“And is that how it worked out?”
“No, he died.”
“So they use this for autopsies, too?”
“There aren’t that many needed in the county, Charley.”
“I suppose not.”
We didn’t have long to wait. The body of the boy was wheeled in on a gurney by an attendant. The medical examiner followed them in, wearing surgical pajamas, gloved but unmasked. He looked up and waved at Sue as the attendant pulled the sheet from the boy’s naked body and transferred him to the operating table. There was a tape recorder and a microphone on a smaller wheeled table next to the big one. The microphone was raised and bent in such a way that the medical examiner could speak into it easily while going about his business.
“All ready up there?” he asked. His voice came through speakers on both sides of us. Stereophonic sound.
Sue nodded.
“Now, when I switch on the tape recorder, everything I say will go on the tape, but you’ll be able to hear it, too. There’s no way for you to speak to me from where you are, so all you can do is watch. If you have any questions, take notes, and see me afterward. Is all that understood?”
Sue nodded again. She fished out a notebook and a ballpoint pen from her purse.
“All right, here we go.”
He switched on the tape recorder and began speaking in a less casual, more authoritative manner, giving the date, the time, and the place. He identified himself.
“The subject,” he began, “is Richard Fauret. He is a Caucasian male, about seven years old. His height is”— here he used a tape measure—“forty and one half inches. He has been weighed at forty-two pounds. He appears to have been in good health. He has good muscular development and is of stocky physique. There are no exterior wounds or scars. Previous to being washed for this autopsy .procedure, the subject’s hands showed traces of dried mud and dirt.”
He paused at this point and looked across the operating table at the attendant.
“I will now make a butterfly incision around his thorax area.”
He picked up a scalpel and proceeded to do just that. The famous butterfly incision. I’d heard of it, of course, but had never seen it done. There was very little blood, just a red line that followed the path of the knife. Yet I hadn’t expected what came next. The instrument he chose then had a small hand-sized grip and at the end of it a circular saw blade about two inches in diameter. He switched it on, and the blade glinted in the light as it whirled.
I looked at Sue in panic. I found her leaning forward, quite absorbed in the action before us.
My hands began to tremble.
He dug the saw in the hollow at the bottom of the boy’s throat and proceeded downward, cutting through the sternum, attaching the two wings of the butterfly.
I looked on, not quite believing, as the medical examiner put aside the saw, and with the help of the attendant, pulled open the boy’ cnese. Except for the glass between us, I was sure I would have heard the rip of flesh, the tearing of bones.
And there was little Richard Fauret, more than naked, exposed. It was almost as if his killer had planned this as the final insult. I’d seen the bagman for Detroit’s biggest dealer similarly violated, his intestines exposed, drooping down from his slit belly. I’d managed somehow to handle that, but this was different because Richard Fauret was innocent. Just as innocent as Catherine Quigley, or Lee Higgins, or Billy Bartkowski. What Bob Williams had said to me that night after my experience out on Clarion Road was true: It’s the destruction of the innocents that hurts the most, that calls our most deeply held beliefs to question.
What did I do? What could I do? I left there in full flight, actually running to get away. I knew I couldn’t stay to see the boy’s organs lifted out, examined, and weighed. I had to get out of there.
I went toward the elevator, then saw the sign that led me to the stairway. I must have gone down the stairs, because I remember getting out of the hospital without passing the reception desk, or going through the lobby. Finding myself out in the hospital parking lot, I looked around, feeling disoriented, lost, and needing a drink.
Oh, yes, needing a drink very badly.
After some difficulty, I found my car and drove straight to Jimmy Doyle’s. It was the only bar I knew of that was open at that hour of the morning.
19
About what happened during the next three days, I don’t have much to say. That’s partly because I feel a certain guilt, even shame, about it all. After all, I’d gone years without a drink, and though I never lost sight of the fact that I was a recovering alcoholic, I had built up confidence that I could go years more without a drink. I thought I had the problem under control.
I didn’t.
At Jimmy Doyle’s I had three straight shots of bar Scotch, but they weren’t enough to erase those images from the autopsy from my mind. The two old geezers at the end of the bar watched me rather carefully; they seemed to know something was seriously wrong. When I called for a fourth shot, the bartender refused to serve me. I didn’t make a fuss; I couldn’t; he was right to cut me off. I paid up, remembering to tip him just to show there were no hard feelings, went out to my car, and vomited in the gutter. What a pretty picture.
That didn’t stop me, didn’t even slow me down. I got into the car and drove in that slow, extra-careful way that drunks do. Not directly home, but to a liquor store on the way. If I was going to do this, then I was going to do it right. I bought a half-gallon bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, my old brand of preference, assuring myself that the reason I’d thrown up was that I’d drunk bad Scotch. That never happened when I drank Johnnie Walker. Then, as an afterthought, since I was obliged to keep office hours the next day, I bought a bottle of vodka. At some unspecified time later today, I would switch to vodka, and no one would know tomorrow that I’d been drinking. Sure.
Returning to my apartment, I made a vow not to answer the telephone—it was sure to be Sue, and I had no wish to speak to her—and settled down for some serious drinking. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it. The rich, golden liquid hit my tongue like so much nectar, yet there was enough bite to it to let me know that this was the real stuff, the right stuff. Oh yes, I remembered it well.
I started out drinking it on ice, more civilized that way, and settled in a living room chair with the television set switched on. I can’t say that I was watching it. But the changing flow of images on the screen gave me something on which to concentrate my vision, and the voices occupied some part of my mind. I heard, I saw, though I didn’t really listen or watch. I was in my old drinking mode, running on automatic pilot. The idea was not to think and not to remember. And for a while it was working pretty well. I eventually decided it wasn’t really necessary to put ice in the glass. No ice, more Scotch. Then I passed out, unconscious, a dreamless sleep.
The telephone woke me. Sue, of course, and the thought of her annoyed me—no, more than that, it made me angry. Or perhaps it was simply the persistent ringing that made me angry. In any case, I decided to do something about it. I slipped off the chair and crawled over to the telephone. Reaching up, I pulled the receiver off its cradle. Then I went into the next room and collapsed on the bed.
Some time later, Sue was at my door, banging, kicking, and yelling about Thanksgiving. She said she knew I was there because my car was in the parking lot. There were some other things, too, that I didn’t quite understand or don’t remember. I do recall, though, that I wished she wouldn’t make such a racket because it was a holiday—that much I knew, at least—and all the neighbors, such as they were, would be around to hear her. I couldn’t call the cops because she was the cops.
How long did she continue? Not long, probably, but she had succeeded in bringing me to some degree of wakefulness. I got up, relieved myself in the bathroom, and sat down in the living room again and finished off the half-full glass of Scotch I’d left. There was a football game on television, Dallas and some other team. Dazed, I tried to give some att
ention to the progress of the game. Failing that, I could at least find out the score, or what team Dallas was playing. But no, even that proved too much. After another drink, a short one this time, I stumbled back to the bedroom.
Bad dreams. Maybe it was the violence of the football game, or maybe I failed to drink enough to obliterate those images I’d tried to escape earlier. Whatever the cause, along with sleep came something like a movie montage of all the worst I had known and seen in these past weeks. There were monster football players pulling apart children. There was a hanging man, eviscerated, trying to talk without a tongue. There were angels in the snow—Catherine Quigley and Richard Fauret—rising, trailing their plastic shrouds. There were other horrors, too, which were, I guess, just the product of my alcoholic state, fantasies unconnected to memories.
They seemed to last a long time, but how could I tell? It was enough to wake me in a sweat about half sober. It was dark out. I threw off my clothes and took a shower and realized I was hungry, a good sign. Wrapped in my bathrobe, I had a cheese sandwich and a glass of orange juice, a strange combination, but the orange juice tasted good. And so, when I’d finished, I kept on drinking orange juice with vodka. There went the rest of the evening and a good deal of the next day.
I’m not going to prolong this account because the truth is, I don’t remember much of the rest of it. I do know that sometime during the day on Saturday I drank the last of the Johnnie Walker Red and, having also finished up the vodka, went out and bought some more. I managed to eat something each day and kept drinking orange juice with the new bottle of vodka, because I’d made up my mind that no matter what condition I was in, I had to get into the office on Monday. During the weekend I must also have replaced the telephone receiver, because later on the calls started again, though I didn’t answer them. I was doing a pretty good imitation of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend.
Late Sunday afternoon or early evening, I was dozing in the living room chair in front of the television. Another football game, this one from the West Coast, was rocketing to a finish. There was a knock on the door, followed by another one, followed by another and another. This couldn’t be Sue. Whoever this was at the door wasn’t interested in making a fuss; he intended to break it down. He beat it. He kicked it. But he didn’t say a word.
I struggled out of the chair and made it to the door.
“Who is it?” I yelled, trying to sound gruff. “Who’s there?” Actually, I was kind of frightened, knowing how incapable I was at that moment.
“Bob Williams. And you’d better open this door while it’s still in one piece.”
He was the last guy in the world I wanted to see. My best friend? My AA sponsor? Forget it. When he saw me in the condition I was in, he’d be my worst enemy. I couldn’t deal with him. I didn’t want to try.
“Go away, Bob. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He let fly a great kick right around the lock. I saw it give. A couple more like that, and it would fly open. I could put on the chain, but the damage would still be done. And so I surrendered, unlocking the door, opening it, and I saw him poised to deliver the next threatened kick. A couple of doors were open down the hall. My so-called neighbors peeked out at us. They didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them.
Bob rushed in, perhaps fearing I might change my mind and close the door again. He pulled it shut behind him, and then he looked me up and down.
“Just what I suspected,” he said, his face filled with concern.
I didn’t answer. At various times in the last few days I knew I’d been in worse condition than I was then. There was no point in telling him that.
He swept past me, picked up the glass of vodka with its faint orange coloration, and headed for the kitchen. Without a pause, he dumped its contents down the drain of the kitchen sink.
“Hey,” I said, “who gave you permission?”
“You did, when you joined the program. Or have you forgotten? I’m your sponsor. Remember?”
He turned and looked at the table with its array of bottles, then he shook his head in disbelief.
“Did you drink all that?”
“It was a long weekend.”
“You ever hear of alcohol poisoning?”
He grabbed the quarter-full bottle of vodka and the supplementary fifth of Johnnie Walker Red, just about half full. “Go on,” he said. “Take a shower. You smell bad. Shave, if you can manage it. If you’ve got an electric razor, it might be safer.”
Arms folded, feet planted wide, I stared at him, trying to decide whether to tell him to go to hell and get out of my kitchen. But in the end, I turned around, went into the bathroom, and did as I was told. On my way, I heard the gurgle from the bottles as he emptied them down the drain.
On the drive to St. Jude’s Church, Bob surprised me by saying that he blamed himself in large measure for my fall from grace.
“I take responsibility for my own acts,” I said, “my own failures, too.”
“Okay, tough guy, but the way I see it, you’ve been heading for this for about a month, maybe longer. I remember the night of that big early snow when you saw that little girl’s body out on Clarion Road. You were shattered, had to talk. And what did I do? I gave you a pat on the back and told you to go talk to Father Phil.”
“You gave me more than that, Bob.”
“Let me finish. Then there was last Sunday. You wanted to have dinner after the meeting. What you really wanted to do was talk about all these things that were bothering you. But then that priest came along, the one from Hub City. We had dinner, and that’s all we had. We had to listen to his loony ideas on how Double-A really ought to be run. Then, finally, on Wednesday I got a message from you on my machine, very innocuous—‘just checking in,’ you said. No, you weren’t. You were asking for help, and I’ve been too damned busy to give it to you. It’s been a fault with me, Charley. I get too involved in details, administrative bullshit. I seem to have forgotten the program is about people. A fine psychiatrist I am.”
We drove along saying nothing for a while. Having listened to Bob’s mea culpa, I had no wish to add to his indictment. It seemed to me he was being much too hard on himself. I decided to move him away from the question of blame.
“How did you know what I’d done?”
“Sixth sense, I guess. No, actually I’d put some of this together and came up with a guilty conscience. I started calling you and not even getting your answering machine. Somehow that didn’t seem right, so I came over and knocked on your door.”
I chuckled appreciatively. “That was some knock.”
“Your response through the door told me my hunch was dead-on.”
“You mean if I’d been a little more polite, you might have gone away?”
“I mean here we are at St. Jude’s just in time for the regular Sunday meeting in the basement. Amazing how these things work out, isn’t it?”
He turned into the parking lot and pulled in close to the door. It looked like there was a pretty light turnout that night.
“And you may or may not be happy to learn, Charley, that I got on the phone while you were in the shower and made an appointment with Father Phil for right after the meeting.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that.” That was an honest response. It was no good feigning enthusiasm I didn’t feel.
“He’s a good man. He’ll talk to you straight. I don’t think he’ll pretend to have answers he doesn’t have.” He nodded and opened the car door. “Come on, let’s go.”
It’s true the meeting that night wasn’t very well attended, yet it was good for me to go, even in my condition. In spite of the shower and shave, and notwithstanding the reasonable manner I’d conversed with Bob, I was still about half trashed. I’d long ago learned how to fake sobriety. I sat in back and listened as Bob ad-libbed a brief sermon on the duties of a sponsor. Just as he was about to wind things up, he happened to pause, and I took that opportunity to rise. Bob recognized me.
“My name is Char
ley, and I’m an alcoholic,” I said, then I waited, not knowing quite how to continue. “I made quite a speech here last Sunday about how those big problems of life, the ones we share with everybody, have to be faced along with the particular problem we have here. Well, no big speech tonight. I’m just going to say that one of those big life problems caught up with me and gave me a big kick in the behind. I tried to get away from it in the old way, the way all of us here know so well. I just want to tell you that the answer to any problem can’t be found in a bottle. So now I start over again, counting the days, one at a time.”
I sat down. Bob nodded, looked around to be sure that each had had his say, then ended the meeting with the familiar prayer. A moment later, in the midst of the shuffling of feet and the scraping of chairs, he appeared at my side, eager to rush me out.
“Ready to see Father Phil now?”
I sighed. “Okay, I guess.”
I grabbed my coat and was taken by the elbow, up the stairs to the exit. And outside. It was a chilly night. If there had been a cloud in the sky, there might have been snow in the air. But there were only stars and an enormous three-quarter moon. Somehow the right sky made the walk to the rectory in the cold more tolerable.
We hurried up the stairs to the entrance of the old brick building.
“I’ll come by for you,” said Bob, “just as soon as I drink some coffee with those guys and clean up the place.”
He rang the bell.
Only moments later the door opened, revealing the Reverend Philip LeClerc. He must have been hovering nearby. Father Phil was a slender man of about forty who, except for the fact that his hair was beginning to gray, looked quite youthful. Wearing gold-rimmed glasses, he had an almost ascetic appearance. We shook hands. I’d met him on a number of previous occasions, of course, and we’d had a couple of conversations about nothing in particular. If anyone had asked me what I thought of him, I would have said simply that he seemed like a nice man.
Bob left us alone, promising to be back in about half an hour. I entered the rectory and was shown directly into a small room right off the hall. It was lit by a single desk lamp, but that was enough to reveal the floor-to-ceiling shelves, crowded with hundreds of books.
The Judgment Page 37
