“Take me,” said the albino girl.
He tried to determine whether she was asking him to rescue her too or whether she just meant she wanted him to lay with her. “I caint,” he said. “No time. I’m sorry.”
“Take me!” she repeated, insistently.
“I’m sure sorry,” he said, and began pushing you out through the door. He closed it and re-locked it, but even the closed door would not muffle that girl’s loud sobbing. He began to get jittery for the first time. “Wait right here,” he said to you, and then he moved quickly down the corridor to where the night attendant’s station was, and, finding that she was still asleep, he gently lay the ring of keys on her lap. Even when she woke and found the leather thong of the key ring cut, she would not dare mention the thong to the investigators, for fear it would be an admission that she had fallen asleep on duty.
He returned to you and said “Come on” again and led you up the corridor stairway, and pushed you far enough up the stairs so that he could get the door closed and then carefully replace the lock he had unscrewed. Then he led you on up to the fifth floor.
Only when he arrived below the hatch to the attic did he realize his most serious error. “Of all the boneheaded stunts!” he said. How was he going to get back up? The hatch was twelve feet above the floor; he should have left his rope dangling down. Feeling near the edge of panic, he began to look around for a ladder or even a box to stand on. He could find nothing; all the storerooms were locked.
At this point for the first time it occurred to him that if he were caught he would get at least twenty years, maybe more.
There was only one thing to do. He came back to you and put his hands on both your shoulders and spoke slowly and gently, “Now listen careful, Latha, here’s what we’ve got to do. I’m going to boost you up there and you climb out and then you’ll find a triangle vent-hole and right outside that vent-hole is my rope. You get that rope and bring it back to me.”
Those big eyes of yours stared at him.
“Kin you understand me?” he pled. “It’s our only chance. The rope, we got to have that rope. I’ll boost you up to the attic, and you’ll see that there vent-hole that I opened up, and right outside it on the roof is a coil of rope. Bring me that rope.”
A nod from you would have eased his mind, but you did not nod. You did, however, crane your neck and stare in the direction he was pointing, upward at the hatch.
It was his only chance. He clenched his hands together and opened his palms to make a stirrup for your foot. You stared at the stirrup for a moment. “Come on, honey, you kin do it!” he urged. You put your foot in the stirrup. You raised your arms and put your palms against the wall. He began to lift. Up, up you went. When your feet were level with his chest, he unclenched the stirrup and got each of his palms under the soles of your feet and pushed upward until his hands were as high above his head as he could reach, and him on tiptoe. The blanket in which you were wrapped fell off of you and covered his head but he did not flinch. Your fingers strove upward and felt the rim of the hatch. You caught hold. You tried to pull yourself up. Your feet left his palms and he whipped the blanket off his head and looked up at you. You were straining. The hospital had never given you any exercise, and you were weak.
You fell. He caught you, breaking your fall and falling with you to the floor. He got up, sighing, and helped you to your feet. There would be bruises on your back where you had mashed against the hard tools in his pockets. He covered your nakedness again with the blanket, knotting two corners of it together around your neck.
“Let’s try it once more,” he said. “See if you caint get your hands on the sides of the hatch, that way you’d have more leverage.”
Again he made the stirrup with his hands. Again you rose slowly up the wall until your hands reached the hatch, one hand on one side, the other hand on the other. Again your feet left the palms of his hands. Again you began to strain, every muscle in your arms and shoulders exerting itself.
You began to rise, but reached a point where you could strain no longer and were on the verge of falling again. Suddenly he leapt. He leapt upward for all he was worth, shoving his hands upward against your feet and propelling you upward beyond that crucial point. You got your chest up onto the attic and clambered up and out of sight.
You were gone for quite some time. He was exceedingly nervous. For all he knew you had fallen off the roof. Maybe you were gazing at the stars. Maybe you were just trying to find that triangular vent-opening. Maybe you had forgotten what he had asked you to get, or had never understood him in the first place. We do not know. At any rate, you caused him considerable anxiety.
But at last you re-appeared, and you had the coil of rope. Now another problem presented its ugly self to him: could he explain to you how to tie one end of the rope to something so that he could pull himself up? He did not wait long enough to formulate the explanation in his mind. “Just drop it down,” he said, and you dumped the rope on him.
He quickly fashioned a lariat, and, after two or three misses, he lassoed the dangling hatch-cover, pulled the rope tight, grabbed hold and climbed hand over hand up the rope with his feet braced against the wall until he could reach the hatch. He pulled himself up through it.
Then he untied the lariat, and replaced the hatch cover, screwing the hinges back on. He was covering all his tracks.
There remained just two tracks to cover: he led you out onto the roof and after cautioning you to be careful not to fall off he replaced the louver in the vent opening and bolted it back on. Then he fashioned a small loop on one end of his rope and dropped it over an iron finial on the corner of the eave.
“Now here comes the tricky part,” he said. He could not trust that drainpipe to remain attached to the mortar. Nor could he trust you to lower yourself alone down the rope.
He turned his back to you and said, “Wrap your arms around my neck.” You hesitated. He reached back and took your hands and raised them and wrapped your arms around his neck and clenched your fingers together and said, “Hold on tight as you can.”
Then he threw the coil of rope down off the roof and watched it uncoil to the ground. He knelt with you straddling him at the edge of the roof and grabbed hold of the rope and edged himself over.
As he began to lower himself hand under hand down the rope he cursed himself for overestimating his strength. The weight of you on his back was such that he dared never release one of his hands from the rope; instead he had to slide his hands down the rope and the rope was burning the heck out of his fingers and palms. Then the clench that you had on his neck tightened as you yourself sensed fear, and you began choking him. He could not even get his throat unclenched enough to ask you to stop choking him.
He was near to passing out, and began to think it would be a blessed release to let go and kill both of you. Then out of the survival instinct’s self-centeredness he began to think that if he fell you would fall first and land on your back and cushion his fall so that even if he killed you he might survive and escape and whoever found you would think you’d somehow done it all on your own.
But while he was thinking these mad thoughts he was making swift progress down the rope; his hands and his neck were in such pain that he was oblivious to his own progress. He did not even realize that he was so near the ground. When he finally could stand his pain no longer and said to himself The hell with it! Let us die! and let go of the burning rope with both hands he was surprised to find that he was standing on the ground.
He collapsed. You collapsed with him and let go of his neck, and finally he got his wind back and stood up. There was just one track to cover. He could hardly bear the touch of that rope again on his raw hands but he grasped it once more and gave it a whip, and the whip undulated higher and higher but did not quite reach the top. He gave it another whip and the whip undulation rose and rose to its end, and snapped, cracked, and the loop popped off the finial and fluttered down to the ground. He coiled the rope and said to you,
“Okay, let’s go.”
It would have been insanely ironic if someone had caught you leaving the grounds, but maybe the night watchman was over in F Ward helping subdue a maniac. The grounds were deserted. So were the streets beyond them. In Little Rock at three o’clock in the morning only the milkman is out on the streets.
You made it to his car. He opened the door for you and got you in, and then he opened his door and threw the rope and tools into the back seat, and got in. He started the motor and drove away.
“You’re free, gal!” he cried. “Call me a monkey’s uncle if you aint free, by granny!” And as he drove he began whistling loudly and happily the tune of “She’ll Be Comin Round the Mountain When She Comes!”
You quietly uttered your first word: “Free.”
We do know of the phenomenon whereby certain mental patients, resistant to and perhaps resentful of all efforts to make them well, have become spontaneously cured, as it were, upon being removed from formal treatment. There are on record a number of cases of patients, many of them considered incurable, who, when abandoned or sent home or left alone in some corner of the institution, seemed to become so relieved at being free from the intense attention of the doctors that they rapidly cured themselves.
We do not know at what precise point during this episode you began to heal. It might have been at the very moment he came into your room and woke you up. It might have been during those minutes when you were required to climb up through that hatch and fetch that rope. Possibly when you muttered that first word, “free,” you were beginning to feel a definite sense of relief from the treatment. Any one of a number of incidents occurring in the days following could have been the trigger. We know you would not be wholly “well” for weeks to come, and we know you would not even regain use of your memory until that morning in the Nashville hotel. But you were on your way.
He did not cross the Arkansas River at Little Rock, because he did not want to drive through the downtown business area and risk being spotted by a policeman. He drove through Fair Park and emerged on the other side into a dirt country road, and he kept to backroads up through northern Pulaski County, and Perry County, heading toward the ferry that would get the car across the river and on toward Conway.
He talked a blue streak the whole time, trying to be amusing. He told jokes by the dozen. It must have been a relief for you to listen for the first time in three years to a voice that was neither screaming obscenities nor trying to get you to confess when you first masturbated.
“You remember back when the big craze was riddles,” he would say, “and folks would stop strangers right on the road to try out some new riddle they heard. Well, I was riding up to Jasper one day with ole Till Cluley when the wagon got stuck bad in the mud, clear up to the hubs. Ole Till was whippin all four horses and hollerin cuss words at the top a his voice. Just then this preacher from Parthenon come along and says to Till, ‘My friend, do you know the name of Him who died for sinners?’ And ole Till says, ‘I aint got no time for no goddamn riddles. Caint you see I’m stuck in this son-a-bitchin mud?’”
And he would slap his leg and laugh, then turn to see how you would be taking it. But if you were smiling, it was hard to tell.
And speaking of being stuck in the mud, those old backroads were in pretty soggy condition, what with the spring rains and all. Most of the time he would put the car in low gear and bull his way through, slipping and sliding wildly with the engine roaring. But a few times he got mired. I think if you tried hard enough, Bug, you might be able to remember that.
The first time the car got stuck, he turned the wheel over to you and got out and pushed, but when he pushed you free you drove on for nearly a quarter of a mile before finding the brake, and that gave him a bad thought or two. So the second time the car got stuck he made you get out and push, and pretty soon that blanket you were wrapped in was considerably splattered with mud.
Then before long the car lurched into a mud hole that seemed more like quicksand than mud, so both of you had to get out and push together. It was very laborious, and by the time you got the car back onto a semblance of dry land, you were both covered with mud from head to toe.
You stood there panting and staring at him in that fine blue pinstriped suit all covered with mud. The dawn was coming up. Something about his muddy appearance, and an awareness of your own weird appearance in a mud-soaked blanket, suddenly got through to you. You began to laugh.
If I had my own guess, Bug, that would be the moment when you began to get well.
And when you laughed, he began laughing too, and you each pointed at each other and howled with laughter. And then you were in each other’s muddy arms. And then you were not laughing.
Could anyone imagine that a muddy kiss would taste so good?
He stopped in the small hamlet of Bigelow and prevailed upon the keeper of the General Store to leave his breakfast and open the store long enough for him to buy some fresh clothes for the two of you, and a jar of salve for his rope-blistered hands. Then he even persuaded the storekeeper’s wife to sell him some boiled eggs and biscuits and pork jowl and a Mason jar full of steaming coffee. The storekeeper’s wife accompanied him back to the car, and she saw you. He explained, “My wife and I got pretty badly muddied up down the road aways and my wife ruined her dress and had to wear the blanket.”
“Them roads is sure awful this time a year,” the woman said. Then she asked, “Whar you folks headin?”
“Conway,” he said.
“Wal, I’ll tell ye. Ron Lee Fowler don’t start runnin the ferry till noon, but he lives not too awful fur up the road that runs north of the landin, so if you’uns was to go to his house and ast him, he might take you on across.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Much obliged,” he said, and drove on.
Before going on to the landing, he pulled off at a creek, and the two of you cleaned up, washing all the mud off, and donning the new clothes he’d bought. Your dress was a size too small, but it did nice things for your figure. Your shoes were two sizes too big, but they’d do, for a while. Then you sat on the grass and ate breakfast together. It was very good.
Ron Lee Fowler agreed to take the car across, for 35 cents. The roads on the other side of the river were better, and Conway was reached and left behind before any of the stores had opened.
He headed east across Faulkner County, still keeping to back-roads, avoiding highways, pointing in the general direction of Memphis. The traffic was light, a few wagons and horsemen, no automobiles. Still he began to get nervous as the day wore on and more and more houses and people were passed. By this time, word would have been sent out that a nut was on the loose from the state hospital.
Around ten A.M., east of Beebe, he turned off into an old trail that led through a grove of cypresses in and alongside a bayou. He drove as far as he could before the road got too muddy, then he stopped. It was a cool place, nearly dark, like a primeval jungle, with all the big cypresses and their beards of Spanish moss.
“Let’s take a nap,” he suggested, and got out of the car and found a shady patch of soft ground covered with a bed of cypress needles. You followed. You felt very sleepy, and possibly you were feeling grateful for the chance to stop and nap.
The two of you lay down, a few inches apart. He folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. He was dead-tired. You turned your head and smiled, and then you snuggled against him. He opened his eyes and smiled back at you and then he wrapped one arm beneath you and you fell asleep with your head on his shoulder.
You woke, in the same position, seven hours later. As soon as you raised your head from his shoulder, he woke too. The two of you rose and brushed the cypress needles off you, and resumed your journey.
He drove all night. Sometimes he sang songs, “Old Joe Clark,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “The Jealous Lover,” and “Sally Goodin.” Sometimes he just talked, telling funny stories.
“I remember that day we was going off to war, and the Jasper Women’s Cl
ub come down to the staging area where the Army was fixin to pick us up, and those women said they was throwin a seeinoff party for us patriotic fellers. So they served us punch and cookies, and this one lady comes up to me and says, ‘Young man, would you make a speech?’ And I choked on my cookie and says, ‘For God’s sake, what about?’ And she says, ‘Just anything you like, and tell em what you think about it.’ So then I stood up and I says, ‘Well, I like Miss Latha Bourne better than anything else, and I think she is wonderful.’ And then I sat down, a-wiping the sweat off my forehead, and afterwards everybody comes up and says that is the best speech they ever heard.
“J’ever hear the one Doc Swain used to tell about one time he gave Granny Price a dose of medicine and he says to her, ‘Keep a close watch, and see what passes.’ Next day he came back, and she was feeling a little better. He asks her, ‘Did anything out of the ordinary pass?’ ‘No,’ says Granny, ‘just a ox-team, a load of hay, and two foreigners on horseback.’ Doc Swain he just looked at her. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.’”
But you did not show much reaction to any of his stories, and he did not dare attempt to engage you in serious conversation, for fear he would find that you could not reply to the simplest question.
The Mississippi was crossed around midnight, and he drove through the back streets of Memphis and headed northeast. He stopped once at a café to pick up coffee and to consult his road maps.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 19