He had come into the bathroom one morning while the intern was shaving and they had talked baseball while he got out of his clothes and stepped into the shower.
“Hell,” he muttered.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t have any damn soap.”
“Take mine.”
Adam had looked at the white soap in Robinson’s hand, and he had shaken his head. “No, thanks.”
He had relaxed under the warm spray and a few minutes later—without thinking?—he had picked up the thin sliver of used soap in the tray and had lathered his body with it.
As Robinson was leaving he had glanced into the shower. “Ah, I see you found some after all,” he said.
“Yes,” Adam said, suddenly uncomfortable.
“That’s the piece I used yesterday to wash my black ass,” Spur had said pleasantly.
Money no longer was an immediate threat. He became a moonlighter through the kind offices of the chubby anesthesiology resident the OR nurses called the Jolly Green Giant, whom he always thought of as fat boy but whose name had turned out to be just plain Norman Pomerantz. One day Pomerantz wandered into the staff room and while pouring himself coffee asked whether anybody was interested in covering the Emergency Room several nights a week at a community hospital west of Boston.
“I don’t give a damn where it is,” Adam said before anyone else could answer. “If it pays anything I’ll take it.”
Pomerantz laughed. “It’s in Woodborough. You get paid out of hospitalization insurance.”
So he auctioned off his sleep and was not at all unsatisfied with the bargain. The first night he was off-duty at Suffolk County General he took the elevated train to Park Square and a bus to Woodborough, which turned out to be a baroque New England manufacturing village lately transformed into a sprawling and populous bedroom suburb. The hospital was good but small, the work hardly stimulating—lumps and bumps, gashes and slashes; the most complicated procedure he ran into was a Colles’ fracture of the wrist—but the money was lovely, the following evening he sat on the Boston-bound bus and realized almost with awe that he was solvent. Of course, it had come right out of his hide; he hadn’t been to bed for sixty hours—thirty-six hours on duty at Suffolk County General and then another twenty-four at Woodborough—but the sudden feeling of affluence was worth it. When he got back to his room in the hospital he slept for eight hours and then woke feeling light-headed, fuzzy-mouthed and curiously rich.
He made the bus ride to Woodborough every time he was off-duty. As his body became more exhausted he took to grabbing small greedy catnaps—on litters, sitting in the staff room, once even while leaning against a corridor wall, cherishing the sleeping moments like a child savoring a ball of hard candy.
He felt even more alone than usual. One night he lay on his bed and listened to Spurgeon Robinson play the kind of guitar he hadn’t known existed. He thought the music told him a lot about the intern. In a little while he got up and went downstairs to a package store and bought a sixpack of beer. Robinson opened the door when he knocked and stood there for a moment without saying anything, looking at him.