals, pills, tablets, washes, injections and other remedies put together—and maybe, just maybe, he’d be killing two birds with one stone. It took him an hour, but in the end, Will deci
ded to invest his eighteen dollars and sent for the belt.

  And it was working, too—at least it seemed to be. At least when Nurse Graves was present, in any case. He hadn’t yet tried it out on Eleanor—the thing had come only two weeks ago—but the very first morning, as Irene was administering his morning enema, he felt himself growing hard, embarrassingly so, hard as a steel rod, a baseball bat, a great stiff oak rooted deep in the earth. The moment was inappropriate and he must have colored with shame, but he couldn’t help exulting,” too. He wondered if Irene had noticed and, if she had, what she thought about it. She hadn’t said a word, and he couldn’t very well ask her—or could he? She’d kissed him, after all, deeply, practically melted in his arms, and she’d as much as admitted her affection for him. And what should come after the kiss, if not the caress, and then the act itself? He was ruminating on the situation, still planted beneath the banana tree, the empty cup clutched absently in his hand, when there was a visible stirring in the room—even the rubber plant seemed to stand up and take notice—and Dr. Kellogg, trailed by half a dozen luminaries and dogged by Lionel Badger, made his entrance.

  Eleanor was one of the first to move toward them, as if by force of magnetic attraction, leaving the matron in taffeta to fend for herself. Will couldn’t help smiling on seeing the Doctor, fresh from his triumph among the wolves and the worms, hounded by this rasping fanatic who seemed to have taken the higher moral ground in the contest of vegetarian wills. As the little Doctor called out his greetings, making his way from one smiling group to another, Will almost felt sorry for him. He might have built an empire, might have made health a religion and longevity a sacrament, but he still couldn’t shake crackpots like Badger and competitors like Post, Macfadden and the Phelps brothers—and for all his treatments, for all his vibrating stools and salt-mush rubs and enemas, for all his oceans of herbal tea and mountains of Nuttose, he couldn’t begin to compete with the Heidelberg Belt.

  Will was distracted by the Countess Tetranova, who laid a hand on his arm, peered up myopically out of her vague Russian eyes and asked if he might get her a cup of Kaffir tea. She was a small woman, no bigger than a twelve-year-old boy, or constructed any differently, so far as the eye could see, and her features were invested with the pallor and the blandness of the steppe. Since their Christmas trip to Irene’s family farm, she’d considered Will a great friend, often interrupting his progress through the San to allow him the privilege of fetching her one thing or another. Polite, eternally polite, Will had obeyed her without demur, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about her friendship. She didn’t appeal to him. She was no Miss Muntz, but, then, he had to remind himself that Miss Muntz was no more. If she could be said to exist at all, it was as a bald-headed corpse in a vault of dirt in Poughkeepsie, New York, food for worms, a collection of soup bones gone bad in the icebox. Will had attended the service for her in the Sanitarium chapel. It hadn’t been well advertised—death, after all, was bad for business.

  Will brought the Countess her tea and watched as she took half a dozen tentative little sips, dipping her head to the saucer like a sparrow at the birdbath. “A rich brew,” she said, raising her chin to him, the cup balanced neatly on its saucer. “It never ceases to amaze me how Dr. Kellogg manages to make healthful things so appealing to the palate. Don’t you agree?”

  Will didn’t agree—he violently disagreed, in fact. Boiled turpentine couldn’t have tasted any worse. But it would have been rude to say so, and as the Countess seemed happy in her delusion, he got away with a noncommittal grunt. She didn’t pursue the issue, but instead made some banal comment about the cut of Mrs. Tindermarsh’s dress—”Charming, isn’t it?”—and Will, dutiful and correct, uttered a banality in reply. It was just then that the little group surrounding the Doctor made its way up to them, the Great Healer playing the room like a politician on election eve, patting elbows, chucking chins, whispering confidences into waiting ears. Eleanor was at his left hand, Badger at his right. The Countess fawned; Will tried to look both healthy and pleased to see him.

  “Countess,” the Doctor purred, bowing deeply and taking her hand lightly in his, “a pleasure as always. And I expect that little problem we spoke of last week has corrected itself?”

  The Countess was murmuring her gracious thanks, at length—yes, she was so much better now, just as he’d predicted, but she didn’t want to be accused of symptomitis, so she’d just hold her peace—when the Doctor turned to Will. “And Lightbody,” he breathed, eyeglasses throwing light, a foxy, self-satisfied look stamped into his face, “bearing up, I take it?”

  Will’s reply, sunnily delivered, was lost in the nagging rasp of a Badger tirade on the subject of a petition drive to close down a tannery in Michigan City, Indiana. Badger had been haranguing Eleanor, but now he insinuated himself between Will and the Doctor, grinding on about the stink of the hides, the barbarity of the whole concept—why not just go back to living in caves and get it over with?—and his breath, reeking of garlic—latest thing, keeps the blood flowing and the heart strong—seemed to choke the air from the room. Will could see that the Doctor was irritated, that he couldn’t stand being upstaged, even for a minute—leonine, saintly, Chief of it all, he still didn’t know quite what to do with the vegetable puritan at his side. Will enjoyed the flash of annoyance in the Doctor’s eye, and he egged Badger on, asking a disingenuous question about the antivivisection rally in Cleveland, and as Badger took the thought up and chewed it over, the Doctor made as if to excuse himself.

  He never got the chance.

  All of a sudden, the murmur of polite chitchat that had held the room in its convivial grip fell away to nothing. There was one stunned interval of five seconds during which the only voice to be heard in the room, naked now and unconscious of its nakedness, was Badger’s. All heads had turned to the rear exit, where the kumquat tree wrestled with a scattering of flowering vines and birds of paradise. There was a man there, medium height, unshaven, his hair wildly unkempt, his suit like cheesecloth, smudges of dirt on his visible flesh like deep blue bruises. He clutched a jumble of newspaper under one arm and worked a match-box in trembling hands. And why did he look so familiar? Where had Will seen him?

  Before the murmur could resume, before anyone could say anything, the man—he might have been a boy, actually, still in his teen years; the dirt and dishevelment made it hard to judge—produced a match, crumpled a ball of newsprint, and set it afire. Someone cried out. The flaming ball of paper shot like a rocket over the heads of the crowd, the soft fanning whoosh of the flames sustaining it in its flight. But then the man lit another, and another, and the cry became general. An instant later, as the pyromaniac danced gleefully round the room flinging his missiles to the wind, pandemonium seized the crowd.

  “George!” roared the Doctor, and the Doctor knew him, knew this mindless anarchist with his paper bombs, and now there was a nascent fire among the palm husks in the corner and the woman in yellow taffeta was suddenly fanning a quick bright little jewel of flame at her bodice. People were running. The smell of incineration startled the air. A man in a wheelchair, seated just to one side of the fish pond, collapsed without a word into the reedy murk. Exotic plants were trampled. The exits were clogged. “George!” the Doctor cried. “George!”

  Will stood rooted to the spot. But he reached out a hand for Eleanor, pressed her to him. “My God,” she gasped, her shoulders buried in his chest as women shrieked and Badger gaped and the Doctor, Linniman and a small army of attendants threw themselves into the fray, chasing the interloper like hounds, “what’s happening?”

  It was a good question. Will didn’t know, didn’t have the faintest idea. But judging from the look on the Doctor’s face, he couldn’t help suspecting that the Chief knew all about it.

  Chapter 2

  The Letter

  and the

  Note

  Pressed close to his hammering heart, in the left breast pocket of the very suit in which he’d transported Mrs. Hookstr
atten’s $3,849 from New York, Charlie Ossining carried the letter that had arrived at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s two days earlier. He carried the letter where he could feel it against his flesh, wearing it in the way a monk might wear his hair shirt, in fear and trembling. From the moment it had come, his prospects, which had been dismal enough to begin with, suddenly became superfluous, a dream to be discarded, wadded up and tossed in the rubbish like the rag they used on the spittoons at the Red Onion. He took no notice of the sun, the budding trees, the daffodils, azaleas, dogwood, the greening lawns and pollen-drunk bees—it might just as well have been winter still. As far as he was concerned, it was winter, deepest winter—and what was he going to do?

  He was going to Bender, for one thing. On foot. Head down, moving along with the brisk heedless stride of the soul in torment, and no, he wasn’t wearing the sandwich board, and no, he didn’t feel guilty about it, either. What sense did advertising make if the whole world was crashing down around your ears? Of course he’d gone to Bender the minute the letter arrived, and then again yesterday, and Bender had cooed and hummed and purred and given his assurances and his vows and patted Charlie’s hand and poured out anaesthetic doses of Otard Dupuy and reasoned and remonstrated with him—and what good had it done? None. Zero. Zilch. What was he going to tell Mrs. Hookstratten? How could he face her? He was just rounding the corner at McCamly, brisk-legging it up the street, when he thought of the alternative: not to face her at all. To vanish. Skip town. Poof: the disappearing act. All he had to do was keep walking till he reached the depot, get on the train and ride till the sun exhausted itself.