Requiem for the Bone Man (9 page)

Galen sat alone at the desk. All of the detox-unit patients had lined up and gotten their 11 p.m. medications. Now, he hoped, they were sound asleep and not causing any problems.

Just a few more nights and I’ll be able to get that ring.

He smiled at the thought.

You’re getting soft, old bear. Can girls really do this to guys?

He took out his notepad. Time for another letter to Dr. Basily.
Actually, past time, he realized. Had things moved so quickly?

The last note he had written was to pass along the name of the Hospital for Special Surgery, the only facility in the country experimenting in new back-surgery techniques that might help his old professor. That had been in January. Now it was April. Strange, the man hadn’t replied.

Well, here goes:

Dear Dr. Basily,

I hope things are going well with you. Have you looked into that new back procedure yet? So much has been happening since we last wrote. Graduation is coming up in less than a month and, oh, yes, I’m buying a ring. Yeah, I told you about June. I think I’ll wait until May to propose, just before graduation. Never thought I would do that, did you? Now, if I can only survive doing extra shifts and ward work to pay for it!

He paused, thinking of his beloved June. Hard to believe he was dating such an intelligent, good-looking, personable girl—or rather, that she was dating someone like him! He hoped she understood why he had been so busy lately. He hadn’t told her about the ring, but he was sure she wouldn’t be upset. She was so compassionate, so loving, so …

Okay, hotshot, focus on the letter!

People never cease to amaze me with what they say and do. Remember that first year when I told you about my trip down here?

His mind drifted back to that six-hour train trip from New Jersey. He was still smarting from the final argument with his father, so he didn’t react much when the conductor walked through the coach car calling out in good humor, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. All you Yankees be on your best behavior, now, ya heah? Y’all now in the South!”

He had gotten off the train at the Broad Street Station of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, the old RF&P, and sought out a bus headed for the medical school. As he boarded, he saw a seat two-thirds of the way back and headed for it. Suddenly he heard this voice yelling at him from the front. It was the bus driver. And what was he saying?

“Boy, get yo’ ass back up heah! Now you listen up, boy. Ah knows you ain’t from aroun’ heah. But you stand right theah behin’ me.”

What was going on? The whole bus was laughing at him! Then it hit him. The bus was an open Oreo cookie: front half white, back black! He knew about the various demonstrations building up in the South. But he also knew the rest of the country had its share of the same problem. The race riots in Boston, the riots and lynchings in 1920s Oklahoma, Knoxville, Detroit.

He remembered taking the train into Manhattan when he was a child and wondering why some of the cars were filled with whites, while others were exclusively black. Pennsylvania Station had separate waiting rooms, bathrooms, water fountains, and snack stands for whites and “colored.”

But the buses, well, seats were supposed to be catch as catch can, no matter who or what you were.

This was different.

Now, four years later, he could laugh at his former ignorance and relative innocence.

Well, Dr. B., this next bit ought to top that little story. As you know, the junior and senior medical students here are the first lines of care for patients in the hospital. We get to do almost everything. My roommate Dave (aka Country Boy, aka Scarecrow) and I were assigned to the same ward, so we got to know each other’s patients. I was assigned an old gentleman who just happened to be the chief of one of the local Virginia Indian tribes. The chief had come in with what’s called unstable angina, heart pain not controlled by his nitroglycerin tablets. Dave was assigned to the chief’s roommate, Bobby Lee Withers, who had shut his kidneys down drinking moonshine whiskey.

It turns out that Bobby Lee is a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner who hates everyone from blacks to Catholics to ‘furreners,’ and is a full-fledged member of the Ku Klux Klan. My roommate is a good ol’ boy, so he knows how to talk the lingo with Bobby Lee. We would sit there and listen as Bobby told us about the meetings and the secret passwords and handshakes.

Did you know that when a Klansman meets another man but isn’t sure if he is also Klan, he offers the secret handshake and says ‘AYAK?’ Are you a Klansman? And if the other guy is Klan, he answers ‘AKIA.’ A Klansman I am.

It just so happened that Bobby knew of a KKK meeting coming up and Dave, devil that he is, dared me to go with him and see if we could sneak in. The passwords worked, although I got strange looks from the Klan guard at the tent entrance. The stuff we heard wouldn’t have made sense to a third grader, but all of those men were cheering and chanting.

Then we got lucky, because I spotted one of our professors there, so we high-tailed it out before he saw us. (Note how I am picking up the lingo here. And I’ve been told I no longer sound like I’m from “Joisey.”)

Bobby Lee didn’t make it through the kidney failure.

My Indian chief, who reminded me of you whenever we talked about philosophy and other stuff, also didn’t make it. I miss him.

You know that Dave and I are living in an apartment on Church Hill. I don’t think I told you about our neighbors and the time we were almost lynched. After seeing the difficulty the kids in the neighborhood were having getting medical care, we decided to set up a clinic in our apartment. Yes, I know, it really isn’t legal but, Dr. B., I have seen kids die from simple ear infections that spread to their brains because their parents didn’t have or wouldn’t spend the fifty cents for the pills that would have cured them. So Dave and I and our friends Bill, Peggy, June, and Connie decided to see the kids in the evening when we were there. We had some friends in the pharmacy department who saved us the antibiotics and other general stuff that was nearing expiration date but was still good. They normally just pitch it in the trash, so we thought it could be put to better use. We didn’t want or take any of the pain pills, like codeine, because that really would have gotten us into hot water.

When Dave and I weren’t there, usually two of the others would cover, keeping our free clinic running, and we really did some good. Kids were no longer being carried into the medical school clinic dying from preventable stuff. Moreover, we got to know our neighbors. We were the only white people living there, and from what I’ve told you before, you can understand that we were watched from a distance.

One evening, the neighbor living in the apartment next door came to the door with her little boy who, it turned out, had a simple viral cold. We gave her some of the cold prep stuff we had and she started to talk. Turns out she is a lady of the night, if you catch my drift, who runs her business out of her apartment. She wanted to know if we could treat haircuts. Dr. B., “haircut” is slang here for syphilis. We had some injectable penicillin, and that took care of her little problem.

The next night the neighbor from the other side of us came over with his wife, who was complaining of chest pain. We don’t have an electrocardiogram machine—that’s only for rich docs already in practice—but from what we could tell, her condition fit more with an inflammation of the cartilage in her breastbone called costochondritis, which is handled easily with aspirin. That seemed to make both of them happy.

Her husband told me that he had been to Korea, like you. He said that at one point they thought he was dead, missing in action, and shipped his trunk and kit home. Then they found him alive! The funny part was, in his trunk was a fully equipped machine gun with lots of ammo. When he gets drunk or it’s a holiday, he goes out and shoots it off. Scared the hell out of us the first time it happened.

So, you ask, what’s all this leading up to?

Since you asked, I’ll tell you. Our particular housing area became friendly with us. But like in other parts of the country, some residents living a little farther away didn’t take to our being in “their neighborhood.” Luckily, it was just Dave and me, or rather I, who were there that night when the crowd came to get us and string us up.

They would have done it, too, except our lady of the night neighbor stepped outside and started calling out men’s names, telling them to leave or they wouldn’t get any more poontang. I’ll let you guess what that means.

Then our other neighbor walked out with his machine gun, fired off a burst, and that was it. The crowd lit out, we haven’t been bothered since, and we’re now getting kids from those other areas.

It’s hard to believe how close I am to graduating. There won’t be anyone there to see me except Dave’s parents, but that’s all right. They’ve become surrogate family for me. So wish me luck with the ring.

More later,

Bob Galen

“Ruby, who’s covering tonight?”

The round-faced African-American woman who worked as unit secretary on the fifth floor, general medical wing, looked up and grinned at the gray-haired floor nurse.

“We got us a six-pack of the good stuff tonight, Gina. Five West is The Teacher, The Model, and The Southern Belle. Five east is Baby Face, Scarecrow, and The Bear.” She started to giggle. “Good thing they’re workin’ on separate wings. Lawd only knows what those six would be up to if they were all on one side!”

Gina started to laugh, too. “I’ll bet that ol’ farm boy knows how to handle the chickens! And if he doesn’t, I’ll bet The Teacher learns him real fast!”

Both ladies started to cackle. Ruby, in between the laughs, added, “And Southern Belle has got Baby Face all diapered up. Wonder if he’s bottle-fed or…”

The older nurse cut her off by clucking disapproval then changed the subject. “Somebody needs to take The Bear aside and give him some advice on how to deal with the ladies. He works all the time when he should be spending more time with The Model. I got a feeling about those two.”

June, will you marry me?

He had worked night shifts as a clerk in the detox unit to earn the ring money. Night after night, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and then on to his own senior clerk rotation at the hospital. It had taken over seven months, and he hadn’t told her why he was working so hard.

In his mind he had outlined the way he wanted it to go: Graduation, the wedding, and then both would head to their residency programs in New Jersey. He had been accepted both in Virginia and there, but June wanted that OB-GYN spot up north. And her friend Peggy was headed there, too.

Unless he had missed his guess, he expected Bill would propose to Peggy soon. And Dave, that old beanpole, had latched on to Connie like an octopus! Maybe it could be a three-way wedding, each of them acting as best man and groom at the same time!

He actually felt happy. That didn’t happen too often for him. He would pick June up at her place. That’s when he’d propose. If it went as planned, he would head back with her to his and Dave’s apartment.

He still had the bookcase he had rescued from a dumpster in the back seat of his beat-up old car. The car was a gift to himself from the remainder of the money he had earned—he would need it for his residency. The bookcase would be a good surprise for Bill, who had stacks of books piled up on the floor of his own place. The three guys would meet their dates on Church Hill. Peggy and Connie were going to meet them for burgers and fries. He would be alone with June, and who knew what the free afternoon would bring?

He headed down Franklin Street toward the Fan District. The old Civil War-era houses stood like aged doyennes, quietly watching each new generation come and go in Richmond. As he parked in front of her apartment house, he touched the ring box in his pocket one more time, just to reassure himself. It was a talisman for his new life to be.

“June, will you marry me?”

He knew immediately what her answer was—he didn’t need to hear it spoken. His crooked smile poorly masked his feelings. He tried to make a joke to let her know that he understood.

“Hey, City Boy. Is June in the car?”

Bill saw it first. “Bob, are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Tell you what, guys, why don’t you check the back seat of my car. There’s a surprise there for you, Bill. I’ve had a long week. I think maybe I should just catch up on some rest today.”

Dave looked at Bill, nodded, then the two headed outside.

Galen headed upstairs to his bedroom and closed the door.

“She turned him down, Dave. I knew he was building up to proposing. You know how close Peggy and June are. Peggy told me June didn’t know how to tell him when it happened. If I had only known I might have buffered it. I didn’t realize it would be today.”

“That’s why he was busting his ass with the extra work. I’ll bet he even bought a ring. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe he’ll latch on to someone later. But it sure sucks now. Come on, Bill, let’s call the girls and put this off for today.”

Bill nodded agreement, but deep down he knew it would be years before Galen would share his soul with another woman.

The sounds of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1” echoed through the auditorium as the graduating class of the School of Medicine walked double file to the front and split into right and left lines as they found their seats. They remained standing until the completion of the music, then sat down and waited.

“Ladies and gentlemen, honored professors, members of the School of Medicine, Class of 1965, we welcome you to this most joyful ceremony. Let me state that, according to your program, we will begin announcing the names of this year’s Doctors of Medicine. Each in turn will come up to the stage to receive his or her diploma. Then, when all are seated again, these doctors of the future will recite the Oath of Hippocrates, that pledge of service taken by new doctors for centuries.