The Road to Wellville (41 page)

Will said nothing. His mind was clear, and he was seething. Snake oil. Voodoo. He might just as well have gone to a witch doctor in a grass hut. The whole thing, from the vibrating chairs to the salt-mush rub to the sinusoidal bath—it was quackery, plain and simple. And this little charlatan was the root and cause of it all. Will was seething, yes, but he was afraid, too—terrified. He was in rough shape, and he knew it. There were no grapes in his future, that much was apparent, and though he didn’t feel like eating anything, though he felt as bad as he ever had in his life, he was back to psyllium seeds and hijiki, back to square one. He gazed up into those steely blue eyes and had a premonition that sent a shudder through him: he was going to die in this bed, die in the Sanitarium, die under the healer’s hand and be laid to rest out back with the other failures, with Homer Praetz and the woman with consumption and the limp cold thankful bird. “Help me,” he croaked.

“Hmp!” the Doctor snorted. “Help you, hey?” He was up from the bed already, pacing, stroking his beard, wriggling his shoulders and arms and shaking off his fingers as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. He removed his glasses without breaking stride, breathed on the lenses,
produced a spotless handkerchief with which to wipe them, then pivoted and started back across the room again. “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.” He paused, slipped back into his spectacles, eyes cold in their frigid white frames. “I’m told you’ve flagrantly contravened your doctors’ orders—mine and Dr. Linniman’s both.”

Will looked away. He could feel his heart pounding in his throat, his temples, his fingertips.

“Don’t you look away from me, sir. I say, you’ve contravened my orders, risked your life, plunged into some sick reckless debauch. Meat was taken, so I hear. Alcoholic spirits. Pickles, relish, ketchup. Was there black coffee, too? Good Lord, I’m surprised you didn’t oxidize your insides with Coca-Cola while you were at it. Well? Answer me, sir. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Will had turned back to him on command. The humorless eyes pinned him to the pillow. The man was unforgiving, merciless, as persistent and inhuman as the Furies themselves. He decided to lie. “No,” he said, giving some dimension to his voice, “it’s not true.”

The Doctor drew himself up short, froze on the spot, every muscle in his body gone rigid; his look was murderous. “Don’t lie to me, sir,” he snarled, “I won’t have it. Do you take me for a fool? An idiot? Even if I didn’t have a pair of eyes at the Red Onion—yes, the Red Onion—I’d have to be blind not to see it in the wreck you’ve made of yourself. Meat!” he cried suddenly. “Slaughter! Red flesh and blood!” He was trembling, the rapier of his beard stabbing at the air as if he were driving invisible opponents before him.

But in that moment, Will could feel a matching anger rising in himself. Who was this little martinet to be lecturing him as if he were in knee pants still? The inventor of the sinusoidal bath? The murderer of Homer Praetz? “What of it?” he said.

“‘What of it?”’ the Doctor howled. “Dab? Dab? Do you hear this? The man lies there bankrupt on what could very well prove to be his deathbed, self-poisoned, ruined—absolutely ruined—by his own vices, and he throws it back at me. ‘What of it?’ he says. Indeed. Well, sir”—turning back to Will now—”why don’t you allow me to get you a good dose of chloral or strychnine and put an end to it properly, hey? Hey?”

The secretary was bright with blood, flushed, fat, steaming. He looked as if he’d been dipped in the scalding tub at a slaughterhouse. And the Doctor—that pale etiolated little mushroom of a man—was nearly as red. Puffed up. Bloated with rage and moral indignation. Will studied them, two overheated zealots snarling over the bone of their dogma, and it hardened him. Though he was sick with weakness and guilt, though the reference to his deathbed had chilled him to the marrow, he decided to take the offensive. “Yes, all right, and if I’m on my deathbed why don’t you tell me about Homer Praetz—come on, confess it—tell me how your precious treatment redeemed him.”

A blister, swelling and swelling till it bursts—that was Dr. Kellogg. He was blind, he was deaf, he was a god on a cloud: the name of Homer Praetz had never been uttered. Such impudence didn’t merit response. “Nurse Bloethal!” he roared, and the door fell open, Will catching a glimpse of an ashen Irene Graves peering anxiously in at him as Nurse Bloethal strode through the doorway in all her rugged glory. “Take this, this”—the Doctor lowered his voice to a hiss—“this
meat eater
to the Colon Department and put him on the enema machine until further notice. Do you understand me?”

Nurse Bloethal jumped. “Yes, Doctor,” she barked, and for a moment Will thought she was going to salute him.

“Yes,” the Doctor said meditatively, speaking to himself now even as he stared Will in the eye, “we’ll scour him out yet.”

Later that night—it must have been eight or so, the windows black, a hush fallen over the depopulated hallways of the San, bedpans tucked away and enema bags rinsed—Will had another visitor. After a violent irrigation at the hands of Nurse Bloethal, who’d clucked her tongue and scolded him the whole while, he’d taken his meal (such as it was) alone in his room. When the knock came, he was lying there in his agony, staring at the ceiling, the familiar slack-tide taste of seaweed on his palate, seeds expanding in his gut, his bowels washed as clean as the bed of an Alpine stream. The lamp at his bedside was lit, and it focused a sickly yellow light on the hollows of his cheeks and the high ridge of
his nose. A pitcher of water stood on the night table, a single glass beside it. The Atlantic Monthly, in its plain brown cover, lay forgotten at the foot of the bed, along with a spine-sprung copy of
Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt
and the
Harper’s
Christmas number. “Come in,” he called weakly.

The door cracked open and a disembodied face peered round the edge of it. A wink. A grin. And then Charlie Ossining was in the room, the door easing shut behind him. “Hello, Will,” he whispered, tiptoeing across the floor to the chair in the corner, which he seized by its physiologic slats and eased up to the bed. “You’re looking—” his voice dropped off as he settled himself in the chair and produced a paper sack from his coat pocket. “I was going to say you’re looking grand, but I’d be a liar if I did. You look awful, friend, plain awful.”

Will barely glanced up, but he was glad to see him. The last two days had been hellish, a continuum of cranial ache and abdominal pain broken only by the odd visit from a frosty Eleanor, a sadistic Kellogg and a rough-and-ready Nurse Bloethal. Irene, no longer ‘indisposed,’ was keeping a low profile: he’d seen her only sporadically during the eternal hours of his relapse. In short, he was hurting and he was bored. Bored witless.

Charlie Ossining gave him a knowing look. “Hung over, huh?” he said. “We made a night of it, didn’t we? Hell, I felt like I’d been run down by the 5:05 myself—and dragged half a mile in the bargain.” He let out a laugh.

The room fell quiet. Charlie was studying him. A question had been put to Will: was he hung over? It was a naive and hopeful question, and he could see the concern on his friend’s face—a hangover was something he could relate to, something quotidian and explicable, a complaint from which the sufferer could logically be expected to recover. How tell him the truth? How tell him he was doomed, condemned, sentenced to die of a balky bowel and hypersensitive nature?

But Charlie didn’t wait for an answer. His eyes roamed the room, settling finally on the copy of the Burroughs book. “I see you’ve been reading about the president and his bears,” he said. “Rich, isn’t it?”

Rich, yes. Will concurred.

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, brandishing the brown
paper bag, “this whole rugged-individualist business is just a bit much for me, Jack London and all that. I like city stories, men and women in society, that sort of thing. Racy stuff, too. What’s his name, Dreiser? You read him. That book about the hometown girl without a scruple in the world? Just like real life. Women.” He tossed his eyebrows for emphasis, then casually withdrew a pint of whiskey from the bag, broke the seal with a twist of his wrist and worked the cork out of the bottle. “You know, I saw that Olga Nethersole in
Sappho
before they closed it down a few years back. You want to talk about racy, whew! That was it. Boy oh boy.”

Will’s eyes were fixed on the bottle, liquid gold, sleep and forgetfulness, booze. He sat up.

Charlie reached for the glass on the night table. “Join me?” he said. “Just a little nip to kill the pain, eh?” He was pouring. Will watched the golden liquid rise in the glass: two fingers, three, four. “I don’t know what ails you”—a significant look here—”but I’ll bet this’ll go a long way toward curing it.” He handed Will the glass, touched the bottle to it in salutation and then tipped back the bottle and drank.

Frail, throbbing, his stomach plunging like a runaway elevator, sweat standing out on his brow, Will clutched the glass as if he were afraid it would slip through his fingers. His watched his friend’s larynx rise and fall as he lowered the level in the bottle by an inch, and all he wanted to do in that moment was drink. There was no more pain, no more fear, no more tyranny of the elect—there was just the glass in his hand and the bright warm complexion of honey it took on in the glow of the lamp. He held the glass up to the light. Now it was pale as air, now dense as smoke. He lifted it to his nose and smelled all the blossoms of the field, smelled the burnt-oak barrel, the mash, the electric fumes themselves. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Charlie was watching him. He didn’t need any urging. As if in a trance, he lifted the glass to his lips and drained it in three swallows.

“Hits the spot, eh?” Charlie breathed, trying to settle himself in the Doctor’s orthopedic chair. “Christ,” he swore, twisting his neck and peering over his shoulder to examine the ribs of it, “where’d they get this thing—out of the king of Spain’s torture chamber?”

Suddenly Will was laughing. And as Charlie made a show of getting
up out of the chair as if it were on fire, turning it round and finally lifting a leg over the seat to mount it backward, he laughed even harder, laughed till there were tears in his eyes and he felt his chest tighten. “Kellogg’s—” he choked, “the Great Healer’s idea of comfort.”

Charlie was laughing with him, a deep belly laugh that ended in a series of hoots and stutters. He leaned forward to refill Will’s glass. “Here’s to Kellogg and his gizzardite chair,” he proposed, holding the bottle aloft, and they drank again, and they laughed so hard the liquor nearly came back up. After a while, Charlie’s look grew serious. “I think this place is killing you, Will—and I don’t care what Eleanor says, no disrespect intended. It’s not natural, eating nuts and sprouts and whatnot. A man needs meat, tobacco, booze. If it’s all so hurtful, then how’d we get here today? Hell, old Adam would have keeled over before he could start on the rest of us.”

Will had reached a state of equilibrium. Somewhere in his brain a warning bell was going off, but he ignored it. After two days of misery and humiliation, he’d attained tranquillity, and all because of Charlie and the ambrosia that comes packaged in a flat little bottle. “Charlie,” he said, and his voice was thick, “you ought to be my doctor, damn it all—and I mean it. You’ve got more common sense than our little Napoleon here any day—and all his doctors and nurses and dieticians combined. ‘
All
things in moderation,’ right?
All
things.” He gestured vaguely. “Give me another little snort of that, will you?”

Charlie poured. Will drank. The room, which just half an hour earlier had seemed like a mausoleum, was alive now with color and texture. There was hope in the paint on the walls; promise in the grain of the wood; life, spirit and energy in the way the lamps threw their shadows against the chest of drawers. There was no better friend, no better man, than Charlie Ossining.

“Will?”

Charlie was addressing him. “Will?” he repeated, and Will looked up from his reverie. Charlie was leaning forward, so close their foreheads were nearly touching, and now he had a warm grip on the back of Will’s neck, pulling them together in a football huddle. Will could smell the other man’s breath, warm, intoxicating. His face blurred. “Do you remember the other night, Christmas Eve?”

“Sure I do,” Will said, “sure. The Red Onion. Hamburger sandwich. Blind Pig. Best thing in the world for me.”

Charlie was still there, still huddling with him—as close as anybody could get. It was strange. But right, somehow. There was an aura about it, an intensity, a kind of man-to-man fervor that no woman could know. Will thought of the grassy field, cleats, the canvas ball and the smooth solid ashen bat.

“That’s right,” Charlie said, and now he was the coach himself, “and do you remember this?” He let go of Will and sat back. He seemed to be holding a slip of paper in his hand—a banknote? No, a check. A very familiar-looking check …

“Is it mine?”

“Uh-huh.” Charlie gave him a sage look. “The other night, out of the bigness of your heart, Will—and because you’re blessed with the kind of business sense that can’t resist a sure thing—you became one of our stockholders, one of Per-Fo’s select few.”