Lightning Bug

by Donald Harington

  On the afternoon of March 23rd, he parked the stolen car in a weed-choked vacant lot on West Fourth Street bordering the grounds of Fair Park. He was wearing a blue pin-striped double-breasted suit he had obtained that morning at Pfeifer’s Department Store by putting it on beneath his old work clothes in the dressing room. But his shoes, scuffed brogues, were incongruous with the splendid suit. He had wanted to buy some shoe wax and touch them up a bit, but he was impatient.

  He used the Visitors’ Entrance and went up to the desk.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “I’d like to visit with Miss Latha Bourne.”

  “Are you a relative?” she asked.

  “Distant cousin on my mother’s side,” he said.

  The woman consulted her list and said, “She’s in E Ward.”

  “How do I get there?” he asked.

  “You don’t get there,” she said.

  “How’s that, ma’am?”

  “The only visitors permitted in E Ward are members of the immediate family.”

  “Oh. So you mean I can’t see her?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Couldn’t I just maybe look at her from a distance?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, could you just show me which window is hers so’s I could just holler ‘hello’ to her?”

  “We couldn’t do that.”

  “Well, could you get ahold of a preacher who would marry us so then I would be a member of her immediate family and could visit her?”

  The woman stared at him for a moment, then said, “Oh. You are being playful.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “Why are you so eager to see her?”

  “Aint seen her in nearly four years.”

  “You should try to understand, sir, that even if we permitted you to visit with her there would likely not be any communication. Most patients in E Ward are totally withdrawn.”

  “Oh,” he said. He asked, “Can they not be cured?”

  “The hopeless incurables are in F Ward. In E Ward we have a partial recovery rate of about five percent.”

  “How long will she have to stay here?”

  “I couldn’t say. If you were a member of the immediate family you could make an appointment to discuss the case with one of the doctors.”

  “Looks like I’m shit out of luck, don’t it?” he said, “not being an immediate family.”

  “Sir,” she said.

  He left. He wandered around the grounds, looking at the buildings. There were seven white austere blocks, each five floors in height. He thought it looked worse than Leavenworth. Some patients were sitting on benches in the spring sunshine, but they did not seem to notice that flowers were blooming and trees were leafing. He approached one bench and asked the old man sitting there, “Which one is E Ward?”

  “Who knows the way out of a rose,” the man replied.

  He wandered on; he came to two men walking. “Is either one of you fellers sane enough to tell me where’s E Ward?”

  One turned to his companion and asked, “Will you tell him, Doctor, or shall I?”

  The other said, “I yield to you, Doctor.”

  The first said, “No, Doctor, I should much prefer that you tell him.”

  “I demur,” said the second. “You are saner than I.”

  “On the contrary,” said the first, “your sanity is better equipped for answering directional questions.”

  “Let us examine the question, Doctor,” said the second. “This gentleman is not asking us for the location of E Ward. He is asking if either of us is sane enough to tell him the location of E Ward.”

  “I see,” said the first. “Then what is your diagnosis, Doctor?”

  “Frankly, Doctor,” said the second, “I am inclined to detect symptoms of chronic pathological mythomania in both ourselves; therefore neither of us is capable of giving the gentleman a truthful answer.”

  “I quite agree,” said the first. “But if we simply said ‘no’ to this gentleman’s question, would we be lying?”

  “I think not,” said the second, “but of course my opinion would be influenced by my mythomania.”

  “In that case,” said the first, “I suggest we answer ‘yes.’”

  “Very well,” said the second. “Yes, sir, either one of us is sane enough to tell you the location of E Ward.”

  “Then tell me, dammit!” he said.

  “Why do you want to know?” asked the first.

  “I’m goin to visit my dear old mother,” he said.

  “What’s the lady’s name?”

  “Smith.”

  He turned to the other, “Do we have a Smith in E, Doctor?”

  The other said, “I think not. I suspect this person is delusional.”

  “Perhaps he is a patient. What is your name, sir?”

  “Smith.”

  “Do we have any patients named Smith, Doctor?”

  “Surely we must, Doctor.”

  “Come along, sir, and we will find out where you belong.”

  They each took one of his arms, but he broke loose, saying “Now just a dadblamed minute!”

  A nurse came up and shook her finger at the two men. “Now, boys,” she said, “we mustn’t molest the visitors.” Then she asked him, “Did they disturb you, sir?”

  “Naw,” he said, “I was just trying to find my way to E Ward.”

  “Right over there,” she said, pointing.

  “Thanks,” he said, and walked away from them. He was beginning to feel half-touched himself.

  E Ward was identical with the other buildings, the most conspicuous difference being that all of the windows were barred. Just like Leavenworth, he thought. He walked around the building. Although the windows were barred, they were open to let in the spring air. A sound came to him, and he realized the same thing you had previously realized, Bug: that E Ward was appropriately named. The steady noise characteristic of the place was a high-pitched “Eeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeeeee!”

  An old woman appeared at a third floor window and looked down at him. She began to screech, “JOHN MY SON MY SON JOHN YOU’VE COME FOR ME!”

  Immediately a younger woman appeared and shoved the old lady out of the way, saying, “That aint your son, you old bat! That’s my man Willy.” She called down to him, “OH WILLY COME AND FUCK SOME CUNT OH WILLY COME AND SUCK SOME ASS OH WILLY COME AND FLOOR YOUR WHORE WHO’LL LICK YOUR DICK AND DRINK YOUR PISS AND GOOSE YOU WITH HER PRETTY LITTLE THUMBIE THUMB THUMB!”

  “I aint Willy,” he told her, and walked on.

  From another window a girl was staring silently at him. She was an albino with snow white hair and pink eyes, but she seemed to be completely all there. He called up to her, “Do you know Latha Bourne?” She did not answer. He called again, “Is Latha Bourne up there?” She stuck out her tongue at him.

  You who shared the cell with this albino girl heard your name twice, and began to rise from your cot. You lifted a foot; you lifted an arm; you lifted another foot, another arm; you raised up your head, your shoulders; you sat up; you put your feet on the floor; you pushed down on the edge of the cot with your hands and rose up; you stood; you turned; you began to walk toward the window; you began to run; you ran and ran and ran and finally reached the window; you looked out. There was nobody there.

  He wandered through Fair Park, thinking. You should realize that up until this point he had only wanted to see you. He had only wanted to see that you were alive and well. He had hoped perhaps to see you smile. He had hoped to be able to get you to hear him and understand him when he said that he was going to wait for you to get well, however long it took.

  Only his bitter disappointment, his intense frustration over not having been able to see you at all, was what now drove him with the sudden determination to get you out of there. He did not even consider that there was anything wrong with abducting you away from there; to him it was not conceivable that you could actually be insane; to him you were a lovely goddess unjustly inc
arcerated among foul hags. To him he would be protecting your sanity by rescuing you from that place [and this notion, as we know, was not far from the truth]. The brief experience with the old woman, the obscene woman, and the albino, had impressed him deeply. That was no place for you.

  But, even given his talent for having broken out of a federal military stockade unaided, he was at a loss for means of freeing you. To break out of a place is one thing; to break into a place and get somebody else out of it is, he said to himself, an apple off another tree.

  He thought of bribing one of the guards (or aides or attendants or whoever ran the place). He had sixty-five dollars to his name. Would a guard accept such a paltry bribe? Even if he would, there was too much danger in dealing with people. If the attempt failed, he did not want anybody to know even that. He did not want to be seen by anyone sane enough to give a description of him to the police.

  Darkness was necessary, of course. While waiting for it, he went to a hardware store and spent fifteen of his sixty-five dollars on some tools and rope. He stashed these in the trunk of his car and went off to the carnival in Fair Park to while away the early night. He rode the Ferris wheel several times before dusk; and each time it took him to its apex he would look out across the treetops and study the roof of E Ward. After nightfall, he spent an hour at the shooting gallery, winning a great armload of prizes, which he distributed among the children. He wandered around. He bought a ticket to the Girlie Show and went in and watched it through twice. He rode the Merry-Go-Round. A girl offered herself to him for ten dollars; he thought about it, and bought the girl a soda and talked with her some; but finally turned her down. He rode the shooty-shoot. A girl offered herself to him for free; he declined. He visited the ball-pitching booth, and won a giant stuffed Panda. He placed it in the hands of the first girl who passed; her escort took umbrage and accused him of getting fresh, and picked a fight. The man was a big fellow, with much beer on his breath. They squared off. The man swung a roundhouse; he ducked under it and deflated the man’s intestines with one jab, then broke his jaw with an uppercut. The girl thanked him for the Panda. He walked on. The carnival was beginning to close.

  At a quarter past one he went back to his car and got his tools and rope. He crossed the grounds of the hospital, keeping to the shadows of trees. There was not a soul around, but the grounds were still illuminated. He approached E Ward from the corner nearest the trees. He stood at that corner for a moment, listening, then he looped the rope over his shoulder and stuffed the pockets of the suit with his tools, and reached out and took hold of the drainpipe, a thick galvanized tin tube running up to the roof. He began to climb. At the third-floor level he paused and studied the bars on the windows. The ends of the bars were embedded in mortar; he did not have the tools to cut them or bend them. He had a file, but that would take too long.

  He continued climbing, past the fourth floor, past the fifth. The height did not dizzy him, but he was a little nervous about the drainpipe pulling loose from the mortar. It was an old building.

  He arrived at the roof and clung to its gutter; he kicked out with all his might and managed to swing one leg up and hook his heel on the rim of the gutter. Then he pulled himself up.

  He stood up on the sloping roof and climbed it, climbed over a gable and down to a vent on the other side of it, a louvered triangle. He took a screwdriver out of his pocket and pried around the crevices. He discovered there were three bolts in the vent—bolted on the outside, naturally, to keep anyone inside from tampering with them. He took a wrench from his pocket and removed them. Then he inserted the wedge end of his nail puller into the crack and forced the vent out. He laid it carefully on the roof, along with his coil of rope. Then feet-first he let himself down through the vent until his feet touched solid floor.

  From another pocket he took a candle and lighted it and discovered he was in a small attic. He crawled across the floor and located the hatch. It was latched—and probably locked—from below. But the hinges and screws were on this side. He removed them. The hatch dropped down and swung from the padlock on its underside. He slowly peered below. It was the end of a corridor; there was no ladder; it was a good twelve feet to the floor. He lowered himself to his full length, hanging on by his hands on the hatch, then he let go and dropped, flexing his knees to cushion his drop; even so the corridor rang out with a crash of his feet upon the wooden floor. He waited, listening, for several minutes until he was convinced that nobody was coming to investigate the noise.

  He explored the corridor. Apparently all the rooms on this floor were storerooms. He went to the stairs and descended to the fourth floor. The rooms on this floor had names on them: “Hydrotherapy,” “Electroshock Therapy,” “X Ray.” He continued on down to the third floor.

  He was almost spotted by the night attendant, a big woman sitting at a desk. He retreated, back up to the fourth floor and along its length to another stairway. He went down this stairway to the third floor again, but the door at the foot of the stairway was locked. Yet once again, however, the attachments were on the side opposite that to which patients would have access. He took his screwdriver and removed the whole lock from the door. Then he found himself in a dimly lit corridor of many rooms.

  Each door had a nameplate with two names on it. “Ella Mae Henderson and Mrs. Ruby Bridges.” “Mrs. Marianne Templeton and Mrs. Dorothy Grace.” “Agnes Colton and Huberta Read.” “Mrs. Velma Lucaster and Georgene Masters.” “Jessica Tolliver and Latha Bourne.”

  One more locked door, with a barred window set in it, and he had no tools for this one. His first impulse was to knock gently and see if you would open it from the inside, but he realized that this door would lock from the outside. And who would have the key? Why, that big woman down at the end of the corridor, of course.

  He moved quietly along the corridor, still firm in his resolve not to have any contacts with anybody, but determined to club her over the head from behind, if necessary.

  It was not necessary. The woman was asleep. He could hear her snores before he saw her. Her chin was embedded deeply into her chest as she sat in heavy slumber with her hands folded over her stomach. Under her right elbow he saw a ring of keys attached to her belt by a leather thong. He congratulated himself on having the foresight to have included a pair of shears in his purchase at the hardware store.

  He stole up to her and snipped the leather thong and grabbed the keys and stole away, without causing any irregularity in her heavy snoring.

  He returned to your room and tried many keys until he found the one that fit. He unlocked the door and opened it.

  Now, he thought.

  There were two cots, and that albino girl was asleep in one of them. You were asleep in the other. He closed the door behind him. He moved to your cot and knelt down beside it. Maybe, he said to himself, maybe I ought to just try and pick her up and carry her instead of waking her up. But he knew he would not be able to get the dead weight of you out of there. He would need some cooperation from you.

  Gently he shook your shoulder and began whispering in your ear, “Latha, honey, it’s me. I’ve come to take you home. Wake up, sweetheart, and let’s get on back home.”

  Instantly you were awake, and in your eyes that look he had so often seen: that big-eyed look that was not astonishment nor startlement but a kind of hesitant surprise as if you were just waiting to see what the world was going to do to you, knowing it was going to do something and even wanting it to do something, and watching big-eyed to see what it would be.

  You did not speak to him. Knowing what I do about your condition, I would venture a positive guess that you immediately recognized him, even subliminally, that is, that even though you could not have spoken his name to save your soul, you knew him. He was the first non-stranger you had seen in a long, long time.

  Did you even smile? I refuse to discount the possibility that you could have. But his eyes were so close to yours that he wouldn’t have noticed what was happening to the mouth d
own below.

  “Howdy, Latha, honey,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home.” It bothered him a little bit to be lying; he had no intention of taking you home. “Now don’t you make a sound, sweetheart, because nobody knows I’m here. Now you just get your dress on and we will get out of this place and I will take you home, away from all these crazy people.”

  Slowly you rose up out of bed, and he impulsively turned his face away when he saw that you were naked. You stood there for a while like a statue. He had to return his eyes to you to see what you were doing, and when he saw that you were doing nothing he began to look around for a garment to put on you. He could not find one. Had they taken away all your clothes? While he was searching the room he was surprised to discover that the albino girl was awake and watching him. He put his finger to his lips and said to her, “Shhh.” There was hardly anything in the room other than the two cots—no closet, no wardrobe, nothing. He took the wool blanket off the bed and wrapped it around you, then he said to you, “Come on.”

  “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.