The Road to Wellville

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The Road to Wellville Page 51

by T. Coraghessan Boyle


  For a long while he lay there on his back in a clump of sumac, watching the swallows flit in and out of their nests in the ovens, his heartbeat winding down, the afternoon softening into evening. They wouldn’t look for him here. They’d look on the roads, in the ditches, they’d prowl the Grand Trunk depot and the Michigan Central, poke through the refuse out back of the Red Onion and post a man outside the shabby building where he had his room. Here he was safe. Who’d even notice the place? Who even knew it was here? It was an eyesore, a monument to failure, the sort of place the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A. would just as soon forget.

  He was safe for the moment, but where did that leave him? His hands were shackled, he was a thousand miles from New York, he had no wallet, no money, no watch, no food. And he was hungry, the first hot hard tug of necessity clutching at his insides even now. He’d had an egg and some toast at a tavern that morning, too excited about his prospects to hold much down, and he hadn’t done anything more than rearrange the mattress stuffing they’d served up at the luncheon. The luncheon. The thought of it started up his breathing again, made his scalp twitch uncontrollably and sent something fluttering up his throat—but how the world had changed since the morning, how everything golden and shining had turned to shit. And was it only this morning? It seemed like ten years ago.

  The sun held him in its grip, cupped him and held him, and despite himself, he dozed off. When he woke, it was as if no time had passed at all—the sun seemed to hang steady on the wall above him, and he guessed it must have been about five-thirty or six. Birds were pouring syrup into the air, crickets conspired, there was no sound of deputies or hounds or anything else, and nothing had changed. He was still shackled, still hungry, still at large. If he moved, it would be under cover of darkness, and it would be for one purpose only: to steal into a garage somewhere and make off with a hammer and chisel. He saw himself coming back here—leaving to scrounge food, maybe, from a smokehouse, an open kitchen, the trash, even—but always coming back here to sit within these blackened walls and wait on and on until they forgot he’d ever existed….

  But what was that?

  He shrank into the ground. Held his breath.

  A voice, a human voice, rasping and whispery, talking to itself—or, no, singing:

  With the birds and the trees,

  And sweet-scented breezes,

  Good old summertime,

  When your day’s work is over,

  Then you are in clover,

  And life is one beautiful rhyme!

  Cracked, drunken, obscene, the voice rose up over the lyrics as if it were raping them, eviscerating them, turning them inside out, and then there was a pause and it repeated the same verse again, once, twice, a third time. Charlie lay there, wrapped in a cocoon of fear, afraid to breathe, and it wasn’t until the fourth repetition that he began to appreciate how his luck had changed. This was no ordinary concert he was enjoying, no usual drunk—George, it was George. Of course it was. With no one to pay his rent, Mrs. Eyvindsdottir had put him back out on the street, and he’d come home to his hovel under the flight oven. Sure he had. Where else would he go?

  The knowledge invigorated Charlie; gave him new life—George would help him. If there was one person in the whole godforsaken dollar-crazed right-living town who would be able to straighten him out, it was George. Charlie rose up tentatively from his hiding place and tiptoed through the rubble in the direction of the sound. He found George slouched atop an outcropping of ruined machinery, a bottle between his legs, his face raised to the sun. “And life is one beautiful rhyme!” he howled, yelping at the words like a bitch in heat, and then he dissolved in laughter.

  “George,” Charlie whispered. “George Kellogg.”

  George barely reacted. At first Charlie thought he hadn’t heard him, but then the slope-shouldered figure in the ragged coat swung slowly round on his perch—it was an old retort, rusted like an anchor—and let his black eyes and sullen mouth arrange themselves into an expression of mild amusement. “Charlie Ossining,” he said, and it was almost as if he’d been expecting him.

  Charlie took a step forward and raised his hands, the chain stretched tight between them. The sun held steady, just over the treetops. “I’m in trouble, George,” he said.

  “Who isn’t?” George bawled, and then he laughed, a short whiskey-inflected bark of a laugh that made Charlie nervous all over again. He was pinning his hopes on a madman, a souse, a boozehound. George would no more help him than he’d help his own father.

  “Your father did it to me,” Charlie said, suddenly inspired. He hadn’t moved his hands. He stood there in mute appeal, the chain catching the sun in separate hammered beads of light.

  George’s face changed suddenly. There was no trace of amusement in the eyes now and his mouth had fallen in on itself. He swung down from the big cylindrical retort, brandishing the bottle in one hand. “What are you saying? My father? Not that good-hearted man, not the Saint on the Hill himself?” Unsteady on his feet, he threw back his head to take a drink, and Charlie was impatient suddenly, angry—he wanted the cuffs off and he wanted them off now. “Here,” George said, thrusting the bottle at him, “you need a drink.”

  What could he do—refuse? George was leering at him, teeth rotted to stubs, breath stinking like a dead thing, the miasma of his catastrophic odor enveloping him, the bottle waving in the air. Humor him, he told himself, humor him. Charlie fixed his hands on the bottle—it was pint-size, a label he didn’t recognize—and drank. He felt the instantaneous heat of it in him, the charge of the alcohol, but there was something else there, too, something bitter and earthy, muddying the flavor. He took another drink above the gleam of George’s eyes, the nod of the approving head, and he realized how much he’d needed it. “Jesus,” he said.

  George was grinning like a cadaver. “I’ve got a whole case of it tucked away under the oven over there—we’re going to drink ourselves into oblivion tonight, Charlie, just you and me.” He took the bottle back, pointed his chin to the sky and let his throat ripple. “I’m celebrating,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a dirt-encrusted hand. “This is my last night in Battle Creek.”

  Charlie stood there beneath the fat mellow sinking sun, his hands chained together, his dreams obliterated, and conversed with a drunk. For lack of anything better to do, he reached for the bottle. “You know, I really do need to get out of these cuffs, George,” he said, and took a hard swallow. And then, unaccountably, he began to laugh. It was all too ridiculous.

  “Sure,” George said, but he seemed distracted. “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’m going?”

  “Where you going?”

  The yellow teeth, the stinking breath, the high sharp dog’s bark of a laugh: “I don’t know. But I’m damned if I spend another night in this pisshole.” He lurched forward, caught himself. “One little visit to pay before I go,” he muttered, and his look had gone cold again. “You say my father did that to you?” he slurred, tapping the cuffs and relieving Charlie of the bottle in one fluid gesture.

  It took a while to explain, and they were well into the second bottle before George seemed to fully grasp his adoptive father’s role in complicating Charlie’s life, though Charlie had tried to fight down his own bowel-tightening terror and outrage and narrate as plainly as he was able. Charlie had been doing all the talking for some time, while George, silent save for the occasional epithet thrown in as a sort of punctuation, stared off into the distance as shadows seeped in to knock down the walls, and the last of the sunlight illuminated the forest growing up through the packing-room floor. They were lying side by side, stretched out in the weeds. A long suspended moment hung over them after Charlie had finished his recitation; he filled it by helping himself to another drink. Finally George drew himself up, coughed into his fist and observed, “He’s a study, isn’t he, the Saint on the Hill? A real study.” Then he rose from the grass with a sigh and went off into the bushes to relieve himself.

&nbs
p; Charlie listened to the birds and the crickets and the fierce rattling torrent of George’s micturition, one more sound of nature, a nature he was going to know a lot more intimately now, at least for a while, and pressed the bottle to his chest. He’d begun to forget himself, drifting off for minutes at a time on the sheen of the alcohol, the handcuffs barely there, nothing at all, a minor inconvenience—didn’t everyone wear them?—when George returned with a spike of rusted metal in his hand. It was a foot and a half long, blood-dark in its coat of rust—it might have been a lever once, or a connecting rod from some vital moving piece of machinery, a thresher, a sifter, one of the great standing ovens itself.

  “Come over here,” George commanded, and he led Charlie through the wreckage to the base of the nearer of the two big baking and sifting machines. And then, while Charlie strained against the chain that bound his hands, pulling it taut over the projecting edge of the bottommost tray, George lifted the rusted spike and beat the chain with an intense implacable rhythmic fury, beat and beat at it till the place rang with the echoing din and the chain recoiled, jumped, shrank in on itself and finally gave way. They had a drink to celebrate.

  “You’re a free man, Charlie,” George said, tipping back the bottle, and the exercise seemed to have sobered him. “But listen, I’ve got something to do—for both of us. You wait here—and feel welcome to drink as much of this sheep dip as you want, didn’t cost me a nickel, I just found it, you might say, on the back end of a car in the Grand Trunk yard. I’ll be back late, after the fireworks, and they’ll be looking for me by then, too—” He paused, and he seemed to relish the thought. “You can bet they’ll be looking for me.”

  Charlie had no objections. He had nowhere to go and he was in no hurry to get there. He wouldn’t have refused a bite to eat, but the elixir in the bottle had quieted his stomach even as it salved his wounds and stuffed cotton into his skull. He would drink, drink till he passed out. He settled himself down in the weeds. “What did you say this stuff was, anyway?” he asked, squinting at the label.

  George stood over him now, ragged against the backlit sky. The hair stood out wildly from the dark globe of his head, his coattails hung in tatters. He looked grim, old, older than Charlie, older than anyone. “Read the label,” he said, and he was already moving, already in action, off to do whatever it was he had to do to bid his proper adieus to Foodtown, U.S.A.—Charlie didn’t ask, didn’t want to know—but he came back a step and paused a moment on the edge of the darkness to add, “Biggest fraud going. They get a buck a bottle for that crap, can you believe it?” And the shadows swallowed him and he was gone.

  Charlie propped the bottle on his chest and studied the label: Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, it read, A Sure Cure for Prolapsis Uteri and all Female Weaknesses. He was thunderstruck. Stunned and amazed (or at least as stunned and amazed as a three-quarters-inebriated ex-tycoon pursued by the law and wearing a freshly separated and matching pair of steel bracelets could expect to be). He’d been drinking patent medicine for the better part of the past hour and never even suspected it, but for the faint rooty taste of the stuff, a taste no worse or better than the intimation of charred oak you got from a good Kentucky bourbon. Contains 15 Percent Alcohol, he read, tipping back the bottle for another taste. This Is Added Solely as a Solvent and Preservative.

  Yes. Well. Sure it is. He sipped again. Thirty proof and they floated the stuff on the market as a female remedy—and got a buck a bottle for it to boot. Now there was genius, he thought, as Venus showed herself in the east and the sky roiled to a deep quickening cobalt; there was genius on the order of the memory tablets. He took another long meditative pull at the bottle as night closed in around him, warm as a blanket, and somewhere between the moment his lips locked round the glass aperture and the hot certain stuff relit the hearth in his stomach, he experienced a moment of grace.

  Per-To, he said to himself, and he said it aloud. The Perfect Tonic. Celery-impregnated, of course. He wondered if he could call it “peptonized,” too, wondered briefly what “peptonized” even meant, and then dismissed it. Well, all right, maybe it wasn’t peptonized—he’d come up with something else, something even better. It still Made Active Blood, didn’t it? And why settle for thirty proof when it could be sixty—hell, eighty? Per-To. He liked the sound of it—it was catchy, unique. Almost irresistible.

  Later, when the insects had taken possession of the night and all the familiar stars and constellations lay stretched out before him like jewels in a studded tapestry, the first distant rocket shot out into the nullity trailing a plume of gold. It went high, higher than he thought it could ever go, arcing over the sky like a lash of flame, and when it died, another followed in its path, and then another, and another.

  Chapter 10

  Decoration Day

  As the shadows lengthened across the South Lawn and the voices of his patients and staff, unified in song, drifted to him through the open window, Dr. Kellogg sat at his desk amidst the usual blizzard of papers, disposing of several small matters he didn’t want to put off till after the holiday. He was no stick-in-the-mud—earlier, he’d led the Sanitarium Marching Band twice round the grounds, pumping a vigorous baton to the brassy thump of “El Capitan,” and he’d inaugurated the picnic supper by tossing the first Protose steak on the outdoor grill while his immaculate chefs looked on and nearly two thousand patients, staffers and townspeople cheered—but time was money, and life, no matter how physiologic, was short. He was taking a brief hiatus from the festivities, that was all, accomplishing something, if only for an hour.

  At nightfall, when the sky had gone fully dark, and not a moment before, he planned to meet Ella, Clara and the eight children still remaining at the Res for the fireworks display (child rearing had been a devotion of his earlier days; as he grew now into his middle years, he felt no qualms about reducing the number of youngsters in the house, along with the subdued yet omnipresent level of excitation, noise and dirt they inevitably brought with them). He was looking forward to it. Fireworks. How he did love fireworks. Though Decoration Day was hardly his favorite holiday, never having been a military man himself (though you couldn’t begin to count the generals, admirals and even secretaries of war he’d numbered among his intimates), the occasion provided him with a marvelous excuse to light up the sky over Battle Creek with a display second to none.

  He worked on, his concentration unflagging. He prided himself on his ability to shut out the world no matter where he was, be it in a rattling second-class compartment in Gibraltar or a dhow in the Gulf of Oman, and focus on the matter at hand. Still, he couldn’t resist tapping his foot in rhythmic sympathy with “Mother Was a Lady,” which the two-thousand-voice chorus was even now bringing to a stirring close, and when they launched into “Daisy Bell,” one of his especial favorites, he found himself irresistibly humming along.

  As dusk settled in and he labored in the pool of light cast by his Handel desk lamp, he keenly felt the absence of Bloese and, for a moment, just a moment, regretted having given him the day off. But every man needed a break from the routine, particularly one so diligent and devoted as his secretary, and he comforted himself with the thought that, after all, he’d done the magnanimous thing. Thinking of Bloese, he lifted his head briefly from his papers and took a moment to listen to the ticks and murmurings of the great building that rose up above him, savoring its every least rustle and whisper. The Sanitarium was quiet, as quiet as it had ever been—nearly everyone, even the wheelchair-bound, was gathered on the lawn for the sing-along and the pyrotechnics that would soon take hold of their imaginations—and he settled into the feel of that quiet as he might have settled into a familiar chair or a pair of hearth-warmed slippers. Here was his institution, this grand edifice, this tangible representation of his will and his vision, and he had it all to himself for just this briefest sliver of time, while the voices of all those he’d brought together within its walls rose up just beyond the windows in health and jubilation.

/>   It was then, while the Doctor sat there amongst his papers and allowed himself the small indulgence of pride of accomplishment, while his spirit gorged and a sense of the profoundest well-being seeped into his veins like a restorative, it was then that the smell began to invade his nostrils. A chemical smell, harsh with its load of petroleum distillates, the smell of fuel, coal oil, of old glass-chimneyed lamps and wicks burnt to the nub. And where could that be coming from? Was it some trick of memory, a nostalgic echo? He hadn’t used a kerosene lamp since the days of the Western Health Reform Institute.

  Curious, he rose from the desk, shoving back the celluloid eyeshade till it rested on the crease of his hairline, and crossed the room to the door. As he grasped the doorknob, he remarked how much stronger the odor was here, and as he pulled open the door and ventured out into the hallway, he nearly choked on it. But this was odd. The floor, the Italian marble floor he himself had chosen from a design from Favanucci, seemed to be wet, as if the janitors hadn’t finished mopping up, or as if—but he stopped cold. It was wet. He bent a finger to the floor, brought it up to his nose: coal oil. Kerosene. He’d know it anywhere.

  And then he looked up, puzzled, into the eyes and teeth of the greatest trial of his life, of the cauchemar come to life—George stepped out of the doorway of the next office down and leaned insouciantly against the wall. George. In his hand, a match. A single thin insubstantial stick of wood with a dab of phosphorus affixed to the fire-red tip of it. There was no manufactured smile this time, no mocking grin. There was only the bristling patchy beard of the boy-man with its grim slash of a mouth and the eyes black as the rim of the universe, so black they seemed to suck up all the available light and extinguish it. And that wasn’t all: beyond him, at the far end of the hall, lay a five-gallon drum of coal oil, dropped casually on its side, bleeding its glistening contents over the surface of the floor. “Dr. Vegetable,” George sneered. “Dr. Anus. Do you know why I’m here?”

 

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