by Nevada Barr
“I don’t know where they’re going to put you,” the driver said. “Little skinny stick of a boy like you, put in with some of them big boys and… ” He stopped the way Dylan’s parents would stop when they realized “little pitchers have big ears.”
Dylan went back out the window into the snow where the cold could numb his heart and cool his head.
The next time the driver talked, his voice had changed, the way people’s do when they are talking to themselves instead of somebody else. “My gosh. What happened to make you do a thing like that? An axe of all things. I can’t imagine what must have been going through your head.”
He’s scared of me, Dylan realized. A grown-up, frightened of a little kid. They were all scared of him. That’s why they called him names. And not just him. He made them scared of all little kids. Dylan wanted to tell him not to be afraid, but he didn’t know how to do it without being “impertinent.” His mother’s word.
“I’ve heard that rock and roll music works on young people’s minds,” the driver went on. “That crazy stuff from England about the drugs and whatnot. But it would take a whole lot more than that to get most kids to go off the deep end.”
This time Dylan purposely scrambled the words. He didn’t want to think about what the driver was saying. He didn’t want to think about anything.
They arrived late at night. Snow was falling fitfully, tiny ice flakes with no substance but only sting to them. The van drove through big gates with a booth just inside. The driver stopped and rolled down the window. Dylan was aware of voices, people deciding what to do with him. Another short drive down a tree-lined road, branches bare and scratchy against floodlights, and the van pulled in front of a stone building that looked like a medieval castle. The front doors had glass windows, which Dylan thought was odd; in movies, prisons never had any glass, only bars. Two men in dark green uniforms-guards, he guessed-came out of the doors and took him from the van. The guards didn’t have guns, but they had sticks and handcuffs on their belts.
For a long time he waited in a room with plastic chairs and green walls. The guards stayed with him. Finally Dylan was taken to a room where there was nothing on the walls but a mirror of wavy metal. The one chair was bolted to the floor, and the window had heavy wire mesh over it. There was a tiny eyeball window in the door that led into the hall so people could peek in at him anytime they wanted. Already faces had come and gone.
A zoo, he thought, and I’m the wild animal.
A while later a lady, maybe forty-older than his mom-came to the room. He guessed she was a doctor by the way she moved and smiled, like she was so powerful everybody would do what she wanted so she could just relax and enjoy it.
Dylan was sitting on one of two hospital beds with white covers and metal roll bars. His back was flat against the wall, and his legs stuck out over the edge into the narrow aisle between the beds.
He would have stood when she came into the room so she wouldn’t think he hadn’t been brought up right, but he was cuffed to the frame.
The doctor sat on the other bed. She crossed her legs and absently pulled the crease of her trousers straight. Most ladies didn’t wear pants, not at work anyway. Maybe lady doctors were different.
Her fingernails were short like a man’s. They looked strong. She looked strong all over: iron gray hair and wire-rim glasses, a square face and a chunky body. She wasn’t ugly, just solid.
“I’m Doctor Olson,” she said. “I work with the boys two days a week. I’m sure you are aware of the difficulties of finding a place for a boy your age. Most of our juvenile offenders are at least fourteen or fifteen. Some of the bigger boys are… Oh, Lord.”
When she said “Lord,” she took off her glasses and put her thumb on one temple and her fingertips on the other and looked into her hand as if God might be there and she wanted to shut out the light to get a better look at his tiny self.
After she had communed she went on: “I’m one of the on-call psychiatrists. The other, the one you will probably work with, is Dr. Kowalski. You will be housed here for the time being. When you’re ready we’ll move you in with the other boys. Are there any questions you’d like to ask me?”
Dylan meant to answer, to say no or ask something to be polite, but he didn’t.
She waited a moment or two then said, “Okay, then. I guess I’ll say goodnight. An orderly will be in to get those cuffs off of you. He’ll bring you a pair of pajamas and so forth. The kitchen is closed but, if you’re hungry, I’ve arranged for you to have a snack.” Again she waited. Dylan chased after sentence fragments, wanting to say something because she wanted him to, but it was as if he’d forgotten how to speak, how to catch a thought and make it into a sound.
Doctor Olson turned and left. A snick-clunk sound followed-the lock on the door being put into place.
Dylan was home.
5
For three days, Dylan stayed in the room with the observation window. Nobody told him but after a while he figured out he was in Drummond’s infirmary. A lot of the time they left the little hatch door on the peep hole open and he could look out. There was a desk with a nurse at it and twice he saw a guard bring a boy there to get bandages or aspirin or something. From what he could see there wasn’t any other room for sick people but the one he was in, and since he wasn’t sick he didn’t know why they were keeping him there. Since he didn’t care why, he never asked.
A guard took his clothes. That bothered him. Sitting with the covers over his legs felt weird, like he was sick and should be throwing up. He was afraid he’d have to stay like that and when he got up to pee, people could look in and see him running around in his underpants, but in an hour or so the same guard brought him blue jeans and a denim shirt. They were too big but not as bad as the jockey shorts. Plain, white cotton, they reached to his knees. The slot in the front he was supposed to use was so low it was easier to go over the top. He also got a pair of stiff leather shoes. This last offering was left by an “orderly.”
Even in his self-imposed hermitage of the mind, Dylan knew he wasn’t a proper orderly like on Dr. Kildare. For one thing he was fourteen or fifteen and they didn’t make kids orderlies in regular hospitals. For another thing he whispered, “Hey, blood brother,” and “How ya doin’, axe man,” and occasionally mimed chopping when none of the real people were around. That was a major tip-off. He also had a tattoo on his arm. A stupid one, just numbers, that looked like a spaz had done it with a ballpoint pen. Dylan guessed he was what in old movies was called a “trustee,” another prisoner who has earned certain privileges.
Dylan knew the taunts should bother him but by the time they permeated the blanket of fog he’d swaddled himself in they’d lost any power they might have had when they were still warm. The trustee told Dylan his name was Draco but the staff called him James. Dylan didn’t call him anything. Before he’d ended up in Drummond he would have liked to talk to Draco. Not that his mother would have let them be friends. Draco was what his parents called “a bad crowd” all by himself.
Draco kept up the chopping and saying stuff. Dylan watched without a lot of interest. Even when Draco pinched him once and, one time, held a plastic fork to his throat, Dylan couldn’t generate enough energy to speak.
Two days and six meals later, when Dr. Olson came and asked him how he was doing, he found himself answering. Dylan was as surprised as she was.
“Fine,” he said, and then laughed because there was no “fine” left in his universe. Dr. Olson looked worried, said some more things and left.
That night when Draco’d come with the supper tray and reached for the pudding cup to eat Dylan’s desert like he always did, smacking his lips and saying how good it was and too bad he didn’t get any, Dylan said, “Don’t.”
The voice that came out wasn’t his old voice, his boy’s voice; this one was flat and dull and cold, like a knife left out in winter. Draco squeaked like a big fat mouse and jumped a foot in the air. It was funny but Dylan didn’t laugh. For
some reason he only laughed at sad things now. Then Draco put both hands in the air as if he was a bad guy and Dylan was Marshall Dillon. “Hey, man, no problem,” he said. “I’ve just been kidding around. No hard feelings.” He backed out of the room without taking his eyes off Dylan. Dylan was tempted to look in the mirror to see if he had changed into Butcher Boy so completely it showed on his face but he wasn’t up to looking in mirrors yet.
When Dr. Olson came again she said, “James says you’re taking more of an interest in things than you have been. That’s a good sign. That means you’re getting stronger.” She smiled and fiddled with one of her earrings. It was the kind Dylan’s mother used to wear, clipping on tight and leaving a red mark when it was taken off. “If it were a perfect world you would be going to a hospital to live, a place where you could be taken care of better.”
Dylan knew what she meant. An insane asylum. He’d never been to one, only seen them in the movies and on television. The thought of being locked up with crazy people jarred him out of his indifference.
“I want to stay here,” he said. She blinked at him from behind her glasses and he remembered that what he wanted didn’t matter any more. “I’m a danger to others,” he quoted the judge. “You have to keep me in jail.”
“Unfortunately, you’re going to get your wish,” the psychiatrist said. “There doesn’t seem to be a place for you in the system, so you will stay where you are for the time being. I’m also afraid we can’t let you have the sick bay for much longer. There are a hundred and seventy-three boys here at the moment and we have just these two beds that can be secured. You’ll be moved to the psychiatric ward, then if all goes well, to Ward C with the other boys.”
“You’re afraid I’ll chop them up into little pieces and flush them down the toilet,” Dylan interrupted.
“Not that,” she said quickly, but she was lying. That’s exactly what she thought. That’s what everybody thought. “Most of the boys here are here… for different reasons and we want to be able to take better care of you.”
“What kind of care of me?” he asked.
Dr. Olson sighed. She was tired, maybe tired of monstrous boys or maybe just because she worked other places besides Drummond. “We have discussed your case a lot,” she said.
“The ‘Royal We’?” Dylan asked because his mother used to joke, saying, “The Royal We,” and, though he’d never really understood what she meant, she’d always said it in a way that he knew it was supposed to be funny. In his new voice it didn’t sound funny at all.
“Sort of,” she said. “The care I’m talking about isn’t care for your body but for your mind. I have read your case, and I believe you really can’t remember what happened, just that it did happen.” She quit talking then and stared at him with that hungry-dog look like she was expecting him to throw her a bone. Dylan had no bones.
“Stop me if I’m chasing down the wrong rat hole,” she said and smiled again.
Dylan liked her for talking to him like he was a human being. “No, that’s my rat hole,” he said seriously. “I know it happened. Mack the Giant showed me.”
Dr. Olson’s face settled into an older mask; what he said made her think he should be put in the insane asylum, and he couldn’t find the words to tell her he wasn’t seeing things. Mack the Giant was a giant cop named Mack.
She took off her glasses and waved them back and forth the way his dad used to when he came in from the cold and his lenses steamed over. “Mack the Giant showed you,” she said carefully.
A flash memory of blood on the carpet, staining the walls, of Rich’s ashen face hit Dylan so hard he doubled over and clutched his middle as if he’d been struck by a baseball bat.
The hit passed. He straightened up.
“Are you alright? Do you want a glass of water?”
“I’m alright,” he said and suppressed the urge to laugh like he had at “fine.” He was a monster, but he wasn’t a crazy monster. She had to see that.
“What I think-and Dr. Kowalski, the other psychiatrist, agrees-is that you will not be able to begin healing until you can access those memories. That night, bad as it was, needs to be dealt with if you’re ever to be a whole boy again.”
A whole boy. Maybe a real boy like Pinocchio wanted to be. All he had to do was remember. That had been what the lawyers, the policemen, and the judge had wanted. They’d hammered at him to remember and gotten mad and mean when he didn’t.
Wouldn’t, they said. He wouldn’t remember.
If they made him remember, then he would go insane; he would be a crazy monster, a crazy-ass, bug-shit Butcher Boy. If he was crazy maybe he’d grab any old axe he found and start hacking people’s legs off. When he was sent to jail he’d thought the questioning would be over. He would have prayed for it to be over but that would have been blasphemous.
He started to cry.
“That’s a beginning,” Dr. Olson said kindly.
The beginning of what terrified him.
6
Richard turned fourteen in a private room at the Mayo Clinic. Nothing but the best for Richard Raines. Minnesota could not do enough for her injured children, her orphans, or her celebrities, and Richard was all three. Flowers and balloons from total strangers filled the room, their colors painfully bright in the diamond-hard winter sunlight. Out his second floor window was ice-blue sky, the bare branches of trees spider-webbing against it like cracks in the universe.
In the tradition of gout-ridden kings, Richard reigned propped up on three pillows, his leg swathed in bandages and immobilized. It had hurt like a son of a bitch at first but the drugs took care of that.
Took care of everything. The thought drifted through a warm morphine haze.
Kids at Rochester middle school thought they were big deals with a joint or two pinched from their big brothers and here he was mainlining morphine.
Rock star. Dylan would think it was cool.
A whisper of sound pulled his mind from the morphine summer. The skirt of a highly starched pink-and-white dress poked through the partly opened door like a tongue through lips. Richard leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
From beneath his lashes he watched as a doe-eyed face followed the skirt into his room. This candy striper was new, a girl not much older than he, and so pretty if they’d met in the school lunchroom she probably wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Letting herself in silently so as not to disturb the king, she fussed with the covers tented over his wound.
Slowly, he let his eyes drift open. “Could you get me a drink of water?” he whispered.
She refilled his water carafe then poured a glass and held the straw to his lips. The scent she wore was sophisticated. The side of her hand brushed softly against his cheek as she dabbed a drop prettily off his chin, leaning closer than she had to.
“Will you lose your leg?” she asked timidly.
“Maybe.” There was a dimming behind her eyes, a darker shadow pooling in the brown irises.
She was shallower than he’d thought. A one-legged boy couldn’t ski, skateboard, or whatever she thought was cool.
“Naw,” he amended truthfully. “I won’t lose it. Might have a limp is all; the doc says I lost a chunk of thigh muscle the size of a softball.” The doctor had actually said tennis ball but tennis sounded wimpy.
Her child-woman face softened in pity. It was an act. Since he could remember he had been watching people. His mom thought he was psychic but ESP wasn’t necessary to read the minds of ninety-nine percent of people or predict what they were going to do or say. They broadcast their thoughts for anybody paying attention to read.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Bad, real bad,” Richard said and grimaced as he remembered how cutting the pain had been in the beginning.
At the moment he felt terrific. Really terrific.
Acutely aware of how much he liked the sweet-dream sleepiness of the morphine dripping into his arm he promised himself he’d start telling the nurses and d
octors that the pain was better. When he got out of the Mayo life was going to be hard enough without an addiction.
“Would you like me to rub it for you?” Candy smiled coyly.
The smile had probably been practiced, but Richard wasn’t sure. It might have been self-conscious rather than fake. It didn’t matter either way. Stupidity turned him off. Rub it? His leg was nearly sliced in half.
“That’s awful nice of you but I need to get some rest.” He closed his eyes and felt her pat his feet through the thin hospital coverlet before she tiptoed from the room, closing the door with exaggerated care.
As soon as he heard the latch click he opened his eyes again. His room looked like a florist shop: flowers, cards, stuffed bears, balloons. The outpouring of Minnesotans’ inherent kindness had manifested in cash as well as gifts. One of the doctors told him more than two hundred thousand dollars had been sent to the hospital for Richard Raines. The doctor imparted this important fact offhandedly, as if Richard was a child who wouldn’t know what to do with more than movie money.
Even if he could get the money, there was no way they were going to let a freshman in high school live on his own, even though he had a home. The Raines house had belonged to his grandparents; it should be paid for by now, or close to it. It wouldn’t matter; until he was eighteen he’d have to have a guardian. Social workers were having hushed conversations about where to put him, as if he were a towel they could fold and stick on this or that shelf. Their whispers were about as subtle as theatrical asides meant to be heard in the last row.
No one bothered to include him in these sotto voce chats.
An orphanage had been mentioned, but foster care was in the lead so far. People could dress foster care up any way they wanted but they did it for the money: more kids more money. And kids got shifted around. On the radio he’d heard this whole thing about foster kids being given suitcases as presents because at the drop of a hat they were forced to play musical houses.
