4

It happened in all businesses, professions and public services that I knew anything about—the lulls between storms. The sheriff’s office was having one now; and Charleston, Ike Doolittle and I were loafing in Old Doc Yak’s office, along with Doc himself and Felix Underwood, the town mortician.

It had become something of a habit with a few of Doc’s friends, to drop in his place of an evening if time permitted. One missing member now was Bob Studebaker, who often came in for a quiet drink away from his bar and juke boxes. We had glasses in our hands. A bottle of whiskey and a pitcher of water rested on Doc’s desk.

We were, I supposed, a queer assortment, brought together through years of association and sometimes common interests.

Old Doc Yak properly was Dr. Gaylord Summerville, but Doc Yak was the name of an early-day cartoon character, and he had acquired it. Most people now would have had to think twice to address him correctly. Crusty as a cracker, he was the world’s worst driver and the last doctor to accept death, natural or violent. There was nothing meek about Doc.

As we sat, waiting for drink to promote talk, I thought of the change that was overtaking Felix Underwood. Once rather free and easy except at funerals, he was becoming stuffy, perhaps because of a growing bankroll. I flirted with the idea of the relationship between property and propriety.

I was feeling worthless. All my leads had petered out. I had questioned Madame Simone’s friendly sheriff. No help there. I had talked to his deputies. Sure, there had been a little fracas at Madame’s house, but they had straightened it out and sent the man on his way. Name? No one remembered.

“By my lights she was a good girl,” Charleston was saying. He was never quite easy away from his work though he had no real reason to fret now. Sure, he had put a new man on the board—one Kenneth Cole from Titusville—but he was being coached by Blanche Burton, an old watch-commander hand.

A breeze stirred a curtain in an open window. June in Montana, I thought, a time of bluster and sunshine and long light. Not for an hour would Doc have to switch on a lamp. I smelled the first fragrance of lilacs.

Charleston added after a pause, “She took care of her mother and father.”

“All the same, she was selling it,” Underwood answered Charleston. He had grown a little fleshy, thanks to a good life and dead bodies.

“For Christ’s sake,” Doc Yak replied, “that damns her to you, huh? You and your embalmed moralities.”

He swept out an arm as if asking the office and heaven to bear witness. “Listen to the voice of the righteous, but heed not. All is foolishness.”

Doc had enlarged his quarters by taking out the partition between the waiting room and the bedroom where he used sometimes to put patients. Patients were few these days. Some older ones swore by him and fought shy of the two new doctors. Neither did they like the new hospital. Declining practice pleased Doc. He was trying to retire, though he held on to the job of coroner.

Charleston went on, softly:

“Take her up tenderly,

Lift her with care;

Fashioned so slenderly,

Young, and so fair!”

“Bridge of Sighs,” Doolittle said. It was a game they played, each trying to stump the other with a literary reference. Doolittle gave a satisfied, small smile. Slumped in a leather chair, he appeared even smaller than he was, but, looking at him, I remembered that a tough customer, being locked into a cell, had characterized him as hell on wheels.

“I wouldn’t know about that fair business,” Underwood said. “I didn’t get the job. That damn upstart town! Overthrust! They’ll find out same way we found out when we bragged up Midbury as the coal capital of Montana. Shit. Came a soft market for coal and our coal turned out poor, and here we are like always.

“And there’s you, Charleston,” he went on, his indignation spilling over. “Jase, here, would be pitching professional ball if he hadn’t hurt his hand helping you.” He was a baseball nut and couldn’t forget that a bullet had stiffened my pitching hand maybe half a dozen or more years ago.

“What’s that got to do with fair?” Doc asked him. “Me, I examined the body. Even choked she was pretty, or had been.” He shook his head. Age had seamed and contracted his face. It might have been the face of a turtle, except that his head and eyes flicked around like a chipmunk’s. “The choker had big hands, but that doesn’t help you, Jase. Who doesn’t have big hands in this clodhopper country?”

Underwood returned to his standards. “A good-looking girl doesn’t have to whore if she has any sense in her head.” He seconded himself with a drink.

“Felix,” Doc said, “a salute to your vision. And now, brothers and sisters, let us turn the page and sing of the patent-medicine hawkers. There’s whoring of a high order. Thanks to law, they are somewhat restrained these days, but they are the get of wenchers and sluts.”

“Aw, bull, Doc. Where’s the connection between companies and whores?” Felix spoke with good nature. He was a hard man to offend.

“Whores, quacks, same thing,” Doc answered. “No damn field has so many fornicators in it as the health business. Look what the patent-medicine people used to do. Doped their tonics and brews with cocaine or whatever. Once they had their customers hooked, they came along with cures, also doped. Sold their souls for profit. It’s the damn truth. What say, there, Brother Underwood?”

“Whoring is whoring.”

“I ask you, I ask you in all conscience, which is the worse, a little nookie or slavery to drugs? Not,” he added, “that I think the first item is bad.”

“You mean, speaking from memory,” Doolittle put in.

“Your inference is as infirm as your stature is small,” Doc answered him in faked offense. “A man’s a man until he dies.”

Now Doolittle quoted:

“The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Doolittle looked at Charleston, who said, “Andrew Marvell.”

So far the game was tied.

To keep Doc going I said, “But that’s in the past? The doped cures and all?”

“Better now, sure. But you still find dangerous stuff being peddled, and not by the patent people alone. So-called reputable companies put out bad stuff. When it’s caught up with and stopped, it’s too late for the victims. They can sue if they’re alive, but shit.”

“Older generations had some funny ideas,” Charleston said. “When one of us kids had a sore throat or croup, our mother would take an old stocking, line it with raw bacon, sprinkle the bacon with pepper, and tie the stocking around the sore neck. Worked, too.”

“Some old practices did,” Doc said. “More didn’t. But if the patient thought he was better, then by God he was.” Doc drank again. “I get called on for some old, crazy items now and then. Cubebs, for instance.”

I asked, “Cubebs?”

“Cigarettes made out of medicated peppers. Anyhow they smelled medicated. Then there was antiphlogistine, sometimes called Denver Mud. It was mud all right, smooth mud with perfume in it. Used like a mustard plaster.”

“Did it work?” Doolittle asked.

“As long as people thought so, sure. You ever hear of asafoetida? Parents used to tie it in a piece of rag and hang it from strings around the kids’ necks. Supposed to ward off germs like scarlet fever.”

“Good disinfectant?” Felix asked.

“Nope. It smelled so bad any self-respecting germ was supposed to stay clear. Jesus, what a stench! A dog would puke.”

We took time to sip at our drinks. Doc licked his lips and went on, full of himself thanks to what he had had. “You go back and you find all kinds of claims. The poor damn people didn’t know any better. Medicine was bound up with folklore, with witchery, superstition and what not. Sometimes it wasn’t so far off the mark, though. Take foxglove. Take deadly nightshade. Take henbane. All poisonous. And from them these days we get digitalis, we get belladonna, we get hyoscine.”

Doolittle asked, “What’s hyoscine?”

“Questions. Questions. That’s all I get.”

“Come off it, Doc,” Doolittle told him. “Every one of those words had a question mark after it. You ask questions so we’ll ask questions.”

Doc grinned an evil, turtle grin. “Smart ass. If ever you are taken with child and know the pains of delivery, ask for hyoscine. That’s twilight sleep.”

“Case closed. Any other benefits?”

“Lots of them. It was the willow gave us the idea for aspirin.” Doc rubbed his jaw. “The things patients ask for, though. Just lately a man wanted nitrate of potassium.”

Doc knew that someone would ask what that was, and Underwood did.

“It’s commonly known as saltpeter.”

I saw Charleston look up.

“That works against sex, huh?”

“Supposed to suppress the instinct. Supposed to dull desire. Been used in the army and navy and prisons. Maybe still is. I can’t swear to results except it makes a man piss.”

“Who in hell would ask for that?” Underwood said, curiosity getting the upper hand of morality.

“You know better, Felix. That’s confidential.”

“And you prescribed it?”

“Yep, but no need to. Anyone can buy it. It’s just that a prescription gives a sort of legitimacy to the purchase. Makes it all kosher. Doctor’s orders.”

The telephone rang then. The caller wanted Charleston. After listening, Charleston turned to me. “Report of a rustled calf. We can’t do anything tonight. Still, I’ll run along.”

I went out with him.