Ms. Etta's Fast House Page 2

  At her leisure, Penny sipped until she’d had her fill. “Ain’t no man supposed to treat his own blood like you treated me,” she heckled, rocking back and forth slowly on the rise of that barrel. “Maybe that’s cause you wasn’t no man at all. You’ just mean old Halstead. Mean old Halstead.” Penny looked up the road when something in the wind called out to her. A car was headed her way. By the looks of it, she had less than two minutes to map out her future, so she dashed into the house, collected what she could and threw it all into a croaker sack. Somehow, it didn’t seem fitting to keep the back door to her shameful past opened, so she snatched the full pail off the ground, filled it from the last batch of moonshine Halstead had brewed. If her mother had ever planned on returning, Penny reasoned that she’d taken too long as she tossed the pail full of white lightning into the house. As she lit a full box of stick matches, her hands shook erratically until the time had come to walk away from her bitter yesterdays and give up on living out the childhood that wasn’t intended for her. “No reason to come back here, Momma,” she whispered, for the gentle breeze to hear and carry away. “I got to make it on my own now.”

  Penny stood by the roadside and stared at the rising inferno, ablaze from pillar to post. Halstead’s fried corpse smoldered on the lawn when the approaching vehicle ambled to a stop in the middle of the road. A young man, long, lean, and not much older than Penny took his sweet time stepping out of the late model Plymouth sedan. He sauntered over to the hump of roasted flesh and studied it. “Hey, Penny,” the familiar passerby said routinely.

  “Afternoon, Jinxy,” she replied, her gaze still locked on the thick black clouds of smoke billowing toward the sky.

  Sam “Jinx” Dearborn, Jr., was the youngest son of a neighbor, whose moonshine still went up in flames two months earlier. Jinx surveyed the yard, the smashed mason jars and the overturned water barrel.

  “That there Halstead?” Jinx alleged knowingly.

  Penny nodded that it was, without a hint of reservation. “What’s left of ’im,” she answered casually.

  “I guess you’ll be moving on then,” Jinx concluded stoically.

  “Yeah, I reckon I will at that,” she concluded as well, using the same even pitch he had. “Haven’t seen much of you since yo’ daddy passed. How you been?”

  Jinx hoisted Penny’s large cloth sack into the back seat of his car. “Waitin’ mostly,” he said, hunching his shoulders, “to get even.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much when I saw it was you in the road.” Penny was one of two people who were all but certain that Halstead had killed Jinx’s father by rigging his still to malfunction so he could eliminate the competition. The night before it happened, Halstead had quarreled with him over money. By the next afternoon, Jinx was making burial arrangements for his daddy.

  “Halstead got what he had coming to him,” Jinx reasoned as he walked Penny to the passenger door.

  “Now, I’ll get what’s coming to me,” Penny declared somberly, with a pocket full of folding money. “I’d be thankful, Jinxy, if you’d run me into town. I need to see a man about a dress.”

  2

  OH, DOCTOR!

  Delbert Gales stretched his legs when the train pulled into Union Station. The train had teetered through seven hundred miles of track along the Missouri Line, all the way from Texas. Delbert had sworn to himself, every hour on the hour, that the next time he boarded a train he’d have enough money to secure a bed on the Pullman car. The crook in his back proved that a man’s body wasn’t made to sleep propped up against a bench seat. And, after sitting down for nearly two days straight, he was eager to land his best pair of shoes on the cemented streets of St. Louis. With fifteen dollars to his name and a medical degree to his credit, Delbert had his sights set on a lot more. The letter he received two months ago informed him he had been accepted into the residency program at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, one of the few places a colored man could train to become a full-fledged surgeon. Despite Delbert’s thin frame and boyish appearance, he was twenty-two, educated and anxious to match wits with some of the brightest medical minds in the country.

  Feeling that he owed it to himself to take in the sights while strolling through the busy train station, Delbert spotted several tight skirts, attached to some of the nicest legs he’d ever seen. Red Cap baggage handlers darted here and there as he watched hordes of travelers scatting about, nearly all of them seeming to be in one big hurry. Delbert tried to ignore one shapely woman’s assets, who’d strutted out in front of him with a large suitcase in tow, but there was no denying her big city curves harnessed beneath a pink chiffon dress fitting so tightly it could have used some letting out in the back. After Delbert traced her steps all the way out of the depot, he realized he’d erred in judgment. The pink chiffon dress fit that woman’s behind just fine.

  “Hey, kid!” someone shouted at him from an opened taxi window. “You gon’ stand there all day wishing you was that pink dress or you gonna get to going where you need to be?” The taxi driver turned his palms up when Delbert’s puzzled expression fell flat. “Suit yourself then.” As the checkered cab pulled away from the curb, Delbert flagged him down.

  “Yeah, yeah. I need you to carry me to the Ambrose Arms, over on Lexington Avenue.”

  “Now you talking,” the driver cheered. “If that’s the onliest bag you got, jump on in. I’ll have you there in no time.”

  Delbert would have been all right with anchoring himself to that sidewalk for the rest of the afternoon, wishing he was that pink dress and countless others that clung just as tightly to other female travelers, but he figured he had better not get caught up doing anything that didn’t benefit his surgical training, big city girl-watching included. Delbert’s father, an automobile salesman, wouldn’t have stood for anything to get his only son off track after making numerous sacrifices to send him to Prairie View A&M University, outside of Houston, and subsequently to Meharry Medical College in Nashville. To show his appreciation, Delbert had taken life seriously, and made his father the proudest man in Ft. Worth, Texas. He had no designs on disappointing dear ole dad now. Delbert knew that being smart merely qualified him for success but didn’t guarantee it. He’d be forced to overcome the three things stacked against him. He appeared too young to be as accomplished as he was, he wasn’t tall, or well-built, like some of his contemporaries and his skin was two shades darker than most colored people considered acceptable for a surgeon at the time. Discrimination among Negroes was at its height, and many patients shared a common belief that doctors with lighter complexions were the smartest because they had more of the white man’s blood coursing through their veins. Delbert had proven that theory wrong hundreds of times and he was prepared to do so again, and as often as necessary.

  On that warm spring afternoon he wandered through the lobby of the apartment building, realizing for the first time how nervous he had become. Nervousness about surgical training, becoming the man everyone back home expected and making it on his own without the benefit of his father’s bank account, caused his chest to tighten.

  “I need to check in,” Delbert said to the male desk clerk. “There should be a room reserved for Gales, Delbert Gales,” he said, after the man glared his way and quickly blew him off to complete his current task. The clerk, who looked to be nearing age fifty, finally began perusing a list of names from a tablet of some sort on the back credenza.

  “Uh, we have a room for Mr. Delbert Gales,” the older clerk replied, without lending much thought to the young man standing before him. “Uh-huh, a-uh Dr. Gales from Texas. He’s not in yet but you can wait for him over there if you like.”

  Tired and hungry, Delbert wasted no time as he set out to clear up the man’s misconceptions. He extended his hand across the reception counter to offer his credentials. “I am Dr. Delbert Gales. Here is my identification. As you can see, I am from Texas and I’d like to have the key to my room. Now, unless you want me to call the hospital superintendent and have you explain w
hy I’m standing here trying to convince you to hand them over then—”

  “I guess I’d better check you in ... doctor,” the clerk backpedaled. He asked Delbert to sign the log, then handed him the key in a flash. “I hope you don’t hold it against me none but you appear kinda young to be a doctor. I got socks older than you.” He didn’t have to say another word. Delbert had seen and heard it all before.

  “Then I suggest you get yourself some new socks,” he advised, while turning to walk away.

  “Oh, Dr. Gales,” the clerk called out, “you forgot your identification. It sure will be nice having y’all stay here. Mr. M.K. Phipps and Mr. William Browning just arrived a little bit ago.” Those were the names of two other promising young doctors. Sure, Delbert had heard of them and he couldn’t wait to size them up for himself. He snapped out of a hazy daydream when the clerk informed him for the second time that a lounging suite had been prepared for the other arrivals throughout the afternoon. “So feel free to go right on up and knock off some of that traveling dust before you get settled in. That’s room number four-oh-seven, on the top floor. Take a right at the end of the hallway, you can’t miss it.”

  “Thank you kindly.” Delbert said, after returning the I.D. to his billfold resting atop the granite counter. “And who would I speak to about having a few extra towels sent to the room?”

  The clerk tossed a comfortable smile at him. “I’ll see to it personally, Dr. Gales. Wow, we sure are proud to have y’all here.” There was something peculiar in the way the older man’s perception of Delbert had transformed into overwhelming respect, just shy of adoration. The desk clerk’s expression begged to be addressed.

  “Is there something else?” Delbert asked evenly.

  “Well, now that you mentioned it, I get a little pain in my side after I eat my Maybelline’s chili.” The clerk poked at his side to point out exactly where his wife’s cooking had tormented him the most.

  “I have a surefire remedy for that. Don’t eat any more of her chili,” Delbert answered matter-of-factly. “Apologize to her but turn it down from now on. Obviously, it doesn’t agree with you. Trust me, she’ll understand.” He left the clerk standing near the bottom of the staircase, grinning and rubbing his side as if he’d been miraculously healed.

  When Delbert wandered down the hall toward the hospitality suite, laughter and merriment poured through the thin walls. As he lowered his bag to the floor outside room number four hundred and seven, the door whipped open from the other side. He poked his head in the doorway and almost had it knocked off in the process, as a wooden ice bucket, hurled in his direction, slammed against the door.

  “Don’t forget the ice this time, M.K.,” a man’s deep voice shouted with exuberance from inside the oversized room. The ice bucket bounced off the solid oak door and ricocheted into the capable clutches of M.K. Phipps, who had once been an All-American tailback at Howard University.

  “Bill, you just make sure to save me a seat at the table. I’ve been telling everybody back in Washington how I couldn’t wait to get you tangled up in a card game. I’m just the man to take some starch out of that pumped up ego you got going on and lighten your pockets while I’m at it.”

  M.K. Phipps was still as fit as ever, after serving two years in the Army, and wore the same wide-toothed grin Delbert remembered seeing in newspaper photos. William Browning was taller with a slighter build, a paper-sack brown complexion and a full head of curly hair. He’d had the good fortune of assisting in a successful kidney operation, one of the first performed by a colored surgeon. William’s name was included in a national journal article discussing the ground-breaking procedure. William Browning, M.D. became an overnight star in the medical community.

  “M.K. Phipps, well, I’ll be. I’m Delbert Gales.” When Delbert shook hands with the man who was built like a monument of steel, he understood why most would-be football foes feared going head to head with this one time hero of the gridiron. Delbert’s hand disappeared in the man’s colossal grasp.

  “Delbert, nice to meet cha’,” M.K. beamed. “The boys are inside. Hop in and make yourself at home but keep an eye on Bill. He’s a much better card cheat than he is at suturing, so watch out for his slow finger drag on the shuffle. Don’t get distracted with his high-toned signifying or you’ll miss it when he’s dealing off the bottom.”

  “Heyyy! I resemble that remark,” trailed M.K.’s offbeat comment, as William stepped to the doorway to get a look at who was holding up the card game.

  “Bill, take care of Gales here,” M.K. said, as he started down the long hallway. “Delbert, I’d keep one hand on my wallet, if I were you.”

  “Don’t take stock in anything that comes out of that kickball-sized head of his. M.K.’s been losing money to me for years and I’m not so sure he don’t like it that way. Ain’t nobody that bad at cards without trying to be.” William picked up the bag and carried it into the room.

  “Thanks, uh ... William,” Delbert replied awkwardly, having been thoroughly impressed with papers William published regarding early studies on Sickle Cell Anemia.

  “Call me Bill. Come on in and meet the boys.” He sat the leather luggage down and whistled loudly, cowboy-on-the-open-range style, above the noise spurred by numerous conversations all going on at once. Delbert didn’t know what to make of this conglomerate of gifted young talent, exercising an opportunity to yuck it up with other noted contemporaries. Eventually, the noise subsided enough for Bill to make a swooping introduction. “Fellas, this here is Delbert Gales, the boy-genius from Texas we’ve been hearing so much about. Make him feel at home and save some of his money for me.” Hearty chuckling rang throughout the room. As soon as it occurred to Delbert that his accomplishments had been discussed, a strange but warm feeling of fraternity swept over him. In that instance, he felt like one of the fellows, even though he’d still have to find his place among them. Along with the men in that room, he would be tried, tested and twisted beyond anything he could have imagined. Seven out of one hundred and twenty-two medical students were selected for surgical internships at the famous hospital, which prided itself on training the best Negro surgeons in the country.

  “Delbert,” Bill continued, “the slick dresser over there is Charley Morrow. The big fella across from him is Claude “Frenchy” Babineaux. Now, Claude, he’s no bona fide Frenchman, mind you, but I’m sure somebody responsible for hatching him was.” The fair-skinned man waved hello then went back to studying his cards as if they’d changed for the better since the last time he stared them down. “That one sitting next to him is Harry Johnson. Course, you might have heard of him ’cause of some national colored citation with his name on it.” Every black medical student, and most white ones, had heard of Harry Johnson’s name after he achieved the highest scores possible on every standardized medical examination. “Ollie Washington’s the joker of the bunch,” Bill added, “and the long one stretched out on the divan with the forty-five caliber charmer is Baltimore Floyd. He’s a friend of M.K.’s and a good man to know.”

  “Glad to meet y’all,” Delbert said, after the introductions ended. Baltimore’s revolver, resting in his shoulder holster, suggested to Delbert that he wasn’t interested in saving lives, taking a few every now and then, perhaps.

  Bill observed Delbert, somewhat awed by the assortment of men who had traveled from the outstretched corners of the United States to become skilled in surgery. “Now, look, Tex, I know this might appear to be a premiere collection of medical Einsteins but your talents have earned you a place here as much as the rest of these high-minded low-brows.”

  “Yeah, and if he sits his talents down at this poker table,” M.K. quipped, “his spending change will belong to me.” Delbert now laughed as loud as the others. “Delbert, we sent out for sandwiches, if you’re hungry. We should’ve smuggled a few of ’em out of the cafeteria in wax paper when we had the chance.”

  Bill shook his head, protesting the idea. “And have Hiram Knight looking at me
cross eyed? Hell, naw. I might be crazy but I’ve never been mistaken for stupid.” Hiram Knight, the legendary Director of Surgery, was responsible for seeing to the moral conduct of his interns as well as to their technical mentorship.

  “From what I hear, the Little General keeps count of every cotton ball and bandage at HGP,” Ollie said, looking up from his cards.

  Delbert scratched his head, took out a small piece of paper then read over it. “Did I miss something? I thought orientation was Monday morning.”

  “Some of the fellas got in early and went over to scout around,” Bill informed him. “Said they had a nice time grazing over the weekend stock.”

  “I heard there’re over two hundred nurses on staff,” Delbert said with a mischievous leer, eager to have his way with every last one of them. “I guess that’s why they call Homer G. Phillips Hospital, HGP, the Halls of Good and Plenty.”

  M.K. poured himself a stiff shot of whiskey and sampled it. “Round these parts, it’s also known as the House of Good Pussy.” Everyone in the room laughed and applauded that particular acronym.

  After the laughter died down, Ollie tapped his shirt pocket insinuating there was something vitally important inside it. “Matter of fact, I had the notion to test out that theory and I convinced one of the madams of the house to meet me for dinner. Hope she don’t mind springing for it ’cause I’m busted.”

  “Just keep ole M.K. Phipps on deck in case she does mind,” M.K. offered. Whether Ollie’s date was interested in either of them was of no concern, they were in St. Louis and itching to blow off some steam in the way of female companionship. Soon enough, they’d get their fair shot at releasing a lot more than just steam.

  Delbert had been waiting over two months for an opportunity to prove himself in the operating room and now he realized he had to do the same with the ladies in order to keep step. There he was in the midst of other talented black men, who had also taken it upon themselves to endure the rigors of long hours and intense scrutiny for little to no money. Improving the quality of life for their patients, along with the perks associated with being single physicians was their reward. Delbert was feeling better about his chances to make a big splash in a deep pond and although he felt more at ease than he’d anticipated, he quickly came to discover that keeping his head above water wasn’t quite so easy.