Primal Fear

by William Diehl

“Yes. Always a step or two ahead of you, you know? Always wanting to know more.” She returned to her sweeping. “Hard when you’re trying to teach fifteen or twenty others at the same time.”

  “How was he difficult? In what way?”

  She thought for a moment. “Well, demanding I guess would be more accurate. It was like … like trying to fill a bottle with a straw in it. He sipped it out as fast as I put it in.”

  He held the dustpan for her and gazed up and caught her studying him, but her eyes darted quickly away and she swept the pencil shavings, balled-up papers and gum wrappers into the pan, then took it from him and poured the refuse into a barrel in the comer.

  “Reading,” she said, almost to herself. “Aaron read everything. Shakespeare, Thomas Paine, the Rover Boys, Freud, Hemingway, oh God, he read every book he could get his hands on. Do you know he could read Latin? He could read Latin quite well.”

  “What kind of person was he?”

  “It was like… like he was starving to death and knowledge was food.” She shrugged. “He was lovable, arrogant.” She stopped for a moment, searching for the right words. “Sometimes frustrated, then cheerful, then moody. He was different from the rest, Mr. Goodman. For one thing he refused to go down the hole. His daddy used to whale about that. Took his belt to him, but he wouldn’t go down there. Hopefully I had something to do with that. Determined not to be a miner like everybody else hereabouts. He’s quite a beautiful boy, y’know. Didn’t have many friends. The others picked on him, made fun of him.”

  “I’m looking for clues, Rebecca—not fingerprints or needles in the carpet, not things like that. Clues about him. Could he have done it? Why? Could something have made him that angry?”

  “You really do think he’s guilty, don’t you?”

  “Like I told you, the evidence against him is very, very strong. We may have to go for an insanity plea.”

  “He’s not crazy, Mr. Goodman.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “Two years ago. The day he left. His mother fought it. It would have been a tragedy for him to stay here.”

  “It was a tragedy that he left.”

  She looked up sharply. Her expression dissolved slowly into sadness. Her body seemed to shrink and lose its resilience. She sat down at one of the chair-desks, her back very straight, and stared out the window as if in shock. Finally she motioned vaguely around the room with one hand and said, “I teach eight grades here, Mr. Goodman. One to three over there; four, five and six there; seven and eight here. You know what that’s like? I feel I’ve accomplished something if I just get them into high school. If they don’t make it by the time they’re fourteen, fifteen, the boys end up in the mines. The girls get married.”

  “At fourteen?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you talk Aaron into leaving?” he asked.

  “I told you,” she said. “I’d like to think I had something to do with it.”

  “Listen to me, Rebecca. I’m not here because I want him to end up in a madhouse. What I want to do is keep him out of the electric chair.”

  The profound nature of Aaron Stampler’s dilemma suddenly overwhelmed her. She put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes and tears squeezed out and seeped down her cheeks. She tried to stifle her sobs. “All that knowledge,” she mumbled through her hand. “All those years.” Then, in a tiny, pitiful voice, she murmured, “What a waste, what an awful… goddamn waste. He could have been anything, he just needed…”

  “Needed what?”

  “Oh … I don’t know. Encouragement, approval. He dreaded loneliness. I think he feared being alone more than—”

  She stopped, unable to go on, the tears flowing down her face.

  “I guess we all do,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m really very sorry.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

  He walked over and put his hand gently on her shoulder, felt her stiffen at his touch but left it there until he felt her body begin to loosen. He rubbed her shoulder very gently and after a while she moved her head slightly and her hair whisked the back of his hand. He raised it slowly, cupping her cheek in his palm, and she moved her face against his hand, turning slightly until he could feel her breath in his fingers, then the brush of her lips. He put the other hand on the back of her head and gently urged her head against his side. Her tears crept under his fingertips. She finally relaxed and wept without shame.

  He held her for several minutes until her sobs turned to little gasps and finally she pulled away from him and turned her head.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  “What for? I’m glad I was here. Sounded like you needed to do that.”

  She didn’t answer, and finally he said, “Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll go over to the restaurant, ask around, maybe—”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t do that. The men are coming in from the hole. They’ll be drinking. They don’t like strangers, particularly ones who ask questions about their people. Even if they didn’t like Aaron, they’d take offense. It’s the way they are.”

  “But I’m here to help him.”

  “They won’t believe you.”

  She turned back to him and looked up at him, her features softened from crying.

  “You come to my place. It’s just up the road, back in the woods. I’ll fix you something to eat and we can talk about Aaron Stampler.”

  FIFTEEN

  She turned off the main highway and followed the signs that led to a pleasant group of incompatible buildings surrounded by a brick wall. There was a modest office building at the front gate and a small brass plaque that identified the complex: THE STEVENSON MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE. FOUNDED 1924.

  The guard, who wore khaki pants and a dark blue shirt and did not look like a guard, came out, and when she identified herself, he told her pleasantly to follow the road to the main building. Then he went inside to throw the switch that would open the large iron gates. Molly sat quietly and waited for the adventure to begin.

  Molly Arrington was a junior at Iowa State pursuing her dream of becoming a marine biologist when a single, shattering event altered forever the course of her life’s journey.

  Her father, Walter, was a devout fanner who adored the rich, black Iowa soil and all the creatures on earth who derived life from it, and who shared with his children, Bobby and Molly, an abiding love affair with nature and the earth. He refused to use pesticides, preferring instead to plant an extra acre “to take care of the critters,” raised no creatures for slaughter—cows for milk, chickens for eggs, two steers for breeding calves—and took in every stray dog and cat that passed their door. Eight dogs of every size and breed and half a dozen alley cats shared the two-story farmhouse with them.

  The first time Walter Arrington witnessed, through the miracle of television, napalm bombs engulf and devour a verdant Vietnamese forest, he got physically ill. He was so appalled by the nightly display of human misery and earthly destruction that he refused to watch television reports from the embattled land, even during the year his son served over there.

  Athena Arrington had died at the age of thirty-six, and not unexpectedly. Walter Arrington had married her knowing there was a time bomb in her chest—a congenitally malformed heart—and the threat of sudden death would be persistent and only a heartbeat away. But he adored her and was devoted to making her life as happy and full as possible. When Athena died, her three loving survivors walked the tilled rows in the moonlight and sprinkled her ashes by hand over the farm she loved. Molly was twelve and Bobby was fifteen at the time. It was a memory Molly cherished, for the field had become a living, nurtured memorial to her mother.

  Walter, Molly and Bobby were an uncommonly loving family, demonstrative and open and dependent on each other for support, encouragement and sanctuary. They shared their triumphs and disappointments fervently, wept on proper occasions, trusted each other without qualification and were bound together by such
fierce loyalty that when Cy Wright, Bobby Arrington’s best friend, ungraciously jilted Molly to pursue the most nubile of all the high school cheerleaders, Bobby invited him out under the football stand and walloped him soundly. They had never spoken to each other again even though Molly tried her best to heal the rift.

  She had just finished her freshman year when Bobby graduated from grad school as an architect and went off to Vietnam. She was a beginning junior when he returned. But it was not Bobby Arrington who came back to the world—it was a hollow shell of a man, uncommunicative, morose, his fearstruck eyes mirroring the horrors that had possessed him in that faraway land. He abandoned architecture and returned to the farm, tortured by memories he would not or could not share. Conversation became so painful for him, he spoke only in short, sometimes cryptic phrases and lost his temper when he was misunderstood. He was an insomniac, preferring to lie awake in bed rather than risk the nightmares that stalked his dreams. Molly dropped out of school for a semester, then another, and for a year she and her father watched helplessly as Bobby slowly but steadily withdrew from reality, seeking solace from his pain in a world of his own making.

  The awful event that climaxed that dreadful year occurred on a warm day in early June. She was at a baby shower when she was summoned to the phone.

  It was her father and he was sobbing.

  “Papa, what is it?” she cried.

  “He shot the dogs, Molly. He shot all the dogs.”

  She raced home to find Walter Arrington sitting on the porch swing, weeping inconsolably. She wrapped her arms around him, staring over his shoulder at Bobby, who was sitting at the edge of a cornfield, his forearms resting on his knees and the gun dangling from one hand. Eight dogs lay in a semicircle around him.

  “He went out there with a bag of food,” Walter sobbed, “and he called the pups out. Hell, I thought he was going to play with them. Next thing I heard the gun go off. Bang, bang, bang, over and over, and I ran out there and he just looked at me and you know what he said? He said, ‘I had to do it, they were in pain. The ground was burning their feet.’ God, Molly, what did he mean? What’s happened to our Bobby?”

  She went out to her brother and sat down next to him and carefully took the gun out of his hand and laid it beside her in the dirt and he looked over at her and said, “Somebody, please help me,” and Molly put her arms around him and rocked him gently as tears flooded her cheeks. After a while, he said, “Come with me, Mama,” and that was the last thing he ever said. They sat like that for a long time until she felt the tension ease from his body and he slumped against her and fell asleep.

  He never woke up, not in the real world, anyway. Bobby Arrington had been catatonic for ten years. And Molly Arrington had abandoned her dream of swimming with dolphins to pursue a darker but no less defined goal.

  * * *

  The gate to the Stevenson Institute, cruelly known as Daisyland because that was the name of the town, swung open and she drove through, heading up a gravel road bordered on either side by knee-high winter shrubs. Every mental institution presented Molly Arrington with a vast acreage of potential knowledge. She regarded the communities of catatonic and inarticulate souls—slouched in chairs, regarding the world without cognizance—as captives waiting for her to strip away the veils of numbed thought that entrapped them in perpetual and stupefied twilight. She yearned to repair their disabled brains and urge them back to the shores of the living and, by so doing, unearth the secrets that had bound them in that uncharted and nebulous terrain where thought and recollection were suspended. Secretly she craved to invade those perilous realms, to roam their undefined regions in search of mist-bound souls like Bobby whose own fears, paranoia, torment and anguish had lured them into self-imposed exile in unplotted sanctuaries they themselves created.

  For a time she had experimented with hallucinogenics, hoping to pierce the shroud and enter those forbidden and camouflaged precincts, but to no avail. She had even once tried electric shock therapy in order to understand its effect on the human mind, but the fear was so literal, so massive and overwhelming, that she forbade her own patients from submitting to the treatment. Because the disorders that crippled the mind were so inexorably linked to suffering, pain in any form became unacceptable to her. Ultimately her experiments had side effects. She had created her own singular cosmos where pain and pleasure were so closely fused that one begot the other, and because pleasure and pain were twins, she avoided both, rejecting even the ecstasy of orgasm as an unfair prize in the delicate struggle between joy and sorrow. She became a daring innovator who took copious notes on her own experiences, for she was well aware that negotiating the rim of that abyss was a perilous inquest. She carefully cataloged her own neuroses, knowing full well that a misstep could plunge her over the side into her own unmapped and perhaps inescapable netherworld. The clues she left behind might help one of her peers lure her back to reality. And so she approached each new patient with both exhilaration and apprehension, wondering how close the next journey would take her to the edge.

  Aaron Stampler was different. He was conscious of me world around him, and if he had created another country which she was not yet aware of, perhaps she could follow bin into it. It was an exciting thought, one she felt was abundant with promise.

  Harcourt Bascott, the director of the Stevenson Institute, was away but had left instructions for the staff to fully cooperate with her. A young black man named Clyde, who had a pleasant smile and a casual manner, carried her video case for her as he led her across the yard to what was known as New Wing. It was a three-story building with a peaked atrium, its slanted sides constructed of large glass squares. The windows were not barred but were made of thick, bulletproof glass. All in all, a pleasant-looking structure, and obviously built with a sense of humanity toward the inmates.

  The maximum security section was at one end of New Wing, sealed off with a wall and a single sliding steel door. Its security officer, dressed in khaki and blue like the guard at the front gate, sat at a desk beside the door. There were no firearms in view. He smiled as Clyde and Molly approached and offered her a sign-in sheet.

  Inside the steel entrance was a wide hallway, well lighted from the glass-paneled roof, with rooms on both sides. The guard led them into the first room on the right. It was large and had a small desk, a wooden chair, a cot, and a window that was at least six feet above floor level. The walls, furniture and floor were painted pure white. The guard unscrewed a fixture over the electrical outlet on one wall so she could plug in the video equipment and left to get Aaron Stampler.

  She was not prepared for his youth, his openness, for the irrepressible aura of innocence that seemed to encompass him. He was dressed in pale blue pants and shirt, soft cotton shoes and white socks, and he regarded her with surprise when he was led into the room. She was pleased to see he was not shackled.

  “Aaron, I’m Dr. Molly Arrington. I think Martin Vail told you I was coming up here.”

  “Oh, yes ma’am. But I weren’t expecting a lady.”

  “I know. I think Martin was a little surprised, too.” She turned to the guard. “Please wait outside,” she said.

  The guard flicked a look back and forth between Molly and Aaron. “You sure?” he said.

  “We’ll be fine,” she answered. He left the room a bit reluctantly.

  “Martin says you have no objection to the video camera.”

  “No ma’am.”

  She smiled and motioned to the cot while she tried to adjust the camera. She had trouble focusing it.

  “Want me t’ do thet, ma’am?” Aaron asked. “You kin jest sit down thair and I’ll get it in focus fer yuh.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said. She sat in the chair and he fiddled with the camera for a minute and tightened the tripod head.

  “All ready,” he said. “Just push this button to start ’er up.”

  “Where did you learn about video cameras?” she asked.

  “From Bishop Richard,” he
said. He laid back on the cot and stretched out with his feet crossed at the ankles and his arms folded across his chest. He seemed energized, animated, his eyes bright with anticipation. Perhaps it was just having company in the cell and the temporary comfort she provided from the awful loneliness that chaperons anyone banished to solitary isolation.

  “Are you comfortable?” Molly asked after she started the tape.

  “Yes’m.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the bishop, Aaron, not yet at least,” Molly said.

  “Well thair’s a relief. I told thet story so many times. Don’t know what more I kin say.”

  “I’d like to talk about when you were growing up.”

  “Uh-huh. Not very interestin’, though.”

  “Tell me about your hometown.”

  “Called Crikside.”

  “And that’s in Kentucky?”

  “Uh-huh. Friend of mine once said if yair lookin’ fer Crikside, you got t’ go to lost and found.”

  “That’s very funny.”

  “Yes ma’am. But Crikside’s not s’ funny.”

  “What do you mean, not so funny?”

  “It’s a dirty little town. Hardly big as this place is. Nothin’ t’ do thair. Don’t even have a libury. Work, go to church, ’n’ die, that’s what m’ maw used to say.”

  “Did you agree with your mother when she said that?”

  “Well, long’s you stayed thair, there was nary to disagree with.”

  “What did you want to do? When you were growing up, I mean?”

  Aaron seemed open and responsive to her questions. He was candid, never emotional, and at times so objective it was as if he were talking about someone else.

  “I don’t know. Seems like I tried ev’rything. Worked fer Avery Daggett, the lawyer, and Doc Koswalski and Mr. Boise, who owns the groc’ry store. Cut the grass at the city hall one summer. Mainly I wanted t’ learn.”

  “Learn what?”

  “Ev’rything. Read everything I could find. Readin’ was like … like takin’ a trip somewhere. It was a way to get out of that place. And Rebecca—Miss Rebecca, our schoolteacher? She had a lot of books which she lent me and then she ’ud ask questions, t’ see if I knew what they meant. When I got t’ high school it was better. That was in Lordsville—which was ’bout thirty miles over the mountain, we went by bus—and they had a good libury thair.”