What he was groping for, I thought, was a letter giving him power of attorney but I didn’t want to go on with this and antagonize him further. For all my big talk of finance, it was I who needed a loan, and a quick one. The doctor went to his bedroom and brought back the big pasteboard box. He pawed angrily through the stuff. “I’ll give you metes and bounds,” he said. “I’ll give you section, township, and range.”
The plan I had hatched while reclining on the couch was to take Christine to the Fort George for a seafood supper, leaving Victor here at the movie. It was an improper sort of business for a married man who was not legally separated but the idea wouldn’t go away. An alternative plan was to get supper here at the church and then take Christine out for drinks alone, which would be much cheaper, unless she went in for expensive novelty drinks. I couldn’t tell from the feel of things whether they had eaten supper here yet or not.
I asked the doctor cold if he could let me have another twenty dollars.
Instead of answering my question, he showed me a photograph of his father, the squeamish Otho. It was a brown print on crumbling cardboard. Then he showed me a picture of an intense yokel with a thick shock of hair parted in the middle. The boy was wearing a white medical smock and he was sitting behind a microscope, one hand holding a glass slide and the other poised to make a focal adjustment. It was Dr. Symes himself as a student at Wooten Institute. Young microbe hunter! The microscope had no solid look of machined steel about it, no heaviness, and my guess was that it was a dummy, a photographer’s prop.
There were more photographs, of Marvel Clark with Ivo and without Ivo, of an adult Ivo standing by his roofing truck and his hot-tar trailer, of houses, cars, fish, of people on porches, in uniform, of a grim blockhouse medical clinic, of people at a restaurant table, their eyes dazzled by a flash bulb like movie stars caught at play. He showed me a picture of the Wooten Panthers, a scraggly six-man football team. A medical school with a football team! Who did they play? The coach was Dr. Wooten himself, and Dr. Symes, with his bulk, played center. But there seemed to be no picture of the island, the only thing I was curious about.
Suddenly the doctor gave a start and a little yelp of discovery. “Another one! I missed this booger!” It was a window envelope that had not been opened. He wasted no time in ripping the end off and shaking out a check. It was a monthly insurance check for $215 made out to Mrs. Symes. It was almost a year old. “Some of them go back eight and nine years,” he said, folding it and sticking it in his shirt pocket. “This makes thirty some-odd I’ve found so far.”
“Why doesn’t she cash them?”
“She cashes some and she forgets some. People like Mama, they don’t care whether an insurance company can balance its books or not. They never think about things like that. The Aetna books mean less than nothing to her.”
“What will you do with them?”
“What do you think?”
“Your mother will have to endorse them.”
“They’ll be well endorsed, don’t worry about it. That’s no step for a stepper. And Mama will get it all back a thousandfold. This is just seed money for the first drilling rig. This is just peanuts. I’m talking big bucks.” He looked about for eavesdroppers and then lowered his voice. “There’s a billion cubic feet of natural gas under that island, Speed. I plan to have two producing wells down by the first of the year. Do you think that’s an unrealistic goal?”
“I don’t know. What about The City of Life?”
“The what?”
“The nursing home. The long yellow house.”
Waves of confusion passed across his face. “Nursing home?”
“On Jean’s Island. The City of Life.”
Then he was able to remember, but just barely, and he dismissed it out of hand as though it had been an idea of mine. He resumed his search through the big box and he sang softly the words of “Mockingbird Hill.” He passed along odd items of interest to me. I looked at an old diary that Mrs. Symes had kept. It wasn’t a very satisfactory one, in that there were only a dozen or so brief entries in it covering a period of five years. The last one had been made on a September day in 1958. “Dry summer,” she had written. “Mangoes bitter this year. God’s plan unfolding very slowly.” I repeated my request to the doctor for a loan and got no answer.
He was studying a brittle newspaper clipping. “I wish you would look at this,” he said. “I don’t know why in the world Mama keeps all this stuff.”
It was an editorial cartoon of a fat man with buttons popping from his shirt. With one hand the chubby figure was clutching a wedge of pie and with the other he was holding out a Band-Aid and saying, “Here, apply this!” to an injured man with his tongue lolling and tire tracks across his head and x’s for eyes. The caption underneath said, “Our own Doc Symes.”
“What’s that about the pie?”
“Newspaper humor. Those boys love to dish it out but did you ever see one who could take it like a man? I weighed about two hundred and ninety-five then. I had to special-order all my suits from Benny’s in New Orleans. Fifty-four shorts. I’m just a shadow of that man. The Shreveport Times put dark glasses and a fez on me and called me Farouk. This was the original frame-up. I was suspended for six months. They accused me of practicing homeopathy, of all things. Can you imagine that?”
“I’ve heard of homeopathy but I don’t know what it is.”
“The hair of the dog. There’s a little something to it but not much. There’s a little truth in everything. I never practiced it but any stick was good enough to beat a dog like me. Can you see what I’m driving at?”
“Was this the hearing-aid deal?”
“No connection whatsoever. This was my arthritis clinic. The Brewster Method. Massive doses of gold salts and nuxated zinc followed by thirty push-ups and a twelve-minute nap. None of your thermo tubs or hydro baloney. You don’t hear much about it anymore but for my money it’s never been discredited. I saw marked improvement in those who could actually raise themselves from the floor. The older people found it painful, naturally, but that was the humidity as much as anything. I was to blame for the atmospheric conditions too, you see. Granted, the humidity is around a hundred percent in Ferriday, but everybody can’t go to Tucson, can they?
“I worked day and night trying to help those people, trying to give them some relief. I never made so much money in my life and the doctors’ gang couldn’t stand it. My prosperity just stuck in their craw. ‘Get Symes!’ they cried, and ‘Bust Symes!’ and ‘Kick him where it hurts!’ That was all they could think about for two years. Well, here I am. You will judge of their success. I haven’t been a newsmaker for years.”
“I don’t see how the homeopathy ties in.”
“It doesn’t tie in. Brewster had once been a homeopath, that’s all. He later became a naturopath. So what? He had one or two good ideas. I’ll look you square in the eye, Speed, and tell you that I have never practiced anything but orthodox medicine. This was a setup, pure and simple. They were lying in wait. It wasn’t my medicine that stirred those boys up, it was my accounts receivable. You can bank on it, that’s the only reason any doctor ever turns another one in.”
Christine was bustling about in white shorts and a pale blue work shirt that was knotted in front so as to expose her red abdomen. I could tell she was older than Norma from the fatty dimpling on the backs of her thighs. It was like the patterns you sometimes see in blown sand. She had washed her hair, and her ears stuck through the wet brown strands. I found her very attractive with her sunburn and her hoarse voice and her brisk manner. She was making friends with Melba and I liked that too, a young person deferring and giving her time to an older person. She was showing Melba something, a book or a purse or a stamp album. The old lady had been out of sorts and now she was jiggling her leg up and down, making the floor shake again. Christine was charming Melba!
“A patient named J. D. Brimlett developed osteomyelitis,” said the doctor. “That was the claim anyway. I?
??m convinced he already had it. He had everything else. Emphysema, glaucoma, no adrenal function, you name it. Two little hard dark lungs like a pair of desiccated prunes. He belonged in a carnival instead of an arthritis clinic. The world’s sickest living man. No blood pressure to speak of and you couldn’t find a vein to save your ass. Renal failure on top of everything else. The Mayo brothers couldn’t have pulled that chump through, but no, it was my zinc that killed him. A Class B irritant poison, they said. I should have screened him out. I should have closed my eyes and ears to his suffering and sent him on his way. I didn’t do it and I’ve been paying for that mistake ever since. There’s always a son of a bitch like Brimlett hanging around, doing anything to get attention, dying even, and just ruining things for everybody else. Do you want it in a nutshell? I was weak. I was soft.”
He raised a hand to repel shouts of protest and then went on, “It wasn’t the zinc and they knew it. I took a five-pound bag of the stuff to my hearing and offered to eat it all right there with a spoon but they wouldn’t let me do it. Brewster himself admitted that it would give the skin a greenish tint. There was never any secret about that. You get a trivial cosmetic problem in exchange for relief from agonizing pain. Many people considered it a bargain. Talcum powder is cheap enough. It’s true, in a very few cases the eyebrows fell out but I’ve seen cortisone do far worse things. Can you see it now? Do you see what I’m driving at? It was all a smoke screen. The point is, you can’t cross the doctors’ union. Cross those boys and they’ll hand you your lunch. Forget the merits of your case. They kicked Pasteur in the ass. Lister too, and Smitty Wooten. They know everything and Symes is an old clap doctor.”
Outside it was dark. I excused myself and went downstairs to get the chest of silverware from the car. When I opened the church door, the milling boys fell back and looked at me in silent terror, fearing another announcement about the movie being delayed. I made my way through them and I saw that Leet or one of his tireless runners had put another leaflet under a windshield wiper.
The silver chest had been knocked around in the trunk. It was greasy and scuffed and the leatheroid skin was peeling and bubbling up in places from glue breakdown. I put the chest under my arm and slammed the trunk lid. I thought I heard someone call my name. I couldn’t place the voice, though it was familiar in some way.
I said, “What?”
“This way.”
“Where?”
“Over here, Ray.”
“Where? Who wants to see me?”
One of the older boys with a cigar said, “Nobody want to see you, mon. The peoples want to see Tarzan.” A good laugh all around at my expense.
The forks and spoons and knives were jumbled about in the chest and I stopped on the stairs to sort them out and stack them in their proper notches and hollows before making my presentation to the doctor. He said nothing when I set it on his lap and opened it, Mrs. Edge’s shining array of cutlery under his red eye. I told him that I needed some more money at once and that if I had not settled the entire debt by noon tomorrow the silver service was his to keep. It was all too fast for him, my proposition and the heavy thing on his knees. I said nothing more and waited for him to take it in.
Victor had settled in at my old spot in front of the fan. His mother had spread out the beach towel for him. One side of the towel was a Confederate flag and on the other side there was a kneeling cowgirl in a bikini. Her body was sectioned off and labeled “Round,” “Chuck,” “Rump,” and so on, like a side of beef, and the Western cutie was winking and saying, “What’s your cut?” Victor was belly down on the towel reading a Little Lulu comic book. The book was in Spanish but he was still getting a few chuckles from it. “Hoo,” he would say, and, “Hoo hoo.” There might have been a dove in the room. Dr. Symes looked about for the source of these murmurs.
I said, “That’s sterling silver. It’s a complete set. All I want is fifty dollars on it until tomorrow.”
“Certainly not. Why would I want to tie up my money in spoons? You’d do better to take this to a pawnbroker or a chili joint.”
“It’s just until noon tomorrow.”
“Bill me later. That’s your answer for everything. It’s no good, Speed. You’ll never get anywhere living on short-term credit like this. It’s a bad game and I just can’t keep carrying you. Who is that little chap on the floor?”
“He’s the son of that girl in the bathroom.”
“The one who’s washing all the clothes?”
“Yes.”
“Now who is she?”
I tried to tell him but as he was swinging his big head around Melba swam into his ken and he forgot Christine. He called out, “Melba, can you hear me?”
“I heard that,” she said. “I haven’t been listening to you, if that’s what you mean.”
“I want you to get up out of that chair this very minute.”
“What for?”
“I want you to get up out of that chair and start walking two miles every day.”
“No, Reo.”
“Now isn’t this a fine thing. She says no to her doctor.”
He closed the chest and moved it to one side, away from me, in a proprietary way. I didn’t think we had made a deal and I knew I had no money. Mrs. Symes had just made the painful trip up the stairs and she was standing at the top gasping for breath, trying to remember something, what the trip was for. She gave it up as a bad job and went back down the stairs.
The doctor handed me another envelope from the box. “Take a gander at that one, will you? Never opened. I wrote that letter to Mama from San Diego almost three years ago. How in the world can you do business with someone like that?”
“This letter was postmarked in Mexico.”
“Old Mexico? Let me see. Yes, it sure was. Tijuana. I was going back and forth to the Caliente track. Notice the thick enclosure. Rod Garza had drawn up a prospectus for me. I wanted Mama to look it over and see if she wouldn’t co-sign a note. I wrote this very letter in Rod’s law office.”
I pointed out that my previous loans were already secured by the bonds, that I had returned his wallet when he thought it was lost, and that this silver set was worth several hundred dollars. He appeared to consider the points and I thought he might even be wavering, but his thoughts were many miles to the northwest.
“Rod had been reprimanded twice by the Ethics Committee of the Tijuana Bar Association,” he said, “but he could always work himself out of a corner. All except for that last one. You can’t talk your way out of an exploding car, there’s not enough time. And they knew he was no leaper. Oh, they had cased him, all right. They knew just how quick he was off the mark. He’s gone now and I miss him more every day. Strawberries! Can you imagine that? We were trying to raise strawberries on government land. Rod got some boys out of prison to do the work, if you could call it work. As fast as you got one of those pickpockets on his feet, the one behind you would be squatting down again. And hot? You think this is hot? Those pimps were dropping in their tracks. Rodrigo would park his black Pontiac out there in the desert and then roll the windows up to keep the dust out. When we got back to it, the seat covers would be melting. Open the door and the heat blast would make you faint. An inferno. You could have roasted a duck in the trunk. Precious memories, how they linger. Listen to me, Speed. If your time is worth more than twenty cents an hour, don’t ever fool with strawberries. I helped Rod every way I knew how. We were just like David and Jonathan. When he was trying to get his patent, I took him up to Long Beach and introduced him to a good lawyer name of Welch. Rod had an interest in a denture factory in Tijuana and he was trying to get a U.S. patent on their El Tigre model. They were wonderful teeth. They had two extra canines and two extra incisors of tungsten steel. Slap a set of those Tiger plates in your mouth and you can throw your oatmeal out the window. You could shred an elk steak with those boogers. Did I say Everett Welch? I meant Billy. Billy is the lawyer. He’s the young one. I had known his father, Everett, you see, back
in Texas when he was a scout there for the Cubs or the White Sox, one of the Chicago teams. He was a great big fine-looking man. He later went to Nevada and became minister of music at the Las Vegas Church of God, introduced tight harmony to those saps out there. He sold water to Jews. Jews are smart but you can put water in a bottle and they’ll buy it. He had a high clear voice and when he sang ‘’Tis so sweet to be remembered on a bright or cloudy day,’ you could close your eyes and swear you were listening to Bill Monroe himself. And get this. He’s the only man I ever knew who saw Dix in the flesh. He met him once in the public library in Odessa, Texas. Listen to this. Dix was sitting at a table reading a newspaper on a stick and Welch recognized him from a magazine picture. It was right after that big article on Dix, right around the time of that famous June 1952 issue of Motel Life with the big spread on Dix, pictures of his trunk and his slippers and his mechanical pencil and some of his favorite motel rooms. The whole issue was devoted to Dix. There was a wide red band across the cover that said, ‘John Selmer Dix: Genius or Madman?’ I didn’t have enough sense to stash away a copy of that magazine. I could name my own price for it today. That’s the only place where Dix’s Fort Worth address was ever published in full.”
This was not, as I first thought, a speech or a proclamation that Dix had made in Fort Worth, but rather a post office box number and a zip code.
Dr. Symes continued, “This was during the period, you may remember, when Dix was on strike. He had repudiated all his early stuff, said Wings was nothing but trash, and didn’t write another line, they say, for twelve years. Nobody really knows why. Oh, there were plenty of theories—that he was drunk, that he was crazy, that he was sick, that he was struck dumb before the immensity of his task, that he was just pissed off about something—but nobody really knows. Do you want my thinking on it? I believe he was actually writing all that time, that he was filling up thousands of sheets of paper with his thoughts and then just squirreling the stuff away in his trunk. But for some reason that we can’t understand yet he wanted to hold it all back from the reading public, let them squeal how they may. Here’s my opinion. Find the missing trunk and you’ve found the key to his so-called silent years. You’ve found a gold mine is what you’ve found.