Queenie

Here we go again with the monthly Short Story For Shut-Ins, a small-town tale this time. Hope you enjoy.

QUEENIE

By Gerald DiPego

Let’s see…I’m Dr. Ben Vogel, general practitioner, retired, 74 years old. It’s 1983…May, and I’m sitting on a log here in ‘The World.’ It’s what I call the acre behind our home. I thought someday I’d build a larger house here, but as I explored this place, I found that I didn’t want to touch it, just be in it, visit each season that came to it, and here in Illinois we get our seasons in bold face type: hot as hell, cold as hell, a spring that causes you to keep smiling on and on like a fool, and a fall that makes you pull in a breath in wonder.

The acre is full of greenery today and wild flowers, a whole orchestra of birds, and even a small stream that sounds like a traveling conversation, and the trees: fine, tall elms and some willows by the water, a dozen handsome birches, and four massive oaks, which may be the oldest living things in Indian Lake. I’m not in ‘The World’ alone today. My wife Queenie is walking about here somewhere. She loves it as much as I do, but has her own name for it: Eden.

Thinking about her, I search around, and I see movement near one of the silvery birches and wonder and study and then begin to laugh. She is sort-of peeking out at me, but not with her face. She has raised her skirt and is showing me a bare leg, moving it slowly as I laugh, the kind of hard laugh that hurts your chest but you don’t care. She’s almost as old as I am, but it’s a fine leg, and now she gives me her face beside the trunk, gives me a wink and the stunning gift of her smile.

But the story I want to write down today took place long before the Queenie era of my life, starting, I suppose when I left my pre-med studies and signed up for the Korean War. I can’t give you a solid answer why. It was more than wanting to be tested or have an adventure. I really did want to help and to learn. So, I trained as a medic and shipped out, with my family worried and even angry at my decision. We were not a close-to-the-breast kind of family, and it caused a tear that never truly healed, made worse by my decision later not to open a practice in the Chicago suburbs where we lived, but to go north to the lake towns, the small towns.

Oh, what did I learn in Korea? Well yes, how to function under a massive weight of pressure and work quickly and exactly, but the moments that stuck, and are still so vivid, are the ones where I saw death occur, where I saw that piece of a second when life leaves and a living entity disappears and becomes what’s left behind, like empty clothing. Life, with all its pain and joy and mighty noise, simply winks out, like the last ember in the fireplace.

Well, later, there I was, the new doctor in Indian Lake, the ONLY doctor, people having to go to Libertyville or Grayslake before my coming. There was a town druggist, Renzo Padilla, and he and I became friends. He brought me into his poker group, so I soon had a structure to my life outside of medicine, and I also had a procession of people coming to my office, many in distress, fear, pain, and some who mostly wanted conversation. And several of these knew of some woman I should definitely meet. I wanted to go slowly down that road. A loner can manage that.

There were a few pleasant double dates with Renzo and his wife and a few awkward ones, but nothing lit me up until the Bower family needed me at the McHenry hospital, and there they were, the youngest, Ellie, 23, broken badly in an auto wreck, the mother, who could only weep and smelled of drink, and the older daughter, Ann, 31, who was in control and used to it, and who gave me a stare that had a whole book inside of it with chapters such as ‘I’m in charge here,’ ‘You will not take advantage of my family,’ ‘You will tell us the full truth,’ ‘We’re poor and have no insurance so figure it out,’ ‘Stop looking at me like that.’

I found her striking, and it was hard to turn away. She was a couple of inches taller than me, and I found myself correcting my posture. She had long dark hair, and eyes that made her beautiful. There was so much inside there, so much depth, and no bottom to it. I did my job, and the news was not good. Ellie had been speeding, driving drunk, there was rain on the road, she would never walk again without a couple of canes, there was no spleen and the possibility of blood clots heading for the brain…. I did my best, and in a month and a half Ellie went home. Ellie never said thanks. She was angry to the bone, and when I mentioned that to Ann, she said Ellie had always been angry, taking after the violent father who had left long ago. So, Ann, at age ten, had taken over the family, the mother captured by alcohol, the father never to be seen again. But Ann Bowen did not seem bitter, and, on the rare occasion when she smiled, she was to me fully and perfectly complete. I loved her from the starting gun.

I spoke of her to Renzo, and he gave me little hope. She was on and off an item with a tough guy in town, a man of petty crimes and fist fights. Why are they drawn to the bad guys? I had pondered that in high school. I didn’t think I was bland. Was I? Renzo agreed that I wasn’t, but can you trust your best friend to judge you honestly?

I did some quiet studying of her sometime boyfriend, Chet Landi, a Korean vet like me, even with a couple of medals and maybe what we were calling battle fatigue. With some it was anger, with some, like me, waves of depression. He was out of town I learned, and so I felt emboldened, and I arranged to be walking out of the building where my office was at just the same moment Ann was heading home from the food store where she worked. Oh, Hi. Mind if I walk along with you? How is Ellie doing? I had that ready and it began a conversation.

She was not talkative, but pleasant enough. Ellie was Ellie and not improving or cooperating. I made the transition smoothly, I thought.

“Wonder if you’d like to stop and have a cup of coffee at Sandy’s?”

She looked at me, studying, then staring ahead again as we walked and asking “Why?”

“Why? To get to know each other.”

“To know what?” She was thoughtful, quiet about this as continued on.

I shrugged. “A chance to see inside of you, Ann.”

“Hm,” she said, moving along. “You want to operate?”

I blurted out a laugh, enjoying this surprise, but the best part was the smile she was carrying now, still staring ahead. Then she said, “I’m flattered that you like me, Doctor. I’m not really available.”

“Who says I like you?”

Ah, I saw my first big-time laugh from this lovely woman, like a cold drink on a steamy day. “You’re okay in a pinch,” I said, and her smile stayed, eyes alight. “And my name is Ben.”

“You’re okay, too, Ben, but like I said, I’m… not exactly available.”

“Hmm. Okay. Just friends then, having coffee?”

“No thanks. But thanks.”

And that was that, a small exchange that I replayed for days, probably weeks, and always smiled at the memory.

Ellie died about a month after that. I could have put down what I suspected: overdose and suicide, but just left it to her damaged body and a very real weakened heart. I went to the funeral. The mother was destroyed. Ann was dark and quiet and handling everything. We nodded to each other, didn’t speak. Chet Landi was there. When they left the cemetery, he was holding her hand. I didn’t like it, but I DID want her to be happy, even with him.

Then I got the call one afternoon from one of my poker friends, a cop. I was needed. Chet Landi, armed with a pistol, had robbed a local bar and gone on the run. Then he was seen leaving town with Ann Bowen. She was driving. But there was more. The cop was calling me because the couple had stopped at the house of Landi’s friend, and a shot had been fired. The police were now surrounding the place. Maybe I could help whoever had been shot. I got there before the ambulance, and I offered to go to the front door. The chief didn’t want to be responsible. I was heading for that door anyway, when it opened. Ann came out. No gun in sight. She looked at me like death, like an ending of everything. “I had to shoot him,” she said. “See if he’s dead.” And she walked toward the police chief while I hurried inside. Two men on the floor. One had taken a beating. The other was Chet Landi. I rushed to him, acting like a medic one more time, and he looked at me, and I saw it again, I saw the life in his look. I saw it go away.

She got three years for aiding and abetting because when he came to her after the robbery, she agreed to drive him to his friend’s home where he could get a car and the cash his friend owed him. He had gotten so little money from the bar.

The friend, Danny Poe, said he had sold the car and had no money to give him, so Landry had begun to beat him. Danny testified that Ann tried to stop Chet, but the man was a maniac. Ann grabbed the gun from Chet’s belt and turned it on him to stop him, and he only laughed and went on with the beating, and so she shot him. Ann Bowen saved his life, said Danny Poe.

No one ever visited her in prison except me, once every few months. Her mother could not take care of herself and was taken to Elgin State Hospital, a warehouse of the poor and mentally troubled from where, I was sure, she would never leave. I always asked Ann if she needed anything and she would always say no for the first year, and after that asked for cigarettes that she could trade with the guards and other prisoners for things she needed. During the second year she began to help in the prison infirmary and had many questions for me and this led to a correspondence that lasted the rest of her term, and gave me an idea that you’re probably already guessing.

She had already written to the people at the food store, wondering about her old job, but they had told her it wouldn’t be possible because she wasn’t wanted back in the town. They said it just like that, with no apology. I had a job for her, I said. I could use the help in my office, a kind of nursing aide that could take temperatures and blood pressure so that my time could be spent doctoring. I said, “It could be a life for you, Ann.” But she said, “No. They’ll hate me, and they’ll turn on you…I won’t let that happen. I’ll go away.”

But she had nowhere to go, and she finally said she would try it. Of course, she was nervous, even scared, and I had never seen her scared before. She did not show her fear to the people who came into the office and stared or gave her angry looks on the street. She looked right at them and went on with her life. But I could see the pain inside, and she had had so damn much pain. There were people who were friendly enough, and there were people who told her outright to get out of town. There were patients who told me they wouldn’t come to my office as long as she was there, and others who were glad I had given her a chance. All the while we were quietly moving along, often having a meal at the end of the day, and then I’d drive her to her room in a motel outside of town and pick her up in the morning.

There were two men and a woman waiting outside my office one morning when we arrived to open up. They said they wanted to talk to me. I asked Ann to go upstairs and get the office ready. When she was gone, they told me all the reasons why Ann Bowen should be made to leave town. She was bad like all the Bowens, and if I kept employing her, they would force me out, and they were already getting the signatures to do it. I told them that she was a good person and I would stand by her. That’s when one of the men, Frank Pulaski, the chairman of the Indian Lake Mens Club and a sometime member of my poker group, said to me, his jaw quivering with anger, “Ben, she may be a good screw for you, but this town will NOT have her kind live here.”

I was carrying my doctor bag. I put it down and then punched Frank Pulaski in the face. My fist hit his mouth and he went down. He sat up, but couldn’t stand. The others were statues with open mouths. “Help me,” I said to them, and I stood the injured man, and they helped me get him to my office where I put two stitches in his torn lip.

I spent six hours in a cell and was fined four hundred dollars. When I was free it was already twilight, and I went to the office and found it dark and locked. I drove to the motel and found Ann outside the office with a suitcase, waiting for the bus. I went to her and we stared a while.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I left you a note in the office. Please leave me alone now, Ben. Please.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone, Ann. I want to be with you. I want to marry you. I want a life with you. I’d say that I worship you, but that would probably scare you. Please stay with me.”

She stared a long time, and while she stared, the bus pulled up. She started to walk toward it. She was taking my heart with her. I could feel the empty place in my body. She stopped and turned her head, still leaning toward the door of that bus, and she said, “Worship?”

“Yes,” I said. “Worship… like a goddess, like a queen.” She smiled then. I’ve called her Queenie ever since.

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