Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  “Nope,” Egil said.

  “Yes,” mother said smiling back into the kitchen, “the Sons of Norway are getting used to the land up here. They’re gonna expect a good harvest from up here next year, the year after... what was that word...”

  “What word?” Egil asked.

  “That legal word...? Oh. That's it. “In perpetuity. That’s it.”

  In perpetuity. Yeah. A school word. Karl knew what that damn thing meant.

  Chapter 10

  INTERNIST

  “It’s a dark and stormy night.”

  Starting like that? God bless, even thinking about starting like that!

  Doc tipped his glass to the night and watched the rain from the porch of his Victorian mansion. Across his lawn was the park; across the park was the dam. He barely heard the spillway for the rain on the leaves of his new trees, drumming on his porch shingles, tin-tattering on his copper flashing – still bright when day shone on it. He shivered a little. Now it was dark. Lightning lit the air, the bluffs, the town. Yeah, it was stormy. He was here and he was home. Okay, Doc couldn't help it, the night was lousy, the night was dark.

  He tipped his glass again. “My mansion!”

  Pretentious? To the hell with pretense. He'd made an omelet of his retirement egg and brought this place back to life – he’d call it his mansion if he wanted. Maybe he’d brought himself back to life, too! “My castle, if I've a mind to call it such,” he said to the dark and stormy night, adjusting his words to the tone he reckoned folks took here in Bluffton Town.

  “Enough of the dark!” He said to the stormy night. “No more 3 a.m. calls, no more night for me! Now on, I live for the light!”

  Doc was a little drunk on celebration Chablis that night. That night was ten years after he'd first seen the town, a year since he'd first seen the house, six months since he'd bought it and started loving it up into his dream place, and less than a week—a week ago only—since he locked the door on the old life.

  A week ago, down in the City, Eustace Mouth, M.D., woke up, walked out and closed the office door for good. Nothing in particular had bit his ass, just a vague sense of anniversary: thirty-some years a doctor of medicine and twenty, a cutter of the dead.

  People sometimes? Do one thing all their lives and really what they'd wanted was something else, something else entirely. When they realize that? Well, sometimes when they realize that they go a little 3 a.m. bloody.

  Three a.m., people go a little blind, a little weird; kill themselves, three a.m., figure it's best, do it in the dark. The real ones, at least, the ones not out on a ledge to let the whole city know about their private hells. No, the serious ones do it when nobody'll tell them how dumb they’ll look, after, folded on a car top, their heads in the john, or their faces spattered all over the room. Worse, the serious 3 a.m. bloods sometimes get the idea to take others with them. Company. By 3:30 the yellow crime-tape’s up and the cops are prowling, laughing, dunking coffee and sprinkling powdered sugar.

  By 3:45, there would come himself, Doc Mouth, squishing through the muck. Old! Jesus Christ, dragging 50 by a couple years isn’t old.

  Felt old on him. Old Doc had seen the same story sprayed across the thirsty walls of nasty SROs, high dark mansions, and tidy bright bungalows. His bagged loafers had squeegeed blood from deep shags, had sunk quietly into thick wool carpet, or gone slip-sliding on slick linoleum. In the City, he'd breathed the loose-bowel stench of a thousand messy scenes at 3:45 in the deep morning. He'd come calling at cop behest: “Make it official Doc!” And Doc’d put on his face, squint and say, “Yep. Guy's dead.” Laughter all around. “So's she, so’s everyone. All dead. Gunshot.” By then it’d be back to work.

  Gunshot or knife sliced, blunt-struck, or taken the pipe. But all of them almost always were, yep, dead. That which people did to those they loved and killed! Even the strangeness on the edge of death had become ordinary to Doc: party tales told with a smile.

  “Kids! Shame about the kids, huh?” a cop might say.”

  “Yeah. Shame.” Doc’d say. “Keeps ‘em from being orphaned, though.”

  End-of-shift laughs all round.

  Too many people he’d waded through, cleaned off his shoes. There were just too many party tales now. Now the gas oven began looking too good, coming home in so many lovely dawns.

  Wouldn’t happen. Not to Doc. Now, he’d live in the day! He’d been half a life a doctor; half a life looking into waxy ears, down smelly throats, up uncertain butt-holes. Those were the live ones! He sniffed sicknesses like others might a summer wind. He irrigated, drained suppurating fissures and stitched oozing calamities, blasted X-rays through hopeful organs and stared at dire shadows some wet and secret inner thing had cast on photographic sheets; Doc Mouth lived in a world of soaps, scrubs and antiseptics to cover humanity's viler stenches.

  People wondered how he stood it.

  His secret was: He couldn't.

  He gave a half-life to people's insides. He listened to strong and silent men try to get it out, offered nose wipes to the whimpering ones, tried to make children happy, and, for God's sake, silent!

  Through it, he listened. Watched. Felt. Sniffed. An internist did those things. A diagnostician, he observed. That was the best of it. He listened and learned; having learned he could almost taste people's lives and habits. His best tools: his mind, his knowledge, his training, his years. His best weapon: his concerned face, his best defense: indifference.

  From it all, he learned. He gathered ten thousand stories and, with half his head, figured how the stories came to be.

  He learned his patients' tales. Tales? Who would believe them? The stories were sometimes strange and wonderful: epics of courage, miracles of the flesh. Sometimes they were eccentricities, medical quirks to make you smile or monstrosities to make you cringe.

  Doc remembered through nods and smiles, took sympathetic notes on the Pfizer pad he kept at his desk. He transcribed the notes into a notebook at leisure.

  He filled his first book then started another.

  The day he pulled the plug on the practice, he packed a six-foot shelf of closely written stories into four cardboard cartons. These were what he’d taken the day he locked his door.

  “May you have the joy of your world,” Doc said to the kid who’d bought the practice, and he placed the keys in the lad’s small, white hands. “And it of you,” Doc added and tipped his tweed hat.

  He reached Bluffton by early dark. The house was shadows and black lawn, the night was a distant wash of the dam’s spillway.

  The House belonged to the last century. When he'd first seen it, it looked embarrassed, a run down wreck just past the far end of the downtown shops. The high rambling place had been “improved” decade after decade. Touches had been added, details subtracted until the final, late-century version of the place was a Goddamned nightmare, a mess: Depression brick siding, drop ceilings, Formica panels, aluminum, plastic, plywood, cinderblock – and bouncing floors!

  Doc Mouth changed that. Cost good money. Local men ripped it to its foundation, frame, pipes and wires. He looked at old pictures, examined old plans.

  He went to the town library. The little balding lady, whatever her name was (he’d remember these people eventually), picked his house out of a file of turn-of-the-century glass plates.

  “May I?” he asked, reaching.

  “You may not,” she said. She pulled back, protected the plate with her cheek. She made a copy for him, though, and he'd had the details blown up, enhanced, until the place stood out.

  “What I want her to look like,” he told his contractor, “is this. She used to be this way.”

  They all looked: contractor, workers, the hairy guy who did grunt work on the site. “Oh, yeah,” they said, “Ya, sure.” Like in the damn movies. “Yup,” the hairy guy said.

  But, Bluffton? Doc had discovered Bluffton ten years before all that. Snowmobiling, of all things! A thing he'd done with a brief partner and something he did only th
at once.

  Up from the City, the two of them had blasted along the abandoned C&NW tracks. They’d bounded along the banks of the frozen, steaming river, shrieked like a buzzsaw under a pretty little bridge where a sleeping bum woke to their screaming engines and shook a fist as they laughed on by, thumping all the way around the bend and oh my, oh my God...into that town.

  What a town. Winter had blanketed the past century’s additions and architectural editorializations. Snow had smoothed and evened it all, let the mind suggest classic filigrees and cartouches that had once been. Bluffton under snow reminded Doc of a world before snowmobiles, a frozen fugue by a tinkling stream, under some really basso cliffs.

  Snowmobiles! He was embarrassed for Christ sake.

  Doc started thinking. Thinking of a time when people sat and talked around campfires, cheeks burning, or tipped back from potbellied stoves, toes roasting and sang songs for fun, when isolation drove people mad but when friendship cured the crazies.

  He returned in summer and found, Christ, the town was dying! Hell: the place was dead, flattened by modernity and convention. The new-built was assembly line crap. The old stuff? People had tried to make it stylishly crappy.

  But, potential? Whoa! Here were people who remembered; families that stretched to Sweden or the fjords of Norway. People’s memories went to old tales, folk wisdom that went to the heart of man.

  Good old squarehead names prowled the streets: Germans, Roosians. Anabaptist Amish farmed rich land above the bluffs. Their carriages clopped through the streets to the co-op market they'd made in the old town theater.

  God, what a place to retire to.

  What a place to come and live, what a place to come to and tell stories to his neighbors.

  When the house was finished he came to see. The place had sat empty for a few days, a week at most. Paint had dried, the sawdust and shavings had been swept, the residue had blown away. Sod had been laid and unrolled. Grass, green and thick, had sprouted, knitting itself into a lawn. The trees? The trees would have to grow into the property. But he'd paid for hefty young elms and willows, not sprouts. It would be a few years but his Victorian would live again in stately shade and pretty quick, too. Within his life. What a charming space he'd made.

  He thought to furnish it with antiques. The which he did. He thought to add a room, a public parlor to greet guests who'd surely come to hear his tales. He did.

  He thought he'd come up, weekends, a break from 3 A.M. calls. He’d sit on his porch, gather his thoughts, take long walks, eat simple American at the little dinner, other end of town. Sunday's, then, he'd return, refreshed, to the city where being Eustace Mouth, M.D., Medical Examiner, meant something.

  Didn't work that way.

  Five weeks after that first look at the finished and furnished house, Doctor Eustace Mouth locked his office in the city and moved to Bluffton. You knew that. He traveled light, bringing only what fit. You knew that, too. He hung out a shingle: Doc Mouth – Storyteller. “Doc Mouth.” A teller of stories. It fit.

  That may be news to you.

  Storyteller is not a trade that draws an insistent clientele. Doc wandered the town. He went to the Wagon Wheel, evenings, and listened to the disputations of a fat Priest and a young Jew who sat under the pub’s namesake wheel and lamp. Charming. He took mental notes with a thought to join future colloquia.

  But it was the company of the old guys – real people – he sought, the ones who sat at the bar and looked into the mirror, the ones who plucked the burning ends from cigarettes and tucked remaining butts behind their ears, the ones who leaned on the jukebox, their mouths a little open, their eyes a little shut, the ones who played a night of darts with hardly a word passing between them or the ones who came from the clubhouse up the way and near the dam, and ended each night in a slow-motion brawl and subsequent round-up by the smiling patient cop who took seven, eight, nine of them away for breakfast.

  He played a few rounds with the quieter ones, the regulars. He'd been pretty good. He still was. The guys he shot with were curious. He didn't hold back. Doc told them: he’d been doctor. Yeah, medical.

  “Sompin’ happen,” they’d say squinting at his hands.

  “Nah,” he’d say, “fed up, just tired of the drill.” He left out the 3 a.m. calls, the shotgunned flesh, left out that he’d gone stale looking at corpses to report to the world how life had left them, what sad and private things had been done.

  He left it out because he’d learned that, after a few minutes, the squints were back in his dart mate’s eyes and other guys around were staring. “But, hey, that's the old Eustace Mouth, M.D.! I live here now.”

  The dart guys shook their heads. “I had a job being a doc, you betcher ass I'd be outta her like a greasy pig.” One said.

  “Or a lawyer,” another said.

  They grunted, laughed. He joined.

  “Hey, how about that American Restaurant! That’s gotta have a story.”

  The guys looked at each other. Eventually someone told him about the American House—Eats. “I ain’t old enough, myself, but granddaddy'd said there was an old Swede, what was his name, Tim something?”

  “Yeah. Tim something.”

  Yeah. Tim whatever blew his brains out in the kitchen, day the place opened. That's what I know.”

  Doc Mouth, Storyteller, wet his whistle and stood another round for the guys. The guy who’d told the restaurant story tipped his head back and drained his beer. Doc smiled and took a surreptitious look at the blue lump on the neck of the drinker. A carbuncle, a cyst, a 'thing' the guy probably thought. Doc gauged the lump’s pathology. Gave the drinker a year, 18 months. He shivered knowing that. Christ, he knew too much of lumps and men.

  He shook off the prognosis. None of his business. He took a mental note about the headless Swede, because, damn it, he was now Doc Mouth, Storyteller, not that other.

  “Funny name, 'Mouth,' guy sitting at the bar said one evening. “Name like that, figure you'd've gone to be a whatdoyou call dentist or something. Not a whatdoyoucallit...?”

  “Storyteller...?

  “Nah...that other. Whatchacallit?”

  “Internist,” Doc said.

  “Yeah. Whatchacall an internist.”

  Doc smiled at the hairy man. Had he been the guy who worked on his place? “Bunch, is it? Is it ‘Bunch?’ Now you talk about names!”

  Hairy man smiled back and sucked his beer. “Yeah, well, probably a story there. Yeah.”

  The guy let it hang and side glanced Doc. He nudged his empty Pilsner Doc’s direction. Yeah. “Bunch,” had a way. A way of talking a local storyteller might do worse than emulate in tellin' his tales. Storyteller's got to have a voice, he figured. He’d get the story of that name. Someday he would.

  Doc said, “Well 'Mouth', now, I think, is a corruption.”

  Bunch's eyes squeezed closer together.

  Disappointed, Doc figured, thought he had me, thought he had me figured. “German name. A name that got. As got changed. When my great grandfather came to this country, come over here I mean, they gave him, give him, another name at Ellis Island. 'Mouth' is what they called him. In German, reckon it's sumpin' else.”

  “Must've done that to me, too, huh?” Bunch said. “Bunch doesn't sound like much. Or does it?”

  They laughed together. Doc raised his glass to toast Bunch. “You never toast on a dry mug!” Bunch said. Doc bought the man a beer, they clinked glasses and chuckled in their guts.

  “'Bunch,' Doc said, 'sounds like a heap of sumpin’ to me!'“ He laughed.

  A minute later Bunch got the joke and joined.

  At least Bunch looked healthy, Doc thought. No diseases he could see. Breath, nothing but booze; skin, the color of sun, wind and dirt. Lumps were cuts, bruises, scabs and work scars. No chest rattles, no rasps. Nope. Nothing wrong with Bunch. No siree. He reckoned.

  The “Storyteller” shingle didn't do it. He sent fliers, placed ads in the weekly, made radio spots and ran them all throu
gh the valley.

  He made a one-man stage at the end of the “story room,” the one large space in the whole Victorian warren. The stage was a steamer-trunk with a nice oriental thrown over and drooping down the sides. A couple lights let into the ceiling, hidden, focused on the stool where he’d perch to tell a tale or two, the whole surrounded by shelves of books, potted ferns, good soft carpet, big cushions. For the kids, you know. From his stool, Doc looked the length of the room to the double sliding doors and into to the hallway.

  Comfortable. Yeah.

  As a ten-year visitor, Doc was known. As a new resident, he was a curiosity. He was becoming a regular at the Wheel. He was a customer at the Wurst Haus. Esther at the American House – to which he now knew the word “Eats” had permanently been grafted – Esther knew precisely what pie he wanted when. “You should have took up being a diagnostician,” he said to Esther as she shoved a piece of French raisin under his nose. “A pathologist, anyhow!”

  “Hm,” She said, “Something wrong with it?”

  He smiled. “The opposite Esther, m’dear,” he said with his first mouthful, “Perfect!”

  “Hm,” she said. “Thanks. I guess.”

  Ruth at the Library knew him. Ruth, her name was and she didn't exactly trust him, he felt. Here’s this doctor from the city, prying into people, she thinks. Okay, he thought, she doesn't trust most people, either. He'd seen her kind. The stories about her he could let her in on! Ha, she'd be surprised at what a good internist could tell about a person, just looking.

  He was known. And the word got out.

  The Story Room was black. Light in his eyes from above, sides. He shielded his eyes. A tiny dark face looked up. Native American, Doc thought, Indian blood, anyway. Round dark eyes, silent eyes. A face filled with history, he thought. Filed the thought away. Beyond were more little faces. They looked up from the soft rug in front, from the small chairs further back. Beyond, shadowed, parents waited. They chatted and laughed among themselves. Their eyes were black holes in the gray. They waited. Kids waited. All waited to see what the heck was a Doc Mouth Storyteller.