The slick underside of the woman’s palms lick my fingers as I slip the Diphenhydramine over the counter. The fourth time this week, she explains, doll eyes searching mine. She can’t fall asleep and is sick at her stomach. I nod and remind her to come back when she needs more. People in this town never come just once.
“Daisy! I’m taking my lunch break!”
Miss Harper scurries from the back room, knocking over a pile of physicians notes on the side desk. Pinching off a squeak between her pigment-streaked lips, she falls to her knees and pulled the papers to her chest off the sterile tile.
“Sorry! I’m sorry, sir!” Her breath shutters. I pick up Ellis Massie’s note for Effexor and toss it on the pile, offering her my best easy smile. Daisy doesn’t look at me, the fluorescent lights reflecting off her blond curls. I stroll to my office. 
Gadsden, Alabama is a good place for pharmacists. One of the highest paying places in the country for us, in fact. It’s hot as a junebug in July and a pleasant place, being in high cotton for about ten years. I settle in my desk chair by the open window, loosening my tie in the stiff August heat. Outside a young couple mills around the window displays of Gadsden Christian, which gleam with glossy new Bibles and Jesus figurines that reach to heaven with melting plastic fingers. They link hands and press against each other, against the glass. Some bubba saunters out of Gadsden Music, spitting at the roots of the sweetbay sprouting from the precise square in the pale greystone. I try to remember when I was a teenager, but I lose it somewhere in medical school.
Downing a chicken sandwich with sweet tea, I check the hours till I can take that walk back home, back through the Gadsden Memorial Park where General Cobb presides from atop his bronze pedestal. The local kids don’t even dare to mark the old master’s face, at least not since that one boy died a couple years back. It was ruled suicide and everyone believed it.
I hear Daisy whimpering behind my door so I tuck the remains of lunch back in my bag. She has a certain gentleman who needed his anti-depressant quick as a jack rabbit, she explains. Doc’s orders.
~~~
It doesn’t get dark here till around nine, which makes leaving at ten just an hour too late. Daisy, being young, virgin and still under the iron grip of her father, skips out early. The walk doesn’t bother me much though; the park’s nice in the summer evening and the streets stay lit to keep the coons off the back porches. But not tonight-- one is scuffling around in the alley by Peter’s Bar, snorting crushed bottles and mucking around in soggy Gadsden visitor’s pamphlets. It’s a violent one, smacking it’s fleshy body against the metal canister, the sound rattling flower pots on the street. It lets out a little whimper, cutting its paw, I imagine, on some sliver of a rusted can of black eyed peas.
I stop for a moment, peering into the gloom and watching my feet for the little runt to come scrambling out at me. There’s only darkness for a minute and then there’s no coons.
No coons, sir, no. Just a big ole shadow, hulking in the back corner beside Petey’s smoking can where he sits every afternoon ‘round 4 o’clock and chokes his pack. He’s got his back to me, his hands focused on some writhing shape that hisses and sniffles under his fingers. There’s a flash of blonde hair in the warm, moist glow of the streetlight and then it spirals down, grinding into the pavement. The golden creature mewls under the shadow.
The coon starts grunting feral hog noises that don’t belong in the sweet tulip-streets of Gadsden. The little one lets out another scream that could tear pages of Genesis and then there’s just that sudden, mushy gargle of Levonorgestrel going the long way down a woman’s throat. It’s cut short. I realize that I’m in full view, standing there like a mole in the sunlight. I shove myself behind The Sunflower Cafe’s brick siding.
The silence is brutal. One of ‘ems breathing real hard and a watering can is dripping somewhere. I can’t decide whether I want to run or holler or take a patio chair and start swingin’. I shiver in that terrible place between being a man and being a human, but the steps are coming and I freeze like a schoolboy getting his first kiss. The guy’s slouching out of the alley with his fingers clicking his belt back into place. Shoulders, drenched in dark canvas, balance a head that bounces with a full set of baby curls. He crosses the street and smoothes into the black silhouette of General Cobb.
I peek into Petey’s corner and Daisy’s lying there with a rose blooming at her ivory heart.
~~~
I didn’t tell the cops what I saw. Didn’t seem like it would make a difference-- the cameras in the alley had caught just enough of him to make it not necessary for me to fess up. Or maybe I just don’t wanna risk spend the next six days in a cell wondering who I am and what I am doing and why I’m not to blame.
Daisy Harper’s father has used the full arm of the news to his benefit. Her ivory face is on every street corner from here to Birmingham. She is all anybody talks about; she is painted in clouds across the midday sky.
The service is held at Fields of Faith Church with all the pomp and circumstance of our boys headin’ North. Petals and pools of pale colors swamp the little black flies in dark silks who mill around with lemonade and finger sandwiches. It’s halfway between a carnival and a death march, a sunflower with its pit of black seeds.
And Mr. Harper is at its center, spittin’ nails and telling anybody within reach that, “this goddam man is gonna pay if it takes me till the day I die I’m gonna fill that cotton-pickin’ sucker so fulla holes you could use him for a salt shaker and when I get done with him I’m gonna…”
The men growl and grip their Smith & Wessons in their hands and swell up so much their heads might as well be those little orange poppies they’re crushing under their leather heels. The ladies keep quiet.
Nobody bothers much with me and I’m glad for it. Before they start singing Amazing Grace I cut out and slip back to town, back under the old General’s nose where he can see me. I don’t feel guilty. I’m not guilty.
The profile of a boy trying to be a man walks with me all along pleasant street. He’s got that classic cut, classic nose, classic chin and he walks like everybody else, talks like everybody else, so he’s about as guilty as everybody else.
I think about Stelazine in everybody’s water and Prolixin in their blood; the same chalky fuel clogging it’s way through arteries and slick intestines and lymph nodes of all of us. I don’t think about Daisy. I don’t think about Petey. I think about the lilies sprouting from the flower boxes on Main Street, from the ground below General Cobb’s bronze toes. And I wonder about the way the sun shines on that patch of newborn grass and not this one. I wonder about it all the way back to the pharmacy where, slapping the Open sign over against the glass, I slip Daisy’s name tag into the recycling.
~~~
Three weeks later and everybody’s scuffed Miss Harper under the rug with the rest of their dead ancestors and the delicate shards of beetle carcasses. No leads and no rest for Mr. Harper. He’s lost all sense of his dignity, standing on street corners with posters and shouts like any proper heretic. Cobb’s got his eyes on him.
I’ve got a new intern from the college who’s about as green as a pea and has a serious case of diarrhea of the mouth. Miss May June’s alright-- doesn’t quiver when I walk by her, but she doesn’t seem to mind getting comfortable around me either.
It’s another sultry Gadsden day and May’s got her blush sweater drooping off her shoulders.
“Oh Doctor, could you help me a moment please, sir?” She’s taking her sweet time getting a folder out of the cabinet beside my desk and her apple mouth loves making that oooo sound. The desk bell dings and she straightens slowly, like a cat in the sun, and slinks out of my office.
I’m fumbling through my newest patient list. Carlyles, Johnsons, Maheaus, Waltons, Jacksons, Fettys… all tossed together with Zoloft, Paxil, Tramadol, Ambien, Celebrex, Neurontin, ExtenZe. I don’t hear him coming.
May’s got her head back in my office, her golden curls spilling around the corner and asking me to come out front, there’s something wrong with the computer and Mr. Massie is waiting. My legs are stiff all of a sudden and I shove myself up from my chair on my arms, feeling like I’m on my hands and knees. I follow May’s rosy heels to the front desk and there he is, standing as still and as tall as General Cobb in the park on a Saturday, baby curls and all.
It’s a matter of acting, of pretending that you don’t know who the b------ is and what he’s done because business and personal life are two different things.
“Mr. Massie?” I hum, fingers splaying along the computer keys. “How can I help you today?” I swallow the acidic bile of those words.
“I’m picking up my Effexor, please sir.”
Please sir.
May’s got her hands on him already. She smiles sweetly and explains that she doesn’t know where to find it. That I should go look. Her teeth are brilliantly bright and sharp beneath those rose lips. I wonder when I started taking orders around here.
His bag is hanging between Mann and Mayville, a little square cloud on a noose. I know all those little clouds and all those little nooses; all the nice little orange bottles they hold and the nice little red capsules within. Years of biology, organic chemistry, anatomy, oncology and ethics have taught me all about this. Red capsules. Red for danger, for warning, for urgent. Red for Effexor. His first batch. His naive batch. He wouldn’t know if it wasn’t his anti-depressant.
I looked around at all those clouds and all those names and wondered if General Cobb ever needed a prescription. I thought about those Maheaus, those Johnsons, those Waltons, Mr. Harper and his Smith & Wesson. I thought about old Mrs. Wheeler and her seizures-- her cloud of Amobarbital Sodium glowing there right at me from the rack like a daisy in a mudpile. Taken every day, like an anti-depressant, it is lethal.
Before I can even think about what I’m doing, I have ol’ Wheeler’s bag in my hand and I’m shaking it all out on the counter, ripping open the isinglass packet and popping the top, pills pelting down on the countertop. I work like a madman. I go for the Effexor.
“Doctor?” May calls, her voice jolting my hand and tossing the anti-depressants on top of the anti-convulsants-- a shivering sea of identical red capsules. “May I help you, sir?”
My chest clenches.
“That’s alright. Just a moment, please.” I stare down at all those little red poppies on the counter-- the same blooming fire, the same gloss, the same history.
My hand is sweeping across that cold stainless steel countertop, sweeping those pills into two different containers, unbiased. The palms snap the tops back in place, the fingers zip up the bags and the nails grip into the slipping plastic, grip as if the world is slipping away. My feet walk, my lips smile and my arms lift the bag to Mr. Massie, proffering a bouquet of lilies to the altar on high. 
“Thank you, Doc,” he says and grins, lifting his eyes to that light in my hands. I nod and catch Cobb’s eyes on me through the front window as Mr. Massie shuffles out.