Foxfire (7 page)

He had done some minor surgery for a Greek restaurant owner in the latter's home and accepted a fat fee for it. Fortunately, the head surgeon, who found out, kept his mouth shut, for it was a penal offense to practice medicine unlicensed. Viola had accepted the three hundred dollars he brought her with a sad little smile. At her suggestion they blew part of it on a superb week-end in New York. A farewell week-end, it turned out, for she took the rest of the money and went off to Hollywood with it, leaving a little note. “I love you, Hugh, but I
know
I am a great actress, and I must do it. I don't mean just the movies. More than that. Forgive me.”

And she was right. Viola was the one in ten thousand who makes the grade in Hollywood. In three years she had become a star, and long before that she had divorced Hugh, who never communicated with her in any way. Two years ago she had tried her luck on Broadway and met with unusual indulgence from the critics, though the play had only a moderate run. And at thirty-two, her beauty was richer and deeper than it had ever been, judging from her pictures. She had not married again.

Hugh's disintegration had not come fast, after Viola left. He had managed to wall off the memory of her and concentrate on work. He moved to New York State when he was ready to practice, because the doctor who had shielded him had nevertheless not forgotten and kept a watchful eye on him. He had spoken to Hugh one night over a beer in a speakeasy near the hospital.

“Watch your step, young man, you're a good doctor but you've got some sort of queer streak in you. I overlooked that business with the Greek because of your war record, but there've been other things. I know about that extra shot of morphine you sneaked old Billings. He bribed you for it—didn't he?”

“He needed it,” said Hugh sullenly.

“I don't agree. Anyway, he's my patient—and my orders were plain on his chart. Look, Slater, you're too brilliant a medico for shady ethics.”

Hugh was both grateful and resentful, and he got away from the older man as fast as possible. In the New York suburb where he started practice he had bad luck. Jealousy from the already entrenched surgeons, and then a rich patient died on the table through no fault of Hugh's. His practice fell off, and one day he admitted an hysterical woman to his office at eleven at night. She wanted an abortion which Hugh refused from prudent, not moral, reasons, and he referred her to a man on West End Avenue in New York. Here the woman had the abortion and hemorrhaged after getting home. Terrified by her condition and also by the threats of the actual abortionist, she called another local doctor and accused Hugh of performing the operation against her will.

This case came into court, and though Hugh was eventually cleared, his reputation was irretrievably damaged. He moved out West, drifted from town to town finding increasing difficulty in getting practice, since he also became a periodic drinker. The last solution was the mining camps. Isolated mining camps with scant funds and facilities must often content themselves with the dregs of the profession, and ask no questions. So Hugh landed a year ago at Lodestone where the population of six hundred apathetically accepted his ministrations when he applied them, and did without when he was drunk.

The woman on the bed gave a convulsive heave and a shriek. Hugh started, opened his eyes, jumped up and applied the ether cone in one swift motion. He poured the first drops from the can and said, “You're okay. Just let go, and breathe in.” Her frantic thrashings stilled a little. She stared up at him with terrified appeal and her fingers fastened on his arm. “All right, all right,” he repeated, “Take it easy.... ” Her eyelids drooped, her breathing slowed under the white cone.

Maria shuffled in with the potful of instruments, looking scared. She obeyed his curt instructions and took his place at the head of the bed, pouring a drop of ether when he told her to. Hugh pulled on sterile gloves, fished out the instruments, and in five minutes started a delivery which managed before it was accomplished to present him with most of the standard textbook complications.

An hour later he oiled the squalling purplish baby and put it down beside its mother, who still slept heavily. Saved 'em both, now let's wave the flag for Doctor Slater, the wonder boy of Lodestone. The sanctified surgeon of Shamrock Mine.

“They okay?” asked Maria importantly, “or shall I get Padre?” She had twice performed this interesting errand, running down the main street of Lodestone to the corrugated iron chapel on the edge of town.

“They won't need the Padre—” said Hugh peeling off his gloves. “But they need a hell of a lot of other things they aren't going to get.” Aside from the probability that that Bohunk, the brat's father, would kill them both in one of his psychopathic rages.

They'd both have died here and now and painlessly, if I'd let 'em, Hugh thought, and everyone would have been happier.

“I'm going to get out of this blasted shack for a while—” he said to Maria. “If anybody shows up for office hours tell 'em to wait. You stay right here”—he indicated the sleeping woman—“until I get back.”

“You goin' to the ‘Laundry'?” asked Maria wistfully, referring to Lodestone's most popular speakeasy and gambling hall, and so affectionately named because its patrons always emerged “cleaned.”

“Nope,” said Hugh. “And neither are you!” He gave her a look from under his bushy blond eyebrows, which effectively quelled Maria's tentative plans. She thrust out her lower lip and sat down. The Doc was a lot more fun when he was drunk, even when he called her names and hit her. Most men did like that. But when he was sober he was cold and sharp like a knife. Always picking in a mean biting way you couldn't answer back.... And what's he want to keep a magazine picture of that movie star for? thought Maria, reverting to a problem which had given her some hours of jealous pondering. In between his only two good shirts he kept this torn picture of Viola Vinton. She was sitting on a chair and staring at some books, a kind of goofy look on her face. And Viola Vinton wasn't so much, either, her pictures never came to the Miner's Hall in Lodestone, and you hardly ever saw anything about her in the movie magazines. Maria herself had a picture of Ramon Novarro up on the wall of her room at the Garcias', but that was different, besides it wasn't hid like she was ashamed of it.

She'd asked the Doc about the picture once and he'd got awful mad, called her a goddam nosy bitch, yelled at her never to open his drawers or touch his things again.

Maria rested her chin on her hand, morosely contemplating her quiet patients on the cot. I wish I didn't got this lousy job, she thought, but without real conviction. The Garcias' where she boarded and even the Padre kept telling her how lucky she was to have it. Though the Padre kept bawling her out, too, and giving her penances for living in sin, so now she didn't go to confession....I wish I had a real nice lover, she thought, would show me a good time, take me to California maybe;
un rico,
she thought, reverting to the language of her childhood,
muy elegante y amoroso....
She sighed, her head fell forward and slipped down until it rested on the pillow beside the woman and the baby. Maria slept too.

Hugh had flung out of the hospital bearing a gun and a small volume of Schopenhauer whose pessimistic philosophy pleased him. Hugh ignored both hunting seasons and licenses, but as there was no big game down in these arid mountains anyway, nobody ever questioned him, and when the mood was on him he shot indiscriminately at birds, rabbits, snakes or squirrels, or, indeed, anything that moved. This, too, gave him pleasure. One more symptom of my degeneration no doubt, he thought at Amanda, as he passed the Dartlands' cottage and saw her golden head inside near the window. He saw another head, too, unmistakable because of its bird's nest of coiled brown hair, surmounted by a round blue hat.

So the Mablett's calling on the bride already, he thought with malicious amusement. Hope that fool girl can keep from making trouble for Dart. Dart's the only decent guy in this dump.

He strode on up the mine road, flattening himself against the cliffside as one of the ore trucks came grinding down in low. It was filled with concentrates from the mill, destined for the big smelter twenty-five miles south at Hayden.

But with the price of copper shot to hell at six cents a pound, it was not the concentrates which kept the Shamrock Mine fighting for its precarious existence. It was the slender vein of gold-bearing ore, and it was also the Boston stockholders and their dogged and glittering hopes for better production soon. God, if only the price of gold
would
go up, thought Hugh, or if those rock-hounds up on the hill could only find something really good in their mole tunnels, the blasted old Shamrock might get into the black for a change, might even put a little paint on the hospital, let alone raise my salary a nickel a month. He gave an exasperated sigh and whipped his gun through a clump of cholla cactus, morosely watching the vicious little spined segments break off and roll over the road.

“You shouldn't do that, Doctor—” cried a wheezy and reproachful voice. “Susan gets them in her paws.”

Hugh turned to see Old Larky dismounting from his burro and shooing his dog, an obese spaniel, away from the scattered cholla. “Sorry,” said Hugh. “How come you're down from the mountains so soon? You found your lost mine or something?” He surveyed the old prospector with amusement. Like many another of his kind throughout the West, Old Larky lived alone some place in the mountains near a spring; he appeared once a month for supplies in Lodestone, and departed again with his two burros and his dog after a visit to the post office where he invariably received a letter from England. Old Larky was a British remittance man and only Hugh, who had saved his eyesight after a virulent dose of wood alcohol, knew that the usual romantic speculations in this case were true. Larky was the younger son of an earl.

He had shown Hugh a picture of the magnificent Warwickshire castle where he had been born, but his true name or the particular misbehavior which had caused his exile forty years ago Hugh did not know.

Old Larky had blue eyes rimmed with white around the irises which appeared to swim in a viscous red fluid, but through them he surveyed Hugh with dignity. “No, I have not found my lost mine yet, but I have no doubt I shall eventually. I came down early because Susan there will soon be whelping.”

“You don't say so,” said Hugh eyeing the dog with distaste. “She find a lustful coyote up there?”

“Indian hound,” said Old Larky sadly. “There's some Mescaleros camping not far from my cabin. I think some of the bucks are working in the mine. Those damned Apaches—I tried to shoot that hound dog but he was too quick for me.”

“Too bad—” said Hugh and turned to go.

“No, Doctor, wait—” Old Larky seized Hugh by the arm, exhibiting a row of white china teeth in a smile as anxious as the swimming eyes. “Susan, she's a bit old for a first litter, I've always been so careful of her, I thought perhaps you'd just...”

“Oh, my God. No!” shouted Hugh. “At dog obstetrics I draw the line.”

Old Larky's lips trembled. “Doctor, I beg of you—look, I'll pay you well. Look—look at this.” He fumbled in his saddle bag and held out on his shaking palm a round gold coin.

“Gold—?” murmured Hugh startled. For a second it seemed as though there were a spot of seductive, infinitely beckoning light floating on the seamed old hand. “Where'd you get this?” he said angrily. “You didn't offer to pay me when I pulled you through that bout with the melted Sternos.”

“It's a gold sovereign,” said Old Larky. “The only one I have. I brought it from England. You pull Susan through and you shall have it.”

“I don't want it.” Hugh thrust his jaw out, he turned his back on Old Larky.

“It'll buy a lot of Payson Dew, Doctor Slater—” said Old Larky softly. “You like Payson Dew.”

Hugh turned back, he looked at the pleading bleary old face, he looked at the pregnant bitch with her mournful swimming eyes like her master's—and he burst into a sharp laugh. “Okay, I like to deliver dogs so I can get money to get drunk so I like to deliver dogs.”

The old man nodded and climbed on his burro with Susan in his arms. “We'll go to the hospital when the time comes. Thank you, Doctor Slater.” He lifted his lumpy old Stetson, clucked to the burro, and they ambled down the road toward town.

Private room for Susan, said Hugh to himself as he walked on, and it's not, Mrs. Dartland, that I have a heart of gold melting over the pathetic old prospector and his whoring little dog, I assure you, it's just plain gold. He walked on glumly, staring down at the rough road until he reached the original Lodestone, the ghost town abandoned when the Boston company bought the old mine fifteen years ago and had optimistically founded a new town site with more room for expansion, and nearer the Gila River from which much of the water must be pumped.

The ghost town presented the appearance of romantic desolation peculiar to all ruins. There were piles of rubble, a few backless façades, two or three crumbling skeletons of large houses, and an enormous painted wooden sign flanked by giant saguaros fallen against a flight of wooden steps which led into midair. The sign said “Opera House” in dim red and gold letters, and a small lizard lay basking on the letter “H.” In the vanished opera house behind this sign, Lotta Crabtree and Adelina Patti had performed, and here Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske had played to one of the most enthusiastic audiences of her entire career, for during its brief glory in the eighties and nineties, Lodestone had rivaled Tombstone and even Leadville as a boom town.

Hugh was not interested in the ghost town, crumbling under the silent sun, and he skirted all the rock and adobe foundations where rattlers loved to lurk, but he paused by a large mesquite to look up a trail between fallen timbers, a trail which had, over thirty years ago, been a broad avenue flanked by stunted ever-ailing palm trees. A hundred yards up the mountainside on a platform hewed out of the rock behind, there stood the Cunningham mansion.