Max Brand

Whiskey Sour

Warsaw 2019

Contents

A HAND caught interne Jimmy Kildare by the shoulder and shook him, but forty-eight hours of almost constant duty had sickened him with fatigue and he could not be dragged back to consciousness in a moment. First the scenes on the old farm through which he had been dreaming had to whirl away and dissolve, like a landscape viewed from the last platform of an express train. Then he sat up among the heaped bedclothes where he had fallen only an hour or two before.

In the black nausea of weariness the room spun before him, and he made out only dimly the face of the orderly who had roused him. In a great hospital no interne should be overworked, but when Kildare became house surgeon and first tasted authority, he put his teeth into his work and hung on with all the bulldog that was in him.

The orderly bent over and called, “I’m sorry, but there’s a pig-faced son of an Irish porker out there that won’t see nobody but you. Name of Lafferty.”

“I don’t know him. I’m done in. I can’t come,” said Kildare.

“Sure, you don’t know half the people that come here yammering to see you,” said the orderly, “but the word’s gone around this precinct that nobody counts except Doctor Kildare. This Lafferty’s done for. You can’t help him. Shot through the body.”

“Ah!” said Kildare, and was out of bed instantly. He hit the floor, staggered, and kept on staggering until he reached the washstand, where he ducked his head under the cold-water faucet.

“It’s hell,” said the orderly. “Lemme take him a message that you’re sick. You look like your face was thumbed out of dough.”

“You tell Lafferty I’m coming,” said Kildare.

He dressed as fast as he could, though his fingers were stumbling–those same fingers that had caused the West Side to adopt him as a sort of patron saint because of certain miracles he had worked with them. Small boys followed him on the street; groups of idlers saluted him as “doc.” He saw pictures of them as he hurried with blundering feet down the long corridor toward the accident room.

When he opened the door, noise thronged about him with a babbling roar. Four policemen and a pair of detectives helped to take up floor space. Two Negroes were screeching with the agony of deep razor cuts. There were a dozen patients in the big room, but Lafferty was not among them. A nurse took Kildare into the corridor, where the big Irishman waited, doubled over on a chair. He had knotted his coat around his body, perhaps in the vague hope that the pressure would lessen the bleeding of his wounds, but a double trickle of red spattered the floor on either side of him. One huge hand comforted his belly; the other held a pipe.

A big, red-faced policeman was saying, “Go on, Lafferty; don’t be a mug; leave them take you into the accident room and plug you up... How’d you come in on this, anyway?”

He asked the question of a red-haired girl who was studying Lafferty with anxious eyes. She was delicate and lovely as a thoroughbred beside the massive, cart-horse strength of the Irishman. Afterwards, she remained a dim pleasure on the horizon of Kildare’s mind.

“I heard a shot outside the door of my apartment,” the girl said. “Then a frightful crashing fall down the stairs. When I ran out, he was lying on the first landing below.”

“Didn’t see anybody with a gun?”

“No, I didn’t see a soul.”

“You wouldn’t,” said the officer. “Here’s the doc... Hey, Lafferty, here’s Doc Kildare for you!”

The big Irishman looked up, his face adrip with the perspiration of agony. “Ah, the doc,” he said. Then his head rolled back upon his shoulders as he fainted.

Before Lafferty recovered, Kildare had him in the operating room and was scrubbed up to assist the attending surgeon, Stewart Black.

Lafferty came to and waved two gigantic hands toward Black. “You go away,” he whispered. “I want the doc.”

“Sorry,” muttered Kildare. “He doesn’t really know what he’s saying, doctor.”

“Get a stenographer,” whispered Lafferty. “Patch me up so’s I can talk, doc. I’m gunna tell...” Then he fainted again.

“Looks as though that bullet made a mess of his insides,” said Stewart Black. “But you take charge, Jimmy, and make up your mind about it.”

Kildare thanked him with a twitching smile and was instantly at work.

He labored with cold sweat on his upper lip. Once weakness made his knees sag. Once he had to stop short until the tremor left his right hand.

When he finished, he looked up and felt the hard, bright eyes of the attending surgeon upon him. “Beautiful!” said Black.

Kildare tried to laugh casually, but he giggled like a girl.

“You need a bed or a drink,” said the attending surgeon. “Go get it.”

Kildare had hardly reached his room, ready to fling himself on his bed, when an orderly brought word that Doctor Gloster wanted him at once. Kildare dashed cold water over his face and went. He had a vision of himself confronting Gloster, who was the archangel of the hospital hierarchy, and he could hear his voice saying, “Doctor Gloster, will you please go to hell?” That inward voice made him shudder. He recognized fatigue like a poison in his blood.

Gloster was a hard, keen, wise old man. He handed Kildare a newspaper with a pencil mark against the item of a columnist. The item read:

We hear there’s a young interne on the West Side who could vote the whole district. We suppose that comes from knowing the right people to take care of at the city’s charge. Well, we may as well have our politicians out of the hospitals as out of the gutter.

Doctor Gloster said, “That’s a reference to you, Kildare. It’s not the sort of news we wish to send out from this institution.”

“I never intended–” said Kildare.

“I’m not interested in intentions. I’m interested in facts,” said Gloster. “I want no more of this. A man is what he seems to be. Leave your low-class cronies. You can’t raise them; but they can pull you down. If this subject comes to my attention again, I shall have only one more thing to say. Good night!”

Kildare went slowly back to his room.

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