Black Bag by Frank Walters
In the winters of my youth, when I was home sick with strep throat, I chopped off heads. I liked being out of school for a week, but television bored me, and so I stayed in my bedroom and drew comic book stories in notebooks with unlined paper my mother bought for me, waiting for Dr. Ross to make his house call. Mostly I drew war stories, crude imitations of Sergeant Rock and G.I. Joe. Death in these comics was clean, almost clinical: very little blood, at most a grimace. Not so in my stories. Besides heads, legs and arms became detached, too, sent flying in all directions like spears. But toppling and rolling heads dominated. When my mother showed my stories to Dr. Tinley, the child psychologist, an assistant led me out of his office while he talked to her. She came out a few minutes later, her eyes red from crying.
Dr. Ross regarded my stories with bemused tolerance.
“Tsk. So much death.”
His house calls were liturgical events: ritualistic in the way a careful and exacting deliberateness informed his every motion, sacramental in the seriousness he imparted to these motions. Each instrument or vial he brought out of his black bag was potent with magic and mystery. He always wore a blue or black suit, scuffed black oxfords, a white, rumpled shirt, a striped tie, and a battered gray fedora, the biretta that completed the vestments required for the sacred office of ministering to the sick. His stentorian voice suggested a power to heal. But only to heal, not to save. He was a physician of the body, no more. He spoke plainly, abjuring the sententious pronunciamientoes of physicians who mixed their prescriptions with admonitions. He freely offered advice from the well-spring of his experience as a World War II medic. He once told me, while handing back a story, that blood does not splash out of the stump of the neck, like cold coffee flung from a cup, but shoots out in jets timed to the rapidly flagging beat of the heart, initially with a force strong enough to launch the head a foot or more into the air. Death, he said, was not instantaneous.
Of “that slender, youthful neck” supporting the head of Jean-Baptiste Traupmann, who, all agreed, had slept peacefully the night before, Ivan Turgenev writes in “The Execution of Traupmann” (1872),
In my imagination I could not help seeing a line cut straight across it. . . . There, I thought, a five-hundred pound axe would in a few moments pass, smashing the vertebrae and cutting through the veins and muscle, and yet the body did not seem to expect anything of the kind: it was so smooth, so white, so healthy.
Traupmann had butchered the entire Kinck family--mother, father, six children, sparing not even the youngest, an infant--over the course of a few hours on the afternoon and evening of Sunday, September 19, 1869, in the Pantin Commune a few miles northeast of Paris, near the present-day Parc de la Villette, all for the sake of a few hundred francs. Bad as Traupmann was, Turgenev could find nothing good to say about bloodlust’s multitudes gathering that early morning of January 20, 1870, outside the prison, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fatal separation:
And what drunken, glum, sleepy faces! What an expression of boredom, fatigue, dissatisfaction, disappointment, dull, purposeless disappointment. . . . The workaday life was receiving all these people once more into its bosom—and why, for the sake of what sensations, had they left its rut for a few hours? It is awful to think about what is hidden there.
Turgenev lacked the stomach to witness a beheading, but he stood close enough to the platform, along with his friend, the writer and photographer Maxime de Camp, to hear the downward slide of the blade, which produced a sound he compared to the retching of a “huge animal,” to hear the swift sear of the cut, to hear the “abrupt thud” of the blade’s--and Traupmann’s--termination. What Turgenev “got” from the spectacle was a “feeling of involuntary astonishment at a murderer, a moral monster, who could show his contempt for death.”
I remember Dr. Ross as a good doctor and a kind man, but I did not like going to his office, a clapboard storefront on a narrow cobblestone street in the business district of Castle Shannon, a tired suburb south of Pittsburgh. The large bay window, with a deep, worn shelf for a sill, vibrated when a streetcar passed. Strewn about the sill were a dozen or more paperback detective novels, covers illustrated with hard women in spike heels and clingy dresses, cigarettes and guns in their hands. Shuffled among the Highlights for Children and Sports Illustrated on the table in the center of the waiting room were issues of True Detective and Black Mask Detective (“An Orgy of Blood at the Massage Parlor!”) with covers every bit as lurid as those of the paperbacks.
He was an avid collector of old things, medical instruments mostly, many dating back to the Civil War. A set of tenaculum, for example, looking like under-sized logging hooks, used to fish severed ends of arteries from the miasma of surrounding tissue, was mounted in a display case on a bookshelf. Suspended from decorative hooks screwed into the lintel above the door leading to the examination room was a pair of cross-legged forceps, useful for bundling tissue strands during amputations.
His private office, where he consulted with parents, was dimly lit by a single lamp on his desk, which was scattered with papers and folders, a chipped kidney-shaped glass ashtray, a coffee cup, and a pack of cigarettes. The walls were an off-white, hung with more strange instruments, including a syringe the size of a bicycle pump. There might have been a window looking out onto the side alley. But my attention was drawn to the door leading to his nurse’s office. On it was hung a silhouette target. Taped to the target’s head was a photograph, clipped from the newspaper, of a man who had murdered the wives of three prominent men. Dr. Ross wrote out a prescription while he and my father talked and flicked their cigarette ashes into the ashtray. The cold, measuring eyes on the back of the door stared directly at me. I remember them as both piercing and dull, heavy-lidded and menacing.
Traupmann was diseased. So was Alexander Pope, but differently, as he writes in “An Epistle From Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot”: “The Muse but serv’d to ease some friend, not wife,/ To help me through this long disease, my life.” And what a litany of diseases: hunchbacked from a childhood encounter with Pott’s Disease, a form of tuberculosis that affects the vertebrae; Catholic in a country where Catholics were criminals; stained by the “sin” that had “dipp’d [him] in ink”; not least the viral onslaught of critics, sycophants, and imitators, “Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,” Bedlamites who “rave, recite, and madden round the land” and beat a path to his door. The rich and subtle irony of the poem is that John Arbuthnot, M. D., creator of that stout symbol of England’s robust health, John Bull, was dying, we will never know of what, and Pope, poet and critic, was his physician. Dr. Arbuthnot could not have asked for better:
O friend! May each domestic bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arts extend a mother’s breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep a while one parent from the sky!
I heard Dr. Ross greet my mother at the bottom of the stairs with a sonorous “Good afternoon, Mrs. Walters. I’m sorry I had to reschedule my visit. I was called away on an emergency.” She welcomed him in with a demure “Please, Dr. Ross. You needn’t apologize.” His slow, heavy footfall on the stairs contrasted with my mother’s lighter step.
“I was so sorry to hear about your wife. How horrible!”
“Thank you.”
“When are the services?”
“Saturday.”
“Well, thank God he’ll never hurt anyone again.”
“No. He won’t.”
He backed into my room, pushing the door open with his hip.
“And what do we have here, young fella?”
He removed his trenchcoat and hat with the imperious manner of the executioner. He draped his coat across the foot of my bed and put his hat on top of his coat. He was a tall, rangy man, with an angular face and thick, wavy brown hair. It was just after lunch, and his rumpled suit was steeped in the smell of cigarettes. His tie was loosened.
“Any new stories for me?”
He placed his bag on the floor, opened it, and pulled a chair beside my bed. He took my temperature and pulse, he listened to my heart, he peered into my ears and nostrils, he looked down my throat, then he leaned back and pronounced that I did, indeed, again, have strep throat. He told me to turn over on my stomach. He pulled down the waist band of my pajamas and administered the shot, humming in a soft, distracted voice.
“He can go back to school in a few days. Call me if he doesn’t get better.”
We read in the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), by the Japanese poet Yoshida Kenko (c. 1283-1350), that “If our life did not fade and vanish like the dews of Adashino’s graves or the drifting smoke from Toribe’s burning grounds, but lingered on forever, how little the world would move us. It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.” Kenko uses these traditional Japanese tropes to remind his readers, denizens of the imperial court, that even they must ease their way through that short passage between eternities we call life by telling stories huddled around the fire that will one day consume them. But then the drifting smoke parts and Kenko sees the sun: “What a glorious luxury it is to taste life to the full for even a single year.” The essay, numbered 7, is short and easy to overlook.
Dr. Tinley’s office was situated above an A&P across the street from Larry’s Shamrock Tavern. From the fluorescent, sterile interior of the clinic, with its angular chairs and empty shelves, I could see the neon-lit green four-leaf clover hanging above the entrance to Larry’s. My father went there on Saturdays to drink with his World War II buddies, a form of therapy more in line with his needs. He often took me. I drank Squirt and ate peanuts. The men called me “Boy” or “Butch” or “Kid,” tousled my hair, and gave me nickels for Skee-Ball. The interior of Larry’s was loud with talk and laughter, gray with smoke from cigars and cigarettes. Neon signs advertising Iron City Beer and Planters Peanuts flashed like fog-bound ships. When they weren’t reminiscing about the war, they talked about the Pirates or the Steelers. Kruschev had toured the steel mills along the Monongahela River.
Her husband was a lawyer.
No, a professor.
A judge.
A doctor.
Whoever. The son of a bitch had it coming.
Dr. Tinley coughed lightly to regain my attention.
“Sometimes I hear my sister crying,” I said.
We were sitting at a low table across from each other. Between us were board games and puzzles, the kinds with knobs for little fingers. I felt like screaming: For Christ’s sake I’m in the sixth grade!
“The one who died?”
I couldn’t really draw, and my stories were wild and undisciplined. But what did he know of my characters’ inner turmoil and the motives for their cruelty, stick figures with bloated torsos and skinny arms and legs who lived precariously and died spectacularly in a world penciled luridly alive? Sometimes we suffer damage no doctor can heal.
After this visit, I told my mother I would not go back.
What was in his bag? It looked old. The leather was cracked. One handle had worked loose. When opened one side hung lopsided on bent hinges. I leaned over and looked inside. In one panel syringes were lined up like stick soldiers with hats, held in place by elastic bands, each labeled with the name of the patient. A pile of used syringes and cotton balls in a plastic bag lay at the bottom. In separate pockets were a reflex hammer, pen light with attachments, tongue depressors, and other shiny steel devices that reflected the light and whose use I didn’t want to know about. On the other side were a stethoscope, rubber gloves, pill vials, a bottle of alcohol, medicines in dark bottles, more silvery instruments of what seemed to be of frightful provenance.
What I did not expect to see was the gun. It was tucked in a pocket at one end of the bag. When Dr. Ross noticed that I had seen it, he took it out and flipped open the cylinder and spun it too fast for me to see if it was loaded. It looked real enough, like the kind used by detectives on television. With a quick flick of his wrist, he closed the cylinder. Click. Aiming at an invisible target, he pulled the trigger. CLICK! The crack of a tree limb. My mother and I flinched. He slipped the gun back into its pocket and closed the bag.
“You’ll live,” he said, patting me on the leg.
The Chinese essayist Lu Xun (1881-1936), who gave up the pursuit of medicine to become a writer, observed that, “Unlike those of wealth and rank, who are exempt from the laws of the netherworld, it is generally speaking to the advantage of the poor to be reborn immediately after death and for the modestly well-off to exist as ghosts for as long as possible.” This appears in an essay called “Death,” published in September, 1936, a month before he died. In the same piece he writes that in his will he will be passing on this bit of advice to his family: “Under no circumstances associate with people who harm others yet profess to oppose retaliation and to advocate tolerance.” More valuable than any estate.
It is early morning, still dark, and Dr. Ross is in his office getting ready for his house calls. He is especially careful in preparing the syringes: he measures out the precise quantities of medicines, labels the syringes in neat block printing, and clips them into his bag in the order of his rounds. He packs his instruments and reviews his patients’ records. From his desk drawer he takes out the instructions he had written for his nurse over a week ago. He takes the gun out of his black bag and casually turns it over in his hand. He points it at the photograph. He remembers the eyes: their bewilderment, then their shock: living, alive, perhaps for the first time in who but God knows how long, but just long enough for the shock to turn into understanding. He pulls the trigger. Click. He places the gun on his desk and goes into his nurse’s office and lays the instructions on her desk. He returns to his desk and smokes a cigarette and finishes his coffee. He takes a bullet from the same desk drawer and loads it into a chamber. He spins the cylinder and flips it closed. Click. He puts the barrel to his temple and pulls the trigger. CLICK. He removes the bullet and replaces it in the drawer. He puts the gun into its pocket in the black bag. Before leaving he takes the instructions from his nurse’s desk and puts them back in the drawer of his desk.
Traupmann had dressed the morning of his execution, Turgenev writes, “cheerfully and without any sign of constraint—almost gaily, just as though he had been invited for a walk.” There was a brief moment when the two of them looked directly at each other. Each shrugged in surprise. What will the day bring if not change for both?
Dr. Ross was right. I lived. When I returned to school, the teachers asked me if I had done the homework they’d sent to my home.
“No.”
“Then what did you do?”
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Nothing.”
“‘Black Bag’ is my fanciful attempt to solve a murder that might not have happened a long, long time ago. “To solve” does me too much justice, both in terms of the actual and the memory of it. Year after year when I was a kid I came down with strep throat, and the doctor who took care of me was undoubtedly as innocent as the 24-hour day, but somebody took out the villain who had murdered several women. When I saw the gun in my doctor’s medical bag, it didn’t register with me then. But now? What a story! Maybe. This is the first time I’ve submitted it. I’m not sure the point—we all carry a gun in our black bag—will get across; on the other hand, words aren’t hammers, and readers aren’t nails. Writers—I, at any rate—prefer a more indirect approach: an insinuation, like medicine that works slowly but to a purpose, of truth that, when grasped, might not solve anything, but does clear the way for a new and better question. Getting closer is what it’s all about. Have I?”
Frank Walters (he, him, his) lives and writes in Auburn, Alabama. After publishing academic papers in the fields of rhetoric and composition, he has turned to writing Creative Nonfiction. His work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Adelaide Literary Magazine.