He felt in his pocket for the piece of paper with her phone number on it. She wanted so badly for him to get hypnotized and he wanted just as badly to avoid the whole thing. Besides, what was the point if all that had happened was that Everley had been drinking? Maybe there was something else he could do for her, something that might make her feel a little better about what had happened to her brother—or at least not so bad.
For example, there was Everley’s backpack, which was missing and which he supposedly had with him all the time. Beth seemed to attach a lot of importance to that backpack. Maybe the things he had in it—his camera and his stories—meant something to her. He wondered what had happened to it. It could have been any one of a number of things. For example, maybe Everley had taken it with him when he left his house that day, but maybe he didn’t have it with him when he was up on that bridge. Maybe he’d left it wherever he was before he got to the bridge. The cops said he’d been drinking. If he’d had enough to start fooling around on a bridge so recklessly that he’d fallen off it, then he’d probably also had enough to forget his backpack somewhere. Maybe he’d forgotten it wherever he’d been drinking. Maybe nobody had noticed it. Maybe it was still wherever he’d left it. He wondered if Beth had thought about that. If that wasn’t it, then it had to be one of the other possibilities he had already mentioned to her. Either Everley had taken it off when he was fooling around up there on the bridge just before he went over and someone had come along (before the police got there) and had taken it. Or someone had got to Everley before Dooley and had seen he was dead and had taken the backpack off him. It wasn’t pleasant to think about, but it was possible. There were a lot of homeless people down there in the ravine.
Dooley’s uncle came into the kitchen a little before six. He was carrying five plastic grocery store bags. Dooley, who had been sitting at the kitchen table working on his math homework (which he hated) and his history homework (which was not so bad), got up to help him put everything away.
“The mushrooms and the salad stuff stay here,” his uncle said. “And the steaks. The dips, the cheese, and the cold cuts you can put in the fridge. The rest of the stuff goes on the dining room table.”
The rest of the stuff was a couple of bags of potato chips, a bag of pretzels, a couple of boxes of crackers, a loaf of rye bread, and a couple of large plastic bottles of soda water. Poker night. Most guys played poker on a Friday or Saturday night. Not his uncle. At least, not necessarily. Because of the shifts of the regulars, he played whenever everyone could get together. Sometimes it was a Friday night. Other times, like now, it turned out to be a Monday night. But it didn’t matter when it was; Dooley hated poker night.
The first time Dooley experienced poker night was two weeks after he moved in with his uncle. He came home from work and found eight cops and ex-cops in the living room, haloed by a cloud of cigar smoke, fueled by plenty of beer, playing cards to the accompaniment of a symphony of pissing and moaning. Dooley took one look at the gathering, gave a little nod of acknowledgement when his uncle introduced him—“my nephew Ryan, likes to be called Dooley”—and detoured into the kitchen, planning to grab a soda from the fridge and then go upstairs to his room, out of the way of so much blue muscle. One of the cops came into the kitchen while Dooley had his head in the fridge. The cop was scowling when Dooley straightened up after closing the fridge.
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought that was you. So you’re the nephew Gary’s always talking about, huh?”
The scowling cop turned out to be the same one who had arrested Dooley that last time, before Dooley even knew his uncle. He looked at Dooley and said, “What’d you get for that?”
Dooley didn’t answer. He figured the cop already knew.
“And now you’re walking around without a care in the world,” he said. He shook his head. “And they say there’s justice in the world.”
Dooley wondered how long the cop was going to go on. Then, over the cop’s shoulder, he saw his uncle, who had appeared in the doorway. The cop glanced at him.
“What’s going on?” Dooley’s uncle said. He was looking at the cop, not at Dooley.
“Just getting a beer,” the cop said. Fucking coward, wouldn’t even own up to what he was doing. He grabbed a Molson’s out of the fridge and headed back to the game in the other room. Dooley’s uncle looked at Dooley. Dooley just shrugged.
Later, after all his cop and ex-cop friends had gone home, Dooley’s uncle knocked on Dooley’s door.
“I didn’t know Dennis knew you. He’s not a regular. Art brought him. I doubt he’ll be back.” His uncle’s way of apologizing—maybe. “Did he give you a hard time?”
“No,” Dooley said.
“Because Art says he’s a good guy,” his uncle said. “He just takes his job seriously, that’s all.”
“Right,” Dooley said.
Ever since that first time, if Dooley happened to be home on poker night, he stayed up in his room. If he was at work, he came in through the side door and slipped up the stairs unseen. His uncle never asked him to meet the guys, and Dooley had the impression he did it as a favor, not because he was embarrassed.
“Wash the mushrooms and slice them, will you?” Dooley’s uncle said now. “And make them nice and thin.”
While Dooley got to work, his uncle took a beer out of the fridge, twisted off the cap, and sat down at the table to drink it. He looked tired, glad to be home, gladder still to be pulling on a cold one. Dooley purposefully kept his eyes on the mushrooms when he asked the question he’d been saving up all day: “The guy who told you that Mark Everley going off that bridge was an accident, did he tell you where Everley was before he fell?”
Silence.
Followed by the sound of a beer bottle being set down onto a tabletop.
Followed by more silence; in other words, the sound of his uncle thinking. Probably staring at the back of Dooley’s head, too, like he wished he could see clear through it into Dooley’s brain.
“No, he did not,” his uncle said finally. “Why?”
“I was just wondering.”
“I thought you didn’t know that boy,” his uncle said. Dooley was glad he was standing at the sink with his back to his uncle, washing mushrooms.
“I met his sister,” he said. “She’s real upset by what happened. So I was just wondering, that’s all.” He dumped the washed mushrooms onto a cutting board and reached for a knife. “This guy, this friend of yours, you think he would tell you if you asked him?” He tried to make it sound casual, like it was just a question, like it was no big deal.
“Why would I do that?” his uncle said. “Turn around, Ryan.”
Dooley set the knife down. He turned and let his uncle look at him. He even met his uncle’s eyes.
“What’s going on?” his uncle said.
“I already told you. I met his sister. She’s upset.”
“Right. Now pull the other one.”
Dooley was sorry he’d asked. Now he was going to have to explain.
“She says her brother always had this backpack with him. But the cops didn’t find it. She thinks someone stole it from him. But if he’d been drinking…”
“You think maybe he forgot it wherever he was,” his uncle said. He must have been some cop, Dooley thought, the way he picked up on things. “And what? And you want to find it for this girl, maybe impress her a little, is that it?” He sounded as casual as Dooley had tried to be. But he didn’t look it. His eyes were hard on Dooley.
Dooley shrugged.
“Is she pretty?” his uncle said.
“Yeah,” Dooley said. As soon as he said it, he had a picture of her in his mind as clear as if she were standing right there in the kitchen with him. He could smell her, too. Maybe she wore perfume, but he didn’t think so. He thought the way she smelled was shampoo and soap, all sweet and fresh.
His uncle was still watching him, but something changed in his face.
“The guy who told me is Joe DeLucci. I don�
��t think you’ve met him yet. He’s a staff sergeant. He’ll be here tonight,” his uncle said. “Now, how about washing some lettuce?”
After supper—steak with fried mushrooms and a green salad with homemade salad dressing (mixed by Dooley, following instructions from his uncle), Dooley helped his uncle set up for poker. Then he went up to his room to do his homework.
He woke up at one in the morning when his uncle knocked on his door and then pushed it open so that the light from the hall hit Dooley right in the eyes. Dooley sat up.
“Is everything okay?” he said.
“Made out like a bandit,” his uncle said, grinning. Must have drunk like a fish, too, Dooley thought. He was swaying a little on his feet. “They don’t know where the kid was.”
“What?”
“According to DeLucci, the dead kid—what’s his name? Everley?—he left home around four-thirty that afternoon. Didn’t tell his mother where he was going. She didn’t even know when he left the house, which, according to DeLucci, the mother said was standard. Apparently he didn’t feel he should have to keep her apprised of his whereabouts.” Dooley knew exactly how he must have felt. “None of his friends saw him. Nobody knows where he was between the time he left home and the time he went off that bridge.” His uncle stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame to steady himself. Finally he said, “I’m going to bed.”
Eleven
Dr. Calvin poked his head out into the small waiting room and seemed surprised to see Dooley sitting there, leafing through an old copy of Time magazine.
“Dooley, long time, no see,” he said.
“Hey, Doc,” Dooley said. “I was hoping you could spare a few minutes.”
Dr. Calvin checked his watch. “I can spare thirty,” he said. “But only if you don’t mind coming downstairs with me. I haven’t had lunch yet.”
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Dooley said he didn’t mind.
Unlike Kingston, who always wore a suit and tie, Dr. Calvin was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a navy blue pullover sweater. He locked his office door behind him and took the stairs, not the elevator, down three floors to the lobby. Just off it was a coffee-and-sandwich place.
“Can I get you anything?” Dr. Calvin said.
“No, I’m fine,” Dooley said. He sat down at a table and waited while Dr. Calvin ordered a sandwich and a coffee, which he brought over to the table.
“So,” Dr. Calvin said, sitting opposite Dooley and spreading a paper napkin on his lap, “how are you doing? Keeping out of trouble, I hope.”
Dooley nodded. He filled Dr. Calvin in on school (it sucks), his job (it sucks), and his uncle (he’s tough, but he’s fair) before he got to the point.
“Hypnosis, huh?” Dr. Calvin said. He finished off the first half of his sandwich—ham and Swiss. “Sure, it works. Why? Is there something you’re trying to remember?”
Mainly there were things Dooley was trying to forget.
“How do you know the person who’s hypnotizing you isn’t going to ask you a bunch of stuff you don’t want to talk about?” Dooley said.
Dr. Calvin munched on the second half of his sandwich. “It doesn’t work the way you think it does, Dooley,” he said after a swallow. “It’s not like you’re unconscious and totally out of control. It’s more like intense daydreaming. The way a lot of people approach it, they tell you your mind works like a VCR, that you can see a replay of an event, you can slow it down, stop it, rewind it, enlarge it, anything. The person doing the hypnosis controls the subject’s mental viewing with his questions.”
“But how do you know that while you’re daydreaming or whatever that you’re not going to say something you’d maybe rather not say?” Dooley said. “You know, say you were walking along and you were thinking about something and then all of a sudden you saw something, but maybe you saw more than you remember. When you get hypnotized, how do you know that you won’t say something about what you were thinking about at the time?” That was the thing that was bothering him. After all, the point wasn’t what he’d been thinking—that was personal and had nothing to do with anything. The point was what he had seen but maybe hadn’t realized he’d seen or maybe had forgotten. “How do you know that what you were thinking and what you saw aren’t so stuck together in your brain that remembering the one makes you talk about the other?”
Dr. Calvin polished off the rest of his sandwich and washed it down with a couple of gulps of coffee.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “The answer is, I guess you don’t. But you could discuss it in advance with whoever is doing the hypnosis, you know, so that he or she can focus the questions on what you saw. But if, as you say, your thoughts and actions are intertwined—which, by the way, they are for most people—well, then, I suppose it’s possible that you might say something about it. So when you come right down to it, I guess there’s no guarantee that you wouldn’t say something that perhaps you’d prefer not to say.”
And there it was in a nutshell—the reason Dooley had come to Dr. Calvin with his question instead of going to, say, Kingston. Dr. Calvin was always straight. Always. Plus, he didn’t mind talking. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it.
“They’re making me go to counseling,” Dooley said. “My uncle says he called you, but you said you were too busy to take me.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Calvin said.
“Are you still too busy?”
“I’m afraid so.” He finished his coffee. “I see private patients in addition to the patients I see at the detention centre. I see them for forty-five minutes at a time, eight sessions a day, three days a week. Then there’s all the paperwork—files and notes and reports. There’s only one of me, Dooley.”
Shit.
“And I’m getting married in a couple of months.”
“Hey, congratulations,” Dooley said.
“Thanks.” Dr. Calvin glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid I have to go. It was good seeing you again, Dooley.”
As Dooley walked to the bus stop, he thought about what Dr. Calvin had said: there was no guarantee. Dooley didn’t like that. He also didn’t like not being able to do anything for Beth. Nor did he like the idea of telling her, sorry, that’s a big nope on the hypnosis and, what’s more, there’s not a damned thing I can do to help you get over the death of your brother. He told himself it didn’t matter. So she’d be mad at him? So what? There was no way a girl like her was ever going to be interested in him anyway.
Twelve
Atypical school-day lunch period: Dooley walked six blocks from his school to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant frequented, during the daytime anyway, mainly by Chinese seniors, slid into a booth, ordered one of the cheap lunch specials—he was partial to spicy chicken with cashews—and read, usually something he had to read for school, but sometimes something he actually wanted to read (he was making his way through Irvine Welsh) while he ate. No one ever bothered him. So it was a big surprise when, halfway through his lunch on Tuesday, Rhodes appeared and stood beside his booth.
Dooley checked him out. Behind his glasses, which Dooley bet had designer frames, he was a good-looking guy. It was easy to see why the girls were always giving him looks, maybe giving him a whole lot more besides. The guy dressed like a magazine ad—leather jacket that looked as soft as butter, golf shirt with one of those little labels sewn into one side of the collar to let you know it cost a bundle, jeans that were clean and looked like they had been pressed, boots, not sneakers, straight white teeth that had probably cost him a couple of years in braces, and eyes that were blue like the sky in summer. Dooley bet the girls were as crazy about those eyes as they were about the fact that Rhodes’ parents were (according to Linelle) loaded. The thing Dooley wondered was, how come Rhodes didn’t go to a private school? Dooley was pretty sure Rhodes was checking him out, too—taking in the beat-up denim jacket that Dooley had scored at a secondhand store a few years back, way too big for him then, perfect now, also jeans, but a little frayed at the
bottoms and one of the back pockets showing the wear from his wallet, black T-shirt, one of maybe a dozen he owned, none of them new.
“How’s it going?” Rhodes said, smiling at him, but looking shy at the same time. “Do you mind if I sit down for a minute?”
Dooley shrugged and forked some fried rice into his mouth.
“We haven’t really met,” Rhodes said. “I’m Winston.” He thrust a hand across the table at Dooley, which told Dooley, as if he didn’t already know, how different Rhodes was from him. It had never occurred to Dooley to shake anyone’s hand—well, except for a couple of times when his uncle was introducing him to people, and then it still hadn’t occurred to him. His uncle had nudged him and given him a look: Shake the man’s hand, Ryan. But Dooley’s uncle wasn’t here and Dooley didn’t know much about Rhodes and was inclined not to like him purely on the basis that he seemed to know Beth much better than Dooley did. Dooley speared a piece of chicken with his fork. Before he popped it into his mouth, he said. “I’m Dooley.”
“So I heard,” Rhodes said. He smiled at Dooley as he withdrew his hand. If he was offended, he didn’t show it.
Rhodes dipped into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out what looked like a business card, and set it on the table near Dooley’s plate of food. Dooley glanced at it without picking it up.
“I’m having some people over on Friday,” Rhodes said. He peered at Dooley, and Dooley wondered how much he could see without his glasses. “It’s a thing for Mark.”
Dooley Takes the Fall Page 7