"I guess not," the doctor snorted.
"I don't know what happened. I guess the blast of air was just enough this time to dislodge that goddamn Caterpillar machine, and it came rolling down those tracks and I saw it coming, watching him, I was watching through the window beside the lock, I saw what was about to happen and I almost died right there, there was no way to make the lock go any faster, and the next lock was half a mile away and I didn't have a suit anyway, and—"
"Really thought it all through, didn't you?"
"Henry, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I do these things."
"That's between you and your therapist, or your God, or whoever it is you listen to, if you listen to anybody."
"I was so stupid."
"The stupid part I can forgive, John. It's the evil part that scares me. It was evil to do what you did." There was another long silence, then the doctor spoke again, with more curiosity than anger in his voice.
"That's what the Dywoo Caterpillar business was? That he was screaming about when you brought him in?"
"Daewoo/Caterpillar," Valentine said. "You know, the heavy equipment company. Earthmovers, tunneling equipment, asteroid relocation. It was written right on the front of that boring machine. One of the grinder arms or something wedged in the door and I thought... I thought it would never move away." He began sobbing again, great racking spasms that hurt Dodger to hear.
But the boy was already consumed by a hot burst of shame. He sat back on his heels and pounded his fist on his thigh.
"Stupid! Stupid!" he whispered. The one thing in the world he'd been the most frightened of, and it turned out to be nothing but... a machine? Stupid! Biting back tears, he put the stethoscope back against the door.
"There must have been a small gradient there," his father was saying. "The thing rocked back just enough on its tracks, enough so the lock could keep turning. Nothing but sheer, dumb luck. More luck than I deserve, certainly. It must be the boy's luck. Somebody's watching over him."
Dodger had long understood that his father couldn't see Elwood. In fact, he was pretty sure no one could see Elwood but himself. In fact, he'd been wondering, not being completely stupid, if Elwood was just a figurehead of his imagination, a hellishination. A bee in his bonnet, a bat in his belfry. If he was, in a word, crazy. Now he didn't think so. Elwood had shoved that Caterpillar back in its tracks. There was no other explanation for it. Which meant that Elwood was a bona fide ghost, like Hamlet's old man. The only thing he wasn't sure of was if he was the ghost of Elwood P. Dowd, a fictional character, or the ghost of Jimmy Stewart, who had just gone crazy and thought he was Elwood P. Dowd. But from that moment on he knew Elwood was his guardian angel.
"Can I go in and see him now?" Dodger was about to leap back into bed, but held out just long enough to hear the doctor's reply.
"Let the lad rest," said Wauk. "He ought to be out another hour or so, with the dose I gave him. Right now, why don't you take me down to the saloon and buy me a drink or three."
Damn drunk, Dodger thought as he heard the outside door open and close, and the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. Can't even dope me up properly. It's a good thing I'm still alive.
That bastard! Make my father cry, will you?
Dodger started poking around in cupboards and cabinets.
He quickly found a gallon stoneware jug labeled CORN LIQUOR. He pulled out the stopper and smelled it. Booze, all right. Okay, what have we got here?
He spent the next hour reading definitions in an old leather-bound book called Saunders's Comprehensive Medical Encyclopedia, publication date 1898, looking up the words he found printed on bottles and jars that lined the shelves and cabinets in the examining room. "Paregoric," he discovered, was camphorated tincture of opium. It smelled nasty, so he dumped some of it in the jug of corn liquor. "Calomel" was mercurous chloride. That sounded nasty; wasn't mercury poisonous? Into the bottle went a teaspoon of calomel. "Aunt Lydia's Pink Tonic" was said, by the label, to possess excellent emetic properties. After looking up "emetic," Dodger poured in a generous dose. "Nicotine" was a poisonous alkaloid, C10H14N2. In it went. A "sialogogue" was something that increased the flow of saliva. Why not? "Arecane" was a proprietary remedy and efficacious as a purgative. A "parturifacient" was used to speed up childbirth, while an "abortifacient" produced an abortion. Dodger wondered what a mixture of the two would do to a drunken doctor? "Formalin," "cryptomenorrheal," "Salvarsan," "arnicin," "myxorrheal," "leptuntic"...so many new words, so many definitions, so little time.
After a while he grew tired of reading, and felt a little hungry. In the next room, by the dentist chair, he found the remains of a Mexican lunch: chips and salsa and a cold taco. He took a bite of the taco, and in a moment was searching frantically for a drink of water. After he'd put out the fire in his mouth, he examined the bottle of Pancho's Habanero Hell (WARNING: Do not use near open flame!), then took it into the doctor's office and dumped half the bottle into the jug. He smeared a little sauce around the earpieces of the stethoscope.
He jammed in the cork and shook the jug vigorously, then opened it again and sniffed cautiously. It still smelled like booze.
For good measure, he pissed in the jug before going downstairs to join his father.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
From: First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints
Subject: November Audience Ratings
Category: Children's (age 2 to 12) periodical (weekly/fortnightly/monthly)
December 1 (King City Temple)
The November "Flack" numbers as compiled by the Trends Research Department of the Latitudinarian Church are as follows:
| TITLE | AAS | Last Month | Last Year | |
| 1. | The Gideon Peppy Show | 93.1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2. | Admiral Platypus | 84.4 | 2 | 3 |
| 3. | Skunk Cabbage | 80.2 | 5 | - |
| 4. | Barney's Boulevard | 78.7 | 3 | 14 |
| 5. | What the Fuck? | 70.3 | 4 | 2 |
Admiral Platypus seems to have solidified its hold on the number-two slot in the Adjusted Audience Share rating. Barney's Boulevard, benefiting from a new writing staff, has made its way from number fourteen to number four in the past year. The top two stories continue to be the steepening decline of What the Fuck?, the once-dominant Q A offering from NLF-TV3, and the meteoric rise of Skunk Cabbage, the critically panned actioner about a tribe of zombie children. SC seems poised to make a run on those two old reliable warhorses, Peppy and Platy.
Spokespersons for NLF and the Children's Educational Workshop, producers of WTF?, had no comment when asked if the declining numbers of educational programming across the board in the past three years reflected a growing anti-intellectualism or merely a stagnation of fresh new ideas in the presentation of loftier kid-vid. Oskar Bigbird III, chairman of CEW, promised a news conference later in the week, announcing staffing changes on WTF?