Good Kings Bad Kings

by Susan Nussbaum

  “Oh, Teddy. I’m sorry to hear it.” He must know something about what happened, but what he’s thinking about whatever version of events he’s heard is unclear.

  “Don’t be.”

  I say, “That’s too bad. I bet she could use a friend now more than ever.”

  He just stares at the sidewalk. He shakes his head but looks like he’s afraid he’ll cry if he says anything. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze a couple times. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It was such a good day so far. I should have let the feeling last a little longer.

  Teddy Dobbs

  Bernard says, “Jerry was a freak. You know that just as good as anybody in this place.”

  “If she didn’t like him, then why didn’t she tell nobody? That’s what I would do. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  Bernard says, “Not everybody does what you do. Did Yessie tell you anything?”

  “She said I’m a asshole. But if Mia don’t say nothing—”

  “Well, maybe she didn’t know what to do,” Bernard says. “Maybe she just didn’t know.”

  Bernard never gets mad. I’m mad ’cause now everybody’s ganging up on me for being mad at Mia when she’s the one who didn’t talk to me or say nothing all this time.

  “She never thought how I could feel,” I says, “so I ain’t trying to be worrying about her.”

  “Well, maybe she was afraid you’d go all crazy. Like you are right now.”

  Bernard threw his ciggie butt into the empty swimming pool. I ain’t trying to be crazy. I don’t wanna feel this way. But Mia was my fiancée and she should’ve told me if she had a boyfriend, especially if it was Jerry. I can’t even believe that part. All I know is I feel bad.

  I says, “Yessie said Jerry forced her. You think that’s what happened?”

  “Yeah, man. That shit happens to girls. They don’t want it, but dang.” Bernard lit another ciggie. “You wanna puff?” he says.

  “She didn’t want Jerry to be her boyfriend but he made her be?”

  “Yeah, man. There’s no boyfriend-girlfriend thing about it.”

  I says, “You think Mia wants to get back engaged with me?”

  “Just talk to her.”

  “Just say, ‘Mia, I wanna talk to you’?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”

  I says, “She probably could use a friend right now more than ever. Is that what you think?”

  “Yeah, man. Can always use a friend.”

  “Maybe I could talk to her.”

  Bernard says, “I probably have to move back in with my mom. Her diabetes is getting worse.”

  “But her place ain’t even assessable.”

  “I didn’t say I want to. I said I have to. She needs the money from my check real bad to buy medicine.”

  “How are you gonna get in and out? How you gonna go to school?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I could go sometimes if one of my sisters or brothers can come and bump me down the stairs.” Bernard shrugs his shoulders like he don’t care. His mom’s place is up three flights and his brothers and sisters don’t always like him asking them.

  I go, “When you gotta go?”

  “It ain’t set yet. Pretty soon, I think.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Me neither,” he says.

  “Bernard, when I get my own place, you gotta move in with me.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “It’ll be my place. If I want you to move in it’s okay.”

  We sat there for a while and then we left.

  Ricky Hernandez

  There’s this girl at the place. She’s like eleven. Ten or eleven. Cleo. Little girl. Little ponytail off to the side of her head. They always put it in a ponytail. You know, the houseparents. Her head is a little pointy on top—I don’t mean she’s a pinhead or anything. That ain’t what I’m saying. But I think they put the ponytail off to the side to—whatever—to draw your eye away from the way her head is shaped or whatever. Which is cool. Accentuate the positive and all that. I don’t know Cleo too good but from what I do know, she has friends, you always see her with her little group because most of them have their friends they hang with. She ain’t a standout. She ain’t a leader-of-the-pack type. She’s a little shy. And Mrs. Velasquez who is a sub, a substitute, but she’s around a lot because the teachers get sick—she has me paged to come and take somebody out of the class, I get there and it’s this Cleo. Fine. Whatever. So I get in there, they’re all in the gym or they call it a gym but it’s more like a minigym, everybody’s playing catch with this—a beach ball. It’s therapy or phys ed or something. Cleo is sitting by herself, she’s a chair person so she’s in her chair, not acting out, not making trouble, just sitting. So I’m like, “What’s the problem?”

  Teacher says, “She’s not playing.”

  I’m like, “And?”

  She says, “Cleo has to learn that she can’t come to gym class and sit on the sidelines whenever she wants. Gym is just as important as any class.”

  The fuck do they find these teachers?

  I say, “Okay, well, what do you want me to do with her?”

  “I think she might like spending some time thinking it over in the time-out room. Would you like that, Cleo?”

  I’m just standing there thinking, “You are an asshole,” and little Cleo is still deadpanning it. Here’s a kid, she’s not doing a damn thing, so what do they want? They want to stick the kid, by herself, into a stinky room, size of a doughnut hole. Kid is either—either doing too much of something or too little of something. Fuck you, Mrs. Velasquez. So I say okay and I take ahold of Cleo’s chair. “For the rest of the class period,” Mrs. Velasquez says. By then I’m at the door and she says, “Did you hear me?” so I just act like, “No, I didn’t hear you,” and keep on pushing Cleo down the hall.

  I’m wiped. Up half the night helping Consuela move. Something went down in her neighborhood, a shooting, a drive-by, two blocks away, two people killed. So she can’t stay there and I don’t mind helping. My sister’s helped me out more than once. It works two ways.

  Consuela got me a job at a loading dock once. She worked there in the office and she got me a job loading and unloading trucks. First day I’m there this guy, Joe something, is showing me around and I’m thinking like, “No problem,” but the second day is my first full day, right? Get there at the crack of dawn and start unloading these semis which’re, oh, man, packed solid with boxes. We’re talking big, heavy mothers, you know, like boxes from Panasonic filled with TVs or all this electrical equipment, or bicycles which Panasonic actually makes bicycles which was news to me. Lots of different companies though, Foot Locker, Levi’s—huge boxes of Levi’s. Boxes filled with microwaves, office supplies, Sealy mattresses. The mattresses were brutal. But everything you could think of. We’d be unloading these things with nothing but solid muscle, one after another. You’d have ten boxes going to wherever, like Eau Claire, Wisconsin, you’d separate out the boxes, load them onto a two-wheeler, and pack them into another semi. Forty boxes to Rensselaer or Joliet or Wauwatosa. You know, Timbuktu. End of the first day I’m crawling up the stairs to my apartment. I hated it at first. But it got better. After a while I was the go-to guy. They wanted to know where whatever boxes were going, they’d ask me. This one guy, Bill? He used to get Joliet and Beloit mixed up. He’d say, “Hey, Enrique, where’s fuckin’ Boliet?” They called me my real name there. I’d say, “You dyslexic prick, it’s Beloit, not Boliet.” It actually turned into a pretty fun job. I stayed there seven years. Laid off in ’06.

  I feel bad putting Cleo in the time-out room. It’s not right to put a kid in here when it’s dirty like this. Especially a girl. Or a boy.

  “Which way do you want to face?” I say to Cleo. “Not like there’s anything to see, but do you have a preference? Of which way? I tell you what. The only thing to look at is smelly carpet. But if you face this way, see that little window? You can see my handsome face. Ha-ha.
No, just kidding. But if you look up. And I can wave at you now and then. How about that?”

  Ta-da! She nods her head. All right, Cleo!

  So I say, “If you need anything, just wave, okay? Or just say, ‘Hey, you.’ I’ll be right at that window.”

  Then I go out and look through the window, and sure enough, she’s looking at me. I give her a little wave and she waves back. Next thing I do? Genius that I am. Is fall asleep.

  I must’ve been out—maybe ten or fifteen minutes? It was so quiet I didn’t know where I was for a second. I’m thinking, “What time is it? Is it time to pick the kids up at Hoover?” Then I realize I’m by the time-out room and I have to remind myself what kid is in there. Pierre? Vernell? Cleo. I look in the window and the first thing I see is this person and it—it doesn’t look like Cleo. So I go running in.

  I say, “Cleo, Cleo, what happened? What’d you do? What’d you do? Oh—oh, baby!”

  She must’ve had a Magic Marker in her pocket. She’s covered with purple ink. She colored herself in. Not just her skin but, like, everything. Her hands, her fingernails, her face—her whole face. She colored her eyelids, her ears, her teeth even—she colored her teeth.

  I say, “Cleo, why’d you do this?” But she doesn’t say nothing. Just that same deadpan as before.

  So that was how my day started.

  I’m parked over on—I don’t even know—Ogden. I’m waiting here before I go pick up the kids by Hoover. I’d park by the school itself but you can’t breathe over there. Every day, just before school is over, maybe a half hour before it lets out, there’s about five or six school buses that line up in front of the place, and they all keep the motors running the whole time they’re waiting. Diesel fumes everywhere. The whole place is like a mushroom cloud. Most times I try and pull up right as they get out so I don’t have to breathe in that crap for too long. After I get my ten or twelve kids in the ILLC bus I pull away fast and stop a few blocks down so I can help two of them with their inhalers. That’s how bad it is. I don’t give those two a hit, they’re in the ER with a breathing attack.

  I can’t remember feeling this bad. Jo and me were in bed a couple nights ago and I’m telling her I don’t like myself. All I do all day is punish these children. It used to be I could more focus on the driving part, and when we’re in the bus—when me and the kids are in the bus everything’s cool. We got our own little kingdom, you know? But more and more all they want me to do is lock them up or hold them down and I hate it. I hate it.

  And Joanne says to me, “Maybe you need to think about getting out. Doing something else.”

  I’m like, “Yeah, but then I think they’ll get some other gorilla instead of me and at least if I’m doing the job it’s one less psycho they got in there messing with them, you know?”

  “Raping them,” she says.

  Neither one of us talks for a while after she says that.

  I say, “I have these fantasies in my head. All the time, I’ll be walking down the hall at ILLC or driving the bus or brushing my teeth and the whole time I’m dreaming about killing Jerry. But slow-killing him. I want him to suffer. Smashing his head into a concrete wall over and over till his brains start coming out. Pretty fucked up, right?”

  Joanne says, “No, it’s not fucked up. I can understand that.”

  I say, “You think that’s normal?”

  She says, “I think you’re normal. If you were someone who would really do that, that would be bad.”

  I say, “Is that your foot?” and she says, “I don’t know,” and I say, “You can’t feel that?” and she says, “Not really,” and I say, “I’m gonna try harder to not leave my shoes around the house,” and she says, “Good. Are you saying that because I can’t feel my foot?” and I tell her, “Because I got big shoes and I’m leaving them around too much and I saw you tonight, you didn’t see it was behind you and you rolled over it, and the chair—your wheelchair kinda tipped.” She says, “I love you,” and I say, “I love you too.”

  She says, “You do have giant shoes. They’re like pieces of furniture.”

  I can hear a bunch of kids’ voices in the distance now. They must be letting them out of school. I open the window to let some cold air come in, help me wake up. Why does my sister always need me to help her move the night before I gotta work the next day?

  Maybe I’ll stop off at the Dunkin’ Donuts and get some coffee on the way back to ILLC. A “coffee creation.” Box of doughnut holes for the kids. They’ll love that. Grease-and-sugar balls, just what they all need.

  Michelle Volkmann

  A girl died at Riverwood again, one of our IMDs. In Illinois that stands for institution for mental diseases. I don’t know what other states call it. Anyway, a girl in Riverwood that Whitney-Palm runs, she died under weird circumstances. They found her sitting in front of the TV like six hours after she died and by then she had rigor mortis. The thing is, she was sitting in a wheelchair, but she could walk. Before she died she could walk, I mean. So why was she sitting in a wheelchair? I thought that was weird. She was tied into the wheelchair. One of my co-workers, Margo, and I were talking about it and we thought maybe the girl was on really, really strong meds, medicine, and she kept like falling over so they had to tie her. But she was tied really tight and she suffocated from it. That actually happens, especially if a person’s breathing is slow from the meds. Another way it might have happened is—and this would be horrible but not unusual—is if someone was sitting on her and she suffocated. Sometimes if a patient acts up they make him or her lie on the floor facedown and sit on them until they calm down, and if the aide isn’t careful the patient can die. But since the patient was on meds already she probably wouldn’t have been acting up. And if she died from being sat on, they would have had to put her into the wheelchair after she was dead. When you work around these places too much? Your mind starts coming up with all kinds of crazy theories. Anyway, it took six hours before someone even noticed her in the wheelchair. I guess they thought she was sleeping. I don’t know what they thought. Honestly? I wouldn’t say this out loud but I don’t think they cared.

  Tim is furious. Whitney-Palm will probably have to pay another fine because the girl’s parents told the state they wanted an investigation. They’re going to do an autopsy. Autopsies take a long time because the coroner’s office is so busy. They have a bunch of pathologists who all they do is bodies from nursing homes and IMDs. But even though that’s all they do, they’re still really backed up. When they do an autopsy faster it’s because the death is under mysterious circumstances, so you’re more likely to get a big fine. To be honest with you, I don’t know why Tim is as mad as he is because it’s not like anyone ever pays the fines anyway. At the most Whitney-Palm will end up paying 20 percent of the fine, and the state will be completely thrilled to just take whatever money they can get. That’s how desperate they are.

  I was looking in Whitney-Palm’s annual report and the company donated $765,000 last year to politicians. I remember meeting two of the politicians because they both stopped by the office over a year ago. State legislators. At the time I thought it was strange, I mean for a Democrat and a Republican to be together like that. Whitney-Palm must give money to their campaigns so the politicians won’t do anything that would be bad for companies that run nursing homes and IMDs.

  Today is the day we have our big meeting with the staff people who work directly with the nursing facilities we manage. Three different people including me gave reports on what we found from our research at three different Whitney-Palm contracts. My report was on ILLC and I made charts showing how much each area cost, for example medical supplies or food. Then I showed how much on average each individual resident used of each area, in other words cost per resident. Also I had charts showing number of aide hours on average per resident and cost per aide and all the other staff too. Then I made recommendations for streamlining and creating higher efficiency by implementing more up-to-date technology.

  A
fter I was done, Tim said it was very good but he wondered if we could think out of the box more about creative strategies for increasing revenue. He said did I visit the patient floors and I said yes. He asked how many beds were in each room and I said two. He said what if we increased the number of beds per room?

  Wow. I never thought of that.

  I said, “Well, the rooms don’t have much extra space. Some of the space has stuff in it already like medical equipment. But even if that wasn’t there, I don’t think you could fit another bed in very easily.”

  Tim said, “Okay. But think about it. There may be a way of reconfiguring the beds so an extra bed could in fact fit comfortably in the room. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of looking at it from a different angle.”

  I said, “Okay.” I disagree but I’m not going to stress out about it. There’s nothing I can do anyway. Not if Tim wants it that way.

  Tim said, “Why don’t you get the actual dimensions of the room and the beds and look at it again. Sound good?”

  I said, “Yes. I’ll do it this week.”

  Tim said, “Good girl. Let me know what you find.”

  Then he said that was the kind of creative thinking he depended on. He said I was a great example and everyone should learn from me. I’m not sure if I was an example of good or bad, but he was smiling.

  There really is not any more room for beds.

  After all the reports were finished, Tim led a very serious discussion on the outcome of the Pine Hills case. That’s another of the facilities we oversee where there was a big mess. Pine Hills looks like a giant castle from England, at least that’s what it looks like from outside. I’ve only seen pictures. Anyway, it’s another place for developmentally disabled children. It’s not where the girl who got suffocated was. This is a different facility. But it’s a huge deal because what happened there was in the newspapers and Whitney-Palm will have to pay another fine and some politicians said it should be bigger than what we usually pay.