Doc McKinney
by Clint McCown
(from the novel, Haints)
Even after it became clear that his office wasn’t about to collapse into rubble, Dr. Wallace McKinney was slow to crawl out from under his desk. He’d taken cover when the storm had first begun to shake the small brick building where he’d practiced medicine for the past twenty-two years, and to his surprise, he found that he liked the cool, dark safety of the desk’s cubbyhole. The smell of the varnished mahogany was a pleasant relief from the stringent odor of alcohol that usually dominated the room, and even the polished feel of the wood against his cheek was somehow comforting. But what appealed to him most was the sheer novelty of it, of hiding under furniture in the middle of the day. He’d never been beneath his desk before, except to retrieve a pencil or a paper clip. Lately, he’d begun to feel stale—that every examination, every diagnosis, every course of treatment was a tedious reenactment of work he’d already done. Not déjà vu—at least that would have been interesting. This was more a feeling of numbness—a weary disinterest in the drab routine of his life. Every meal, every conversation, every thought in his head seemed a bland repetition brought forward from the day before, or the day before that. Against such stagnation, even the underside of his desk was a welcome change.
He uncurled himself carefully and eased out into the light, which was far brighter than it had been just minutes earlier. All six panes of his office window were broken and his wooden blinds, hopelessly tangled and twisted, stretched along the ox-blood cushions of his tufted leather sofa. The sky had cleared almost as soon as the tornado had passed, and now a cheerful sun shone down on whatever damage and clutter had been left behind. The deflated remains of a child’s blue wading pool lay draped across the window sill. One end of his red Persian rug was soaked from the driven rain, while papers, broken glass, and even small clumps of municipal shrubbery—boxwoods planted only recently by the Rotary Club around the town square—lay strewn about the room. He had covered his face even before the window had exploded, so he’d witnessed none of what had happened. But the sheer cataclysmic sound of it, together with the knowledge that danger—real, honest-to-God danger—had barged into his placid world, had triggered his excitement in a way he hadn’t felt in years, maybe not since the early days with Ellen, when love—or at least desire—had sometimes led him to ridiculous or terrible extremes. But this was different even from that.
He opened the door to his waiting room to check on Mildred. He knew there were no patients to be concerned about. His practice had dwindled over the past couple of years—many of his older patients were dying off and the younger crowd often opted to take their coughs and rashes straight to the new hospital on the west side of town. He’d begun to cut back on his work schedule as a result, and now he no longer saw patients on Fridays at all. Instead, he used the time to read or catch up on his paperwork. For Mildred it was inventory day, and she worked at her desk by the front window cataloguing their ample supply of tongue depressors and hypodermics.
The window was shattered in here, too, and the room was awash in soggy, wind-torn back issues of Life, and Look, and Reader’s Digest. His lithographs of waterfowl hung crooked on the paneled walls, but none had fallen. The oak planking of the floor was spotted with puddles in the low spots, the largest one just inside the opened front door, where Mildred now stood silhouetted, her palms pressed to the side of her face, surveying the scene outside.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
She turned toward him, but the glare from the street kept her face in shadow. “The Lord warned us about this,” she said, her voice as grim as he’d ever heard it. “Upon the wicked He will rain snares, and fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest.”
He forced a smile, the kind he used when he wasn’t sure he understood an ailment. “Surely it’s not as bad as all that,” he said. He stepped up beside her and stared out across the town square. But for once she was right.
The entire north side lay in ruins. Becker’s Jewelry Store had collapsed into rubble, as had the Please-U Beauty Parlor, Sir’s Sporting Goods, and Red Goose Shoes. Margie’s Dress Shop on the northeast corner had been reduced to a gutted hole. The cannon from the Courthouse lawn now protruded from the second floor of the Union National Bank, and, at the center of the square, the Courthouse itself had lost both its roof and its clock tower. Smoke billowed from the broken windows above Rexall Drugs. Several cars lay overturned on the sidewalks, and others sat buried in their parking spaces beneath uneven piles of debris. Fallen branches covered much of the pavement, and what appeared to be an entire elm tree hung precariously from the roof of the newspaper office. The marquee of the Capitol Theatre now obstructed the intersection of Elk and College, half a block away.
“Look at Church Street,” Mildred said. At first he didn’t know what she meant, because Church Street was one block over from the square and obscured from view. Then he realized—the steeples. First Episcopal, First Baptist, First Methodist, and First Presbyterian had all lost their steeples. The entire skyline of the town had been wiped away. He turned to Mildred, trying to read her face. Her husband was the minister at First Baptist.
“Do you need to go?” he asked.
She pursed her lips and stared hard toward the empty piece of sky that had once held the First Baptist steeple. “No,” she said finally. “The Lord preserveth the faithful.”
Dr. McKinney had his doubts about that—a loose brick could fall on good or bad alike, and Reverend Tyree’s odds were no better than anybody else’s. But he was glad to have Mildred stay, whatever her rationale.
A storm this brutal would mean injuries, perhaps unlike any he had seen before, and he felt a guilty excitement at the prospect. The whole community would turn to him for help. He could make a difference here, a contribution. Ellen and Mary Jean would have no choice but to be proud. For once he could even upstage his brother-in-law, Tom Parsons.
Tom had been basking in public approval for over a month now, ever since he’d finalized the arrangements for Jersey Joe Walcott to come to town for a boxing exhibition. Boxing was a sordid and barbaric pursuit, as far as Dr. McKinney was concerned, and it depressed him to see so much excitement generated over so squalid an event. Now he felt a smug satisfaction when he realized that, in the wake of the tornado, the exhibition would almost certainly have to be cancelled.
As he and Mildred watched, the streets around the square began to fill with people. They emerged slowly at first, disheveled store clerks and bank tellers, bedraggled ladies still clutching their shopping bags, professional men in their water-stained linen suit coats, slack-jawed stock boys and disoriented shop owners, all picking their way carefully between fallen timbers and around heaps of bricks and splintered lumber. A few people coughed in the dust that now drifted down from the exposed rafters of partially toppled buildings, but no one seemed able to speak. The devastation was enough to stun everyone into momentary silence.
“I’d better go see what I can do to help,” he said. “You stay here and start putting the office back together. Then get hold of Jimmy Vann—we’ll have to file an insurance claim.” It felt good to be taking charge again.
“Jimmy’s got his hands full,” Mildred said, and pointed to the northwest corner the square. Dr. McKinney squinted through the afternoon light to where young Jimmy Vann was now shinnying down the drainpipe from his second floor insurance office above Willard’s Barber Shop. It appeared that a substantial portion of his office—several green filing cabinets and a fluttering mass of papers—had made it to the sidewalk ahead of him.
Dr. McKinney sighed and blotted his brow with his handkerchief. “Then just clean up what you can for now, and make a list of everything that got broken.” He took off his suit coat and handed it to Mildred.
“We might get some walk-ins,” she pointed out.
“Tell them I’ll be back directly.” He removed his gold cuff links and slipped them into his pants pocket, then rolled his white shirtsleeves to the elbow. “If they’re sound enough to get here, they’re sound enough to wait.”
“Do you want me to call your wife?”
His wife. Of course someone should try to contact his wife. Why hadn’t that occurred to him? His own home may have been hit by the storm. He felt himself turning red.
“I’m sure the phone lines are down,” he said. “But I guess it’s worth a try. If you get through, tell her I might be late for supper.”
As if it mattered. Ellen barely spoke to him anymore, and their housekeeper, Grace, prepared all the meals. In the beginning, Ellen’s distance had bothered him, but he’d learned to accept it. In some ways, he was grateful for it. When he had to be around her for any length of time, he always felt she was searching him out for clues, as if she suspected him of something. He had to keep his guard up.
He patted Mildred’s arm dismissively, then hurried through the cluttered intersection and headed toward the crowd that had begun to gather across from the Rexall. Black plumes of smoke streamed from the old building’s tar-covered roof, and flames leapt outward from the window casements on the upper floor.
“You all need to move back,” he called out. “That brick façade could come down any minute.”
In truth, no one was near enough to the building to be in any danger, even if the walls did somehow come crashing forward. But that wasn’t the point. He needed to announce himself, to let them know there was a prudent voice among them. A few people took a half step back, possibly out of politeness, but most simply ignored him, as he’d expected they would. A couple of the younger ones tried to muster up a look of annoyance, but that didn’t bother him either. He’d seen that look on his daughter’s face at least a thousand times.
His daughter. Didn’t she say she might come into town today? He’d told her to stop traveling alone—her due date was barely a fortnight away—but she’d grown too headstrong lately to listen to common sense. Like mother, like daughter, in so many ways.
He’d been patient, nobody could claim otherwise, not even Ellen. How many fathers would build a new home for a daughter who brought such open disgrace to the family? And he’d sure as hell have a thing or two to say to that snot-nosed Malone kid when the boy got back from Korea.
Mary Jean could have done so much better than a stock boy. Four years at Mary Baldwin College could have opened the door for her to be anything she wanted. She could have been a senator’s wife. Instead, she’d swollen like a watermelon from her sinful indulgence with Bobby Malone, and hadn’t lasted even a single semester.
She was probably at home with her mother, writing letters to that son of a bitch right now. But he had drawn the line on that—he had put Mary Jean on notice that she could write her precious boyfriend all the letters she wanted, but no money of his would pay for postage.
“Somebody ought to get hold of Andy Yearwood,” said an old man in bib overalls.
That was good advice, and Dr. McKinney wished he’d thought to say it. Andy had recently been named head of the volunteer fire department.
“Andy’s right here,” said a freckle-faced woman Dr. McKinney didn’t recognize, and all eyes turned toward the slender young fire chief standing at the rear of the crowd, head down, hands shoved deep in his jeans pockets.
Dr. McKinney felt an immediate wave of misgiving. He’d known Andy all his life—had delivered him in fact—and while Andy had always been genial and well-behaved, and had made it all the way to Eagle Scout, there was another issue only Dr. McKinney knew about. The birth had been difficult, the first one for which he’d ever used forceps, and though he’d been able to reshape the boy’s tiny head somewhat before presenting him to his mother, he always feared that some damage had been done, that Andy Yearwood was a slow fuse burning toward some frightful detonation.
Andy glanced toward the fire hall just off the square, where the town’s fire engine stood ready in the open garage bay door. The storm had skipped over that section of Main Street, leaving the buildings undamaged and the roadway clear, and already a few of the volunteer firemen stood by the front of the truck, waiting. Andy turned back toward the crowd, a pained expression on his face.
“I left the keys in my other pants,” he said, and Dr. McKinney felt the boy’s embarrassment as if it were his own.
“The keys to the fire truck?” the farmer in the overalls asked.
Andy nodded.
“Maybe you should go home and get them,” Dr. McKinney suggested, as gently as he could.
“My car’s in the shop,” Andy said.
“What shop?” the old farmer demanded.
“That one over there.” Andy pointed to Williard’s Barber Shop on the north side of the square, where Jimmy Vann was now hopping down from the wheel well of a Nash convertible that was wedged upside down in the double-doorway.
“Good Lord, Andy,” said Dr. McKinney. “Are you all right?”
“Yes sir, I’m fine,” he said. “I was in the Rexall when it got snatched up.”
Dr. McKinney turned to the crowd. “Can anybody here give Andy a ride out to his house so he can get the keys to the fire truck?” A series of popping noises came from somewhere deep inside the drug store.
“I’d be afraid to drive anywhere,” said the freckle-faced woman. “There might be power lines down.”
The woman was right, and now everyone, including Dr. McKinney, scanned the ground around their feet for potential sources of electrocution. But the utility poles on the square had survived intact, and though all kinds of debris dangled from the wires, none of the lines seemed to have broken loose.
“I’ll take him,” said the farmer. “My tractor’s just two blocks over. It’s slow, but it’ll climb right through this mess.”
“Thank you,” said Dr. McKinney. A loud and prolonged cracking sound, maybe from an interior timber giving way, erupted from the burning building. As Andy and the farmer headed down Green Avenue past the funeral home, Dr. McKinney raised his arms to try to regain the attention of the crowd. “Maybe the rest of us can get some of this debris out of the street, clear a path for the fire truck.”
“Shouldn’t we look around to see if anybody needs help?” asked Miss Lois Brock, a seamstress with chronic indigestion. “There might still be people in some of these buildings.”
“First things first, Miss Lois,” said Dr. McKinney. He pointed toward the drug store. “Fire spreads. That makes it our most immediate concern. Besides, none of you ladies should be poking around through these damaged buildings. They aren’t safe. The best thing we can do right now is make these streets passable.”
People looked at one another, probably hoping someone would expose this plan as a bad idea. But no one spoke, and one by one they all moved grudgingly toward the piles of brush and wreckage.
Dr. McKinney tried to set a good example by heading for a large fallen hickory limb that had been torn from one of the commemorative trees planted seventy-five years earlier by the Daughters of the Confederacy on the Courthouse lawn. The limb looked almost airy, with its broad and twisting fan of branches, but it turned out to be much heavier than he anticipated, and he found he could do little more than rustle its leaves. The others had parceled themselves into groups of two or three and were now busy hauling limbs, car fenders, store signs, and other large pieces of wreckage from the street to the Courthouse sidewalk. No one moved to pair up with him, so he decided to forget the hickory limb and focus instead on salvage—separating out the various housewares and articles of clothing that might still be returned to the storeowners. A gesture like that, he imagined, could have a powerful impact on someone who had just lost everything. Right away he found a pair of Keds—inexplicably, still in their shoebox—and a nightgown from Margie’s Dress Shop. He was just in the process of examining a waffle-iron from Malone’s Hardware when one of the women in the crowd let out a scream.
It was Mrs. Crabtree, who played golf with his wife every Tuesday afternoon at the country club. She’d always been an outdoorswoman, perfectly at ease cleaning fish or game, not skittish at all, so whatever she’d found was bound to be interesting. The two men beside her—Dan Massey, who worked for Avalon Dairy, and a beefy plaid-shirted fellow Dr. McKinney didn’t recognize—both stood staring openmouthed at the flattened remnants of what once might have been a large wooden packing crate, the kind an electric cook-stove or an overstuffed armchair might come in.
“You’d better take a gander at this, Doc,” Dan Massey said, and everyone dropped whatever trash they were hauling and moved tentatively toward the splintered crate. Dr. McKinney shouldered past a couple of teenagers and made his way up beside Mrs. Crabtree, who was now mumbling what he took to be fragments of scripture, her hands knotted together at her chin. He eased her away from the crate.
“You go sit down, Ailene. We’ll handle this.” He turned her toward one of the stone benches at the edge of the Courthouse lawn and gave her a gentle shove, as if she were a toy boat he was launching across a pond. Then he shifted his attention to the crate, which was now completely surrounded by wide-eyed gawkers.
“Holy Jesus,” someone said.
Dr. McKinney maneuvered his way back up to the edge of the crate. Even after Ailene Crabtree’s reaction, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
Tangled inside the frame of the crate lay the naked body of a young white man. His nakedness was disconcerting enough, but even more appalling was the condition of the body. In all Dr. McKinney’s years of practicing medicine, he’d never seen a human corpse so badly battered. The storm had shaken this poor man like a rag doll until his bones had turned to paste. Not that the body was particularly bloody, although there was some of that. But every appendage seemed to have been twisted into an unnatural pose, every joint had been wrenched backward in its socket. The scarred head lolled from the torso on an elongated neck. The man’s jaw had been pulled or jarred loose from his skull, distorting his face into so ghoulish an expression that he barely seemed human anymore. Worst of all was the gaping wound in his abdomen.
More than a wound, really.
The man had an extra leg sticking out of his ribcage.
The extra leg wasn’t naked. It was dressed in a work boot and a long black cotton sock.
“Keep the women and young people back,” ordered Dr. McKinney.
“Keep me back too, Doc,” said Dan Massey. “I didn’t need to see this shit at all.”
Dr. McKinney frowned. He wanted to tell Dan to watch his language, to remind him that there were tender ears present, to scold him for making a bad situation worse. But he held his tongue. Given the circumstance, he knew he’d lose credibility if he sounded like a prig.
Everyone crowded closer to the crate.
“Is he dead?” asked one of the teenaged boys.
“At the very least,” said the beefy plaid-shirted man.
Dr. McKinney leaned over the edge to get a better look. How could a tornado drive a leg into someone’s chest? He’d heard stories of broom straws piercing telephone poles, but this was a different thing entirely.
“Does anybody know who this man is?” asked Dr. McKinney.
“I’ve sure never seen him before,” Miss Lois offered, and the rest murmured their agreement. The man was a stranger.
“There must be another body,” said the plaid-shirted man. “That spare leg came from somewhere.” He glanced uneasily over his shoulder.
Dr. McKinney reached out and gripped the heel of the brown work boot. He shook the leg, to see if it were truly lodged in place. It was definitely stuck, but something about the feel of it didn’t seem right. He circled to the other side of the shattered crate for a better view. Most of the exposed portion of the leg—the few inches between the sock and the ribcage–was obscured by blood and disfigurements from the storm, but he could still make out a small section of the leg itself.
What he saw was wood grain. Hickory, it looked like. He carefully poked a spot on the upper calf with his index finger to verify his diagnosis, then straightened and turned to the crowd.
“It’s an artificial leg,” he announced.
Everyone seemed to take this as good news.
But there was still the matter of the dead man.
“Shouldn’t we…do something?” Miss Lois asked.
“We should get the sheriff,” said the plaid-shirted man.
Miss Lois clenched her teeth and sucked in a breath of air as if she were in pain. “But shouldn’t we…” She indicated the leg. “I mean, it doesn’t seem decent to leave the poor man in this condition, even if we don’t know who he is.”
Dan Massey waved his hands in protest. “Ma’am, you can count me out on that one. I made me a list of things to do today, and I guarantee you, yanking a wooden leg out of a dead man sure as hell wasn’t on it.”
“If it was me,” said the freckle-faced woman, “I sure wouldn’t want my family to see some strange leg sticking out of me like that. It’s bad enough just being dead.”
“The thing’s got to come out sometime,” said the teenaged boy. “They caint bury anybody like that.”
“I think it’s illegal to tamper with a body,” said the plaid-shirted man. “This might be a crime scene.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” said Dr. McKinney. “I’d be surprised if that leg was even the cause of death.” He pushed his shirtsleeves further up his arms and grabbed the wooden ankle with both hands. He heaved upward and unplugged the leg from the dead man’s chest. It came loose with a wet, sucking noise, and a groan of sympathetic disgust rippled through the crowd. He held the leg low beside the crate so no one would have to see the drippings.
“There still might be another body,” said the plaid-shirted man. “That leg didn’t come off no showroom floor.”
The plaid-shirted man was right, Dr. McKinney realized. Anyone who’d been caught up in the storm so violently as to lose his prosthesis would almost certainly have perished, just like the man in the crate.
And then a second revelation hit him, one that he hardly knew how to process. He stared intently at the leg, the sock, the boot. He examined the wood grain more closely, the time-worn coloration of the clear varnish, the out-dated design, the bloody hooks and straps. A flood of hope washed through him. A sinister and degenerate hope, one born of the worst elements of his nature, but one he seized upon completely. This leg might be the herald of his salvation, of his long-awaited delivery.
Not delivery from evil, exactly—no piece of wood could bring him that much grace. Yet a delivery, nevertheless, delivery from something that had ravaged his family from the very beginning and strangled every chance of happiness he’d ever known. But now that chapter of his life might finally be coming to a close.
God, how he hoped so. For two decades he’d been haunted by the walking ghost of Herb Gatlin. First, do no harm, that was the oath he had sworn to live by. But what oath could bind him when Herb Gatlin was the man lying on the table in his office? Herb had mocked him all through school—for his clumsiness at sports, for his thick glasses, for his awkwardness around girls. For everything, in fact. And while pitiful Wally McKinney had spent years pining for Ellen Parsons, Herb was the one she’d always wanted, the one she’d shamelessly chased after for almost a decade before finally getting him to take the bait. But what kind of life could Ellen have hoped for with Herb Gatlin? He was a cowboy, for God’s sake, a rodeo bum, with nothing real to offer. Ellen deserved more than that—she deserved someone with a brain, someone stable and respectable, someone who could give her a big house and a better life. She was halfway to ruin already, the baby just beginning to show. Someone had to save her, someone had to sort out the awful mess, and suddenly there was Herb Gatlin on his operating table, unconscious from the morphine, with a badly broken leg, and suddenly pitiful Wally McKinney wasn’t so pitiful anymore, he was Dr. Wallace McKinney, and he had the upper hand for once, and not just the upper hand, but absolute control over how their lives would go from that moment forward, and he knew what he had to do, not so much for his own sake, but for Ellen’s, and even for her unborn child’s. So he’d cut off the leg, cleanly, with cold precision and a clinical detachment, knowing there was no medical reason to do it, but knowing, too, that Ellen was not the sort of woman who’d spend her life caring for a cripple, even if that cripple was her baby’s father.
Besides, the leg had a truly nasty break, one of the worst he’d seen, so who’s to say there wouldn’t have been complications somewhere down the line, an infection maybe, or a blood clot? Who’s to say the leg wouldn’t have had to come off eventually anyway? It was a possibility, at least. Maybe the story he’d later told Herb and Ellen was true—that Herb would have died if the leg hadn’t come off. Doctors weren’t fortune tellers, they couldn’t always know how things might turn out. Maybe he’d saved Herb Gatlin’s life. Maybe he had no real reason to feel guilty at all.
But either way, at last he could put it all behind him. It was as if the storm had miraculously washed the past clean. He could start fresh, with no more secrets to guard, no more phony charitable handouts to the man he hated most in the world, no more constant reminder of the darkest failing of his life. The curse was finally being lifted. Half a lifetime’s worth of feeling surged wildly through his veins.
He raised the artificial leg from the crate and held it out before him, a torch lighting his clear path into the future. The crowd gasped at this new escalation of gore and impropriety. Blood dribbled onto Dr. McKinney’s wrist and trickled along his forearm, but he didn’t care. His hand began to shake, causing strands of fresh gore to drool from the stump of the prosthesis to the top of the crate, but that was all right, too, nothing could dampen the spreading joy of this moment he’d waited so long to experience. The entire gruesome spectacle was a glorious baptism, his escape from a final day of reckoning, his holy reintroduction to the world.
“Doc, are you okay?” asked Miss Lois. She rested a tentative hand on his shoulder.
All eyes were now on him, he realized. He felt transparent, his guilt revealed, as if every dark thought burned bright as neon, telling everyone what had happened between him and Herb Gatlin. He flushed with embarrassment.
“I know this leg,” he said quietly, and lowered it to his side. His pathetic soul was altogether lost, that much was clear. He knew it from his tight grip on the hickory. He knew it from the joy that bore him up.
