Free Live Free

Cough!

“Take off your shirt,” Dr. Makee rumbled. He himself still wore his tattersall, with herringbone trousers and a bolo tie. His gray herringbone jacket hung from the back of a chair in one corner of his examination room.

“I’m not really sick,” Barnes explained. “I just want to talk.”

“Take it off,” the old doctor said firmly. “I don’t care what the hell you came here for, I’m going to listen to your heart or I won’t talk to you.”

“I can’t pay you.”

“Take it off!” He strode up to Barnes and began to unfasten the buttons himself.

“All right,” Barnes said. “All right.” He pulled loose his tie and hung it on a halltree beside a dusty skeleton, then slipped out of his suitcoat and undid the rest of his shirt buttons.

“That’s better.” The old doctor sipped coffee from a mug on his desk and wiped his white mustache with the back of his hand. “I know you can’t pay. If you could pay, you’d go to a real doctor in the medical center, not to a crazy old retired quack like me. Nobody comes here that can pay, even if some of them do. I know you’re not sick, too. Or anyway, you don’t think you are. I could see that the minute you walked in. A sick man walks one way, a well one another way; but a man who’s sick and doesn’t know it might walk like John Wayne. Hell, John Wayne walked like John Wayne when he was full of cancer. When a man your age comes in here, I always listen to his heart. Suppose you said you weren’t sick, and I accepted it, and you walked out of here and fell down dead on my sidewalk. I’d never forgive myself.”

He stood and adjusted his stethoscope, then thrust its dangling end against Barnes’s belly. “Cough!”

Barnes coughed.

“That’s not for your heart, that’s your lungs.” The old doctor put his instrument in half a dozen other places, occasionally rapping Barnes’s ribs with his knuckles. “How long since you’ve had a good physical?”

“Five years, maybe. Six.”

“I thought so. Now I want you to skip in place. Watch how I do it.” He hopped from one leg to the other; Barnes tried to imitate him. “Good enough. You want to see how a sick man walks?” The old doctor hunched one shoulder and lurched about, dragging a leg. “This is sick!” He chuckled fiendishly and clawed with his spotted old man’s hand at Barnes’s bare shoulder. “Yes, Master! Igor will obey!”

Barnes recoiled, and the doctor straightened up and shoved his stethoscope against his chest again. “Nothing like a little anxiety to bring up the pulse rate.”

“I just wanted to ask you about Mr. Free,” Barnes said.

“Ben Free?” Dr. Makee took the earpieces from his ears, walked around his desk, and sat down. “Your heart seems to be pretty good. What did you say your name was?”

“Osgood M. Barnes.”

“Well, I don’t think you have a problem there, Mr. Barnes. Just the same, I’m going to check your blood pressure. Put on your shirt again, and come over here and sit down. Father deceased?”

Taking his shirt from the halltree, Barnes nodded.

“What did he die from?”

“Accidental causes.”

The old doctor sipped his coffee. “You’d just as soon not talk about it, I take it. Fine with me. Sit down here and let me do the blood pressure. You can put on your tie but not your coat. You wanted to ask me something about Ben Free?”

Barnes nodded again.

“Thought you lived with him. I’ve seen you over there, so you ought to know more than I do. Put your arm here, level, on my desk. You got your breath? Heart pretty well slowed down?”

“Yes, fine,” Barnes said. “I did live with him. You’re right about that, Dr. Makee.”

“You were over there when I stitched up the fella that got hit with the ax.”

“Yes, I was. But Mr. Free was gone by then—we didn’t know where he was. We still don’t. We’re hoping you can tell us.”

The old doctor wrapped a rubber cuff around Barnes’s arm. “I won’t, because I don’t know. That satisfy you? Don’t know where he went when they started to wreck his house. Don’t know where I’ll go myself when they start on this one.”

“It’s not a question of my being satisfied, Doctor. We’re worried about him. He’s lost his home. We’d like to help him if we can.”

“Out of the goodness of your hearts? I don’t believe you, Mr. Barnes. People don’t do those things. They think they do, but they don’t. Something happens, and they think if it weren’t for such-and-such I’d do so-and-so. But such-and-such is always there, except when so-and-so might put money in their pockets.”

“Are you saying there aren’t any humanitarians? I’d have said you were one, Doctor. You said you were retired, too. Why do you take care of your patients?”

“Thunderation, somebody’s got to. Besides,” the old doctor chuckled, “because I do, I can get away with just about anything I want around this neighborhood. You notice how I made you take off your shirt soon as you came in here?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I do that with all of them. Make ’em strip so I can check their heart and lungs. For decency’s sake, if a lady or one of these young gals has on a brassiere, I don’t make her take it off. But lots of these young gals don’t wear them now—you know that?”

“Yes,” Barnes said. “I’ve noticed that myself.”

“And when they do, why frequently they have these real lacy, frilly things. I like them damn near as well. You’re too young to recall what it was like in my day, Mr. Barnes. But back when I was a boy, if I saw down the front of a good-looking gal, I’d really seen something. Why, I thought about something like that for a month afterward. Why when we got the Monkey Ward catalog, my ma used to tear out the pages with the ladies’ unmentionables to keep my brothers and me from lookin’ at ’em.”

Barnes grinned. “You’re not really that old, Doctor. You know, you remind me a lot of Mr. Free.”

“Well, I ought to.” The old doctor began to pump the blood-pressure cuff. “He was my son, you know.” Barnes stared at him, and he chuckled again. “Not my actual son—Tommy died a long while ago, and I think Ben was really a few years older than I am. But we used to pretend that way, and we had a lot of fun. I was the dad because of my mustache. Ben shaved his face all over back then. He’s got more hair on his face than I do now.”

Barnes nodded.

“That’s right, you saw him many a time.” The old doctor pressed his stethoscope to the inside of Barnes’s elbow and cocked his head. The air escaping from the cuff made a faint hiss, the sigh of a sleepy serpent. “Started when we were coming home on the bus one time. I’d wrenched my knee a little, and Ben gave me a hand up the steps—your blood pressure’s okay, Mr. Barnes. Good, in fact, for a man like you, because you’re lean. Get plenty of exercise and stay away from rich food, anything sweet or greasy. Never salt a thing.”

“I won’t,” Barnes said. “Thanks for the tip. I hope your knee’s better now.”

“Knee? Oh, sure, the story. Well, sir, Ben helped me up, and then there wasn’t two seats together, so I took the one up front and Ben sat about three rows back, next to a lady about my age.

“And when we were both settled down, she said something like, ‘Will your friend be all right?’ and Ben said something like, ‘Doc’ll be okay.’ Only the lady was a mite deef, and she thought he said Dad’ll be okay. So she said, ‘Oh, is he your father? Such a distinguished looking man!’ Well, Ben’s always a great kidder—you could say just about anything to him and he’d go along with it. So he told her he was sixty-nine and I was ninety-one, and how we’d lived together all our lives, and so on so forth. From then on it’s been a joke we pick up every once in a while.”

“You haven’t really known Mr. Free all your life?” Barnes asked.

“No, of course not. Only since he moved in across the street.”

“How long has that been, Dr. Makee?”

“Just a few years.”

“Dr. Makee, I know you think I’m prying into something that’s really none of my business, but Mr. Free‘s—your friend Ben’s—missing, and all of us who lived there with him are concerned about him. We’re afraid something may have happened to him, and until we find out nothing has, we’re going to keep looking.”

The old doctor nodded, his face expressionless. “Have you called the police?”

“No,” Barnes said. “Not yet.”

“That’s what most people would do, Mr. Barnes.”

“We’re not …” Barnes hesitated.

“Not what?”

“Not the sort of people the police pay much attention to, Doctor. A man in your position—you’re a physician, you own this house, you have a certain status in the community.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”

“I think—Dr. Makee, I used to be a regional sales manager for the Continental Crusher Division of Yevco Incorporated. I had a house and a wife and kid. Two cars, a gold American Express Card, all that stuff.”

The old doctor nodded. “What happened?”

“A lot of things. The point I want to make is that when I lost all that, I lost it so slowly I hardly noticed it happening. The wife and the kid and the house and one car first. That was all in one lump.”

“I see.”

“Then my job. After that I went through five jobs in a little over a year. Each of them looked nearly as good as the last one—do you know what I mean? I know you’re thinking it was my own fault, but not all of it was. Like, once I was sales manager for a small company. They got bought up by a big one, and I was out. They said I could stay around as a sales trainee if I wanted, and I told them to stuff it. Today I’d jump at that.”

The old doctor nodded again.

“I’m getting way off my point. What I wanted to say was that one day I was making a call at a liquor store. The man who owned it was out front by the register, and he didn’t want any. You know how they do, ‘I ain’t got time, come back next month,’ all that bullshit.”

“I can imagine.”

“While I was standing there trying to tell him about the products I represented, a cop came in. The owner looked at him and said, ‘Throw this guy out.’ I suppose the cop got a fifth of cheap Scotch from him at Christmas; they usually do. Anyway, he grabbed me.”

Dr. Makee chuckled. “The bum’s rush, that’s what we used to call it.”

“They still call it that. It’s funny, until you realize you’re the bum. Anyway, the cop did it. He tossed me out so I couldn’t get my feet under me, and I landed on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. When he threw my sample case after me, it hit so the latch came open. All my samples were scattered on that sidewalk. Some of them got stepped on, and some of them got lost; I suppose people picked them up and carried them home.”

“I can understand how that must have hurt you, Mr. Barnes,” Dr. Makee said softly.

“In a way, he’d done me a favor, because that was when I knew where I was. That’s about where all of us who lived with Mr. Free are. You wanted to know why we didn’t call the police.”

“You’ll have to excuse an old man, Mr. Barnes. We get set in our ways, and I suppose I was thinking more about how the police used to be than how they are now. Ben would have called them himself, that’s what I was thinking; but he was old like me. Ben and I, we sort of lived in the past, I suppose. It was hard for us to keep in mind how much the world’s changed. You’re too young to understand it, maybe. Crystals in the brain’s what some of them think it is. Did you know that, Mr. Barnes? Hirano bodies. The brain’s turning to glass, or something like it. Well, folks said the both of us were cracked a long time ago.”

Barnes laughed dutifully.

“For you young people, it’s all the same. But people my age, or Ben’s age, we have to wonder what kind of glass it is. For some a shot glass, I suppose. One of those funny mirrors for Ben, I think, and if Trudie were still with me, hers might be a pretty cut-glass vase. I don’t know.”

“Speaking of brains, Doctor, you said once that a concussion was a brain bruise. Do you remember that?”

The old doctor shrugged. “I’ve said that maybe a thousand times, Mr. Barnes.”

“This was just yesterday, when you bandaged Sergeant Proudy at Mr. Free’s.”

“Oh, him.” He nodded.

“Right. I want to ask you more about Mr. Free, if you don’t mind. But first a couple of questions about Sergeant Proudy. How did you know to come?”

“When he got hit with that fire ax? Because I saw it. I was watching all the hoorah out my front window. I suppose by that time the whole neighborhood was. When he got hit, it looked like a fine chance to just busybody over and see what the commotion was about, so I did.”

“Mr. Free didn’t call you, then.”

“Nobody called me. I just came.”

“Doctor, I’m not very good at asking questions, but Stubb told me specifically to ask this one. When was the last time you saw Mr. Free?”

“I’m not much on answering ’em neither. I don’t know.”

“You mean you don’t think it’s any of my business.”

“Nope. I mean I don’t know.”

“You were his friend.”

The old doctor seemed to hesitate, his eyes roving from the yellowed, wired-together skeleton by the halltree to the window and back. At last he said, “I’d like to think so,” and let the words hang, as though there were no more to say. Barnes was conscious of the warmth of the room and the smell of carbolic acid clinging to everything.

“I’d like to think so, Mr. Barnes. I know for certain, that if you’d have asked, Ben would have said he was mine. I’m getting old.”

“Not mentally, Doctor.”

“Old every way. I’ve got an old mind in an old body. I’ve got an old soul. That Chinese wise man …”

“Confucius?”

“Yes. We used to make up jokes about him. Confucius say this and Confucius say that. What Confucius really said was that in the pursuit of knowledge he forgot he was getting old. My practice does that for me, Mr. Barnes, that and keeping up with the new developments. But it doesn’t stop me from getting old, only from thinking about it.”

Barnes waited.

“You ask me when I saw Ben last, and I feel like I just did. But I can’t pin it down. Maybe yesterday. Maybe today. Maybe it was last week, and maybe it was last year.”

“I think I understand.”

“It may come to me. Then again, it may not. I could tell you a hundred things we did, a thousand things we talked about, because we talked about everything. But I couldn’t tell you just when it was, except sometimes that it was summer or winter or whatever because I remember what kind of clothes I wore, or maybe that Ben got himself a soft ice cream. Then too, it isn’t always easy to know when you saw Ben, if you didn’t see him right to his face. One way he looks like everybody else, but another way he looks like everybody. Sometimes he’s just as straight as a poker. Sometimes he’s stooped over like his back’s giving him a lot of trouble. He—”

“Is it?” Barnes asked.

“Hurting him? I think so, but he never came to me for doctoring. I used to try to get him to, but when I started I made the mistake of telling him I wouldn’t charge him. After that he wouldn’t come.

“Now, Mr. Barnes, I like to take an interest in all my patients, just like in my friends. You said something about that policeman I stitched up yesterday. Why don’t you quit prying into Ben Free’s affairs and tell me about him?”

Barnes nodded, uncertain at first about putting his thoughts into words. “You said yesterday he might have a slight concussion, isn’t that correct?”

“I believe we’ve mentioned it today too.”

“Right. Is it possible for a slight concussion to make somebody a little confused and very suspicious of—of another group of people?”

“Paranoia? No.”

“It isn’t possible?”

“Slight concussions can cause some confusion, Mr. Barnes. If you’ve ever seen a boxer or a football player walking around and maybe even doing what he’s supposed to, fight or run with the ball, but acting kind of dazed and maybe staggering a little, you’ve seen the results of a slight concussion. But a concussion like that doesn’t cause paranoia or any other mental disorder, in my experience. Sometimes almost any kind of trauma will produce overt paranoia in a person who’s had it for years and been covering it up, though. How does … I can’t recall his name.”

“Sergeant Proudy.”

“How does Sergeant Proudy act?”

Barnes told him.