Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  He said he was in the community hospital for almost a year, where the doctors had him on morphine first and then Percodan. Then they gave him a Haldol prescription and told him to kick. And whether it was that he couldn’t or didn’t want to or only felt okay when he had the drugs Doug couldn’t make it without them and got busted for heroin three times in less than a year and was remanded here in lieu of a two-spot at Misericordia. Before the incident with the neighbor, he didn’t even smoke pot, he said.

  He told me all that one morning before first wake-up. I was passing through the living room at Acacia where they had me Night Guarding and I heard him call out to me. They had him in the detox room with the skull-and-crossbones on the door because they didn’t know where else to keep him, I guess, him being in a chair and all and having special needs and drugs and maybe still needing detox from the heroin too. I stopped outside his door and asked him what was it and what did he need and he said he couldn’t sleep and just wanted to talk. He was lying there in his bed propped up and off to one side and we talked small talk for a while until I mentioned that the room sure smelled funky. It killed the conversation right there and he dropped his head and started crying. “That’s not the room,” he said, “that’s me. I can’t help myself. I can’t control it.” And me, I had never done anything like this before—nurse work I guess—and in the back of my memory I knew that stuff like this once disgusted me. But it was part of my responsibility now and being responsible I’d been taught meant you couldn’t pick and choose when you wanted to be—you always were. And so, I cared for him the best I could—rolling him over on his side and getting his nightshirt off and cleaning him with a washrag and warm water, and then lifting him naked off the bed and sitting him in his chair while I took off the sheets and nightshirt and took them to the laundry room and got him some fresh ones. And it was while I was changing the sheets and getting him into his clean clothes that he told me all this, and he told me too that he didn’t think he could make it here doing what we did and all and that because of his condition, both physical and mental, he couldn’t feel a part of it again, at least not yet. He couldn’t be here and now because he still couldn’t believe what had happened there and then and that the only way he could live with it now was if he was still numb. He wondered what difference it made anyway if he was on drugs or not and why they couldn’t just leave him alone with a Percodan or Dilaudid scrip until he felt he was ready to be healed instead of getting it forced on him like this. It was a lot to lose at twenty-seven, he said. And when we were talking and he found out that I’d once been a carpenter too, he asked me if I remembered what it felt like to ridge walk and roll rafters on a fine day, pinning ’em and toe-nailing ’em clean—single-licking them mostly, scurrying around on a six-inch beam with a thirty-five foot drop below you not feeling an ounce of fear, in total control and your body absolutely obedient to what you wanted it to do. And I remembered it exactly as he said it. “Okay,” he said. “Now take that all away in a heartbeat.”

  He asked me if I’d talk to Indica and Jackie and see what I could do about getting him transferred to a hospital like Yountville Vets where there were people more like him and where they were better equipped to care for his needs. There wasn’t even a ramp in the whole fucking building, he said. He couldn’t get around here even if he wanted to, he said. And I told him I’d do what I could but when I talked to Indica about it, he said, “No Way,” and that Doug would just have to deal as best he could and that he should feel lucky just to be here and not in Misericordia. And though I thought about asking Indica how lucky he’d feel if what had happened to Doug had happened to him but I knew how that would go down and that it would be my ass, not Doug’s, that would be hanging out and wide open.

  Then I told Doug how it was. I said that he should take it as best as he could. And he gave it his best shot for a while, wheeling himself into house meetings, sometimes not even the last one in and trying to do his job as hall cleaner, pushing a dust mop in front of his chair. But still I could see he wasn’t making it, wasn’t going to make it. And partly it had to do with how he was feeling but it also had to do with the fact that he was as he was and that made him different from the rest of us, and everybody else treated him differently too. I told O’Neill what I was thinking and he said privately for me only that he agreed but that Indica seemed to have his own reasons for keeping him there and there was nothing we could do about it, just hope for the best was all.

  I got phased here to Redwood the morning after my best night as Acacia Night Guard. There was a meteor shower that night—a bright and clear and moonless night in late May—and I laid on a blanket on the exercise ground out back watching the star fragments rip across the sky, losing count at around eighty and dizzy from it when I finally went back inside. When I crossed the living room, Doug called to me and asked me could I help him. By then, Indica and Jackie had told me to not get too close to him, to not let him get dependent on me and so I asked him through the door what it was but he wouldn’t tell me, so I went inside and found him lying there in his own filth again and crying soundless but uncontrollably. Again, I changed him and cleaned him as best I could and while I was doing it he pleaded with me to talk to Indica and Jackie again. He wasn’t going to make it here, he said. He said he could feel himself slipping away. And I told him, “Listen, Doug, you’re just going to have to hang tough and try to make the best of it.” And I told him too that he was lucky and should feel grateful to be here. But he kept at me until I finally told him that I’d talk to Indica once again as soon as he came in and before morning meeting, I promised, and I told him that I’d come back and tell him what happened before we went out for exercise. And just as I thought he would Indica got on my ass when I did, and told me to tell Doug “No Way,” and that from here on out I wasn’t to fraternize with him again; he’d have to make his own way, Indica said, and through the whole house not through me. And when I came back into his room, knocking hard on the skull-and-crossbones before entering, Doug could see from my face without my saying anything what the answer was. “I’m sorry man,” I told him. “You’re on your own,” I said.

  He thought for a minute and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “yes.” Morning meeting was maybe five minutes old when Indica realized Doug hadn’t come out for it. Indica stopped it and turned to me. It was part of the Night Guard job to make sure everybody was accounted for. “Tell that motherfucker to get his pinche ass in here quick,” Indica said following me hard with his hard eyes as I crossed the room in front of everybody. I knocked hard on the decal and when there was no answer, I turned the knob and entered, pushing against the chair that he’d stuck there to block my way. He was staring straight at me when I came through the door but he wasn’t seeing me. The room was funky again but not just with shit smell and when I pulled back the covers, I saw him lying there in his own shit and blood. A table knife was still in his hand and he’d sawed through both leg arteries all the way to the bone. I could tell from the color of his face that he was dead.

  It was panic the next hour or so. When I came out and told them what he’d done everybody tried to crowd into the room as though group support could put blood and breath back into Doug again. Then O’Neill told everybody but Clark and me to clear out of the room and tried to revive him with CPR. And when that didn’t work—and I think Paul knew from the gate that it wouldn’t—he told me to call an ambulance. When I got done doing that I went over and sat on the lawn by the hedge and watched the circus of it all. And I saw Indica and Jackie burrowing through the office files, looking for stuff while everybody else was still milling around the living room and trying to look in on Doug’s room and finally when they got what they were looking for saw them hop on Indica’s Harley and tear off up the dirt road, passing the ambulance on the way in. And I saw the paramedics unpacking their gear in a hurry and then after they’d been in the room a few minutes saw their pace change to routine, and then saw Delaney and Pat Douglass and Connie arrive from the dow
ntown office and huddle with Clark and O’Neill in the office. And when they were done it was Delaney himself—the program director—who came over to me and told me that I was phased to Redwood and was leaving right now and wasn’t even here last night, did I understand? And I said yes I did and though I wasn’t sure until later just how the scam worked I knew it was something I’d seen or heard or known and something that I shouldn’t. I could hear the police siren wailing when O’Neill and I crossed on foot to the other side of the creek, the side where there was no entry to Acacia. “Don’t run, Ram,” he told me. “Just act casual, like nothing happened,” he said.

  And that was how I became a record-breaker because I was an accomplice, if you want to get technical about it. But there was nothing I could do or say that would bring back Doug or stop the Indica Munizs or Jackies or Jacks of this world from doing what they did for that’s who was involved in the scam. Indica and Jackie with the forged welfare payments for residents who had long ago hooked ’em up and gone down the road but who were still kept on the books and Jack with their food stamps and the coupon racket with the warehouse. Who was I to look this opportunity in the face and say no to it? So much for rehabilitation, you could maybe say. And in the end it all worked out anyway. They ran Jack down at one of his boyfriend’s apartment in the Castro, and Indica and Jackie in East LA. And so justice was served in a sense and at Jack’s preliminary hearing last week, the attorney for the program reminded the judge of our ongoing record of good and begged him not to throw out the basket because of one bad apple. This is a program that saves lives was what he said.

  Out on the playing field the lights are coming on again and another game will soon be beginning. It’s been two weeks now since I began this journal again, writing every night as much as I could, stopping now and then to watch them play or just to listen to my thoughts and try to follow the pictures in my head of all that happened during my time in Acacia and Walnut, wondering, from time to time, how Monroe and Barry and Romero are getting along back in Fremont on Six East, and whether Darrell went back Out There after he went down the road. But me, I’m fine for the most part, I guess, though it still bothers me that I still can’t get the steel wool out. Writing, just thinking clearly is still difficult for me now, painful sometimes, foreign somehow. It’s funny how that is—ironic is the proper word I’m looking for. There was once a time when words flowed out of me in torrents; sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page—reams of it, really—in carefully chosen prose, or pure verse, all in meticulous measured meter. That last bit; that was a bit like it once was.

  Chapter Three

  Six months ago, I walked out of Fremont Neuropsychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane with a piece of paper in my hand certifying that I was sane again. It was early summer, hot, no breeze, and I walked the forty blocks or so to the bus station, getting sun drunk along the way. Reflecting on the paper in my pocket and concluding that even if I wasn’t perfectly sane, meaning normal, I guess, I was at least changed, a new being who, aside from the familiar rind of my body, was startling and impossible to reconcile with the Ram Le Doir I’m acquainted with from press clippings, dubious recollections, and rumors, which combined forms his personal history.

  I’ve even devised a workable construct to explain the particulars of my crimes and misdeeds—I didn’t do them. It was the other Ram, the Ram that died with the attempted cocaine overdose at the murder scene or from the massive applications of electroshock, narcotherapy, and group psychotherapy. The King is Dead, Long Live the King, Tod und Verklärung. The jury returned a verdict of guilt with diminished capacity, which I have amended to not guilty by reason of not being born yet. It was him, not me. And though this might be ratiocination on my part, it is nonetheless what I tell myself. It’s the only way I can live with myself at present.

  At certain times during the course of the day—and at the oddest hours, really—like when I’m watching a sunrise or sunset—I’m reminded of the facts regarding the previous tenant’s—Ram the First, as I call him—murder of Vera Dubcek, star of stage and screen and onetime queen of Refugio. Sometimes, when I look at my finely-shaped hands—musician’s hands as my Grandma Theo used to say—I will slowly become aware that these artful-looking digits entwined a roll of industrial-strength duct tape around a naked woman and her lover, and, after pouring gasoline on them like ships being christened, struck a match and barbecued them on a Khoramassor rug in the stately living room of a chalet-style home along a creek in a lush redwood canyon, high above the seaside town of Refugio.

  How do I deal with that? How do I reconcile myself to so horrendous an act?—even with the death and rebirth that has transformed this moribund frame? Well, I don’t very well. I try not to think about it. I do whatever it takes to avoid facing and answering these questions, sometimes inflicting pain on myself to distract me from it. I live with the knowledge and the flickering guilt of the everlasting flame which attends it, much the same way, I imagine, as one lives with dialysis, chronic backache, or the heartbreak of psoriasis. It’s always there or waiting to announce itself, but what can I do about it? Remorse or self-torture will not bring Vera Dubcek back from the charcoal the previous tenant had reduced her to, nor will it turn back time to allow him another option. And, besides, I feel Vera got what she wanted anyway. Hadn’t she always said that she wanted passion so strong as to feel like she would die at the hands of her lover? I can’t say whether or not I feel she deserved it. Two years ago, I might have said she did. A month from now, she may be the innocent party whose personality complemented that of the former tenant and which he subconsciously required for the climax of an Armageddon scenario. Or maybe it was the other way around, her seeking innocent him/me to annihilate her? Who knows really? At the end of these unwanted moments, I always conclude that it will do me no good to ponder overlong about Vera Dubcek, for she is gone and I’m not—at least from the survival angle of looking at things.

  I’m now living in a narrow yellow house on a short bluff that overlooks the Russian River, just outside one of the little villages strewn about this area. It’s a pleasant little house and its interior is paneled in warm tones of red cedar, varnished to a high gloss. It has exposed beams and a tidy little deck out back that affords a view of the river canyon. The horizon beyond is dominated by the redwood-ridged outline of Mount Armstrong, its peak far to the east of its mass, and its decumbent spine tailing off westward toward the invisible ocean. The sun sets directly behind it in the evening, and on days off, I like to sit on my deck, watching the sun hurry down the last patch of sky, muting the redwoods from a dark green to the nacreous gray that looks like crew-cut hair on a misshapen head. The death of afternoon/birth of twilight is still my favorite part of day—a holdover from the previous tenant—and if I’m driving home late from work during this time, I’ll pull over to the side of the River Road and stay there awhile, until the shadows vanish and the crickets take up their old and trancelike tune; watching and smelling and listening until evening is full with moonrise. This is perhaps my one remaining obsession, and if I have any passion left, it is for this cycle of day. In the program, they beat my obsessions out of me. But somehow, they missed this one.

  On weekdays, I assemble relays at an electronics factory in a light industrial park just outside the resort community of Healdsburg. The factory sits on the savannah, away from the river. Wheat-colored weeds surround the parking lot, and oaks and willows and acacias are visible through the two-foot square window just opposite the bench where I sit from 8:30 until 5:15, Monday through Friday, sometimes later when an important contract is being processed. There is some irony in this situation, because most of our work is for defense contractors. And here’s me, the student revolutionary who pulled the plug on the U.C. Deerville campus main computer, the expatriate who ran resisters and draft dodgers and deserters across the border at Peace Arch Park in the dead of night (speaking of the former tenant now), sitting in a clean room, and microsc
opically soldering relays on missile triggering systems. How would he regard this irony? As I said before, I cannot answer for Ram I, because this person, Ram II, knows him only obliquely through snapshots—many of them burned or partly melted, clippings, rumors, whispers; the outlines that inscribe a life that my physical body lived but which is not my own, in the sense that we say things are our own, meaning I/me/mine.

  I tend to think of him in an objectified sense almost, a historical figure whom I know like you know him, only in a bit more detail. I imagine him as a man not all that dissimilar from any other man: good and bad, prone to mistakes and the occasional right move, capable of some things and incapable of others, giver of joy, and, certainly, of sorrow. His life and its random episodic nature strike me now as a kind of travelogue of dementia. His greatest assets? Probably his charm and that other quality so highly prized these days: charisma. His shortcomings were delusion, self-destructiveness, and an inability to accept the status quo. Not at all like me. I accept things the way they are. The program gave me that. Why battle when you’re bound to get squashed anyway? Charisma and charm are mine in short supply—happily, I might add.

  What this new tenant thrives on is regularity, routine, uniformity, and, above all else, quiet. I don’t like things that interrupt my quiet, and although that does not occur often, there have been incidents in these past six months. Incidents that have upset me and disturbed the eggshell-like placidity I now wish to live in.