It was true. The diplomas hung about the waiting room, just high enough to make reading difficult, were mostly grammar-school graduation certificates. The only course Big Boy had completed was the one offered by the House of Correction, where he’d done a stretch for prescribing cinchophen, a drug for which he’d once entertained such a fondness that he’d succeeded in tearing up some three dozen human livers before his supply had been cut off. He’d picked up his present racket in the bucket, as being safer than either peddling cinchophen or living on the curette.
Safer, more respectable and more profitable, what with red and green light rays, a bit of fancy bone snapping, neck twisting and pills of every hue, shade, shape and size. He liked to wet his fingertips from his lips, when he felt the psychic approach was required, place them tenderly upon the patient’s forehead and gaze into her eyes steadily, seemingly entranced by something there. Then he’d come out of it, prescribe Holland gin, collect his three-fifty and send out for a pint of Cream of Kentucky for himself.
‘I’m gettin’ the astral pow-wer,’ he would confide in some matron who lay supine and stripped to the waist before him. ‘You got to relax, you got to tell yourself you’re not afraid of anything.’ While his hands caressed her so warmly that she felt herself starting to burn with rare courage. He had found most matrons brave enough after a while.
He never made verbal propositions: those hot damp hands did his proposing. Proposed and fulfilled. For old Doc D. wasn’t working for nothing. ‘We don’t do business in an alley,’ he warned any woman wearing a fur coat; though his side entrance opened onto an alley all the same. He charged as much as the traffic would bear and when the payments began coming harder the patient was cured, he’d decide after a glance at a book in which no records were kept at all. ‘You’ve cured me all right,’ the patient would have to conclude. For by the time he was through with a woman he had more on her than she had on him; he himself never got out of line until the patient was so far off base she couldn’t get back in a month of extra innings.
‘I can see it now,’ he told Sophie, breathing heavily above her, ‘I can see the astral pow-wer.’ The sheet was covering her modestly from throat to knee, he hadn’t yet been able to figure how much of a charge she’d stand.
‘With some patients it is little white dots, with others colored dots. Each person has his own color.’
This was true too. Big Boy’s own special color was the hard cold green of ten-dollar bills.
‘What’s my color?’ Sophie asked.
‘Turk-woiz blue. You can feel something, can’t you?’
‘Yeh. I feel somethin’.’ It was his right hand growing moderately bold as his breath grew warmer and the astral power really began to move. ‘My husband takes care of that angle,’ Sophie told him quietly, wishing Frankie really did. For Frankie’s physical interest in her, increasingly casual since their marriage, had passed altogether with the accident.
Old Doc D. immediately became professional. ‘You got the blood pressure of a five-mont’-old baby – but that’s nothin’ serious. Eat lots of hot t’ings – pepper ’n hot sauces. Drink a little wine before meals or a little whisky. But never mix them. And believe you’re going to get well. Now turn over and we’ll wibrate the wertebrays.’
Big Boy loved to wibrate the wertebrays. When he’d wibrated each one he applied a grease to her back, sharpened a pencil and recorded, down the spinal column, the location of something he called ‘ligatites.’ They were the real cause of Sophie’s trouble. He showed her a rough diagram of her spine. ‘You can see for yourself what shape you’re in.’
She saw. But he sensed her doubt and decided that the root of her difficulty was Lack of Faith – which was also curable. So she attended a meeting of the Royal Aryan Crusaders and the Aryans sold her so many varieties of pills, pamphlets, booklets, wormwood tea and senna leaves that she couldn’t afford to have the wertebrays wibrated for three weeks following.
When she resumed treatments, largely because of Frankie’s gloomy aversion to the doc, Big Boy introduced her to the electric blood reverser. This was simply a frosted twenty-five-watt bulb which glowed with a lavender light. He also had some pale green bulbs for the better-heeled clientele and if necessary he could, literally, make sparks fly. It was only by sheerest chance that he had as yet electrocuted no one.
‘I’m talkin’ cold turkey to you now,’ he warned Sophie. ‘How many treatments can you take a week? You ought to take them every day so the good effect don’t wear off in between. But you got to come t’ree times a week or they won’t do no good at all. It’ll be the greatest investment you ever made. Have your husband wash your feet in ice water every night, don’t drink no liquor except beer, no eggs in hot weat’er ’n come back T’ursday for wibrate the wertebrays.’
Frankie knew he was being played for a mark but it took Violet to put her foot down. When she no longer had anyone to wheel her down Division to Big Boy’s, Sophie finally resigned herself to forgoing his ministrations.
Thus Frankie had robbed her again, of course, of her one chance to get well. If he wouldn’t let her go to Big Boy’s she wouldn’t go anywhere at all. For weeks she wouldn’t let anyone help her upstairs but Frankie.
Even though Vi had helped her down the stairs it had to be on Frankie’s shoulder she must now come up. Once, wearied like a child by hours of horror films and animated cartoons, she clung with all her weight to the banister, crying that no one must touch her any more but Frankie.
‘Let me help you, Sissie,’ Violet urged her, wiping Sophie’s forehead, ‘Frankie’s gone to work.’
‘He ain’t suppose to go so soon,’ she complained miserably in the darkening hall, ‘he’s suppose to help me up, he’s the one who done it, he’s suppose to, he’s suppose to-’ She began beating the scarred newel post with both fat fists. ‘He went early just so’s he wouldn’t have to ’n I told him to wait – I told him, I told him-’
‘He got to earn a livin’ first, Sissie. He ain’t even got the clinic paid off yet.’
‘You call this livin’?’ Sophie wanted to know, and her voice rose into such a hysterical rattle that Violet slapped her cleanly across the cheek. For one moment Sophie’s full-moon face stared out in white shock at Violet’s impudence. ‘Now my best friend turns on me,’ she mourned, ‘he made me this way ’n you stick up fer him – you got a name like a flower but you’re a devil all the same. Go on, get upstairs, the sheeny shoplifter is waitin’ to give you some hot lovin’, you’ll just have time before Stash gets home – I’ll get upstairs by myself ’r die right here in the hall.’ She was pale with sweat and leaned heavily upon the post for support. Violet waited, hands on hips, for the tantrum to pass.
But at last had turned slowly away, so sorry that Sophie, of all people, should talk like that. Violet had hardly felt the stairs beneath her feet. In the hall at the top of the flight a red light shone over the gas meter, among a dark maze of pipes, with the meter’s single hand pointing to some midnight when no cripple would be crying below with her head on the dark newel post. Some midnight when neither Sparrow nor Frankie would be near at hand nor anyone at all, of all the friends she knew. She looked down over the banister. Sophie was in the middle of the first flight and coming on strong.