The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  Miller growled, then laughed. Jeffers appreciated the fact that Miller was unbaitable, although he wondered what force of restraint the man would have with a drink in him.

  The other men sitting in the loose day-room circle laughed or smiled as well. Wright; Weingarten; Bloom, who seemed to prefer boys; Wasserman, who was the youngest at nineteen and had raped a prom queen who refused him a dance; Pope, at forty-two, the oldest, intractable, malevolent, gray-haired, with trucker’s muscles and tattoos. Jeffers believed that he had committed far more crimes than the police suspected. He remained silent, mostly, leading the doubtful list. Parker and Knight completed the Lost Boys. They were a matched pair, acned, angry, in their mid-twenties, both college dropouts. One had been a computer programmer and the other a part-time social worker. They sneered at much, but, Jeffers thought, would eventually come to realize that they had a chance at a life.

  The laughter faded and Meriwether jumped into the quiet.

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Like what, little man?”

  “We’re not crazy. What are we doing here?”

  Several voices jumped in quickly:

  “We’re here to get fixed . . .”

  “We’re here for the program . . .”

  “We’re here, you dumb fuck, because we were all sentenced under the state’s sex-offenders act. That clear enough for you, slime?”

  “Man, maybe you don’t know what you’re doing here, but I sure do . . .”

  The last comment gained laughter. It subsided after a moment and Jeffers watched Meriwether wait until he had clear silence.

  “You guys are stupider than I thought . . .” he started. There were hoots and meager catcalls. Again Meriwether waited. Jeffers noted the wry grin that the little man wore, clearly enjoying the center of the group’s attention.

  “Think about it for a minute, freaks. Here we are in a loony bin, but are any of us really crazy? If we were really criminals, don’t you think they’d just lock us up? Instead they got us here in this carrot-and-stick world. Do the program, they say, learn to love right. Learn to hate what you were. Then we’ll straighten you out and head back to the world . . .”

  He paused, watching for effect.

  “You know what gets to me? Every time I walk through one of the psych wards everyone steps out of the way. For me! It’s enough to make you laugh, isn’t it, Miller, you tough guy? But they know, don’t they? They know.”

  He laughed.

  “All of us here, inside, huh, way inside where we figure the shrink can’t see, figures we’re gonna beat this. We just hang on long enough and say the right things . . . well, we’re gonna walk. They aren’t going to be able to change me!”

  He turned to Jeffers.

  “Screw your aversion therapies. Screw your peer-group pressures. I’m smarter than all that.”

  “Is that what you think?” Jeffers replied.

  Meriwether laughed.

  “What a wishywashy question. Can’t you see it’s what all of us think deep inside . . .”

  He thought. “Way inside. Way, way inside. Where you can’t touch it.”

  Miller growled. “Speak for yourself, asshole.”

  “I do,” said Meriwether.

  The two men stared at each other and Jeffers thought again of his brother. He remembered how surprised he had been when he learned that Doug routinely robbed the drugstore’s register for pocket money. He had thought that wrong, he realized, not because it was wrong to steal but because the consequences would be so severe if discovered. He recalled his brother’s easy laughter and insistence that the money was only partially the reason.

  “Don’t you understand, Marty? Every time I take something I feel like I’m getting back at him. His precious money. A little here, a little there. It makes me feel like I’m not just his victim.”

  Doug had been thirteen. And he had been wrong. We were his victims.

  He beat Doug, Jeffers thought. Why not me? He supposed it was his brother’s insistent, obvious rebelliousness. Then he shook his head, thinking that was probably only partially true. Certainly Doug had been irrepressible, but there was something else, something further that their father had seen, which had catapulted him into red-faced anger and savagery.

  “Little man,” said Miller, “you piss me off.”

  “The truth,” replied Meriwether, “always hurts.”

  “Tell me what you think is the truth,” Miller said. “You know so much, you squirrelly little numbers runner, you tell me what you know about my life!”

  Meriwether laughed.

  “Let me think,” he said. He eyed Miller like an appraiser looking over a cracked piece of goods.

  “Well,” he started slowly, aware that he had the entire group’s attention, “you probably hated your mother . . .”

  Everyone laughed except Miller.

  “She loved everyone except you . . .”

  Meriwether smiled at his audience and continued.

  “And now, unable to punish her . . .”

  The room laughed at the truism.

  “You punish others.”

  Meriwether hesitated. Then, smiling to the audience, said, “Tah-dah! Basic truths illuminated!”

  Miller did not smile. Jeffers found himself again trying to picture his own mother’s face, but unable. When he spoke the word “mother” to himself, all he pictured was the druggist’s wife, their cousin-mother, who would sit in the afternoons in a corner of the house, fanning herself, drinking tea, regardless of whether it was summer or winter.

  “Keep going, hot shit. You’re in a world of trouble already, might as well shoot the moon,” Miller said.

  Jeffers wondered briefly whether Miller would explode, then doubted it. He was too con-wise. If he feels he needs revenge, he’ll take it at his convenience. He’ll wait and bide his time; all cons knew that what they had in abundance was time, and the savoring of revenge could be as much enjoyment as the homemade shiv firmly wedged between the ribs itself. Jeffers scribbled a note on the daily session log to watch out for conflict between the two men.

  “Well,” said Meriwether, “how old was that last chick? The one you beat up and robbed in addition to, how shall we put it? Delicately, of course, ah, enjoyed. . . . Could she have been twenty? No, perhaps more. Thirty, then? No, still a mite shy. Well, forty? Lord, no, not close . . . fifty? Sixty? How about seventy-three years old? Bingo!”

  Meriwether closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.

  “Old enough, I daresay, to be your mother.”

  He was quiet before turning to Jeffers.

  “You know, doc, you ought to pay me for doing all your work here.”

  Jeffers said nothing.

  “So,” Meriwether continued, “tell us, tough guy. How was it?”

  Miller’s eyes had narrowed. He waited until there was quiet.

  “You know, mouth. It was perfect. It always is.”

  Miller paused.

  “Right, freak?”

  Meriwether nodded. “Right.”

  Jeffers stared around the room, halfheartedly hoping that a voice would be raised in opposition, but doubting he would hear one. He had come to realize that there were certain qualities the group could not frustrate, one being the idea of pleasure. He made a note for follow-up in each man’s regular individual session. The group, he thought, only serves to reinforce the ideas imparted through the daily therapeutic sessions. Sometimes—he smiled to himself—the magic works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

  “Miller,” Jeffers said, “are you telling the group that you considered the beating rape of a seventy-three-year-old woman a satisfactory sexual experience?”

  He would not be so blunt with some of the others, he thought.

  Miller shook his
head.

  “No, doc. Not when you put it like that,” he sneered. “A satisfactory sexual experience, whatever the hell that is. What I was saying is—and freak there knows what I’m saying, don’t you, maggot?—is that she was there. I was there. It was just part of the whole scene—nothing special.”

  “Don’t you think it was something special to her?”

  Miller tried to make a joke.

  “Well, maybe she’d never had it so good . . .”

  There was a smattering of laughter, which faded swiftly.

  “Come on, Miller. You savaged an old woman. What kind of person does that?”

  Miller glared across the room at Jeffers.

  “You’re not listening, doc. I keep telling you, she was there. It was no big deal.”

  “That’s the problem. It was.”

  “Well, not to me.”

  “So if it wasn’t such a big deal, what were you thinking of when you did it?”

  “Thinking of?” Miller hesitated. “Hell, I don’t know. I was worried she might be able to make me, you know, so I made sure I crushed her glasses, and I was trying to be careful, didn’t want to wake the neighbors . . .”

  “Come on, Mr. Miller. You left fingerprints all over the premises and you got caught trying to fence the old woman’s jewelry. What were you thinking about?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  He crossed his arms and stared dead ahead.

  “Give it another try.”

  “Look, doc, all I remember is being angry. You know, just flat-out pissed off. It seemed like nothing had been going any way except wrong. So I was definitely in a bad mood. And all I remember really is being pissed off. So pissed off I wanted to scream. I wanted to hurt somebody, you know? That’s all, just make someone else hurt. I wanted that real bad. I’m sorry the old gal got in the way. But she was there, and that’s what I wanted. Got it? That do you okay?”

  Jeffers leaned back. He thought to himself: I’m pretty good at this for a newcomer.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s talk about anger. Anyone?”

  There was a small silence before Wasserman, who stuttered, said, “S-s-sometimes I think I’m always angry.”

  Jeffers leaned back in his chair when he heard one of the men reply, “Angry at what?” There were only a few minutes left in the session and he knew that the group dynamic would take over; anger was always a fruitful subject. All the Lost Boys were angry. It was something they were intimate with.

  He looked about the day room. It was an open, airy place, painted white, with a bank of windows that overlooked the exercise area. The furniture was old and threadbare, but that was to be expected in a state facility. There was a Ping-Pong table folded up against one wall, rarely used. Once there had been a pool table, but a pool cue in the hands of a psychotic patient one day had put two orderlies in the infirmary, so now there was none. There were magazines that flapped when a breeze found an open window, a televison set that seemed possessed only to play soap operas and old movies. There was an out-of-tune upright piano. Periodically someone would step up to it and play a few notes as if hoping through some process of osmosis that it had come into tune. The piano is like the patients, Jeffers thought. We keep pushing at the keys, hoping to find a melody, usually discovering dissonance. Jeffers liked the room; it had a quiet, benign character, and it seemed to him sometimes that the room itself had defused trouble. It would be an incongruous place for a fight.

  He could not remember a time he’d ever fought with his brother.

  That was unusual: All brothers fight, why would we have been any different? But he was still unable to come up with a single memory of flat-out murderous brother-rage, the kind that suffuses one’s entire being one instant then evaporates the next.

  He remembered a time when Doug had pinned him to the floor, easily, arms twisted back; but that had been to prevent him from chasing after their mother, who was transporting their report cards to the druggist. He had failed a course for the first time—French—and had been ashamed. He remembered his brother’s grip, which he could not break. Doug said nothing, just held him. He had not been certain what he was going to do: seize the report card, destroy it, he did not know. He simply knew that the druggist would be outraged, which he was. Locked for a week in my room each night. But next semester I got a B and the final semester it was an A.

  “Hey, Pope!” It was Meriwether speaking. “Come on, Pope, you’re a killer, Pope. Tell us how angry you’ve got to be to kill someone.”

  Jeffers waited, as did all the men in the room. This is a good question, he thought, perhaps not strictly from a therapeutic standpoint, but from curiosity.

  Pope snorted. He had narrow black eyes and shoulders that were outsized for his small frame. Jeffers imagined him to be immensely powerful.

  “I never killed nobody I was real angry with.”

  Meriwether laughed. “Awwww, come on, Pope. You killed that guy in the bar. You told us about it the other week. A fight, remember?”

  “That’s not anger. That was just a fight.”

  “He died.”

  “That happens. A lucky punch.”

  “You mean unlucky.”

  Pope shrugged. “I guess from his position.”

  “You mean you fought him and he died and you weren’t even mad at him?”

  “You don’t understand so good, do you, wise guy? Sure, the dude and I had a fight. We’d been drinking. One thing came to another and he shouldn’a called me a name. But this ain’t anything special. This happens in every bar every night. But I never been so angry at some man that I sat around sober and figured out a way to do him. You’d think you could guess at that.”

  This made sense to the group and they were quiet.

  “I was that angry once,” said Weingarten. He’d been silent most of the session, Jeffers noted. He was a greasy-haired exhibitionist who’d gotten carried away with his display in a shopping mall and actually grabbed a young woman. She’d fought loose, easily picked him out of a lineup the next day, and he’d landed in the Lost Boys. Jeffers doubted the program would have much success with him; he had just begun to escalate his deviant behavior. He probably remains too fascinated with his new vision to cut it out so early. The Lost Boys do not suffer from ordinary diseases. He had a sudden memory of the emphasis in medical school on catching disease early, before it progressed. Not so here, he thought. Here you had to catch the disease after it had formed and manifested itself fully. Then you tried to eradicate it. It was generally a losing proposition, he realized ruefully, despite the inflated rates of success that were created to ensure continued funding of the program.

  “I mean I wanted to kill him and everything.”

  “What did you do?” Jeffers asked.

  “In high school there was this one guy who was always all over my case. You know the type of guy that walks up to you in front of everyone else and punches you real hard on the arm just to make you look bad. ’Cause he knows you can’t hit him back? You know what I mean? A real jock. A real head case . . .”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Meriwether.

  Weingarten ignored him and continued.

  “I was gonna just kill him, at first. My dad had a hunting rifle, he liked to go deer hunting, which I thought was real gross, but he never bothered to take me anyway. It had a real nice scope on it and I had the guy, one time, right in the crosshatches. Shoulda done it, too. But then I got smart and figured I’d just get him back kinda like he’d been getting me, right? Good and public, too. So I waited, figuring I’d get him back just before the big homecoming game. I’d get him suspended, you see, it was gonna be simple. The coach had a curfew and I knew this creep was always making it with this cheerleader. I just followed them out to the place where all the kids liked to park and waited. Wasn’t too long befo
re they was going at it. I watched for a bit, then snuck up and bam! Ice pick nice and easy in each tire. I knew they’d never get home in time. Bingo! He’d get suspended. The girl was the coach’s daughter, you see. Foolproof.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They didn’t get in till four in the morning.”

  “Did the coach suspend the creep?”

  Weingarten hesitated.

  “He was the fucking fullback. All-county. Had a scholarship to Notre-fucking-Dame. It was the fucking homecoming game. What do you think?”

  The Lost Boys all laughed and Jeffers joined in.

  Weingarten laughed as well. “It was a good idea,” he said. “At least the creep tore up his knee in the second quarter and kissed his scholarship goodbye.”

  “Whatever happened to him?” one of the other men asked.

  Weingarten smiled. “Man, he was such a creep. He had to become a cop.”

  Laughter from the Lost Boys filled the day room.

  His brother, Jeffers thought, could have been a terrific athlete. When he did play, it always seemed as if the ball would follow him. He was quick and coordinated and he had that odd strength, not muscle-bound at all, but stronger than the others. Doug always had that extra ability too, to be able to run all day if need be. He had unbelievable stamina. It came from anger. The more their parents encouraged athletics, the less Doug would have to do with them. It was another of his mini-rebellions. He remembered sitting in their room one night, lights out, listening to his brother talk about hatred. It had surprised him to know how deeply his brother felt: “I won’t do anything for them,” he had said. “Nothing. Nothing that makes them feel good at all. Nothing.”

  Now, Jeffers thought, he would say that such an attitude reflected a fundamental self-hatred. But his childhood memory was more powerful. All he recalled was the force of his brother’s words in the dark room. He could not see his brother’s face, but remembered instead the nighttime view through the window in their room, across the yard and out to the street, moonlight filtering through the trees. It was a modest house in a modest suburb that quietly contained all the anger within.