“Oh Christ. That won’t be pleasant.”
“A tragedy like this one rarely is. And as for me, well, I was a friend of your uncle’s, and you’ve both done a lot of business with me, you and your uncle and that friend Mr. Nolan of yours as well, so you do whatever you think is fair.”
Jon got up and went to the silverware drawer to get the combination to Planner’s wall safe.
4
The doctor put two pillows under Charlie’s feet. He took the pulse of his unconscious patient, casting a cursory glance at the wounded thigh. Then he gave Walter a brief smile — one of those meaningless smiles doled out by doctors like another pill — and walked to a sink across the room to wash up.
Walter stood at his father’s upraised feet, wishing he could do something to help, watching the doctor’s every action, wondering why the man moved so damn slow.
Or maybe it was just him. Maybe the doctor wasn’t slow at all. Walter couldn’t be sure. His sense of time was fouled up. Was that business at the antique shop just this afternoon? It seemed years ago.
Moments earlier — or was it hours? — the doctor had offered to give Walter a hand carrying Charlie, but Walter had refused, wanting to bear both the weight and responsibility of his father in his own arms, following the doctor through the darkened waiting room and down a short narrow hall and into a closet of a room, where Walter had eased his father onto a padded examining table that sat high off the floor, like a sacrificial altar. The table was white porcelain with its padded, contoured surface black but mostly covered by white crinkly tissue paper. In fact, almost everything in the room was white: stucco walls, mosaic stone floor, ceiling tile overhead, counters, cabinets, sink, everything.
Except the doctor’s clothes. Walter thought the blue sweater and yellow slacks were grossly inappropriate. He would’ve felt more secure if his father’s welfare were in the hands of a man in traditional white; he had the feeling this guy wouldn’t know the Hippocratic oath if he tripped over it.
The doctor removed his sweater and folded it neatly and deposited it on a chair by the sink and began ceremoniously to wash his hands. Jesus, Walter thought, what does he think he is, a damn brain surgeon? The shirt beneath the sweater turned out to be white, but that was no consolation to Walter, as it was an off-white, sporty Banlon, with rings of sweat under the arms and wrinkled from eighteen holes of golf.
The doctor dried his hands and moved from the sink to a counter, where he filled a modest-sized hypo from a small bottle of something.
“What’s that?” Walter said.
“Morphine,” the doctor said cheerfully, beaming at Walter with all the sincerity of a politician. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
“All right,” Walter said. There was a chair directly behind him and he backed into it and sat.
The doctor administered the hypo, then went back to the counter and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of cloudy liquid. He dabbed some of the liquid onto a folded strip of gauze.
“Ammonia,” the doctor said, anticipating Walter’s question. He walked across the room and held the gauze under Charlie’s nose and Charlie came around quickly, thrashing his arms like a man waking from a nightmare, finally pushing himself to a sitting position with the heels of his hands.
“Goddamn shit,” he said to the doctor, “what’d you hold under my nose? Who... who the hell are you? Where the hell am I? What’s going on?”
The doctor smiled again. He did that a lot. He said, “You’ll have to ask your young friend here about that.”
Walter got up and came around the other side of the table and squeezed his father’s shoulder. “You’re going to be all right, Dad.”
“Of course I’m going to be all right,” Charlie said, his speech slightly muddy. “I’m all right now. I feel just fine.”
“You should,” the doctor said, “you’re full of morphine.”
Suddenly Charlie noticed his wound, said, “Jesus,” and settled back down on the table.
The doctor continued to work while Charlie talked to Walter. What the doctor did was give Charlie several shots — a tetanus toxoid, some Novocain around the wound — and proceeded to debride the wound, stripping away the flesh that had died of shock on the bullet’s impact. What Charlie said to Walter was, “You stupid goddamn kid, we should be long gone from here by now, what the hell you doing dragging me to a doctor for? Christ, a little goddamn scratch on the leg and you’re dragging me to a doctor, what the hell you use for brains, boy,” and more along those lines.
After the doctor was through debriding the wound, and his father was through sermonizing, Walter said, “Dad, you were unconscious and I felt I should get you to a doctor. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
Then Walter turned away and walked to the window and separated two blades of the white Venetian blinds and stared out into the street. It was twilight and a few seconds after he started looking, the streetlights came on. The doctor’s office was on the back edge of the Iowa City downtown, where the businesses trailed off into the residential district. The street was quiet, right now anyway, and almost peaceful to watch. The traffic ran mostly to kids of all ages sliding by on bikes, with only an occasional car, and every now and then a bird would cut from this tree to that one. Walter felt better now. He was relieved that his father was coming out of it. His father yelling at him for staying in town and going to a doctor was a disappointment, but to be expected, he supposed. It wasn’t worth brooding over.
While Walter stared out at the quiet street, the doctor applied a pressure dressing to the wound and explained to Charlie that carrying that bullet in his leg wasn’t going to hurt him any, and going in after the slug just wasn’t worth the time and trouble. Charlie said he knew that, that a lot of his friends had bullets in them.
“Hey,” Charlie said.
“Yeah?” Walter said.
“Listen. Listen, thanks.”
“It’s okay.”
“Come here a minute.”
“Okay.”
Walter joined his father. The doctor said that he was going across the hall to get some pills for Charlie and left the room. Charlie asked Walter to tell him what had been happening.
Walter explained about going to see Sturms, and calling Uncle Harry, and then having trouble getting hold of the doctor. Seemed the doctor’s wife was out of town and it wasn’t till Sturms thought of the country club that they got a lead on the guy. Unfortunately, the doctor had left the club on an emergency call and hadn’t told anyone what or where the emergency was. They had continued calling the man’s home, and finally someone at the country club called back and said the doctor had returned to the club for supper and cocktails and Sturms had got him on the line and set things up.
“What’s the doc’s name?” Charlie said.
“Ainsworth,” Walter said. “Sturms says he’ll do anything for a buck. Built his practice on abortions and draft dodge. Still helps Sturms out, with O.D. situations, different drug things. I guess the reason Ainsworth stays out of trouble is he’s done work for important people in the area and has too much on too many of them for anybody to bother him.”
There was the sound of talking outside the room and Charlie jerked up into a sitting position. “What the hell’s that? Who the hell’s that goddamn quack talking to? You bring Sturms along or something?”
“No, I told you, Dad, he just set it up and never left his house.”
“You got a gun?”
“Right here,” he said, pulling the silenced nine-millimeter from his waistband. After getting caught by Sturms he wasn’t taking chances.
“Go out and see what the hell’s happening.”