The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  You might think Carl’s been drinking; he’s dry as a stone in Death Valley. Not that drinking hasn’t been a problem, just like anger’s now a problem, which is a reason why he’s upstairs and not downstairs. Harriet’s downstairs and his step-brats are downstairs and the dog and cat are downstairs, and he’s upstairs by himself, sober and calm. His only problem is knotholes, the sly ones creeping across the ceiling, gathering news, making plans. And who do they tell his secrets to, that’s what he wants to know, who does he have to watch out for? So Carl isn’t moving even a little finger; he’s making like a dead guy just to trick them, like he’s lying in his coffin, staring up like a corpse might stare up. But lying like that takes effort. It’s hard work and he starts to sweat and the pressure starts to build. He can feel it, like something in his gut trying to break free. Pretty soon it’s going to blow and then people better watch out.

  TWO

  WOODY POTTER’S PHONE on his night table began ringing at two-fifty-three a.m., and his cell phone joined in two seconds later, so even before he was technically awake he knew it was something big, and he reached out blindly with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Hoping to shut off the sound before it disturbed Susie, he made a grab but knocked his cell to the floor, sending it skittering under the bed, and then he remembered that Susie wasn’t lying next to him and might never again lie next to him. But by then he had the phone to his ear and was on his belly, trying to grab the other, and urgent voices, blessedly, put his female problems on the back burner.

  Hank Alvarez, the trooper on duty at the Alton Barracks was on the cell; Brewster acting police chief Fred Bonaldo was on the house phone. Woody knew it was a mistake to listen to both with a phone to each ear, an atonal duet about snakes, missing babies, escalating hysteria, and the crime scene unit being on its way. He wanted to tell them he was wandering in a sleep-deprived dead zone, a fog of unknowing. Instead he said he was leaving for the hospital immediately, which, really, was all they wanted to hear.

  Woody swung his feet onto the floor and then sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. Although he had gone to bed before eleven, he’d tossed and turned for an hour. Ajax, his golden retriever, padded over in the dark and licked his toes. Worse than whatever horror show was on display at Morgan Memorial was the vacancy on the other side of the queen-size bed, a vacancy matched by an increasing vacancy within him, a hole so big his entire life seemed in danger of tumbling into it and he wanted to lie down and put his head under the pillow. Then he shook himself, grabbed his jeans and boots, and four minutes later he was hurrying out the back door to his Tundra as Ajax and Tufito, the cat, stared at him from the top of the kitchen stairs as if saying, “What-zup, what-zup?”

  Woody Potter was one of five state police area detectives assigned to Washington County, and he knew what lay ahead was something Fred Bonaldo felt he couldn’t handle alone. Brewster had thirty full-time police officers, with another fifteen part-timers who worked May 1 to October 1. If acting chief Bonaldo needed more assistance, he would call the troopers; or if, say, he needed a SWAT team, he might instead call Westerly or South Kingstown, since Bonaldo would probably yell for a SWAT team if a toddler threw a snowball at a cruiser. But aren’t I being unfair? thought Woody. And wasn’t this something Susie’s been complaining about? His negativity? The question mark floated above him like a striper might consider a fishhook as he drove the dark roads toward Brewster. Then he said “Fuck it!” so loudly he jumped, as if the voice belonged to someone squatting in the narrow seat behind him.

  He was thirty-nine and, he’d thought, on the cusp of his second marriage. No kids. A year after graduating from Tolman High School in Pawtucket, he’d joined the army in time for the first Iraq War: six months of stultifying boredom and several moments of terror. Next came four years at the University of Rhode Island, a degree in political science, a minor in criminology and criminal justice, the continuation of a heavy drinking problem, and Cheryl, his wife. A year later, he entered Roger Williams law school. He lasted nine months, got his drinking under control as his marriage went careening out of control. This, he used to think, was Cheryl’s problem. “You’re no fun anymore,” she’d said. She liked to party and he was sick of partying. Now he thought the problem had been likely his. He was short-tempered and silent if things bothered him. In any case, they divorced. Cheryl was in Oregon, and they’d probably never see each other again.

  Even before the divorce had been finalized, Woody had entered the State Police Training Academy in Foster for a twenty-six-week program, with the first twenty-one weeks living at the academy five days a week. It was like basic training—worse in some ways, better in others, since he got to go home Friday nights. Now he had been a trooper for eleven years. What had happened since graduation from the academy and where he was this morning was, on one hand, the soothing exactness of trooper discipline, and, on the other, a series of botched sexual relationships, a bad temper, or, as he was told, an anger management problem, and a question he repeated like the refrain of a song: “Just what the fuck you think you’re doing?” Was he happy? He guessed so. He never thought about it. Was he depressed? Well, everything’d been fine till Susie left, so maybe it hadn’t been fine after all. What else? Those few moments of terror in Iraq would sometimes pop back in his head and all he could see were flashing lights and explosions and, oh, yes, flying body parts. When he’d seen a therapist last week—still hoping to save his relationship—Dr. Nardone asked, “Where d’you see yourself in ten years?” He began to say, “In jail,” then bit his tongue. Where did that come from? he’d asked himself.

  What had he learned as a trooper? To keep his face absolutely blank, to express confidence and optimism, to expect the worst, to remain alert in incredibly boring situations, to go to the gym five days a week, to lie in moderation, to keep away from the bottle. He liked it. He liked the occasional adrenaline rush; he liked the routine; he liked the clarity; he liked a bunch of the guys he worked with, men and women. He liked being with people he could trust. This, more or less, was Woody Potter. All in all he was a pretty good guy, though, as he’d be first to admit, there was room for improvement. Oh, yes, he was tall, muscular, had short dark hair—more like a fringe than a haircut—dark eyes, a jutting chin, and a three-inch shrapnel scar on the left side of his neck. An eighth of an inch deeper and he’d be dead.

  It was eight miles from Woody’s small Cape in Carolina to Morgan Memorial, much of it through the woods on Route 2, a pause at the light on Route 1, and then three miles up Water Street—coming through a dark place and ending up at a three-ring circus, since cruisers and emergency response vehicles from half a dozen towns had seen fit to pay a visit. All were drawn up around the emergency entrance with lights flashing and radios chattering. Two ambulances and a rescue vehicle had also turned up. Some of the cops were off duty. Were they volunteering? No, they were here to see the fun.

  More were inside the ER, but the only patient was a big South Kingstown cop being treated for a sprained ankle, which he’d twisted in his rush to see the snake. In an observation room was the nurse, Alice Alessio, who had been on duty in labor and delivery, and whose hysteria, Woody was told, was thought to be on the mend. Soon he was calling her Nurse Spandex like everyone else, though a few called her Alice Spandex and when Woody first heard the name, he thought she must be East European.

  The two mothers in labor and delivery, including the Summers girl, whose baby had disappeared, had been moved to another floor. Bonaldo wanted to clear labor and delivery entirely. “The big problem,” he told Woody, “is the snakes. We found one sneaking through the nurses’ station. I mean, Alice Spandex doesn’t recall how many she saw. She said maybe five, maybe ten. But she’s not thinking clearly.”

  This really is a circus, thought Woody. “Are they poisonous?”

  Bonaldo was a balding middle-aged man with a red-faced, swollen look. He was tall, a little over six feet, though Woody was taller. His rimless glasses sat at
a crooked angle on his nose; his blue shirt was half untucked. “Fucking corn snakes—’bout the nicest snakes you’d want to meet, and the one we caught was like doped up. Nearly a six-footer. And pretty? It looks like Halloween candy. But how many others are out there? Nurses, patients, doctors, everyone—they’re seeing snakes all over the hospital. It’s like a hysterical reflex.”

  Bonaldo said this in one long breath, and Woody felt he was having too good a time. He felt that Bonaldo was “acting” chief much in the way he might be called a “pretend” chief. Actually, he was a Realtor doing the town a favor. Quarrels in the department and friends in City Hall got him the job, but more of this later.

  “And the baby?”

  They stood by the triage desk. The woman on duty pretended not to be listening.

  “There you’ve got me. Like it seems to be gone.”

  This was the first of many times that Woody thought the snake, or snakes, were taking precedence over the baby. Bonaldo would deny it, but it wasn’t the missing baby making him flap his hands and roll his eyes, nor was the baby making his comrades in law enforcement dash around, look in closets and under beds with highly agitated startle responses as one after the other imagined that he, or she, had seen a colorful flicker at the corner of his or her eye. Woody had brought back a fairly active startle response from Iraq, so much so that Susie wouldn’t walk up behind him without announcing her presence, but he felt like an absolute beginner compared to these guys. But then he’d always liked snakes.

  “So who’s in charge?”

  “I am, I guess.” This seemed to embarrass Bonaldo. “Though there’s an off-duty South Kingstown captain who’s been a big help, also a Westerly lieutenant. But it’s my jurisdiction. Did I tell you an FBI guy’s coming down from Providence or Boston? Abduction, you know, that’s their bailiwick. And now you’re here, too, Corporal. You’re the trooper. That’s why I called you.”

  “Great,” said Woody, without enthusiasm. He felt lots of stuff had to be cleared away before he got to the actual baby. All these cops in the ER, outside and upstairs and more arriving—most he knew and a few were close friends, basketball buddies, fishing pals. It was like a convention with tabloid written all over it. Rhode Island was more of a big town than a state; it was a third the size of San Diego County, where his sister lived, with a third the population. Soon cops would be showing up from Woonsocket fifty miles away on the Massachusetts border, as far as you could get from Brewster and still be in Rhode Island. And the crime scene unit was driving down from North Scituate, also nearly fifty miles.

  “What does Miss Spandex say?”

  Bonaldo made a grunt that might have been a laugh and explained the confusion about her name, ending up, “Actually, I was in high school with her mother. Hot? You better believe it.” He cracked his knuckles in emphasis.

  Woody grasped that Bonaldo hadn’t really talked to Alice except to learn the basic details—baby boy missing, snakes in crib—because she was hard to talk to: “It’s the hysteria.” Other nurses were trying to calm her down. South Kingstown had tried to talk to her, as did Westerly, but all they’d discovered was there might be, really, quite a lot of snakes. “Like a menagerie,” said Bonaldo.

  When Woody had been learning anger management techniques, one method had meant practicing three types of patience, one being the patience of voluntarily accepting suffering. He was, with a degree of irony, trying that now. The alternative was to start yelling.

  “And the mother?”

  “Oh, you know, she’s taking it pretty well, considering.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk to the nurse first.”

  “The problem,” said Bonaldo, “is this Spandex girl was supposed to be on duty and she wasn’t. I mean, she wasn’t on the floor. The babies were by themselves, I don’t know how long. It was the curse. . . . You know, her monthlies. She said she had the cramps something awful. My wife does the same thing. She was all knotted up in the toilet.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough.”

  Alice Alessio was in a room across from the ER desk. A Brewster cop—Harry Morelli—stood at the door with crossed arms. With a shaved head, drooping mustache, and ferocious scowl, he looked like a Turkish harem guard shoved into a blue uniform.

  As Woody began to enter the room, he saw two men and a woman from the crime scene unit hauling their stuff through the emergency entrance. Woody knew them well, and they nodded to one another. The corporal, Frank Montesano, came over to Woody, as a Brewster detective led the others to the elevator.

  “Got a circus on your hands, Detective?” said Montesano.

  “It’s not my circus, I hope.”

  “Why steal a baby?” Montesano was as solid as a fire hydrant and about forty.

  “Who knows? To sell it, have it, ransom it, trade it, you name it.” It was a question that Woody hadn’t given much attention to. Those damn snakes kept getting in the way.

  “I guess the hospital doesn’t use a baby LoJack system.” Seeing Woody’s disbelief, Montesano added, “It’s a transmitter you put on the baby as an anklet. If someone takes the baby out of a designated area, all the doors and elevators lock down and bells ring. Some come with a GPS. Lots of hospitals use them.”

  “Well, Morgan Memorial’s not one of them.”

  After Montesano went up to the nursery, Woody asked himself: Why had the baby been taken? Cops hurried through the ER on a variety of real or made-up errands, glad to break out of a routine. Boredom, Woody thought, was as dangerous to cops as risk-taking. But the trouble at Morgan Memorial was nothing Bonaldo could handle on his own—taking statements, gathering evidence, searching the hospital and nearby vicinity, assisting the transfer of patients to other floors and hunting for snakes. It was a logistical nightmare. Practically speaking, the whole hospital was a crime scene. It might take days to straighten it out. It wasn’t the work Woody minded but the clutter. Here he found lots of clutter. But no matter how bad it was, it would get worse as the news spread into the world. By now the hospital’s top medical and administrative staff were arriving, including the director, Dr. Joyce Fuller, who had degrees in business and hospital administration rather than medicine. In addition, somebody had put out calls to local psychologists and counselors to help with the general hysteria. A lot of patients needed calming down; some of the staff as well. Although the hospital had only fifty beds, it employed about two hundred people. Woody guessed every one of them had learned what had happened and all would call a minimum of five friends and/or relatives.

  To complicate matters, an ambulance pulled up at the door with a real emergency. The tech and driver took an elderly man out of the back, a resident of Ocean Breezes suffering from chest pains. Several cops glanced at the old guy in irritation, as if he were a trespasser who should be sent someplace else. Woody knew the EMTs: Seymour Hodges and Jimmy Mooney. Hodges had got back from Iraq about four months ago and Woody had been interested in talking to him about it, though not enough to actually call him. But then he turned his attention to Nurse Spandex.

  Alice Alessio lay on her back with her hands pressed to her cheeks and seemed focused on the ceiling light. She was rigid, but every few moments she began to shake so the bed rattled, and then she began to whimper. The older nurse sitting by her side stroked her forehead and aimed soothing noises at her ear. This was Bernie Wilcox, and she’d been a nurse for forty years. If she hadn’t insisted on working part-time, she could have been a head nurse or a nurse supervisor, not in a podunk hospital like Morgan but in Providence or Boston. She didn’t say this; other people said this. Everybody she worked with said she could have any job she wanted. She was that good. Years back, she’d had some of those jobs, but now she liked her loom, her weaving, and her thirty sheep as much as she liked nursing. So she split her time.

  Woody Potter had never met Bernie, but he was struck by her empathy and calm. If he didn’t have so much on his mind he might have guessed the empathetic calm was professional appa
ratus. It made her job go more smoothly. This didn’t mean that Bernie was the opposite of calm, but she had little use for Nurse Spandex. What she wanted was to keep Nurse Spandex from running screaming through the hospital, because making scenes and pitching fits was what Nurse Spandex was all about. That and getting laid.

  Woody knew none of this, but he knew the name Nurse Spandex, and he could see how her nursing scrubs had received a variety of tucks and taking-ins to set off her figure. At thirty-five, or thereabouts, she was on the cusp between overripe grape and fallen peach. Windfall was the word he was looking for, or was it deadfall? Then there was her makeup. Her eyeliner and eye shadow were distributed across her cheeks much like a flooded Mississippi River is often distributed across the Midwest.

  At the foot of the bed, Woody tried to imitate Bernie’s expression of empathetic calm. It wasn’t easy for him, not because he wasn’t empathetic but because a blankness of expression and varieties of anger were the only expressions he was good at. Or, as Susie had screamed at him recently: “You only look happy when you’re playing with the dog!”

  Woody leaned forward. “You’ve had a terrible shock.”

  Although he spoke in what seemed to be a melodious whisper, Alice Alessio responded with a wail. Bernie looked at him reproachfully. Alice heaved herself about the bed and Bernie had to take her arm so she wouldn’t fall out. Woody lowered his head and folded his hands in front of him to look vaguely priestlike. He disliked hysteria; he didn’t see the purpose of it. What he liked in life was unruffled affability with a touch of ironic humor, an easy male banter where he didn’t have to explain his feelings. Men might worry, they might curse, they might weep, but they didn’t get hysterical. What was the point of the upset? Emotionalism on one side and dirtbags on the other—surely, it was a narrow path through life.