Dr. Horace Dormody whistled through his mask over an appendectomy and told a political joke to the anesthetist, but he didn’t mention Doc’s broken arm. A patient’s problems, no matter how funny, were sacred to Dr. Horace. But he couldn’t help chuckling discreetly to himself now and then.
How did the word spread about Doc’s arm? Who knows? Fauna heard it with her crullers. Alice, Mabel, and Becky got it with their orange juice. The Patrón heard it from Cacahuete, who thereupon rushed to the beach and played three loud and uninhibited choruses of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” using six changes of key.
Wide Ida was siphoning Pine Canyon whisky into Old Crow bottles when she heard it.
Mack and the boys had the news early, and it gave them something pressing to do.
Suzy opened up the Poppy that morning. The counter was crowded with breakfasters who dawdled over coffee. It was well into the morning before Suzy heard that Doc had broken his arm. And then she couldn’t do anything about it because Ella was getting a permanent. But after she heard it some mid-morning customers got curious service from a Suzy who looked blankly over their heads when they spoke to her. She called Mr. MacMinimin Mr. Gross, and she called Mr. Gross “you” and served his eggs straight up which sickened him.
Mack was first on the scene. He didn’t even put on his shoes. He regarded the new cast, which still hadn’t cooled off, and listened to the only explanation Doc could think of—that he had got his arm caught between the cot and the wall.
“What you going to do?” Mack asked.
“I don’t know. I have to get south, I have to!”
Mack was about to make an offer when a thought came to him that made him say, “Maybe something’ll turn up.” He bolted for the Palace Flop house.
Once there, he went to Hazel’s bed and found it pristine and unwrinkled.
“He ain’t been in,” said Whitey No. 1.
“Well, what do you think of that?” Mack said with admiration. “Why, the sweet son-of-a-bitch!”
Mack went out to the cypress tree and crawled under its low hanging limbs, and he dragged Hazel out the way you’d drag a puppy from under a bed and half carried him up to the Palace Flop house.
Hazel was far gone in emotional fatigue. “I had to,” he said hopelessly.
“Anybody seen Suzy?” Mack asked.
“I seen her go to work early,” said Eddie.
“Well, you better go break the news to her. Do it offhand,” said Mack. “Now, Hazel, how’d you do it?”
“You mad with me?”
“Hell no,” said Mack. “’Course we don’t know how she’ll work out, but it’s a step in the right direction.” He turned to the two Whiteys. “I want you should notice Hazel didn’t bust Doc’s leg. That was good judgment. Doc can walk but he can’t work. You, Whitey,” he said to Whitey No. 2, “I want you should get over to Doc’s and hang around. If anybody offers to drive him down to La Jolla you take care of it. Where’s the indoor-ball bat?”
“I throwed it in the bay,” said Hazel.
“So that’s what it was! Whitey, you get yourself a couple of feet of gas pipe.”
Hazel went into collapse. Mack sat on the edge of his bed and placed and replaced cold damp rags on Hazel’s feverish brow.
Hazel struggled for speech. “Mack,” he said, “I can’t do her. I don’t care if the stars or even the cops say I got to, I can’t do her. I ain’t got the poop.”
“What you talking about? You already done her.”
“I don’t mean that. You tell Fauna she got to get somebody else for President of the United States.”
Mack stared down at him in amazement. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I thought you’d forgot.”
“I practiced,” said Hazel brokenly. “I don’t want to let nobody down, Mack, but I just ain’t no good at it. Try and get me off, will you, Mack? Please? Pretty goddam please?”
Mack’s eyes brimmed with compassion. “Well, you sweet bastard,” he said. “You poor little rabbit. Don’t you worry. Ain’t nobody going to force you. You done noble stuff. Wasn’t nobody with guts but you.”
“It ain’t oysters,” Hazel said. “Hell, I could do that. I’d eat old socks if I had to. It’s just—the job’s too big for me. I’d mess up the whole country.”
Mack said, “You just lay there, Hazel baby, Mack’s going to take care of it. There ain’t nobody brave as you. Whitey,” he said to Whitey No. 1, “you set here on Hazel’s bed and kind of pet him. Don’t let him get up until I get back.” And Mack hurried out.
“You got to do something and do it quick,” Mack said to Fauna. “S’pose Hazel gets another noble idea—why, hell, he might kill somebody.”
“Yeah,” said Fauna, “I can see how it is. Just let me get my stuff together. You think he’d like a nice monkey head?”
“He’d love it,” said Mack. “He needs it.”
Fauna held her chart in front of Hazel’s eyes. “Anybody can make a mistake,” she said. “They was a fly speck on the chart. Saturn wasn’t in the bicuspid at all.”
Hazel said suspiciously, “How do I know you ain’t malarkying me now just to make me feel good?”
“How many toes you got?”
“I counted them—nine.”
“Count them again.”
Hazel slipped off his shoes. “Looks like the same as before,” he said.
“Look at that little toe kind of bent under. Hell, Hazel, I may of made a mistake with a fly speck, but you miscounted your toes! You got ten. One bent under.”
A slow smile began to spread over Hazel’s face, a smile of relieved delight. Then for a moment the shadow of worry came back. “Who you think they’ll get instead of me?”
“Nobody knows,” said Fauna.
“Well, he better be good,” said Hazel ominously. And then he abandoned himself to pure relief. “ ‘I got a little shadow that goes in and out with me,’ ” he sang.
Fauna rolled up her chart and went home.
Just before noon the expressman picked his unaccustomed way up to the chicken walk to the Palace Flop house.
“I got a great big crate for you guys,” he said. “I ain’t got no call to deliver it up a rope ladder. Come on down and get it.”
“It’s here!” Mack cried. “God works in his tum-te-dum way his tum-tums to perform.”
Hazel and Whitey No. 1 and Mack were wrestling the big wooden case up the chicken walk when Eddie joined them.
“Suzy come!” he cried. “I come with her. Seemed like she was about to take off any minute. She’s in there with him now.”
“Give us a hand,” said Mack. “How’s she look?”
“Fireball,” said Eddie.
They carried the case into the Palace and Mack attacked it with a hand ax.
“There she is,” he said when the lid was off.
“She’s with Doc. Say, what you got?”
“Look!” said Mack. And he and the boys gazed down on the instrument, the great black tube of an eight-inch reflector, eyepieces socketed beside it, and its tripod cradled.
“Biggest one in the whole damn catalogue,” said Mack proudly. “Jesus, Doc’ll be happy! Eddie, tell us everything that happened, don’t leave nothing out.”
What a day it was! A day of purple and gold, the proud colors of the Salinas High School.[126] A squadron of baby angels maneuvered at twelve hundred feet, holding a pink cloud on which the word J-O-Y flashed on and off. A seagull with a broken wing took off and flew straight up into the air, squawking, “Joy! Joy!”
Suzy was ahead of her racing feet when Eddie intercepted her. She answered yes and no to Eddie’s casual comments on the weather, but not only did she not hear the comments, she didn’t know Eddie was beside her.
She went up the steps of Western Biological without seeing Whitey No. 2 standing guard with a sashweight. Her coming relieved him of a duty, but he stuck around to hear.