But Tom Griggs was more concerned about finding his topped tee-shot and when Ganaway asked him again, halfway up the fairway, old Tom said he hadn’t noticed anybody; they both glanced back but the “gallery” had evidently lost interest and wandered off. Nothing back there now but the steamy woods, a damp shed for storing mowers and sprinklers, and a long-nosed dog that probably belonged to the children in the settlement on the hill by the Veterans Hospital, and Ganaway’s thoughts tumbled back to the good year just rounded off by J. W. Ganaway & Son, Wholesale Groceries and, for contrast, to the quick twinge he had had in his side as he drove off, which reminded him that exactly one year ago to the day he had been stretched out in the other hospital minus a stone or so in his left kidney. And had been saying fervently to himself that if he could just have one more year, that was all he would ask. Hard to imagine today he had said that—Who was good for ten, maybe twenty! Whipping out a Number Four Iron and taking a vigorous practice swing.
As he took his stance for a long approach shot a thought entered his head of their vanished “gallery” and he suddenly realized at the top of his back-swing that the young man had probably been the dark speck he had caught sight of on the break of the hill as they went up the seventh. And his ball went bouncing away before his volley of hearty curses into the trap on the right of the green.
Nevertheless, he and Milt Coles won the inside and the match, and when he had enjoyed for a minute or two the pain coating both the dollar bills that old Banker Milt handed him on a side bet, he told him to come in the bar and he would buy him a drink. But Milt was in a hurry to get home, and the others were too, though it was only a little after twelve-thirty.
He decided to have a bourbon and soda alone. It was a long time until his two-fifteen dinner and he wasn’t in the habit of sitting round the house in the middle of the day with no Sunday papers to read. A quiet drink to the New Year, to the heavy supplies moving into the warehouse now, to prosperity, to Jean graduating from college in the spring, to Kathy marrying a garrulous but not impossible Frank in February, to Bess who had metamorphosed from good wife to good mother with as little fuss as August grows into September. To Jim junior, buried in the ashes of Iwo Jima.
The bar was empty except for Sam on a stool among the bottles, sleepy-eyed in the air that had got too warm from the pine log simmering in the fireplace. Ganaway took his glass over to a corner table, frowned at the rain that was now giving him the lie over the deserted first and eighteenth, then gulping a hefty half of his drink, opened out the scorecard on the table to figure what he would have made if he had taken two putts on every green instead of usually three and, on the eighth, four.
He didn’t look up when he heard the outside door open but, a second or two later, having pared his score to a rather handsome eighty-three, he lifted his eyes to the young man in the raincoat who by now was beginning to look as familiar as if he had known him for years, or at any rate known his father. He appeared to be about thirty, not fat but stoutly built, the cheeks of his broad pleasant face faintly gray at the sides from a close shave of his black hair; he moved with a good deal of self-assurance of an inoffensive kind as if he were perhaps a salesman of products he had real confidence in, or the representative of a well-established organization, such as a big life-insurance company, or even the FBI. Or even the Church. Certainly he didn’t look like someone out of work; which reminded Mr. Ganaway he was going to want an extra man in Middle Georgia this year, the way things were going, and that nothing appealed to him more in hiring a new man than that the new man shouldn’t appear to need the job.
“Raining?” said Ganaway, noticing the dark shoulders of the tan coat; he knew it was but he felt friendly, adding with a playful indignation, “Got no business raining with the wind in the west.”
The young man said something that sounded like “another new man probably” but, that making no sense at all and the whole encounter too offhand to ask for a repeat, Ganaway ignored it and watched him while he hung his hat and coat on a chair not far from the fire, arranging them with the almost fond neatness he had noticed in Jim junior home once on a pass after three months at Parris Island; he guessed the young man’s basic training was still hanging on. The little routine made him seem almost like one of Jim’s fraternity brothers in college days and Ganaway motioned at a chair across from him and asked if he would like a highball.
The young man thanked him and added, making no point of it, “May I have a Scotch and soda, Mr. Ganaway?”
Ganaway rapped on the table to arouse Sam from his dreams, not thinking much about the boy’s knowing his name, which was after all not surprising; thinking rather that you didn’t often hear “Scotch and soda” in Georgia and wondering idly if the young man was a visitor in town—which didn’t quite fit with his knowing Ganaway’s name, but no matter. “Scotch and soda, Sam,” he said, repeating it after a second as Sam slipped off his stool and leaned both hands doubtfully on the bar.
He wondered as the young man sat down if the boy could have been planning something like this all along—following him round the course, growing from a dark speck against the overcast into an individual whose name, he began to feel, should really be on the tip of his tongue—looking for a chance to talk to him. He thought if the boy had “job” on his mind such perseverance was in his favor and he would tell him to come down tomorrow and talk to Jones. “I’ve seen you round somewhere but I don’t seem to remember where it was.”
The young man smiled at a corner of the table. “I stopped in to see you one day about a year ago.” Then as Ganaway studied his face, trying to set it in his office and, failing, in his waiting room, “As a matter of fact you were just coming out of the anesthetic.”
“You came to see me in the hospital?” his voice going wary. He didn’t like that very much; it was too intimate by a good deal. Then it occurred to him the young man could be one of those visiting preachers who had passed through his foggy room that day, leaving tracts on his counterpane and smiling at the NO VISITORS on the door as if it had been a weak joke. The possibility fitted with the self-assurance, the faint aura of authority. “You’re with one of our local churches?”
“I don’t get round to the churches much,” reaching for the glass Sam had set down beside the bourbon and sliding it in front of him. “Not that I think a man can get along on less than two hours of poetry a week without becoming dehydrated.”
Ganaway turned far enough to give him both his eyes, considered asking him to repeat even though the words had come through clearly enough, then gave it up, wagged his head and went back to measuring the somewhat draughty sensation of talking to a person who has seen you under ether. He thought of asking the boy if he had been a patient there too but decided against it; after all, he must have been trundled past a dozen people on his way back from the operating room. And besides, he had come too close to the edge to want to talk about hospitals. “Well,” he said, lifting his glass, pretty sorry he had let himself in for all this but seeing no way out now for a few minutes, “Happy New Year to you!”
“And to you, Mr. Ganaway,” putting the glass back on the table, turning it about in his fingers for a minute then saying quietly as if speaking to the ice cubes, “You haven’t forgotten our little agreement, have you, Mr. Ganaway?”
Ganaway, annoyed, caught himself as he was about to tell him brusquely he had never said a word to him before in his life; the uncomfortable truth was that if he had been under the anesthetic, or partly under, there was no knowing whom he had said what to. He might have promised to go on the boy’s note; or give him a job. All he could remember for sure was that he had never expected to get out of the place alive; and of course that absurd little monologue about wanting another year, mumbling to himself maybe louder than he realized. Something had gone wrong upstairs, he had never inquired too closely just what.
“What agreement, son?”
“You remember you said the only thing you asked for was one more year.”
For a moment Ganaway felt a tingle as of something starting to crawl up behind his ears. Then he recalled that the resident had been a broad-faced black-haired young man and he dug about hastily in his memory for the doctor’s name. Bush! “You know, I didn’t recognize you, Dr. Bush!” he smiled. He hadn’t realized he had discussed it with Bush but he evidently had. He chuckled: “I probably did ask you for another year. I thought I wasn’t going to get another week.”
“Well, that was a year ago.”
It sounded as if Bush were teasing him, and he thought it wasn’t becoming in a doctor to twit you about that sort of thing. He was not amused but he said indulgently, “Yes, and I believe I’m good for another one. Thanks to you and the others down there. You were mighty good to me,” gauging the number of swallows left in his glass and thinking he would down them all in a gulp and beg an engagement.
“As I remember, Mr. Ganaway, you wanted another year on account of your family. Your wife was still upset about Jim junior, and Kathy hadn’t been able to make up her mind about Frank. Anyway, they’re inclined to be lenient—if possible.”
He wondered if the doctor had been drinking, this glum New Year’s morning. “What’s that you’ve got?” as the young man took a wallet from his coat pocket and pulled out a pale green card. “Is that the hospital record?”
“This is from the files in the Accounting Department. It says here ‘Extension granted’—which of course we know. You were scheduled out.”
Ganaway scowled at the card, feeling in his jacket for his glasses case. Then he let it go, picked up his bourbon and scowled at it. “I’m not sure I quite get what you’re driving at, Dr. Bush,” he said stiffly.
“I’m not Dr. Bush,” the young man said, “My serial number is 712-A-11-16-69-MSV-RV. Which is their way of saying I was born in Radford, Virginia, and died near Mylai in South Vietnam at twelve after seven on the morning of November Seventeenth, 1969. They call me Seven-Twelve.”
Ganaway felt the glass sliding through his fingers and heard it smash on the floor with a tinkle and a wet rattle of ice cubes, one of which shot across the tile floor toward the bar like a billiard ball. He wasn’t sure what happened for a few seconds, then Sam’s voice came to him from among the mundane bottles: “You all right, Mr. Ganaway?”
“Certainly I’m all right! Bring me another drink—wait a minute. It must be nearly one o’clock. I’m afraid I’ve got to run along, young man. My folks’ll be waiting dinner on me.”
“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Ganaway, is that you asked for—”
“Just a minute now, son. Let’s let Sam get all this straightened out here. You’ve got a sort of unusual resumé, you know,” managing a smile and when the young man seemed to hesitate going on conversationally, “You say you were killed in South Vietnam?” It was an almighty strange thing for an American businessman to hear coming out of his mouth but he kept his eyes fastened on the prosaic sight of Sam gathering up his broom and rag and pan. He knew there was an explanation right here somewhere in front of him because there always was but he couldn’t lay his hand on it; he could feel a sort of itch in his finger to press the button on his desk for Miss Havird, who knew the whereabouts of everything.
“It’s getting a little vague now” the young man said. “About all I remember of it is that it seemed to cut short some rather important ideas, though I sometimes wonder if I didn’t really get them just after the thing hit me. A mortar-shell fragment—Russian,” tapping himself carelessly on the chest a couple of times.
Ganaway glanced at the exit door to the parking lot, warning himself he had better prepare to have the boy start unbuttoning his shirt. He hoped he would be spared the sight of the path of a shell fragment, healed though it would be by now, but in case he might not be able to hit on a polite good-by in time he reordered the drink. “Straight, Sam. And right now. Just let that floor go for a minute.”
“Scotch, Mr. Ganaway?”
“Bourbon! Bourbon! I never drink—” stopping as the explanation for all this flashed into his mind, an explanation that was somehow as humiliating as it was simple and (up to a point) reassuring. It made him feel like a fool, but glad he could feel; it was like floundering and trying to save yourself in a creek that turned out to be three feet deep: the boy was a patient at the Veterans Hospital! The Psychiatric Ward. They escaped sometimes; you ran into them now and then. One had written him on a fancy letterhead in three different-colored crayons, demanding financial help in publishing some songs he had composed; usually they appeared at your door selling magazine subscriptions. Which you bought because they turned red and got furious if you didn’t—even got dangerous, he had heard.
How this one had found out what Ganaway must have been mumbling down at the other hospital he couldn’t say offhand, but there were ways; the boy might have been at one time what Jim junior used to call a “medic,” might have happened to be down there at the operation. He might have known one of Mr. Ganaway’s nurses. There were ways. Mr. Ganaway pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, hot at the memory of the ride the boy had taken him on. He tried not to think of having let the glass drop but enough of the moment returned to wet his upper lip and he wiped the handkerchief across his mouth too.
It was a temptation to get up and leave at once, but remembering he had heard of these cases getting mean sometimes he realized that his problem, though immeasurably simplified, was not quite solved; he had better not walk out unceremoniously. The thing to do was notify the Hospital; they would send over two or three in white jackets and pick the boy up. But he couldn’t very well use the phone on the bar, with the young man sitting there listening.
Sam brought the drink and Ganaway swallowed a good part of it before signing the ticket—before thinking of writing a note on it to the manager to call the Hospital. “Where’s Mr.—Mr.—” he couldn’t think of the man’s name though he knew it as well as his own.
“Mr. Graham? He took the day off, Mr. Ganaway,—New Year’s.”
“Well, who’s here? Who’s looking after things?”
