We walked around the edge of the pond and paused to sample wild blueberries. At the far end of the lake there was a long concrete dam, mossy and green with water flowing over the top.
“When are you going to teach me to swim?”
“When we get to the other side.” I thought it odd that he didn’t take off his shoes before he started across the spillway. From where I stood, it looked like he was walking on water.
He was halfway across when he turned and looked back at me standing on the bank. There was a six-foot drop on the other side of the dam. The water was dark, the concrete slimed slick with algae.
“Are you scared?” His voice echoed across the emptiness.
“A little bit.” I was following him out onto the spillway now. It was less than a yard wide. The pond’s overflow rippled over the tops of my sneakers, then cascaded down into a deep pool. From there, a fast-moving river disappeared into a scrub forest I did not know was called the Pine Barrens.
Suddenly struck by the emptiness of the place and the sky overhead, I stopped and called out, “I think I want to go home now.”
“It’ll all be over soon.” I heard him tell me that twice on account of the echo. “Once you make friends with what you’re scared of, it’s not scary. Letting go’s half the secret . . . of swimming.” The lesson had begun.
“What’s the other part?” I was hurrying to catch up. I kept my eyes on his back to keep myself from looking down. I was halfway across the dam and feeling brave.
“Of what?”
“Your secret.” The crow cawed and swooped low and close over my head. There was a tiny speckled egg in its beak. I waved my hands thinking it was going to fly right into me. The crow lost its grip on the egg. As I watched it fall, I made the mistake of looking down.
My sneakers skidded on the slime. There was nothing to grab hold of. Gravity did the rest. As I toppled back off the dam, I caught a glimpse of my swimming instructor staring at me, eyes wide and blank like he was watching a commercial on TV.
I hit the water with a quiet, relaxed splash. Gasping for air, yanking my head from side to side, I looked up at the spillway— my instructor was nowhere to be seen. My head was underwater now. My eyes were open. The water was freckled with sediment. The pool was deep. I was sinking, and the bottom was a terrible darkness that wanted me. Even though I was underwater, all my mind could tell me to do was, “Run away!”
Sinking deeper and deeper, feeling the chill of the water, panic setting in as my bloodstream ran low on oxygen, no one to listen to but myself, I began to run, run as if I were on dry land. Arms pumping, legs stretching out with nothing to push off but fear, I gagged on pond scum and brown water as I broke back to the surface. My instructor was kneeling on the spillway, smiling down at me. When I screamed, “Help,” all he said was, “You’re swimming.”
Arms flailing, legs pedaling, still running—I was swimming. Sort of.
I closed my eyes and swam/ran faster. I made a few feet of headway. But when I got near the dam and tried to grab hold of the concrete lip, the overflow pounded down on me. The current was pulling me back. I was tired, I couldn’t hold on. At the last minute his hand reached down and grabbed hold and pulled me up next to him.
He took off the lab coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. The sun was hot on my face. I forgot I was ever scared, which seemed the same thing as being brave to me. Without any warning I shrugged his white coat off my shoulders and slipped off the edge of the dam into the pond, and gleefully swam/ran/doggie paddled in a small circle.
“You really taught me how to swim,” I shouted with pride and disbelief.
“I did . . . didn’t I?” Cleaning his glasses on his necktie, he looked as full of wonderment as I felt.
It was just after six when we got back to Greenwood. The sunset torched the horizon a happy shade of pink, as warm and soft as a stuffed animal. My father’s friend let me off two blocks from our house. He said he had “things to do.” He shook my hand quickly, then told me, “Thank you for today, Zach.”
It seemed odd, him thanking me. I was the one who learned how to swim. As he put the car in gear, I called out, “When are we going to go swimming again?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be around.” As he drove off, he shouted out the window, “Tell your father I’ll be in touch.”
I cut through two yards and jumped a hedge to get home as fast as I could. It was getting dark. Just as the chimney of our house came into view, I saw our neighbors combing their bushes with the beams of their flashlights and calling out my name. I ran in the backdoor, eager to tell my father the good news.
I found my family huddled around the dining room table. My mother was crying. Fiona wailed like Homer, “I’m sorry.” Lucy was praying, Willy was eating a Mars bar. My father was on the phone. I didn’t know a police car was parked outside. They didn’t hear me enter.
“Dad, Mom, you’re never going to believe it.” It was the best moment of my life.
“Thank God,” my mother shot out of her chair and grabbed hold of me so hard it hurt.
“The boy’s here. I’ll let you know what I find out.” My father hung up the phone.
My mother was kissing me and my father was madder than I’d ever seen him. “Where the hell have you been?”
“We went swimming.” I thought he’d be as excited as I was.
“You don’t know how to swim. This is serious, I want to know the truth, goddamn it!”
“It is the truth. I can swim.”
“You’re scaring him, Will.” I was scared, my father was terrified.
“Why are you so mad at me?”
“I’ll stop being mad if you tell me exactly what happened.”
“Your friend taught me how to swim in a gigantic pond.”
“What was his name?”
“Casper.”
“What?” my mother shouted in my face and pulled back in horror.
“His name was Casper. You know, like the friendly ghost.” I was more than disappointed that my father didn’t congratulate me on my victory over fear.
“What did this Casper look like?”
“Like a doctor. He had a white coat and a stethoscope.”
“What did he say to you exactly?”
“He said, ‘Thank you.’ ”
My father crouched down next to me, his face inches from mine. His voice was calm but his hands trembled. “For what?”
“For letting him teach me how to swim.”
My mother shot my father a look. “What’s that mean?”
My father held up his hand for silence. “Did Casper say anything else?”
“He said to tell you he’ll be in touch.”
Dinner was cold cuts and potato salad. As I ate, my father asked me questions. His manner was casual and friendly. He wore the same smiley face he put on for my birthdays. He worked hard to make it clear to me he wasn’t mad. I knew he was something because when my mother interrupted his warm, fuzzy de-briefing to ask me if I wanted more chocolate milk, he slammed his hand on the table and shouted, “Nora, for God’s sake, will you shut up and let me talk to the boy?”
He started off asking questions about the swimming lesson. Did Casper help me take off my clothes? Did he try to touch my penis? Did he ask me to touch his penis? Between mouthfuls of potato salad I explained how I had swum in my shorts and T-shirt because I had fallen in.
Satisfied I wasn’t sexually molested, he focused in on how I’d come to fall off the spillway. When I told him about the crow almost flying into my head and slipping, he acted like he didn’t believe me. He kept asking me, “Are you sure Casper didn’t push you?” He made me repeat the part about Casper’s pulling me up out of the water three times.
Finally I protested, “You act like you think I’m making it up.”
“I’m just trying to make sense of it all.”
I remember my father made notes on a yellow legal pad as we talked, while I spooned my way through two scoops of butter pecan ice
cream. He asked me questions about the car ride. From my description of the hot dog stand’s green awning and cheese fries, he knew that Casper had taken Route 1 south. He drew our route on a map in a black wax pencil. When I told him about the dust and the Christmas trees, he circled the Pine Barrens.
A little after eight he told my mother to put us to bed and got up to go outside to talk to the state police. When Fiona complained that she wasn’t sleepy, my father cocked his right hand back as if he were going to slap her. My mother called out, “Will, don’t make it worse.”
My father put his arm round Fiona’s shoulder, as if he’d forgiven her. “If you’re not sleepy, I suggest you lie down and think about what your afternoon of mutual masturbation almost cost this family.”
My mother tucked me in after she read me a story and kissed me good night. She fixed her gaze on me and told me with strange, dry-eyed determination, “I’m not going to permit anything bad to ever happen to you, Zach.”
Tired of explaining that nothing bad had happened to me I yawned and said, “I love you.”
She whispered, “I love you more,” and went back downstairs to my father and the police.
My night-light glowed in the darkness. Lucy tiptoed into my room first. Fiona followed, then Willy. That’s when my sisters and brother whispered their version of what had happened to our family. I heard about Dad’s being on the top of Casper’s death list, how he came to kill us on a stolen motorcycle but drove off and murdered Dr. Winton instead.
When I asked, “Who’s Dr. Winton?” Lucy said, “She was Mom and Dad’s best friend.”
Fiona insisted Jens was their best friend and Dr. Winton was somebody “Daddy worked with who Mom was jealous of.” They all agreed that the Wintons were rich and that Casper shot her in the throat. There was disagreement over how many bullets were fired, but they all concurred that Mr. Winton was left paralyzed, and Willy said Dad said he had to wear diapers. They talked about people I’d never met or even heard of, a street I never played on, a home, a life I knew only from snapshots. It was hard for me to fill in the blanks, especially when it came to Jack.
Willy said, “Casper killed Jack, too.”
Fiona, a stickler for accuracy, corrected him. “We don’t know that.”
“Why not?”
“No proof except for what Lucy thinks she saw.”
“I don’t think, I know. I saw a man’s shadow in the pricker bushes.”
“That doesn’t mean that it was Casper’s shadow, or that he killed Jack.” Fiona was always accusing Lucy of jumping to conclusions. They knew Jack, I didn’t. It made me sad that they could talk about him without crying, which is what I started to do.
Willy told me, “Don’t be a baby.”
Fiona reminded me, “You said you wanted to know everything.” It was what I couldn’t know that had me crying.
Lucy was crying now, too. “I don’t want to think Casper killed Jack. Maybe Jack just bumped his head on his own and . . .”
“He’s a killer. Killers kill people.” Willy had no doubts.
“I told Mom and Dad he was creepy. Riding up to the house on a girl’s bicycle. He had pimples and he didn’t wash his hair.”
“Yeah, but he got handsome.”
“But why did he shoot the lady doctor?”
“Moron, have you been listening? He’s crazy.” Willy began to flick my night-light on and off to scare me.
“He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. That’s why they didn’t send him to the electric chair.” Fiona was using words I didn’t understand.
“Killers deserve to be killed.” Willy was still flicking my nightlight.
“Daddy promised us he’d never get out of the mental hospital. He said there’d be bars and guards and it’d be impossible for him to get out.” At least Lucy was upset.
“How did he escape?” I asked.
“Probably killed a guard or strangled a nurse.” Willy was convinced.
“It’s not Dad’s fault he escaped.” Fiona felt so guilty about Joel she stuck up for my father, even though she would stay angry about the mutual masturbation crack for the rest of her life.
“You’re lucky Casper didn’t drown you. That was probably his plan.” I didn’t believe that.
“Shut up, Willy, you’re scaring him.” I was crying harder now.
Fiona put on her grown-up voice. “Mom and Dad have told you a thousand times not to talk to strangers.” I felt like a stranger as I stared out my window at the darkness.
“What were you thinking, getting into that car with him?”
“I thought he was a friend of Dad’s.”
“Dad hates him.”
“I don’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He taught me how to swim.”
Fiona said that when I was older I’d understand. Lucy said if I got scared, I could come into her room. Willy told me, “You’re as crazy as Casper.”
It was hard to sleep after that. Every few hours, the phone would ring. When I got up to pee, I heard my parents talking downstairs. I heard my father say, half pleading, half shouting, “Nora, I have done everything I can.”
My mother answered softly, “No, you haven’t.”
When I got back in bed I heard the metal chains of the swings in the backyard creak in the wind. When I looked out the window, I saw a man sitting on the swing seat, looking up at me in the dark. Sure it was Casper, I opened my window to warn him. “Run away!” was what I was going to shout. But before I could, the shadow lit a cigarette. The glow of the lighter revealed a policeman with a pump shotgun cradled in his lap.
Willy was wrong, at least about Casper’s escape from the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. No one was strangled, no one was shot. At 6:30 A.M. the Pep Boys woke Casper and the twenty-three other men in Ward B. They slept on thin mattresses in wrought-iron beds with eyehooks at their heads and feet for those occasions when restraints were prescribed. Three rows of eight in a green room the size of a basketball court. As always, the room smelled of urine and spunk. As always, Manny, the most gregarious of the Pep Boys, woke them with his usual greeting, “Rise and shine, girls.”
Casper was in his bed. The bars were still on the windows, and everything was as it had been on the ward since Casper had first woken up there over nine years earlier. After breakfast— oatmeal, powdered skim milk, and a slice of stale toast spread thin with margarine—Casper and his ward mates received their meds. In Casper’s case, 40 mg of reserpine.
Casper had a spotless record of good behavior, a model patient willing to discuss his problems and shortcomings in group therapy. “I use big words and try to impress people with how much I know and that I went to Yale because deep down inside, I know I’m weak and frightened. I want to change, I have to change; I know I’m kidding myself when I say I’m trying my best.” But it was the remarkable progress he showed in his weekly fifty-five-minute therapy sessions with Dr. Shanley that turned the key for Casper.
Week by week, year by year, Casper dazzled and titillated Shanley with a slow, psychic striptease, revealing in installments a life history of sexual shame, repressed homosexuality, Oedipal rage (Shanley was particularly pleased when he got Casper to remember his mother slapping him when he got an erection during one of the cold cream enemas she gave him to cure his chronic constipation), adolescent rage, cruelty to animals that took the form of setting cats on fire. None of which ever happened.
Casper would never have been able to concoct such a seductive case history for himself if he had not had the help of a red-tailed hawk. Casper found its wing feather on the ground just a few feet from where he had helped himself to the locoweed. It was eight inches long and marbled in shades of butterscotch and cream.
A memory from another life, an art history lecture he had attended back in Yale, a professor with a fruity voice describing the wonders of Nero’s vomitorium, how the Romans feasted, gorged, and then inserted a feather down their throats, tickled their
glottis, and then vomited so they could gorge again, gave Casper the idea of taking that feather the hawk had dropped from heaven into the toilets just after meds were handed out and dutifully swallowed in front of the nurse. Regurgitating his breakfast and the 40 mg of reserpine before it had a chance to dull the razor’s edge of his thoughts allowed Casper’s feelings for Dr. Friedrich to evolve.
Armed with a feather, no longer having to fight the daily battle against the poison they pumped into him, the thought of revenge distilled into a far more intoxicating and noble idea. That feather gave Casper’s rage wings, enabled it to soar to a lofty place and perch on the righteous thought that by killing Friedrich, he would be preventing Friedrich from contaminating anyone else’s mind with hope.
Now that Casper could think clearly, his mission was sanctified. If he could save just one soul from his own fate, all that he had suffered would have meaning.
Casper was careful to let Shanley feel he was peeling Casper’s onion, rather than the other way around. He was never too forthcoming. He’d clam up for months at a time before treating Shanley to a breakthrough. Casper made himself into a perfect case study, a textbook case worthy of publication.
Seventeen months prior to his escape Casper had in fact caught sight of a letter from a publisher on Shanley’s desk. Casper read it upside down and began to turn the key. He didn’t say anything about the letter. He just planted the idea. “You know, sometimes, after we finish, I remember things I should have told you.”
“What sort of things?”
“Embarrassing stuff, mostly.”
“That’s the stuff we need to talk about in order for me to help you.”
“I know. It might be easier for me to tell you everything, go into detail, if I wrote it down instead of saying it out loud.”
And so it was that Casper earned the privilege of spending two hours each morning in the hospital library with a yellow legal pad just like the ones my father had used and a thick, child’s blunted pencil. Shanley was aware Casper was still a danger to himself and others. He was vigilant in keeping implements of menace far removed from Casper Gedsic’s grasp. Sharp objects were stowed out of reach. Metal spoons that could be ground down into shivs on concrete were counted after each meal. Strings, shoelaces, old rags, torn bedsheets, anything that could be braided into a garrote or a hangman’s noose was kept under lock and key. His psychiatrist wasn’t stupid. It was simply that Dr. Shanley and everyone else at the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane had an IQ forty points lower than Casper’s.
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