by J. Warren
“What did—umm—what did he—uh—?” I tried to finish a thought, just to move beyond the words we had already said, but nothing came of it. Quiet settled between us, and he took the ice pack off. Underneath, the skin was already turning purple.
He looked up at me. “He’ll kill me if he ever finds out I was with you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Don’t you get it? I thought for sure you were smart enough to see…”
“See what?” I asked.
“How many nosebleeds you get in an average week?” he asked, looking at me as if this explained something.
“Four, sometimes more; why?” I asked.
“Lucky, then. I get about six or seven if I’m lucky. What about headaches?” he asked. Again, he looked at me as if all this was perfectly clear.
“Two or so,” I said.
He nodded, “Pretty lucky, then.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mikey, you left, so you never really got to know any of the other people here. I did, though. People talk about all kinds of stuff when they’re lying next to someone they just got to live out a fantasy with,” he said, and shuddered. “Everyone who’s about our age and a little younger seems to have the same problems, Mikey: Nosebleeds, headaches, stuttering under stress. I talked to Dr. Gantner one time, and—,” he started.
“Did you have sex with him?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“No,” he said, “unlike most men I’ve ever met, Bud Gantner really is straight. Thing is, though, he told me once that he was amazed at how many babies were born within the last thirty years or so with these same conditions. He said something else that was very interesting, too.”
“What?” I asked.
“That almost every baby born here in Placerville in the last thirty years or so has been a boy. Not like every single one, but way over the fifty-fifty mark, he said.” I thought back and he was right. There always had been far more boys than girls in school. “For a time, I didn’t think anything of it, until I noticed one thing; there is a real resemblance between all the boys born in this town.”
I stood up and walked to the refrigerator. I got a few more cubes of ice from the tray, and walked back. I took the bag from him, and put them in. When I handed the bag back, he said “I know, it sounds a lot like that show with the guy detective who believes in flying saucers and stuff, and the woman who’s always trying to find a rational explanation or whatever, but it’s true.”
“What is it you’re trying to say?” I asked.
He set the bag of ice down once more, “I think that the Sheriff has been forcing himself on just about anyone he wants in this town for at least twenty years.” I sat down, again. “I don’t have any way to prove it or anything; I’m not a doctor or a scientist; but look at the facts. Almost every kid born in the last thirty years has been a boy, and they all have headaches and nosebleeds and most stutter when things get rough--.”
“The sheriff doesn’t stutter,” I interrupted.
“He doesn’t, no, but one time—,” he started, but then stopped. I waited. “This one time,” he continued, “he wasn’t—rough—or anything. He didn’t hit me or whatever. After, he just—he held me and talked. It wasn’t like he was talking to me, he was just talking. I think—I think his little brother had just died. He said something about how his little brother used to stutter so bad that his father couldn’t understand the kid. He said his father used to think that a demon had gotten into the boy, so he beat the kid every night while the mother stood over him and quoted bible passages. He said that, back where he came from, they called it a ‘cure’. They beat the kid so much, he said, that he tried not to talk to anyone for fear of stuttering. The only person he’d talk to was the sheriff.” He put the ice pack back against his cheek, with a sharp inhale over his teeth.
“I still don’t know that I understand,” I said.
“That little boy that went missing, the McPherson kid—,” he said.
“Randy,” I said.
“Yeah, him; you were close to him, right?” he asked. I nodded. “What color hair did he have?” he asked, and I flinched. Even though he’d been dead so long, hearing the past tense in that sentence shocked me.
“Black,” I said.
He nodded, “What color hair does Pete McPherson have?”
“Brown,” I said.
He nodded, again, “Gwen McPherson is a brunette, too,” he said, “you had high school biology, Mikey; do the math. There is almost no chance that the child of two people with brown hair could turn out with jet black hair,” he paused, then said “he had nosebleeds, too, huh?” I nodded. Something clicked inside me, and my whole body tensed.
“That would mean that—that—that you think I—that my mom—,” I stammered.
His eyes didn’t move from my face. He didn’t say anything.
“More like at least half the town, Mikey,” he said after a while.
I found I was sitting down, though I didn’t remember doing it. My body was going crazy, and my head felt like something heavy was sitting on it. I thought my eyes were going to pop out from all the pressure behind them. He stood up, and stared at me for a second, then walked to the sink. He dropped the ice pack in; the loud thunk made me jump. He stood there at the sink, watching me. I still felt like I had to come up with some reason that he was wrong, and that I could do that if only I could get my brain to relax some, but it wouldn’t.
“You don’t believe me,” he said, “I can tell. Thing is, you don’t have to believe me. There’s someone else who can tell you.”
“Who?” I asked after a moment.
“Get your clothes on, I’ll show you,” he said. That was when I looked down long enough to realize that I was completely naked. It seemed logical; he’d woken me, stashed me in the closet, all with no time for dressing. Since coming out, I hadn’t even noticed that I didn’t have any clothes on.
I stood and walked back to the bedroom. While I dressed, he came in. When he dressed, he didn’t put on underwear. He slid into his shirt differently than I did. His motions seemed somehow graceful and awkward all at the same time. It was like someone who danced alone all the time suddenly having to dance for an audience. Some writer would probably describe it much better, but his dressing seemed like something incredibly private that I shouldn’t be seeing. He put on his shoes without socks, and my mind, still reeling from everything we had spoken of, fixated on that.
“Aren’t you afraid of getting calluses?” I asked.
“No,” he said, standing, “I’m almost never in my clothes long enough to worry about it.” With that, he walked into the other room, and I was alone, sitting in the dark on the bed where everything had changed.
TWENTY-SIX
“Where are we going?” I asked. He stood up as I walked into the living room. I followed him to the door.
“The Hospital,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. He fished in his pocket and came out with his keys. He handed them to me.
“Why—?” I started to ask.
“Because I like it when someone else drives,” he said, and opened the door. I opened the driver’s side door, and it squeaked loudly. I sat down and began to adjust the seat. I hadn’t noticed how much shorter than me he was. As I was adjusting the mirror, he opened the glove compartment and took out a tiny white plastic bottle. As I started the car, he opened the cap and sniffed, then closed the top. “Want some?” he asked, offering the bottle my way.
“What is it?” I asked.
He grinned in a way that made my stomach tense.
I took the bottle. The label said Video Head Cleaner. “This is the stuff you use to clean the readers on your VCR,” I said.
He leaned back against the seat, his face relaxed and clear. “No, it’s not; just like it says on the label, it’s to clean your head,” he said, and giggled, “Drive.” He took the bottle back and kept it in his palm. I wanted to say something, but realized anything I could say would sound l
ike some lecture. It was that moment above all others in my life, sitting there in the car with the ruin of a boy who had once terrorized me, that I realized I knew nothing about how life works. I started the car, and backed out onto the tiny dirt road.
“Did you want him?” Kevin asked as I made the turn onto Hitt road from the trailer park.
I looked over at him; his head was turned toward the window, and he was staring blankly at the trees and houses as the floated by. The window fogged every time he exhaled.
“Who?” I asked.
“The little boy,” he paused, “Randy.”
“What?” I asked.
His head rolled lazily over toward me as I pulled to a stop light. “The McPherson kid; did you want to touch him?”
“No!”
He smiled at something, and his head rolled lazy back over toward the window. He took the bottle, opened the cap, and sniffed again. He rubbed the back of his head against the headrest, and his eyes closed. The light changed, and I drove. I turned on the stereo, and that same voice came on.
“What is it with this guy?” I asked.
“Who?” Kevin asked from somewhere far away.
“Johnny Cash or whoever; what is it with this guy?”
Kevin inhaled loudly in that way someone does when they think a question you’ve asked is stupid, and said “He’s lonely, Mikey.” On the stereo, the man was singing about how hard it was to walk a straight line.
“So why do you want to listen to him?” I asked, turning off Hitt road onto Cadence. The hospital wasn’t far away.
“It’s nice to know that someone is as lonely as me,” he said. “After the hospital,” he said, inhaling loudly again, “you’ll understand.”
“Who’s at the hospital?” I asked.
“The only one that ever wanted it,” he said, drifting back to someplace far away.
“Ever wanted what?” I asked.
“This will all be easier to explain once you’ve been there,” he said, and raised his hand to hold off whatever I was about to say next, “I promise, I will explain it all when we get there.”
After a moment, I said, “If something so awful is going on around here, then why do you stay?”
He laughed, and leaned his head back against the headrest. He turned to look out the window, and I couldn’t tell if he was staring at the clouds, or his own reflection. “Mikey, you were never from here. I know that. When you get to know people, you figure out some things. I can’t explain it any better than that. The second I saw you walk into Sully’s with Doc Gantner, I could tell you weren’t from here.”
My stomach tensed. “You knew who I was?”
“I know who everyone in that bar is. Most of the guys I go with, though, are the people who just came in off the train. The locals, well,” he said, inhaling and exhaling loudly, “they tend to avoid me unless I’m there at last call.”
“There at last call?”
“Turn right up here,” he said, without even looking forward, “it’s a shortcut.”
“What do you mean by ‘there at last call’?” I asked. Something in me knew, but I had to hear the words.
“If I haven’t gotten anyone by then, one of the boys will get brave enough to come over, buy me the last beer of the night, and we’ll go home together,” he said.
I flinched. I had almost managed to forget, or maybe though—maybe I had thought he’d give it up. His voice didn’t show any signs of regret or shame. The same way I would describe changing someone’s oil or rotating a tire, he was talking about going “home together”. I didn’t feel like talking, anymore.
“Everyone keeps talking like they aren’t sure who those bones belong to, but I know,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Stop being naive, Mikey; it doesn’t suit you,” he said, “Turn left here.”
I turned along the side street. It was what we’d always called a “Back alley” as a kid. We didn’t have any alleys in a town this small, but we’d seen them on television so often, we tried to make our town more normal. We added things like alley and downtown to our vocabulary, even back then. There were no such things in Placerville; just streets and dirt roads. This was a small street which, from the looks of it, had only recently been paved. Several blue dumpsters lined up along the small wall running along the sides.
“Up ahead, turn into the little opening in the wall,” he said, sitting up and leaning forward.
“Where is this?” I asked.
“This is the garbage truck service entrance,” he said, “the doctors figured it wouldn’t look so good for guys to come hauling garbage out the front door, so they had this built about six or seven years ago.”
“How did you know it was here?” I asked. He didn’t answer or even look over at me. He just stayed leaned forward, staring ahead, and I got the strange image of a man on the bow of a boat in a thick fog for a moment; he seemed to be steering us through rough water. I turned into the small service entrance that opened up behind the hospital. Several more blue dumpsters lined up back here, along with two green ones marked with a strange symbol. I pulled the car up next to that one and asked “here?” He didn’t say anything, but opened his door. I put the car in park and shut it off. He closed his door just as I opened mine. When I closed mine, it sounded like a gunshot had gone off. He turned sharply toward me, sucking air in over his teeth. I shrugged.
As he walked, I noticed he didn’t stumble or sway. I found myself watching how his body moved, and I shook my head. I remembered thinking about him when I’d first seen him in his boxing trunks; watching how his body twisted and flowed. Back then, I thought about it with envy—I’d always been klutzy. I recognized it in hindsight, though; I’d been admiring him.
He opened a white door. I followed him in, and he closed it slowly, his whole body tense. The corridor was well-lit, but no other doors opened onto it. It led straight to a turn.
I followed him in everything; the way he stepped, the way he breathed. This was all very familiar to him. I was burning to ask how and why, but I had a feeling I knew what the answer was. In a way, that made me want to ask more, but I knew that piercing ache in my stomach would start, and shortly after, the pictures.
The corridor kept getting wider, and then opened into an elevator lobby. Only one set of doors, here, but they seemed very wide. He pressed the button.
“Won’t that set off an alarm or something?” I whispered.
He turned toward me, and rolled his eyes, “If there was anyone paying attention, yes,” he said. The elevator didn’t ding; the noise simply stopped, and the doors opened. The car was huge, and there was none of the wooden paneling or paint designed to put friendlier faces on other elevators. This was simply a metal container located behind the scenes. The doors closed, and Kevin pressed ‘9’. The car started upward with a jolt, and I had to steady myself by grabbing onto the railing.
“Nine?” I asked.
“The loony bin,” he said, and grinned. I could see his eyes were still large, and bloodshot. Something in him was still flying. I thought for a second about hitting the ‘stop’ button and trying to get him back into the car. At that moment, though, I noticed he was staring at me out of the corner of his eye. The gesture was so unsure, so gauging, that I was certain he was searching for approval. For some reason, this meant a lot to him. I started to think, what could be so important that he—, but then I stopped.
I knew. With an immediate sureness, I knew where he was taking me. What was more, I knew he’d been here, before. He already had the answers to some of the questions I had wanted to ask when I’d come here earlier.
The number climbed from seven to eight, then nine. The car came to a stop, and the door opened.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“How are we going to get in?” I whispered, my eyes already searching through the barely open doors. He laughed in his throat, and stepped forward boldly. The look in his eye was that same one I’d seen once before.
Back durin
g the Y days, Mr. Roger had gotten the grand idea to hold a boxing tournament. “We teach ‘em to box,” he’d said, “but we don’t let ‘em, if ya’ understand me.” I wasn’t supposed to hear, but then it is often the case with children that things not meant to be heard are hardest to keep quiet. Mr. Roger had been speaking with Mr. Terrance, the man Mr. Roger called “the Bureaucrat.” I didn’t know what that word meant, at the time, but I knew it was filled with contempt.
I was sweeping the outer room, where the secretary sat and answered phones all day. The door to Mr. Terrance’s office was cracked, and I had seen Mr. Roger go in there as I had started. “Make sure to get behind thuh file cabinets,” he’d said, and walked past. I had kept my eyes on the floor the whole time. He’d rapped twice on the door and then gone in after Mr. Terrance’s muffled “Come.” Mr. Roger hadn’t shut the door all the way.
“I understand that, Roger,” Mr. Terrance was saying, “but isn’t it a little dangerous?”
“Nuh, not the way I see it. We train them to do it right, don’t we? To be safe and sportsmanly?”
“Yes, I mean, of course we do, but—,” Mr. Terrance was saying.
“Then why not let ‘em have a go at something?” he’d asked. As was the case with Mr. Roger when he wanted something, Mr. Terrance gave in.
Of course, Kevin O’Mally was the top ranked kid going in. Like a lot of things, I couldn’t tell you why I went to watch. Maybe I went because it was important to Mr. Roger. I didn’t like the idea of boxing, and the noise made me feel uneasy the entire time. Something about the way the men and older boys were watching and yelling made me feel as if any minute, everyone was going to start tearing into each other. I could see it on the faces of most of the boys, too. All except one: Kevin entered that ring and looked around him. He was like a tiny statue for a moment; defiant and powerful. I remember wishing I could feel like he looked just then.