“Right. Otherwise, apart from the material good it might do, it’s money wasted.” Plunk.
“Wow, Joe.” Pop.
“Hardball, Bill. Scripture’s rough and tough and hard to stay with. People can’t have it both ways, and we — the clergy — can’t, though God knows we try.” Plunk.
“Be a lot more charity — true charity, Joe — if everybody looked at it like that.” Pop.
“And a lot less strong-arm stuff like Arf.” Plunk.
Pop.
Plunk.
“Man I ran into last night, Joe, said he talked to you about registering, but didn’t get around to it. Name’s Gumball.” Pop.
“Oh, yes. Phoned. Never came in.” Plunk.
“Said to tell you he’s sorry about that, Joe.” Pop.
“So when’s he coming in?” Plunk.
“Joe, I told him he wouldn’t have to, in the circumstances [“What circumstances?”], since I’d seen him and all his free time goes on the house. Hers too. They’re redoing the place from scratch. But he said he’d put a check in the mail.” Pop.
“Great.” Plunk.
“How d’ya mean, Joe?” Pop.
“I tell man he, or his wife, has to come in to register, and you tell him forget it.” Plunk.
“I thought, in the circumstances…” Pop.
Plunk.
Pop.
“You want to be the good shamus, Bill.” Plunk.
Pop.
“And you want me to be the bad one.” Plunk.
Pop.
“No way to run a parish, Bill.” Plunk.
Pop.
Plunk.
Pop.
“O.K., Bill. Man won’t have to come in.” Plunk.
Pop.
“But only because I don’t want you to look bad — and the Church.” Plunk.
Pop.
Plunk.
Pop.
Plunk.
“Ow!”
On seeing the new patient at his front door — this was, in fact, their first meeting — Dr Wylie had said, “Oh, shit,” but had turned off the TV within and rushed the patient over to the clinic next door, turned on the TV there, and ministered to him silently during the rest of Gunsmoke.
Now that the air had cleared, physician could consult with patient. “Mind telling me how it happened?”
Joe did mind, some. “Playing catch in the yard. Hardball.”
“No shit? In that getup? You don’t look it.”
Joe, immaculate in black and white, found this line of questioning hard to take from a professional man of his generation (and, incidentally, short stature) who wore cowboy boots, overalls, no shirt, and a lavaliere. “Had a bath and changed before I came here.” And also had a drink — should’ve had two.
“Hard to dress yourself, wasn’t it, with one hand?”
“Yes.” And to make a drink.
Dr Wylie blew smoke in Joe’s face, saying, “Well, that’s what you get for playing catch in weather like this.”
“Just trying to keep in shape.”
“Keep? You sure as hell don’t look like you’re in shape to me.”
“Let’s just say I’m trying to keep my weight down.”
“Keep? Down to what? You’re twenty pounds overweight.”
“Let’s just say I don’t want to be thirty.”
“Sure as hell will be if all you’re doing about it is playing catch with kids. Had a physical lately?”
“No.”
“Who’s your regular quack?”
“Don’t have one — haven’t since I was a kid.”
“About time you had one then. But don’t think I’m looking for business. Mind if I ask how old you are?”
For some reason, Joe did mind. “Forty-four.”
“Yeah? Guess how old I am.”
“Why?”
“Go ahead, guess. I won’t bill you for it.”
“Thanks. You’re about my age, maybe younger.”
“Like hell I am. I’m fifty-four.” Dr Wylie stubbed out his cigarette. “How do I do it, huh?”
“You’re on some new special diet?”
“Diet, shit. I eat like a horse, drink like a fish.” Dr Wylie lit a cigarette. “Try again.”
“You smoke a lot?”
Dr Wylie, as if he’d underestimated Joe, looked at him with qualified respect. “Smoking can be a factor in weight control, and to that extent it’s a plus, but there are minuses too. The Surgeon General has determined that smoking is dangerous to your health.”
Joe nodded.
“But smoking, or nonsmoking, could never account for this.” Dr Wylie, seen now in profile, hands hooked and pulling against each other, biceps and pectorals tumescent, lacking only grease, posed like the late Charles Atlas.
Joe nodded.
Dr Wylie relaxed then, only to expose a muscular calf and flex it.
Joe nodded.
Dr Wylie slapped his belly, which was tight as a drum, and glanced at Joe’s, which was embarrassing.
But Joe nodded.
“How do I do it, huh?”
“You pump iron?”
“Iron, shit.”
Joe nodded.
Dr Wylie laughed. “O.K., I’ll tell you. Last thing I do at night — drunk or sober — is go for a little ride.”
In case this meant what Joe thought it might and he was about to be tempted to have sex on medical grounds — celibacy was still the Church’s trump and why the heathen rage — Joe waited for clarification and did not nod.
“Sleep like a log.”
Joe did not nod.
“Wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
Joe did not nod.
“See that horse in the lobby?”
Joe looked in the direction indicated, trying to see through the cinder block wall, but couldn’t. “Horse?”
“Mechanical horse — for kids. Have ’em in supermarkets.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Have one in my bedroom. Muscle model. Runs on two-twenty current. Knock the shit out of you. What you need.”
“That so?”
“If you can pass a physical, which I doubt.”
“That so?” Joe — he’d had enough of this — rose to go, but noticed his thumb, numb in its pink plastic sheath thing, and wondered what the prognosis was for it. “Won’t be deformed, will it? Gnarled?”
“Shit, no,” said Dr Wylie.
Joe, dying for a drink when he got back to the rectory, had to deny himself, for Bill was in the study with a big, heavy, white-haired, red-faced type in a summerweight business suit with flared trousers.
“Mr McMaster,” Bill said. “Mayer, Mayer, Maher, Chicago.”
Mr McMaster, having heaved himself up from the couch with his right hand out, put it away. “Hurt your hand, Father?”
“Thumb.”
“Car door?”
“No.”
“Sorry,” Bill murmured to Joe, nodded to Mr McMaster, and left them alone.
Mr McMaster was sitting down again, but Joe — significantly, he thought — remained standing.