know, 'cause I've been using it for almost twenty years. So what I did was go out to my farm and get some I've been using on my horses. Works on them, reckon it's gonna keep right on workin' on you. Well, of course it did, and I healed up fine. I was catching bluefish that summer, just like he said. I drifted into hanging around with him, doing things on his rounds with him. The things I saw! Wherever he went, people opened their doors to him. He'd be up all night in a Negro shack delivering twins, and, then his next call'd be at the grandest house on the East Battery, washing himself with their scented soap and served chickory coffee by the butler on the Bahamas porch, the sea breeze from Fort Sumter mixin with the honeysuckle from the garden in back. I did a lot with him, saw a lot, and wanted more than any thing to be like him.'
'What happened to him?'
'Oh, he's still there. He's waiting for me to finish up here and come on down and join him for a whit till he retires and I take over. I suppose it could as soon as next year.'
'Sounds great. Is that what you want to do?' '
'Yeah, but I guess it's just a dream.'
'Why just a dream?'
'It's not the kind of medicine I'm learning here, it? I wouldn't know one end of a twin delivery from another. And my wife doesn't want to move from the surgery program at the MBH. She do want to move to the South at all.'
At the Leggo's party, Berry had asked me which one was Potts, and I'd pointed him out. He was only one without a name tag, and Berry asked me why that was.
'He lost it.'
'He didn't get another?'
'Nope.'
'Doesn't sound too healthy.. Unless he's being flamboyant '
'Potts flamboyant? No way.'
'It doesn't sound like he cares too much about himself.'
'You're much too analytic,' I said, getting irritated.
'Maybe, but I'd worry about him, Roy'
'Thank you for your expert diagnosis. I'm not losing any sleep over Potts.'
I had been wrong. One night I'd found myself lying awake thinking about him. I thought of his disappointments: his wife, his too?academic internship, his withering dream of going home to Charleston to be a doe there, his sad dog. I began to feel nervous. A few days before, Potts and I had been watching the Crimson Tide of Alabama roll over Georgia Tech on his TV in his bedroom. Next to his bed was a revolver, an unholstered loaded forty?four.
I parked in the House lot and hurried toward the E.W. When I'd told Potts over the phone that I was sorry about his father's death, he'd said, 'I'm not. He died in the gutter after a fight with some other drunk. I figured it would end this way. I feel kinda relieved.'
'Relieved?'
'Yeah. You've got to understand, Roy: for years he used to walk into my bedroom when he thought I was asleep, and stand there in the dark staring at me. And every once in a while I'd see a glint of light off the barrel of the revolver he carried in his hand. I'm just going to the funeral to see Mother. Sorry, you've got to cover for me. I'll make it up to you.'
And so it was a bone?chilling Sunday in the middle of the dead week between Christmas and New Year's, and I expected, in my twenty?four?hour shift, few major traumas and more the small stuff trying to get into God's House for the warmth. How shortsighted, to think that on that Sunday I'd see only the products of that Sunday. Two thousand years previously Christ had bit the dust, hundreds of years ago some Renaissance red hot had thought up hospitals, fifty years ago some Jewish red hot had thought up the House, two months ago God had reincarnated winter, a few days ago some TV programmer had switched off a spine-tingling pro?football game to put on a rerun of that Teutonic grenade
Even at eight A.M. the waiting room was full, mostly female, mostly black. Crazy Abe, jumping up and down amidst these women, screamed at me YOUR PROBLEM IS YOUR CIRCUMCISED YOUR PROH . . At the nursing station, things were out of whack? Howard Greenspoon, looking pale, was sitting
'I went into the bathroom on the second floor an hour ago, and I was in the toilet, and a guy opened the door, poked a shotgun in, and demanded money. I gave him three bucks, and then I did a really stupid thing?I gave him my college ring. How could I? I loved that class ring, I really did. He didn't ask me for it, and I offered it to him. Why?
'Remarkable,' said Gilheeny, 'but better it gone and you here than vice versa.'
Howie left, but the policemen stayed on, and Quick, explaining, said, 'It is a season of terror, and we have been been asked to serve another eight hours until four P.M. Sixteen hundred in the military convention, is it not, Naval Officer Gath?'
'Aye aye, mutha,' said Gath. 'I shore wish we'd get some of that big stuff in heap, instead of all this vagitch. I feel so mean I could go bear hunting with a whip.'
'A remarkable statement, and no less so than the night just past,' said Gilheeny, 'when Quick and I were summoned on police radio to a naked bar for an alleged shooting. We entered, the music stopped, all heads turned to us. The Law. Silence. 'Too calm,' I whispered to Quick as we watched the barkeep slowly mop the floor and deny any shooting in his establishment. Then Quick supplied the clue.'
'The slop the barman mopped was red. Beer is not red, and yet red blood is,' said Quick.
'I then spotted three men sitting too close together against the wall, and commanded them to move. They did, and the man in the middle fell over, dead. Such was their surprise that we refrained from having to 'stick them' with our lead nightsticks, thus avoiding many months of work with Cohen around the gnawing question of guilt. A dangerous time.'
'The raw red time when words give way to acts,' said Quick.
'We must all take care,' said the redhead. 'With luck we shall see you again at sixteen hundred in the fine post meridian. Good?bye.'
They were gone, and fear and gloom coated my mind. The charts were already piling up, the main themes being anxious men who'd seen the TV special on 'How to Have a Heart Attack' and women with Sunday?morning belly pain. Picking up a chart, I ventured into the crotch of the day, my head ringing with the words COMPASSION and HATRED. There was no 'big stuff,' there was no humor, there was only the clear translation of black rage into, as Cohen put it, 'the body ego.' The main translation was into the abdomino?genito region. and I heard the chief complaint of 'pain in my stomach' over and over again, until there were quarts of urine to be looked at, tens of pelvic exams to do, and do carefully, for every once in a while there could be a 'keeper.'
With one particular woman came disaster. Having done the total work?up, and finding nothing, I'd gone back into the room to tell her I could find nothing wrong with her that I could treat. She accepted that, and began to put on her clothes, but her boyfriend did not, and said, 'Hey, wait a minute, man. You mean to tell me you're not going to do anything for her? Nothing?'
'I can't find anything I can treat'
'Listen, dude, my woman is in pain, real pain, and I want you to give her something for it'
'I don't know what's causing her pain, and I don't want to give her anything, because if it gets worse, I want to know about it, and have her come back. I don't want to mask what's going on.'
'Damn you, look at her, she's suffering. Now, you gotta give her something for her pain.'
I said I would not. I went back to the nursing station to write up my findings. The boyfriend pursued me, and although the woman was embarrassed and stood near the door wanting to leave, he would not and began to use the crowded E.M. as a forum: 'Gods damn you. I knew we wouldn't get any help here. You just want her to suffer, 'cause you enjoy it. You honkies don't give a shit, as long as we get the hell out.'
