The Will

by Reed Arvin

  “Why didn’t you try to stop me if you felt that way?”

  “Would you have heard a word I said?”

  Henry thought. “No.”

  “Exactly. I wasn’t willing to waste this talk when it didn’t have a chance of making any difference. So I prayed you over to God, and hoped for the best.”

  “Pretty weak.”

  “I suppose.” Baxter paused a moment and added, “And yet here you are.”

  Henry leaned back against the headboard. “And you place great meaning in that.”

  “I place enormous meaning in that.”

  Henry sat quietly for a moment and said, “So you trusted your God I’d come back around.”

  “No. I just trusted God. I had no idea if you’d come around. I pray for everybody, Henry. Some get better. Some don’t. God’s not on the end of my chain.”

  “But surely you can see how thin it is. And we’re supposed to live like it was everything we needed. It’s absurd.”

  “It’s all we get. Anything else is just mumbo-jumbo to make us feel better about the unknown. I won’t do that. Look, Henry, the only difference between you and me is what we see when we look into the dark. That’s it. You look into the dark, and you see nothing. I look, and I see a light. Distant, maybe, and not always very clear. But we both see the dark. Everyone awake sees the dark.”

  “And what is this dark? Surely you don’t believe in some Satan.”

  “The dark is the thing that makes the light utterly precious. I hang on to the light. That’s all prayer is, Henry. It’s nothing more than deciding to hang on to the light. And it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to that I can’t know beforehand what God is going to do about my prayers. It wouldn’t be much of a story if I knew the ending before it began.”

  “And on this thread you base your life.”

  “You call God unreliable. I call Him the Mystery. But even a mysterious God is better than no God at all. If I really believed we were alone in the universe I wouldn’t hesitate to kill myself. You would call that cowardice, probably. But I would call it a heroic act of disdain for the meaninglessness of life.” He laughed softly. “Of course what either one of us thought about it wouldn’t make any difference. Nothing would matter.”

  “So you refuse to believe in that nothing.”

  “You refuse to believe in my God.”

  “It’s paper thin.”

  “I suppose. And yet here you are.”

  Henry paused. “So you keep saying.”

  “Sorry,” Baxter said, and he laughed again. “If you believe in the good ending, it’s possible to smile without disregarding the pain of today.”

  “The good ending.”

  “You can call it grace, if you like.”

  “If this is grace, it hurts like hell. I thought it was supposed to take away pain.”

  “If you thought that, you’ve forgotten how grace entered this world.”

  “That’s the big story, isn’t it? The cross. But hope is all you have on that. You don’t know anything.”

  “That’s perfectly true. But if it’s not real, they’re going to have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”

  The two sat in silence a moment. At last Baxter said, “Get some sleep, Henry. I can’t fix this. It may not get fixed. There aren’t any guarantees. But calling me was the right thing to do. I don’t know what will happen next. I think you’re in the grip of the Hand, but that’s looking at it from my point of view. From where you sit . . . well, I wouldn’t want to be where you sit.”

  “If I am in some grip, I want out.”

  “You have that right. Sleep now. And call me when you want to. It might help.”

  Henry hung up the phone and lay back on the bed in the dark. He could hear the traffic again now, the sounds of life filtering up from the streets below. For some time he didn’t move. Then, because there was nothing else to do, he opened his mouth and inhaled deeply, feeling the air rush back into him.

  The next day passed slowly. Henry awoke early, habit enforcing its will. His first, automatic thought was to go to the office. Then, with the thudding realization that he had nowhere to go, he got up, made himself breakfast, and sat down to look over his accounts. If he was out of work, he needed to know his precise financial condition. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been; his spending had loosened up considerably since meeting Elaine, but his relatively poor upbringing had kept him from doing anything truly irresponsible. But Chicago was an expensive city, and he estimated about four months was all he had before things became serious.

  He dressed, ate an early lunch at home to save money, and spent the afternoon near the lake. Growing up on the plains had left him with an innate wonder at anything having to do with water, and Lake Michigan had always held him spellbound. He prowled the dock area, watching men loading the outsized cargo vessels. He felt a wave of romanticism for a life of simple physical labor; the easy camaraderie of the longshoremen seemed enormously appealing, watching them cuss and talk trash to one another. But he moved on downtown, wandering through the little shops and restaurants by the water. Office buildings towered behind him, and he looked at them for a long time, thinking about the stupendous amount of living that went on within their glass-and-steel frames. He bought a beer at a little place off Carter Street, nursing it for a long time. At last, when dusk began to form out on the water, he took a last look at the lake and drove home.

  It was early evening but he had already drifted off to sleep when he heard a distant ringing. He opened his eyes, trying to pinpoint the sound. It was his cell phone, and he was hearing it through his briefcase. He leaped to open the case, flipped open the phone, and said, “Hello?”

  “Billy Payne, sir,” the voice on the line said. “The manager down at the Feed and Farm Supply. There’s been a little trouble, and I thought you’d want to know.”

  Payne, Henry thought. He probably doesn’t even know I’m in Chicago yet. “What kind of trouble?” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s that Birdman,” Payne said. “He’s gone crazy.”

  Henry came instantly to attention. “Tell me what you know, and start at the beginning.”

  “All I know is that the alarm went off at the store,” Payne said, “and it’s my number at the alarm company, so I got called. I got there about the same time Collier did.”

  “Who’s Collier?”

  “Sheriff Collier. He was just gettin’ out of his car when I pulled up.”

  “What happened? What does Boyd have to do with it?”

  “I guess he went crazy, like I said. It was a real mess we found. The glass was broken out all along the front of the store. He’d been throwin’ rocks, big ones. Busted out the picture windows, every one of ’em. Then he come in and went through the stock, and left quite a trail. When that old man gets angry he’s got some energy.”

  “Is he all right? Did anything happen to him?”

  “Yeah, the old man’s all right,” Payne said. “It’s Collier’s the one that’s hurt.”

  Henry’s stomach tightened. “How bad?”

  “Not bad, but he’s mad as hell. That Birdman bit him, bit him hard, too, right on the arm. Doc’s on his way over here.”

  “God, what a mess. Where’s Boyd now?”

  “Collier’s got him locked up. Got him in a straitjacket. Took three of us to hold him down.”

  Henry imagined Boyd, anguished and uncomprehending, being manhandled into submission. Tumblers clicked in Henry’s mind, expensive, life-changing thoughts that he wished he could avoid. “Listen, Billy, I hear a lot of noise in the background. What’s going on over there now?”

  “Whole damn town’s out here. Must be forty, fifty people milling around.”

  “All right, Billy, listen to me carefully. I’m in Chicago right now.”

  “Huh? Didn’t know that.”

  “The number rings me wherever I am. Now tell me what kind of man this Collier is.”

  “He’s all right,
I guess. Hates trouble. Mad as a rattlesnake right now.”

  “Okay. Then I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Whatever I can.”

  “Good man. Tell Sheriff Collier that Boyd isn’t for public display. Tell him that I said to take him over to his office and keep people away from him. There’s a ten-fifteen from O’Hare to Kansas City. If I make it, I’ll be at Collier’s office in about five hours.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you about this. Like I say, I didn’t know you had left.”

  “Just tell Collier to go easy on Boyd.”

  “I’m not sure he’s in a listening mood.”

  “Just tell him.”

  * * *

  Henry changed clothes quickly. It may not get fixed, Baxter had said. There aren’t any guarantees. He might find a destiny behind Boyd. He might find nothing but a lunatic and a plane ride home. But for now, what mattered was getting to Boyd. It was the right thing to do, and improbably, he was free to do it. To have a purpose again was enough. His bag was still packed; in the rush to make Elaine’s party there hadn’t been time to unpack, and he had ignored the job in the malaise of the previous day. He looked around his apartment for a moment before leaving. Thoughtfully, he walked to a drawer in a chest in his bedroom. He opened it, stared at a somewhat yellowed envelope, and put the envelope in his pocket. He drove straight to O’Hare, parked in long-term, and took the tram to the ticket counter. There were plenty of seats available, and he got a row to himself for the seventy-five-minute flight.

  When Henry pulled his car up at the sheriff’s office it was just after two in the morning. The crowd had dwindled, but the headlights of three or four latecomers with nothing better to do shot through the night across the parking lot, sending streaks of luminescence through the limbs of the people still standing around outside the office. Henry screeched to a halt and had the door open before the car stopped. He entered the sheriff’s office at a trot.

  Sheriff Collier was about forty-five, with a dark, sunburnt face, short-cropped hair, and sallow gray eyes. His weight had settled comfortably in his stomach, which protruded from an otherwise slender frame with spindly legs and an arched back. When Henry saw him he was standing by his desk, adjusting a bandage on his wrist and hand.

  “Sheriff, I’m Henry Mathews. I’m the one who asked you to get Boyd out of there.”

  Collier turned toward the voice without actually acknowledging it. “Didn’t do it for you,” he said. “Don’t need any scenes around the Crandall store, that’s all. Roger wouldn’t like that. Best to bring the nutcase in here, till we can get him out in the morning. Already got a call in to the state hospital up in Larned. Night nurse in the psychiatric ward said they’d come over first thing in the morning, pick him up.”

  “I want to see Boyd,” Henry said. “Immediately.”

  Collier tucked in his shirt, walked around behind his desk, and sat down. “I could’ve called out to the Crandall place, but no need. I happen to know Roger’s in Topeka.”

  “I’m glad to know that. I’d like to see Boyd, now.”

  “He’s gettin’ himself another lawyer, what he told me before he left. Told me you’re out. So I’m just tryin’ to figure out why I should give a damn about you seein’ Boyd.”

  Henry walked to the desk. “I never worked for Roger Crandall. He’s been free to get any representation he wanted from the day I first got here.” Collier rose and walked to a coffeemaker, pouring himself a cup. He looked Henry over, weighing the size of the threat. “Don’t make me no difference anyway.” He gestured toward the door leading into the small cellblock. “See, I got myself a lunatic in there. The man just destroyed a lot of valuable property. Crandall property, not that I give a damn.”

  “You’re above all that, then? The Crandall name strikes no fear in your heart?”

  Collier gave Henry a dark look. “I don’t take my orders from Roger,” he said in a low voice. “No, thing is, the whole town’s in an uproar. So like I said, I don’t believe we’re gonna have any visitors tonight.”

  Henry thought, If not from Crandall, then whom? “I have no idea what happened tonight,” he said, “but I do know that Boyd is obviously extremely upset about something. I want to know what that thing is. This kind of action isn’t in his history at all.”

  Collier sat back down and pushed back his chair. “See this?” he said. He shook his bandaged forearm. “The little rat bit me. Bit me, like a damn animal. Now, I got a responsibility to keep order in this town, Mathews, and I’m gonna do just that.” He looked out the window at the crowd milling around in front of the office. “I got a situation here,” he said. “There isn’t a hell of a lot to do on a Monday night in Council Grove. Folks got a lotta time on their hands. So like I said, no visitors tonight. We got us a criminal matter now. Destruction of property. Disturbin’ the peace. Criminal trespass. So I’d say you can get on home now and leave this matter to me.”

  Henry looked Collier directly in the eyes. Maybe there was a reason I became a lawyer after all, he thought. It’s not much, but it’s something. At least I can put the fear of God into small-town punks like this. He leaned over Collier’s desk. “I’m going to explain something to you now, Sheriff,” he said, “and I’m going to use small words, so you don’t miss anything. I’m not some podunk legal-aid attorney from one of the little insect-infested towns around here. I’ve been paid a lot of money to destroy people, and I haven’t forgotten how to do it. I say this without the slightest hostility— simply to inform you—that I am a legal nightmare beyond your limited comprehension. It would mean nothing to me to bury you in actions you lack the simple capacity to read. Understand me, Sheriff. I don’t mean burying your department, insignificant as it is. I mean burying you, personally. By the time I’m finished, for the rest of your small, insignificant life, your pathetic little salary will go entirely to Mr. Raymond Boyd, in compensation for the gross violation of his civil and medical rights you are now foolish enough to imagine perpetrating.” He leaned even closer, and felt Collier retreat in the face of his energy. “It might have crept into your minuscule brain that I’m bullshitting you. Look at me, Sheriff. Do I look like I’m bullshitting you?” Collier didn’t speak. “I don’t ever bullshit about destroying people. Given Mr. Boyd’s extremely tentative mental condition and your lack of medical expertise, I would say that your ruthless restraint of him in a straitjacket is tantamount to psychiatric murder. I’m confident that a number of psychiatrists can be found to testify to that fact. You will be held liable for any harm that comes to him as a result of your impulsive action, and I will see that you are found negligent because you didn’t seek expert psychiatric and medical opinions regarding that restraint. Of course, if he has any type of seizure or suffers any physical harm in attempting to free himself, those damages will be added to the total. The violation of his civil rights, which are grotesque, are an entirely different matter, but we’re already somewhere in the millions. That’s off the top of my head, Sheriff. I can sit down and really start to work on making you miserable, if you like. Or you can find some keys. It’s entirely up to you.”

  Collier stared for a full half minute, and Henry didn’t allow himself even to blink. He merely bored a hole into Collier’s skull with his eyes, and watched the sheriff levitate off his chair and fumble nervously for the cell keys.

  “Shit,” Collier said, “if you’re gonna throw that legal crap around you can go see him. If this’ll get you out of my hair, go on. But hurry up. I don’t want you in there all night.”

  “I’ll let you know when I’m done,” Henry answered dismissively.

  “Just watch his teeth, damn it. Doc’s gone home, and I ain’t in the mood to patch anybody up tonight.”

  Collier led Henry through a heavy steel door with a single, barred window. The door opened into a narrow hallway with four cells arranged in a row on one side. Boyd was the only prisoner. Henry walked down the hallway, looking in each cell, until he got to the third; there, he saw Bo
yd sitting on the edge of a bare metal cot. He was hugging himself tightly, his arms pulled back by the tight cords of the straitjacket. Henry walked in front of Collier to the cell door and placed his hand on it; Boyd didn’t look up.

  “There’s no reason for the personal restraint,” Henry said sternly. “He’s incarcerated as it is.”

  “He’s still got to be handled,” Collier answered. “I don’t want any more incidents. Easier this way.” He looked at Henry. “I like things easy.”

  “The man can’t even go to the bathroom, did you ever think about that? We’re getting him out of that thing.”

  Boyd was still for the moment, slumped over and breathing quietly. His eyes were open but he stared into space, apparently unseeing. His hair and beard were streaked with sweat and dirt. After a few seconds Collier pulled a wooden nightstick from his belt and gripped it firmly. “Tell you what,” he said. “You take it off him. But if he so much as peeps, the jacket’s goin’ back on, and he can go in his pants for all I care.”

  Collier unlocked the door of the cell, his eyes on Boyd. The door swung open, but Boyd didn’t move. Henry walked into the cell, passing Collier, who stayed in the hall. Boyd was trembling slightly within the straitjacket, tiny shudders erupting as if he were freezing. Henry looked at him searchingly, wondering if he should continue forward. “This man has been minding his own business for a very long time,” he said. “It must have taken something severe to drive him to this. A man doesn’t sit on a park bench for twenty-five years and suddenly attack a building.”

  “Don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “Aren’t you interested at all in what the thing that pushed him over the edge might be?”

  “How should I know?” He waved his nightstick. “The man’s a nut, Mathews. Who knows why he does anything? Maybe he thinks God told him to do it.”

  “This didn’t just happen. There has to be a reason.” Henry turned back to Boyd, approaching slowly. Boyd was calm for the moment, and Henry helped him up off the metal bed. He removed the jacket, Boyd looking sullenly downward, his thoughts apparently far away. As Henry let the jacket fall at last to the floor, Boyd looked up into his eyes. There was a longing and hurting there that overwhelmed. But even as Henry looked, the face quickly clouded over again into oblivion, shutting him out. Henry turned and looked at the sheriff, seeing the habitual, lazy disinterest in the man. It wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen if the situation was left unchecked: criminal prosecution for Boyd, public humiliation, eventual committal to a psychiatric ward, possibly indefinitely. He turned back to Boyd, catching his gaze once again. “Absolution,” Henry whispered. “Absolution, old man.”