Good Kings Bad Kings

by Susan Nussbaum

  So I’m back in the Neon. I gotta admit, I feel a little bit stupid. Looking back at my whatever. The Notebook Caper. Why challenge the guy? He’s just another cop, right? Stupid guy crap, you know, you learn it coming up, and that’s the way you do things. You defend your manhood or whatever bullshit you tell yourself.

  It just bugs me that some people are even allowed around kids. Louie, a guy who couldn’t even make it as a prison guard. “Oh, he’s too big a creep to deal with prisoners? Let him take care of kids.” And Candy. I could more see her in a job like, you know, mortician or toxic waste cleanup. Something like that, where she could use her people skills.

  Something like that.

  Yessenia Lopez

  I was sitting with Fantasia, Amber, and Ree Ree after we four had got our trays. It was lunchtime. Jimmie was there too because she was cutting up Fantasia’s meatballs and spaghetti. Ree Ree is my roommate since Cheri got sent away. I don’t like Ree Ree and I don’t hate her. She’s just there. She’s fourteen, two years younger than me, but she looks like about ten years old on account of being small for her age and she acts young. Like she’s always asking questions. “Yessie, will you put makeup on me?” “Yessie, can I go with you?” “Yessie, can I sit next to you?” And she laughs a little tinkly laugh at every damn thing I say and I know I’m funny but I’m not that funny. Jimmie told me just be patient ’cause I don’t know nothing about her yet, so I am trying to give the child a chance. Lord knows, I am trying.

  One other thing about Ree Ree that I don’t like—and I know I’m being bad to say so, but I can’t help it—the girl has something funny in her eye. Funny like disgusting. Just one eye only. It looks like somebody dropped a blob of snot right on her eye. Not on the white part? But on the eye, on the brown part. The eye itself. It just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t wanna look at her because I don’t wanna see that one eyeball staring out at me.

  But Ree Ree ain’t the reason I’m telling about being in the lunchroom eating meatballs and spaghetti and garlic bread and waxy beans or waxed beans or whatever that crap is.

  It was Jimmie, Louie, and Mr. Hudson was the adults. Mr. Hudson teaches the kids what can’t go to school on the account they might be too sick or have to stay in their bed. I love Mr. Hudson. He’s the nicest, least strictest teacher in this whole place and he always stops and says, “Hi, how are you, Yessenia?” and jokes around with you and he’s just really, really cool.

  So we was all—us four girls and Jimmie—talking and just minding our own sweet businesses when all of a sudden there’s a whole lotta yelling going on like three tables away. And I see Louie is grabbing at Pierre Washington’s tray of food and Pierre won’t let go of that sucker even though Pierre is little and skinny and Louie’s big and reminds me of a damn skinhead. You know who he reminds me of? This guy called Meatstick that used to work at the Chili Shack near Hoover. Anyway, hunks of food start falling offa the tray, like little meatballs go flying through the air and waxy beans just plopping down all over the floor. Then Louie got the tray away from Pierre and Pierre says, “You fucker!” and Louie says, “Pick up that mess! Pick up that mess right now, you little freak!” and Mr. Hudson like breaks in and says, “What’s the problem here? Louie! You got to calm down. Louie!” and Louie says, “He’s on a delayed lunch and he don’t belong in here and he knows it!” and Pierre says, “You a liar!” and Louie says, “You’re outta here, you stinking little shit!” and he grabs Pierre on the arm and Pierre hollers and Mr. Hudson—he grabs onto Louie’s arm and says, “Louie! Calm down! Let go of that child!”

  So Louie lets go of Pierre but he more like jerks him away than just letting him go and Pierre falls down and Mr. Hudson goes, “Louie, I am supervising here today and they give me the list of who gets what kind of lunch”—he meant because some kids can’t eat regular food, okay?—“who gets what kind of lunch and Pierre’s name is right here and they would’ve told me if he was on a delayed lunch, so why don’t you just let him eat.”

  That only made Louie more mad, so he says, “Get off my dick!” Right to Mr. Hudson’s face! Louie done lost his mind. He must have realized at that same minute that he went too far ’cause he did back off then. He even helped Pierre up offa the floor and gets him to sit down. There’s practically no food left on Pierre’s tray, so Mr. Hudson sends Jason Remke to make him a new tray and Mr. Hudson sits down and everybody goes back to what they was doing and Ree Ree is up in my face asking what happen and why’d he do that and am I scared and every other stupid thing and I says, “You’re sitting here seeing the same shit as I am, so why you asking me?”

  And just when I’m saying that, Pierre must have had him a pencil. Or he grabbed up somebody else’s pencil, but before you even know what’s happening Pierre is up and racing with his ricket legs at Louie and he sticks that pencil right in Louie’s chest. And Louie let out a scream like a pig just got stabbed by a butcher knife. Oh my Lord Jesus, it was the greatest thing I seen at ILLC since I been here! But now Louie’s really mad and he stands up and the pencil is still in him wobbling around and he raises his arm up over Pierre’s head and wham! He slams Pierre so hard that Pierre’s feet go right out from under him and it look like he’s just hanging in the air for a second till all of a sudden he goes down. But Louie wasn’t done yet. Pierre was all curled up in a itty-bitty knot on the floor and Louie looks like he’s gonna kill him.

  I guess my eyes were all on Louie and Pierre because I swear I never even seen Jimmie coming. First thing I see is her big paw clamping onto Louie’s neck and—I can’t explain it—it looks like she’s dancing with him, like they’re just gliding along until Louie’s body slams up against the wall and she’s holding him there with her one hand on his neck and her other arm pulled back in a fist the size of a bear paw. Her face didn’t even look mad.

  All of us kids started in cheering and screaming, “Jim-mie! Jim-mie!” You could see that Jimmie was saying something to Louie too, real close-up so nobody else could hear, and Louie’s face was real red and his eyes popped out and looked all still and straight ahead, so whatever it was Jimmie said, it must’ve been good.

  They hadda send for two ambulances, one for Pierre and one for Louie and his pencil. It had fell out of him when Jimmie pushed him up against the wall but he was still holding his chest like he was dying even though there wasn’t even any blood. He only got a couple stitches and that was that. Just a little scratch. Why they even bother threading a needle? Let the Meatstick bleed is what I say.

  Pierre got hurt bad. Louie broke that boy’s jaw. When I broke Mary Molina’s jaw they put my ass in prison, so I bet Louie’s gonna get a whole library of books thrown at his ass.

  Everybody’s talking about it with everybody. I got a picture of Pierre getting beat down in my brain, and it keeps playing over and over in my head. Pierre’s a runt and Louie has big muscles like a redneck con. Then I think of Cheri being took away and put in el manicomio even though I wasn’t there, and that girl Maricela at Juvie when she come outta the Hole and she couldn’t even talk.

  I found Jimmie after she came out from being talked to by the po-lice about what happened at the cafeteria. I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t want to go to my room because Ree Ree was there. So we went out to Jimmie’s car in the parking lot and I got out of my chair and we sat in the front seat together. It makes me feel like I must be doing something right to have a friend like Jimmie. I got a picture of Jimmie in my brain too, the part where she pins Louie up against the wall with her one hand on his fat neck and she has her other hand ready to break his face whenever she felt like it. I said, “Jimmie, girl, what the hell did you say to Louie when we couldn’t hear?” Jimmie says, “Oh, nothing much.” Do you believe that woman? I kept on asking and she just kept on saying, “Nothing much, nothing much.” Finally she said, “Really. I just told him not to mess with any of you kids anymore. Or something like that.”

  I won’t never forget how Louie looked. And I won’t never forget what Jimmie
did. None of us children or young adults will.

  Michelle Volkmann

  Ever since the little boy killed himself and they printed up all those horror stories about Pine Hills and the rapes and stuff, Tim has wanted us to all be extracareful to make sure we know what’s going on at the different places we—meaning Whitney-Palm—manage. So yesterday I had to drive out to Riverwood Juvenile Mental Health Hospital and stay overnight at a Days Inn in Aurora, Illinois. Kill me right now if I ever end up living there. On the drive over I’m thinking how Tim should really give me a raise because this was not in my job description. The thing about recruiting is that I can make a big bonus every time I get a new person and now I’m just on my salary which is not that great and I’ll probably have to move because my lease is up in two months and I know my landlord is going to raise my rent and two nights ago my engine light went on.

  Plus my best friend Ariel is getting married to this guy—his actual name is Guy which fits him perfectly because he is so generic—they fight constantly and he throws stuff at her and she calls me up crying. I say, “Ariel, why would you marry someone who throws a cell phone at your head?” But I’m the maid of honor so I have to get a dress plus the wedding itself is in Duluth so I have to buy a plane ticket and there’s the present which has to cost at least a hundred. I can’t afford to do that on my salary.

  I practiced asking for a raise out loud in my car. I said, “Tim, I know the company is going through a really hard time right now.” Which is a lie. Maybe I’m wrong but it doesn’t seem like it’s that hard of a time because Tim bought a house in Florida which I saw a picture of online and it’s huge and his wife is decorating it, so he bought her a Lexus so she could drive around while she’s there. So that’s real nice for her but why do I have to hear about it when my car is a piece-of-garbage rusty gas-guzzler?

  Today I’m supposed to be at Riverwood by 7:00 a.m. to see how things are when the shift changes and stay there all day and answer questions on a giant checklist. But first I’m having the continental breakfast which is just coffee and a croissant which was obviously frozen and they nuked it.

  I’m sure it will be depressing. I mean, it is a mental hospital, so. Also, they don’t know I’m coming. Usually if they know someone’s coming they clean up a little better or as this guy Kevin at Whitney-Palm says, “They hide the bodies,” but that’s not really funny anymore. They probably won’t go haywire if a Whitney-Palm person comes by surprise. They only get upset if it’s someone from Family Services or the public guardian’s office.

  Believe it or not, I’ve never been to Riverwood before. It’s just this beige brick building near some old train tracks that must not get used anymore because they have weeds and grass and stuff growing around the tracks. There are some stores too, like a Denny’s and a place you can buy giant spools of wire if you happen to need a giant spool of wire, and a shoe repair store with dusty shoes in the window.

  Along the way, there are places with FOR RENT signs on them, like a hardware store and a bridal store with naked female mannequins in the window and other places you can’t really tell what they are or used to be. There aren’t very many people around but that could be the area. I go into the beige building and of course I have to get buzzed in because this is a mental hospital. There’s a little tiny room behind glass with wire in it where I show them my ID from Whitney-Palm, and then this African American guy has to unlock the elevator for me to even get on. Then he takes away my purse and cell phone and my scarf and makes me go through a metal detector. I asked him how come he needs my scarf and he said because someone could come up behind me and strangle me.

  There’s a room where they make the parents wait to visit their children. There’s a sign with the visiting hours which are Tuesdays or Thursdays between six o’clock and seven thirty. Only one visitor is allowed at a time.

  Finally I get to go in the main hospital. The walls are this tannish color and they have those fluorescent lights that keep buzzing and buzzing.

  It’s real quiet except for the buzzing, so I guess the patients are still sleeping and the staff is doing their switch-over to the next shift. I go to the nurses’ station and there’s another African American guy sitting there and he looks exactly like the first guy. Because he’s big, I mean. He’s wearing a T-shirt and he has really developed muscles. I tell him I’m from Whitney-Palm and ask where the nurses are meeting and he just ignores me like I don’t exist. So I say, “Excuse me, can I ask a question, please?” and I tell him again and he says, “I need to see ID,” and I tell him no problem, but hello, the first guy took my purse with my ID in it, so he waits there for about a minute and neither of us says a word and then he gets up and walks away like nothing even happened. Well, thanks. Finally he comes back and starts walking in another direction. Then he turns around and says, “Are you coming or not?” God! He unlocks the door to another room where there are these two women sitting having coffee.

  I introduce myself and ask if I’m in the right place for the report session. It’s just a head nurse and a Hispanic nurse. The head nurse asks if I have ID, and I’m totally exasperated and I explain—again—so they start going through the list of patients and reporting how they were last night like did they sleep okay or did they act out, what meds they’re on, all sorts of things. Then I hear the name Cheri Smith and I’m thinking, “This is weird,” and I know it can’t be the same girl because she’s at ILLC but maybe she had her schizophrenia act up and they sent her here. Oh my God, I really hope not. Smith is a very common name but not Cheri, but they pronounced it like “cherry,” so maybe it’s a different person. I’m going through my checklist and under “Shift Change” I check “Orderly and efficient.” I asked them where are the other nurses and they look at me and say there aren’t any. But the head nurse says they have a lot of assistance from the patient-care techs. So I say, “Oh, where are they?” And she said the guy who unlocked the door was one of them.

  I’m supposed to walk down the halls and look in the rooms now, but honestly? I feel uncomfortable. So I stay in the TV area until they come out. I look at my checklist and for “Condition of the Common Area?” I check “Clean” but I put a “No” by “Cheerful.” It’s really not. It’s ugly and almost bare. There’s some random books and games like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. There’s a poster of a hot air balloon and another one of three hot air balloons. And one about being courteous, but that’s about it. I’m pretty sure they have the exact same hot air balloon poster at ILLC. Maybe all these places get the hot air balloon poster. There’s a couch with orange-and-blue plastic seat cushions and the TV is on even though no one is in there. One thing about these kinds of places is the TV is always on.

  After a while the patients start coming out. It’s pretty slow because I guess all the rooms are filled but they only have those two nurses. And the seven patient-care techs or PCTs. Next to “Ratio of Staff to Patients” I write, “Enough nurses?”

  I haven’t seen Cheri yet, so that’s a good sign.

  Some of the girls here are very young. It starts at twelve. A PCT guy, who isn’t as big as the first two guys but almost, is giving them trays and they eat the food but kind of slow and they talk to each other a little bit. The TV has Supermarket Sweep, so they like that. Every now and then another girl comes out and sits down. The PCT guy gives each girl a tray and says, “Good morning, ladies. How are you this morning?” and they say fine but most of them are still pretty sleepy. They look normal, not that I was expecting them to look abnormal, but they really do look normal. I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess they take strong meds which makes them walk slower and only talk a little but they basically look normal, like I said. When the guy talks to them individually they perk up. So that’s good. I still haven’t seen Cheri, so I go up to him and say, “Are these all the patients?” and he says, “Not all. Some of them take breakfast in their rooms.” At least this PCT talks to me.

  Well. I guess I should go look in the rooms. I pu
t “No” next to “Do the food handlers wear hairnets?”

  There are windows in every door, so I start looking in the windows a little bit at a time. The rooms are small. There’s a decent-size window in the door but in the room the windows have wire mesh. There’s a little dresser and a closet that’s anchored to the wall and not much else. There’s a sink but no mirror and no place to put personal things like shampoo. The showers must be someplace else. Most of the rooms have two beds. Some of the girls are still in bed. There are names written next to each room. Coleman. Elston. Gomez. Garner.

  The rooms aren’t too cheerful, so I cross that word off the list. They look clean. But the lights keep buzzing so loud and my head is beginning to pound. I hope I’m not getting one of my migraines. In one room there’s a teenage girl brushing her teeth really slowly and a female PCT folding some clothes. In another room there is a girl lying on her bed in her underwear. In another room there is a girl sitting on her bed with a helmet on her head.

  When I get to the room that says “Cheri Smith,” I admit that it must be my Cheri. I can’t really see at first because she’s still lying on her bed. There’s a tray of food on a hospital table and the PCT is sitting there and he’s that asshole from before. “Eat your breakfast, Cherry. Turn around and sit up now, please.” But she doesn’t move. So he pulls her into a sitting position. It’s Cheri but not Cheri. Her eyes are almost closed and her mouth is open. When he lets go of her she slides back down in her bed. I move back from the window and turn around and start walking. Someone says, “Miss? Are you leaving?” And I walk a little faster to the elevator and press the button but it’s locked. I look around for help and get the nice PCT to call someone on his walkie-talkie. Then he fiddles with his key ring for a while and unlocks the elevator. Downstairs the guy at the desk gives me my things and I walk as fast as I can down the street, past the giant spools of wire and past the closed diner and the shoes and the Denny’s, and then I get in my car and drive.