Journey From Heaven

by Joe Derkacht

  #

  What at first I thought were two white butterflies flitting across my field of vision resolved into white little hands busily twisting around each other in arcane gestures.

  “C’mon Jackie-boy, get with it! We wanna go!”

  I had the first boot on, had tied my childish foot into it with the same complicated lacing scheme I’d seen my father perform a thousand times before. It would never fit but I thought it would probably stay if I walked carefully enough. The other boot, also a discard my father meant to plant with hens-and-chicks, had lost its rawhide lace.

  “C’mon, c’mon, we can’t wait all day,” the same girlish voice said. “By the time we get to the beach, the waves will all be gone.”

  I turned, glancing at Lulu Clause, my neighbor, who as usual was dressed in a pair of green bib overalls. Bib overalls because she was a tomboy. Green because it fit her mother’s idea of femininity. Under the shoulder straps, one buttoned, the other hanging loose, she wore a raggedy, formerly white t-shirt. She impatiently tapped one bare, tanned foot on the concrete porch.

  I glanced around, looking for whatever I might use to lace on the other boot. Lulu thought I was a sissy for sure, but the rocks in my driveway and the road that led to the beach two short blocks away were sharp and uneven, too harsh for my tender little feet. Lulu didn’t mind a few sharp rocks—or broken glass, either. Her feet were tougher than the worn old shoe leather of my father’s caulk boots.

  “Leave him alone,” her brother said. “You’re always pickin’ on him.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and let out a loud, dissatisfied huh! Her brown, curly hair bounced with the gesture.

  Claude, her brother, in jeans with cuffs rolled up high and a sleeveless undershirt, didn’t have her curly hair or her freckles or button nose. Instead he had the same tough feet. If she had hit the ground running barefoot since her birth seven years ago, he had hit it ten years ago.

  I was still hurriedly rifling through a jumble of boxed chainsaw parts and other mechanical odds and ends, which had migrated to the porch from my father’s workbench in the carport, for something to tie my boot. Claude picked up a rusty Folgers can and carelessly jammed his hand into its contents and stirred them up.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t take him to the beach with us?” Lulu suggested. “We are supposed to be baby sittin’ him.”

  I watched anxiously as Claude stirred the rusty screws, nails, burnt out fuses, and other parts for which my father swore he would someday find a use.

  Claude’s response to his sister’s suggestion was a quiet, “Mmmh.”

  “What if something happens to him?” She whined. “He’s not much of a swimmer.”

  “Didn’t know you could swim,” Claude muttered, shaking the can in disgust. Giving up, he poured out the contents onto the porch. “Besides, we’re takin’ him with us because we’re baby sittin’ ’im. Hard to baby sit somebody long distance, you know.”

  From the resulting heap he pulled an old watch spring, its blued metal rusted like the nails and screws, and turned to me with a triumphant smile.

  “Whaddya think, Jack? Will it work?”

  I thought so. I eagerly grabbed it from his hands and began stretching it apart. It was easily long enough to wind around the boot top.

  “Keerful, now, don’t cut yourself,” Claude said encouragingly. He turned to his sister. “We can’t just leave him here all alone—if you want to see the waves, we got to take him with us.”

  “You’re just thinkin’ of cookies,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said, shrugging. “Look at him go, Lulu! He sure is clever with his hands for a little guy.”

  “I’m not gettin’ in trouble over him like the last time,” she said, stamping her foot again.

  Finished tying the boots, I looked up in triumph. I eagerly lifted a foot and stomped down hard, chipping off a few more flakes of red paint from the concrete. To celebrate my accomplishment, I did the same with the other boot.

  Lulu skittered away as if I planned on stomping her foot next, maybe wanted to puncture it with all those nasty little spikes. She was probably right to move away—no matter how tightly I’d secured the laces, one a watch spring and the other a worn rawhide string, and no matter how small my father’s feet might be, size 7 EEE to be exact, those boots weren’t going to stay attached to my feet forever.

  “Thattaway!” Claude exclaimed. “Off we go, Jackie-boy.”

  We left the porch, with me awkwardly clomp-clomping at Claude’s side, and Lulu assiduously keeping her brother between us. The last time she had gotten in trouble over me was because of an umbrella. Everybody in the neighborhood said it was because you couldn’t really make an umbrella into a parachute. She figured I just hadn’t climbed high enough in the tree behind our house or maybe popped the umbrella open quite fast enough to make it work right.

  “Wow! Look at those waves, willya!” Claude exclaimed. “Nine feet! Can you believe it?”

  “Y-Y-Yeah,” I said. Holding onto his hand, I stared at the beach. The morning fog had lifted, revealing waves that looked no higher to me than usual. Still, if he said so then they must be, even if I couldn’t see anything different. Same beige sand, with the same madly hopping sand fleas as usual, that’s for sure. Same few rock needles standing far out in the waves, too, the same riprap lining the shore, and the same driftwood tangled for miles both north and south, after which the town was named.

  Much earlier that morning, my mother had been putting the finishing touches on her cloud of blonde hair when I opened the front door for Gerda Clause, Lulu and Claude’s mother.

  “She still primping?” She asked, starting through the living room and glancing into the empty kitchen without waiting for an answer.

  “You in your bedroom?” She called out. She didn’t wait for my mother’s answer, either. She walked straight to the open bedroom door and stared in.

  My mother was seated at her vanity table. The table was painted white, with gilt edging, and both tabletop and mirror frame echoed the curves of a violin. My father, who dabbled in furniture making when he wasn’t logging, had seen something like it in a museum and made it for their fifth anniversary. Besides her hair brushes, it was her most precious possession.

  “Did you know we was havin’ nine foot tides today?” Gerda asked.

  Mother’s eyes shifted momentarily to Gerda in the mirror. Her lips turned down in a pout. She flounced her hair around her shoulders one last time and carefully set down her hair brush, before smoothing out the shoulders of her sweater.

  “I’d sure like to have me a look at those tides,” Gerda announced.

  “A nine foot tide or nine foot waves, Gerda? There is a difference, you know.” my mother said, standing to admire herself in blue jeans and a lemon-yellow, chenille sweater. She had lived all her life on the Oregon and Washington coast and didn’t much care about tides or waves, whether they were six inches or sixteen feet. “You can see the ocean anytime.”

  Gerda was originally from the Ozarks. Stubbornly, she said, “Yeah, but nine feet—”

  “Try adding a couple feet in your imagination,” Mother said, grabbing her black patent leather clutch from the table. “Do you want to go to Astoria with me or not?”

  “Well, sure,” Gerda answered uncertainly, as Mother herded us out of her bedroom.

  “You do still have the money you saved for that dress? You didn’t lose it in a card game, did you?”

  Gerda snickered, her face turning red when she realized I was listening.

  Stopping for a closer look at her, Mother asked, “Oh, Gerda, couldn’t you wear something nicer to town?”

  “I-I—” When flustered, she stammered as badly as I did. Like my mother, Gerda wore jeans; unlike Mother’s, hers were wrinkled and not nearly as tight fitting. Instead of a sweater she wore a plain white blouse. An ink stain over the breast pocket matched the blue of her jeans.

&n
bsp; “And your hair! What a mess!” She ran back to her bedroom, returning shortly with a red cardigan and a matching red scarf. Ordering Gerda to hold out her arms, she helped her into the sweater and then demanded she take off her glasses. Draping the scarf over her head, she gathered the corners together and tied her knots, completely hiding her mousy, brown hair.

  “Much better!” She said, standing back for a look.

  “Really?” Gerda asked, fumbling with her wire-rimmed glasses.

  Except for my mother urging us to the front door, Gerda would have taken a long look at herself in our living room mirror. In spite of my ignorance of fashion, I supposed she would have seen the improvement. Gerda wasn’t unattractive; she actually had a pretty, country girl’s sort of face. Unfortunately for her, her fashion sense was stuck somewhere back in the distant Ozarks. As for my mother, she drew stares wherever she went, and women were always asking her for advice about their clothing and makeup. Her softly lilting accent, passed on to her from her Finnish-born parents, seemed to be another plus in her favor, too, though I didn’t know particularly why it should, considering half our neighbors were of Finnish or Swedish extraction.

  As soon as we stepped outside and closed the door behind us, Mother snapped open her purse and pulled out a box of cigarillos and her Zippo lighter. With her purse tucked under one arm, she lit a cigarillo and at the same time placed her free hand under my chin.

  She stared into my eyes.

  “Now, Jackie, are you listening to me?”

  I stared back, fascinated by the lit cigarillo waggling between her pink lips. In the town of Driftwood Bay, in the 1950’s, many women weren’t daring enough to smoke cigarettes in public, much less a cigarillo—yet another point of curiosity for folks, some of it less than friendly.

  As an aside, she said to Gerda, “You have to look boys straight in the eye—just like a dog, Gerda. That’s the only way they’ll listen, you know.”

  Her hands, always as soft as rose petals, gripped me tightly.

  “Are you?” She demanded. “Listening, I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “You stay out of trouble, do you hear?”

  My eyes watered from the tobacco smoke.

  “And don’t let that—” she hesitated a moment, glancing at Gerda before continuing. “Don’t let precious little Lulu talk you into anything you shouldn’t be doing. Your father isn’t made of money. If you do hurt yourself, I don’t want to hear about it—you just keep it to yourself.”

  I nodded again.

  “I’ve asked Claude to look after you. He’ll make a peanut butter sandwich for you at their house if you get hungry. Do you understand?”

  Seeing I did, she released her grip.

  “We’ll stop and buy cookies at the bakery in Seaside, but Claude knows neither one of you’ll see even a crumb if I hear you’ve been a bad little boy.”

  “Y-Yes, M-M-Mama. I-I-I’ll b-be g-g-good.”

  “You better,” she said. Gerda smiled at me and waved, going ahead of my mother to my dad’s black ’55 Chevy Bel Air coupe.

  “Well, do you still have it?” Mother demanded of Gerda.

  “Have what?” She asked, obviously flustered at this seemingly out-of-the-blue question.

  “Still have your money? You never did answer me, you silly goose.”

  “In my purse,” Gerda answered, primly straightening up and squaring her shoulders before tugging open the passenger door. She slid in and rolled the window down.

  “Mr. J. C. Penny is not about to sell you that dress on your good looks alone, Gerda,” Mother lectured, as she walked to her own door. She settled behind the steering wheel and checked her hair in the rearview mirror.

  “Maybe if you asked him, he would,” Gerda replied, attempting a smile.

  “Gerda, he’s not a real person, you know.”

  “J. C. Penney not a—? Are you sure?”

  “All those people are made up names. Didn’t you know?”

  “Then who’s in those pictures you see of him?”

  “Oh hush!” Mother said, digging through the bottom of her purse for her keys. “Just because you’ve seen the Jolly Green Giant on a can of beans doesn’t mean he’s real, does it?”

  Gerda looked askance at her. “I don’t think that’s the same, Emilie.”

  Mother had found her keys. She ignored Gerda’s response and started the car. She fixed her eyes on me as she backed from the driveway.

  “And you stay out of the house until we come back. I don’t want you tracking dirt all across my nice clean floors.”

  I nodded. She drove perhaps ten feet down the road, and then stopped the car and threw it into reverse. Gerda, busily winding the window up, wound it back down.

  “If you can’t find something to do with yourself,” Mother said past Gerda, “you can cart some of your father’s junk from the porch and put it on his workbench. Maybe that will keep you out of trouble.”

  “Y-Y-Yes, M-Mama.”

  The tip of her burning cigarillo winked goodbye at me. I watched until they turned the corner and were lost from view, hoping that they weren’t really going to Astoria, that it was all a game, that they would return in a minute or two. After five minutes of waiting, of staring forlornly at the end of the street, I took a long look around the porch. It was littered with a dozen or more cardboard boxes, most of them open to the elements, stuffed full, as my mother had said, of my father’s junk. I already knew I couldn’t actually lift any of them.

  Mother had said if I couldn’t find anything to do with myself. I wandered over to my red tricycle and pulled it out of the weeds growing up against our white picket fence. My father didn’t like mowing and weeding any more than he liked picking up tools after himself. I dragged my trike into the gravel roadway instead of trying to push it through the high grass, and began riding. Claude and Lulu wouldn’t be over for another hour. They liked to sleep in late on summer days.

  All of that had been hours ago, long before Claude and Lulu finally made it over to my house. Now, Claude walked me down the short path to the beach past clumps of tall sword grass. Lulu waited for us to reach bottom and then ran out to the water without asking permission. The dry, fluffy sand squeaked under her feet as she darted off.

  Letting go of my hand, Claude followed her. Watching them, as they began chasing each other barefoot through a tide pool, I forgot all about my mother’s remonstrations, all about cookies and other dire warnings. Nothing other than Lulu and Claude, the roar of the surf, and the wind in my hair, was on my mind.

  Running over soft sand in my father’s boots was impossible. Even walking was difficult, until I reached the area compacted by the waves. With arms held wide open, I marched up behind Lulu. Noticing Claude look in surprise at something over her shoulder, she turned and let out a loud shriek at finding me almost upon her. She jitter-bugged out of my grasp, and I turned to follow.

  Claude splashed out of the tide pool and ran after her, easily outdistancing me, which didn’t say that he was fast enough to catch his sister. Each time he lunged toward her, she gave him the slip and bolted in the opposite direction.

  “Look, Jack,” Claude said, coming back to me. “You keep chasing her no matter what. Sooner or later I’ll herd her into your arms, okay?”

  I watched eagerly as he ran after her, hounding her, trying to drive her back in my direction. She was too smart and too nimble for us, aided as she was by all sorts of logs or piles of driftwood she could leap over, run atop, or step between to evade capture. Shrieking with unbridled joy, she laughed or called us names unfit for the ears of adults, once in a while adding insult to injury by clipping me on the ear or swatting the back of my head as she swept by without my laying a finger on her.

  That said, she couldn’t dodge the two of us forever. Gasping for breath, she finally stopped, leaned over at the waist, and rested her hands on her knees. Equally spent, Claude gave up the chase and stared haggar
dly at his sister.

  As for me, I marched gleefully on, arms held wide, finally ready to grab her from behind. At my very moment of victory I saw Claude’s jaw drop.

  “Run!” He yelled. Lulu sprang into action, doing just as her brother had said. Sprinting past him, she scampered up the gnarled branches of an old driftwood log that seemed to have been planted upright in the hard damp sand by a giant’s hand. Taking his own advice, Claude quickly scrambled after her and urgently shouted for her to climb higher.

  Until the noise of the surf rose behind me, I thought it was part of our game. A wall of water was headed in my direction. Somehow over its roar I heard Claude and Lulu screaming at me to run.

  A log bigger around than I was tall, and easily thirty feet long, was beside me. I had just time enough to clamber aboard. From my vantage point I looked down upon the wave, as it rolled in, unaware, in my childish ignorance, of how easily a wave could carry a log out to sea as if it were no more than a matchstick. If I had known that smaller waves routinely threw ashore logs just like mine, I might have been frightened.

  Gulls cried overhead. Behind me, Claude and Lulu were screaming. The wave hissed as it surged around the end of the log. I felt a sudden lurch, like a car quickly accelerating from a standstill. The log rolled.

  In caulk boots my father, who had won more than one log-rolling contest, might have rolled that log across the entire width of the bay. Me it threw. I tumbled into the surf and barely missed being struck in the back of the head, as the log bounced under a second roller. Even while I struggled to right myself, the tide sucked back out, rolling me with it, first sending me to the sandy bottom in those heavy caulk boots, then yanking my feet out from under me and somersaulting me forward, toward a stretch of the beach famously treacherous for its rip tides.

  Still, I wasn’t scared. The relentless waves beat all fear out of me, beat out of me almost everything not related to catching a breath of air. If I thought of anything at all, it was that I would never again see my mother or father. Never again… never again… never again… thoughts the malevolent surf seemed intent upon drowning out before finally drowning me.

  From nowhere, a hand reached down and plucked me half out of the water. A muscular arm encircled me. A desperate struggle toward shore commenced.

  Give him the works!

  The works?

  Full power, you heard me!

  Lightning shot through my body. My neck arched and I felt cold fire racing down my throat into my chest and arms. I convulsed against the metal table.

  The strange voices faded into the distance. Soaking wet, I was standing up with my hands holding onto the seat in front of me, watching over a stranger’s shoulder as he drove. A woman sat next to him.

  “If his hair wasn’t red—” she sobbed.

  He took one hand off the steering wheel and patted her knee.

  “If his hair wasn’t red—” she sobbed again, as if I weren’t standing right behind her.

  “But his hair is red, red as a copper penny,” he said, shaking his head wonderingly. “That’s why you were able to see him in the surf, and that’s why I was able to save him. Even then, when I got out in the water, I almost lost sight of him.”

  “I’m just glad we were driving by,” she said, her voice teary. “Do you really think he knows where he lives, Eddie? He’s awfully young.”

  “You know where you live, young fella?” Eddie asked, looking in the rearview mirror for my answer. “You don’t say much, do you?”

  I nodded, and he laughed.

  “But you can point out the right roads?”

  I did as he’d asked—pointed the way home.

  My father’s rust bucket pickup truck was parked out front. Homelite chainsaw in one hand and a five-gallon gas can in the other, my father was headed into the carport. Steel hardhat cocked on the back of his head, suspenders hanging loosely over his work pants, caulk boots thrown over one shoulder, he wore the beat up old slippers he liked to drive in when on his way to work or coming back. An unlit Camel cigarette dangled from his lower lip. His eyes widened, as he saw the burgundy-colored Buick coupe pull into the driveway.

  Eddie opened the car door and stepped out.

  “You the owner of a fine, red-haired young lad?” He asked. As my father approached, Eddie flipped the seat forward and lifted me out.

  “Looks like a drowned rat to me,” my father said, throwing his head back and laughing. The woman leaned over in her seat to speak through the open door.

  “The tide was taking him out to sea. Eddie had to go in after him.”

  “That right, son?” My father asked, though he didn’t have to; Eddie’s jeans and short-sleeved checked shirt were as soaked as mine.

  “He doesn’t talk much, does he?” Eddie asked.

  As if lost in deep thought, my father scratched at his dark stubbly beard and stared at me curiously.

  “Nick,” he said, vigorously wiping his hand on his shirt before sticking it out for the other man to shake. “Nick Raventhorst.”

  “Ed Rhone,” he replied, wincing at my father’s handshake. “And this is my girlfriend, Sylvia.”

  “Nice to meet you folks. You want a towel or something, Ed? You don’t want to ruin your nice new car.”

  “No, no, that’s okay, I have a blanket to sit on. I’ll just get on home and change my clothes.”

  My father extended his hand again. “Any thing you ever need, Ed, you just let me know, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it, it was a privilege,” he answered solemnly. “It’s not every day I save a life.”

  “What do you do for a living?” My father asked, as Ed backed his car from the driveway.

  “Doctor—I’m the new doctor at the clinic.”

  “I’m a logger,” Father said unnecessarily. “Anything you ever need, you let me know. Anything—”

  I waved as they drove off.

  “Why the devil are you wearing one of my old caulk boots, and where’s the other one?” Father demanded. When I didn’t answer, he shook his head and gestured for me to follow. Muttering, he added, “I could kick a pig, get a better answer than out of you, boy.”

  My mother woke me up from a sound sleep. She sat on the bed and tousled my hair.

  “Your father tells me you took a swim today.”

  Remembering my tumble through the surf, how I was sure I would never see her again, I stared as if speechlessly memorizing every feature, her large green eyes beneath thin, sculpted eyebrows, the heart shaped face with small but shapely nose, evenly spaced perfect teeth, ears tucked well within her voluminous hair—

  “Don’t you think the oxygen flow should be upped, Doctor?”

  “In the old days they didn’t even use oxygen.”

  “Or muscle relaxants, I know. Is that what this is all about? You’re trying to see if you can get better results by those same old methods? Prove you’re smarter than they were?”

  “Just do as you’re told.”

  The jarring voices faded, replaced by equally jarring, ghostly images that played across a sort of inner movie screen. First she sat next to me with her arm curled around me, tucking me under her chin, and then I saw a shorter-haired version wearing a different outfit, watching through the Venetian blinds to make sure my father really was driving away. This woman didn’t know I, in turn, watched her through a crack in the door, that I could hear her as she dialed the phone and spoke quietly to someone.

  The scene shifted. She smiled with relief that I was leaving for the summer to stay with a childless aunt and uncle in California.

  Again the scene shifted: my mother, yelling and screaming at my father, raised a knife in the air. Turning in what appeared to be slow-motion, he knocked it from her hand as easily as someone else might swat a fly.

  Blinking hard, I again found myself staring into my mother’s eyes. Stroking my hair, she let out a sigh. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what you thought
you were doing at the beach,” she said, hugging me tighter. “Ohh! I remember, Gerda’s nonsense! She wanted to stay and see the high waves, didn’t she? And Claude and Lulu wanted to see them, too. Is that why you were in the water? Nitwitted Lulu had to play in the surf? Didn’t I tell you not to let Lulu talk you into anything you shouldn’t be doing?”

  I was tired. I closed my eyes and her voice dropped away. My father was leaning over me. Even with my eyes closed I could still tell he’d had his bath. He smelled like the powdered laundry detergent he bathed in every day after work to wash the smell of gasoline from his skin.

  “You’ll get through this like you’ve gotten through everything else, Johnny,” he said.

  Get through what? I wondered.

  “This too shall pass,” he said quietly. “At least that’s what your grandmother always says.”

  A smile was in his voice. “Of course she doesn’t say it in English, and she likes to add that all good things pass along with the bad ones.”

  Which grandmother? I wondered. His mother was Romanian and my mother’s mother was Finnish. Neither one of them spoke English with ease. Some people thought maybe I had trouble speaking because of my spending so much time in their company instead of with my parents. Which didn’t explain a lot since neither my father nor my mother stammered or stuttered, and each had grown up with English as a second language.

  Staring out through slit eyelids, I pretended to sleep. One moment I had been listening to my mother and the next to my father. One moment I was looking into my mother’s beautiful face, the next my father’s dark, craggy visage. Against my father’s wishes, she was smoking in the house, while he had his usual pinch of Copenhagen tucked in his cheek. The flat round can was clearly visible in his t-shirt pocket. One day the unfiltered Camels he loved, and that little can of smokeless tobacco, would ravage his muscular body…

  Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I could still smell mother’s cigarette. I certainly smelled tobacco on my father’s breath. I took a lungful of air through my nostrils, loving the fragrance of tobacco and the scents of mother and father.

  “No, no, open your mouth, I said. I didn’t tell you to take a deep breath.”

  I reflexively gritted my teeth.

  “Open your mouth!”

  Icy chills shot through my body. Though my eyes were shut, I felt the world spinning around me, tumbling me end over end over end.

  “Open your mouth, Mr. Raventhorst!”

  This time a slap came with the order. My eyes flew open.

  The face hovering over me held no more than a vague resemblance to my mother’s. The hair was short and blonde, the eyes blue, the features pudgy and not nearly as refined. The stale smell of tobacco rolled over me from her open mouth.

  Leaning closer, she smiled triumphantly. The look on her face made me want to slug her. What was wrong with my hands and arms? Try as I might, I couldn’t move them an inch. I seemed completely paralyzed.

  She leaned closer still, and that was when I arched my back and flung myself at her.

  “Omigod!” She screamed, jerking away, her hands flying to her face. “My nose! My nose!”

  Footsteps hurried off. Another face leaned over me. This one was black, male, very round, clean-shaven, and much more kindly looking.

  “Well, I’m sure that about tears it with her, Mr. Raventhorst,” he said, returning my gaze without coming closer.

  “Wh-Wh-Wh—” I struggled to speak, the words refusing to form on my lips. What could possibly be wrong with me? All I wanted to ask was, Where am I? Why had the strange woman wanted me to open my mouth? Why had she slapped me? If my mother or father had seen her, she would have had worse than a broken nose.

  “Mr. Raventhorst?”

  That Mister business again. Why didn’t my father answer him? I stared into brown eyes shading into black, pools almost deep enough to fall into.

  “Will you open your mouth for me?”

  Why was he calling me, a little boy, Mister? Was it like Uncle Erke calling me Mister Jackie?

  “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Raventhorst?”

  I must’ve shaken my head.

  “I’m Ralph, your friend. I’m trying to help you.”

  I opened my mouth. The man stuck a raspy finger inside my cheek and began fishing around for something.

  “Here we go,” he said, retrieving a capsule from beside a back molar. “You’re wise not to swallow something like that.”

  He offered me a cup of water in exchange. Dutifully, I took a sip.

  “She’ll be back with a needle, I can guarantee you,” he said. “But maybe I can talk to her, tell her I got you to swallow it.”

  He must have read the questions in my eyes.

  “Tell you what. Why don’t we get you up and into the shower? That way if she comes back she’ll just have to hang fire until you darned well feel like coming back to bed. If I know her, she have to wait too long, she’ll give up all right—”

  Under his breath, he added a few, familiar sounding curses, and began working at my wrist restraints.

  “Mr. Raventhorst, you ever read that book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”

  One what? I shook my head.

  “Our Nurse Jo, she’s worse than her,” he said. “Most of us around here call her Nurse Wretched. Not that we say it to her face, naturally.”

  Neither the book nor the name meant anything to me. But my eyes widened, as first one hand and then the other came free of the restraints, hands that proved to be deeply callused and, even more surprisingly, with muscular arms attached to them. I wasn’t a little boy. I was a man, and I was in the nuthouse again. Let everybody else call it an Insane Asylum or something polite like State Hospital: to me it was the nuthouse.