Con Doctor

They've come for you at last. Outside your cell door, gathered like a storm. Each man holds a pendant sock and in the sock is a steel combination lock that he has removed from the locker in his own cell. You feel them out there, every predatory one of them, and still they wait. They have found you. Finally, they crowd open the cell door and pour in, flailing at you like mad drummers on amphetamines, their cats' eyes glowing yellow in the dark, hammering at the recalcitrant bones of your face and the tender regions of your prone carcass, the soft tattoo of blows interwoven with grunts of exertion. It's the old lock-and-sock. You should have known. As you wait for the end, you think that it could have been worse. It has been worse. Christ, what they do to you some nights.

•

In the morning, over seven-grain cereal and skim milk, Terri says, "The grass looks sick."

"I think you want the lawn doctor," McClarty says. "I'm the con doctor."

"I wish you'd go back to private practice. I can't believe you didn't report that inmate who threatened to kill you."

McClarty now feels guilty that he told Terri about this little incident—a con named Lesko had made the threat after McClarty cut back his Valium—in the spirit of stoking her sexual ardor. His mention of the threat, his exploitation of it, has had the unintended effect of making it seem more real.

"The association is supposed to take care of the grass," Terri says.

They live in a community called Live Oaks Manor, homes with two to four bedrooms behind an eight-foot brick wall, with four tennis courts, a small clubhouse and a duck pond. In McClarty's mind it is Walled-In Pond, his retreat from the complexities of postmodern life. This is the way we live now—walled in, on cul-de-sacs in false communities. Bradford Arms, Ridgeview Farms, Tudor Crescent, Wedgewood Heights, Oakdale Manor, Olde Towne Estates—these capricious appellations with their diminutive suggestions of the baronial, their vague Anglopastoral allusiveness. Terri's two-bedroom unit with sundeck and Jacuzzi is described in the literature as "contemporary Georgian."

McClarty thinks about how, back in the days of pills, of Dilaudid and Demerol and Percodan, he didn't have these damn nightmares. In fact, he didn't have dreams. Now, when he's not dreaming about the prison, he dreams about the pills and also about the powders and the deliquescent Demerol mingling in the barrel of the syringe with his own brilliant blood. He dreams that he can see it glowing green beneath the skin like a radioactive isotope as it moves up the vein, warming everything in its path until it blossoms in his brain stem. Maybe, he thinks, he should go to a meeting.

"I'm going to call this morning," Terri continues, "and have them check the gutters while they're at it." She will, too. Her remarkable sense of economy and organization, which might have seemed comical or even obnoxious, is touching to McClarty, who sees it as a function of her recovering-alcoholic battle against chaos. He admires this. And he likes the fact that she knows how to get the oil in the cars changed or how to get free upgrades when they fly to St. Thomas. Outside of the examining room McClarty still feels himself lacking competence and will.

She kisses his widow's peak on her way out and reminds him about dinner with the Clausens, whoever they might be, God bless them and their tchotchkes. Perversely, McClarty actually likes this instant new life. Just subtract narcotics and vodka and stir. He feels like a character actor who gets a cameo in a sitcom and then finds himself written into the series as a regular. He moved to this Southeastern city less than a year ago, after graduating from rehab, and lived in an apartment without furniture until he moved in with Terri.

McClarty met her at a Mexican restaurant three months ago and was charmed by her air of independence and unshakable self-assurance. She leaned across the bar and said, "Fresh jalapenos are a lot better. They have them if you ask, but you have to ask." She waved her peach-colored nails at the bartender. "Carlos, bring the gentleman some fresh peppers." Then she turned back to her conversation with a girlfriend, her mission apparently complete.

A few minutes later, sipping his Perrier, McClarty couldn't help overhearing her say to her girlfriend, "Ask him before you go down on him, silly. Not after."

McClarty admires Terri's ruthless efficiency. Basically she has it all wired. She owns a clothing store, drives an Acura, has breasts shaped like mangoes around implanted cores of saline. Not silicone, she announced virtuously, the first night he touched them. If you ask her she can review for you the merits of the top plastic surgeons in town. "Dr. Milton's really lost it," she'll say. "Since he started fucking his secretary and going to Aspen his brow lifts have become scary. He cuts way too much and makes everybody look frightened or surprised." At 40, with his own history of psychological reconstruction, McClarty doesn't hold a few nips and tucks against a girl. Particularly when the results are so exceptionally pleasing to the eye.

"You're a doctor?" Instead of saying yes, but just barely, he nodded. As she masticated a corn chip that first night, her chin and her breasts seemed to rise on the swell of this information. Checking her out when he first sat down, Dr. Kevin McClarty thought that the blonde on the next stool looked like someone who would be dating a pro athlete or a guy with a new Ferrari who owned a chain of fitness centers. She was almost certainly a little too brassy and provocative to be the consort of a doctor, which was one of the things that excited Kevin about her. Making love to her, he felt simultaneously that he was both slumming and sleeping above his economic station. Best of all, she was in the program, too. When he heard her order a virgin margarita, he decided to go for it. He moved in with her a week after the jalapenos.

•

The uniformed guard says, "Good morning, Dr. McClarty," as the doctor drives out past the gate on his way to work. After all these years he still gets a kick out of hearing the honorific attached to his own name. He grew up even more in awe of doctors than most mortals because his mother, a nurse, told him that his father was one, though she refused all further entreaties for information. Raised in the bottom half of a narrow, chilly duplex in Evanston, Illinois, he still doesn't quite believe in the reality of this new life—the sunshine, the walled-in community, the smiling guard who calls him Dr. McClarty. Perversely, he believes in the dream, which is far more realistic than all this sunshine and imperturbable aluminum siding. He doesn't tell that to Terri, though. He never tells her about the dreams.

Driving to his office, he thinks about Terri's breasts. They're splendid, of course. But he finds it curious that she will tell nearly anybody that they are surgically, as we say, enhanced. Last time he was in the dating pool, back in the Pleistocene era, he encountered nothing but natural mammary glands. Then he got married and ten years later, he's back in circulation and every woman he meets has gorgeous tits but whenever he reaches for them he hears: "Maybe I should mention that, they're, you know . . ." and inevitably, later: "Listen, you're a doctor. Do you think, I mean, there's been a lot of, like, negative, like, publicity and stuff." It got so he stopped saying he was a doctor; he imagines it is a little like being rich or famous—you don't know whether they are fucking you for yourself or to get an opinion on this weird lump under the arm, right here, see? Well, actually you do know. Even after all the years of medical school and all the sleepless hours of his internship, he didn't really believe he was a doctor. He felt like a pretender, though he eventually discovered that he felt like less of a pretender on 50 milligrams of Seconal.

The weather, according to the radio, is hot and hotting up. McClarty has the climate control at 68, windows up. High 95 to 98 outside. Which is about as predictable as Stairway to Heaven on Rock 101, the station that plays all Stairway, only Stairway, 24 hours a day. A song that one of the junkies in rehab insisted was about dope, but everything is about dope to a junkie in rehab. After a lifetime in Chicago, he likes the hot summers and the temperate winters down here. And he likes the American suburban sprawl of franchises and housing developments with an affection all the greater for being self-conscious and haunted by irony. As a bright, fatherless child he had always felt alien and isolated. Later, as a doctor, he felt even further removed from the general populace (it's like being a cop), an alienation enhanced when he also became a drug addict and de facto criminal. He wanted to be part of the stream, an unconscious member of the larger community, but all the morphine in the pharmacy failed to produce the desired result. When he had first come out of rehab, after years of escalating numbness, the sight of a Burger King or a familiar television show could bring him to tears. The "please don't squeeze the Charmin" ad had seemed like a cheerful touchstone of the communal here and now, had made him feel, for the first time, like a real American.

He turns into the drive marked mid-state correction facility. It's not an accident that you can't see the facility from the road. There are homes worth half a million dollars within a quarter mile of this place. Construction was discreet. The state was happy to skip the expense of a new prison and board its high-security criminals with the corporation that employs Dr. Kevin McClarty. He drives up the long drive into the bottomland, past the long east flank of the prison with its chain-link fence and triple coils of concertina wire.

Dr. McClarty signs in. These guards, too, greet him by name and title, from behind bulletproof plexi. Guards are at both ends of his short commute. Through the plexi he sees the blownup photo of a Nike Air sneaker that a visitor just happened to be wearing when he hit the metal detector, with the sole sliced open to show a .25-caliber Beretta nesting snug as a fetus in the exposed cavity. Hey, it must have come from the factory that way, man, like those screws and syringes and shit that got inside Pepsi cans. I ain't never seen that piece before. What is that shit, a .25? I wouldn't be caught dead with no fucking .25, man. You can't stop a roach with that fucking popgun.

McClarty is buzzed inside the first door, and then, after it closes behind (continued on page 144)Con Doctor(continued from page 118) him, through the second. As soon as he is inside, he can sense it, the malevolent funk of die prison air, the dread ambience of the dream. The varnished concrete floor of the long white hall is as shiny as ice.

Emma, the fat nurse, buzzes him into the medical ward. She wears a button that announces Jesus' imminent arrival.

"How many signed up today?" he asks, deflecting her attention to terrestrial matters.

"Twelve so far."

McClarty retreats to his office, where Donny, the head nurse, is talking on the phone. "I surely do appreciate that. Thank you kindly." Donny's perennially sunny manner stands out even in this region of pandemic cheerfulness. He says good morning with the accent on the first syllable, then runs down coming attractions. "A kid beat up in D last night. He's waiting. And you know Peters from K block, the diabetic who's been bitching about die kitchen food? Saying the food's running up his blood sugar? Well, this morning they searched his cell and found three bags of cookies, a Goo Goo Cluster and two Moon Pies under the bed. I think maybe we should tell the commissary to stop selling him that junk. Yesterday, his blood sugar was 400."

McClarty tells Donny that they can't tell the commissary any such thing. That would be a restriction of Peters' liberty, cruel and unusual punishment. He'd fill out a complaint and then they'd spend four hours in a hearing in court downtown where the judge would eventually deliver a lecture, thirdhand Rousseau, on the natural rights of man.

Then there's Caruthers from G, who had a seizure and claims he needs to up his dose of Klonopin. Ah, yes, we'd all like to up our dose of Klonopin, Mr. Caruthers. File the edges right off our day. In McClarty's own case from 0 mg a day to about 50 mgs, with a little Demerol and maybe a Dilaudid thrown into the mix just to secure the perimeter. No, he mustn't think this way. Like what the priests used to call "impure thoughts," these pharmaceutical fantasies must be stamped out. He should call his sponsor, go to a meeting on the way home.

The first patient, a skinny little white kid McClarty has never examined before, one Cribbs, has a bloody black eye, which, on examination, proves to be an orbital fracture. His eye socket has been smashed in. The swollen face is familiar; he saw it last night in his sleep. "Lock-and-sock?" asks McClarty. The kid nods and then winces at the pain. Obviously new, he doesn't even know the code yet—not to tell nobody nothing.

"They just come in the middle of the night, maybe five of them, and started whaling on me. I was just lying there minding my own business." He is a sniveler, a skinny chicken, an obvious target. Now, away from his peers and tormentors, he seems ready to cry. But he suddenly wipes his nose and grins, and shows McClarty the bloody teeth marks on his arm. "One of the sons of bitches bit me," he says, looking incongruously pleased and proud of his wound.

"You enjoyed that part, did you, Mr. Cribbs?" Then, suddenly, McClarty guesses.

"That'll fix his fucking wagon," says Cribbs, smiling hideously, pink gums showing above his twisted yellow teeth. "I got something he don't want. I got the HIV." For the moment he is delighted at the prospect of sharing the disease with his enemy. After McClarty cleans up the eye, he writes up a hospital transfer and orders a blood test.

"They won't be messing with me no more," he says in parting. In fact, in McClarty's experience, there are two approaches to AIDS patients among the inmate population. Many are indeed given a wide berth. But sometimes they are killed, quickly and efficiently and without malice, in their sleep.

Next, a surly, muscled black inmate with a broken hand. Mr. Brown claims to have smashed into the wall of the recreation yard accidentally. "Yeah, I was playing handball, you know?" Amazing how many guys hurt themselves in the yard. Brown doesn't even try to make this story sound convincing; rather, he turns up his lip and fixes McClarty with a look that dares him to doubt it. So far, in the year that he has worked here, McClarty has not been attacked by an inmate except in his dreams. He has been threatened by several, most recently by Lesko. Big pear-shaped redneck. Aggravated assault—Lesko took a knife to a bartender who told him it was closing time. The bartender was stabbed 15 times before the bouncer hit Lesko with a bat. Lesko has threatened to kill McClarty, but fortunately not in front of any of the other prisoners, which lessens the possibility that he will feel his honor, as well as his buzz, is at stake. Still, McClarty makes a note to check up on Lesko; he'll ask Santiago, the guard over on D, to get a reading on his general mood and comportment.

McClarty makes his first official telephone call of the day to a pompous ass of a psychopharmacologist to get an opinion on Caruthers' medication. Not that McClarty doesn't have an opinion himself, but he is required to consult a so-called expert. McClarty thinks diazepam would do the trick, stave off the seizures just as effectively and more cheaply—which is after all what his employers are most concerned about—than the Klonopin. What Caruthers is concerned about, quite independently of his seizures, is catching that Klonopin buzz. Dr. Withers, who has already talked with Caruthers' lawyer, keeps McClarty on hold for ten minutes and then condescendingly explains to him the purpose and methodology of double-blind studies, until finally McClarty is forced to remind the good doctor that he did himself attend medical school. In fact, he graduated second in his class at die University of Chicago. Inevitably, they assume that a prison doctor is an idiot and a quack. In the old days, McClarty would have reached through the phone and ripped this hick doctor's eyeballs out of his skull, asked him how he liked that for a double-blind study, but now he is happy to hide out in his window-less office behind the three-foot-thick walls of the prison and let somebody else find the fucking cure for cancer. "Thank you very much, doctor," McClarty says finally, cutting the old geek off in midsentence.

Emma announces the next patient, Peters, the Moon Pie-loving diabetic. "Judgment is at hand," she tells Peters, as he waddles into the examining room. "We must all prepare our souls for the Savior." She looks over at McClarty.

McClarty nods. "Don't worry, Emma, Terri is buying a Stair Master to heaven."

Emma slams the door in parting. Peters is bouncing on the examining table. He is a fat man, of jelly-like consistency. Everything about him is soft and slovenly except his eyes, which are hard and sharp, the eyes of a scavenger ever alert to snatch a scrap from beneath the feet of the predators. The eyes of a snitch. McClarty examines his folder for a moment.

"Well, Mr. Peters.

(continued on page 198)Con Doctor(continued from page 144)

"Hey, Doc."

"Any ideas why your blood sugar is up to 400?"

"It's the diabetes, Doc."

"I guess it wouldn't have anything to do with those Moon Pies and Snickers bars that were found in your cell yesterday, would it?"

"I was holding those for a friend, Doc. Honest."

A common refrain here in prison, this is a line McClarty remembers fondly from his drug days. This is what he said to his mother the first time she found pot in the pocket of his jeans. The guys inside have never stopped using this line; the gun in the shoe or the knife or stolen television set always belongs to some other guy. They're just holding it for him. They never ceased to profess amazement that the cops, the judge, the prosecutor didn't believe them, that their own court-appointed lawyers somehow sold them out at the last minute. They are shocked. It's all a big mistake. Honest. Would I lie to you, Doc? They don't belong here in prison, and they are eager to tell you why. With McClarty it's just the opposite. He knows he belongs in here. He dreams about it. It is more real to him than his other life, than Terri's breasts, than the ailing lawn outside these walls. But somehow, inexplicably, they let him walk out the door at the end of his shift every day. And back at Live Oaks, the guards wave him in past the booth into the walls of the residential oasis as if he were really an upstanding citizen. Of course, technically he is not a criminal. The hospital did not bring charges, in return for his agreement to resign and go into treatment. On the other hand, the hospital did not know, nobody knew, that it was he, McClarty, who, in exchange for a small service, shot nurse Tina DeVane full of the Demerol she craved so very dearly less than an hour before she drove her car into the abutment of a bridge.

•

Terri calls just before lunch to tell him that the caretaker thinks the brown spots in the lawn are from the cats peeing on it—"I told him that was ridiculous, they're not peeing any more or less than they have for the past two years—oh, wait, gotta go. Kiss, kiss. Don't forget about the Clausens, at seven. Don't worry, they're friends of Bill." She hangs up before McClarty can tell her he might stop off at the meeting at Unity Baptist on the way home.

•

Toward the end of the day McClarty goes over to Block D to check the progress of several minor complaints. He is buzzed into the block by Santiago, the guard on duty. "Hey, Doc, what chew tink about Aikman's straining his ankle?" he asks. "Your Cowboys, they gonna be hurtin' till he come back." Santiago labors cheerfully under the impression that McClarty is a big Dallas Cowboys fen, a notion that apparently developed after the doctor mumbled, in response to a query, that he really didn't pay much attention to the Oilers. McClarty has never followed sports, doesn't know Cowboys from Indians, but he is happy to play along, delighted to find himself at this relatively late date in life assigned to a team, especially after he heard the Cowboys referred to on television as "America's team." Like eating at McDonald's, it makes him feel as if he were a genuine citizen of the republic.

"Hey, Doc—that sprain? That, like, a serious thing?"

"Could be," McClarty suggested, finally able to offer a genuine opinion on his team. "A sprain could put him out for weeks."

Santiago is jovial and relaxed, though he is the only guard on duty in a cell block of 24 violent criminals, most of whom are on the block this moment, lounging around the television or conspiring in small knots. If they wanted to, they could overpower him in a minute; it is only the crude knowledge of greater force outside the door of the block that keeps them from doing so. McClarty himself has almost learned to suppress the fear, to dial down the buzz and crackle of malevolence and violence that is the permanent atmospheric of the wards, as palpable as the falling pressure and static electricity before a storm. He is not alarmed when a cluster of inmates moves toward him, Greco and Smith-field and two others whose names he forgets. They all have their ailments and their questions, and they all trot over to him like horses across a field to a swinging bucket of grain.

"Hey, Doc!" they call out from all sides. Once again, he feels the rush that all doctors know, the power of the healer, a little touch of the old godlike sense of commanding the forces of life and death. It was the best buzz, but he could never quite believe it, or feel like he deserved it, and now he is too chastened to allow himself to revel in the feeling. But he can still warm himself, briefly, in the glow of this tribal admiration, even in this harsh and straitened place. And for a moment he forgets what he has learned at such expense, in so many airless, smoky church basements—that he is actually powerless, that his paltry healing skills, like his sobriety, are on loan from a higher power, just as he forgets the caution he has learned from the guards and from experience behind these walls, and he does not see Lesko until it is too late, fat Lesko who is feeling even nastier than usual without his Valium, his hand striking out from the knot of inmates like the head of a cobra, projecting a deadly thin silvery tongue. McClarty feels the thud against his chest, the blunt impact that he doesn't immediately identify as sharp-instrument trauma. And when he sees the knife, he reflects that it's a damn good thing he is not Terri, or his left breast implant would be punctured. As he falls into Lesko's arms, he realizes, with a sense of recognition bordering on relief, that he is back in the dream. They've come for him at last.

•

Looking up from the inmate roster at that moment, Santiago is puzzled by this strange sort of embrace— and by the expression on McClarty's face as he turns toward the guard booth, toward Santiago. "He was smiling," Santiago would say afterward, "like he just heard a good one and wanted to tell you, you know, or like he was saying, Hey, check out my bro Lesko here." Santiago told the same thing to his boss, to the board of inquiry, to the grand jury and to the prosecutor. And he would always tell the story to the new guards who trained under him. It never ceased to amaze him—that smile. And after a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, Santiago would always mention that the Doc was a big Cowboys fan.

McClarty did attend med school. Inevitably, they assume that a prison doctor is an idiot and a quack.

They could overpower him in a minute. Only the knowledge of greater force keeps them from doing so.