”I want my patients to want my hands on their bodies,” Miriam said. “How else can I help them? Men in their fifties — I suppose you’re up there now yourself — whose stomachs have gone soft, who don’t try to hide their bald spots with fancy hair styles, and if they don’t shave for a couple of days, what of it? Who aren’t always squeezed up tight to keep their gas in, and are smooth on their chests as babies — those are your interesting men.”
He could not picture her as she had been. He remembered her voice, but couldn’t recall her face or the shape of her body. He didn’t know if she had been tall or heavy or anything about her. Nevertheless, though he had not seen her in thirty years, he had what he was sure was an exact impression of what she had become. He saw her dowager’s hump, the features of her face, the nose rounded and gently comical, the crow’s feet and wide mouth, the precise color of her hair, the immense rounds of breast, full as roasts, the wide lap beneath her nurse’s white uniform with its bas-relief of girdle and garter like landmarks under a light snow. He had removed his shirt and slipped out of his pants and underwear, and was almost as naked as he had been in Morristown when she had bathed him in bed, or as she herself had been when she padded about their small room doing her little chores and telling him stories of her life in Iowa. He closed his eyes for just a moment, content, irritated only by the distortion of her voice on the telephone.
“Well,” Miriam said, “it’s awfully late. I have to give my little man his pill. Maybe before I leave Ohio I’ll call again. I’m proud you made such a success, Marshall.”
He thanked her comfortably. He had pulled off one stocking and was rolling the other down his leg. “Ohio?”
“Yes. I told you that.”
“Cincinnati?” Behr-Bleibtreau, if that’s who the anthropologist had been, had made a pointed reference to the caller from Cincinnati.
“That’s right, Marshall. How’d you know that?”
“Your patient — what’s your patient’s name?”
“Well, that’s a matter of professional ethics, Marshall.”
“Does he know you listen to this program?”
“Why, yes, of course he does. He’s the one who told me about it. We’re listening to it together right now.”
“Listen,” he said, “his name’s Behr-Bleibtreau, isn’t it?”
“Marshall, I can’t tell you a patient’s name when I’m on a case, and that’s final.”
“It is Behr-Bleibtreau, isn’t it?”
“Final is final. You don’t know me when I make up my mind. I can be pretty darn stubborn. Goodnight now, Marshall.”
He looked down and saw that he was undressed. One knee-length sock, bunched over his heel, was all he was wearing.
“Listen—” he said.
“Goodnight now.” She hung up. Dick Gibson angrily pulled the sock the rest of the way off his foot.
“Your feet stink.”
He was talking to an old fellow. The man had been driving along the rough back road between Aliosto, Georgia, and Clendennon, Alabama, on his way to visit his son-in-law who was foreman of the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Anniston, when he spied a tree, uprooted and lying across some power lines near the side of the road. The tree was not a large one, but its weight was great enough to bow the lines, pressing them down to about the level of a man’s shoulders.
Before the old man retired he had worked for many years as a drill-press operator in a factory which manufactured and assembled playground equipment. He said that this is what had given him his great love for children. During his last five or six years with the company he had been appointed by his union to be the shop safety officer, and it was his responsibility to be on the lookout for potentially hazardous situations and to figure out means by which accidents could be cut to a minimum. Not only had he supervised the posting of several dozen instructive signs throughout the plant, but he had developed what he called a “check list,” a series of precautionary steps which a worker took before ever turning on his machine.
When the old man saw the tree lying in its treacherous sling, he said his first thought was that here was a terrific potential for an accident if he ever saw one. If the lines snapped, live wires would go jumping and bucking all over the place. The lines were close enough to the side of the road to hook a passing car. Even more urgent was the fact that some kid might be lashed by the energies in the broken cables. “There’d been a terrific wind up in Aliosto the night before last,” the old man said, “and I figured maybe some tornado had touched down in the woods and just picked up that old tree and set it down on them lines.
“Well, sir, I was at that point in my journey where I didn’t know would it be better to turn back to Aliosto or press on to Clendennon. I drive an old Hudson which the feller I got it from turned back the odometer, and it ain’t worked proper since. It don’t register at all except every ten thousand miles the first two numbers over on the left change, so was no way to tell how far I already come. That’s all woods and dirt road between Aliosto and Clendennon. You don’t pick up County double ‘S’ to Anniston till the other side of Clendennon, so one mile don’t look no different than another. Speedometer’s bust, too, so I couldn’t tell how fast I’d been coming, and I don’t wear no watch so I didn’t know how long neither. Anyway, I decided to continue along to Clendennon. Which it turned out come up a good deal faster than I thought it would.
“There’s a general store in Clendennon, and I went inside and asked the feller could I use his pay telephone. I called the phone company business office down to Anniston and told them what I seen. The girl there put me through to the service department, and I told them again.
“‘Well,’ says the feller in the service department, ‘we didn’t get no reports of any interruption in service. Whereabouts this happen?’
“‘On the road between Aliosto and Clendennon.’
“‘No,’ he says, ‘in which state, Alabama or Georgia?’
“‘Why, there ain’t no state line marker on that road,’ I told him. I didn’t see one.’
“So he asks me where I’m calling from and I tell him Clendennon, and he says Clendennon’s pretty close to the Georgia line and that if that tree was down on those wires in Georgia no Alabama truck could go out there and fix it.
“‘Well, man,’ I said, ‘somebody better. Them lines ain’t gonna hold up that tree much longer. Some kid could get hurt.’ This was summertime. There’s fishing all along back in them woods in the lakes. I’d already passed some boys on bicycles. So he says, well, could I do this much for him then — could I go back and get the shield numbers on the two poles holding up the wires that tree was flung across, and call him back.
“‘What shields are those?’ I asked.
“‘Why, the shields,’ he says. ‘The little tin plates that are on every telephone and power pole. They’re fixed about five and a half foot up the west side of the pole.’
“You know I never noticed them? I’m seventy-one years old and been around telephone poles all my life and I never did see that they had any tin plates on them. Well, I thought all this was his business and not mine and I told him so, but he tells me he just ain’t got no trucks available at this time. I probably would have dropped the whole thing, but I couldn’t stop thinking ‘bout them kids that could get hurt. My son-in-law didn’t know I was coming, he didn’t expect me, and it didn’t make no difference what time I finally got there, so I decided I’d go back.