He Said, She Said

by John Decure

  On that count she was hard to read of late, but she certainly didn’t lack confidence. When I’d ask her—vaguely, casually—about the shape of things to come, she’d deflect my entreaties like shooing a fly, jokingly neither confirming nor denying a thing. We’ll see who’s there when I start calling names, she told me, breezing a hand through that fabulous mop of hair. And those who fail to answer the call will have hell to pay, won’t they?

  The last time I checked in with her, I’d uttered something lamely encouraging, if for no other reason than to show her I was, indeed, on her side as her supervisor. But she’d gone silent, her tight-lipped amusement at my weak efforts damnation enough.

  “Never should’ve gone this far, Raw-ool,” the Major lamented.

  I had to agree. We even took away her medical expert—the major had dispatched the guy on an extended European vacation, for God’s sake—and somehow she’d conjured up another expert, the same damned day. Proud of how she’d done it, too, confiding in me that maybe this was a sign this case was about to go right.

  Ay, Dios mio! The same damned day!

  I could hear too well the major’s chunky breathing, pictured him sitting in his black-leather swivel chair behind that big walnut desk in his study, his protruding middle inflating and deflating, up, down, up, down…. I waited, reminded of a pregnant Myrna, her abdomen big as an igloo, all lubed up for the ultrasound. Holding her hand, trying to love her despite my revulsion at the sight of what my sperm had wrought. Half a decade has since gone by. Seems like a long time ago, when she was young and pretty and exciting to me… seems like so very long ago. Her figure never quite recovered, the so-called baby weight becoming permanent, like a vat of concrete hardening in a wheelbarrow. My attraction for her had gone missing ever since.

  Staring at the wall, at the Los Lobos concert poster above the file cabinet, I was thinking about the lonely wolf and his plight, yearning for that kind of roaming freedom… but the major, he was barking at me again, jerking me back to the problem at hand.

  “Can’t spin it for you anymore, son. This case has got to resolve. Conclude. Settle.”

  “We tried that.”

  “Obviously you did not try hard enough, so dammit, try again!”

  “It won’t work.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know her. Listen to me. Bradlee Aames won’t win. She’s off her head. And that patient, Loberg, she looked like a nervous wreck at the settlement conf—”

  “Don’t tell me about the patient, whatever you do, dammit!”

  “What?”

  “It… makes me think about all the other patients out there!”

  “Excuse me?”

  He was snorting like a bull. “Oh, come on! Don’t you see that’s what this is about? Damn it to hell, Raw-ool, are you blind?”

  “You lost me.”

  Half my desk blotter baked white in sunlight. Wishing I was anywhere else at this moment, I leaned forward tiredly and spun the gold wedding ring on my finger, tried to conjure a quicksilver reflection but couldn’t find the right angle.

  “All right, then, Raul,” the Major said, his pronunciation spot on. “Truth is, it’s my fault.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say—”

  “Just button it, stop talking! Listen to me, son. Just listen. You probably think Donald Fallon’s just an old pal I’m lending a helping hand to, I’ll bet. That about right?”

  “No, sir, you’d mentioned your family’s link—”

  “Cat’s out of the bag already.”

  He belched quietly, as if he was holding the phone away from his big fat pie hole. But I heard it. He’d been drinking.

  “I guess so is the bullfrog,” I said, just to mess with his head. “Out of the bag.”

  “Son, any time you need to supply a roadmap for a joke, it wasn’t funny in the first place. But I digress. Now, tell me something, what’s the weather like down in LA?”

  “The weather?”

  “Stand up and go to the window. Then take a look, a really good look. I’ll hold.”

  I didn’t move. “What about the weather?”

  “Check the weather, dammit. Get cracking.”

  Bastard. I hated the way he pushed me around, but I set down the receiver and got up to take a peek. The last time I’d glanced out my window, I’d not noticed a thing, so lost was I in the riddle of what to do about Bradlee; a hailstorm wouldn’t even have raised an eyebrow. For now, the bright, cloudless, midday sun-scorched blanch of yellows and blues I expected to see seemed to have receded. Instead, ruffled high clouds had formed a ridge over East LA, dappled with the colors of rainbow sherbet.

  The air evaporated from my lungs, and I felt my heart knocking against my rib cage.

  Oh, pale sky, deafening street, roar on, in mourning and majestic grief!

  Ancient poetry, setting the scene eight stories up. Lightheaded, I had the sensation of falling. So much I’d wanted from this life, and what was so wrong with trying to take it? My father, his brown-leather face—I spied a hint of it in my unsmiling reflection in the window. Papi!

  He’d tended fields in Mexico, washed dishes in Calexico, dug ditches in Pacoima. Died trying to give his children more. What else could I do, but reach higher?

  Sin verguenza, Raul. Sin verguenza.

  No, no, there’s no shame in striving for a better life, no shame in having ambition.…

  Wiping a coil of hair from my forehead, I left the window and my father’s judging eyes, remembering the major’s stupid objective. I sat back down, feeling vaguely defeated.

  “The weather’s sunny and beautiful, sir. Some high clouds, but otherwise, typically perfect.”

  “Well, let me tell you a little story about a man who’s out there, enjoying that perfect afternoon somewhere not so far from you. Let me tell you what’s on that man’s mind, and I assure you, Raul, his thoughts don’t match your description of the weather.”

  So he told me about Donald Fallon, the promising neuro-psych resident who, thirty years ago, had wowed the Major’s only sister, Hilary, a lovely, quiet RN who didn’t get out much, with his witty patter, his seemingly vast social contacts around town, and the supreme ease with which he could order fine wines from menus written in foreign languages.

  “Still,” the major said, “he was marrying a Coughlin.”

  “Marrying up,” I said.

  “My point exactly, Raul. Something of the confidence man, that Fallon, the way he operated. My father met him once, called the estate lawyer right after, to put Hilary’s inheritance into a trust. But Hilary couldn’t be persuaded. We didn’t have any evidence, just a gut feeling that old Donnie wasn’t the innocent charmer he professed to be.”

  They were wed on a beach on Maui a mere three months after they’d met. I asked the Major if he’d attended.

  “No one was invited.”

  Life went on. Eight years later the couple had a big Spanish house in Hancock Park with red-tile roofs and a pool. Maybe the Coughlin family had been wrong, too hasty to look down upon an outsider. Maybe in Hilary’s case, true love had won out.

  But no. Despite the mundane domestic trappings, Hilary couldn’t help but notice her husband’s increasingly odd work hours. He seemed always to be rushing off to rescue a patient, particularly late at night. As a former nurse, she knew how doctor’s worked. Knew he couldn’t possibly be on call that often.

  “Cheating,” I said.

  “She didn’t know for certain, Raul. But yes, she suspected. Tried to talk to him, reason with him, but every time he’d shut her down. His hours got stranger, and when she’d object, he’d go from annoyance to rage, breaking stuff, the neighbors calling the police. When she told him he had to go with her to counseling, he threatened to kill her, then himself.”

  The major laughed tiredly. “Eventually she came to me, the big brother.”

  “Last resort, I said.

  He was silent for a while. I studied that wolf on the wall, saluting his nobili
ty.

  “You’re a bright young man, Raul, you can figure out the rest.”

  “The patients. This isn’t the first time.”

  “Bingo. Bango.”

  “You’ve known this… for what, years now?”

  “Bongo. Should’ve acted a long time ago to rein him in, but I couldn’t figure out a way.”

  “So, if this case settles with a term of probation, you won’t be putting him out of business.”

  “How could I go that far? Think about it.”

  “Your sister—”

  “I hope you’re not judging me, Raul. I had a probation monitor all picked out, Dr. Hans Kupferman. Heard of him?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s tops. Knows little Donnie’s backstory. Kupferman was gonna be my eyes and ears.”

  The Major’s purported containment plan was so asinine, I involuntarily issued a snort.

  “Oh, so you are judging me, my friend.”

  “Come on, major, he rips into another patient, I guarantee a probation monitor’s not going to be around for it.”

  “Don’t think you’re so superior, Raul, because you aren’t.”

  “Had I known, I’d—”

  “You’d have done nothing different, son. You question my judgment? Look at you! That little wild one, she’s defying your authority. Your feelings for her have clouded your judgment, son.”

  “That’s not true.”

  The Major chuckled malevolently.

  “Let me put it in plainer terms for you, counselor. Had you not been thinking with your johnson, you’d have assigned this case to a worthless hack, like say, that Ravola character.”

  The Major was referring to Dirk Ravola, a Deputy AG better known to his many detractors as Dork Revoltya. To the worthless hack description I would add only the words lazy and unprincipled.

  “But you didn’t,” the Major said louder. “You let your selfish interests get in your way.”

  “My selfish interests? You should talk.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I’m a deeply flawed individual, Raul, so help me God. But you’re the one who didn’t do your job, here.”

  That was it for me. “Know what, Major? You don’t even know what you’re talking about. It’s true, I thought Bradlee Aames would’ve imploded by now—”

  “We’re screwed, son. Both of us. Not to mention the next little patient Dr. Donnie gets in his—”

  “No, it’s your turn to listen, Major. I’m gonna let you in on something, because even though you roll out the slick little backstory on this creep, and now you play the injured party ’cause I didn’t sweep this entire pile of crap case under the rug for you, it’s you who don’t know what your interests are. You don’t even know what we’re dealing with, here.”

  “Okay, Mendibles, I may have been a little harsh, and if so—”

  “I don’t want an apology from you, I just want you to see how fucked up this whole thing has become.”

  I heard another quiet belch, followed by more heavy breathing. I pictured the major fortifying himself with his juice of choice, studying his portly outline in a window reflection just before his head was about to spin off his shoulders.

  “What you get with Bradlee Aames is not just a mentally ill problem child. She’s a very good attorney. I’ve seen her case file, took a peek at it to keep up with what she was doing. There are more bad facts than we alleged in the Accusation. Things Dr. Don did to the victim.”

  “Hell, he nailed her in his office under the guise of therapy. I know that. What more do you need to know?”

  “The victim, Rue Loberg. He abused her. Degraded her.”

  “Hell’s bells.”

  “He’s got the characteristics of a sadomasochist. What he does is charm, woo, make a victim feel special. Wins her over. Then slowly, he introduces a new dynamic. Undermines her sense of normalcy. Gets her to do things she knows are outside the norm. It’s like, the sadomasochist conditions his victim to be a ‘bad’ girl. Then once he’s accomplished that, when she does something ‘bad’ again, he’s got to punish her.”

  “Man’s a public menace.”

  “You know why I’m telling you this. You should talk to your sister, Hilary.”

  The Major took a swig, or a slurp, I couldn’t tell. “Jesus. And say what?”

  I was already swimming in deeper water than I’d ever attempted. My usual work routine involved carefully remaining uninvolved. The major was an unsavory ally to be cautiously cultivated and maintained, not a friend to reach out to with concern. This was not how to get ahead.

  “You’re right. Never mind.”

  “Mendibles,” he said after another half minute of throat burn and heavy breathing. “You did good. So should I, believe you me. Problem is, we’re not programmed to be do-gooders. We’re fixers. Don’t deny it—it’s how you met me. I like you, believe it or not, I like you because you remind me of myself. So okay, my brother-in-law is a sick puppy. I’ll follow up with Hil, soon as I figure out what to say to her. Meantime, let us reassess. Come up with a new containment strategy.”

  “In all honesty, I don’t see it. He’s a menace, you said so yourself.”

  “Containment, son. Gotta put our heads together on this.”

  He was half in the bag. I hung up the phone and put my head into my hands instead.

  The stench of Dr. Don lingered long into the afternoon. I sat at my desk as if pinned to my chair, like a puppet—his puppet.

  Over a slow, indeterminate spell of self-pitying stewing, I simply didn’t budge, and in time the motion sensor shut the lights off automatically. I sat there, in my energy-saving government office, watching the sunlight angle down, more sideways now. Blocks of shadow crept up the sides of the brick bank district buildings, an inky plague slowly blotting out the elaborate wedding cake facades. When I fell asleep or lost consciousness, I can’t say, but…

  On the wall the Los Lobos wolf detects the scent… of my wishful raw ambition, responding with a yellow-eyed, feral proud howl that stokes my soul. Where to? Does it even matter? Untamed fearless wide-open roaming awaits! A pathological yearning to join the wolf swells my tired spirit. My raw eyes and crooked spine and overstuffed inbox say no to this… sheer preposterousness, Mendibles, but… follow, I will follow. …

  A sundown breeze cools my neck amid green fields of budding corn and mud drying hard on the state capitol’s riverbanks, where old-town planks moan with rot beneath the tourists’ feet. I ruffle the fur on your back, Lobo; it’s just you and me and nothing but highway ahead. But then… it can’t be! No—anywhere but here, I know this place, Lobo, I’ve been here before and it’s not worth stopping, not for anything. But you can’t hear me, and so you slow to peer down into a gully beside the road, down a slope of wet grass, where an upended car lies, a front wheel still spinning. Inside is a man, passed-out drunk, hanging from a strap like a pig in a butcher shop window—and if I had words to tell you to keep moving, to quietly light-foot it on by, I would; but predictably, I find that I’m present… but not quite here, and I fail you. So you approach, dip your head to investigate, paw a button until it clicks, and the man slumps free, his shirt collar clamped in your jaws as you tug him, snorting with supreme effort, to safety. He awakens, his head jerking up at the sight of you, and he recoils in fear, scrambling backward.

  I stand at a safe distance, a self-involved witness to what for you was merely an instinctive act. How I wish this scene would end; but over my avid objections, the laws of the universe assert themselves and impose another moment on us. You move on, padding down the road as would suit your spirit, but the unheroic impostor stays behind and very much alone, hatching a surefire plan…

  17

  RUE LOBERG

  It wasn’t hard to understand why Dr. Craig was worried about me. I mean, I’m not the most stable, reliable person. And I could see a lot of myself in Ms. Aames, too, the way she seemed to be fighting off things only she could see, only with her, she kept goin
g no matter what, win or lose. Ms. Aames just had that certain fire, like a wild animal that knew it was wounded but would fight to the death anyway. It’s hard to pin it down any better than that, but what she had, by instinct I wanted it for myself, too. So, with this trial coming, I was looking up to her. It was like, by believing in her, I was casting a vote of confidence in myself. Hope that makes sense.

  Not that I’m anywhere near her level in life—a successful lawyer and such a head-turner, and all. But we share one thing. Men? They look upon her as an object of pleasure; you can see it in those sweaty stares, hear it when they laugh along with her simplest comments, even when nothing’s remotely funny. And boy, the men have done this to me, too. I know what it feels like, to be seen as an object, not a person.

  Ms. Aames, though, she’s nobody’s toy. She opens her mouth and out comes a lick of fire. She can make them pay. But Ms. Aames, she’s also burdened with a kind of tiredness of spirit that hangs about her like a shawl made of lead. A kind of exhaustion that chews at you all the time, a weariness that comes from fighting the world, but also yourself inside your mind, all the time. She promised that when I took the witness stand to tell my story, she’d be there to protect me, and though I didn’t think it possible for me to say my piece without getting plastered, I believed her anyway. Believing in Ms. Aames seemed to be on par with her believing in the epic, bad girl, screw-up-turned-state’s witness Rue. So what the hell.