John Verdon: Let the Devil Sleep

Still standing by the breakfast table, he finished his coffee in two large swallows. Then he carried the mug to the sink and let the hot water run into it. He could hear Madeleine down the hall in the mudroom, cleaning out the cat’s litter box. The cat had recently been added to the household at Madeleine’s initiative. Gurney wondered why. Was it to cheer him up? Engage him in the life of a creature other than himself? If so, it wasn’t working. He had no more interest in the cat than in anything else.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he announced.

He heard Madeleine say something in the mudroom that sounded like “Good.” He wasn’t sure that’s what she said, but he didn’t see any point in asking. He went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water.

A long, steamy shower-the energetic spray pelting his back minute after minute from the base of his neck down to the base of his spine, relaxing muscles, opening capillaries, clearing mind and sinuses-produced in him a feeling of well-being that was both wonderful and fleeting.

By the time he’d dressed again and returned to the French doors, a jangled sense of unease was already beginning to reassert itself. Madeleine was outside now on the bluestone patio. Beyond the patio was the small section of the pasture that had, through two years of frequent mowings, come to resemble a lawn. Clad in a rough barn jacket, orange sweatpants, and green rubber boots, she was working her way along the edge of the flagstones, stamping enthusiastically down on a spade every six inches, creating a clear demarcation, digging out the encroaching roots of the wild grasses. She gave him a look that seemed at first to convey an invitation for him to join in the project, then disappointment at his obvious reluctance to do so.

Irritated, he purposely looked away, his gaze drifting down the hillside to his green tractor parked by the barn.

She followed his line of sight. “I was wondering, could you use the tractor to smooth out the ruts?”

“Ruts?”

“Where we park the cars.”

“Sure…” he said hesitantly. “I guess.”

“It doesn’t have to be done right this minute.”

“Hmm.” All traces of equanimity from his shower were now gone, as his train of thought shifted to the peculiar tractor problem he’d discovered a month ago and had largely put out of his mind-except for those paranoid moments when it drove him crazy.

Madeleine appeared to be studying him. She smiled, put down her spade, and walked around to the side door, evidently so she could take off her boots in the mudroom before coming into the kitchen.

He took a deep breath and stared at the tractor, wondering for the twentieth time about the mysteriously jammed brake. As if acting in malignant harmony, a dark cloud slowly obliterated the sun. Spring, it seemed, had come and gone.

The Gurney property was situated on the saddle of a ridge at the end of a rural road outside the Catskill village of Walnut Crossing. The old farmhouse was set on the gentle southern slope of the saddle. An overgrown pasture separated it from a large red barn and a deep pond ringed by cattails and willows, backed by a beech, maple, and black-cherry forest. To the north a second pasture rose along the ridgeline toward a pine forest and a string of small abandoned bluestone quarries that looked out over the next valley.

The weather had gone through the kind of dramatic about-face that was far more common in the Catskill Mountains than in New York City, where Dave and Madeleine had come from. The sky had become a featureless slaty blanket drawn over the hills. The temperature seemed to have dropped at least ten degrees in ten minutes.

A superfine sleet was beginning to fall. Gurney closed the French doors. As he pulled them tight to secure the latches, he felt a piercing pain in the right side of his stomach. A moment later another followed. This was something he was used to, nothing that three ibuprofens couldn’t suppress. He headed for the bathroom medicine cabinet, thinking that the worst part of it wasn’t the physical discomfort, the worst part was the feeling of vulnerability, the realization that the only reason he was alive was that he’d been lucky.

Luck was not a concept he liked. It seemed to him to be the fool’s substitute for competence. Random chance had saved his life, but random chance was not a trustworthy ally. He knew younger men who believed in good luck, relied on good luck, thought it was something they owned. But at the age of forty-eight, Gurney knew damn well that luck is only luck, and the invisible hand that flips the coin is as cold as a corpse.

The pain in his side also reminded him that he’d been meaning to cancel his upcoming appointment with his neurologist in Binghamton. He’d had four appointments with the man in less than four months, and they seemed increasingly pointless, unless the only point was to send Gurney’s insurance company another bill.

He kept that phone number with his other medical numbers in his den desk. Instead of continuing into the bathroom for the ibuprofen, he went into the den to make the call. As he was entering the number, he was picturing the doctor: a preoccupied man in his late thirties, with wavy black hair already receding, small eyes, girlish mouth, weak chin, silky hands, manicured fingernails, expensive loafers, dismissive manner, and no visible interest in anything that Gurney thought or felt. The three women who inhabited his sleek, contemporary reception area seemed perpetually confused and irritated by the doctor, by his patients, and by the data on their computer screens.

The phone was answered on the fourth ring with an impatience verging on contempt. “Dr. Huffbarger’s office.”

“This is David Gurney, I have an upcoming appointment that I’d-”

The sharp voice cut him off. “Hold on, please.”

In the background he could hear a raised male voice that he thought for a moment belonged to an angry patient reeling off a long, urgent complaint-until a second voice asked a question and a third voice joined the fray in a similar tone of loud, fast-talking indignation-and Gurney realized that what he was hearing was the cable news channel that made sitting in Huffbarger’s waiting room insufferable.

“Hello?” said Gurney with a definite edge. “Anybody there? Hello? ”

“Just a minute, please.”

The voices that he found so abrasively empty-headed continued in the background. He was about to hang up when the receptionist’s voice returned.

“Dr. Huffbarger’s office, can I help you?”

“Yes. This is David Gurney. I have an appointment I want to cancel.”

“The date?”

“A week from today at eleven-forty A.M.”

“Spell your name, please.”

He was about to question how many people had appointments on that same day at 11:40, but he spelled his name instead.

“And when do you wish to reschedule it?”

“I don’t. I’m just canceling it.”

“You’ll need to reschedule it.”

“What?”

“I can reschedule Dr. Huffbarger’s appointments, not cancel them.”

“But the fact is-”

She interrupted, sounding exasperated. “An existing appointment can’t be removed from the system without inserting a revised date. That’s the doctor’s policy.”

Gurney could feel his lips tightening with anger, way too much anger. “I don’t really care much about his system or his policy,” he said slowly, stiffly. “Consider my appointment canceled.”

“There will be a missed-appointment charge.”

“No there won’t. And if Huffbarger has a problem with that, tell him to call me.” He hung up, tense, feeling a twinge of chagrin at his childish twisting of the neurologist’s name.