T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“A shame about Hoch,” O‘Kane said after a while, just to say something.

Mart grunted. Mr. McCormick stared up into the sky.

“I liked him, you know what I mean, Mart? He wasn’t so excitable as Hamilton or Brush, if that’s the word I’m looking for. And Mr. McCormick really came to like him too, didn’t you, Mr. McCormick?”

O‘Kane hadn’t expected a response — he and Mart spent half their lives talking right through their employer and benefactor — but Mr. McCormick surprised him. He shifted his head to get a closer look at O’Kane, his eyes shrinking into focus. “Dr. Hoch?” he echoed, his voice high-pitched and unstable. “Wh-what happened to him?”

“You remember, Mr. McCormick — it was just yesterday, yesterday morning. Dr. Brush gave us the news.”

There was a pause. A reflective look stole over Mr. McCormick’s features. After a while he said, “No, I don’t remember.”

“Sure you do. You were very upset at the time — and I don’t blame you. All of us were upset.”

Dr. Brush had returned from the War a month ago, in August, just in time to take the baton from Hoch, who was fading fast. If anything, the rigors of the Western Front had left the good doctor fatter and heartier than ever, and with a raft of platitudes and a whole shipload of for-the-main-and-simple-reasons he’d explained to Mr. McCormick that Dr. Hoch had passed on early that morning of congestive heart failure — a weakness that ran in his family. But Mr. McCormick shouldn’t feel too badly, he said, because Dr. Hoch was an elderly man who’d lived a full and rich life and made innumerable contributions to the field of psychiatry, including the manuscript of a new book— Benign Stupors— which he’d been able to complete before his heart gave out.

Mr. McCormick was sitting over his breakfast at the time, fastidiously dissecting two fried eggs and a thick pink slab of ham with a soup spoon, the only implement available to him. “How elderly?” he asked without looking up.

“Hm? What?” The question had caught Brush by surprise.

“Dr. Hoch,” Mr. McCormick said in the small probing voice of the rhetorician, “how-how elderly was he?”

Brush produced a stub of cigar from somewhere and jammed it in his mouth. “Hoch?” he repeated. “Oh, I don’t know — in his sixties, anyhow.”

“Fifty-one,” Mr. McCormick corrected, still without looking up. “And do you know how old I am, Dr. Brush?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be forty-five in November. Am I an elderly man too?”

“Why, of course not, Mr. McCormick — Stanley,” Brush boomed, all his flesh in motion as he shimmied round the room on his too-small feet, “you’re a young man still, in the flush of health and vigor, for the main and simple—”

Mr. McCormick had waited until the breakfast dishes had been cleared and he’d got dressed and made his way to the theater building before he gave vent to his feelings on the subject. In a roaring stentorian voice that drowned out the hypnotic tick-tick-tick of Roscoe’s projector and nullified the antics of Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler, he announced: “I don’t want to die!

Brush’s voice leapt out of the darkness: “You’re not going to die, Mr. McCormick.”

“I am!”

There was movement now, O‘Kane and Mart positioning themselves, Brush rising mountainously from his folding seat in a swirl of shadow. Up on the screen, Charlie Chaplin spun round and booted a policeman in the rear, and O’Kane laughed aloud despite himself. “Now, now,” Brush was saying, looming over the slouched form of their employer, “you’re a healthy mean, Mr. McCormick, in the peak of health, and you know it. Why, you’ve got the best of everything here, the most salubrious possible environment—

Mr. McCormick’s voice, pinched thin as wire: “He’s a stinking rotting corpse, with — with things coming out of his eyes, because that‘s — that’s the part they eat first, the eyes, and you know it!”

“I know no such thing, for the main and simple reason that that is just too morbid a thought for me to hold.” Brush was waving his arms now in the flickering light, the lower half of the Little Tramp’s face appearing fitfully on his shoulder as if in some ghostly manifestation. “Think of him in heaven, in the arms of God—”

“God’s a fraud,” Mr. McCormick spat, wrenching his neck angrily round. “And so are you.”

And then there was the inevitable roughhousing, the collapse of the chairs, the curses, shouts and whimpers, the fumbling for the light switch and Dr. Brush’s intimate presentation of his persuasive and salvatory flesh to the recumbent form of their employer and benefactor.

Understandably, O‘Kane didn’t want to push the subject now — he was burned right down to the wick after that footrace round the property and up that damned hill, and he’d had enough exercise for the day, thank you. “Well, anyway, at least we’ve got Dr. Brush back,” he said, lamely. “And he’s all right. I guess.”

Mr. McCormick didn’t seem to have an opinion on the subject. He just stared up into the sky as if he might find Dr. Hoch up there somewhere, seated on the edge of a cloud. And Mart — Mart was no help. His arms dangled over the sides of the bench and his breathing slowed till he began to snore. O‘Kane lay there a while, hands cradling his head, enjoying the silence and the glory of the day, until he began thinking about the one thing that sustained him lately — booze, or more specifically, the pint bottle of bourbon whiskey he’d sequestered in the reservoir of Mr. McCormick’s toilet. It was past noon and there was no reason they should be lying in the grass when they could be inside making themselves presentable for lunch — and other activities. He saw himself slipping into the bathroom as Mr. McCormick spooned up his meat loaf and gravy, saw the bottle all striped with water and felt the cork twist out of the neck of it and the swallowing reflex of his throat that was the nearest thing he had to an orgasm lately, since he’d sworn off women, anyway. “Well, and so,” he said with as much cheer as he could muster as he pushed his weary parched self up off the grass, “what do you say, gentlemen — time for lunch?”

And that would have been all right, because Mart woke with a start and Mr. McCormick found his legs and began mechanically brushing off his jacket preparatory to slipping it back on — if it weren’t for the gopher, that is. O‘Kane didn’t even know what it was at first. A little thing, like a rat, only pale and yellowish almost to the color of a butter-nut squash, and it suddenly popped its head out of a hole in the ground and tore twice round the patch of lawn before vanishing down a second hole like water down a drain. Mr. McCormick was dumbstruck. At first. And then he got excited. “Did you see that?” he said. “Did you? Did you see it?” And by now he was down on his hands and knees, probing into the thing’s lair with his right hand and forcing his arm in up to the elbow. “What is it?” he kept saying.

“Beats me,” O‘Kane said with a shrug. “A weasel?”

Mart came over and stood there looking at the hole and Mr. McCormick ruining his cuffs and the sleeve of his jacket. “That’s no weasel,” he said. “Are you nuts or something? A weasel’s long and skinny. ”

“So what is it then?” O‘Kane demanded. He didn’t really give a good goddamn one way or the other, but he hated for Mart to show him up.

Mart scratched his head. “A groundhog,” he said, but he didn’t sound too sure of himself.

By this point, Mr. McCormick had got his whole arm in the burrow, right up to his shoulder and he was scooping out dirt with his bare hand. “It’s in there, I know it is,” he said, and then he got to his feet and collapsed that portion of the burrow he’d already excavated, falling once again to his knees and thrusting his arm into the new opening. He looked up, perplexed. “It‘s — It’s going for the daphnes,” he said.