The Sick Doll
© 2001 Jeff Mariotte

"Golderg.  That's a Jewish name, isn't it?"

Earl Pugh didn't say it that way, though.  He pronounced the last two words as one, innit.  That's a Jewish name, innit?  I looked at him to see if maybe he was joking, but if he was there was no sense of it in his demeanor.  He sat on the edge of the old, threadbare couch, shoulders hunched, forearms resting on his knees.   His slightly milky eyes held steady on my face, as if I might cut and run, or draw some kind of weapon.

Instead, I smiled.

"Yes, yes it is.  Is...that a problem?"

He held my gaze a moment longer, then shook his head.  "No, no.  Just can't say as we've ever had a Jewish fella spend the night in our house before."

"We're sometimes hard to spot," I said, before I thought better of it.

Earl Pugh just let it slide off, though.  His wife, Marjorie, stood and walked toward the kitchen, as if wanting to avoid being any part of the conversation.  She was tall and angular, but somehow hollow, as if life had sucked everything between her ashen skin and her hollow bones right out of her.  She didn't say much, either, or hadn't since I'd shown up forty minutes before.  But now, as she reached the doorway to the kitchen, she turned around to look back at me.  "Course, we've never had a Californian spend the night, either," she said.  Then she turned away again, showing me that her long gray hair was pulled back in a bun held by what looked like an antique tortoise-shell comb, and vanished into the kitchen.

She had me there.  Jewish by birth and heritage, I couldn't be described as devout, or even practicing.   But as far as living in California, that was undeniable.  San Francisco, no less.

My suitcase still stood on the rug next to the straight-backed chair.  Maybe it was a good thing I hadn't unpacked yet.

But Earl skipped over that one, too.  "Tell me again what you're doing here," he demanded.  "You aren't here to make trouble, are you?  That Japanese girl tried to explain it, but I had a hard time with her accent."

"Debra Chin.  She's Chinese," I said.  "Chinese-American."

"Yeah, her.  Whatever."

Debra's accent was strictly Pomona, but if walking Earl Pugh through my mission was as bad as it got, I figured I was in for an easy week.

"Cyanide," I said.  "You know the gold mine, West Star, used a heap-leach mining process by which the rock was broken down with cyanide to get to the gold, right?"

"Yup," he said.  "And I know that kind of mining was outlawed here since then."

"Here in Montana, that's right," I agreed.  "But there are plenty of places where it hasn't been.  And in those places, the mining companies are still trying to claim that heap-leach mining is a safe and environmentally sound way to get at the gold.  But you know better."  I hesitated, not wanting to speak the name.  "Jamie is proof, right?"

Earl winced at that, and shut his eyes for a moment.  I felt a pang of sorrow that I'd had to bring up his dead son again.  But that was why I was here, and everybody knew it.  He looked old, they both did, really, looked like people in their late sixties or early seventies, when in fact they couldn't have been older than their late forties.  I guessed it was losing their son that had done it to them.  "I reckon so," Earl finally whispered.

"So what I want to do here is collect some anecdotal evidence—we've already had scientists out here testing the ground water, and sampling what comes out of the wells you folks are drinking out of.  I need to look around at the human cost.  How many people are sick, and how many of those sicknesses can't really be explained any other way.  That's what I want to see."

Earl shook his head sadly.  "I just don't want no trouble," he said.  "My neighbors work at West Star, some of them.  They might not look kindly on us sheltering someone that's here to..."

"To what?  I'm not going to shut the mine down.  They've already stopped using cyanide.  But they used it for years, and it got into the groundwater, and there's no denying that."

Marjorie came back into the living room, bearing tea on a plastic tray with a picture of a farm on it.  The farm was romanticized, the sun coming up on a red barn with a neat haystack in front of it, and a friendly-looking farmhouse, smoke trailing from a chimney, standing nearby.  Such a farm may have existed at one time in American history, but they were as rare as honest oil executives now.

She set the tray down on the wide arm of the couch, obscuring the lace doily that covered where the couch arm had been worn out by decades of hands resting on it.  "Do you drink tea, Mr. Goldberg?" she asked me.  "We like a little before bed.  It's decaf."

"That'd be great, Mrs. Pugh," I said.  "And please call me Seth."

She handed me a cup and saucer.  The bone china looked as fragile as her fingers.  The saucer had been chipped once, and glued back together carefully.

I sipped the tea and tried to reassure the Pughs that there would be no rabble-rousing, no union organizing, no protests or pickets while I was in town.  I didn't, I told them, even own a guitar or know a folk song.  I had come to Right Fork—a name which scared the crap out of the leftist in me, I had to admit—to talk to people and count the sick ones, that was all.  I'd be gone in less than a week.  The Pughs had approached the Northern Forest/Mountain Environmental Association in the first place, after their son had died, so we had every expectation that they'd cooperate with the investigation.  They had gone a step farther than we anticipated by offering to let me stay in their house, but since the nearest motel was forty miles of mountain road away, I wasn't about to turn them down.

After the tea was done and I'd done my best to ease their concerns, Earl led me up a narrow flight of stairs to "my" room, which had been Jamie's room when the eleven-year-old had been alive.

Tucked under the eaves of a slanted roof, crossed by ceiling beams I'd have to watch my head on, the room still looked like a boy's room.  As with the rest of the house, "rustic" was the watchword.  A polished tongue-and-groove floor lay underneath a braided throw rug that looked soft enough to curl up with.  A bed crafted of pine—quite possibly, I thought, by Earl Pugh himself—filled one corner.  Clean sheets, folded in neat squares, sat on the end of it, probably so I wouldn't think they'd left the bed made since Jamie had died in it.  On the pine dresser, toy soldiers marched in random ranks.  A fishing pole and net stood in a corner, next to a chair that held a baseball glove.  Upended behind the chair, leaning against the pinewood wall, a skateboard that would never be ridden again waited.  I couldn't imagine a boy of Jamie's age keeping his room so neat, but all the things in the room spoke to me of rural youth, of a boyhood spent in the twin pursuits of fun and adventure to which all boys aspire.

Earl had almost left me alone in the room when I saw the thing hanging up over the head of the bed, nailed to the wall by a string that looped around what I took to be its waist.  It looked like some kind of homemade doll, fashioned of sticks and grasses bundled together with twine.  Grasses had been bent into a spherical shape, maybe wrapped around a small ball of some kind, to form a head.  Twigs poked out from underneath that in a torso shape, with others making up arms and legs.  Painted on the head was a "face" consisting of two blue eyes and a red slash of a mouth.  The whole effect was disconcerting, even scary—some kind of folk art dummy hanging over the place I was supposed to lay my head.

"What's this?" I asked, bending over to take a closer look.

Earl pushed past me, brusquely, I thought, and tugged the nail from the wall.  "That's Jamie's sick doll," he said plainly.

"Sick doll?" I repeated, not sure I'd heard correctly.  "What's that?"

Earl took it in his big, gnarled, spotted hand.  The doll looked small and somehow fragile there, as if he could crush it to dust with a squeeze.  "Jamie made it," he said, his voice tight.  "He...he thought it could keep the sickness away, when he started to feel bad.  He thought it would keep him from getting any worse."  He made a noise that could have been a sob or a laugh.  "Lot of good that did him, huh?"

He turned away from me and carried the sick doll to a wicker wastebasket that stood next to the dresser.  "Superstitious nonsense," he said, and dropped the doll unceremoniously inside it.

Not really, I thought.  People hang crucifixes and Stars of David and Ojo de Dios for basically the same reasons all the time.  What was wrong with Jamie taking things into his own hands, coming up with his own protective idol?

As I undressed and got ready for bed—the bathroom was downstairs, so I had to make that trek again to brush my teeth—I wondered if that was all it was.  There were thousands, maybe millions, of superstitions of which I went through life blindly unaware.  This could have been another one.  Just because it was American, even from a region of the country in which I spent a good deal of time, didn't mean I'd have heard of it.  When I went back up to my room, I fished the thing from the wastebasket.  I had a friend who taught cultural anthropology at San Francisco State.  Maybe he knew something about sick dolls.  Or would want to investigate further.  I put the little creature in my duffel bag and went to bed.

# # #

Spring comes late to this high Montana valley, and then it's over fast, getting out of the way for the short but hot summer on its tail.  By the time I left the Pugh house, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and ham and biscuits, orange juice and coffee, it was after nine and the mercury was already climbing past eighty.   I was still chuckling at how red Marjorie Pugh's face had turned when she saw me looking at the ham on my plate.  As I've said, I wasn't a particularly devout Jew—okay, not even remotely devout—and while I had no specific objection to eating pork, it still wasn't something I really did, as a rule.  But I tried Marjorie's, and it was good enough to explain why Gentiles made a habit of it.

I'd been given a couple of leads, names of families that had suffered unexplained or improperly explained illnesses.  I made those my first stops, cruising slowly down dirt roads looking for addresses painted on mailboxes or house numbers nailed to shingled walls.  People were friendly but guarded, for the most part, as one might expect when a total stranger shows up at their door asking personal questions.  I had to answer a few myself, the most common of which seemed to be, "You married?  Have a girlfriend?"  I took that to be code for, "Tree hugger, eh?  You gay?"  I answered in the affirmative, even showing a wallet photo of Julia to one guy who pressed the point.  The truthful answer, though, was that I wasn't even sure.  The last time we'd been together had ended with one of us more or less breaking up with the other one, though I couldn't tell you which one had done what, or if it was permanent, or what.  She had left my place in tears and I'd remained on my living room sofa in a state of numb shock, and the couple of awkward attempts at conversation since then had proven exceedingly indeterminate.

Nonetheless, I decided to call her that night, swallowing my nervousness like foul-tasting medicine.  Fortunately, I had the events of the last several days to fill the space between us.

"It's awful here," I said, after a few moments of uncomfortable greeting.  "Everyone is sick, or knows someone who is.  Cancers, tumors, lymphomas, birth defects, infant deaths…it's like Love Canal or something."

"Is it all attributable to the cyanide, do you think?" Julia asked.  I pictured her twisting the phone cord around her fingers while she talked, which was a habit she couldn't seem to get shake.  I'd even bought her a cordless once, and after a few weeks she gave it away because she didn't know what to do with her hands while she talked.

"I don't know.   I'm not scientifically or medically well versed enough to answer that question.  From an anecdotal point of view, though, I look around at a relatively small mountain community, with pretty clean air, a beautiful environment…I have to wonder why there's more inexplicable disease here, per capita, than there is in what should be a dirtier, more toxic place like Los Angeles or Houston."

"Well, that's what you expected to find, right?"

"Damn skippy," I said.

"What?"

I paused.  "What, ‘what?'"

"You said ‘Damn skippy.'  Where the hell did that come from?"

I had no answer for that.  "I must have heard it somewhere," I said.  "I really have no idea."

"So it's not the new phrase du jour or anything."

"No."  Was it?  No.  "No.  Just something I picked up that slipped out.

"Okay."  In the silence that followed, I could almost feel her brown-eyed gaze burning into me across the miles.  She had a way of looking at you that felt like she was filleting you with her eyes to see what was inside.  There had been a time I'd loved to see her power in action, grilling some corporate flack, for instance.  Then, more and more, it had been turned on me, and I'd found it disconcerting.  Then maddening.

Now I squirmed a little even though I couldn't see it.  I ended the conversation a couple of minutes later and went to bed.

My first night in the Pugh house I'd slept like a rock, tired out from getting up early, flying, then driving the rental car up from Helena.  The second night, though, was very different.  The house creaked and moaned, speaking the secret night language that only old houses knew.   Outside, familiar city sounds were missing, replaced by the strident, insistent buzz of crickets and the occasional shush of wind in trees.

And my dreams were vivid, waking me up several times, though when I tried to grasp them they dissolved like tissue paper in a rushing stream.  I caught only snatches: a boy running full speed down a rural hill, sun on his freckled face, arms out to the side as if to embrace the world and his own unlimited future; a gleaming trout arcing out of the water and then splashing back in again; the brisk chill of snow getting inside rubber boots and melting.  None of the fragments were recognizable parts of my own life, but I supposed they were images implanted from wandering around Right Fork all day, and pushed them out of my mind.

In the morning, I felt weak and sluggish, as if I'd barely slept.  Marjorie Pugh made another one of her big breakfasts, but I could barely eat it, managing only a cup of coffee and some toast.  I gathered my notebook, tape recorder, and digital camera, and went back out for another day of interviewing the locals.

Leukemia.  Craniopharygioma.  Hodgkins Disease.  Legionnaire's Disease.  HIV.  AIDs.  Ebola.  Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.  Epstein-Barr.  Repetitive Motion Disorder.  Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Somewhere along the way, we had beaten Polio and Typhoid and Whooping Cough, struck down Measles and Influenza epidemics that claimed the lives of tens of thousands.  But we had only replaced those diseases with newer ones, illnesses of our own invention that had ten times the killing power the old ones had.  It wasn't enough to build enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet a hundred times over, but we had also created the ability—possibly the inevitability—to wipe everyone off the Earth with disease.   Since 1900, the Earth's population had swollen, from just over a billion people to more than six billion.  With that growth came the spewing of toxins into our air, earth, and water, and those toxins, it seemed, would kill us all.

These thoughts and others gripped me as I interviewed the sick and the dying who were probably, it seemed to me, victims of the West Star mine's cavalier approach to containment of its cyanide pools.

Halfway through the afternoon, I stopped at a small market for a bottle of iced tea.  I had paid for it and stood on the sidewalk outside unscrewing the cap when a man approached me.  He was in his mid-thirties, I'd guess, and wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants.  Unlike most people around town, he had a tan that didn't stop at a hat line.  The crispness of his clothes, his gold watch, and the fine gold chain around his neck all spoke of money.  He didn't look like a local.

"Are you Seth Goldberg?" he asked.  There was a smile on his face that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"Yeah," I said.  He put out his hand, and I took it instinctively.  "Bob Martin," he said.  "I'm VP of Public Relations for West Star.  Glad to meet you."

"You are?"

"Sure.  What I hear, you haven't come to cause trouble for West Star, right?  You're looking into cyanide."

"That's right."

"And you know we haven't done any heap-leach mining here since the state of Montana outlawed it."

"That doesn't mean," I pointed out, "that there aren't people here who were damaged by it when you were doing it."

"You'll find that West Star is well loved by this community, Mr. Goldberg," Bob Martin told me.  "We take care of the residents.  We provide medical services when they need them.  I think it's safe to say that you won't find anyone in town who's willing to claim that West Star has injured them in any way.  Certainly there are no legal actions pending against the mine."

He was right about that.  NF/MEA's research had uncovered the same fact.  West Star had secured promises not to sue from many of the stricken, had settled out of court with others.  Legally, they appeared to be untouchable, which was why we weren't going up against them here.  We were only here to find ammunition to take on mining operations in other states, where heap-leach was legal and cyanide posed a future problem.

After our brief exchange—which was friendly in the way that makes you glad there's a building at your back so your new "friend" can't plunge a knife into it—he went his way and I went mine.

I knocked off early that day—earlier than I should have, since I was scheduled to go home in just two more days, and had many families left to visit.  But I was still feeling tired from not having slept well the night before, and didn't want to push myself too hard.

As I drove my rental back up the steep hill to the Pugh home, watching shards of sunlight dance among the leaves and fighting to stay awake, a flash of color at the corner of my eye startled me.  I swung my gaze that way and saw a young boy dashing into the street.  Stomping on the brake and wrenching the wheel brought me to a shuddering stop in the middle of the road.  "Dang," I said, a word that sounded strange in my head.   Like whatever I had said to Julia last night, that was not a word that was part of my vocabulary.

It sounded, I thought, like something an eleven-year-old kid would say.  Maybe the one who had run across the road in front of me, who had, for just that awful split-second when he's been framed in my windshield like a picture—or a target—looked like the photos I'd seen of the Pughs' boy Jamie.

But when I looked up again, the kid was gone.  I craned my head this way and that, but couldn't see him anywhere.  Shrugging, I cranked the key—I'd managed to kill the engine somehow—and continued on my way.

I was in Jamie's old bed, and sound asleep, before Marjorie Pugh even had dinner on the table.  Once again, my sleep was restless and troubled though, made worse by a pain in my stomach that just grew and worsened as the night dragged on.  I clenched my eyes against the pain, but I smelled hot dogs cooked over open flame, heard the sounds of a baseball game on a hot summer afternoon, tasted lemonade and peanut butter.  By the time the sun rose, I couldn't drag myself from the bed.  I lay there, too weak to even call out, until Earl Pugh came up to check on me.  He took one look and left the room to call an ambulance.

# # #

My days now consist of laying in a hospital bed in the Right Fork Medical Center, smelling that everpresent antiseptic stink and feeling to my body eat itself from the inside.   The job is almost done—a matter of days at the most, maybe hours.  They wanted to transfer me to a real hospital, with an Oncology unit, but I didn't see the point when they told me that my body looked like I'd had cancers growing inside of it for years.

Which, of course, I haven't.

They wanted to poke me and prod me and cut me open.  They had never seen a case like this, they said, with so many different cancers present at once.  I didn't see the point—they wouldn't find anything in there that would help—and refused permission.

Earl and Marjorie Pugh came to see me once at the Medical Center, bringing my duffel bag with all my worldly possessions in it.  They needed, I suppose, to clear up some space in Jamie's old room.

A couple of days later, Bob Martin came to see me.   I was half-expecting his visit, and had even arranged for one of the nurses to unzip my duffel and take out Jamie Pugh's sick doll, which was now prominently displayed on the room's credenza.  After all, Jamie would have no more need of it.

My theory now is that Earl was less than forthcoming about how the sick doll was supposed to work.  That by appropriating it—let's be honest, why not at this point, right?—by stealing it, I had somehow activated it.

And it had done what it was supposed to do.  Returned his son to him.

I signed the release Bob Martin asked me to sign, absolving the West Star mine of any responsibility for my medical condition.  Then I pointed out the sick doll.  He walked over to it, picked it up, turned it over a couple of times as if looking for a price tag.

"Do me a favor?" I asked.

"What is it?"

"That's worth some decent money," I said.  "Primitive folk art or something.  When I die, take it and sell it to a museum or a rich collector, and distribute the money to the families around here that have sick kids."

He put it back down, agreed, and left.

I don't have anything, particularly, against Bob Martin.  He's just one of a class of people ruled by greed, who let that impulse overrule everything that might otherwise be decent in them.

If he surprises me, and does what I asked with the mask, then maybe the families of Right Fork will get a little money out of the deal.

If he doesn't surprise me, if he takes it and keeps it, that's okay too.

That just means I'm coming back.

The End