In an attempt to alleviate tension, Charters briefly considered using his smooth, calming doctor’s voice to speak with subtle professionalism, but was afraid that Wakowski might smash in his trachea. “I’m more sorry about this than you’ll ever know, Roger, so please don’t add to the burden by giving me the cold shoulder. I apologize that you were forced to become part of this charade, but it was necessary, and it’s your job. It’s my job. And you of all people know how difficult it is to get to the truth of these matters when we’re not sure of all factors involved.”
Wakowski stood at attention now, hands behind his back, eyes averted and gaze resting on a spot somewhere off to the left of Charters’s ear. Was he looking at the collage?
“Sir, may I … ?”
“For Christ’s sake, you’re not in the Marines anymore, Roger, though you might wish you were. You can say whatever the hell you like. And I would appreciate your honest opinion here.”
“I think it’s wrong.”
Charters waited. He hung forward in his chair, stroking his mustache. Wakowski said nothing more. “That’s it? You think it’s wrong?”
Wakowski’s voice changed, loosening, as if each portion of himself were just another role, as if another man entirely were talking now. “I think you’re handling it badly. This wasn’t advised by the police. It wasn’t a part of our normal procedure. We either watch a visit for its duration on the closed-circuit monitors or we don’t. You’re too immediate and confined to this case.”
“There may be some validity to that.”
“This is too covert without any reason. If you suspect that Galen is a part of this crime, then he ought to be under investigation as well. You should have informed the police of his arrival. By attempting to protect him you’ve already implicated him. If Galen knows anything he’ll still have to cover for his friend, and I doubt that either of them is stupid enough to talk freely when they know they’re being monitored. I can see nothing useful in any of this.”
Glad that Wakowski wasn’t staring directly at him, Charters wondered about Roger’s past for the first time in a long while. Men always in strife are accustomed to strife. Charters could only guess Wakowski’s age to be between forty-five and fifty, and wherever he’d been had apparently been bad enough. Yet his distinct code did not allow him to question his superiors. He’d been perfectly trained, and you had to be curious about a man who ever grasped perfection in any form.
Charters felt as though he were working a CIA mission in the night deserts of Tehran. “I agree, believe it or not. But unfortunately I have no other choice.” The tuna felt like rubber cement as he brought his fist down on it. “Do you think I enjoy playing these games on men I’ve known since they were children? These boys are family to me, but even if there is the slightest chance that A.G. might open to Matthew, and that Matt Galen himself might speak freely, then I have an obligation to this town and to six families to learn as much about this case as possible.”
“You’re working blind, and under misconceptions. You’re nearsighted because you knew them as children, and you’ve lost the ability to discriminate. You know little about the patient himself, and less about Galen. You’re baiting them with each other, and that’s simply foolhardy, and probably worthless.”
“Something’s brought on A.G.’s collapse, and Matthew is my best chance at discovering the impetus. There’s an incredible bond between them. They’re the two most stubborn young men I’ve ever met, and if I have to use Matt to gain the truth then I am prepared to do that.” Charters realized he had begun repeating himself.
“So am I, but I wanted to state my position clearly,” Wakowski said, his tone switching again, “that I have my reservations about you being able to handle this case efficiently due to its personal nature.”
“What else can be done? I’m the most qualified doctor to handle this case. Moser and Cohen have never dealt with an aberrant psychosis like A.G.’s. My Christ, they heard about him sitting with a skeleton and started quoting the Chianti and fava bean scene from Silence of the Lambs. And Patterford, Peale, and Willits have enough to do running the group therapy sessions and the alcohol and drug rehabs. I can’t just pull them and walk away.”
“Let him be taken out of state to Stanfield, or up to Corzone Sanitarium.”
“If he is criminally insane, they won’t be able to handle him. It hasn’t even been proven that A.G. is guilty of these crimes. I won’t commit him to that without more evidence.”
Wakowski crossed his arms and leaned forward slightly, voice controlled and focused. “He’s already been committed in one sense, sir. He’s guilty of exhuming the bones of children, and though the police haven’t formally charged him in this case, you know they will. You talk as though he’s a little boy playing in a sandbox, riding his bicycle with a skinned knee.”
So Wakowski had been looking at the collage. “Be that as it may, Sheriff Hodges is still trying to find solid evidence. He’s hoping to make an open-and-shut murder case out of this, and I’m afraid there’s more to be learned, good and bad. He wants to keep A.G. within his jurisdiction, and I want to keep the boy within arm’s length in case he needs me. Now, if you don’t mind, Roger, I’d like to be left alone.”
“No,” Wakowski said, turning, looking as though he might maim someone as he left. “No, you don’t. You’re so lonely it’s warping your perspective.” His nostrils flared as if a noxious and overpowering odor had suddenly invaded the room. “It bleeds from you.”
Charters grimaced as he viewed the flare of black snow and realized there had been some kind of camera malfunction after all. Such pure irony wasn’t lost on him. “Beautiful, this is just so goddamn beautiful.” Disgusted, he kneaded his temples. “Maybe I should’ve been a shoemaker like you, Grandpa.” The mighty mouse gazed up at him until he threw Man and His Symbols at it.
A.G. and Matthew could hardly be seen through the crackling interference. The entire bottom third of the picture fluctuated fiercely, filled with scrambled static and jumping billows of color, creases, and strange aftershadows. He tried adjusting the tracking, but nothing helped.
“Beautiful. Wonderful, just fucking great. And just how in the hell did this happen?”
Bulging silhouettes swung across the screen, superimposing the outline of A.G. so that others appeared to be sitting on his bed beside him, moving in tandem. Video figments concealed the shifting remnant figure of Matthew entering the room, eclipsed by the gray dead area of tape. Charters wondered if A.G. could have smeared his own feces on the camera somehow.
The doctor pulled his chair to within inches of the set but could make out little of what was actually happening in there, who was doing what, if anything at all, but the sound seemed unaffected as Matthew’s footsteps rang through the cell, the snap of the bench as he sat. The sound must be working, yes, but even now, after three, four, then five minutes more, no one had said anything. Why wasn’t he saying anything? Sign language, speech through gestures, lipreading? What was going on in their heads? “Damn these machines!”
Now only a low, vague, indefinable noise beginning to hiss over the speaker: whistles, tickings, like the rush of breeze through a wood. Frenzied images changed, looming larger, stretching over the blurred, shady forms like swaying dancers. He could almost see Melissa there, twirling.
Matthew moved, perhaps, but still said nothing.
“What is he doing? Why isn’t he talking?” Whistles grew much louder. Snippets of faraway chattering faded in and out. The picture jumped erratically, and flickered. “Why?”
His eyes ached terribly, but Charters couldn’t keep himself from watching the screen, couldn’t hold back this attack of anxiety that gripped him as he waited for something to happen, anything that might give him a hint as to what caused the breakdown, his own or anyone else’s, a clue to the missing children.
For nineteen minutes he waited for a word, stroking his mustache, staring into the storm. He sat back in his chair and regarded the collage
, the mighty mouse nibbling on Dora.
Matthew said, “Let the kid go.”
The VCR vomited the tape.
Chapter Five
If it was a dog, it was the ugliest one he’d ever seen.
Evening porch bug-lights gave off barely enough yellow illumination for Matthew to notice the heap lying on the sidewalk in front of him. Despite the jutting pink tab that might possibly be a tongue, he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a worn-out living room carpet, a mohair beanbag chair, or a Hefty bag put out in the trash. Dangling fur puffed out at intervals, as if from an exhaling snout. In the darkness of Manor Lane’s canopy trees he found himself wondering.
Leaves whipped before his face, falling from high branches. His legs were tightening up on him, sore after the lengthy walk across town.
His bad ankle throbbed, and he needed more time—he hoped there was time left—to scope the situation, to plan and rest. To relearn some of the more difficult disciplines.
Fatigue pervaded his mind and body. He had to get some sleep before he crashed so hard he wasted tomorrow slumbering. There weren’t any hotels in Summerfell. There was no need for them in a town without a tourist attraction, unlike Loudon, where people came to see nuns cavort and kiss in the moonlight, though Matthew’s mother, too, had danced naked in the dark streets.
The only motel in town, The Outside Inn, was actually a run-down bar with a few extra rooms for rent upstairs, where you’d have to sleep on sheets you wouldn’t touch even if knotting them together was your only escape from a fire. Sheriff Hodges constantly raided the place for any number of justified reasons. Matthew elected to try to get a room over at the Carmichaels’ boardinghouse, if it still existed.
The ugly dog didn’t stir.
Luna moths fluttered in the glow of the streetlamps, casting shadows onto the curb. The satchel strap cut into his shoulder, so he unbuckled it and let it slip into his hand. From an open window of the house behind him, a stereo played loudly. The moon lay submerged in clouds, and he chastised himself for not having the foresight to check and find out exactly what phase it was in. That would make a great difference.
The reunion with A.G. had proven more taxing and less worthwhile than he’d been praying for. It had been exhilarating and god-awful to see him again, inside each other’s heads, even with the bars and spilled blood between them—merely being in the same room was a reaffirmation of their friendship.
Their castle had swelled and accompanied them; come to life, the insanity followed them everywhere. It was true. They had been together forever, just as A.G. said, perhaps even entwined in an earlier incarnation. That counted for more and less than Matthew could understand. He knew whose bones had been unearthed and what they were being used for.
A.G. had returned to the altar and carried Debbi up the stone stairs. Then he must’ve gone to the sunken meadow beside Potter’s Field, and—in accordance with the rituals—using only his hands to yank clumps of sod and dirt, he dug until his hands bled, making damn sure that his hands bled, until he’d burrowed far enough to smash his fists through the rotted orange crates that the hospital had once used to bury the aborted and stillborn. The remains of the unblessed.
He’s using them as locks, to keep out the Goat.
It wouldn’t be enough.
Headlights flashed down the length of the cross street and a ’69 Mustang—the kind Jazz used to drive—full of teenagers, made a wildly sharp left around the corner, tires screeching. One of the kids lobbed a half-full can of beer at him and a couple of girls in the backseat laughed and waved; the driver blared his horn twice. Screw the curfew, everybody had to buck the decree.
Matthew caught the can with an athlete’s graceful ease and flipped it behind him into the grate of a sewer drain. Summerfell at night appeared to be no different than before, except the neighborhood seemed less full of motion. Old ladies weren’t out in the park walking their poodles one last time before bed. He saw no couples sitting on their verandah love seats.
He wondered who would deliver Richie Hastings’s papers. Who would go collecting.
It surprised him that he felt so certain the people and places of town had not changed—could not have changed—in his absence. He remained the catalyst. He’d even thought of the dead past in the present tense, as though only a few drunken days had been skipped instead of five years. You can never leave home, no matter how hard you tried. You were nailed to the life you once led. He’d passed ten thousand unaltered sites. Like pulling snapshots out of his wallet. The houses were painted the identical color year in and out, rock gardens with the same rocks, seashells highlighting the brickwork. So many lawns mowed in long-established patterns, Mr. Shelard’s going east to west and curving eights around the trees, the duckbill weathervane twirling in the breeze.
Above the town floated Matthew’s own past, the eerie bane of children. Night wings flitted.
Whatever the thing was that lay on the Carmichaels’ walk, as Matthew approached it finally lifted that part of the body it probably considered its head, then gradually raised the rest of its sizable bulk off the ground and began to shamble down the driveway toward him. Gravel crunched beneath its slow, plodding steps. Perhaps they were paws. Perhaps it had a face hidden somewhere in that densely matted fur that barricaded what might be its head. Or possibly not.
Matthew leaned against the street sign and tried to see if it had a tail or any other canine features he could discern. The closer it got, the less certain he became. Drooping fur continued to puff up every now and then, so at least it breathed, producing a kind of wheezing, gurgling sound that your lawn mower would make if tipped into your Jacuzzi.
“Jesus, pal, you are a walking stretch of similes,” Matthew said as the dog tripped and fell over the curb like a gutter ball, sniffed at his sneakers, and hunkered down next to his knees. “I can’t help myself.” The dog shoved something round and wet and hopefully nonsexual against his hand; Matthew at last recognized a nose, and there, below it, the slobbering indent of a mouth. He petted its head, trying to part the fur so that he could see eyes. He found a collar with two tags buried within layers of black knots and fat.
One read:
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example.
—John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, I
The other read: Disgusto.
He patted it some more. “Disgusto? Pretty rude, but man, you ain’t kidding.”
Curious if the Carmichaels would remember him, Matthew started up the walk to the house. Disgusto joggled beside him, wheezing and coughing.
Knocking on the screen door, Matthew squinted into the glare of the bug light. He shielded his eyes and pressed his face close to the screen. Strange that the door should be open in the October chill, but on occasion somebody would start a blazing fire in the fireplace and still leave the windows open. “Hello?” he called. A water tap ran in the distance, pots banging together, and a television muttered canned sound-track laughter. Someone humming, snoring lightly.
Eugene Carmichael’s gruff voice cut through the undercurrent sounds. “Come on in! Hold on just a sec!”
Confused by that, Matthew grabbed the latch and started to enter, shrugged, and decided to stay put until being formally invited in; again he realized that the old habits had not died easily (they hadn’t died). His mother’s lessons had been with him too long, and to this day he couldn’t put his elbows on the table even if he wanted to, or drink straight from the milk carton.
Disgusto wagged his flank without any visible tail, then stood on his hind legs, scratched at the faded white shingles, and wailed a unique dog bark.
In a way, it sounded like the bleating of a goat.
Mr. Carmichael came to the door, wiping soapy hands on an apron. “Somebody been teachin’ you how to knock, Gus?” He addressed the dog standing stretched on its hind legs before him, and said, “Now, you know better than that, get down this second or I’m taking y
ou for booster shots, and you know what a pain that can be, the vet havin’ to hunt around lookin’ for your ass all day.” Gus dropped to the ground. Eugene Carmichael opened the screen door, and the dog cantered inside.
Whiffs of lemon-scented dishwashing liquid drifted by. Mr. Carmichael had not aged a great deal, though the last time Matthew had seen him it didn’t appear that the man could age much more anyway: Eugene Carmichael remained one of those eternally enduring people who never look older or younger than sixty. Bald except for the same few silver wisps that stuck like lint to the top of his narrow head, with shaggy tufts of white hair springing from behind his ears, his beard trimmed and still containing some brown patches. Spry and wiry, he had a pair of arms that looked as though he could heft a cannonball across a football field.
Mr. Carmichael always spoke to the kids as though he were a kid himself, which proved better than having him talk to them as if they were adults. He’d often played two-hand touch with them; Manor Lane was the widest road within several blocks, and all the kids that didn’t take it to the park played their street games here. The Carmichaels never shouted if you ran to the side of their house and drank from their hose, or climbed their trellis to get a Frisbee off the gabled roof. He couldn’t recall anyone ever having spoken a bad word about them.
Carmichael stared for a moment with some glint of recognition, a thoughtful grimace curving his mouth. “I know you, son? I know you.” He glanced around like a contestant on The Price is Right searching the audience for answers.
“I’m Matthew Galen. I used to deliver your paper.”
“That’s what you say? That you used to deliver the paper? You don’t say that you’re a big playwright in New York, got all kinds of awards and news clippings in the town hall? You say you used to deliver that gazette?” Carmichael laughed, stepped outside smiling broadly, and lifted his arms to clap Matthew on his shoulders. “Mattie Galen, come home after all this time only to catch a henpecked man like me dressed in an apron. Damn! It ain’t fair, I believe, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m forgetting my manners; come on inside.”
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