by Tim Sandlin
Evanston was out of the question, of course. I couldn’t even consider traveling so far from Colette and the Tetons. And the things Gene had said about the mental institution scared me. Besides, I still had an outstanding anal charge in that county.
However, there didn’t appear to be much choice in the matter. I was incarcerated—in jail. Where my body went and didn’t go seemed fairly out of my control.
Who had control? Julie, John Hart, and a judge. Julie and John wouldn’t help. They hated me. That left the judge, and I don’t like putting my fate in the hands of strangers, even judges.
The only alternative was escape. I stopped at the door and felt the lock. Fat chance of picking it, even with a bobby pin. All prisoners think up escape plans—it’s an interesting way to pass the day—but without tools and time, what could I do? Desperate escapes are out of my league.
Luke was in a real tizzy. The actor playing his character on All My Children had changed. Luke lived in the soaps and an actor change, especially his character, created a tremendous identity crisis. It was as if I walked over to the apartment and found that the person playing Cora Ann was suddenly five years older, had black hair, and couldn’t dance.
I felt sorry for the poor murderer.
He turned off the TV and lay on his bunk, flipping through one of the two thousand magazines stashed around the cell. Every now and then he gazed out the window and sighed.
“You ever thought of breaking out?” I asked.
Luke’s eyes weren’t focused. “What’s that?”
“Busting out, cutting loose. I have some appointments and can’t stay here much longer.”
“You can’t escape.”
“I’ve got to. I can’t stay.”
Luke pointed at the door. “Three locks between here and the sheriff’s department, then down through the courthouse and on the street. How long would you last in orange coveralls and slippers? It’s impossible. Read magazines and watch television. You aren’t leaving.”
I was leaving, I just didn’t know how. There’s never been a problem yet that I couldn’t solve by thinking. I just don’t usually choose to think.
Hands in pockets, I propped my forehead against the north wall and willed the left side of my cerebrum into action. There had to be a way. Brain particles clattered. Nerve ends tingled. Nothing happened.
Escape. How to do it? How to proceed after I did it? How to contact Colette and persuade her to cooperate? None of the questions had answers. The only thing I knew for certain was that I couldn’t allow myself to be shipped off to any mental institution three hundred miles from Colette. She’d be in big trouble without me.
More from boredom than any real need, I took a leak in the northeast corner toilet.
My piss said, “Only Lizbeth can get you out of this.”
“What?”
Luke grunted, “Huh?”
“Did you hear anything?” I asked.
“I heard you say ‘What?’”
“Lizbeth can do it,” the piss said, then dribbled into silence.
Flushing toilets speak to me. And showers and rivers and perking coffeepots, even a waterbed if I rock it hard enough.
But never my own body fluids. At first I thought it might have been the still water in the toilet bowl, but no, it was unmistakable. My own urine had said, “Only Lizbeth can get you out of this.”
I drank two quarts of water in the next ten minutes.
***
Not thinking anymore, I sat on the edge of the bunk with both hands folded in my lap, waiting for the water to work its way down the system and into the bladder. Everything was okay now. My pee had it figured out. In no time at all I would receive a urine analysis of the situation.
Maybe it wanted Lizbeth to smuggle in a pistol or a file. She could see me privately and no one else could, though that seemed a lot to ask of a therapist. She might lose her license. Maybe the piss wanted us to switch clothes. I didn’t know. I’d just have to build up a good load and see what it had to say.
“Garbage.” Luke threw his magazine on the floor. “That was the stupidest story I ever read.”
“What’s this?” I looked down at the magazine. It was a Real Life Romance. A girl on the cover was cowering in front of a greasy biker with a knife. She looked scared.
“What kind of sick person writes crap like that?” Luke said. “I’ve got enough problems without warped people laying their perversities on me. First All My Children, now this.”
I picked up the magazine. It was dated August 1970. “Which story?”
“The first one. Hell. My day’s been ruined twice.”
The first story was titled “Is My Daughter a Cow Mutilator?”
“My mother wrote this,” I said.
Luke rolled over on his bunk to face me. “You’re kidding.”
“No. I saw it on her desk once. I wasn’t allowed to read it, though.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I shrugged. “Believe what you want. Mom wrote this story.”
“No wonder you’re crazy.”
The title was in large black letters under a picture of a woman confronting her daughter with a swollen cow udder. “Cattle mutilations were real big back then,” I said. “Most people thought the UFOs did it because no one ever found any tracks around the cow. Mom followed the Satan-worshiper theory.”
Luke rolled back over in disgust. “I don’t believe you. Nobody’s mother is that twisted.”
It was quite a long story. I read it while waiting for the water buildup. It started with a mother finding a cow udder under the daughter’s bed. In the final climax, the girl is staked out on a flat rock and branded with the Satan sign. The mom fights off the cultists with a big cross while the Romantic Interest of a boyfriend hurls himself between the girl and a rattlesnake. He lives, she repents, and, like all true-confession stories from that time, the mother thanks God in the final paragraph.
“I think the story is kind of exciting,” I said.
Luke growled, “You have no values.”
“Look who’s talking.”
He turned over quickly. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Nothing.” Luke was overly serious about his job. I never knew if he freelance killed people or not, but I decided early to stay on Luke’s good side.
Sometimes I wonder if Mom’s short-story period had anything to do with my desire to become a writer. Wouldn’t that be a kick? I never read any of her confessions, but I remember thinking how neat it was to get paid for doing something all by yourself.
I never told Mom that I wrote books. I was afraid she might want to read one. She could decide I was a bad writer and try making me face reality. She’s always after me to face reality, but I don’t see how it’s possible to do that and write a novel at the same time.
Not that launching a modern dance career at fifty-two is facing reality.
I let Julie read the first three westerns, but she thought they were low quality. She refused to read the fourth book—the one I wrote the last months before she left. Julie said my writing was shallow and horrible. She said I was going to be a drunk and a dishwasher all my life, and the novelist act was just pretension. She said I was a failure and I should accept it gracefully.
The fourth book isn’t very good. An agent told me my westerns were not commercial enough, so, in a huff, I wrote the most commercial outline in history. A Mafia bagman returns home one night and finds his girlfriend in bed with another man. He kills the other man, but when they turn on the light, the bagman discovers he has murdered the president of the United States.
The book has a presidential assassination, a Mafia ripoff, two sex scenes, a professional football player, and a thinly disguised Kennedy character, all in the first four pages.
The agent loved it. At his insistence, I finished the book.
Somewhere in there, the president’s head explodes in a Litton microwave oven. It climaxes at the Super Bowl at halftime, when the Secret Service pulls a fake assassination.
The flaw was that I don’t know anything about presidents, mafiosi, Washington, D.C., or anything else in the book. The vice-president talks like an Idaho potato farmer and the first lady comes off like a bartender at the Cowboy. It is a terrible book, worthy of Julie’s scorn.
I only keep it around to impress waitresses with what a deep, sensitive young novelist I am. Us tortured souls need comfort.
***
My career goal isn’t the Nobel Prize or Pulitzer Prize or any other Prize. It isn’t even being the last guest with only three minutes until we have to leave on The Tonight Show, on a night when Johnny Carson is host. What I’d really like is to write a book that matters so much that someday Willie Nelson shows up at the door and asks me to sign his guitar.
***
The key, I decided, in the message from my bladder, was the wording. Throughout the long night I drank and dribbled, but all the piss ever said was, “Only Lizbeth can get you out of this,” and occasionally, “Lizbeth can do it.”
Get you out seemed important. She didn’t necessarily have to help me escape. All I needed was assistance in getting out of the jail. Around dawn, the master plan took shape. It was daring and gutsy. It required timing and self-inflicted pain. The plan was riddled with holes, and only a lovesick genius fool would attempt such a death scheme. I had two of the important traits and they were strong enough to make up for the third.
***
One of the major holes filled itself the next day during visiting hours. Cora Ann appeared.
After all those years around the apartments, I guess we’d gotten used to seeing each other every day, because when the deputy led me to the glass partition and I looked through at Cora Ann, I was so happy I nearly cried. I felt tremendous relief, as if my lost family had come to take away the solitude.
All I could say was, “Hi.”
Cora Ann half-smiled. “Well, you finally made it.”
“You always said this would happen someday.” Cora Ann appeared perkier than I recalled, tanner. Our split-up certainly hadn’t affected her health.
“How did you find out where I was?” I asked.
She stared at me intently, as if she could tell more by how I looked than what I said. “You made this week’s paper. I saw the story at breakfast.”
“Was there a picture?”
“No, just the story. Did you really try to kidnap her, Kelly?”
“Of course not.” Quickly I sketched out the details of my bust.
“She turned you in,” Cora Ann said.
“She didn’t mean to.”
“How could she have not meant to?”
That was an interesting question. I hadn’t quite worked out an answer yet, so I didn’t care to get into it with Cora Ann. “You look healthy,” I said.
“I’ve been in the sun a lot—kayaking, climbing. I’m taking up windsurfing.”
“How’s Alice?”
“Mean, spoiled, and crabby as ever. I don’t understand what you see in that cat, Kelly.”
“She’s family.” We sat still, not looking in each other’s eyes. Cora Ann wore a blue T-shirt that said CLIMB A ROCK across the front. She had dangly silver earrings.
Cora Ann sighed. “I’m sorry this happened, Kelly.”
“It’s okay.”
“It is not okay. Every time I think about that rich bitch I get so mad I could spit.”
“She’s not so bad.”
“She is too.”
“It wasn’t her fault.”
Cora Ann’s hands doubled into fists. “Look what she’s done to you. She encourages you just enough and strings you along to stroke her injured ego. She uses you, Kelly. Don’t you hate her?”
“I can’t hate Colette.”
“If you won’t, I’ll hate her enough for both of us.” Cora Ann’s mouth drew into a line.
It was my turn to sigh. “I wish you liked her more, Cora Ann. Maybe after you get to know her better.”
“You’re hopeless, Kelly. I can’t even feel sorry for you anymore.”
This surprised me. “Why would you feel sorry for me?”
Cora Ann didn’t answer the question. “Are they treating you okay?” she asked.
“Fine, except they won’t let me leave.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“As a matter of fact, there is.”
For the first time, Cora Ann smiled. I don’t know why. “Shoot,” she smiled.
“You can take a message to Colette.”
The smile evaporated. “No.”
“What?”
“No, Kelly. I won’t do it.”
I went ahead on faith. “Tell Colette to saddle two horses and meet me at the cottonwood behind her house at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“Kelly.”
“Tell her timing is important, and she should bring her toothbrush. She’ll know what that means.”
“Kelly, she betrayed you. Nothing’s changed.”
“Just give her the message, Cora Ann.”
“No.”
Through the glass, I stared at her hard. “Please. As a friend. Trust me, Cora Ann. I know what I’m doing.”
“How could you?”
“I’m a realist. It’s a long shot, but if I don’t try once more I’ll be locked away for life and never know if she cares. I need one last chance, Cora Ann.”
“No.”
I was silent.
“Just how do you plan to arrive at the Hart Ranch tomorrow at one?” she asked.
“I’ll be there. Give Colette the message.”
“No, I won’t do it.”
***
That night I watched an Atlanta Braves baseball game with Luke and Jimmy. The Dodgers beat them 8-2 on a six-hitter by a Mexican rookie named Valenzuela. Taggart Creek would be pleased.
“Give me that letter to your wife,” I said to Jimmy.
“Why?” He was cross because he’d rooted for Atlanta. Nothing was going right in Jimmy’s life.
“What’s the address?”
“Idaho Falls, she’s staying there with her darling sister who’s a bitch.”
I felt generous since I was going to escape and he had to stay. “I’ll deliver the letter by hand and tell her I’m not leaving until she reads it. Maybe she’ll forgive you.”
Luke leered at me through Lark smoke. “You planning to be in Idaho Falls soon?”
“I might stop by.” I wasn’t feeling generous toward Luke. He’d said my mother was warped.
Jimmy fished around under the bed and handed me the letter without a question. “Tell her I love her or something,” he said.
“Or something.” I put the letter in my front coverall pocket and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. It was the same dull green as the walls.
The beauty of my plan, the only thing about it that made me dream it might work, was that everyone involved had to act completely out of character. Cora Ann had to give a message to Colette—a thing she had sworn she would never do; Lizbeth had to help me bust out of jail—ethically an outrageous favor to ask of a psychiatrist; and Colette had to meet me and run away with me—a task she’d failed once before.
There’s a law of nature, Darwin’s Black Hole Theory, I believe, that states that the impossible is much more likely to happen than the highly improbable. God’s way of keeping us on our toes.
14
The sanity hearing was as stiff and choreographed as a Lawrence Welk dance routine. I had no more chance than a black rapist with an all-white jury.
My lawyer and I sat on the right. Julie, John Hart, and three big-city, snappy-dresser lawyers sat on the
left. Lizbeth and Gene were behind me, and the deputy with the sideburns stood back by the door.
They hadn’t let me change out of the coveralls. It was embarrassing being the only one dressed down for the occasion. Julie wouldn’t look at me, but John Hart stared and growled—growled like a damn bear. I couldn’t believe it.
The judge walked in and we all stood up. I’d expected an old man—gray hair, strong chin, will of iron. This judge wasn’t even forty years old. He could have been my brother. Tanned, blond, he looked like a fucking surfer.
The kid judge slapped a gavel, announced what was going on—mental incompetency complaint against Kelly Palamino—and the preplanned show rolled on. Those city lawyers knew their stuff. Right from the opening statement they made me out as a dangerously twisted deviate, baby snatcher, and political assassin—a Rocky Mountain Jack the Ripper, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Charles Manson packed into one vicious little body.
They put Lizbeth on first to get her out of the way. She brushed close to me as she walked to the stand. Then, as she talked, Lizbeth looked at me kindly. She knew I was screwed.
Her testimony went about the way I expected: depressive neurosis, addictive personality; the suicide attempt two years ago was an isolated incident, not likely to be repeated.
The hotshot city-slicker lawyer leaned against the stand and leered at me. “Are you aware that Mr. Palamino talks to water?”
Lizbeth shifted in her seat. “Kelly listens to the water talk. He doesn’t talk to it.”
“Listens is different from talks to?”
“I suppose.”
“But he does hear words. He receives messages from the water.”
“Yes.”
“Would you describe this as a psychotic episode?”
“Yes.”
“But you do not diagnose Mr. Palamino as psychotic?”
“No.”
“He has psychotic episodes, but he is not psychotic.”
“That is correct.”
“Miss Morley, if you treated a patient for several years and grew too close, became too involved with that patient to be objective, would you admit it to this court?”
“Yes.”
“No further questions.”