Max Brand

Interns Can’t Take Money

Warsaw 2020

Contents

JIMMY KILDARE used to get away from the hospital every afternoon and go over to Tom McGuire’s saloon on the avenue. He always drank two beers. An interne in the accident room has to have the brains in his fingertips in good order all day long, but two beers don’t get very far between a man and himself if he has a bit of head on his shoulders, and Jimmy Kildare had.

McGuire’s saloon was comfortable in a dark, dingy way. The sawdust was swept out only once in two days, and the floors were never scrubbed except the evening before Election Day. Just the same, it was a good place. It made Jimmy Kildare think of the barn out on the old farm. The faces of the bums and crooks and yeggs who lined up at the bar were sour, just like the faces of the cows and horses that were lined along the mangers of the barn–long, and all the lines running down except for their arched eyebrows with the fool look of the cows.

When Jimmy Kildare leaned an elbow on the worn varnish of McGuire’s saloon, it was always easier for him to think of home. The future to him was a great question mark, and New York was the emptiness inside the loop of the mark. Add a few strokes to the question mark and you get a dollar sign.

Jimmy Kildare used to think about that but he never dared to think very far because, when he began to dream, he always saw himself back on the farm in the frosty stillness of an autumn morning where every fence post and every wet rock said to him, “Jimmy, what are you doing away back here?”

The only times that he escaped entirely from those dreams were when he was working at the operating table, all scrubbed up and masked and draped in white. But even when he was going through the wards and looking into the life or death that brightened or shadowed the eyes of his patients, the old days and the terrible sense that he must return to them used to come over him.

He always wanted more relaxation from his work than those two beers in McGuire’s saloon, but he knew that his purse would not stand it. The hospital paid for his laundry. It gave him three meals a day of soggy food. Otherwise, he had to find himself entirely, except for an occasional lift from famous Doctor Henry Fearson. Fearson from his height had noticed Kildare in medical school and had made it possible for him to carry on when home funds ran out.

Perhaps it was pity that moved Fearson to make those loans. Perhaps it was a quiet belief that there was a talent in the youngster. Kildare never could decide what the motive was, but he loved Fearson. During the interneship Fearson’s loans became almost negligible, possibly because an absent-minded genius like Fearson forgot that an interne is an unpaid labor slave. A lot of the other lads were the sons of affluent doctors, and they were always going places on days off, but they never took Kildare and he could not afford to take himself. He wasn’t a very exciting companion; he wasn’t good-looking; he wasn’t stylish.

There was only one day at the hospital for him to write down in red, and that was the occasion when he had assisted at a kidney operation. In the blind red murk the scalpel of the operating surgeon made a mistake and a beautiful fountain of blood and life sprang upward. Jimmy Kildare snatched a forceps and grabbed at the source of that explosion. He reached through a horrible boiling red fog and clamped down. The fountain ceased to rise. Afterward the artery was tied off, and a blood transfusion brought the patient back to life.

That day the great Henry Fearson stopped Jimmy in a corridor and gripped him by the shoulder and said, “You’ve got it, Kildare!”

Jimmy shrugged and hooked a thumb. “That back there? That was just luck,” he said.

But Fearson answered: “Surgery is like tennis. There’s no luck except bad luck.”

Afterward, Jimmy Kildare went to his bare concrete cell and sat for a long time looking at the wall until the wall opened and showed him a brief glimpse of heaven. Then he said: “Henry Fearson–by God!” and a great promise began to live along his blood stream.

Then the trouble started at McGuire’s saloon.

The bartender was named Jeff. He had only one eye. Sometimes he wore a leather patch over it; sometimes he wore a watery glass eye that didn’t fit. He was, Kildare gathered, a real force in the precinct because he knew by first name practically every voter in the district. This fellow Jeff never looked at Jimmy Kildare. He always had his one eye fixed on the habitués of the place, for McGuire’s saloon had long ago ceased being a money- maker. It was merely a political nerve center vital to McGuire’s power in the town.

One day a man in a blue suit and green necktie came into McGuire’s saloon when Jimmy Kildare was having his beer. He was a big young man with a blunt, rather fleshy face, like a prize fighter out of training. He said, “H’are ya, Jeff? Give me a drink, will you?”

Then he dropped to the floor, with his arms thrown wide. The sleeve pulled up from the right arm and showed Kildare that the forearm was cut clean across, well above the wrist.

Jeff, the bartender, put a hand on the bar and leaped over it. He dropped on his knees and began to cry out: “Hanlon! Hey, Hanlon!”

Jimmy Kildare got out of the saloon and went back to the hospital. An interne who takes supplies out of the hospital is–well, he is a thousand times worse than a burglar, because he is trusted. But Jimmy Kildare took supplies from the hospital. He kept thinking of that young, rather fleshy face, battered, but somehow honest. Not honest enough, of course, or else he would have taken that gaping wound straight to a doctor.

Yet he might not be a criminal who dreaded having a doctor report his case to the police. There were many stories in the precinct of men who died silently, refusing to name their assailants to the officers of the law, and all of those who died in that manner were not thugs. It merely seemed that in McGuire’s following and among his enemies there were men who lived according to a new standard of morality about which Kildare knew nothing. And he determined to put from his mind all thought of the letter of the law, remembering only that great silent oath which dwells in the soul of every good doctor–that promise to relieve the suffering ones of this world.

He took from the hospital retractors, sutures, needles, iodine. He went back to McGuire’s and found the door locked.

He banged heavily on that door until Jeff looked out at him and said: “What do you want? Get out of here!”

Kildare said: “Unless those cut tendons are sewed together properly, Hanlon won’t have a right arm. The forearm will shorten. The hand will turn in. There won’t be any power in it.”

“Hell!” said Jeff, looking down at him. Then he said: “All right! All right!” He reached out, grabbed Kildare by the shoulder and dragged him into the family room of the saloon.

Somebody said, “He’s dead!”

Hanlon lay on two tables that had been put side by side. His feet hung over the end of one table.

Kildare said, “Get out of my way.” A big man barred him, arms spread wide. Kildare kicked him violently in the shins. The fellow howled and hopped away on one foot. Kildare shoved his hand over Hanlon’s heart and heard Jeff say: “Cut it out. This is a kind of a doc. They got them over in the hospital like this. Maybe he knows something.”

Kildare said: “He’s only fainted. Be useful, some of you.” He began to unwrap the towel, exposing the instruments.

“He’s come and brought the stuff,” said Jeff. “Who would of thought!”

Kildare began with iodine. Then he made two men hold Hanlon’s right arm. They had put a clumsy tourniquet above the elbow. Kildare got to work on the tendons. He made Jeff and another man hold the retractors that kept the wound gaping for his convenience.

Jeff said, “It makes me kind of sick.”

The other man said: “Watch what he’s doing, you dumb cluck! The kid’s got eyes in his fingers. Watch what they do!”

Kildare put the tendons together one by one, matching the ends with care, and then securing them with mattress stitches, using threads of black silk. You could see the zigzag pattern of the little threads against the cordage of the tendons, all frayed at the cut ends.

Someone said, “Who did it?”

Another man said: “Who do you think, dummy? Dennis Innis, of course.”

“He’ll get Innis yet,” said another.

“He ain’t gunna have no gun hand to get Innis,” said the first speaker. “There won’t be no brains in that right hand of his, even when this slick job is finished. The wits is cut out of it.”

Kildare told himself that he must not think of the meaning behind that right hand. He kept on matching the severed ends of the tendons and making the stitches. Then Hanlon wakened from his trance and began to curse and struggle.

Jeff said: “You damn fool, this doc is saving your hand. Shut up, will you!”

Hanlon shut up. Suddenly he extended his limp right arm toward Kildare. “Okay,” he said, and kept his muscles flaccid. Only the loudness of his breathing told of his pain.

When the wound was closed and Kildare stepped back from his work, Hanlon sat up. Jeff and another man–he who had worked with the retractors–were rubbing the blood from Kildare’s hands with painful care. He surrendered his hands to them like tools of infinite value in the trust of friends. A warmth flowed like strong drink through his brain.

Hanlon stared at Kildare, saying, “Who are you?”

“Oh, go to hell!” said Jeff. “This is Doctor Kildare. He’s a right guy. Oh, go to hell, will you!”

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