Ben Hoban is a GP in Exeter.
Monday morning arrived like a bull in a rodeo, mean and full of fight, and Johnny Valdez* woke up with the feeling that it had already thrown him off. He muted the alarm and reached for a bottle of antacid on the floor by his bed, feeling the bile in his throat. He was swallowing down a different sort of bitterness too, and he doubted whether there was any medicine for it, at least not this early in the day. He shaved, trying not to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, and dressed for work. There was a foil dish on the side in the kitchen containing something congealed which he could not remember having seen before. He left it where it was and went out to face the week, walking to Epping tube station the way a man walks when he has a gun to his back, not hurrying, but doing his best to keep one step ahead of trouble.
He recognised that something important had changed, although he could not put his finger on what it was.
When Johnny boarded the train, he reckoned it would take him about where it usually did, to a day at a desk, sweating sense out of the scroll of tasks on his screen until it was time to go home again. Thinking back on it later, he shook his head at how wrong he’d been. Then again, maybe he’d always been going someplace else and just hadn’t known it at the time. The carriage was already full, and Johnny wondered, if he had the choice, would he rather take a seat that a dozen other folks wanted for themselves, or stand quietly where he was and not be in dispute with the world? He swallowed again, trying to keep his expression neutral. When they entered the tunnel on the far side of Leyton it was a grey day, drizzling softly and unsure of itself. When they came out again past Shepherd’s Bush, the light was hard, the sky the colour of faded denim, and the landscape was a flat waste of scrub and saguaro cacti, reaching out of the ground with their malformed hands. It was hot too, in a way that sapped the strength from your legs and stole the words from your mouth before you could say them. As the train pulled into the next station, Valdez saw that the name of the place was painted onto a wooden shingle. Instead of ‘White City,’ he read ‘Contention.’ He recognised that something important had changed, although he could not put his finger on what it was. It was if he had just woken from a dream in which everything was wrong, and it felt good to be himself again.
He walked across the way to Henry’s place and pushed through the saloon doors, waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gentler light inside. A couple of grizzled prospectors sat hunched over their breakfast at one of the tables. Aside from them, the only customer was a skeletally thin youth in shirt sleeves leaning on the bar over a glass of whisky, his coat in a heap on the floor next to him. His ginger hair was pasted onto his pale head with some kind of lotion and a thin moustache clung to his lip. He grinned as he turned his head towards Valdez, but his pupils were pin-point small and it was if he was looking right through him. The proprietor was standing behind the bar.
‘Morning, friend. How do you like our new médico? He only got one kind of medicine, but he ain’t too proud to take it himself, a real man of the people.’ Henry nodded cheerfully at the young man, then looked more seriously at Valdez. ‘You been gone too long, doc.’
‘That’s so,’ replied Valdez. Then to his neighbour, ‘You the new company doctor, huh?’
‘Yessir, all official, got my contract right here…’ He reached for the inside pocket of his coat, then realised it was on the floor, looked down at it for a moment, giggled, and shrugged his shoulders before returning to his drink. Valdez could see that his teeth were rotten, and he thought there was plenty else that was rotten too. He moved over a step towards him and lowered his face to look him directly in the eyes.
‘You go right now, see the señor for me, you tell him Dr Valdez is coming. Understand?’ The man’s face fell as he nodded slowly, and it seemed for the first time as if there was a person behind those distant eyes. Without a word, he bent down to pick up his coat, brushing off sawdust from the floor. He put it on and walked out of the saloon, a little unsteady, but more or less in a straight line.
The house was a little way outside of town, past the mine and the sheds where they stamped the ore and up on a hill so that it caught the breeze in summer. As Valdez made his way up the slope on a bay that Henry had loaned him, he could see a rider waiting for him outside the gate, the stock of a Springfield carbine resting on his saddle.
‘You can’t come here, doc, you know that. Not after what happened with the señora.’
‘Well then, Jimmy, I guess it’s like that time I was busy setting your pa’s busted leg and couldn’t see to your piles, still did though.’ The rider’s hat was pulled down low over his eyes, and it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like he smiled a little.
‘He sees you, he won’t be happy, no two ways about it. You think I owe you, and maybe I do, but I’d be settling the score better if I turned you around right now.’ Valdez smiled now, looking up at the man and nodding slowly.
‘I know, and I appreciate the advice, but I still think I’ll speak to him some, see what he has to say.’ Jimmy shrugged a shoulder and turned his horse around to face the pale pink of the adobe wall and the timber double doors. He and Valdez dismounted and Jimmy knocked twice on the dark wood with the heel of his gloved hand. After a moment, the right-hand door opened inwards and they entered the courtyard of the house. A hand led away their horses and left them in the shade of an orange tree, looking up at a veranda above the stables, where an older man in a dark suit was reclining on a wing-back chair, smoking. He exhaled slowly, inspecting the end of his Montecristo, and it was hard to say whether his look of distaste was directed at the two men below or the expensive cigar.
‘I think maybe you been out in the sun too long, huh, Jimmy? Why else would you bring this peón into my house?’ He spoke softly, the way you would to a child, although there was steel in his voice. Jimmy kept quiet, and when Valdez replied, it was simply as one man to another.
‘If something matters to you, shouldn’t you take care of it? If I leave town and you give my place to some dope fiend who needs help wiping his own nose, it’s your business. Why should I complain? People round here start to think that’s how the company looks after them, though, maybe they don’t feel so happy about it. I don’t know, I’m just a doctor.’ The señor lowered his cigar and looked directly at Valdez. It was some time before he spoke again.
‘People in this town want to stay healthy, they do what they’re told. You plan on making any more trouble for me, hombre, you’d better find yourself a good undertaker first.’ They were not words that invited a response, but Valdez went on.
‘A man with a silver mine and a nice house can talk big, but what will he do when his workers are sick and his own hands are too soft to hold a pick or lay a charge? Why should there be trouble between us anyway? If one of yours comes to me for help, it ain’t right to turn them away, but I’ll send a bill to the company office with my compliments, and I’ll be sure to let folks know that it’s the señor who’s taking such good care of them.’ Valdez had made sure to hold the man’s gaze, and it was only after he finished speaking that he noticed the short barrel of the Deringer pointing towards him from his right hip. The distance was not great, but it was really a weapon for the poker table, and he would have to shoot through the metalwork of the veranda to reach him. In the same moment he took in both the flash from the handgun’s muzzle and the señor’s white teeth as he smiled.
For the second time that day, Johnny woke abruptly, the clatter from the tracks setting his heart racing as the train pulled into Ealing Broadway. He was leaning against the glass partition at the end of a row of seats and his neck felt stiff. The day was still grey, but it seemed to him more inviting of possibility than earlier, and as he left the station, he realised that he was walking with an unfamiliar sense of purpose. When he reached the surgery, he let himself in through the staff entrance. He swiped the door of the purple team office but did not sit down in his cubicle as usual. Instead, he nodded briefly at the handful of colleagues who had arrived before him and took the stairs to the management suite on the floor above. He had been there once before after a significant event; it had not gone well. The glass door of the meeting room was shut. Through it, he could see the practice manager, the managing partner, and the business manager sitting in conversation around one end of the long table. He took hold of the handle, briefly savouring the cold of the brushed steel against his fingers, opened the door, and walked in. For a moment, they kept talking. Then, noticing that he was neither leaving nor carrying tea and coffee, they looked up. The practice manager’s eyes flicked briefly down to Johnny’s name badge before settling into a professional smile.
For a moment, they kept talking. Then, noticing that he was neither leaving nor carrying tea and coffee, they looked up
.‘We’re just in a meeting, John. Would you like to make an appointment to see me later?’ Her smile faded a little as he stood there, looking first at her, then at the three of them, and then for a while at some other place, breathing in the hot desert air and letting it out again slowly. He spoke softly, the way you would to a child, although there was steel in his voice.
‘It’s Valdez. I’ve come to tell you that things are going to have to change. From up here, it probably looks like everything is fine, but down there, it ain’t so. You tell yourselves that we’re delivering even more appointments than last year, but don’t you ever wonder why we need to? Maybe you spend so much time looking at the workflow that you don’t see the people anymore, going around in circles and getting lost in the system. I’m done being a triage monkey. Sack me if you want to, but you got to change things before it’s too late.’ He was not wearing a hat, but as he tilted back his head and looked down at the group at the table, it was as if he was peering out from under the brim of a worn and dusty Stetson. The practice manager opened her mouth slightly without making any kind of sound, then closed it again. The business manager looked anxiously at the managing partner, who got up suddenly, knocking over her chair. She stood with her feet shoulder-width apart, hands hovering at her sides, and locked eyes with Valdez. For a moment, nobody breathed. Then, smiling, she bent down, picked up the fallen chair, and offered it to him.
‘Have a seat, mister, we were just saying we need some new ideas around here. I’ll put the kettle on.’
Johnny Valdez nodded, swallowing a little out of habit, although there was no bitterness in it.
*Author’s note: With apologies to Elmore Leonard
Featured image by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash
