Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  I leave William’s office and head for the dormitory, but when I pass the nurse’s station at the end of the hall, I have an idea.

  I have seen how LSD can open up someone’s thoughts, how it can help patients. Could it not also open up my thoughts and help me in my search for Henry Tudor? Could it not unlock my imagination and make it obvious where my missing patient has gone? If I can find Henry, then perhaps everything can be reversed and I will not have to be separated from Bill.

  It’s easy to get the nurse on duty to open the drugs cabinet for me. It’s too soon yet for anyone to know about my being fired. The nurse just assumes all is as it should be.

  I don’t remember the exact dosage that patients are given, so I just approximate. I shake some of the liquid LSD into a glass of water, drink it, and then go to my office and sit at my desk, waiting for the drug to take effect.

  THE WIND IS up and there are clouds whipping past above my head as I walk down the path from the hospital. I look for Henry Tudor by the fence, through the trees bordering the field, under an overturned wheelbarrow. I imagine him as suddenly small, no bigger than a matchstick, hiding in all manner of places. It makes me smile to think of him as a matchstick. If I found him when he was this small, I could just slip him inside my coat pocket.

  Henry is not under the rock my shoe turns over. He is not sitting on top of the dandelion at the side of the road. He is not perched on the back of the bird that flies past my head. He is nowhere and everywhere all at once. I can hear the sound of his matchstick head striking when the wind blows against my coat. I can smell the burning of his matchstick body in the dry grasses that border the cinder path. What if the fire catches and runs all the way to the barn?

  “Bill! Bill!” I come bursting through the stable door, all nerves and feeling, but the stables are completely empty. There’s not even a horse left in the building.

  I go towards Bill’s stall, thinking that I will just wait for him there, but all of a sudden my legs are very heavy and walking becomes difficult. I am wading through mud—the effort is that great to pull each foot up and then plant it back down again—and I don’t get farther than the bales of hay stacked up against the wall opposite the stalls. Even sinking down to the ground feels like a supreme effort, and it seems to take hours before I am sitting down. It is as though each of my movements has become elastic, just keeps stretching farther and farther out, endlessly, and I am hopelessly chasing after myself in an effort to catch up to what I am doing.

  The straw scattered on the floor around my boots appears to be the most splendid gold, each piece shining as brilliantly as a needle of gold. I pass my hand over top of it and can see the gold glowing through my skin. Why did I never notice such riches before? Why couldn’t I see the glory that was all around me? I move my leg, slowly, and the straw shifts and glistens, pulls back into a small wave of gold. I move my leg again, and the wave subsides.

  I don’t know how long I do this for, play with the straw, sit on the floor by the wall of bales. I don’t seem to have a sense of time anymore and can’t understand it in the old way that I used to understand it. It seems foolish to think I once believed in the regular march of hours. This version of time doesn’t move relentlessly along, but billows and collapses. It’s not linear, but something that surrounds me.

  I don’t know how long I am in the stables before Bill comes back. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. But I hear the drums of the horses’ hooves as the team of Percherons enters the building. I want to shout out to Bill, as I did before, but it seems to take tremendous effort just to open my mouth, and after I do that, I’m not sure how to let the words out from between the bars of my teeth.

  The horses see me before Bill does. One of them gives a magnificent snort and shakes his head. Another stamps his foot. I can feel the weight of his foot coming down on the boards as a tiny buzzing all through my body. It’s like there are bees in the earth, a whole colony of bees in the earth.

  If I hadn’t gone out to the stables nothing would have happened. I would have climbed down off the drug after a few hours, returned to my cottage, and packed my belongings. I would have been scared and sullen and still a little high, would have gone out and looked at the river one last time. I might have had the courage to go and say goodbye to Agatha, to wish her well, to wish her a happy reunion with her beloved children. None of that would have been pleasant, but it would have been harmless. I wouldn’t have ruined anyone’s life. I wouldn’t have put anyone at risk.

  But we have gone past that now. There is nothing to come but the tragic consequences of my impulsive and irresponsible behaviour.

  Bill is behind the horses, guiding them forward into their stalls. He seems to glow as he walks, shed light, and I realize that he is golden, just like the straw.

  “Dr. Lenny,” he says when he sees me, “are you hurt?”

  It seems a funny thing for him to say, and I start to laugh, and then can’t stop. It’s like my laughter is a machine that turns on itself, goes faster and faster. I can’t get off and it’s getting hard to breathe, and all of a sudden I’m afraid.

  Bill is suddenly on the floor beside me, and I think later about how he knew instinctively what to do. At first I think how remarkable that was, but later it occurs to me that it was simply what he knew. Bill knew madness. He knew the forms it took. He recognized its face. He struggled with the idea of normalcy, with fitting into a world where he didn’t belong; but he understood madness. It was his familiar.

  Bill gets down on the floor beside me and puts his arms around me. I cower inside the cave of him. I am sobbing now. I’m not sure when the change happened, when my laughter turned to tears, but the sobs rip through my body, each one seeming to fracture more of me. I’m afraid there will be nothing left. I’m afraid that I will be destroyed by my own terrifying sadness.

  “Save me,” I say to Bill, and he tightens his arms around me. I can smell the horses and the outdoors on his skin. I can feel the cage of his ribs and the scratchy surface of his overalls against my cheek. He mumbles something, but I can’t make out the words.

  There’s a moment when I hang there, in a space between terror and safety, perfectly balanced between those two states. And then everything tips over into terror.

  I hear the noise, but I don’t know what it is. When I look up, I see the creature bearing down on us. It’s a monster. It’s black and drips blackness, like it’s crawled out of the bottom of a swamp. It’s a swamp monster and it has trouble walking on dry land, does a sort of monster shuffle towards me.

  I scream, and I don’t stop screaming. The monster doesn’t slow down, just keeps advancing towards me, and I scream all the louder.

  Bill jumps up and I see him reach for something and throw it at the monster. The monster sways a little on his feet and then crashes to the floor and disappears.

  WHEN I WAKE up, I’m lying on Bill’s bed. He must have carried me in from the main room of the stable and laid me down. I can hear him throwing hay in for the horses, can hear the swish of the hay and the scrape of the fork as it hits the wood of the stalls. I look around. Everything seems returned to normal speed. I look at my hand. It doesn’t seem remarkable. I move my head. It’s easy to do.

  “Hello,” I say, and the word comes out without effort.

  I struggle up to a sitting position, swing my legs over the side of the cot, and stand up. I walk to the stall door and open it. Bill has respectfully latched it to give me privacy and quiet. I walk out into the stable and I see the body on the floor by the hay bales.

  It’s Henry Tudor. He’s lying on his back. There’s a great deal of blood on his shirt, and when I kneel down to check his breathing, I can see that there are four holes in his chest. He’s lying perfectly still. I put my shaking hand against his neck to search for a pulse and there isn’t one. My head has a sudden sharp pain in it, and I feel as though I’m about to vomit.

  I find Bill inside the nearest stall. He swings the pitchfork d
own to push more hay into the enclosure. He has his back to me. He is tossing the straw into the stalls with a rhythm that is the same as the way field grasses bend to wind, or the way a flame dips and sways, as graceful as a dancer.

  “Bill,” I say, my voice coming out as a whisper. “Bill, what have you done? Henry Tudor is dead.”

  Bill turns around and smiles at me. “Lenny,” he says, “you were sick, but now you’re better.”

  I take him by the arm and turn him so that he faces the body of Henry Tudor. I can see the blood on the straw where it has been spread out for the horse. I can see blood on the tines of the pitchfork Bill’s been using.

  “You’ve killed him,” I say. “He’s dead. You’ve killed him.”

  Bill nods solemnly, and then he turns back to his work.

  “He had it coming to him,” he says.

  Weyburn

  Saskatchewan

  1960

  WILLIAM SCOTT MEETS ME IN TOWN. HE comes to the apartment where I live above the restaurant. This has been our arrangement since I was fired from the Weyburn Mental Hospital. William wants to help me, but he can’t let it be known to anyone at the hospital that he is helping me. I have left there in disgrace. No one wants to see me come back. Not only did I lose a patient, but I then became, inadvertently, responsible for his death. No greater level of incompetency is possible in someone who has taken the Hippocratic oath.

  William and I have decided to do this without LSD, all things considered—the old-fashioned way.

  He comes to the apartment three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He comes after work, after dinner on the hospital ward, arriving around nine p.m. and staying until eleven. He borrows Dr. Mortimer’s car to drive the small distance into town and waves away my attempts at payment, even though I bring it up at every session. I made many mistakes while at the Weyburn, but for all I did wrong, it seems that maybe I did one thing right. I made a real friend there.

  I always leave the apartment door unlocked on those evenings that William Scott comes to see me. I like to sit on the battered old sofa by the window and listen, first for the sound of the car engine shutting off, and then for his footsteps on the stairs. He has a light tread, as though it is nothing for him to walk up several flights of stairs, as though he had all the energy in the world.

  Tonight, a Wednesday, he arrives exactly at nine. I hear the soft tap of his feet approaching the apartment, then the squeak of the doorknob turning in its socket.

  “Hello,” he says cheerfully, entering the apartment.

  This is another thing that I have come to rely on from William Scott, now that I know him better. He is always in a good mood. He is always tremendously upbeat. In this way, I can see how he would be a good doctor. Simply being around him would make anyone feel better.

  “Hello.” I get up from the sofa to go and shake his hand. This is how we greet each other, and how we say goodbye. The formality of it always makes me feel happy.

  William means to get to the bottom of my obsession with Bill. That’s his term for it—obsession—and I can’t say that he is wrong. Even now, I am still anxious to know how Bill is, after he was returned to the penitentiary. Occasionally I ask William Scott to find out, to call the prison and ask after Bill’s condition, but he always refuses. He says it would just complicate things, that my problem has always been linked to knowing Bill, and I should know enough not to want to continue this pattern. He believes, although he never comes out and says it directly, that I was abused as a boy by Bill.

  We have been at this for several months now. After I was fired from the Weyburn, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back to Montreal, and I couldn’t return to my parents’ home in Canwood. I couldn’t even tell them that I had failed at my first, and perhaps only, job as a psychiatrist. They had been so proud of me when I got accepted into medical school, even though I didn’t become what my father called a “real doctor.”

  At the inquest there was a suggestion that I might face criminal charges for my part in Henry Tudor’s death. But Bill had killed before, and it was more convenient for Dr. Christiansen to speak to that, to blame him entirely, and save any scrutiny of his leadership, and of his drug experiments. Christiansen testified that I was trying to stop Bill from killing Tudor, and I got off. “A lucky break,” he said to me afterwards, “a second chance.”

  But nothing about it felt lucky, and as for a second chance, after the inquest, I stayed in town, picked up a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant, and rented this small apartment upstairs. I asked William Scott for help and he agreed and I will stay here, in Weyburn, until he says that I am ready to leave, ready to go back into the larger world. Until he pronounces me cured. Or cured enough.

  We sit at the kitchen table. I pour us both a glass of water. William spreads out his papers, uncaps his ballpoint pen. There is never much small talk between us. This is not a social visit. Time is limited, so we get right to the point.

  “What I still don’t understand,” says William, “is your unshakable attachment to Bill. It is almost certain he abused you.”

  “But if he did abuse me, why did I feel no fear towards him?”

  I have lain awake nights thinking this very thing. It makes sense that Bill abused me. There was something not right about our relationship. I think I always knew that. But surely if he had abused me, I would have felt afraid of him? And at some point I would have remembered something of the abuse.

  “A strange sympathetic response,” says William. “You identified with your captor.”

  “Perhaps.”

  I certainly did empathize with him. His feelings were my feelings.

  “You saw yourself as somehow complicit in your abuse?”

  “But I don’t have any memories of Bill abusing me,” I say. “I just don’t believe that he did.”

  “Why were you so taken with him?”

  “I liked his free spirit. I liked how he lived. It was romantic to a young boy. I admired how he behaved around people.”

  “He was a sociopath,” says William. “And he suffered periodic bouts of psychosis.”

  Sometimes I hate the labels we’re meant to attach to people. It seems so bogus, and actually explains nothing of who they are.

  “He just didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him,” I say. “He was true to himself.”

  Something suddenly occurs to me.

  “I think I even admired the murder,” I say. “The first one. The killing of Sam Munroe.”

  “Why?”

  “It was done so recklessly and absolutely.”

  “Murder often is,” says William dryly.

  “It’s an impulsive act,” I say. “Murder is the logical end reach of impulse. I think I can relate to the desire to follow impulse to its conclusion.”

  “But you have never expressed a desire to kill anyone yourself?” says William.

  “But I am a little impulsive myself,” I say. “And I think that, given the right circumstances, I could act as Bill acted.”

  “You could be Bill?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wanted to be Bill?”

  “Yes.”

  William Scott considers for a moment. “That’s all well and good,” he says, “but it still doesn’t entirely explain the attraction.”

  “There was no one like Bill,” I say. “I came from a series of small prairie towns. There was no one as exciting as Bill. He cut a very dramatic figure to a young boy such as myself.”

  “All right,” says William. “I’m willing to see the attraction when you were a boy. But what about when you were a man? What about when you were a working doctor, and you neglected your duties because you were still in thrall to this Bill? How do you explain that?”

  I can’t explain it.

  “I loved him,” I say.

  “But this was not a harmless sort of love,” says William. “This was an obsessive love that caused a great deal of damage to you and those around you. This was
a love that resulted in murder.”

  “It was worse for Bill,” I say. “He was incarcerated, all liberties suspended. I was reprimanded and allowed to go on with my life.” I feel terrible about this, and guilty for my part in it. Bill was trying to protect me and now he will be locked up forever in prison.

  “He was the one who killed. He should have been punished for the act. It is illegal to murder someone.”

  “But it was my fault he did murder.”

  “You’re protecting him again,” says William. “Why do you continue to do this?”

  “I love him,” I say.

  William leans forward. “You didn’t use the past tense,” he says. “Just then. You said ‘love.’ Bill is gone. He’s in prison. Never to return to your world. It’s over.”

  “But it’s not,” I say. “It’s not over. That’s the trouble.”

  “Describe this love to me.”

  “What about it?”

  “How it felt to you. Back then.”

  I lean back in the chair and look at the apartment ceiling. There’s a large water stain near the window, flaking bits of plaster above my small stove. Sometimes, when I’m cooking, the scales of plaster fall off the ceiling into my frying pan.

  “I felt like I wanted to give myself away to Bill,” I say. “I wanted to surrender myself to him, to be taken and not returned. I wanted to be free of myself, to fall out of the shape of my life.”

  “Why did you want to be free of yourself? What were you trying to be free of?”

  I think hard. I open myself up to my own subconscious, but nothing occurs to me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I feel we’re close,” says William. “But whenever I sense we’re getting somewhere, you shut down.”

  “I know.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Tell me about your relationship with your father,” he says.

  I know what he’s doing. He’s found the door bolted and now he’s walking around the building looking for an open window.