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  “Yes, doctor,” answered the petite and perturbed duty nurse. Her name was Sue Jacobs, a pleasant twenty-four-year-old with a penchant for blowing off doctors who exhibited a healthy appetite for casual affairs with nurses. Since Delbert hadn’t looked at her twice, she felt quite comfortable in his company until now. His strange behavior was puzzling so she flashed her soft brown eyes innocently, riddled by his question.

  “That sounds like a typical appendicitis. It’s odd that she isn’t being seen in the appropriate unit,” he reasoned.

  “One of the staff has had a look at her, decided the pain wasn’t caused by her appendix and they sent her over for you to give your opinion,” the nurse said, as if to ask why any of that mattered.

  Delbert was oblivious to the nurse looking upside his head like it had a hole in it. “So, she’s not expecting?” he asked, in the same confused manner as before.

  “I’m sure by now she’s expecting for a qualified physician to walk into that room and examine her, doctor,” smarted the nurse, after momentarily forgetting herself.

  Delbert read over the chart a second time, praying he’d missed something. He stalled long enough to raise the nurse’s suspicions. “Is she prepped for examination?” he asked, while moving toward the door to open it.

  “Yes, doctor, at least she was before we started this conversation,” Sue answered, her voice trailing off at the end of it.

  “Mrs. Collier, I’m Dr. Gales,” Delbert announced as he entered the small room with white walls, a standard examination table and a short desk which doubled for a place to situate instruments and write evaluations.

  “ ’Bout time, Doctor!” the frumpy older woman grumbled with both eyes cut sharply at him. “I been shuffled around this place like a damn dairy cow and I want you to know I don’t care for it.”

  Delbert took one look at the large brooding woman and smiled. “Yes, Mrs. Collier, I don’t blame you for being upset. It’s been a long day and I aim to move things along for you if I can. How’d that be?”

  “That’ll be just peachy,” the woman chuckled. “I’m beginning to feel better already.”

  How’d that be? Nurse Jacobs thought. Oh, brother. She didn’t know what to make of this young doctor she’d heard such a great deal about. Just outside the room, he was as worried as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Now, his bedside manner was downright charming. What caused the quick turnabout wasn’t clear, but she simply chalked it up to what the senior nurses referred to as baby doctors on “training wheels” syndrome. Some interns weren’t afforded the opportunity to see a lot of different ailments before arriving and immediately found themselves subjected to big city illnesses in an often overcrowded facility. “Sometimes it’s too soon, too much and too fast,” Head Nurse Robinson surmised when one of the fellows buckled under pressure and washed out of the program in the early stages. “They usually sneak off and turn tail for home if the training wheels start to wobble before they know it.”

  Delbert looked the patient over thoroughly with his assistant watching his every move. He discovered that her discomfort was caused by ascites, ascitic fluid causing the pain and bulging flanks in the abdomen as opposed to a growth in the abdominal cavity. He explained to Mrs. Collier her need for medication, and because it was less complicated than he’d originally suspected, she was expected to heal within a week. The young nurse followed him outside of the room after grasping his impressive examination technique and heady prognosis.

  “You were very good in there, doctor,” she politely complimented him. “You probably saved her from the knife. Good for you. Good for her. Nevertheless, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. While we were in with Exam Room Two, another patient has been prepped for you in Number Four. After what I just saw in there with Mrs. Collier, this is a cakewalk for you. A simple external examination ought to do it and then we’re off for lunch. Here’s her chart. She’s experiencing vaginal discharge and discomfort during urination.”

  Delbert froze. He swallowed hard but didn’t want to appear thrown off. “Sure, I’ve done enough of those to know my way around,” he said, envisioning someone as large and equally unattractive as Mrs. Samuella Collier, who was unquestionably older than his mother and several pounds heavier. Delbert wished for the most hideous woman alive to be dreadful and draped on the other side of that door. Unfortunately, the moment his eyes landed on her lying at ease on the examination table with her feet placed apply in the stirrups, a dilemma begun to grow inside of his boxers.

  Wearing a surprisingly perky smile and not much else, she happened to be the same woman in the tight pink dress Delbert had fantasized about at the train station. He’d dreamed of her in that exact compromising position, flat on her back with both feet reaching toward the ceiling but this was altogether different. His dream had turned into a nightmare, one that forced him to stand by as it unfolded.

  After staring between the patient’s thighs for what seemed like forever, Delbert heard a woman’s voice. It was Nurse Jacobs beckoning him. “Dr. Gales, is there a problem, something you need me to do?” she asked, for the second time.

  “Oh, uh ... no,” he answered, snapping out of an awkward gaze. “No, I’m fine. Sorry. Ms. Alberta Hawkins,” he said, reading her name aloud from the chart. “I wasn’t sure I had the right notes. I must’ve confused you with someone else.”

  “Naw, you got the right one, doctor,” she purred shamelessly, while glancing down at the stiff erection in his white uniform slacks. “I ain’t ever been so sure about nothing in my whole life.”

  Cleverly, the patient opened her legs slightly wider. Her ploy didn’t go unnoticed by the attentive nurse. She’d seen women with some of the most unthinkable conditions flirt with doctors in mixed company. Likewise, more than a few physicians have sent her away on pointless errands in order to take advantage of the right situation. Delbert appeared to get caught off guard, uncertain how to handle his obvious attraction to the woman regardless of her current symptoms. He hesitated to begin the interview.

  Having been through this sort of thing before, Nurse Jacobs removed the chart from Delbert’s grasp. “Ms. Hawkins, the doctor has had a very trying day. He’ll need a moment to compose himself,” she said, opening the manila folder.

  “He don’t have to go composing his self on my account,” Ms. Hawkins flirted. “He’s a real thrill packaged just like he is now.”

  “Okay, let’s get something straight,” the nurse replied, once she’d seen enough. “This is a hospital, not a dance hall. If you can’t respect yourself, at least you could save all that cooing until I’m out of the room.” That last comment was aimed at Delbert, who until then had become merely a bystander.

  “Yeah, she’s right,” he said, nodding his head in a deliberate and methodical manner. This is my profession. This is not the time for letting what I really want getting in the way. She’s the patient, I’m the doctor, and the nurse ain’t missing a beat. “Let’s concentrate on the matter at hand. Ms. Hawkins, how long has this problem existed?”

  Although Delbert worked hard at training his focus above the draping, what he’d witnessed going on beneath it was getting the best of him.

  Smacking her lips in direct opposition to the nurse’s interference, the patient answered with her tone subdued and edgy. “The problem started existin’ when my no good steady got it in his head to tip out on me a few weeks back. Can you fix it, doctor?”

  “I’ll do the best I can, ma’am,” Delbert answered, feeling sorry for her, but thankful that he wasn’t lucky enough to make her acquaintance at the train station and ultimately sharing what her steady had stumbled home and greeted her with. Seeing her as just another patient for the first time, Delbert experienced no additional angst while treating her. He took a seat on the short stool at the end of the examination table. He inspected her thoroughly, collected a specimen and then studied it beneath a microscope on the adjacent desk. Before long, he’d begun humming a mellow tune. Eventually Alberta
Hawkins hummed along with him and wiggled her toes to the beat.

  “Ooh, that’s nice,” she said, more relaxed than before. “I always liked that song. Never could remember the name of it though.”

  “‘The Very Thought of You,’” answered Nurse Jacobs as she smiled amiably. “I’ve always been fond of it too.” Somehow decorum was restored in that small white room. Delbert had confronted his demons and with a little help from a crafty assistant, he chartered a route back to respectability, a great place to be for a new doctor trying out his training wheels. And since the specimen he swabbed proved to be a garden variety case of gonorrhea, he was able to treat the attractive woman immediately with a dose of penicillin, although she was all too enthusiastic to straddle the table for an injection. Delbert fought back a laugh when Nurse Jacobs turned her nose up at the sight of the woman’s behind readily tooted skyward.

  “That’s how you ended up with the clap in the first place,” she wanted to say, but didn’t. “Better luck next time,” she told the woman on her way out, after Delbert refused to accept her home number and the standing invitation for late night house calls. Moments later, the nurse checked her watch. She tidied up the room as Delbert made notes in his training journal for his report to Dr. Hiram Knight after each shift.

  There was a naiveté about this young man of promise from Texas, she thought. If she didn’t know better, she’d have assumed he was afraid of women by the way he initially balked at going near Alberta Hawkins. Good thing for him, she didn’t know better.

  Delbert was a virgin, despite how hard he worked at concealing it. Coming face to face with one substantiated case of gonorrhea wasn’t going to stand in his way either, not by a long shot. Delbert stepped onto the elevator when the same nurse glided between the doors. He’d had the chance to recount the morning’s activities in his mind and it wasn’t at all as stellar as he imagined it would have been. A quick glance at the nurse conveyed a lot of what she was thinking. Her eyes darted back and forth then drifted toward the floor. “I wasn’t that bad, was I?” Delbert asked as they exited the elevator together.

  “Excuse me?” she said, knowing exactly what he meant.

  “I mean, I did buckle there at the end, but I couldn’t have been as lame as that look you saddled me with implied.”

  “What look? I didn’t say a word.”

  “You didn’t have to,” he said. “Your expression said it all.” Delbert read her name tag and winced. “Nurse Jacobs, Sue, could you do me a favor and keep this between us?”

  “I wish I could,” she apologized, “only I have to make a report at the end of my shift and hand it in for review. Besides, why should I go out of my way for you when you’ve just decided to take the time to learn my name?”

  Delbert threw his head back and whistled. “This’ll be the end of me.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. When I report how you calmed a patient who was very upset after being sent here and there, made a good diagnosis, and acted professionally when seduced by a naked woman, you’ll come out on top. That is, unless you do something to mess all that up this afternoon. See you later, doctor,” she said, walking off in the opposite direction from the staff dining hall.

  “Sue Jacobs, you’re all right with me,” he said to himself, standing in the middle of wide hallway. “Yeah, all right with me.”

  “What’s all right with you?” M.K. asked, from the other end of a half-eaten pressed ham sandwich.

  “Oh, nothing, just trying to keep up with my first day on the floor is all,” Delbert answered. “Hey, was there anymore of that ham?”

  “Uhh-huh and plenty of it where this came from. Come on, I’ll show you where they keep the good stuff.”

  Serving trays were set aside in the surgeon’s lounge in the event that a difficult case prevented the golden boys of medicine from making it to the cafeteria. Delbert’s stomach growled when he saw the buffet. “Man, I know I’m not supposed to be in here. This is fit for a king.”

  “You’re almost right,” M.K. corrected him, while grabbing yet another sandwich and a soda to go. “They lay all of this out for the surgical staff. Most of ’em too stuck up to appreciate it though. I know you must be hungry, go ahead and dig in.”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble over this,” Delbert objected cautiously.

  “Man, what’s gotten into you? You belong here, there’s good grub, so dig in.” When Delbert’s hunger won out, he stacked his plate so high that M.K. laughed. “Now, that’s more like it.”

  “You tell him, M.K.,” seconded Dr. Hiram Knight, entering the room. “Keeping your strength up is as important as keeping your spirits up.” Delbert felt like a sinner listening to a preacher pitching a sermon directly at him. “You did a fine job in there,” Knight congratulated M.K. “We might have lost the patient’s hand if it hadn’t been for your battlefield training. You could learn a lot from him, Delbert, a whole lot.” Dr. Knight nibbled on a piece of toasted bread before someone came in to call on him for another case. “Glad to have you back, M.K.,” he offered on his way out.

  “Thank you, sir, glad to be back.” M.K. felt eyes plastered on him, so he stared back at Delbert. “What!” he shouted.

  “What? How dare you ask me what when I’ve been up to my elbows in expectant mothers, old battleaxes and wayward women all this time while you’re upstairs with the chief performing your first miracle?”

  “Any of those wayward women happen to be good looking?” was M.K.’s anxious reply.

  “One of them was pretty stacked, enough to get me worked up,” Delbert answered nonchalantly.

  “Ha-ha, the boy is growing up fast. Did you get her private exchange?”

  “Yeah, I did, but I didn’t have no use for her phone number. She was lying there with the evidence oozing out to prove it,” he rattled off quickly. “I’m trying to hear all about you saving a man’s hand and you’re going on about a patient with a nasty irritation.”

  M.K. eyed Delbert curiously. “You say she was a looker and stacked to boot. And, you treated her right?” He frowned as Delbert contended that he was right on all counts. “Then somebody needs to sit you down a spell. What am I gonna do with you, Tex? You got all the way to third base and then she opened her legs wider, giving you the signal to slide in for home. Instead you went in standing up. Pitiful.”

  Delbert replayed the way things went down. He shook his head disappointedly. “I guess I could use some coaching on women.”

  “Give it some time. You need to walk before you can run. Maybe I ought to drop you by the high school to practice before your next time at bat. You think about it while I head out back for some fresh air and a cigarette. Got another miracle scheduled in an hour. A man got a hammer stuck in his rectum and now he expects us to go up in there and get it out.” Delbert clenched his buttock cheeks when calculating the unrivaled pain associated with getting it lodged up there in the first place.

  “Damn, M.K., a real hammer?”

  “Yep, the end with the nail claw on it.”

  11

  THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

  Just outside of the courthouse a large angry crowd swelled.

  Tensions soared when more than an hour crawled past and the city’s deputy mayor hadn’t addressed the crowd’s concerns after he’d promised to return with full disclosure of passing test results. Opposing parties on both sides grew increasingly more vocal with their comments and unfounded suspicions of the other. Suddenly, two paddy wagons rolled into the town square, parting the rising sea of animosity. As if on cue, the Metro Police Mobile Units idled at the base of the courthouse steps to deter onlookers when the department chief escorted an intimidated city leader out of the front entrance. Despite the fact that he had a platoon of officers in riot gear flanking them on either side to prevent an onset of violence, his eyes darted back and forth as he surveyed the horde.

  Henry Taylor had completed the exam over an hour ago and he also had the foresight to utilize the rear exit, avoi
ding the risk of being recognized by the mob in the event that things got out of hand. He managed to convince three others to do the same but some of them couldn’t pass on being showered with thunderous ovations upon emerging through the front doors after completing the lengthy civil service examination. Pretending to be curious but indifferent bystanders, Henry and those friends of his with level heads loitered on the broad sidewalk behind the massive gathering. While watching the situation simmer to a slow boil, each of them wanted cooler heads to prevail, although it seemed highly unlikely.

  “All right, that’ll be enough of that!” the police chief yelled into the narrow end of a large cardboard megaphone, when several people continually voiced their opinions regarding the city’s stand to open the force to blacks. For a man in his mid-fifties with graying hair, Chief Riley appeared to be in decent shape, considering he was as lazy as they came and only appointed to his post after digging up dirt on the last mayor before he was ousted by a front-page sex scandal involving a colored woman. “We all know why we’re here and I won’t stand for any civil disobedience despite how you might feel over the outcome,” the chief threatened, in his finely polished blue uniform. “That means we won’t hesitate to haul the lot of you off to jail if your actions demand it.” Once the gathering quieted down to his satisfaction, the top cop took one calculated step backward to yield the floor.

  “I want to thank you in advance for keeping it down while we get on with the business at hand. Remember that we stand for the city of St. Louis and hope that you accept this class of Metro Police cadets with a measure of respect and dignity. Nothing short of that will be tolerated.” After the deputy mayor lowered the boom, a hushed murmur spread throughout the audience. There was no use in getting arrested before hearing the verdict. “Good, we understand one another then,” he said, in a tone more resolute than before. “First let me be very candid in telling you that out of sixty-one applicants, our highest number to sit for the exam, we have selected twelve deserving and qualified men for the next three-month training class.”