13 1/2

by Nevada Barr

  Vondra’s parents, the Werners, were a possibility. Vondra would try to help, but Mr. Werner didn’t like him. Not that he said anything; Richard had read it behind the man’s eyes. That he’d been with his daughter in the middle of the night when her parents were out didn’t make it any better.

  There was a nurse in the ER he remembered. He remembered everything about that night with surreal vividness. Weeks later it still seemed more immediate than the time he inhabited from moment to moment. He’d liked her. She was smart and quiet and gentle with him. Her name was Lackey, Sara-with-no-h Lackey. Nurse Lackey was in her forties and didn’t take care of herself: she was underweight, her hair was a mess, and her nails had been bitten down to pseudopods.

  Depressed, he guessed.

  The next time a nurse came into his room, a hefty woman with an honest face and strong hands, he said, “There was a nurse who was extra nice to me that… that night. A Miss Sara something. I’d sure like to thank her.”

  Hefty beamed approval at him as she deftly set about changing the dressing on his thigh.

  “Oh, yes, that’s a sad story, that one,” she said.

  When the nurse finished her bandaging and her story, Richard asked if she thought Sara would come see him sometime. “I liked her voice.” Saying it he remembered how good it had felt to hear that warmth, how good it had felt to be the center of her attention when the world was screwed up.

  7

  For nearly three weeks not much happened except that Dylan was moved from the infirmary into the psych ward. It wasn’t like he’d imagined, with people thinking they were Napoleon and sneaking around at night smothering each other, but it was pretty bad. There were three other kids. One was always screaming because he saw spiders. After half a day of it Dylan was looking around for the spiders himself. A couple times he thought he felt them on him but he didn’t let that show. He didn’t want to be stuck in the psych ward forever.

  Not that he deserved anything better; he wasn’t stupid enough to pray for it or pretend he had a right to get out. Still he didn’t want to spend his life with loonies. Another kid was a great big retard, big as a man. There was nothing else wrong with him that Dylan could see. He was stupid but he was nice enough as long as you didn’t try to touch his things. The third boy just sat and plucked at his eyebrows and eyelashes, or where they’d used to be; he was bald-eyed as a bunny and blinked rapidly. At first Dylan thought he was staring at him, but Carl didn’t stare at anybody; he just stared.

  Dylan did his share of staring too. Out the windows mostly. Psych was on the third floor on the backside of the building. Outside nothing but snow-covered fields stretched all the way to the snow-white sky. Dylan put himself in the snow and numbed out as much as he could.

  After a while, Dr. Olson decided he could go to classes with the sane kids and eat with them in the dining hall. Given that he shouldn’t feel happy or good anymore he felt guilty for being glad to be out of the nut ward. There wasn’t enough snow in Minnesota to numb him clear past boredom. It was so bad he was actually excited about going to the school they had for the inmates. He still spent nights with the crazies and had to shower and use the bathroom there.

  Being crazy-Dylan supposed he was and it wouldn’t have mattered if he was as sane as apple pie, crazy was like cooties, highly contagious, and he was living at cootie central-got him picked on by the sane boys. They didn’t beat the crap out of him-not like he’d wanted Rich to that time-but they were always poking and pinching and shoving, making him drop his tray in the dining hall, pushing him so he fell down.

  It was still better than doing nothing with the loonies. Being left alone with only his brain to play with was too weird. He’d think about the other kids and what they’d done and he’d think about himself and what he’d done, and then he’d think that they were humans and he wasn’t, that he was this other thing, this monster thing, and if he kept on like that he knew he’d be screaming about invisible spiders before long.

  At first Draco was the worst. Then, after a while, he got tired of it and decided to be Dylan’s friend. “Don’t go thinking I like you,” he warned. “But, man, you’re like Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday, Jesse James. These sad fucks think they gun you down, they’re hot shit. More laughs fucking with them than fucking with you. So you’re this big axe murderer. Big deal. My bet is you did them in their sleep. Or somebody else did them and you took the rap. No way a little fart like you could get it up for forty whacks. You know about ‘forty whacks?’ Lizzy Whatsername slicing and dicing her folks? Worse kids than you been through Drummond. Me for one.”

  Draco was always going on like that, like they were all big criminals. Except for Dylan, nobody much was. The other guys were in for stealing cars, or running away from home too many times, or shoplifting. One kid knifed another kid and a couple of older boys were in for armed robbery.

  Draco was in for selling marijuana and then stealing the police car when they tried to arrest him. At least that’s what he said. Dylan suspected maybe the police car part was just something he liked to think he did.

  After he started hanging around with Draco things got better.

  Class was good too. Dylan liked school now. Looked forward to it. He pretended not to because crazy cooties got him in enough trouble. If he started doing teacher’s pet he’d get the crap beat out of him, Draco or no Draco.

  English and history weren’t all that great-people could twist them and Dylan was scared of twisty. He’d gotten twisted and twisted and ended up in a psych ward in a jail and didn’t remember doing anything wrong. That meant he didn’t know when he might do it again. That’s why they wouldn’t let him sleep in Ward C. Nobody else knew when he was going to start hacking people up again either. Drummond slept better when Dylan was locked down for the night.

  What he really liked was math. Outside, he’d hated it. Now he loved the order of it and that it was always the same. Nobody could twist it. A number stayed the same and if it was added to another number it always, always came out the same way.

  Phil was the math teacher-he told the boys to call him Phil, not Mr. Maris-and he was part of why Dylan liked math best. For one thing Phil was young. Everybody but the inmates was old at Drummond, old and musty like the walls. Draco said Drummond was an elephant graveyard where old prison staffers came to die. Most of them didn’t want to be there any more than the boys they guarded did.

  Phil wasn’t more than twenty-three or -four. He wore his hair long. It was light brown and curled on his collar and over his ears. Draco called him a hippy and laughed at Dylan because he didn’t know what that was.

  Math and Phil gave Dylan a place to go outside his skull. Dylan’s mom would have called that a blessing. He got to thinking maybe monsters were blessed by some kind of monster god.

  They weren’t.

  At half-past ten in the morning a couple months after he’d gotten to Drummond, Dylan was called out of class by one of the guards, an old man who was scared of the bigger boys and made up for it on the littler ones.

  Ten a.m. was math class. Dylan hated being taken out so he didn’t move as fast or look as meek as he usually did when the guards told him to do something. The old guy made him pay by herding him down the hall with a bitter monologue: “You really think you’re something don’t you you little psycho if you’d been a kid of mine by god you’d never have picked up any axe or I’d have shown you what for and don’t think I won’t do it now you get any kind of idea… ”

  Dylan didn’t listen. None of the boys listened. Still the sourness of the man tainted the air. Drummond smelled old and cold. Under the pervasive odor of the benzene the janitors used was the reek of rancid fat, sweat, sauerkraut, farts and fear. The worst thing was that it didn’t smell like home, not like anybody’s home. At first the smell had made Dylan lonely and scared. Now he was okay with it. He was okay with Drummond. Where else could a kid like him be?

  On the second floor, above the classrooms and below where the Ward C boys
slept, a big hall had been cobbled up into a lot of small rooms with flimsy doors letting off a narrow hallway. Rat maze, the Ward C boys called it. The rooms didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, which was built of beams with this cobwebby chandelier made to look like thorny branches.

  The guard told Dylan to stop outside the third door then shouldered him aside as if he might be thinking of rushing through and murdering whoever was inside. Acting like he’d just saved the world from the forces of evil, the guard rapped on the wood. Dylan couldn’t help but look at the billy club on the old guy’s belt; it was all but sticking in his face. Maybe he wanted Dylan to try to take it so he could beat on him, or spray him with Mace and play the hero.

  Maybe he was just a stupid old man.

  One day it would get him killed.

  “Enter,” said a voice. Not “come in” or “just a minute,” but “enter,” like he was a king and they were his subjects.

  The guard pushed open the door and said, “Got your nutcase for you, Doc.” He stood aside and Dylan walked past him into a little office. Three of the walls were plywood, painted white. On one there was a nondescript picture of a foggy landscape, no glass in the frame. Dylan knew it was bolted to the wall; a bunch of similar murky paintings were bolted around Drummond. The story was they’d been done by a warden’s wife and he’d put them up. Maybe they thought it would make the place seem less like what it was.

  The other wall was of granite, like a castle from the movies. Against one of the plywood walls was a couch, not fancy leather but a faded cloth couch that had once been turquoise. A wing chair was beside it with a little round table at its arm. A single deep-set window let in a suggestion of the short winter day’s light.

  A middle-aged man, trim and fit looking, with carefully combed hair and long thin fingers, sat in the room’s only chair. He had a short beard and sandy graying hair. His beard was red and looked as if it belonged on somebody else.

  “I’m Dr. Kowalski,” he said and gestured to the couch.

  Lying down would be too weird. Dylan perched on the edge of the sofa. The doctor looked at him for a long time-so long Dylan had to stop himself from fidgeting.

  “So you’re the Butcher Boy,” the doctor said finally.

  Butcher Boy.

  Dylan had heard it before but for some reason this time the words made his brain skid forward and back. Time warped. For a second he was back in the courtroom in black and white and Chinese. Eleven years outside seemed as if they’d never happened and the months in juvie felt like all of his life. Life before rushed in, and then receded, and it shook him.

  The doctor wanted to shake him; at least Dylan chose to believe that. If it wasn’t a trick to get him to respond in a certain way, then Dr. Kowalski was “one mean fuck,” as Draco would say. One who wanted to pry Dylan’s brain out and look at it under bright lights. Fear shuddered up. He tried not to let it show.

  Rich wouldn’t let anybody see him scared.

  “Yes, sir,” Dylan said. The man stared at him. Edges of the fake room wavered slightly like they’d done at the trial. “Butcher Boy,” Dylan said, in case that was what the doctor was waiting for him to admit. If the man didn’t start talking soon, Dylan was afraid he wouldn’t be able to understand him, that his brain would turn on him like it had with the lawyers. Survival instinct told him Dr. Kowalski wouldn’t deal well with that.

  “And you don’t remember anything. That so?” the doctor said.

  “No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. I don’t remember.” He did remember bits here and there but he knew they weren’t the bits Kowalski cared about. Besides, he didn’t think the doctor really wanted him to answer; he sounded like he had all the answers already and was waiting to spring them.

  “I’m here to help you remember that night. I’ve worked with boys like you-men too. I wrote a book on a case of a woman who had blocked out drowning her infant daughter. Didn’t make the New York Times Best Seller List, but it sold well enough.” Dr. Kowalski smiled and waited.

  Having no idea what the New York Times list was or whether it was bad or good that the book didn’t get on it, Dylan looked at the murky oil painting over the doctor’s chair so his eyeballs had some place to be.

  “Do you believe that?” the doctor demanded.

  Dylan didn’t know if he was asking if he believed he was there to help him or that his book had sold well enough. Confusion was growing up thick as brambles in a fairytale.

  Tick, and tick, and tick, the doctor let more silence clock by. Dylan knew he should say something, remember something, but since he couldn’t he went as far into the murky picture as he could. The painting wasn’t laid out very well and it made him slide in his mind toward the trees on the left side. The warden’s wife wasn’t a very good artist, he decided.

  “So, tell me about your dreams,” the psychiatrist said. He crossed his legs like a girl and leaned back in his chair.

  Dylan came out of the painting with a twitch. The eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses were boring into him.

  “Should I lay down or something?” Dylan asked. The sofa looked clean but it smelled of damp and carbolic.

  “Do you want to lie down?”

  The way he asked the question made it sound important. Not knowing whether he was supposed to want to lie down or not to want to lie down, or if the doctor would think he was going to kill people if he did the wrong thing, Dylan did nothing.

  Dr. Kowalski sighed.

  Nothing was clearly not the right thing to do, Dylan knew then, but it was too late to do anything about it.

  “Tell me about your dreams,” the doctor repeated.

  Usually Dylan dreamed a lot and vividly but as he cast back in his mind he couldn’t recall a single dream. It could have been the drugs they gave him at night, but he guessed it was because the doctor was being so screwy he could hardly think.

  Kowalski nodded sagely. “You’re afraid to dream,” he said. “Your unconscious mind is afraid to let you relive the bloodshed.” He jotted something down on a little note pad.

  Dylan flinched. A dream jerked loose from his brain. He had dreamed. A vivid dream. “I remember,” he said excitedly.

  The doctor leaned forward, his eyes intense.

  “I was outside,” Dylan said. “Me and Rich were playing a game or something and Mom called from the backdoor for us to come in. When we went in she was putting supper on the table and a dog was sitting at the table in a chair like a person and we all laughed.”

  Doctor Kowalski waited, pursed his lips so his whiskers fanned out around his mouth, then leaned back again.

  “That’s it,” Dylan said. “That’s all I remember.” The doctor didn’t believe him; he thought Dylan made up the dream to prove his unconscious mind or whatever wasn’t hiding the things that happened.

  “Shall I lay down now?” Dylan asked desperately. Dr. Olson had been hinting he might get out of the psych ward soon and he needed to do one right thing before the psychiatrist pushed him down the rabbit hole and his head shut down.

  “Do you want to?” the doctor asked disapprovingly. He was just asking; it didn’t mean anything now.

  For a while longer the psychiatrist asked questions. They weren’t the kind of questions anybody should ask. He wanted to know how many bowel movements Dylan had every day and if he liked the way they smelled and if he touched them. When the hour was over, Dylan thought he might actually be glad to get back to the psych ward.

  The guard didn’t come for him. Draco did.

  “You get any good drugs?” Draco asked.

  Dylan didn’t know he was supposed to but he didn’t want to seem like a dork. “Nothing good,” he said.

  “You get, you share.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re alright,” Draco said. They walked down the narrow fake hall where partitions chopped up the once gracious room. “You gotta get out of psych,” Draco said suddenly. “You stay in psych you’re gonna be crazy as a loon in no time. Seriously. They make y
ou one crazy fuck in there. Get out.”

  Dylan believed him. He could feel himself becoming one crazy fuck after just an hour with the psychiatrist. “How do I get out?” he asked.

  Draco thought for a minute. “What you gotta do is act like you want to stay. You know, like you’re sane but you want the easy life, the extra food, the bigger space, like that. You got to ask for drugs, not like you need ’em but like you like ’em for the high. They don’t know squat; they don’t know those aren’t, like, recreational drugs, you know. Catch 22 man. You do that and they’ll put you in Ward C before you can say, ‘Lithium.’”

  “Will I still have to talk to Dr. Kowalski?” Dylan asked.

  “Nothing is going to get you loose from Dr. K. He’ll suck your brain out and use it for toilet paper.”

  Dylan believed it. “I’m already a few squares low,” he confided and Draco laughed.

  “This candy-assed shrink is going to duh-rug you, fill you so full of pills you aren’t going to know whether you’re saluting the flag or beating your meat.” Draco let out a whoop like this was good news.

  “You’re so fucking crazy, we’re going to end up millionaires.”

  LOUISIANA, 2007

  Charlie Starkweather. Bunch of folks killed. 1958. This one’s ancient history. I don’t know why I have to do Charlie. But he’s easy. He lived in Nebraska. If that’s not a good reason to start shooting, what is? It was probably winter, and he just went nuts. Back then, they were all into this bad-boy thing. I mean like Billy the Kid, but modern day. There were those movies and stuff about bad boys and how cool they were; women wanted to sleep with them. They just did what they wanted. Took what they wanted. Then died in a blaze of glory. That looks pretty good from where I sit. Instead of rotting in some little Nebraska berg, you grab a great car and go around the country with your girlfriend, and you live high on the hog, and if anybody tries to stop you, you just shoot them and drive off. I bet Charlie was seeing himself as a Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde kind of guy, just having a high old time. Putting the baby down the outhouse hole. I couldn’t do that. She’s crying and all, but there’s nobody around for a million miles, so why not let her cry? She was too little to identify them.