The Bully of Order (6 page)

Out of his coat and dried off, the smartly dressed, slightly gray and waddling doctor returned with a silver tea service and milk for Duncan.

“Well, here we are,” he said.

“Here we are.”

“And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Mrs. Ellstrom?”

“Just a visit, really, because I'm fine, you know—my husband sees to my health. I'm in good health. And Duncan's well, hale enough to run me ragged. I believe I liked him better when he only crawled.”

Dr. Haslett sat patiently with his back an inch or so off his chair. I couldn't bring myself to say what I'd come to say. “Take your time, Mrs. Ellstrom. I have nothing on the schedule that can't be put off until tomorrow.” He smiled a close-lipped smile and then took one quick drink from his cup and then another twice as long. I watched his throat work beneath the fatty layers of his prickly neck. The color came into his face and he took a deep breath. He struck me as being two men: a narrow and average man and a fat man that had engulfed the smaller one.
Knuckled
was a word that I thought fit Jacob well, and
ensconced
was a word that fit Dr. Haslett. Just men, as they are.

The doctor was about to say something else, and I quickly gathered my courage and spoke right over the top of him: “It seems my husband has disappeared.”

“What's this?”

“On Monday. He left and never returned.”

“I'm sure he's fine. He's probably been detained somehow, is all. I wouldn't worry.” By the look on his face, I could tell he was pleased at my misfortune but didn't want to show it.

“I had Mr. Tartan look for him in the places I wouldn't go. Where men usually go when they don't want to come home.”

“I see. Would you like me to try and find him? I could ask around.”

“People trust you, like they once trusted my husband. People are mostly honest with doctors, don't you think?”

“Honestly, I don't think anyone's particularly honest with anyone.”

“That's a dark view.”

“Perhaps.”

I let Duncan down, and he crawled across the room and busied himself pulling on the drapes.

“Duncan.”

“He's fine. Leave him.”

“The real trouble is”—my voice was barely above a whisper now, and the doctor leaned in to hear—“I spoke with Mr. Hayes, and it seems Jacob, Dr. Ellstrom, is deeply in debt—I don't know what we'll do.” I did my best to fight back the tears, but they were there, hot on my cheeks, smeared onto the back of my hand. I hadn't gone there to cry. Duncan was watching me with a look of terror on his face, so I smiled through my tears and he half-smiled back.

Dr. Haslett stood up and came over to me. “He'll turn up. You stay here. Make yourself comfortable. I mean it, pretend that this is your home, sleep in the beds, eat all the food, break the dishes—I don't care one bit. We'll get to the bottom of this, I promise you.”

“Thank you, Dr. Haslett. I didn't know who else to talk to.”

“You'll be fine. Wait here.” He spoke to Duncan. “I believe Miss Falvey, my housekeeper, left some cookies in the cupboard. Better go and see if you're tall enough to reach them.”

I thanked him again.

“You'll be fine. I won't be gone more than an hour.”

He got his coat and left. Duncan and I stayed in the living room for a few minutes after the door shut, and then we went into the kitchen and I heated him some milk and fed him cookies like you'd feed carrots to an old and well-loved horse.

H
is coat was still
damp. Something about putting on warm and wet clothing bothered him immensely more than cold and wet. It wasn't simply uncomfortable and impractical; it was disgusting. He stood in the entryway for a moment, wondering where to start. He thought: I'm weary of this whole business. No wonder that swindler Ellstrom had disappeared. He understood. Hippocraticly speaking, Dr. Haslett would just as soon first do nothing than do no harm. Not that he believed that; he believed he was doing good, and without that belief he would be lost, nothing, a vessel filled with smoke. A lustful but mostly empty vessel.
Women and God are the two rocks on which man must anchor or be wrecked.
And Mrs. Ellstrom came for my help. This pleased him. Not so old and bloated and worthless as you felt this morning. Not quite.

He'd see the banker first, Hayes, the twerp. Not long ago the little man had slammed his hand in a door and broken his fifth metacarpal, and when he'd straightened the finger to splint it the banker had wept like a child. He'd seemed hard behind his desk, but with the tears he went instantly wainable. There are degrees of toughness, and from the doctor's experience he judged women to be generally about three orders above men. Give them a reason to weep and pat their heads. And isn't life hard. And isn't pain painful. Your wife gave birth to a ten-pounder and didn't so much as whimper. Not that you can compare that to the pain of a man, particularly the pinkie finger of a banker. Tearful slints, their bravery so easily abandoned, as a pocketwatch left upon the dresser.

The inside of his derby was dry, and for this the doctor was thankful; without this he would be wrecked. Women, God, and hats. His wife's umbrella was there behind the door, and every time he noticed it, he wanted to take his scalpel and cut hundreds of tiny slits in it and send it to her in Seattle or wherever she was now, California. He went out the door into the wet with the picture of his wife's face sizzling on his mind. She'd stopped the world for him the first time he saw her, that's how he chose to remember it, but in his heart he felt duped somehow. She'd set him up for this. She'd known that she would do this all along. Then it occurred to him that his children were being raised as Californians; illiterate gold chasers, opium-addicted carpet vendors. Thoughtless little brutes who would someday be arrested and hung for stabbing a store clerk with a penknife. He'd rather they be raised by wolves. But they were, weren't they? Katherine, if nothing else, was a wolfish bitch, wasn't she? He smiled and his blood went hot as if he'd been standing too close to the train tracks when it passed by. She scared him, his wife. She'd weakened all the parts of him that mattered. She was his bad weather, and even when she was hundreds of miles away she beat him down, eroded him like the sandcliffs on the coast.

He went to cross Heron Street but had to wait for a goatherd to push his animals by, more goats lately and more people. The whole Harbor was filling up. He'd heard there was another doctor in town, that made four. But minus Ellstrom, well, still four, three and a half.

He checked the Alaska Bar first, had a shot of bourbon with Persimon the choker setter gone double amputee. No news from him or the bartender, Meigs, but he didn't have to pay for his drink. Not a bad stop. Good day, gents. Velchoff the doorman asked him about a goiter.

“Come see me next week.”

“Why not sooner? It really hurts.”

“Don't whine, it causes goiters.”

Going out the door, he replaced the hat on his head and was thankful again for silk because the silk lining of his hat reassured him and caressed him like a nurse he'd had as a child mending his fever. Sweet memories, silk kerchief. Explains why your wife walks all over you. He understood love to be glacial; it's bigger than anything and it grinds you to bits and leaves a big hole.

Daisy at Ed Dolan's Eagle Dance Hall had seen Dr. Ellstrom three, maybe four days ago, post-leaning drunk, said he was drooling a little.

“You clean him out?”

“Not me, but somebody was gonna if they hadn't already. Why don't you come upstairs and let me rub your feet.”

“Another time.”

“I didn't really mean your feet, Doc,” she whispered.

A raised hand, unspoken promise, and back in the street, three bourbons down. There are limits to what is allowed, the doctor thought. Each man according to his fate, like barefoot height and eye color. You can't push against the great mass of things. Life so often calls for burrowing and sliding and forgetting, and foot rubs. Helplessness is a choice made when you can't stand against the immovable.

Jacob Ellstrom was a lucky man, and like most lucky men he probably disdained to admit his luck, and if he did he loathed it, felt he didn't deserve it, hadn't asked anyway. He didn't seem particularly clever, and he was far from being handsome; he was quite unattractive, really, ugly even. Says the walrus. He'd heard rumors that Ellstrom's father was a wealthy man, but he must've turned off the spigot now. They always give you something, if you can manage not to nod off, or plot patricide, as they ramble, as they go on. Like dogs beg, so do we. Young men so often think pride repairable. How wrong they are. Some debts call for marrow.

Or it could be that Jacob Ellstrom, the fraud, was kind and loving or even a comedian when he and his wife were safely behind walls, a big laugh, a good Heath. No, it was something else. Perhaps he shouldn't be looking at Jacob at all but at Nell. She could've been the one that chose him, but she had to be, didn't she? What kind of woman, not much more than a girl really, settles on such a mess to be unmade? Oh, she was the best kind, the very best. Above all the saints and martyrs, God loves a beautiful woman who of her own choice weds an ugly man.

The liquor in his belly made him feel unsettled, so he skipped the bank. Hayes wouldn't know anything anyway, and no one he asked at the docks had seen Ellstrom around either. He'd left his cigars at home. He went to the Coast Sailor's Union.

Hank Bellhouse was behind his desk working his pugio over a stone, oil glistening on his fingers and on the backs of his hands. The room was large and open, with a spruce slab table and a bank of windows that looked out over the harbor. Leaflets and posters adorned the wall along with random taxidermy; animals and fishes, a flower made of the carapaces of Dungeness crabs. The union seal painted eight feet tall and lopsided. He'd only just opened shop.

“Look at you, physician, all fuss and feathers. Fucking rumpled tissue in a widow's palm.” Bellhouse was febrile, sanguinary, every part of him. His eyelids were muscle.

“What do you know of Dr. Ellstrom?”

“I know his degree says it comes from Brown.”

“Besides that.”

“Didn't you tell me and everyone else at Dolan's that night that they don't turn out doctors at Brown?”

“So I did.”

“Strange his degree says it, then.”

“Letters aside, he was here before me, and what I hear speaks of a moderate competence.”

“You weren't saying that at Dolan's.”

“No, I wasn't.”

Bellhouse held the knife up to inspect the blade and then dragged it over his thumbnail to test it. Back to the stone, working as he spoke. “You were talking like we should run him out of town.”

“Looking back, I think I shouldn't drink so much, but looking forward—you don't have any whiskey, do you? I've got a chill.”

Bellhouse smiled and shook his head, his arm moving without break. The stone took its measure from the blade equally, three passes to a side. “I've met my share of physicians, and none of them are any good to drink with. More fun to drink with a dead sailor than a live physician.”

“Don't blame the trade, it's the rain that does it to me, the gray gloom.”

The blade stopped with the doctor's last syllable, and Bellhouse raised his eyes. “All I can say is, we're all just plain lucky you arrived and saved us from Ellstrom's inadequacies. Who knows what kind of injury he could've visited on us?”

“I've apologized to you enough.”

“A stack of nothing is still nothing.”

“If you'd give me a drink, I could better suffer your insults.”

“What use is it to keep liquor on hand if everyone arrives at my door already drunk?”

“I'm not drunk.”

Bellhouse set the knife down, leaned back and reached into his desk drawer. He produced a puny, dented oil can, spurted oil onto the stone, and spread it with the edge of his thumb. He weighted the knife in his palm and then continued sharpening.

“I thought you were going to pull out a bottle.”

“I know you did.”

“Give me a cigar, then, would you? Mine are at home.”

With his chin Bellhouse motioned to the box of cigars and the matches beside it. The blade coughed out one after another of its lonely dying breaths.

Dr. Haslett lit the cigar and dropped the spent match in the ashtray. “I should tell you that whoever you're sharpening that blade for, don't send them to me. I don't have time.”

“A farmer complains about the dirt and a sailor the wind.”

He liked Bellhouse despite himself. “And a logger the trees.”

“A logger the fucking trees, right?” The short-necked German was like a bulldog that had been trained to act like a man, but not stupid. The muscle ended at the mouth, fleshy lips. It would be folly to confuse his strength with simplemindedness, his rigidity with an unwillingness to act or slowness.

“A boy of seven had his hand cut off in Boyerton's mill this morning.” Dr. Haslett leaned back and admired his cloud of smoke.

“I heard.”

“His mother asked what they paid for a lost hand.”

“I think I know this one.”

“They don't pay, Hank. Not a dime.”

“Half a pair of mittens must cost half as much. He's looking at some savings long-term.”

“Is that the compassion we can expect from your union? Which, I should say, I think is bullshit. I don't believe you even have a charter. I think you're running a game against that lot in San Francisco. These are fine little cigars, aren't they?”

“I got cases of them.” He opened the box on his desk and with a flicked wrist, a flourish of pageantry, offered them up. “Help yourself.” Less an invitation than a dare. His eyes narrowed, and he grinned as if strings were pulling on his lips.