It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. The only news was that Gary and Leroy gave out a speeding ticket last week, their first in a month or more. If there was a law against pokiness, they could have made a mass arrest of the entire town—people have been feeling low since the Swedish flu struck. It’s the usual flu with chills, fever, diarrhea, vomiting, achiness, and personal guilt, but it’s accompanied by an overpowering urge to put things in order. Before you collapse into bed, you iron the sheets. Before you vomit, you plan your family’s meals for the upcoming week.
The Bakkes got back from two weeks in Florida. Jeanette said it was cold and miserable there and they almost went crazy staying with Jack’s sister Judy and her husband D.J. and their four kids in their mobile home near Winter Green. D.J. smokes so much Jeanette said it was like she was smoking herself. It made her nervous and she ate more greasy food and gained six pounds and split a seam on her new red Spandex bathing suit. That depressed her, so she gained three more. The food tasted of smoke. She could smell every puff coming from Judy and D.J.’s bedroom at night, and she could hear them fighting like they were in the room with her. So Jack and Jeanette couldn’t sleep. Their mattress smelled of smoke too. Judy’s oldest boy worked in a supermarket until 3:00 A.M. and the youngest one sleepwalked and was a bedwetter (as Jeanette and Jack discovered one night when he crawled in with them). On the drive home from Minneapolis, they had the bitterest fight of their eighteen-year marriage over whether it had been a good vacation or not and why, and it upset her so she started coughing and she could see smoke coming out of her mouth, but, she told Dorothy when she got back, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that she set off the metal detector in the Miami airport. So it’s true what she read, that a faulty can opener makes steel filings that fall in your food. She’s had the same opener since 1969. Jack’s mother gave it to her, along with a sarcastic remark about cooking. Shards of steel in her tunafish, creamed corn, mushroom soup, for eighteen years: how was she supposed to know? If you can’t trust your can opener, then what? Is your wastebasket going to get you? Your slippers give you a disease? (Deadly Foot & Mouth Virus Traced to Pink Scuffs, Doctors Reveal.)
“If you set off the metal detector, how’d you get on the plane?” asked Dorothy. “Oh, when I took off my cinch belt, it didn’t buzz anymore, but that cinch belt never used to set off alarms. It’s these filings building up that finally pushed me over the limit,” Jeanette explained. “Good gosh! how could I eat for all these years and not notice pieces of steel? I must not’ve been chewing my food good enough.”
So she ate more potatoes to try to absorb the filings, although the same magazine that warned about can openers also warns about a virus from unclean potato eyes that can cause hair loss, and now Jeanette has gained so much weight she’s afraid to climb on a scale.
Jack is still mad at her. As Justice of the Peace, he married a couple last Sunday that looked so happy he told Jeanette he wanted to tell them what it was really like. “If they’da stayed around here fifteen minutes, they’da changed their minds about matrimony,” he said sardonically. It was an older couple, in their fifties. They drove up during breakfast. Jeanette was still in her bathrobe. She could tell by their embarrassment that they’d come to get married. When she got them a cup of coffee and they said they were from Grand Forks, North Dakota, and she said, “Oh. That’s a long way to drive, isn’t it. Where’d you spend the night?” they looked down at their shoes, like teenagers. He was heavy, bald as a bowling ball, and perspiring, and she was skinny and had a little mustache, and the backs of her hands were red and flaky. Jack called up Leroy, who lives next door, to come over and witness. He said to the man, “That’ll be twenty-five dollars. I always ask for it in advance because, you know, some people are in a hurry to get away. Heh heh heh heh heh.” The man turned crimson and fished out the money. Leroy came over. He was sick, he said, so if he had to depart suddenly, that was why. They got married and Jeanette put on a record of Perry Como singing “True Love” and Jack said good luck to them, and out they went, another story that we’ll never know the ending of.
Leroy was sick, he thought, because of exhaust fumes in the police car, a 1984 Ford. He and Gary sit in it with the engine idling and they get severe headaches. Clint Bunsen checked it and said it was perfectly all right. But Clint himself has been under the weather, so maybe he missed something. Clint is the sort who doesn’t get sick until everyone else has had their turn, then if he has a day or two free he’ll be sick too but not quite as much.
They had just had the car checked and resumed patrol when they gave out the speeding ticket to a green 1987 Lincoln Continental. Leroy said it was going at least sixty-five down Main Street and never even touched its brakes. Myrtle Krebsbach was about to cross the street in front of the Clinic and heard the engine whine and looked up, and a sheet of water hit her amidships. She thought it was a heart attack. Gary and Leroy tore after it, almost running into the rear end of Rollie Hochstetter’s manure spreader, and it took them two miles to catch up. They pulled the Lincoln over and walked up alongside and the man rolled down the window and said, “Just a moment. I’ll be right with you.” He was talking on his car telephone. They had never seen one before.
They waited. Leroy stood, his arms folded, and Gary leaned down by the window, looking in. The man was about sixty, with silvery hair and blue suit. He was talking in numerals, it was amazing, the figures he had in his head. They couldn’t figure out what he was saying. A minute passed and Gary cleared his throat. “Let’s go, we don’t have all day,” he said. But he wasn’t quite as angry as he was before.
They told him what he’d done and he almost collapsed from horror. “Oh no,” he said over and over, “oh my gosh—thank goodness nobody was hurt. I don’t know what happened to me. I didn’t even see a stop sign. I don’t remember seeing stores or anything. Houses. Schools. I was concentrating on—you see, I have a carton of belostalone I’m supposed to deliver to the University of Chicago tomorrow—that’s who I was talking to—but I should’ve been paying attention. It’s my own fault. Take me in, it’s all right. I’ll get these drugs there some other way. It’s my responsibility.”
Gary rode in the Lincoln, Leroy following in the cruiser. Leroy noticed that Gary and the guy were talking pretty friendly when they arrived at the Chatterbox. They all sat down in a back booth and Leroy called Jack to come. A lynch party had gathered, including Myrtle and Dorothy, but it didn’t hang him right away. It asked questions, that was its first mistake. “Who in the hell are you?” said Myrtle.
He gave them his card: Dr. Walter W. Ingersoll, Saint Luke’s Biomedical Laboratory, Saint Francis, Ontario. A Canadian! “That’s right,” he said.
Leroy said, “What do you think you’re doing, going sixty-five miles an hour through a town with children! You’re a doctor! A doctor ought to have some sense!”
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, “and there is no excuse for what I did. All I can say is that I’m supposed to be at the U of Chicago hospital at eight tomorrow morning with a carton of belostalone. It’s an experimental drug that we’ve been testing in Canada and now they’re about to introduce it in America. I don’t know how to explain it to you, it’s kind of technical for the lay person.”
Jack and Jeanette had arrived. Jeanette said, “Well, I think you’d better explain, and, you know, we’re not as dumb as you might think. We know about medicine.”
“Well, then, you’ve probably heard of the experiments with Compazine in Alaska—” Yes, she’d read a little bit about that. “Well, fine, Compazine was a chemotherapeutic drug that showed some effectiveness against myoplasmia, but it made people lose their hair, so belostalone was developed to combat that side effect, and it turned out that not only did people not lose hair, it…I don’t know how to say this,” he said, “but if Chicago knew I was telling you this, I’d lose not only my license to practice medicine but my doctorate in genetic cybernetics as well—so you have to promise…” They promised. “Belostalone not only prevented hair loss, it also reversed the effects of aging in every respect.”
“It makes you younger?” said Jack.
“No, sir. I didn’t say that. Your chronological age cannot be changed. But you don’t have to show it. I’m seventy-two. But you’d think I was sixty-five, wouldn’t you?”
Actually he looked more like fifty-five.
“If anyone got hold of that carton in my trunk, it would have a street value of approximately sixteen million dollars.” He looked them straight in the eye. He said, “I know that what I did was terribly wrong, and I don’t think I’m going to sleep well for a long time thinking about how I could’ve killed someone, a child.…There’s only one way I can make it up to you, and it’s wrong too, I suppose, it’s stealing, but it’s the lesser of two evils—I’ll give you each a bottle of belostalone. It’s in my trunk.”
His trunk was full of blank brown cartons and a black bag and boxes marked “Fragile: Pharmaceuticals.” It smelled of disinfectant, the kind you find in doctors’ offices.
“How long did it take to develop this, Walter?” Gary asked, putting a big foot up on the Lincoln’s bumper.
“It was found utterly accidentally,” he said. “The amazing advances all come about that way. They were looking for a simple booster for spring chicks and started with root extract from Jerusalem artichokes and— This is all natural, by the way….” He fished out a box of tiny glass bottles carefully packed in cotton. He handed a bottle to each of them: Gary, Leroy, Jack, Jeanette, Myrtle, Dorothy, and Floyd, Dorothy’s son-in-law, who was helping her paint the cafe. Everyone looked embarrassed. “Listen,” Gary said, “we can’t have you stealing these for us. Let us pay you something.” Walter wouldn’t hear of it, but they insisted. “At least your cost.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s the thing, it’s so expensive, medical research, these new drugs are sky-high: just the cost on this is twenty dollars a bottle.”
To reverse the effects of aging, this seemed like a good deal.
They pressed their money into his hand and he gave it back and they handed it to him again but he waved them away and finally they stuck it in his shirt pocket. There it stayed. They stood by the green Lincoln and talked for a while about Canada and good fishing places up there, and finally he drove off. Only then did Leroy realize that he had never actually written Walter the ticket for speeding.
When Clarence heard the story from Leroy, he almost lost his balance and fell over. “Reverses the effects of aging!” he said. “Oh that’s good. That’s just about perfect. I guess we know what his monologue is going to be about this week. You boys ought to copyright this yourselves, so you can charge royalties.”
Yes, they knew it themselves: they were had, in broad daylight, swindled by a smooth talker into buying twenty dollars’ worth of swampwater, and they were ashamed of it, but the odd fact is that they all look better this week. Jeanette feels terrific. No more flu, and she’s losing weight, and her skin color is back. Leroy’s headaches have stopped. Gary had another problem from sitting too much in the patrol car, and those have cleared up too.
Jack called the University of Chicago hospital and they’d never heard of Dr. Ingersoll or belostalone, and neither had anyone in or around Saint Francis, Ontario. Who else could he call? The problem with a fake like Dr. Ingersoll is that when he does you good and you want more medicine, you don’t know how to reach him. There is no place to go. A fake takes you to where you start to get well and then leaves you there, on your own.