by Lamb, Wally
Neither the nurse nor the aides had seen Ray, they said. So where the fuck was he? I waited for ten minutes, then left.
Back downstairs, I was a step or two off the elevator when someone called my name. Ray. He sat slumped in a waiting room chair. He looked small, lost in his coat.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Nothing’s the matter. How’s the tire?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You see him? You been up there?”
He looked around to see if anyone was listening. Shook his head.
“Why not?”
His voice was a croak. “I don’t know. I got halfway up there and then I just changed my mind, that’s all. Come on. Let’s get out of here. Don’t make a federal case out of it.”
He stood up and walked toward the door. “Did you see Dessa?” I asked. “She was just here, visiting him.”
“I saw her,” he said. “She didn’t see me.”
We were almost out the door when I noticed he was still holding the visitor’s pass. “Your pass,” I said. “You forgot to hand in your pass.”
“The hell with it,” he said, stuffing it into his jacket pocket.
Halfway home, Ray regained his composure—became Mr. Tough Guy again. “You know what the trouble always was with that kid?” he said. “It was all that namby-pamby stuff. . . . All that ‘Thomas my little bunny rabbit’ stuff she used to say to him all the time. With you, it was different. You went your own way. You could handle yourself. . . . Jesus, I remember the two of you out on the ballfield in Little League. You two guys were like night and day. Jesus, that kid was pitiful out there on that field, even for the farm system.”
I shook my head a little but kept my mouth shut. That was Ray’s theory? That Thomas had cut off his hand because he sucked at baseball? Where did you even begin with Ray?
“If she’d have just let me raise him the way he should have been raised, instead of running interference for him all the time, maybe he never would have landed down below in the first place. ‘It’s a tough world,’ I used to tell her. ‘He’s got to be toughened up.’ “
“Hey, Ray,” I said. “He’s a paranoid schizophrenic because of his biochemistry and the frontal lobes of his brain and all that shit Dr. Reynolds went over with us that time. It wasn’t Ma’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“I’m not saying it was her fault,” he snapped. “She was a good woman. She did her best by both of you two, and don’t you forget it!”
And you’re a hypocrite and a bully and a horse’s ass, I wanted to snap back. Wanted to pull over to the side of the road and yank him right out of the goddamned truck and speed away. Because if anyone had fucked up Thomas when he was a kid, it was Ray. These days they called Ray’s kind of “toughening up” child abuse.
We rode the next couple of miles in silence.
“Want one?” he said. We were stopped for a red light on Boswell Avenue. His shaking hand held out an open roll of Life Savers, butterscotch. He’d probably sucked a million of those things since he gave up cigarettes. That had really gotten me: how he was the one who’d smoked like a chimney all those years and she was the one who died of cancer.
“No thanks,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yup.” Neither of us spoke for the rest of the way back. When I pulled up in front of the house, he asked me if I wanted to come in, have a sandwich with him.
“No thanks,” I said again. “I’ve got to get to work.”
“Where?”
“That big Victorian on Gillette Street. Professor’s house.”
“Still?”
“Yeah, still. That goddamned place has more gingerbread on it than a bakery. I ought to have my head examined for taking that job at the end of the season.” Not to mention that it had rained four days last week. Not to mention that my goddamned brother had complicated things just a little bit.
“You want some help with it? I can give you some time tomorrow. Thursday, too, if you want. I don’t go back to work until Friday.”
Ray’s help was the last thing I needed. The only other time he’d helped me, he’d spent more time giving unsolicited advice than painting. Telling me how to run my own business. “I’ll get it done,” I said.
Maybe I wouldn’t even go over to Gillette Street that afternoon. Maybe I’d just go home and smoke a joint, watch CNN. Find out if either Bush or Saddam Insane had fired the first shot. Not answer the phone. . . . That morning at breakfast, Joy and I had fought about whether or not to disconnect the damn thing. I’d accused her of getting off on all the attention—talking with all those media assholes.
“Well, screw you, Dominick!” she’d fired back. “You think this is easy on me? You think I like everyone looking at me weird because I happen to be living with his brother?”
“Hey, how’d you like to get the looks I’m getting?” I said. “How’d you like to be his brother? His friggin’ look-alike?” The two of us stood there, shouting at each other. Having a pity contest. You think Dessa would have ever pulled that shit? You think Joy would have ever gotten her ass over to the hospital and visited him like Dess had done?
Ray got out of the truck and walked toward the house. I backed down the driveway. Braked. “Hey?” I called. “You okay?” He stopped in his tracks. Nodded. “Don’t talk to any of those reporters or TV jerks if they call. Or if they come over here. Just tell ’em, ‘No comment.’ “
Ray spat on the grass. “Any of those clowns come around here, I’ll take a baseball bat to them.” He probably would, too. Fuckin’ Ray.
I backed onto the road and threw her into first. “Hey!” he called. He was walking toward the truck. I rolled down the window and braced myself.
“Just answer me one thing,” he said. “Why didn’t you let them at least try to put his hand back on? Now he’s got a physical disability on top of a mental one. How come you didn’t have them at least try?”
I’d been flogging myself with the same question for the past two days. But it pissed me off—him asking it. A little late for fatherly concern, wasn’t it?
“For one thing, they were only giving the reattachment a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. “If it didn’t work, it would have just sat there, dead, sewn to his wrist. And for another thing . . . for another thing. . . . You didn’t hear him, Ray. It was the first time in twenty years he was in charge of something. And so I couldn’t. . . . I mean, okay, you’re right—it doesn’t make him a hero.” I looked up from the steering wheel. Looked him in the eye—that trick I’d taught myself way back when. “It was his hand, Ray. . . . It was his choice.”
He stood there, hands in his pockets. Half a minute or more went by.
“You know what the funny thing is?” he said. “I never even bought that goddamned knife. I won it in a card game from this guy in my outfit. Big, beefy Swede, came from Minnesota. I can see him plain as the nose on your face, but I been trying all afternoon to think what that guy’s name was. Isn’t that something? My kid cuts his hand off with that knife, and I can’t even remember the guy’s name I won the damn thing from.”
“My kid.” It struck me that he said that. Claimed Thomas.
That night, Joy brought home Chinese food as an apology. I sat there, eating without really tasting it. “How is it?” she asked me.
“It’s great,” I said. “Great.”
Later, in bed, she rolled over to my side and started getting friendly. “Dominick?” she said. “I’m sorry about this morning. I just want things to get back to normal.” She rubbed her leg against my leg, flicked her finger in and out of the waistband on my underpants. Got me interested with her hands. I just lay there, letting her do me without doing anything back.
She got on top and put me inside of her. Put my hand, my fingers, where she wanted them. I was just going through the motions at first—performing a service. Then I started thinking about Dessa out there in the hospital parking lot, in her jeans and little jacket. I was making love to Dessa .
. .
Joy came quickly—intensely. Her orgasm felt like a relief, a burden lifted off my shoulders. I was almost there myself, almost ready, when I just stopped. I didn’t mean to. I just started thinking of things: the way the state hospital corridors smell like dead farts and cigarettes, and the way Dan the Man had painted that happily-ever-after mailbox out there for them, and the picture I’d conjured up for Ray to get myself off the hook: Thomas’s severed hand, stitched to his wrist like dead gray meat.
I went soft on her. Slipped out. Nudged her off me and rolled away.
“Hey, you?” she said. Her hand curled around my shoulder.
“Hey me what?”
She grabbed my earlobe, pulled it a little. “It’s okay. No biggie.”
“Now there’s a compliment,” I said.
She jabbed me one. “You know what I mean.”
Yanking up the covers, I turned further away from her—swung my hand up for the light switch. “God, I’m whipped,” I said. But a few minutes later, it was her breathing that was soft and regular.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night. Spent hour after hour staring up at the void that, in the daytime, was nothing but our goddamned bedroom ceiling.
“Finish, Dominick,” Thomas said. “Finish the psalm.”
I felt, rather than saw, the cop look over at me. I opened my brother’s Bible. Give me not up to the wishes of my foes, I read, for false witnesses have risen up against me, and such as breathe out violence. I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
The police cruiser took the familiar turn off the parkway, the cop waved to the security guard, and eased over the speed bump. We rode by the boarded-up Dix Building. Coasted past Tweed, Libby, Payne. . . . Someone had told me once that back during the state hospital’s heyday, those brick monstrosities had housed over four thousand patients. Now, the inpatient population was down to around two hundred. Decay and downsizing had closed every building but Settle and Hatch.
“Hey, you just passed it,” I told the cop when the cruiser rolled past the Settle Building. “Turn back.”
He looked in the rearview mirror, exchanged a look with his partner. “He’s not going to Settle,” the other one said.
“What do you mean, he’s not going to Settle? That’s where he always goes. He runs the news rack at Settle. He runs the coffee cart.”
“We don’t know anything about the coffee cart,” the escort said. “All we know is our orders say to take him to Hatch.”
“Oh no, not Hatch!” Thomas groaned. He pulled and struggled against the restraints they’d put on him; his resistance rocked the cruiser. “Oh, God, Dominick! Help me! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!”
4
The maximum-security Hatch Forensic Institute, located at the rear of the Three Rivers State Hospital grounds, is a squat concrete-and-steel building surrounded by chain link and razor wire. Hatch houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Viet Cong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class. But Hatch is also the end of the line for a lot of less sexy psychos: drug fry-outs, shopping mall nuisances, manic-depressive alcoholics—your basic disturbing-the-peace-type wackos with no place else to go. Occasionally, someone actually gets better down at Hatch. Gets released. But that tends to happen in spite of things. For most of the patients there, the door swings only one way, which is just fine with the town of Three Rivers. Most people around here are less interested in rehabilitation than they are in warehousing the spooks and kooks—keeping the Boston Strangler and the Son of Sam off the streets, keeping Norman Bates locked up at the Hatch Hotel.
There’s never been an escape from Hatch. Circular in shape, the place is divided into four independent units, each with its own security station. The outside wall of the building is windowless; the inside windows look onto a small, circular courtyard—the hub of the wheel, so to speak. There are some picnic tables out there and a rusted basketball hoop that pretty much gets ignored because most of the guys are fat and sluggish from Thorazine. Unit by unit, twice a day, patients whose submissiveness has won them the privilege can enter that concrete-floored courtyard for a twenty-minute hit of fresh air and nicotine.
I’ve heard motormouths on the radio and on the barstool next to me complain that the insanity plea is one of the things that’s wrong with this country—that we let rapists and killers get away with murder by letting them hide out at “country clubs” like Hatch. Well, guess again, folks. I’ve been there. Walked out with the stink of the place still on my clothes and my brother’s screaming still in my ears. If there’s a hell worse than Hatch Forensic Institute, then God must be one vengeful motherfucker.
The cruiser’s blue lights winked on and off. The cop who was driving us stopped at Hatch’s front gate and handed a guard some paperwork. “It was a sacrifice!” Thomas kept shouting. “It was a sacrifice!”
I turned around and told him to take it easy—that I’d get the whole thing straightened out and get him back to Settle that night. But I only half-believed that myself. The steel grid between the front and back seats of the cruiser—between my brother and me—was beginning to feel like a preview of coming attractions.
There was a whirring sound. The gate glided open and clunked to a stop, and the cruiser eased past, over a speed bump, and around the building. We came to a halt at a double door marked “Patients Receiving—Unit Two.” A red light above the door flashed. We sat and waited with the motor running.
“What law did I break?” my brother blurted out. “Who did I hurt?”
The answer to the last question was as obvious as the bandaged stump on the end of his arm, but how did that make him a criminal? It had to be a mistake, I told myself. It made no sense. But as I sat there staring ahead at those double doors, that winking light, I felt a yank in my chest—one of those fight-or-flight rushes. “Hey,” I said, turning to the cop next to me. “What’s your name?”
The question surprised him. “My name? Mercado. Sergeant Mercado.”
“All right, look, Mercado. Just do me a favor, will you? Just bring him over to the Settle Building for five minutes. I know the night people there. They can call his doctor and get this sorted out. Because this whole thing is a big mistake.”
“You’re tampering with an agreement between God and me!” Thomas warned. “The Lord God Almighty has commanded me to prevent an unholy war!”
Mercado looked straight ahead. “No can do,” the cop in back answered for him. “They’d have our ass in a sling if we ignored signed orders.”
“No, they won’t,” I said. I turned around to look at the guy. His face and Thomas’s were crisscrossed by that metal screen that divided us. “They’ll be glad that you straightened out the mix-up before any shit hit the fan. They’ll be grateful.”
“I run the news rack at Settle!” Thomas pleaded. “I run the coffee cart!”
“Hey, I can sympathize with you,” Mercado told me. “I got brothers myself. But the thing is, we can’t just—”
“No, don’t!” I said, interrupting him. I was wired, pumped on sheer desperation. “Just think about it for a second before you let some knee-jerk police response come out of your mouth. All I’m asking you to do is be a human being instead of a cop for five minutes, okay? All I’m asking is that you throw this thing in reverse and drive—what?—one-sixteenth of a mile over to Settle. You don’t even have to leave the hospital grounds, Mercado. One-sixteenth of a mile, man. Five minutes, tops. That’s all I’m asking.”
Mercado looked in the rearview mirror. “What do you think, Al? We could just—”
“Uh-uh,” from the backseat. “No way, José. No can do.”
“Then you get up tomorrow morning at five-thirty and start the coffee!” Thomas shouted. “You make sure there’s enough change in the change box and that nobody buys Mrs. Semel’s Drake’s cakes. You make sure none of the other
doctors get Dr. Ahamed’s Wall Street Journal !”
Mercado and I looked at each other. “You got brothers?” I said. “How many?”
“Four.”
“Come on, man,” I whispered. “Follow your gut. Five minutes.”
Reflected in the flashing light over the “Patients Receiving” door, Mercado’s face turned red, not red, red. I saw the hesitation in his eyes, the struggle. That’s when I blew it. I reached over to touch his arm—make some human contact with the guy—and he freaked. Batted my hand away so hard that it hit the windshield.
“Keep your hands to yourself!” he said. “Understand?” His own hand was down at his holster, a shield over the butt of his gun. “That’s the last thing you want to do is grab an armed officer. Understand? You could end up real sorry next time you did that.”
I looked out the side window. Took a deep breath. Gave it up.
A uniformed guard unlocked the double doors and motioned us inside. Mercado got out and opened the back door, easing my brother out of the cruiser. “Watch your head now,” he said. “Watch your head.”
A part of me wanted to stay right there inside that cruiser: to secure my status as the uncrazy twin, the one who wasn’t going into that place. I’m not talking about major abandonment, just five seconds’ worth of hesitation. But I admit it. I hesitated.
“Here,” the older cop said when I got out of the cruiser. He handed me Thomas’s duffel bag. I was already holding his Bible.
Thomas stood, hunched over a little from his restraints. He told the older cop he had to go to the bathroom. Was there a bathroom inside that he could use? He’d had to go most of the way there.
His leg chains rattled with each small step he took toward the building. I had a bitter taste in my mouth and a dull, thudding feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was like I’d swallowed those chains or something. What was going on? Why were they doing this?