"I noticed that. It seems you have an audience, or rather an onlooker." She speaks in an easy but guarded voice, looking over my shoulder.

"Who? Oh." I turn around. Across the tiny quadrangle, still holding the steel chart in both hands, Bob Comeaux is looking straight at me.

"Yeah. He's waiting to see me when I finish."

"Hm. So it seems. Could I also?"

"Also what?"

"Have a word with you."

"Sure."

Mickey is thrashing impatiently. Lucy is spoiling her game.

I'm out the door and down the hall, looking for a wheelchair for Mickey.

"Doctor!" A sharp peremptory un-Southern man's voice. "Just hold it right there."

It's Bob Comeaux, with Sue Brown holding a chart. He's angry, I see at once, so angry that he's past prudence, to the point of showing his anger toward another doctor in the presence of a nurse-which for a doctor is angry indeed. He's lost his temper. His nostrils flare and have actually whitened where they join the lip. Sue Brown gives me a frightened smile.

Bob Comeaux is not smiling. His eyes are up in his eyebrows, mouth tight like a chief of surgery on grand rounds.

"Doctor, would you mind stepping over here?" We walk back, past the open door of the room, presumably to get a little away from Sue Brown. We don't want a nurse to see doctors fight. But Sue Brown has vanished into thin air. For a split second I am aware of Lucy through the doorway, standing still, her brown eyes rounded.

Bob Comeaux and I find ourselves standing side by side, backed against the wall, hands in pockets, looking down at our toes in a studious exercise of control, of not facing each other, not confronting, not yelling, not fistfighting. We could be a couple of horsy docs discussing the hunter-jumper show. I notice that his field boots are muddy. He's wearing short spurs. I remember wondering at that very moment if his coming to the hospital in riding clothes is simply a matter of convenience or whether it is more than that.

"Doctor, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" asks Bob Comeaux pleasantly, smiling-white around the mouth with rage-down at his boots.

"I was doing the consultation on Mickey you asked for."

"I saw what you were doing."

"You did?"

"You ran a Tauber test, then some Luria X's and O's. I saw you."

"So?"

"What the fuck for?"

"I-"

"And you were about to wheel her out."

"Yes."

"Where were you taking her?"

"Down to get a PETscan. That's the best I can do in this hospital. You must have seen the order on the chart."

"I sure as hell did. But to what end, for Christ's sake?"-smiling, taking a deep breath, examining each muddy boot carefully. He's getting it back, his lost temper. "Oh, I know you, old buddy!"-now smiling brilliantly, even nudging me. He has recovered himself and can wipe the smile and come close with a comradely seriousness. "God knows, I understand your intellectual curiosity, Tom-such is the stuff of great discoveries-but I'm just an ordinary clinician and must think first of my patient."

"I think she's got a cortical deficit, probably prefrontal."

"Very interesting. Okay, okay. Let's skip the metaphysics. You get into the prefrontal, you get into metaphysics. In any case it's academic when it comes to managing her. That's not why I asked you in on this."

"Why did you ask me in, Bob?"

"I thought for one thing to do you a fucking favor. Believe it or not, I thought we were friends, and as a friend I wanted you back on your feet as a working physician-entirely apart from my role as one of your probationers. As such, I don't mind telling you it was I who got the Board of Medical Examiners to move you from a Class Three to a Class Two offense."

"What is that?"

"It means, Doctor, that your license is not revoked or suspended but that you are on probation. Do you think that happened by accident? We are hoping to get it down to Class One, reprimand. Tom, we want you doctoring here and not greens-keeping in Alabama. A good idea for all concerned, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Now as far as LaFaye is concerned, my point is that she is neurological and not psychiatric, which puts her on my turf, right? So all we need to commit her to my program over at NIMH is your co-signature as consultant."

"I see."

Things have eased between us. Hands in slant pockets, he's pushing himself off the wall by nodding his head. His spurs clink against the terrazzo. We've fallen into our standard medical comradeship, having gone to the same medical school, years apart. We did not know each other there but we remember the old Columbia joke which has almost become a password, a greeting, between us: "Just keep in mind, Tom, the two most overrated things in the world."

"I will."

"Sexual intercourse and-"

"Johns Hopkins University."

Bob Comeaux likes this because he knows I interned at Hopkins.

The anger is gone, the threat withdrawn. Or did I imagine the threat? The threat: That if I don't behave I could find myself back in the pine barrens of Alabama, driving the big John Deere.

Bob Comeaux has always been skittish with me. The anger over Mickey LaFaye is something new and puzzling. The skittishness is old. It comes from something in his past which he is almost, but not absolutely, certain that I don't know, can't know. There is no reason why I should know, but the tiny possibility makes him skittish. Sometimes I catch him appraising me, wondering. It is a very small thing that I might know and it needn't worry him, but it does. In fact I do know it, this curious little thing, and by the merest chance. It came from my reading the P & S Alumni News two years ago. You know a physician is not doing well when he has nothing better to do during office hours than read the alumni news. One's eye skims down the listed names for someone familiar in "Necrology"-who died?-in reunions, newsy notes from alumni, honors. What my eye caught was not a name but a town, this town, in "Alumni Notes," and opposite the name of the physician, a Dr. Robert D'Angelo Como, and the breezy note: "Bob doing yeoman work in the brain pharmacology of radioactive ions at NIH's Feliciana Qualitarian Life Center-an appropriate name for a Qualitarian satellite, reports Bob, who describes himself as a converted Johnny Reb with his own hound dawgs, hosses, and ham hocks." Hm. The familiar mixture here of professional seriousness and the always slightly deplorable tone of medical bonhomie. But Como? Not Comeaux? That's what worries Bob. I can imagine what happened. It was his twenty-fifth class reunion and the secretary got his name not from his letter but from his class roster-yes, there he is on the reunion list, Dr. Robert D'Angelo Como. A small matter certainly, especially in Louisiana, where name changes were commonplace to accommodate whatever nation prevailed. German Zweig and Weiss often became La Branche and Le Blanc. Le Blanc and Weiss have been known to become White. No one cares. I know a man named Harry Threefoot whose family changed their name from Dreyfus. From French-Jewish to Choctaw. Why? Who knows? And in Louisiana who cares? Harry laughed about it. No, the little pique of interest comes from another small scrap of memory. A couple of years ago Mickey LaFaye, not then a horsewoman, lying on my couch, was going on in her old derisive tone about her husband, Durel, and his exclusive Feliciana Hunt Club, the old-line names and the old money it took to get in, the snobbery of it, the silliness and cruelty of fox hunting and so on, then less derisively about an attractive doctor she'd met at the Hunt Club, Dr. Robert Comeaux, newly arrived at Fedville but not one of your D.C. bureaucrats, no, he was old-line Delaware Huguenot stock. Voted into the club on the first ballot. Something occurred to me. Two years ago. My eyes went up to my bookshelves. My father subscribed to a yearly tome, the U.S. Medical Directory. I took down the most recent, ten years old. There he was: Dr. Robert D'Angelo Como, b. Long Island City, N.Y., C.C.N.Y., Columbia University's College of Physicians & Surgeons ...

A small thing, but puzzling. Why would anybody want to change Como to Comeaux nowadays? Why would anyone prefer to be thought Huguenot and not Italian? I've known plenty of both, and frankly- A small thing, but enough to make him skittish with me. But he's very much at his ease now, clicking his spurs against the terrazzo and pushing off the wall by ducking his dark head just graying at the temples, neither Sicilian nor Huguenot now but very much the English gent in his muddy field boots. He smiles his new, brilliant smile.

"Bob, what's this about a fire and vandalism out at Mickey's ranch? Did something happen out there? Something about a groom?"

"Oh boy." Bob's face goes grave, showing white around the eyes inside the tan. With his deep tan and flashing white smile suddenly going grave, Bob is as handsome as a young George Hamilton. "Oh boy, it was more than that. The fire was the least of it. Tom, Mickey took it into her head one day last week to remove her husband's .45 automatic from the closet shelf, drive out to the ranch, and begin shooting her thoroughbreds, beginning with the least valuable, fortunately-you know, she's got over two million in horseflesh out there-until she was stopped and disarmed by a groom. Those horses weren't burned. She shot them. Then she deceived the groom by pretending contrition, talked him out of the gun, headed back to the house. Tom, I'm afraid she intended harm to herself or her children or both."

"How do you know that?"

"She told me."

"How did she tell you? In her present state I can't see her telling a story, relating an event."

"You noticed that." Bob Comeaux gives me a keen-eyed look. "You would. You're quite right. You get it out of her by questioning her like a child. But she'll tell you!"

"What's this about some sort of sexual business between her and the groom? Did the groom attack her?"

Bob looks grave. "I fear not, Tom." He stands quite close, facing me, head down, talking so low that not even Sue Brown, who's back, now six feet away, can hear. "She was coming on to him, Tom."

"That's the groom's story?"

"Yes, and I didn't believe it at first. But she told me herself, quite openly."

We fall silent, pondering. Now Bob is back against the wall, speaking in our old offhand style.

"Tom, you asked me earlier, with your typical Freudian skepticism, just how did I propose to modify her behavior and what sort of behavior I wanted from her." Actually I didn't ask him any such question. "Well, you've seen for yourself. Wouldn't you say that such behavior needs modifying-entirely apart from whatever is going on in her subconscious mind, as I believe you call it."

"Yes."

"You know, Doctor, you and I might just be the ones to achieve a meeting of minds over the old mind-body problem, that ancient senseless quarrel. What do you think?"

"Our minds might."

"Ha ha. Never quit, do you?" By way of leave-taking he gives me a warm, horse-smelling, shoulder jostle. "Oh, Tom-"

"Yes?"

"I know I can count on you to help me see to it that Mrs. LaFaye gets the best care we can give her."

"You can."

"Thanks, hoss. What say to the Ein und Zwanzig and a flick?" That's old P&S talk for let's go to Twenty-One to eat and then to the movies at Radio City.

"Thanks, but I got a junior dog." I got a date with a student nurse.

"Oh shit. Tom?"

"Yes?"

"I almost forgot. This is not a favor. This is something I'm sure you'd want to do because it involves an old friend of yours."

"Who's that?"

"I spoke to you about Father Smith and Father Placide over at St. Michael's?"

"Yes?"

"Well, it seems the good fathers have a problem. Father Placide called me a couple of weeks ago. Incidentally, he's a hell of a nice guy-we served on a couple of committees together. He's got a little problem and frankly I think you're in a better position to handle it than I."

"What's the problem?"

"The problem is Father Smith. It has to do with his behavior. Ha ha, I'm sorry, Tom, but I'm quoting Father Placide. Frankly, Tom, I'm a little out of my element here. I believe you've known Father Smith for some time, that you knew him well in, ah, Alabama."

"Yes. What's wrong with him?"

"I'm not clear on that-something about him flipping out, not coming down from a fire tower. Anyhow, I'd appreciate it if you would talk to Placide. I'd take it as a personal favor."

"All right."

He looks at his watch, a curved gold wafer. "Could you drop by there this afternoon?"

"Well-"

"Tom, just hear what Father Placide has to say. Then I want you to take a look at Father Smith and give me a DX. Okay?"

"All right," I say, looking around for Lucy.

"Great," says Bob, giving me a strong pronated handshake and a long level-eyed look. "You know something, hoss. If the creek don't rise, I think we're going to make it. Right?"

"Right," I say, wishing he'd let go of my hand and wondering what he wants from Father Placide.

4. LUCY CATCHES ME IN the parking lot. She's got two sandwiches and two Cokes. We sit in her old pickup, a true farm vehicle spattered to the windows with cream-colored mud. The truck bed is loaded with a tractor tire and a cutter blade from a combine.

My two-toned Caprice, even older, is alongside. Beyond, in the far corner of the lot, a Cox Cable van is parked facing out. Later I remember wondering what a cable van was doing here. The hospital has a dish antenna.

"You look underfed. Eat," says Lucy, eating. She still wears her white coat.

But I don't eat. I sit hands on knees. The hot October sun pours through the windshield. The vinyl seat is torn. Stuffing extrudes through the tear.

Lucy lights up one of her Picayunes, plucks a grain of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, pointing her tongue. I remember her doing this before.

"You and Bob seem to have patched things up," says Lucy, watching me. She is sitting in the corner, half facing me, white coat open, bare knee folded on the seat. A splendid knee.

"What? Yes." A deja vu has overtaken me. It began when she unlocked her door, got in, and I, waiting at the other door, watched her lean almost horizontally, holding the wheel with her left hand and with two fingers of her right, palm up, lift the latch. She's done this before for me, hasn't she?

It is the smell of hot Chevy metal and the molecules of seat stuffing rising in my nostrils and the rustling of her starched coat. I've been here before.

"You were testing her for a cortical deficit, weren't you?"

"Yes. I'm glad you were there."

"I made it my business to be there. Did you find it?"

"What? Oh, the deficit. Yes, I think so."

"I wanted to tell you why Bob Comeaux was so angry."

Lucy is telling me something about Comeaux and his interest in Mickey LaFaye and her ranch. It is difficult to listen.

The deja vu has to do with sitting in a car with a girl, woman, with her swiveled around, bare knee cocked on the seat, with the smell of hot Chevy metal. We'll sit there for a while, then we'll- She touches my arm. I give a start. She is leaning toward me. "Are you all right?"

"Sure. Why?"

"You've been sitting there for five minutes, not saying a word."