Twisted Ones

by Packer, Vin

  “Dr. Mannerheim?”

  He looked up and saw Brock Brown standing by his desk.

  Brown puzzled him somewhat. He seemed always on the verge of wanting to tell him something, but was never able to get the words out. Once or twice before, Brown had brought books to him, asking him to explain something in the books. Invariably they were very advanced psychological studies, too advanced for Brown, Mannerheim had decided long ago. They were Brown’s excuse for talking with him. He knew that, but he could never bring Brown to speak his mind.

  Clyde Mannerheim also knew that there was something going on between Carrie Bates and the Brown boy. He had noticed that often in the last morning hour. The Bates girl did everything to get Brock Brown’s attention, while Brown did everything to pretend he was not interested. Mannerheim suspected that Brown and this girl had had some dealings outside school. This was no bashful girl—bashful boy relationship. For one thing, Carrie Bates was not the least bit shy. For another, whatever was on the Brown boy’s mind, Carrie Bates had something to do with it. Clyde Mannerheim had watched the pair for some time now, and he was sure of it.

  Teen-agers, Mannerheim thought, poor stumbling creatures. He remembered his own teens, and how he had very nearly tried to commit suicide, because he felt so intensely guilty over the fact he had not controlled himself one night with a girl he had been seeing for two years. The next day she had put an end to their relationship—even though she had not tried to stop him the night before—and Mannerheim had gone to the river near his house and stared into it, thinking that he was the vilest, most foul, most sinful young man in existence.

  “What can I do for you, Brock?” said Mannerheim.

  “I don’t want to keep you, sir. You’re going to lunch, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not all that hungry,” Mannerheim answered, smiling. “What’s on your mind?”

  The boy laughed, passing his hand through his short-cropped black hair. “I guess I’m all shook up,” he said.

  “You and Elvis, eh?”

  “I don’t like rock ‘n’ roll. Don’t get me wrong.”

  “No? I was noticing your sideburns,” said Mannerheim smiling again. “Brock, there’s nothing wrong with rock ‘n’ roll. Do you think there is?”

  “It’s not good music.”

  “But you don’t have to feel guilty because you like it.”

  “I don’t like it, Dr. Mannerheim. And I don’t like Elvis Presley. These sideburns aren’t like his.”

  “Maybe not, Brock.”

  “I just think when a man wears his hair cut real short on the top, it looks good to have it inch down a little by the ears.”

  “It does look good.”

  “But I’m not shook up that way,” said the boy. “You know what shook up means? It’s just a word. It doesn’t mean someone goes running around all over the place acting like other guys.”

  “What are you shook up about, Brock?”

  “Nothing, really. I didn’t do anything wrong. Not really.”

  “Can you tell me a little more, Brock?”

  “If you want to go eat lunch, go right ahead, Dr. Mannerheim. You know, I’m not desperate.”

  “I don’t want to eat lunch, Brock.”

  “The whole thing’s crazy anyway. I wouldn’t know how to say it, even if I did have time.”

  “You have plenty of time.”

  “Sure,” said the boy, “right through to Memorial Day.” He laughed and shoved his hands in his pocket.

  “Go on, Brock.”

  “You hear all the time about guys running around with girls, Dr. Mannerheim. I mean …” he stopped what he was saying, and shuffled his feet. “That isn’t what I mean. I guess I don’t know how to say it. Put it this way. My name is Brock. My first name. It was my mother’s maiden name, Dr. Mannerheim. She died. I felt bad about that. You know, what boy wants his mother to die? What kind of a boy would want his mother to die?” He paused again. “That isn’t what I mean. I don’t know what that’s got to do with what I mean. I don’t know what murder’s got to do with it.”

  “Murder, Brock?”

  “Death. My mother died. She was giving birth.”

  Clyde Mannerheim thought a moment. Then he said, “Lots of times youngsters wish their parents dead. It’s a very normal thing. But if one of their parents die, then sometimes they feel responsible, because they wished for it. Of course, they aren’t responsible at all.”

  “Do you think I wished my mother dead?”

  “Did you, Brock?”

  “I revered her. I do revere her. Her memory. I’m not that kind. I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore.”

  “You started by saying something about your first name.”

  “That’s right. Brock. It was my mother’s maiden name.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it’s a different name. I guess I’m different too, sort of. All shook up, or something. But I’ve never done anything really wrong, not like other guys.”

  “What have you done, Brock?”

  “It’s sort of perverse or something. Not abnormal. I don’t mean abnormal. It’s the most normal thing in the world, but—”

  The boy was playing with a key now, tossing it from one hand to another.

  “What’s perverse about it?” said Clyde Mannerheim.

  He remembered again the way he had felt, staring into the river that night, remembered how he had thought, Lord, God, what if mother ever finds this out. He supposed every boy felt some unconscious incest guilt about sexual relations with girls. Particularly if the girl was a “nice” girl. In Brock’s case, it might be a much more guilt-ridden situation. His mother had died in childbirth. He probably felt, unconsciously, that he might kill a “nice” girl if he were to have relations with her, just as his father had killed his mother by getting her pregnant. Maybe Brock Brown was trying to tell him that he had done something with the Bates girl. Maybe that was why he tried so hard to ignore the Bates girl. He was afraid of what he had done.

  “You see this key?” said Brock. “It fits some lock.”

  With his left hand, he pushed the key through a hole he made with the fingers of his right hand.

  It was all too clear to Dr. Clyde Mannerheim.

  He said, “Go on, Brock.”

  “You’ll think I’m—I don’t know what you’ll think,” said Brock Brown. “In fact, I don’t even want to discuss it any more.”

  “We haven’t discussed it yet.”

  “You better go eat your lunch, Dr. Mannerheim.”

  “I told you, Brock. I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, I am. I’m going to eat mine. Down in the cafeteria.”

  “Are you sure you want to leave now, Brock? You got this far.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, really. I didn’t do anything, really. I did something, but I’m not going to run around talking about it.”

  “It won’t get any farther than me,” said Dr. Mannerheim. “If it’s about a girl, her name is safe with me.”

  “It’s not about a girl! It’s not about a girl!” Brock shouted.

  Clyde Mannerheim realized his mistake. He should never have forced it that far. He said, “All right. Okay, Brock.”

  “What kind of a guy do you think I am anyway?” Brock said.

  “A nice guy, Brock.”

  “What I was talking about—” he stopped in the middle of his sentence, and shoved the key back in the pocket of his trousers. “I’m going to have my lunch now, Dr. Mannerheim,” he said, sighing.

  To Mannerheim, the symbol of the key was obvious. Now that Brock had put it back in his pants, the matter was closed; there would be no more conversation on the subject. Yet Clyde Mannerheim could not let this boy walk out of his classroom feeling as though he were perverse, or evil, or sinful, simply because of an involvement with a girl. There had been no one to help Clyde Mannerheim some twenty-five years ago, but there was someone to help Brock Brown—even if it was only a moment’s reassuran
ce, even if it was just a masked reference to the subject, some slight clue he might offer the boy to help him out of the mire of guilt and self-recrimination.

  “Wait a minute, Brock,” said Clyde Mannerheim as the boy turned to go. “I want to tell you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Think about this, Brock. Think carefully about it. You mentioned perversion. Things that seem perverse.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s only one real perversion in this world, Brock. Just one. Do you know what that is?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “It’s chastity,” said Clyde Mannerheim. “Chastity.”

  The boy stood momentarily staring at him, his eyes fixed on Mannerheim with some thin veil of alarm to their expression. It would take awhile for him to realize the meaning of Mannerheim’s words, but Clyde Mannerheim sat back in his swivel chair with the feeling of a job well done. “Think about it, Brock,” he repeated.

  Wordlessly, Brock Brown turned and went out the door.

  Chapter Eight

  REGINALD WHITTIER

  At high noon that day in May, Reginald Whittier and Laura Lee were married by a justice of the peace, just outside the capital of Vermont, in a small town called White River Junction. When they returned to Montpelier, they bought a sack of hot dogs and some soda pop, and took it to their room. For two days, they had been staying in a tourist home.

  Between them, they had twenty-six dollars and ten cents left. On the night they had eloped, they had the fifty dollars that Laura had just been paid and the four Reggie had in his wallet. They had no change of clothes, and neither had succeeded yet in getting a job. At night, Reggie slept on top of two pillows on the floor, while Laura occupied the double bed. The first night they had tried sleeping in the same bed, but Reggie just could not fall asleep. He wasn’t used to it, he apologized. After he got work, they’d find a place with single beds. Laura understood perfectly, she said; things would work out.

  Last night they had gone to a movie. It was a very mushy affair, about two newly-weds whose parents thought they were too young to marry. Reggie kept getting up to go out and have a cigarette during the love scenes. He had bought his first pack of cigarettes yesterday afternoon, and Laura had tried to teach him how to inhale, but he couldn’t seem to get the knack of it.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t smoke at all,” he told her after he tried for a while. “It gives you cancer anyway.”

  But when they had left the movie and were walking back to the tourist home, he said: “I guess I have the cigarette habit. I kept wanting one all through the picture.”

  “It wasn’t a very good picture,” said Laura.

  “It wasn’t the picture,” said he. “I really wanted to smoke.”

  She said, “Reggie?”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go to the doctor and find out for sure before we go through with it tomorrow?”

  “I want to marry you,” he answered. “Either way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Things will be different when we’re married.”

  She said, “I’m not complaining or anything.”

  “We decided to get married, didn’t we?” he said, “You left your folks the note and everything.”

  “I wouldn’t have to go back to Auburn, if we didn’t get married. I could go to New York or someplace. I’d be all right.”

  “I want to marry you,” he said.

  • • •

  In a way, Reggie Whittier did believe that things would be better after they were married; and in a way, he did want to marry her. He believed this, and he wanted this, because he could not bring himself to admit that the elopement had been the sudden, thoughtless, angry inspiration it was. He could not chalk this up as another failure, as more proof that he really was the scrub in the valley his mother always told him to be.

  But since he had left Auburn, Vermont, left without a word or a note to his mother, he felt as though he were a stranger in a foreign country. Only once before in his lifetime had he experienced this feeling. That was the summer he attended the Boy Scout Jamboree in Edgewater, New York, against Miss Ella’s wishes. It was the summer he was thirteen, the summer he joined the Scouts. The Scoutmaster, a young, sturdy fellow who managed Stoker’s Drugs, had encouraged him to join, and then at meetings paid special attention to Reggie, giving him wild praise for his feeble attempts at tying diamond knots and figure-of-eights, awarding him this merit badge and that, with enthusiastic reassurance, and ultimately accomplishing the near-impossible by convincing Reggie to do something Miss Ella disapproved of.

  The Scoutmaster did not go along on the Jamboree, however. Few of the boys who did go cared the least bit about knots or merit badges. Reggie was mosquito-bitten, tongue-tied and lonely at the end of twenty-four hours, and at the end of forty-eight, he came down with impetigo. Mr. Danker drove down from Auburn to get him, and when he arrived at Whittier’s Wheel, Miss Ella ignored him for three days, until in a burst of nervous, remorseful tears, Reggie told her she had been right. He sobbed out the whole story—how there had been bugs in the Welsh rabbit, how the boys had short-sheeted his bed and called him Bugs Bunny because of his stutter, how the tent had leaked during the rain the first night, and how much he had missed her. Especially how much he had missed her.

  His mother applied soothing ointment to his impetigo, saying, “We’ll just forgive and forget, Reginald. We’ll just forgive, and forget all about the Boy Scouts of America.

  “Just remember,” she said. “If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail.”

  • • •

  Reggie Whittier sat on the double bed in the tourist home that noon, munching his hot dog while Laura made up her face. She was going to apply for a job as a waitress at the Montpelier Tavern.

  “What I can’t figure out,” said Reggie, “is why mother hasn’t done anything.”

  “Stop worrying about it, Reggie. All that’s behind us.”

  “It’s her car, you know. I mean, she gave it to me, but it’s registered in her name. She could have called the police.”

  “I’m going to write my folks a long letter tonight. Dad’s probably cooled off by now. You know, they eloped—mom and dad. In Sarasota. Jeez. Mom was only sixteen.”

  “What’s that gluck?”

  “This? Mascara.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter with mascara? Everyone uses it. All the movie stars use it.”

  “I never saw anybody use it.”

  “Everyone uses it! Is there something wrong with it?”

  “You sure use a lot of makeup, Laura.”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Sure. I like it. I just said you sure use a lot of it.”

  “It sounds like you don’t like it.”

  “I do. I really like it.”

  “I’m not kidding, Reggie. All girls use it. Oh, I suppose your mother never did. But then, she never would.”

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  “What are you so touchy about? You told me yourself you’re glad to be on your own.”

  “It’s just that you don’t have to say things against her.”

  “I wasn’t, Reg. I just said she wouldn’t use mascara.”

  “You said, she wouldn’t,” he said. “It was the way you said it.”

  “All right, I’m sorry.”

  “She’s not such a bad person, you know.”

  “Did I say she was?”

  He wadded up the wax paper from the hot dog and tossed it into the wastebasket. “They’d certainly find us if they were looking for us,” he said. “After all, we’re right in the state capital.”

  “They aren’t looking for us. You know what?” she said, “I bet we’re both good riddance, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “No. You don’t know my mother.”

  “Maybe you don’t know her. She hasn’t tried to find you, has she?”

 
“Mother’s funny about some things,” he said. “She might be just sitting back and waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, she usually doesn’t try to stop me from doing anything. She usually just lets me find out for myself that it was a bad idea.”

  “Thanks. Thanks a batch.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, you know. I don’t even think I am pregnant.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Laura.” He reached for a cigarette and struck a match. “I’m glad we’re married.”

  “Some honeymoon.”

  “You knew, Laura—you knew how it’d be.”

  “If you’re going to smoke,” she said walking across to him, “at least try again to learn how to inhale. Here, give it to me.” She drew in on the cigarette. “See?”

  “I don’t see that I’m doing very much different from what you’re doing.”

  “You have to get it down into your lungs. Take a drag and breathe in, Reg.”

  “All right.”

  He took it from her hand and tried. This time he didn’t cough or choke.

  “Much better!” she said. “Much better, Reggie!”

  “I’ll try it again,” he said, “I think I’m getting it.”

  She watched him while he sucked in on the cigarette a second time. “You got it, now! That’s it! That’s right!”

  “I did it okay?”

  “Honey, you inhaled! That’s what you did! You inhaled!”

  “I did?”

  “Sure! How do you feel?”

  “Not too dizzy.”

  “It makes you feel a little dizzy, but you’ll get over that. That’s great, Reggie. It took me weeks and weeks.”

  He sat on the double bed grinning up at her.

  “See how easy it is?” she said.

  “It was easy, Laur.”

  “I’m so proud of you, Reg!”

  She bent over and put her arms around his neck. “I’m so proud of you!” she said. “Hey, what’s the matter? Am I poison or something.”

  “It isn’t that. I didn’t mean to pull away.”