Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  WHISKEY SOUR

  A HAND CAUGHT Interne Jimmy Kildare by the shoulder and shook him, but forty-eight hours of almost constant duty had sickened him with fatigue and he could not be dragged back to consciousness in a moment. First the scenes on the old farm through which he had been dreaming had to whirl away and dissolve, like a landscape viewed from the last platform of an express train. Then he sat up among the heaped bedclothes where he had fallen only an hour or two before.

  In the black nausea of weariness the room spun before him, and he made out only dimly the face of the orderly who had roused him. In a great hospital no interne should be overworked, but when Kildare became house surgeon and first tasted authority, he put his teeth into his work and hung on with all the bulldog that was in him.

  The orderly bent over and called, “I’m sorry, but there’s a pig-faced son of an Irish porker out there that won’t see nobody but you. Name of Lafferty.”

  “I don’t know him. I’m done in. I can’t come,” said Kildare.

  “Sure, you don’t know half the people that come here yammering to see you,” said the orderly, “but the word’s gone around this precinct that nobody counts except Doctor Kildare. This Lafferty’s done for. You can’t help him. Shot through the body.”

  “Ah!” said Kildare, and was out of bed instantly. He hit the floor, staggered, and kept on staggering until he reached the washstand, where he ducked his head under the cold-water faucet.

  “It’s hell,” said the orderly. “Lemme take him a message that you’re sick. You look like your face was thumbed out of dough.”

  “You tell Lafferty I’m coming,” said Kildare.

  He dressed as fast as he could, though his fingers were stumbling — those same fingers that had caused the West Side to adopt him as a sort of patron saint because of certain miracles he had worked with them. Small boys followed him on the street; groups of idlers saluted him as “doc.” He saw pictures of them as he hurried with blundering feet down the long corridor toward the accident room.

  When he opened the door, noise thronged about him with a babbling roar. Four policemen and a pair of detectives helped to take up floor space. Two Negroes were screeching with the agony of deep razor cuts. There were a dozen patients in the big room, but Lafferty was not among them. A nurse took Kildare into the corridor, where the big Irishman waited, doubled over on a chair. He had knotted his coat around his body, perhaps in the vague hope that the pressure would lessen the bleeding of his wounds, but a double trickle of red spattered the floor on either side of him. One huge hand comforted his belly; the other held a pipe.

  A big, red-faced policeman was saying, “Go on, Lafferty; don’t be a mug; leave them take you into the accident room and plug you up... How’d you come in on this, anyway?”

  He asked the question of a red-haired girl who was studying Lafferty with anxious eyes. She was delicate and lovely as a thoroughbred beside the massive, cart-horse strength of the Irishman. Afterwards, she remained a dim pleasure on the horizon of Kildare’s mind.

  “I heard a shot outside the door of my apartment,” the girl said. “Then a frightful crashing fall down the stairs. When I ran out, he was lying on the first landing below.”

  “Didn’t see anybody with a gun?”

  “No, I didn’t see a soul.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said the officer. “Here’s the doc... Hey, Lafferty, here’s Doc Kildare for you!”

  The big Irishman looked up, his face adrip with the perspiration of agony. “Ah, the doc,” he said. Then his head rolled back upon his shoulders as he fainted.

  Before Lafferty recovered, Kildare had him in the operating room and was scrubbed up to assist the attending surgeon, Stewart Black.

  Lafferty came to and waved two gigantic hands toward Black. “You go away,” he whispered. “I want the doc.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Kildare. “He doesn’t really know what he’s saying, doctor.”

  “Get a stenographer,” whispered Lafferty. “Patch me up so’s I can talk, doc. I’m gunna tell...” Then he fainted again.

  “Looks as though that bullet made a mess of his insides,” said Stewart Black. “But you take charge, Jimmy, and make up your mind about it.”

  Kildare thanked him with a twitching smile and was instantly at work.

  He labored with cold sweat on his upper lip. Once weakness made his knees sag. Once he had to stop short until the tremor left his right hand.

  When he finished, he looked up and felt the hard, bright eyes of the attending surgeon upon him. “Beautiful!” said Black.

  Kildare tried to laugh casually, but he giggled like a girl.

  “You need a bed or a drink,” said the attending surgeon. “Go get it.”

  Kildare had hardly reached his room, ready to fling himself on his bed, when an orderly brought word that Doctor Gloster wanted him at once. Kildare dashed cold water over his face and went. He had a vision of himself confronting Gloster, who was the archangel of the hospital hierarchy, and he could hear his voice saying, “Doctor Gloster, will you please go to hell?” That inward voice made him shudder. He recognized fatigue like a poison in his blood.

  Gloster was a hard, keen, wise old man. He handed Kildare a newspaper with a pencil mark against the item of a columnist. The item read:

  We hear there’s a young interne on the West Side who could vote the whole district. We suppose that comes from knowing the right people to take care of at the city’s charge. Well, we may as well have our politicians out of the hospitals as out of the gutter.

  Doctor Gloster said, “That’s a reference to you, Kildare. It’s not the sort of news we wish to send out from this institution.”

  “I never intended—” said Kildare.

  “I’m not interested in intentions. I’m interested in facts,” said Gloster. “I want no more of this. A man is what he seems to be. Leave your low-class cronies. You can’t raise them; but they can pull you down. If this subject comes to my attention again, I shall have only one more thing to say. Good night!”

  Kildare went slowly back to his room.

  He ought to sleep, but a greater duty was to say good-by at once to one-eyed Jeff, the bartender, and to big Pat Hanlon, and to all the rest with whom he drank his two beers daily in McGuire’s saloon; not to speak of District Leader McGuire himself!

  It was true that they loved Kildare and that he loved them, though only for services rendered freely, from the heart. But Gloster was right. A man’s life cannot embrace two such opposites as an interneship and the dingy cheer of McGuire’s saloon.

  Kildare got out of the whites and into his shabby street clothes. He was delayed in leaving by a memory of his last look at Lafferty. The anesthetic should not have made such a difference in his appearance.

  Kildare could not say what was wrong with Lafferty but as he recalled the greenish color, the wooden texture of the man’s face, he went to the telephone and rang up the ward nurse. “Watch Lafferty closely,” he directed. “Temperature, pulse, respiration — and the look of him.” Then he left the hospital.

  When he came to McGuire’s place under the elevated he pushed the door open on a busy scene. The tables along the wall were fully occupied. Half a dozen men leaned their elbows on the bar.

  “Hi!” said the one-eyed bartender. “Will you have one on me?”

  “You know I like to pay for my own. Thanks just the same, Jeff,” said Kildare. “Can I see Hanlon and McGuire?”

  “Wait a minute,” answered Jeff, and went into the family room.

  Big Pat Hanlon, dressed as sleekly as Broadway’s best, was in there, and fat McGuire with his usual cigar. There was also that pretty redheaded girl who had been with Lafferty at the hospital.

  “The doc’s out there having his beer,” said Jeff. “He wants to see you both.” McGuire started to heave his bulk out of the chair but the girl said, “Don’t you want to talk this out?”

  “I don’t want to talk. That Harry of yours is no good,” said McG
uire “Sure he isn’t,” she answered. “He’s so bad that if Lafferty squeals on him, he’ll squeal on you!”

  McGuire slumped down in the chair. “Go keep the doc talking for a while,” he said to Jeff. The bartender left the room, and McGuire said to the girl, “Now, what’s all this mean, Meg?”

  “Harry’s scared to death,” she said. “He knows he’ll go up Salt Creek if Lafferty talks, and Lafferty’s going to talk. He was trying to all the time in the hospital. If Lafferty blabs, Harry’ll say everything he knows.”

  “Harry don’t know so much,” said McGuire.

  “It’s not what Lafferty and Harry know,” answered the girl, “but what they think they know. And they’ll yell loud enough to get into the papers, Uncle McGuire; loud enough to knock all the politics out of you.”

  “Yeah,” nodded McGuire. “My hands are clean, but there’s enough dirt in some newspaper headlines to sink a saint, halo and all.”

  “That’s no fooling,” said Hanlon. “But Lafferty can’t talk. He’s got his ticket, hasn’t he?”

  “I guess he has,” answered Meg, “but faith will keep him alive long enough to do the dirt, and he’s got the faith of a hunting dog in Kildare. Is that little mug such a great doctor as all that?”

  “The doc ain’t so little,” said Hanlon sharply. “You see him doing his stuff and he’s the biggest guy you ever met. If Lafferty needs five minutes of breath to spill the beans, the doc’ll give them to him, all right.”

  McGuire said, “My God!”

  “Does the point begin to get into you, Uncle McGuire?” asked the girl. “Look, you’ve got Kildare here now. Can’t you make it hard for him to leave?”

  “Well?” demanded Hanlon.

  McGuire stared at him. “Because I do a couple of good turns for that dirty rat of a double-crossing Harry,” he said, “because I paid him for some electioneering a coupla times, I gotta be pulled down in the dirt by a flock of yeggs like I was a gangster or something.”

  “Don’t cry about it, uncle,” said the girl. “What can you do about keeping Kildare away from the hospital?”

  “I couldn’t lay a finger on the doc,” McGuire confessed.

  “You’re damn right you couldn’t,” said Hanlon.

  “You wouldn’t let everything go crash because you like the doc, would you?” said Meg to Pat.

  “Wouldn’t I?” said Hanlon.

  “Shut up, Meg,” said McGuire. “You don’t understand nothing. Pat would of burned, once, except for the doc.”

  “Well, let me have a chance at Kildare,” said the girl. “He’s waiting for you. Go breeze in from the street entrance. Coupla minutes later, I’ll happen in through the family entrance. If red hair and green eyes make him absentminded that’s nobody’s fault, is it?”

  “What you say, Pat?” asked McGuire. “I dunno,” muttered Pat. “If he wants to waste some time on a gal, I guess that’s his own business.”

  That was why Pat Hanlon and McGuire arrived in the saloon a few moments later, coming in fast. When they shook hands with Kildare, he said, “May I speak to you alone?”

  “Clear out the back room, Jeff!” commanded McGuire. “Come on back, doc. Jeff, send in something, will you?”

  Jeff came into the family room with beer and a whisky and started out again.

  “Wait a minute, Jeff, will you?” said Kildare. Jeff came back importantly. “What is it, doc?” asked McGuire. “Over at the hospital,” said Kildare, “they want an interne to be just a doctor. They don’t want him doing other things or being in other places. They don’t want to have an interne talked about on the outside. I’ve only a short time left at the hospital, and I’ve got to do what they want. When I get out, all I’ll have will be a surgical reputation — and it has to be good. You fellows mean a lot to me, but I’ve come over to say good-by.”

  “You mean you won’t be dropping in for a pair of beers now and then?” McGuire asked.

  “Ah, shut up!” said Hanlon. “Are you gunna make it hard for the doc?”

  “Yeah, I’ll shut up,” said McGuire. Jeff said, “Doc, you keeping away from us account of the hospital don’t mean we’re out, does it?”

  “Jeff has always gotta play the fool,” said Hanlon.

  But all three waited as Kildare’s eyes ran helplessly from face to face.

  At that moment the rear door of the family room opened.

  “Keep out!” shouted McGuire.

  “It’s only me, Uncle Tommy,” said the girl.

  She came into the light, and Kildare recognized her. She wore a red-fox fur and a rust-colored tweed suit. Her hair was auburn; that and the green of her eyes colored Kildare’s mind with beauty and with brightness.

  “I’m no uncle of yours, Meg,” said McGuire. “Go away and don’t bother us.”

  “Wait a minute, Meg. You keep the looks,” said Hanlon. “How you do it? What you use?”

  “Cellophane,” said Meg. “Jeff, bring me a whisky sour, will you? It’s on the house. Hello! Here’s Doctor Kildare.”

  “He’s no business of yours,” said McGuire.

  She looked steadily at Kildare and smiled. “No?” she asked. “Not a bit my business?”

  Sleepiness began to run out of Kildare like so many scampering rabbits. Meg held out her hand to him, and when he took it, she drew closer to him, looking up in such a way that suddenly he felt tall and strong.

  “Think how long I’ve been hearing about you!” said Meg. “But I thought you were a lot older, doc. The way everybody looks up to you, I thought you’d be all gray, sort of. When I saw you in the hospital this evening I couldn’t talk, I was so surprised. How’s poor Lafferty? Has he a chance?”

  “I like to feel that everyone has a chance,” said Kildare.

  “Oh, do you?” murmured the girl. She took the drink Jeff brought in. “Thank you, Jeff,” she said, and added, “I don’t know why sour goes so well with whisky... But here’s to you, doc!”

  Kildare found his beer and took a long swallow. When he lowered the glass, he was aware that Hanlon was muttering in the girl’s ear.

  She said, “Oh, quit it, Pat, will you? Try your weight on your own feet for a change. Why is the sour so good with the whisky, doc? You tell me!”

  “It’s the sweet and the strong with the sour and the weak — isn’t there a saying about that?” said Kildare.

  “Look! He had the answer!” said Meg. “Let’s go somewhere and have a talk, doc. I know you have all the answers.”

  “I’d like to,” said Kildare. “But I have to get back to the hospital pretty soon.”

  “Please waste some time on me, doc,” she pleaded. “I’m not trying to put anything over.”

  “The hell you’re not!” said Hanlon.

  “We’ll take a ride in my car. It’s a nice time of day,” said Meg, “and I want to talk to you about something.”

  Kildare glanced through the plate-glass window. Darkness was swirling outside it. “I’d like it a lot. You mean you really want me to go?” he asked.

  “Haven’t I been begging?” she said.

  “Ah, well,” said Hanlon to McGuire.

  Meg began to sing, “Rum, rum... to Kingdom Come...”

  “I knew you could sing,” said Kildare.

  “How’d you know that?” she asked.

  “Just by looking at your throat.”

  “Is that good? That’s a honey!” said Meg, laughing. “Let’s make a start,” she suggested.

  They went out to her car, a convertible coupé with the top up. As they started down the street, she began to sing a bit of a song about “pone and m’lasses.” When her song ended, Kildare asked, “Are you from the South, Meg?”

  “Can’t I be from anywhere I want?” He said, “You can be from any place I could take you. That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “There’s a lot of time wasted making sense that could be used to make better things,” she declared. “Where’ll we go?”

  “Anywhere,” said Kild
are. “It doesn’t matter. Just the going...”

  “Good old Jimmy. You know!” she said. She was swinging along under the elevated. “We’ll slide up the Drive.”

  “You wanted to talk to me about something?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. What you think? Will poor Lafferty get well?”

  “I don’t know,” Kildare said. “Just what the bullet has done to him internally, I can’t tell. But I’m going to fight!” She said, “D’you know he’s just a poor mucker? He’s spent half of his life in jail.”

  “I don’t care,” said Kildare. “Where he’s been or where he’s going doesn’t matter if I can keep life in him.”

  All the laughter, all the smiling sureness deserted the face that stared at Kildare. “Jimmy,” said Meg, “I know why they all love you. I love you, too.” All this while, the weariness had not left Kildare, but now the numb fingers of exhaustion were unclasped from his brain. Only a small pulse kept up a tremor high in his throat.

  “Don’t say that, Meg,” he protested.

  “I’m not ashamed. I’m proud of saying it,” she answered. “It isn’t as though I were talking to you for the first time I’ve seen people’s faces when they speak about you. They all love you, Jimmy.”

  “Yes. Like a brother,” said Kildare.

  “Oh, damn the brothers!” said she.

  She laid her gloved hand on his, and they looked at each other and laughed together. As he listened to that laughter of hers, he knew that the sound of it would never be out of his ears.

  They turned at Seventy-second and so reached the wind that never dies along Riverside Drive. With his head back, his eyes half closed, Kildare watched Meg and let the breeze blow joy through his soul.

  At last, far up the Drive, she pulled off into the semicircle which overlooks the Hudson and the cliffs of the other side. Night had covered New York; but from the Drive it was possible to see the pale end of day over the Jersey shore.

  “Nice here, isn’t it?” asked Meg. “Your eye gets a jump-off into space. It makes me want to go places and do things.”