Free Live Free

by Wolfe, Gene

  “I won’t,” Barnes said. “Thanks for the tip. I hope your knee’s better now.”

  “Knee? Oh, sure, the story. Well, sir, Ben helped me up, and then there wasn’t two seats together, so I took the one up front and Ben sat about three rows back, next to a lady about my age.

  “And when we were both settled down, she said something like, ‘Will your friend be all right?’ and Ben said something like, ‘Doc’ll be okay.’ Only the lady was a mite deef, and she thought he said Dad’ll be okay. So she said, ‘Oh, is he your father? Such a distinguished looking man!’ Well, Ben’s always a great kidder—you could say just about anything to him and he’d go along with it. So he told her he was sixty-nine and I was ninety-one, and how we’d lived together all our lives, and so on so forth. From then on it’s been a joke we pick up every once in a while.”

  “You haven’t really known Mr. Free all your life?” Barnes asked.

  “No, of course not. Only since he moved in across the street.”

  “How long has that been, Dr. Makee?”

  “Just a few years.”

  “Dr. Makee, I know you think I’m prying into something that’s really none of my business, but Mr. Free‘s—your friend Ben’s—missing, and all of us who lived there with him are concerned about him. We’re afraid something may have happened to him, and until we find out nothing has, we’re going to keep looking.”

  The old doctor nodded, his face expressionless. “Have you called the police?”

  “No,” Barnes said. “Not yet.”

  “That’s what most people would do, Mr. Barnes.”

  “We’re not …” Barnes hesitated.

  “Not what?”

  “Not the sort of people the police pay much attention to, Doctor. A man in your position—you’re a physician, you own this house, you have a certain status in the community.”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”

  “I think—Dr. Makee, I used to be a regional sales manager for the Continental Crusher Division of Yevco Incorporated. I had a house and a wife and kid. Two cars, a gold American Express Card, all that stuff.”

  The old doctor nodded. “What happened?”

  “A lot of things. The point I want to make is that when I lost all that, I lost it so slowly I hardly noticed it happening. The wife and the kid and the house and one car first. That was all in one lump.”

  “I see.”

  “Then my job. After that I went through five jobs in a little over a year. Each of them looked nearly as good as the last one—do you know what I mean? I know you’re thinking it was my own fault, but not all of it was. Like, once I was sales manager for a small company. They got bought up by a big one, and I was out. They said I could stay around as a sales trainee if I wanted, and I told them to stuff it. Today I’d jump at that.”

  The old doctor nodded again.

  “I’m getting way off my point. What I wanted to say was that one day I was making a call at a liquor store. The man who owned it was out front by the register, and he didn’t want any. You know how they do, ‘I ain’t got time, come back next month,’ all that bullshit.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “While I was standing there trying to tell him about the products I represented, a cop came in. The owner looked at him and said, ‘Throw this guy out.’ I suppose the cop got a fifth of cheap Scotch from him at Christmas; they usually do. Anyway, he grabbed me.”

  Dr. Makee chuckled. “The bum’s rush, that’s what we used to call it.”

  “They still call it that. It’s funny, until you realize you’re the bum. Anyway, the cop did it. He tossed me out so I couldn’t get my feet under me, and I landed on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. When he threw my sample case after me, it hit so the latch came open. All my samples were scattered on that sidewalk. Some of them got stepped on, and some of them got lost; I suppose people picked them up and carried them home.”

  “I can understand how that must have hurt you, Mr. Barnes,” Dr. Makee said softly.

  “In a way, he’d done me a favor, because that was when I knew where I was. That’s about where all of us who lived with Mr. Free are. You wanted to know why we didn’t call the police.”

  “You’ll have to excuse an old man, Mr. Barnes. We get set in our ways, and I suppose I was thinking more about how the police used to be than how they are now. Ben would have called them himself, that’s what I was thinking; but he was old like me. Ben and I, we sort of lived in the past, I suppose. It was hard for us to keep in mind how much the world’s changed. You’re too young to understand it, maybe. Crystals in the brain’s what some of them think it is. Did you know that, Mr. Barnes? Hirano bodies. The brain’s turning to glass, or something like it. Well, folks said the both of us were cracked a long time ago.”

  Barnes laughed dutifully.

  “For you young people, it’s all the same. But people my age, or Ben’s age, we have to wonder what kind of glass it is. For some a shot glass, I suppose. One of those funny mirrors for Ben, I think, and if Trudie were still with me, hers might be a pretty cut-glass vase. I don’t know.”

  “Speaking of brains, Doctor, you said once that a concussion was a brain bruise. Do you remember that?”

  The old doctor shrugged. “I’ve said that maybe a thousand times, Mr. Barnes.”

  “This was just yesterday, when you bandaged Sergeant Proudy at Mr. Free’s.”

  “Oh, him.” He nodded.

  “Right. I want to ask you more about Mr. Free, if you don’t mind. But first a couple of questions about Sergeant Proudy. How did you know to come?”

  “When he got hit with that fire ax? Because I saw it. I was watching all the hoorah out my front window. I suppose by that time the whole neighborhood was. When he got hit, it looked like a fine chance to just busybody over and see what the commotion was about, so I did.”

  “Mr. Free didn’t call you, then.”

  “Nobody called me. I just came.”

  “Doctor, I’m not very good at asking questions, but Stubb told me specifically to ask this one. When was the last time you saw Mr. Free?”

  “I’m not much on answering ’em neither. I don’t know.”

  “You mean you don’t think it’s any of my business.”

  “Nope. I mean I don’t know.”

  “You were his friend.”

  The old doctor seemed to hesitate, his eyes roving from the yellowed, wired-together skeleton by the halltree to the window and back. At last he said, “I’d like to think so,” and let the words hang, as though there were no more to say. Barnes was conscious of the warmth of the room and the smell of carbolic acid clinging to everything.

  “I’d like to think so, Mr. Barnes. I know for certain, that if you’d have asked, Ben would have said he was mine. I’m getting old.”

  “Not mentally, Doctor.”

  “Old every way. I’ve got an old mind in an old body. I’ve got an old soul. That Chinese wise man …”

  “Confucius?”

  “Yes. We used to make up jokes about him. Confucius say this and Confucius say that. What Confucius really said was that in the pursuit of knowledge he forgot he was getting old. My practice does that for me, Mr. Barnes, that and keeping up with the new developments. But it doesn’t stop me from getting old, only from thinking about it.”

  Barnes waited.

  “You ask me when I saw Ben last, and I feel like I just did. But I can’t pin it down. Maybe yesterday. Maybe today. Maybe it was last week, and maybe it was last year.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “It may come to me. Then again, it may not. I could tell you a hundred things we did, a thousand things we talked about, because we talked about everything. But I couldn’t tell you just when it was, except sometimes that it was summer or winter or whatever because I remember what kind of clothes I wore, or maybe that Ben got himself a soft ice cream. Then too, it isn’t always easy to know when you saw Ben, if you didn’t see him right to his face. One way he lo
oks like everybody else, but another way he looks like everybody. Sometimes he’s just as straight as a poker. Sometimes he’s stooped over like his back’s giving him a lot of trouble. He—”

  “Is it?” Barnes asked.

  “Hurting him? I think so, but he never came to me for doctoring. I used to try to get him to, but when I started I made the mistake of telling him I wouldn’t charge him. After that he wouldn’t come.

  “Now, Mr. Barnes, I like to take an interest in all my patients, just like in my friends. You said something about that policeman I stitched up yesterday. Why don’t you quit prying into Ben Free’s affairs and tell me about him?”

  Barnes nodded, uncertain at first about putting his thoughts into words. “You said yesterday he might have a slight concussion, isn’t that correct?”

  “I believe we’ve mentioned it today too.”

  “Right. Is it possible for a slight concussion to make somebody a little confused and very suspicious of—of another group of people?”

  “Paranoia? No.”

  “It isn’t possible?”

  “Slight concussions can cause some confusion, Mr. Barnes. If you’ve ever seen a boxer or a football player walking around and maybe even doing what he’s supposed to, fight or run with the ball, but acting kind of dazed and maybe staggering a little, you’ve seen the results of a slight concussion. But a concussion like that doesn’t cause paranoia or any other mental disorder, in my experience. Sometimes almost any kind of trauma will produce overt paranoia in a person who’s had it for years and been covering it up, though. How does … I can’t recall his name.”

  “Sergeant Proudy.”

  “How does Sergeant Proudy act?”

  Barnes told him.

  Chapter 32

  I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA

  Little Ozzie cried until he could cry no more. He could not have said just why he cried, but he cried because he knew, in some deep part of him where the knowledge would remain till he was dead, that the world was a more horrible place than he could ever imagine. He might think of monsters or mad dogs, but the world would beat him. It would turn the people he loved and trusted to monsters; it would reveal those meant to help him as mad dogs. He wept for himself, and he wept because he knew there would never really be anyone else to weep for him.

  It ended slowly. Perhaps half an hour passed between the first slacking of his tears and his last choking sob. That gave him time to look about without having to commit himself to consideration of what he saw. It was nothing anyway: a narrow room; a narrow window, high and old-fashioned looking, with bars on this side of the glass. The scuffed sofa where he lay smelled faintly of tears and dust, and creaked a little when he got off.

  The door opened and a black woman in a white dress like the school nurse’s took him by the arm and said come along, boy. They went into a wide hallway with tiles on the floor, a place he faintly recalled. The plaster was dark brown until it got higher than his head. Up there it was vanilla. Chocolate for kids, he thought, vanilla for grown-ups. Serves them right.

  They went through a door, and the nurse pushed him through another one.

  A man in a white coat was sitting at a desk. He had a fluffy beard that was not quite red and not quite yellow, sort of like ketchup and mustard mixed up. “Hi,” he said.

  Little Ozzie nodded, not speaking.

  “Want to tell me your name? I’m Doctor Bob.”

  “Osgood M. Barnes.”

  “Is that what they call you at school?”

  Little Ozzie nodded again.

  “I bet they don’t. I bet they call you … Skippy.”

  Little Ozzie shook his head.

  “Skeeter?”

  “No.”

  “Duke?”

  “No.”

  “All right, Osgood. Now Doctor Bob wants to ask you a few simple little questions before we send you home to your mommy and daddy. You’d like to go back to your mommy and daddy again, wouldn’t you?”

  Little Ozzie shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Osgood. Doctor Bob can’t send you home if you won’t tell him where your home is.”

  “I don’t see how it’s any use to have a doctor send somebody home if he doesn’t know where you live unless you tell him.”

  “You’re feeling defiant, aren’t you, Osgood?”

  “No!”

  “Can you explain to Doctor Bob why it is that you don’t want to tell him where you live?”

  “I do want to tell you—I just don’t live anyplace right now.”

  “Maybe we ought to talk about something else for a while, Osgood. Want to tell me where your mommy is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Uh huh.” Doctor Bob turned away for a moment and stared out the window, playing with his beard. “There’s a Coke machine and a candy machine I know about. Would you like a Coke and a candy bar?”

  “No,” Little Ozzie said honestly, “I’d like a sandwich and a glass of milk.”

  “What kind of sandwich, Osgood?”

  “Jelly and cream cheese.”

  “How about peanut butter?”

  “I don’t like peanut butter much.”

  “Dr. Bob doesn’t think they have any cream cheese down in the commissary, Osgood. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—if you’ll tell Dr. Bob where your daddy works, Dr. Bob will have somebody bring you a glass of milk and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

  “At the Consort Hotel.”

  Dr. Bob smiled. “Now we’re getting someplace, Osgood. Do you know what he does there?”

  “He’s a salesman.”

  “I see.” Dr. Bob stroked his chin.

  “Can I have my sandwich now?”

  “Why not.” Dr. Bob pressed a button on the intercom on his desk. “Shirley, run down to the commissary and get us a cream cheese and jelly and a glass of milk. Peanut butter, if they don’t have cream cheese. Then call the Consort, downtown. Ask if they have an employee or a guest called Barnes.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “What’s Daddy’s first name, Osgood?”

  “Ozzie.”

  “First name probably Osgood, but don’t count on it, Shirley. Any Barnes.”

  The intercom squeaked at him.

  “Grape, strawberry, whatever they have,” he said. “White bread.” With a snort of disgust he released the button and turned back to Little Ozzie. “Now I want you to tell me about the fat lady who brought you here. You know who I mean?”

  Little Ozzie shook his head.

  “Sure you do. She has curly blond hair and blue eyes. She came into the building with you, and then she assaulted the therapist at the front desk?”

  “She’s not fat,” Little Ozzie said. “Fat means ugly.”

  Dr. Bob stared at him for a moment, then nodded to himself and made a note. “Interesting. But you know who I mean. What’s her name?”

  “Candy.”

  “Do you mean that’s her name, or just that she gave you some candy?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Did she give you candy?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  Seeing that “Candy” was not a satisfactory response, Little Ozzie shrugged.

  “Is she your sister or a cousin—something like that?”

  Little Ozzie hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

  “Have you ever been to Philadelphia, Osgood?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have? Fine. When was that?”

  “Last year.”

  “Why did you go?”

  “Everybody did.”

  “Your mommy and daddy?”

  “No, they couldn’t come.”

  “The lady who brought you here?”

  “No,” Little Ozzie said again. “From school. Everybody from school. We saw where they signed the Decoration of Independence.”

  “I see, it was a class trip.”


  “Uh huh.”

  Dr. Bob picked up his pencil and balanced it between the tips of his fingers. “The reason I asked you about Philadelphia, Osgood, is that the label in the dress the lady who brought you here wore indicates she bought it there. Do you know anything about that?”

  “No,” Little Ozzie said for the third time. “Can I talk to her?”

  The growl of angry voices came from the hallway. Dr. Bob said, “Don’t pay any attention to that, Osgood. Sometimes we have a little trouble with the sick people here. It will be all right; we’ll soon have them calmed down again.”

  The angry voices grew louder. A woman who sounded like the one who had come for him screamed, “We’ll call the police!” and he heard glass breaking. The door flew open, and a man with a brown face and stringy black hair looked at Dr. Bob. “Nah,” the man said. “This ain’t him.” Before he shut the door again, Little Ozzie noticed he wore earrings. Little Ozzie had never seen a man with earrings before.

  “What the hell!” Dr. Bob stood up. Little Ozzie got up too, beginning to feel better. Dr. Bob went out the door with Little Ozzie at his heels.

  The crash had come from a glass of milk. Milk had made a star in the middle of the brown tile, full of glassy twinkles. By one point of the star there was a sandwich somebody had stepped on. Dr. Bob jumped over the star and ran out into the corridor.

  People in white pajamas were milling around, mixed up with nurses and doctors and white-coat men. In the middle was the man who had looked in Dr. Bob’s office. With him was a littler, younger man in a soft felt hat and a woman with her hair in a red handkerchief. They were talking more than anybody else. They waved their arms a lot and the people in white pajamas saw them and waved too.

  Ozzie ducked between legs, getting closer and closer to the man with the earrings until he got caught by the woman, who held him at the end of her arms, then squatted down in front of him.

  “What are you doin’ here, little boy?”

  Ozzie decided she smelled like cooking hamburgers outside. It was a nice smell, but he was getting pretty tired of people who asked questions. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m lookin’ for a old man named Ben Free. You know him?”

  Ozzie shook his head.