by Neely Tucker
“So I just don’t see the reason, if it’s so easy to walk in there, why it’s a big deal to bring one lousy visitor with you one time.”
“Why you want to talk to this man if he crazy?”
“He tried to kill me.”
“Maybe he’s not crazy.”
“Why is Reggie up in there, anyhow? Canan Hall, right? The baddest of the bad?”
“Why is Uncle Reggie in St. E’s,” Sly said, leaning back in the chair, pausing to watch a lady walk her dog past the restaurant, then cross Maryland Avenue, heading for the corner store. It was a weird little dog, all the hair poofed up around its neck, the rest of him looking like he’d been skinned. “Used to not see white people ’round here at all. Now you got girlfriend here, walking the dog. My grandfather, he got himself killed just after the riots in Red Summer, 1919, you know about that?”
Sully nodded.
“He, his name was Lester, Lester Hastings. Sold life insurance to the black folks. Did real well at it, had been to Howard. A race man. He knew Du Bois, I mean, for real. The Talented Tenth. Then he got hisself killed and we wasn’t the talented shit.”
“What happened?”
“Got pulled off a streetcar. Year after the riots. Crackers beat him like a dog in an alley. Left him there. He crawls out, some brother sees him, take him home, he dies two days later. Intestinal, no, internal bleeding. Septicemia. Blood poisoning. Not a good way to go. They had their own house, over in Anacostia. He died and Grandma went broke in ten minutes. Get this. He sold life insurance? But he didn’t have any hisself. Just, I mean, Jesus. House repossessed, the family went to boarding houses, back rooms, public housing.
“Grandma’s a drunk by then, you know? Worked at a saloon, gave it up for extra cash, to pay the rent, whatever. Reggie, he got born in ’35, not even after a year after my mother got born. Different fathers, so my mom always said. Who knows. Reggie wasn’t ever right in the head. Got sent up to St. E’s in 1981, I think it was. Drunk or high or crazy or all three all the time. Got through fifth, maybe sixth grade. Stabbed two niggers and shot another, was doing life on the installment plan at Lorton. So one day they send him up to St. E’s for evaluation.”
“And been there ever since,” Sully said.
“And been there ever since. But, look, the real story, you want it straight up, is that we couldn’t take him back, hear? He’s family, but you know what a pain in the ass crazy people are? Tearing shit up, yelling at three in the morning, eating the neighbor’s flowers, barking at they dog, getting a gun and shooting up the house, pistol-whipping other crazies in the parking lot of that whore hotel on New York Ave.? My mother, she had her own shit to deal with, me and a drug habit, both. She passed, there wasn’t nobody left for him.”
“Except you.”
“Except me.”
“How often you go see him?”
“Once a month. Sometimes twice.”
“For how long?”
“Since 1981, the year he went in.”
Sully sat back. That was nineteen years, nineteen times twelve visits a year, that was, what, a little short of two hundred and forty visits. Well, exempting the times Sly had been in lockup himself.
“I didn’t know this.”
Sly looked over at him. “Why would you?”
“I’m, I’m just saying. That’s a hard thing.”
“You, you, don’t know the half of it. I . . . it’ll . . . eat you alive, that place. I won’t lie to you. Uncle Reggie is my one tie to all that came before me, my family, my history, my people. Last of that generation. And he’s in there, that shithole. He ain’t ever coming out.”
He sat there, looking across the street. Sully had not seen Sly this way. It was a raw nerve, as deep as it was unexpected.
“I—”
“Shouldn’t come out,” Sly said, softly.
“Shouldn’t?”
“You don’t know the man. You don’t know the place.” He looked up at Sully. “There’s places worse than prison.”
Sully let it sit.
“That’ll work on you, brother,” Sly said, “the last of your people living that way, you let it sit in your head.”
“Does he know who you are? I mean, is he on this planet?”
“Depends. Half the time they got him on lockdown for trying to fuck somebody up in there. You know they don’t call them inmates, right? It’s patients. Motherfucker in a locked ward and ain’t ever leaving, he’s a patient. My black ass.”
“So, how you get a visit?”
“You family, they got days. You call ahead.”
“Do family members have to sign their name, state a relationship?”
“They know me. They don’t know you. You don’t look like family.”
“I’m the cousin you don’t talk about.”
“And why is it you think,” Sly said, “once I get you in, that I can fix it for you to get in a room with this ice-pick motherfucker?”
“You just said they know you.”
He let that hang in the air. Nobody who knew who Sly Hastings was and what he did and what he could do to them with a flick of his finger was going to get in his way, particularly not anyone whose best job in life was emptying piss pots at the crazy house.
Sly looked back across the street. “It ain’t for free. I mean, I got to take care of some people. You’n pay for this? I thought you guys couldn’t pay for news, like that.”
“We can’t.”
“Then you shit out of luck, brother.”
Sully took a deep breath.
“Noel,” he said, softly as a whisper in the dark.
A car pulled up to the traffic light and stopped. Birds flapped around in the tree above. Far above, a plane left ice trails across the sky. Sly’s face did not move, not an eyebrow. He just kept looking at the corner market across the way, the door clanging open, like he was waiting for the lady with the crazy-looking dog to emerge. “Noel who?” he said.
“Don’t play.”
Sly let it hang.
“That’s the transaction?”
Sully nodded and now Sly looked over at him, his eyes black, tight. “One more. I do you one more solid on this and we’re good. We clear? We do this thing, I don’t hear that name again.”
Sully’s mouth was dry, he could feel it at the corner of his lips, a little cracked piece of skin. This was vile. He thought of Lorena, Noel’s sister, and wondered why he’d never stopped back up by her house to, you know, say hello, see if she’d ask him inside to have another drink on her back porch. It shouldn’t have to be this way. A feeling in his chest, like a rock descending in deep water. When he couldn’t feel it anymore, he licked his lips and let go of the last hope of justice that Noel Pittman’s murder likely would ever have.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” Sly said. “Visiting’s tomorrow. Me ’n Lionel’ll pick you up right here, ten in the morning.”
Sully nodding, standing up, wanting to get this over with, changing subjects. “How’s George these days, things in Frenchman’s Bend?”
Sly stayed seated but waved his hand over his head and Sully heard Lionel crank up Sly’s Camaro, where he had been parked on the street, the boss’s righthand bodyguard, and saw the car pull up to the curb. “They all over his ass down there, the cops. Can’t move so much as a ki. I been up at the apartments most of the summer, getting them ready to rent out. Good time to work. You can get them Hispanic brothers, man, they work all day and half the night. Might have to put George to work up there, things don’t pick up.”
* * *
He put tuna steaks on the grill that night, some shrimp that had marinated in a tequila and lime sauce of his own mixing. Alexis made the salad. Josh played disc jockey, putting on a bunch of crap Sully hadn’t heard before but didn’t mind, the more he listened to it. Somethin
g, anything, to take his mind off tomorrow, the number of ways that it could go wrong. Bourbon could be your friend, times like this. The Blanton’s, half empty—Josh or Alexis had found it—was in the cabinet. He uncorked the pewter stopper and poured two fingers over some chunky ice cubes in a crystal tumbler, loving the gurgle.
Rattling it around, he wandered up to the front bay window, looking out, the light traffic, the streetlights winking on. Three people staying in the house. Hunh. Things happen you don’t see coming. Somebody walking by out front on Sixth Street, getting the waft of the grill smoke, the music, Alexis and Josh bantering in the backyard, darkness descending? They could mistake it for domesticity.
They ate on the back patio. The table wobbled on the uneven bricks. Sully got two books of matches to prop up the short leg. The heat had given way to a breeze. It swirled up the alley and through the branches of the cherry tree, tracing over them, a delicate-fingered, invisible thing.
“Is that the first touch of fall?” Alexis wondered aloud.
She had her hair down, home from work, getting used to the pace of editing in the office, then coming home on time. She said she was liking it.
“You coulda stayed gone a couple more days,” she said.
“Yeah,” Josh said, looking over at her. “We were fine.”
Alexis wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse the color of sand. It set off her olive-brown skin. Josh, infatuated in the way only teenage boys can be, was turning her into his personal pinup, following her around with a sketch pad and a charcoal pencil, getting lines down even while she was doing the dishes, for God’s sake.
“You want to tell me what this plan is you’ve got to see the mystery man?” she said. “How exactly it is you’re going to get in St. E’s?”
“You don’t even want to know.”
Josh put six, seven sketches beside him on the table. Sully wiped his hands and flipped through them, leaning back in his chair. All were of Alexis. In thoughtful repose. Smiling, looking off to the right. Walking out the door to work, hurried, lines blurred.
“Landscapes,” Sully said, putting a bite of tuna in his mouth, letting it dissolve on his tongue, it was that thin, that good. “I thought the class, what you were working on, was landscapes.”
Josh, not worried about it: “Random other assignments are good.”
“Yeah,” Alexis said, mock defensive. “Fresh eyes. Gotta have fresh eyes.”
After the dishes, in the basement—which Josh was turning into his own apartment, his sketches now tacked to the wall, making plans to come back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, anything other than the endless oppression of Sunday School and Bible study in Phoenix—he had them watch Alien.
“It’s the third time,” Alexis complained.
“But that thing on his face,” Josh kept saying.
The boy was asleep by midnight. They left him on the couch and went up the steps, tiptoeing to the top floor, Sully with two or three bourbons in the bloodstream and Alexis with at least three glasses of wine in hers. They tumbled into the bed in a giggling rush, him tugging off her blouse and shorts, pulling the thong to the side, just enough, and her gasping, slow down, slow down.
“Thought you said you wouldn’t with a kid in the house,” he whispered.
“You want me to stop?” she whispered back.
The darkness unfolded and he felt himself losing himself in it. Things moved in his chest, his conscious mind fading from him, giving way to a deep well of lust and need and fury and fear and she was whispering in his ear again.
“With me, baby,” she was saying, her hips still moving, her left hand on his shoulder but her right on his chest, “with me. Not to me.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
ST. ELIZABETHS, NO apostrophe, thank you, was not a happy place, and neither was its home in Southeast, the poorest, roughest quadrant of D.C. Almost entirely separated from the rest of town by the Anacostia, Southeast was its own world. It was a place that the majority of the population in, say, Northwest—the wealthiest, whitest part of town—had never been and had no intention of going.
Lionel took the Camaro uphill from the eastern banks of the river, the car thrumming alongside the brick boundary wall of St. E’s. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the main drag through this part of the city, split the asylum grounds in two, on a roughly north-to-south basis, dividing the east campus from the west. The original brick boundary wall lined the street-front of the west campus, the oldest part of the hospital. It was high, imposing and solid.
It always stunned Sully, the few times he’d been up here, the size of the place. More than three hundred acres at its peak, seven thousand patients and who knows how many staff, back in its early twentieth-century glory days. The idea then that the mentally disturbed needed peace and quiet and sunshine, thus the working farm and huge grounds, removed from and across the river from the stresses and bad humors of Washington proper. It had been rural then.
The west campus, situated on a ridge line above the river, offered one of the most dramatic views in America—the U.S. Capitol across the river, the federal city swaddled by the Anacostia and the Potomac, the Washington Monument, the sun fading to the west, over the wide sweep of the continent—and it was the sole property of the insane.
It sort of explained Washington, in a way.
“You know, my hometown, it was maybe two thousand people,” Sully said, looking out the window, the boundary wall looking back at him, “and this place, it used to have two, three times that many crazy people, all behind that wall.”
“I thought everybody in Mississippi was crazy,” Sly said, drawing a snort of laughter from Lionel.
“Louisiana, hayseed. I’m from Louisiana. The other side of the river. It’s different.”
“You say so.”
Sully, feeling butterflies in his gut, moved around on the backseat. How Sly came up here to see his crazy-ass uncle mystified him. The place had given him bad vibes the few times he’d set foot inside. Ghosts and lunatics, the long halls of madness. The nights in there. Jesus, what it must have sounded and smelled like back in the day. The howls. The stench.
Lionel pulled the Camaro into the main entrance and stopped alongside the security booth, letting the window down. The guard looked at him, leaned over to look in at Sly, who just looked straight ahead, tapping his right hand on his knee, and glanced at Sully, who looked out of the opposite window.
The guard did not speak. He leaned back in the booth. The gate swung open.
Unfolding before them, as Lionel slowly pulled into the property, was the wide sweep of dozens of seen-better-days brick buildings with red tile roofs. Most of them were a century old and looked like it, their façades dotted by white-brick or cement inlays arched above the doors. Windows on upper floors looked to be set in crooked frames. The doors seemed to hang on hinges gone askew. Gargoyles, their eroded stone faces more impressionistic than detailed, looked like they were about to fall off the edifices they enhanced.
Oaks and elms and fruit trees stood withering in the heat. The grass was dry, uneven, and patchy. The feds, downsizing mental health facilities after Thorazine ended the warehousing of the mentally ill, had dumped the white elephant of St. E’s on the overburdened city government decades ago, to the benefit of no one but federal taxpayers. Misery, a hopeless lack of funding, mismanagement, the exodus of talented medical staff, finger-pointing and exposés followed. Receivership, lawsuits about conditions. The patient load went from mostly well-to-do whites from across the country to impoverished blacks from D.C. Then the feds blamed the District for the horror show they had dumped in their lap . . . or, really, just another day in how the federal city worked.
Directly in front of them was the main administrative building. The white rectangular clock tower was perched neatly atop the center of the roof, just above the double row of white round columns. It was possible to believe
it was a college admissions building on a small Southern campus, gone slightly to seed. Hitchcock Hall, the graceful old theater building, enhanced the effect: two stories, red brick and white trim, a black slate roof, the arched stone front over the door with 1908 at the top of the frame. Paned windows, set in an arch, were above that, and at the very top, the smiling face of a satyr. Two round, porthole-like windows were on the upper floor, left and right, like a set of eyes, white woodwork framing each.
Lionel idled through the grounds at the speed of a golf cart. There were only two people to be seen, both men in suits walking out of the administration building. He pulled down the ridge line to the left, the wards spreading out in wings from the center building, the windows a series of blank, unseeing eyes. They eased forward on the narrow ribbon of asphalt, the streets named for trees on the grounds: Plum, Cedar, Birch, Redwood.
And then, bringing his eyes forward, Sully saw the hulking redbrick mass of Canan Hall. It loomed directly in front of them. The building was three stories. It lay on the grounds, heavy and squat, a faceless hulk that took human beings in and never let them out. It was more than a century old. It seemed to have absorbed all the pain and violence and madness into its bricks, into the rotting wood of the fascia that lay discolored and dark at the roof line, into the peeling white paint of the eaves and ledges and doors. The windows looked like cataracts, blind and unseeing. It looked like it could take an artillery hit. It had presence. Like movie stars. Like monsters.
Lionel parked in the shade of the only tree and cut the engine. Sly didn’t move.
“Well,” Sully said.
“Hate this place,” Sly said.
A beat passed and then he opened his door, stepping out, already walking by the time Sully freed himself from the back.
“Okay,” Sly said, not slowing, “one, you got to remember is that this ain’t D.C. Jail. These patients, they got rights. They walk right up on you, too. Sniff. Put they hand on your dick.”
Sully, squinting in the harsh light. “You skeered, Sly?”
