Machine Dreams

the
Life
newsprint pictures—they looked almost like enlarged Kodak snapshots, out of focus and aged. Mitch smiled. “Home is damn morbid lately, McAtee. I don’t know why you have to have those funeral clippings right here where Doc and I sit.”
    “I’m trying to get you boys to think serious,” McAtee said.
    Reb raised both hands to his eyes and peered at the pictures as though through binoculars. “Fate does play the old trick.”
    “Damn right. Never can tell how things will turn around.” McAtee set the beers up and gestured toward the clippings. The glossy paper of the pictures shone slightly in the light of the lamp. “Look at old Blood and Guts. Liberated the damn graveyard and then laid down in it. All those battles and then breaks his bastard neck in a kraut car wreck.”
    Reb pulled his beer mug closer, turning it by the cracked handle. “Plenty broke their fool necks for him.”
    “Right, Doc.” McAtee made a show of scowling. “Broke their necks to save yours.”
    Reb grinned. “Old Man here saved my neck personally—I know that for a fact. Isn’t that right, Cowboy?”
    “That’s right, and I’d say you owe me a little sobriety.” Mitch threw McAtee a collaborative glance. “You’re an insult to your profession and to Bond Hospital.”
    Reb laughed. “He’s on me again, McAtee. Reads me like a book.” He took a long drink, draining half the glass. “Damn you, Cowboy, you know I don’t take a drop till one in the afternoon. McAtee, tell him.”
    “I got work to do. You two want the special? Yeah, you want the special.” McAtee moved down the bar away from them, pulling his long apron tighter. Behind him the glass bottles registered the shading of his passage, then shone again with their same dull sparkle.
    Mitch leaned on the bar, his hands touching his cool glass. “Really, Doc, you and Clayton been keeping some late hours here.”
    “Cowboy, I believe you’re serious.” Reb was quiet a moment, then tipped the glass and drank slowly. “Clayton’s been hitting it lately.”
    “He was damn drunk when you brought him home last night. Finished that bottle the two of you started.”
    “No kidding.” Reb took his cigarettes from his suit jacket pocket. “My drinking buddy is getting ahead of me.”
    “Maybe you’d better talk to him, Reb. Be a doctor, give him a scare.”
    “Hell, Mitch, where you been? He’s already scared, that’s why he’s drinking so much. He’s scared about Katie. Thinks she’s going to die and then Bess will go to pieces. Trying to beat Bess to it, fall apart himself before anyone else does.” Reb lit a Marlboro. “He’s wrong. Bess could stand up under anything.”
    “Die? Katie?” Mitch felt his stomach tense as though in preparation for a blow.
    “Listen, she’s not going to die. I just said Clayton thinks she will, though he won’t admit it.” He took a drag on the cigarette, then looked at Mitch squarely. “Katie’s on a daily dosage of penicillin now. She’s safer from infection than you or me, but Clayton doesn’t believe it. The truth is, Katie scares him every day. She’s not the healthy kid she used to be. Clayton can’t take it.”
    Mitch touched the rim of his glass. The edge was blunt and thick. “Katie won’t ever be any better, will she?”
    “She’ll get some stronger, maybe, but she’ll always have that heart murmur, tire easily … be delicate. No way to repair a damaged heart. We never even knew about that first strep throat. Katie kept it a secret because she didn’t want to miss school. Strep symptoms go away, show up later as fatigue, pain in the joints—and by then it’s rheumatic. But everyone in town had a flu then, and Bess thought Katie had it too. Kept her in bed and gave her aspirin. I saw her after about a week, heard the murmur, knew what had happened. That was in December. She just didn’t have much resistence afterward and got pneumonia in February.”
    “That was the term she was out of school.”
    “Yes, and she was ashamed to be home in bed. Bess tried to explain it all but the kid is—over-responsible.”
    Mitch touched the grooved, uneven surface of the bar. It was true, she had to be perfect, like Bess. Ten years old and would drive herself to a frazzle. “And the second time, she didn’t tell you she had a sore throat?”
    “She knew she was supposed to, but in the winter of ’44 she’d only been back in school a few weeks, afraid we’d take her out again. I’d had