The Bully of Order by Brian Hart Page A

often calls for burrowing and sliding and forgetting, and foot rubs. Helplessness is a choice made when you can’t stand against the immovable.
    Jacob Ellstrom was a lucky man, and like most lucky men he probably disdained to admit his luck, and if he did he loathed it, felt he didn’t deserve it, hadn’t asked anyway. He didn’t seem particularly clever, and he was far from being handsome; he was quite unattractive, really, ugly even. Says the walrus. He’d heard rumors that Ellstrom’s father was a wealthy man, but he must’ve turned off the spigot now. They always give you something, if you can manage not to nod off, or plot patricide, as they ramble, as they go on. Like dogs beg, so do we. Young men so often think pride repairable. How wrong they are. Some debts call for marrow.
    Or it could be that Jacob Ellstrom, the fraud, was kind and loving or even a comedian when he and his wife were safely behind walls, a big laugh, a good Heath. No, it was something else. Perhaps he shouldn’t be looking at Jacob at all but at Nell. She could’ve been the one that chose him, but she had to be, didn’t she? What kind of woman, not much more than a girl really, settles on such a mess to be unmade? Oh, she was the best kind, the very best. Above all the saints and martyrs, God loves a beautiful woman who of her own choice weds an ugly man.
    The liquor in his belly made him feel unsettled, so he skipped the bank. Hayes wouldn’t know anything anyway, and no one he asked at the docks had seen Ellstrom around either. He’d left his cigars at home. He went to the Coast Sailor’s Union.
    Hank Bellhouse was behind his desk working his pugio over a stone, oil glistening on his fingers and on the backs of his hands. The room was large and open, with a spruce slab table and a bank of windows that looked out over the harbor. Leaflets and posters adorned the wall along with random taxidermy; animals and fishes, a flower made of the carapaces of Dungeness crabs. The union seal painted eight feet tall and lopsided. He’d only just opened shop.
    â€œLook at you, physician, all fuss and feathers. Fucking rumpled tissue in a widow’s palm.” Bellhouse was febrile, sanguinary, every part of him. His eyelids were muscle.
    â€œWhat do you know of Dr. Ellstrom?”
    â€œI know his degree says it comes from Brown.”
    â€œBesides that.”
    â€œDidn’t you tell me and everyone else at Dolan’s that night that they don’t turn out doctors at Brown?”
    â€œSo I did.”
    â€œStrange his degree says it, then.”
    â€œLetters aside, he was here before me, and what I hear speaks of a moderate competence.”
    â€œYou weren’t saying that at Dolan’s.”
    â€œNo, I wasn’t.”
    Bellhouse held the knife up to inspect the blade and then dragged it over his thumbnail to test it. Back to the stone, working as he spoke. “You were talking like we should run him out of town.”
    â€œLooking back, I think I shouldn’t drink so much, but looking forward—you don’t have any whiskey, do you? I’ve got a chill.”
    Bellhouse smiled and shook his head, his arm moving without break. The stone took its measure from the blade equally, three passes to a side. “I’ve met my share of physicians, and none of them are any good to drink with. More fun to drink with a dead sailor than a live physician.”
    â€œDon’t blame the trade, it’s the rain that does it to me, the gray gloom.”
    The blade stopped with the doctor’s last syllable, and Bellhouse raised his eyes. “All I can say is, we’re all just plain lucky you arrived and saved us from Ellstrom’s inadequacies. Who knows what kind of injury he could’ve visited on us?”
    â€œI’ve apologized to you enough.”
    â€œA stack of nothing is still nothing.”
    â€œIf you’d give me a drink, I could