The Dick Gibson Show (52 page)

“But you know, one thing he
did
convince me of was that there was going to be a terrific demand for R.N.’s. ‘You get your degree, Miriam,’ he said. ‘You get your R.N. license and you’ll have it made once war breaks out. Finish up, then enlist in the Army Nurse Corps. Don’t wait until December 7, 1941.’

“So that’s what I did. I enrolled as a student nurse at Morristown General, and I went into the Army Nurse program as soon as I graduated. Everyone on active duty as of 2400 hours on 6 December ’41 was promoted to first lieutenant, and if they agreed, as I did, to sign up for the duration they were jumped to captain. I was a major by V-E Day, stayed in for twenty years and rose to colonel before I retired.”

“After we were married Kranz put me through my student year at Morristown General and I made him the beneficiary of my $10,000 G.I. life insurance. He died just before the close of the war. I was with him at the time, on a stateside furlough. He had a hunch his time was up and, not wanting to die in bed, asked me to dress him. I got him into his clothes and tied his tie. When I finished knotting it he just looked down at it kind of thoughtfully for a moment and said, ‘You know, Miriam, styles come and styles go. Wide ties like this one aren’t going to be considered very fashionable in a while, but then, in about twenty-five years, they’re going to be more popular than ever.’ Marshall, these were the last words he ever spoke.”

Miriam related all this in her lazy style. Listening to her, Dick had a sense of the piecemeal forces of erosion. He never interrupted; even when she slipped and called him Marshall he let it pass. He was tilted back deep in his chair, his feet on the desk next to the microphone.

“I take only private cases now,” Miriam was saying. “The money’s better, for one thing—though I don’t need money, really. There’s my army pension, and Kranz, who had this terrific business sense, told me back in Morristown that the big thing in the fifties and sixties was going to be office equipment—copiers, things like that. I made some good investments and I’ve got a pretty fair-sized nest egg now.”

Yes, Dick thought, nest. He remembered their nest. He undid the buttons of his shirt and scratched his belly.

“I take cases mostly because it lets me travel—I’m with an agency that sends nurses all over the country. I meet a lot of interesting people. The sick are wonderful folks, Marshall. If you recall I once told you I have to help people. Thank God that’s never burned out in me. Well, they’re just so gentle. Sedation does that, of course, helplessness does. It hurts them to move and you have to do everything for them. And if they’re old they’re that much weaker anyway. Why, some of my patients I just take and tote them around as if they were babies. I was always strong, you’ll remember, and I’m a big old gal now. You probably wouldn’t recognize me.”

He had an erection. The pressure of his clothing was irritating, so he unzipped his fly and his penis sprung out of his pants. His director rapped on the glass of the control booth with a key. Marshall Maine glanced at him and waved lazily.

“Course, maybe I wouldn’t recognize you either,” she said. “Oh Lord, I was with so many young men in the army. You know, you get tired of young people after a time. Of course if they’re really sick they’re just as good as anybody else, but most of the time they don’t want to take their pills, and they
never
get over being embarrassed. You just can’t do for them like you can somebody who’s had some experience and seen the world and knows its ways. My patient here in Ohio, now; he’s a man about our age, Marshall, a widower with a bad phlebitis. A
very
interesting man. ‘Mrs. Kranz,’ he’ll say, ‘with my leg the way it is I just can’t handle myself on the bedpan. Would you mind very much if I just let go? You don’t have to do the sheets—heck, just throw them away and buy some more over the telephone through the Home Shopper.’ He’s very generous. I just can’t say enough about it. Naturally I have to clean him up afterward; you can’t let a person lie in his own dirt. Now you couldn’t do that with a young man; a young man would just as soon be constipated forever before he’d let you touch him.

”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.

“Well, that’s what I did, and a good thing too, because now those lines were no higher than a man’s belt, and when I looked up I could see that where they was attached at they was under more strain than ever. They could have bust loose from their connections right while I was standing there.
Well.
I looked for the plates the feller told me about and there they was, on the west side just like he said, and five and a half foot up, too. You ever see one?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re just like—what do you call it—insignia on a train conductor’s hat, and they’re tin, and they got these letters and numbers stamped on them, raised up like the figures on a license plate. Some kind of code. I wrote down the numbers and went back to Clendennon and called the fella again and give him the information.

“‘That’s Georgia,’ he says. ‘That’s a Georgia pole. You’ll have to call them.’”

“What a lot of red tape,” Dick Gibson said.

“No, no, that ain’t the point. Hang on a minute. You see, just like you, I thought it was all one company, but it isn’t. Georgia is Southern Bell, and that part of Alabama where I was is Talladega County Telephone Company.”

“Well, you went to a lot of trouble.”

“Wait. I called the phone company in Marietta, Georgia. That’s where they come out from to service Aliosto where I live, so I called them. This time I didn’t tell my story to the girl who answered the phone but asked to be put right through to the service department. I had the numbers of the shields right in front of me, and as soon as the man got on the line I told him, ‘Sir, I’m a stranger who while driving along the back road between Aliosto, Georgia, and Clendennon, Alabama, this morning happened to notice a tree pressing down on the lines between poles LF 644 and LF 643. When I first noticed the tree it was lying on the lines at about five and a half foot. When I went back, I would estimate about an hour and a half later, it had sunk to about three foot off the ground. That’s about one foot, three inches each hour. That tree is straining desperately at them wires, and I fear for the children in the area if the lines should snap. In fact, they may already have snapped.’ You know what he told me?”