Michael Palmer - Side Effects

"Which is it, man or woman?"

"Which is what, darling'?"

"God! Daddy, you're not even listening to me at all." She was seven years old with sorrel hair pulled back in two ponytails and a China doll face that was, at that moment, trying to pout. Paquette swung into a space in front of Darlington Army/Navy and stopped. Never totally calm, he was, he knew, unusually tense and distracted this morning. Still, it was Second Thursday and that gave him the right to be inattentive or cross, as he had been earlier with his wife. He turned to his daughter.

She had mastered the expression she wanted and now sat pressed against the car door displaying it, her arms folded tightly across her chest. In that instant, Paquette knew that she was the most beautiful child on earth. He reached across and took her in his arms. The girl stiffened momentarily, then relaxed and returned the embrace. "I'm sorry, sugar,"

Paquette said. "I wasn't listening. I'm sorry and I love you and I think God is a woman if you're a woman and a man to someone who's a man and probably a puppy dog to the puppy dogs."

"I love you too, Daddy. And I still don't know why I should have to pray to Our Father when God might be Our Mother."

"You know, you're right. I think that from now on we should say… Our Buddy who art in Heaven."

"Oh, Daddy."

Paquette checked the time. "Listen, sugar, my meeting is in half an hour. I've got to get going. You be brave, now."

She flashed a heart-melting smile. "I don't have to be brave, Daddy.

It's only a cleaning."

"Well then, you be… clean. Mommy will be by in just a little while.

You wait if she's not here by the time you're done." He watched as she ran up the stairs next to the Army/Navy and waited until she waved to him from behind the picture window painted Dr. Richard Philips, DDS.

Then he eased the Mercedes away from the curb, and headed toward the south end of town and his eleven o'clock Second Thursday meeting with Cyrus Redding, president and chairman of the board of perhaps the largest pharmaceutical house in the world. The. meeting would start at exactly eleven and end at precisely ten minutes to noon. For seven years, as long as Paquette had been with the company, it had been like that, and like that it would remain as long as Cyrus Redding was alive and in charge. Nine o'clock, labor relations, ten o'clock, public relations, eleven, product safety, an hour and ten minutes for lunch, then research and development, sales and production, and finally from three to three-fifty, legislative liaison, department heads meeting with Cyrus Redding, one on one, the second Thursday of each month. The times and the order of Second Thursday were immutable. Vacations were to be worked around the day, illnesses to be treated and tolerated unless hospitalization was necessary. Even then, on more than one occasion, Redding had moved the meeting to a hospital room. Second Thursday, raises, new projects, criticisms, termination-all, whenever possible, on that day. The factory covered most of a thirty-acre site bordered to the south and west by pine-covered hills and to the east by Pinkham's Creek. Double fences, nine feet high with barbed wire outcroppings at the top, encircled the entire facility. The inner of the two barriers was electrified — stunning voltage during the day, lethal voltage at night and on weekends. The only approach, paralleling the new railbed from the north, was tree lined and immaculately maintained. Two hundred yards from the outer fence, a V in the roadway directed employees and shippers to the right and all others to the left. A rainbow

sign, spanning the approach at that point announced, REDDING PHARMACEUTICALS, INCORPORATED DARLINGTON, KENTUCKY 1899

"The Most Good for the Most People at the Least Cost" Paquette bore to the right beneath the sign and stopped by a brightly painted guardhouse, the first of a series of security measures. He found himself wondering, as he did on almost every Second Thursday, if knowing what he knew now, he would have left his university research position in Connecticut to become director of product safety. The question was a purely hypothe ical one. He had taken the job. He had agreed to play Cyrus Redding's game by Cyrus Redding's rules. Now, like it or not, he was Cyrus Redding's man. Of course an annual salary that, with benefits, exceeded four hundred thousand dollars went far toward easing pangs of conscience. Suzy was the youngest of three children, all of whom would one day be in college at the same time. He stopped at the final pass gate, handed the trunk key to the guard, and drummed nervously on the wheel while the man completed his inspection. It hardly paid to be late for a Second Thursday appointment. + Over the hundred and eighty years since Gault Darling led a band of renegades, moonshiners, and other social outcasts to a verdant spot in the foothills of the Cumberlands, and then killed two men for the right to have the new town named after himself, Darlington, Kentucky, had undergone any number of near deaths and subsequent resurgences. Disease, soldiers, Cherokees, floods, fires, and even a tornado had at one time or another brought the town to its knees. Always, though, a vestige survived, and always Darlington regrew.

In 1858, the Lexington-Knoxville Railway passed close enough to Darlington to send off a spur, the primary purpose of which was the transport of coal from the rich Juniper mines. By the end of the century, however, output from the Junipers had fallen to a trickle, and the railbed was left to rot. Darlington was once again in danger of becoming a ghost town. Shops closed. The schoolhouse and Baptist church burned down and were not rebuilt. Town government dwindled and then disappeared. In the end, where once there had been well over a thousand, only a handful remained. Fortunately for the town, one of those was Elton Darling, self-proclaimed descendant of Gault. In 1897, Darling engineered a massive hoax utilizing three pouches of low-grade gold ore, two confederates, and a remarkable ability to seem totally inebriated when stone sober. Rumors of the "Darlington Lode" spread quicky through cities from Chicago to Atlanta, and Darlington acquired an instant citizenry, many of whom stayed on, either out of love for the beauty of the area or out of lack of resources to move elsewhere. Having single-handedly repopulated his town, Elton Darling set about giving it an industry, making use of the area's only readily available resource, the sulfur-rich water of Pinkham's Creek, a tributary of the Cumberland River. In less than a year, with some food coloring smoky-glassed bottles, an attractive label, and an aggressive sales force, the vile water of Pinkham's Creek, uninhabitable by even the hardiest fish, had become Darling's Astounding Rejuvenator and Purgator, an elixir alleged effective against conditions ranging from dropsy to baldness. Over the years before his death in 1939, Elton Darling made such changes in his product as the market and times demanded. He also made a modest fortune.

By the time his son, Tyrone, took control of the family enterprises, the rejuvenator had been replaced by a variety of vitamin and mineral supplements, and Darlington Pharmaceuticals was being traded, though lightly, on the American Stock Exchange. Far from being the visionary and businessman his father was, lyrone Darling spent much of his time, and most of his money, on a string of unsuccessful thoroughbreds and a succession of city women, each of whom was more adept at consuming money than he was at making it. Darling's solution to his diminishing cash reserves was simple, issue more stock and sell off some of his own. In the fall of 1947, at the annual Darlington stockholders meeting, the ax fell. Intermediaries for a man spoken of only as Mr. Redding produced proof of ownership of more than fifty-three percent of Darlington Pharmaceuticals and in a matter of less than a day, took over the company on behalf of Mr. Cyrus Redding of New York, New York. Stripped of influence, as well as of a source of income, Darling tried to negotiate. To the best of anyone's knowledge, he had not succeeded even in meeting with the man who had replaced him when, on the following New Year's Eve, he and a woman named Densmore were shot to death by the woman's husband. Thus it was that the fortunes of Darlington, Kentucky became tied to a reclusive genius named Cyrus Redding and to the pharmaceutical house that now bore his name. In the years to follow, there were a number of minor successes, Terranyd, a concentrated tetracycline, Rebac, an over-the-counter antacid, and several cold preparations.