Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die

by Charles Runyon

  Thinking. His brain was like a hard-packed swirl of sand. He looked out on the lawn and watched the night shadows take on substance and form.

  The eyes are everywhere. The nightmares of the patients leak out through the bars and hump across the lawn. In the women’s section I see Wanda bending over a water fountain, her head falls in, the severed stump spurts high, blends with the light. Not my vision. Whose? Chauncey’s maybe. I see him two windows down, his skinny legs bent like a kangaree’s inside his baggy shorts. Chauncey DePugh is a gentleman born, but he has a weakness for what he calls “Pretty Ladeez.” In his weakness he sneaks up behind them and pinches their tits, then runs.

  A dog slinks under the hedge—no, it’s a prince bewitched, locked in a dog’s body, waiting for the love-kiss which will give back his beauty. Whose is that? Pat’s probably. Shankara speaks to her at night. You are frightened of snakes which do not exist, he says. Once you see they are merely frayed ropes, you will realize that your fear is baseless. Yes! Says Pat. Yes! Yes! She calls aloud in her sleep: They are ropes, only ropes! But they keep biting her.

  The loud ringing in my ears is Edgar’s. He’s a civil engineer, got papers to prove it. The dent in the back of his skull looks like a catcher’s mitt. It’s been there since his car jumped the guard rail on the Clark-Street overpass. Twelve years now, and his head is still full of white light.

  Squeak-squeak. Gentleman Jack has worked his hands free of the straps. They told him when he was a child that excessive masturbation would drive him crazy. Now he is where he always expected to be, so he has nothing more to lose.

  Alvin moans. He used to get slapped for crapping in his rompers: now he sleeps with his anal sphincture clenched. Every few days he is sedated, and a special spoon used to dig the impacted feces out of his colon.

  Ashcroft tosses and turns, while hunger pains growl in his stomach. He’s scheduled for E.C.T. at dawn tomorrow, and his bowels must be kept empty because when the juice hits your skull everything goes …

  My fellow patients: I feel like winter has come outside, because here there is no light, no joy. Where are my friends from the dawn of the New Age? Stillborn. A message for humanity. Get this, you cocksuckers. We came bearing flowers, you gave us murder and brutality. Now you can just wallow in your own shit …

  Behind him, Loren Grooms got up from his cot and marched toward the bathroom. Hup-two-three-four. Grooms was a war hero. He didn’t look it though: narrow skull patched with gray hair, yellow bleached-out skin drawn tight across his forehead and around his eyes, the mark of a schizo. Grooms won a silver star and a bronze star, killed a helluva lot of Nazis and would’ve knocked off a few Japs too if he hadn’t started getting headaches. Grooms often saw Japs and Germans out on the lawn at night. He got furious when Danny didn’t follow hospital rules. You folla orders, Mac, and nothin’s gonna happen to you.

  Grooms stood at attention outside the latrine. Danny called: “Col’m right, HARCH!” Grooms entered, dropped his shorts, and lowered himself to the commode stool, keeping his spine straight at a forty-five degree angle.

  Is Grooms psychotic? He won’t obey a command to walk into a brick wall, I’ve tried. Well then, am I?

  Monkeys in a cage. Who built the cage?

  He pushed himself away from the window and walked into the dayroom. Darby, sitting at the table with his diagram spread out before him, turned the sheet over and spread his palms flat on the paper. Darby was building a rocket ship. He had copies of his plans secreted around the hospital. He had to keep moving them because of the CIA. But the day would come, and Darby knew it well. He could close his eyes and see the ships shooting between Mars and Venus, and in the luxury saloon the sleek women would sip their drinks and say, “We wouldn’t be here without the Darby Drive.” And then the blonde would smile and unzip her tunic …

  “What happens if they find those plans of yours, Darby?”

  “They’ll put me in Alcatraz for a hundred and ninety-nine years.”

  “Jesus, you’d be an old man when you got out.”

  Steven Poole looked up from his cards and laughed. He was an old man with a two-week stubble of white whiskers and a pair of glittering blue eyes. He sat alone at a table in the corner, cheating himself at solitaire. Steven had told Dan not to worry about good and evil, or even about death. “I’ve been through it seven times.” And Dan asked: “What did God look like?” The old man had rubbed his whiskered chin, looked up at the ceiling. “One hundred and forty-four thousand golden balls!”

  A good Zen answer, thought Danny, sitting down across from him. “How come you came back to earth, Steven, if you went to heaven?”

  “Well …” the old man shrugged and picked up a card. “You get bored.”

  Indeed you do. Dan watched Chauncey shuffle in and squat in front of the tv. Might as well go talk to Elizabeth, he decided. He got up and walked toward the staff room …

  “I’m supposed to remember those girls, right? Well, I guess the first one was Virginia, wife of an artist I’d known in Mexico. She came with him and didn’t want to leave—he was going into some turned-off job of teaching, and she couldn’t stand it. She stayed about three weeks, then split. Her last name was Harris, Hollis, something like that. We never used last names. He taught someplace like West Platte, Nebraska. After her there was, lessee … I’m not sure of the sequence. I manage to identify these girls with some seasonal change, like I remember Ginny smelling the dogwood blossoms, so that means she came in the spring. Then in the summer there was Betty. She was a go-go dancer, not much brain but good bod. She had a habit she hadn’t told me about, she couldn’t go to sleep without a handful of downers, and she liked her lush too well. She got to walking out to the highway and hitching into town, lushing it up at the honky-tonks and then having some drunk-ass redneck haul her home. She went out one night and didn’t come back, and that was fine with me. You have to understand that I didn’t have any emotional ties with these girls. I just invited them to share the peace of the forest In some cases they did, in other cases they just pretended. After Betty I was cooled off on women for a good four months. Then I ran into Magda at a rock festival. That would be about eight-nine months back. She was a nurse. I remember she was there as a volunteer, and there were some freak outs, a couple of OD cases—I always get curious about people who choose to hang around fucked-up people. Like I’m curious about you, Elizabeth. So I invited her out into the woods to rest up, and she dropped acid for the first time. After that she used to drop by every couple weeks—she was a traveling nurse working about a three-state territory for this syndicate of retirement homes—and then finally she just quit coming. I figure she got out of the racket and settled down somewhere, she was always talking about how she’d like to have a go at marriage. She gave up on me, which was just as well. So now, lessee … I think the last one was a sorrel-haired girl, Patricia—she broke horses in Texas. Kind of a gamy huntress type, Diana of the Forest. She liked to be on top, if you know what I mean. One day she packed a lunch and walked off in the woods. She didn’t come back that night and I figured, well, I oughta do something. So I tried to follow her trail and got lost for a whole day. But she knew the woods as well as I did, so I’m sure she must’ve got out. I wasn’t surprised that she left without warning, she said she always did it that way …”

  The door opened. Danny turned and saw Chauncey standing there, jiggling excitedly on his bowed legs. “You oughta see the late news, Danny. Jesus, right here in the county—”

  “What is it?”

  “Somebody murdered a whole bunch of GIRLS!” Chauncey’s breath caught in a giggly hiccup. “They’re still diggin’ em out. It’s awful! C’mon. They might show it again …”

  Seven

  “I’ve called this special staff meeting,” said the administrator, tapping the top of his narrow bald head with the stem of his pipe, “to expedite the release, discharge or, uh … further commitment of Daniel Bollinger who was referred to us three weeks ago by the ci
rcuit court—is that correct, three weeks?” He looked down the long, polished oak table at Elizabeth, who nodded. “Three weeks ago to see if he was well enough to stand trial. Since then—” He turned the page of a folder and smoothed it down with his palm, “—there has been a development which has, let’s say, altered the situation outside these walls, but we should not consider this except where it has a direct bearing on the patient’s mental health. We are not here to determine guilt or innocence, but only to ascertain whether or not he is capable of conducting his own defense, and of understanding the nature and importance of the proceedings against him. These are the terms of the modified ‘McNaughton Rule’ with which I’m sure none of us fully agree, but let us keep our eyes fixed on our own …”

  Elizabeth kept her eyes fixed on the pad in front of her. Like the ecclesiastical courts of the middle ages: We are here to decide only whether or not he is possessed by Satan. Those decisions must have been made in equally quiet rooms by refined and cultured people—and did they ever associate themselves with the auto-da-fe, the shrieking of the idiot mob and the crack-pop-sizzle of burning flesh? Suddenly she saw it as it must have been: the selection of a sacrifice. Throw an occasional patsy to the mob so we can live in luxury on the labor of the peasants …

  She shook off her feeling of malaise and listened to the recreational director. Hall Grimes, an athlete who never quite made it outside the home town, now bald and fat, had only one criterion for judging a patient: Was he a good team player? His conclusion did not surprise her; Dan was emphatically NOT a team player.

  “But then neither was Galileo,” said Dr. Jeffrey Kossuth.

  “True,” said the administrator. “You wanted to make a point about the patient?”

  “No. Just about Galileo. I’ve never seen the patient.”

  Jeff looked at her and smiled, Elizabeth smiled back without conviction. Jeff was the only one who looked fully relaxed, his chair pushed far back from the table on the right of the administrator—appropriate for the chief psychiatrist, who was nominally second in command. She saw his knee propped up against the table, clothed in patch madras slacks in a yellow-and-brown plaid pattern. His face was burnt a deep reddish-brown, almost the shade of ginger. Eyes blue, hair a walnut hue trimmed full below his ears and above his collar. She thought to herself, he’s a beautiful man. Unfortunately he is well aware of it. Sometimes he needed others, herself for example, but usually his own appreciation of himself was enough—Jeffrey at the tiller of his sloop, dressed in his breton fisherman’s shirt and white duck trousers, with the silk scarf drawn flat across his throat, tied with an infinitesimal knot. Jeffrey in his Mercedes, wheeling through a mountain setting of tall pines, his pipe tilted at a jaunty angle. Jeffrey at her breakfast table that morning, his elbows spread wide apart on either side of his plate, his chin resting on his laced fingers looking at her with a quizzical amused smile as he asked: What the hell did you scream about last night?

  And she knew what he must be thinking now: Little Liza, bereft during my absence, calls out to her lover in the night. And Jeff, hearing, rises from his bachelor cot to run barefoot up the sidewalk, up the back stairs and into her bedroom, undresses quickly and slips between the silken sheets, gives her what every woman wants but is afraid to ask for. Well, face it, the same dream coming two nights in succession had disturbed her, and sex with Jeff was pleasant, and comfortingly familiar …

  Now Ted Ditscher, the administrator, was explaining, in his pedantic manner, the background of the case “… For the benefit of our chief psychiatrist, Dr. Kossuth, who has been on vacation …” She saw Rita sitting in the little black secretarial chair, scratching in her shorthand pad, and realized Ted was talking for the record.

  Jesus Christ, doesn’t anybody care about the patient?

  Only you, Elizabeth.

  Oh, really?

  Jeff’s voice broke into her thoughts:

  “Now here’s a contradiction. The State wants him to stand trial, and if he is found … let us say, sane, they are then put in the position of trying to prove that a sane man can murder six women and bury their bodies—”

  “Five women. One was a male infant, apparently full term.”

  Christina’s child, thought Liza. It looks very bad …

  “Are they going to try to prove that he killed the infant?”

  “I don’t think that’s included in the charge.” Ted cleared his throat. “But as I pointed out, we are not to concern ourselves with the nature of the charges—”

  “Dammit, I resent being pinned to the wall like this.”

  Ted gave a tired, whimsical smile. “I’m sympathetic, Jeff. I’ve fought the battle for many years. Still, I would like to correct one thing. Our findings that he can stand trial do not mean that he is well or … sane, but only that he can understand the proceedings of the court. Later, if he should plead not guilty by reason of insanity, then the prosecutor would have to prove that he knew the difference between right and wrong.”

  “I’m not even sure of that,” said Elizabeth. “What is the difference?”

  The administrator sighed. “In legal terms, murder is wrong. Did the patient know that, was he able to make a free choice, to kill or not to kill? If we believe he heard voices telling him it was right to kill, or if he was under the illusion that he was slicing open a watermelon when he was actually stabbing somebody in the stomach, then we might have reason to support a not-guilty verdict. But that comes later. Right now we only concern ourselves with his condition at this moment, in the here and now.”

  But instead of the here-and-now, there was more dredging in the past. Coffee was served in styrofoam cups, cigarettes and pipes were lit, a numbus of blue smoke floated above the table. The social worker gave the background of his home and family in a dull, dry monotone:

  “Father originally from Pennsylvania, stationed nearby during the Korean war, met and married a local girl of good family who was killed in an auto accident when Danny and his twin sister were ten. Following this, the care of the twins fell to a succession of housekeepers. Danny brilliant in school, far outshining his sister. Danny drafted into service, cited for bravery. During his service in Vietnam his father killed himself. Shortly afterward the sister married a successful real-estate dealer. Danny dropped out after his discharge, reportedly lived on his pension in Mexico, was deported and came home to live on some land his brother-in-law owned. After three years was arrested by the sheriff on an anonymous tip. Found to be cultivating a large patch of marijuana, presumably for resale. Arrested, jailed, brought here under referral by the court …”

  Such a dry, bloodless paper cutout of a person, she thought. Doesn’t sound like Dan at all …

  Everybody was looking at her. She realized she’d missed something. “What was the question?”

  Ted answered: “Dr. Kossuth wants to know how he reacted to the news that the bodies had been discovered.”

  “I really couldn’t say.” She glanced at Jeff, saw his eyebrows lift by a fraction of an inch. “I asked him to recall the circumstances of his parting with the girls who came to see him. He told me. I suppose I could have said, You’re a liar, you killed them and buried them in the dam, because that’s where the sheriff found them. I wasn’t conducting a murder investigation, Jeff.”

  “Yes but—” Jeff hunched his shoulders and leaned forward, “Don’t you think it’s just the least little bit pertinent whether or not he killed them?”

  “Certainly. But how many people commit murder in their minds and feel just as guilty as those who actually do it? And how many of those are able to blank out the memory of the deed entirely? I’m not saying he did either of these things. I’m just saying it’s irrelevant for my purposes. Getting a signed confession is no doubt important for the sheriff. To me it would merely be one more piece of data, and I didn’t think it important enough to risk breaking a rapport with the patient.”

  Jeff looked at her a minute, then nodded. “All right What was his reaction
when you asked about the girls?”

  “He was vague, indifferent. I think he’d actually forgotten them until I brought it up. You know the side effect of electroconvulsive therapy.” (Now I’m talking for the record.) “Beatrice has forgotten the birth of her last two children. She just stares at their pictures and shakes her head—”

  Jeff interrupted. “Why was Bollinger given ECT in the first place?”

  “It happened before he was assigned to me. I think Mr. Weiss recommended it.”

  Weiss was a wizened, sharp-nosed little man who’d been in charge of the dairy in the days when mental hospitals were expected to be self-sufficient. Now he was security chief. He cleared his throat with a dry, rasping sound and read from the loose-leaf notebook in front of him: “He caused, or was the center of, various disturbances in the receiving ward. He seems to have a powerful personality which he uses in destructive ways, such as organizing patients to engage in group defiance of the attendants. In the particular incident in question, he persuaded one of the male attendants to lend him the keys to the lumber storage room, which he then used on a succession of nights for amorous purposes.”

  “For this you gave him shock treatment?”

  Weiss flushed. “There was more than one woman involved. In fact, on the night I was called, there were several, including a female attendant who has since been terminated. And they had gotten some whiskey. The security men had trouble getting it under control, particularly since some of them were involved.”

  Jeff leaned back, shaking his head. “How many times must I repeat, shock is not to be used as punishment. Sonofabitch!” He glared at Ted. “I thought we were getting away from that.”

  “We are, Jeff.” Ted’s voice was placating. “It shouldn’t have been done, but it was. Now shall we continue?”

  “All right, but it seems to me that throwing a party is a perfectly rational act. Tell me, Elizabeth—” Jeff turned to her. “In your opinion, could a rational man kill five women?”