"Look, Henry," his father said. "We're rolling in cash. I want you to take this. Please. It would make me feel better."
"Just my normal fee will be sufficient, John," said the doctor.
"Come on. As a favor to me."
"Right at this moment, my old friend, I'm not inclined to do any favors for you beyond the one I just done. No, sir, and I don't think I have much interest in makin' you feel any better, either. In fact, I think I just done you the last favor I'm ever goin' to do you."
There was a long silence. Dodger held his breath. He heard the sound of a chair scraping across a wooden floor, then a creaking sound. Someone just sat down in the chair, Dodger guessed.
"What you just done to that boy is a crime, John. You don't need me to tell you that, you know it already. But knowin' how you feel about laws, and the power of the state, and such, I'm going to tell you something else. What you done to that boy is a sin."
There was an even longer pause, then a sound that Dodger at first didn't recognize but which still froze his heart. It came again, and suddenly Dodger knew his father was weeping.
"Ah, shit, John. Let me try to drop the cornpone, here. I've been living here so long now the accent's hardly an act anymore. But you remember me. It's Henry Wauk talking to you, John. The guy who used to understudy you in half the stuff you ever acted in. I'm the fellow who would have given anything to be half as good as you are, and if I couldn't do that, at least I could hang around you and hope some of the brilliance would rub off. It never did. All we really had in common was a propensity for the bottle. I don't know if you ever thought of me as a friend—"
"I did," John Valentine sobbed. "I still do."
"...well, that may be. I don't know if it's really friendship when one admires the other as much as I admired you. I owe you a lot. I still do owe you a lot, but I'm telling you now, I don't owe you this. This is the third time you've brought that little boy in to me so I could fix him up. I didn't really think much about it the first time. Fixed his busted eardrum, dived back into the bottle. But after the second time I couldn't seem to get it out of my mind. Not what you'd done to his body, John, but what you were doing to his... I don't even know what the word is. His soul, maybe. There's a part of him's always going to be frightened. Scared of you, maybe. Scared of everything."
Dodger bit his lip and frowned. What the hell was the damn quack talking about? He wasn't afraid of his father. He loved his father.
"I don't know why I do these things," Valentine said, miserably.
"That's something I don't even want to think about. I don't care why. What I'm telling you now is, it ends here. You bring him back to me all bloody and swollen up like that again, I'm going straight to the cops."
"That's exactly what you should do," Valentine said.
"I ought to call 'em right now," Wauk went on. "Shit, John, that poor kid was... well, you know how he was."
Dodger almost missed his father's next words, which were barely above a whisper.
"It was an accident. Oh, god, don't look at me like that, Henry, I know it's my responsibility. I know if he'd died it would have been exactly like I'd murdered him. Killed by my stupidity. I'm just trying to tell you... it didn't happen like I thought it would."
"I guess not," the doctor snorted.
"I don't know what happened. I guess the blast of air was just enough this time to dislodge that goddamn Caterpillar machine, and it came rolling down those tracks and I saw it coming, watching him, I was watching through the window beside the lock, I saw what was about to happen and I almost died right there, there was no way to make the lock go any faster, and the next lock was half a mile away and I didn't have a suit anyway, and—"
"Really thought it all through, didn't you?"
"Henry, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I do these things."
"That's between you and your therapist, or your God, or whoever it is you listen to, if you listen to anybody."
"I was so stupid."
"The stupid part I can forgive, John. It's the evil part that scares me. It was evil to do what you did." There was another long silence, then the doctor spoke again, with more curiosity than anger in his voice.
"That's what the Dywoo Caterpillar business was? That he was screaming about when you brought him in?"
"Daewoo/Caterpillar," Valentine said. "You know, the heavy equipment company. Earthmovers, tunneling equipment, asteroid relocation. It was written right on the front of that boring machine. One of the grinder arms or something wedged in the door and I thought... I thought it would never move away." He began sobbing again, great racking spasms that hurt Dodger to hear.
But the boy was already consumed by a hot burst of shame. He sat back on his heels and pounded his fist on his thigh.
"Stupid! Stupid!" he whispered. The one thing in the world he'd been the most frightened of, and it turned out to be nothing but... a machine? Stupid! Biting back tears, he put the stethoscope back against the door.
"There must have been a small gradient there," his father was saying. "The thing rocked back just enough on its tracks, enough so the lock could keep turning. Nothing but sheer, dumb luck. More luck than I deserve, certainly. It must be the boy's luck. Somebody's watching over him."
Dodger had long understood that his father couldn't see Elwood. In fact, he was pretty sure no one could see Elwood but himself. In fact, he'd been wondering, not being completely stupid, if Elwood was just a figurehead of his imagination, a hellishination. A bee in his bonnet, a bat in his belfry. If he was, in a word, crazy. Now he didn't think so. Elwood had shoved that Caterpillar back in its tracks. There was no other explanation for it. Which meant that Elwood was a bona fide ghost, like Hamlet's old man. The only thing he wasn't sure of was if he was the ghost of Elwood P. Dowd, a fictional character, or the ghost of Jimmy Stewart, who had just gone crazy and thought he was Elwood P. Dowd. But from that moment on he knew Elwood was his guardian angel.
"Can I go in and see him now?" Dodger was about to leap back into bed, but held out just long enough to hear the doctor's reply.
"Let the lad rest," said Wauk. "He ought to be out another hour or so, with the dose I gave him. Right now, why don't you take me down to the saloon and buy me a drink or three."
Damn drunk, Dodger thought as he heard the outside door open and close, and the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. Can't even dope me up properly. It's a good thing I'm still alive.
That bastard! Make my father cry, will you?
Dodger started poking around in cupboards and cabinets.
He quickly found a gallon stoneware jug labeled CORN LIQUOR. He pulled out the stopper and smelled it. Booze, all right. Okay, what have we got here?
He spent the next hour reading definitions in an old leather-bound book called Saunders's Comprehensive Medical Encyclopedia, publication date 1898, looking up the words he found printed on bottles and jars that lined the shelves and cabinets in the examining room. "Paregoric," he discovered, was camphorated tincture of opium. It smelled nasty, so he dumped some of it in the jug of corn liquor. "Calomel" was mercurous chloride. That sounded nasty; wasn't mercury poisonous? Into the bottle went a teaspoon of calomel. "Aunt Lydia's Pink Tonic" was said, by the label, to possess excellent emetic properties. After looking up "emetic," Dodger poured in a generous dose. "Nicotine" was a poisonous alkaloid, C10H14N2. In it went. A "sialogogue" was something that increased the flow of saliva. Why not? "Arecane" was a proprietary remedy and efficacious as a purgative. A "parturifacient" was used to speed up childbirth, while an "abortifacient" produced an abortion. Dodger wondered what a mixture of the two would do to a drunken doctor? "Formalin," "cryptomenorrheal," "Salvarsan," "arnicin," "myxorrheal," "leptuntic"...so many new words, so many definitions, so little time.