That was almost seven years ago.

Now I am 'home.' In Hooker, Nebraska, my point of origin.

I practice medicine in the Hooker ER and places like it. I work the hours the other doctors don't want.

Hooker, population 9,858, is the only town in an 80-mile radius with a hospital. There's a one-doctor clinic over in Othello but that's a really tiny town, 27 miles from Hooker, and they lock down on nights and weekends. From 7 PM on any Friday until 7 AM on the following Monday the only doctor the ill or injured can see is me, or somebody like me.

My Henry Troubles in Arizona left me practicing medicine as an itinerant physician. I camp on weekends in ERs like Hooker's, scattered across the plains, for 60 hours at a stretch, for an hourly wage, currently $43. I am, or so it says on my papers, only partly trained.

The hospital in Hooker has the kind of non-committal name they seem to like in generic small towns - "Hooker County Community Memorial Medical Center." "HCCMMC." A medical center, not just a hospital mind you, that commemorates the community. My guess is it had the least chance of being controversial when the Board of Trustees had to pick.

I grew up in Hooker, an age ago. It seems it is my home again. Relocation by default.

Through college in Boston and medical school in San Diego, I told friends Nebraska was a great place to be from, emphasizing the 'from'. There was mild dishonesty in participating in the clichéd bashing of a place I loved, but it helped shut off the stupid jokes from people at the edges of the continent about how backward everyone knew us Midlanders to be.

Luckily I had a Nebraska medical license before the Troubles began. Licensure requires medical school, internship and the National Board Exam, not a residency. Near the end of my internship in Arizona my father harangued me into doing the paperwork to get my Nebraska medical license. Dad was planning on me taking over his practice when I finished residency, and he was getting impatient. When he started practice thirty-odd years before my internship he was the only doctor in an eighty-mile radius. It was catching up with him.

I made it clear I had little interest in either a generalist's practice or a life on the prairie, but for the cost of a license fee I figured I would be able to get him off my back for at least the duration of the residency.

Getting a license, however, was a happy event. Pre-Henry I was a jauntier soul; the future was boundless. While home for a week vacation I made rounds with Dad every morning. With my shiny new License to Practice the hospital was willing to give me 'Courtesy' privileges, and I got to scrub an appendectomy with him. He actually let me do the operation, though my deliberate manner, under the eyes of 30 years of proficiency, must have seemed plodding. It created palpable impatience at the operating table. Nonetheless I count it as a trophy memory.

15.p.

Though he didn't entirely approve of my choosing to be a full-time surgeon he did understand that no one, these days, could do it all, the way he had. He was a throwback to the days before every doctor did a residency; a living, breathing General Practitioner. He still did routine operations and delivered babies. In those days of hubris I told him he was a living fossil. I also pointed out that a fully trained surgeon, should he be so inclined for some silly reason, could take over the majority of Dad's practice, where a fully trained internist or family practitioner could not. He nodded and smiled, believing I would still find just such a silly inclination.

My next visit - after my failed residency, after Glory, after Henry - was the antithesis of the Proud Homecoming. Tail between my legs, unable to explain in sufficient detail, Nebraska was a hideout, my sanctuary. Jauntier days looked quaint.

For gainful employment I checked on the hometown ER, hoping to pick up some hours. They said to call Western Acute Health, Inc.; they 'had the contract.' Western Acute was the cashflow brainchild of Mel Steele, an ER doc in Cheyenne. Mel figured out he could develop an income stream by holding contracts to supply doctors for ER coverage at tucked away little towns few doctors would otherwise find. Western gets paid by hospitals like Hooker County to keep a licensed doctor available in the ER for the entire weekend every weekend. So the local family docs don't have to cover all the hours of the day and night. So they don't get too fried and pack away like moths to the lights of the city.

It started out as a way to pay my bills while I waited out my appeals and applications. I would work weekends but get the uncrowded weekdays to be skiing in Colorado or fishing or hunting in Wyoming. It became a habit.

The work can be good.

The waiting can be brutal.

The hospital in Hooker is at the western edge of town. Sometimes I stare out the window of my second-floor call room - "The Penthouse" - watching, just across a gravel road, beef cattle graze. Hooker has no golf course, and no low mountains. But then, there's nothing that needs to be hidden.

Watching the sky is the best. Clouds of hospital cotton float overhead on sunny summer days and the blackest, most malevolent thunderheads roll across grassy dunes just before sunset. The better ones kick up all kinds of flotsam with their opening salvos, then pelt it back to earth with fishing-sinker raindrops or, on a good evening, hail that sounds like glass slowly shattering.

Recreation inside a hospital is cramped. Sixty hour shifts, mostly spent in the on-call quarters, reading, watching some game-of-the-week on the tube, sleeping, eating cafeteria fried foods. Since Henry and my time in Glory, flirting with nurses has lost much of its allure. But the time is not all a waste. I do study my area of medicine. I mix literature into my often-pedestrian reading list and for at least part of every weekend I get paid $43 per hour for sleeping.

16.p.

When things fell apart I told Dad the final outcome and a smattering of the details. Naturally, he was angry with all concerned. He wanted to bring legal action. Afraid the law might have something to say to me, too, I silently demurred. I told him about certain clauses in Arizona employment contracts that would make a suit pointless. These gnawed at him, too.

Two months ago I was back in Arizona. Though I am persona non grata there to the medical establishment they have not yet set up border barricades.

Mary Ellen Montgomery, my former housemate and the doctor who took Henry Rojelio off my hands that night in Glory, called, via my parents, saying she had something for me. I made it to Phoenix in 36 hours.

While there I called a criminal attorney, Gerry deLee, and made an appointment. A cop I know recommended him. His office was in a bank tower in central Phoenix. It smelled of cigarettes and sweat. The view from the lone window was of a city block across the street, sandy and completely vacant but for three broken off palm trees and an equally topless concrete foundation.

Mr. deLee's face had redundant folds of the upper eyelids that made him look half asleep most of the time. From the questions he interposed, though, it was obvious he was listening, acutely. I retold Henry's story. I rambled. It ran to two hours. He rendered professional judgement: The statute of limitations was running out on minor things and for major things the situation was too murky and the time too long ago for any DA with an ounce of sense to want to pursue it.

Apropos the events, there can be no certainty.

Also apropos the events, I am going to act on the knowledge I possess: I have a certain freedom to speak.

My would-be career as a surgeon was castrated so long ago it is irrecoverable, and to me, through the years, a vanishing concern. Still, these events were real. They redefined my life.

I will tell two stories: Neither means a thing without the other. They are separated in time by ten months. Though they are nearly seven years old they are clearer to me than my last weekend ER shift. Both happened in the Phoenix area. They call it "Valley of the Sun."

Some may see crimes or insufficiencies in my manifest acts. Certain omissions trouble me more. Major parts are played by individuals believed by most to have known better. Most of the cast is still about, playing their parts, greasepaint intact.

Ergo, my story.