Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“Thunderation, somebody’s got to. Besides,” the old doctor chuckled, “because I do, I can get away with just about anything I want around this neighborhood. You notice how I made you take off your shirt soon as you came in here?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I do that with all of them. Make ’em strip so I can check their heart and lungs. For decency’s sake, if a lady or one of these young gals has on a brassiere, I don’t make her take it off. But lots of these young gals don’t wear them now—you know that?”

“Yes,” Barnes said. “I’ve noticed that myself.”

“And when they do, why frequently they have these real lacy, frilly things. I like them damn near as well. You’re too young to recall what it was like in my day, Mr. Barnes. But back when I was a boy, if I saw down the front of a good-looking gal, I’d really seen something. Why, I thought about something like that for a month afterward. Why when we got the Monkey Ward catalog, my ma used to tear out the pages with the ladies’ unmentionables to keep my brothers and me from lookin’ at ’em.”

Barnes grinned. “You’re not really that old, Doctor. You know, you remind me a lot of Mr. Free.”

“Well, I ought to.” The old doctor began to pump the blood-pressure cuff. “He was my son, you know.” Barnes stared at him, and he chuckled again. “Not my actual son—Tommy died a long while ago, and I think Ben was really a few years older than I am. But we used to pretend that way, and we had a lot of fun. I was the dad because of my mustache. Ben shaved his face all over back then. He’s got more hair on his face than I do now.”

Barnes nodded.

“That’s right, you saw him many a time.” The old doctor pressed his stethoscope to the inside of Barnes’s elbow and cocked his head. The air escaping from the cuff made a faint hiss, the sigh of a sleepy serpent. “Started when we were coming home on the bus one time. I’d wrenched my knee a little, and Ben gave me a hand up the steps—your blood pressure’s okay, Mr. Barnes. Good, in fact, for a man like you, because you’re lean. Get plenty of exercise and stay away from rich food, anything sweet or greasy. Never salt a thing.”

“I won’t,” Barnes said. “Thanks for the tip. I hope your knee’s better now.”

“Knee? Oh, sure, the story. Well, sir, Ben helped me up, and then there wasn’t two seats together, so I took the one up front and Ben sat about three rows back, next to a lady about my age.

“And when we were both settled down, she said something like, ‘Will your friend be all right?’ and Ben said something like, ‘Doc’ll be okay.’ Only the lady was a mite deef, and she thought he said Dad’ll be okay. So she said, ‘Oh, is he your father? Such a distinguished looking man!’ Well, Ben’s always a great kidder—you could say just about anything to him and he’d go along with it. So he told her he was sixty-nine and I was ninety-one, and how we’d lived together all our lives, and so on so forth. From then on it’s been a joke we pick up every once in a while.”

“You haven’t really known Mr. Free all your life?” Barnes asked.

“No, of course not. Only since he moved in across the street.”

“How long has that been, Dr. Makee?”

“Just a few years.”

“Dr. Makee, I know you think I’m prying into something that’s really none of my business, but Mr. Free‘s—your friend Ben’s—missing, and all of us who lived there with him are concerned about him. We’re afraid something may have happened to him, and until we find out nothing has, we’re going to keep looking.”

The old doctor nodded, his face expressionless. “Have you called the police?”

“No,” Barnes said. “Not yet.”

“That’s what most people would do, Mr. Barnes.”

“We’re not …” Barnes hesitated.

“Not what?”

“Not the sort of people the police pay much attention to, Doctor. A man in your position—you’re a physician, you own this house, you have a certain status in the community.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”

“I think—Dr. Makee, I used to be a regional sales manager for the Continental Crusher Division of Yevco Incorporated. I had a house and a wife and kid. Two cars, a gold American Express Card, all that stuff.”

The old doctor nodded. “What happened?”

“A lot of things. The point I want to make is that when I lost all that, I lost it so slowly I hardly noticed it happening. The wife and the kid and the house and one car first. That was all in one lump.”

“I see.”

“Then my job. After that I went through five jobs in a little over a year. Each of them looked nearly as good as the last one—do you know what I mean? I know you’re thinking it was my own fault, but not all of it was. Like, once I was sales manager for a small company. They got bought up by a big one, and I was out. They said I could stay around as a sales trainee if I wanted, and I told them to stuff it. Today I’d jump at that.”

The old doctor nodded again.

“I’m getting way off my point. What I wanted to say was that one day I was making a call at a liquor store. The man who owned it was out front by the register, and he didn’t want any. You know how they do, ‘I ain’t got time, come back next month,’ all that bullshit.”

“I can imagine.”

“While I was standing there trying to tell him about the products I represented, a cop came in. The owner looked at him and said, ‘Throw this guy out.’ I suppose the cop got a fifth of cheap Scotch from him at Christmas; they usually do. Anyway, he grabbed me.”

Dr. Makee chuckled. “The bum’s rush, that’s what we used to call it.”

“They still call it that. It’s funny, until you realize you’re the bum. Anyway, the cop did it. He tossed me out so I couldn’t get my feet under me, and I landed on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. When he threw my sample case after me, it hit so the latch came open. All my samples were scattered on that sidewalk. Some of them got stepped on, and some of them got lost; I suppose people picked them up and carried them home.”

“I can understand how that must have hurt you, Mr. Barnes,” Dr. Makee said softly.

“In a way, he’d done me a favor, because that was when I knew where I was. That’s about where all of us who lived with Mr. Free are. You wanted to know why we didn’t call the police.”

“You’ll have to excuse an old man, Mr. Barnes. We get set in our ways, and I suppose I was thinking more about how the police used to be than how they are now. Ben would have called them himself, that’s what I was thinking; but he was old like me. Ben and I, we sort of lived in the past, I suppose. It was hard for us to keep in mind how much the world’s changed. You’re too young to understand it, maybe. Crystals in the brain’s what some of them think it is. Did you know that, Mr. Barnes? Hirano bodies. The brain’s turning to glass, or something like it. Well, folks said the both of us were cracked a long time ago.”

Barnes laughed dutifully.

“For you young people, it’s all the same. But people my age, or Ben’s age, we have to wonder what kind of glass it is. For some a shot glass, I suppose. One of those funny mirrors for Ben, I think, and if Trudie were still with me, hers might be a pretty cut-glass vase. I don’t know.”

“Speaking of brains, Doctor, you said once that a concussion was a brain bruise. Do you remember that?”

The old doctor shrugged. “I’ve said that maybe a thousand times, Mr. Barnes.”

“This was just yesterday, when you bandaged Sergeant Proudy at Mr. Free’s.”

“Oh, him.” He nodded.

“Right. I want to ask you more about Mr. Free, if you don’t mind. But first a couple of questions about Sergeant Proudy. How did you know to come?”