Boone

by Berntson, Brandon

  Emily Grabowski sat in a rocking chair with a green and red afghan draped over her legs, wearing a heavily knit sweater. Her long black and gray hair was tied in one giant braid. She didn’t acknowledge the two men but sat staring at the rain, rocking back and forth.

  “If this keeps up much longer, Booner, we’ll both be rowing home.”

  Boone nodded. It didn’t sound like a bad idea.

  “Feeling better?”

  Boone nodded.

  “Should have known the way you work. Sometimes the patients just need a little fresh air to make everything right again.”

  Where the porch descended to the walkway, there was a steady curtain of rain falling from the eaves.

  The grass looked greener. It always did on cloudy days. A cold breeze touched the back of his neck, and Boone looked behind him. The black hand of the shadow boy was now curling around the front door.

  He let out a tiny groan that Desmond didn’t hear. “Bout time we got inside Boone. Unless you want to hang out still. I can sit wit’cha.”

  But Boone heard, “Bout time you settled them all in the ground, Boone. If ya know what’s good for ya.”

  Boone nodded, agreeing.

  ~

  Desmond took him back to his room after a while. He didn’t mind. He had the view of the creek and the cottonwoods. The rain smeared and blurred the window, but it was still a good view. Boone decided to stay in his room for the rest of the evening, and though the weather reports continued to come in, the staff at the Shepherd’s Grove Asylum had everything under control.

  There was no cause for alarm.

  ~

  “Sir, there are several floors starting to leak, and I think we should—”

  Leslie McGovern, Director of the Shepherd’s Grove Psychiatric Hospital, made an impatient gesture across his throat. He opened his eyes wider than Weasel Tarkington thought they could go, telling the janitor and groundskeeper to shut the hell up. He was talking to Mayor Sam Bainbridge, or so Weasel guessed, only because they were talking about the safety issues of the hospital and the flood warnings, all of which spelled discomfort and unease for Leslie McGovern. The man had priorities, and they weren’t the safety concerns of the Shepherd’s Grove Psychiatric Hospital. Weasel figured he had a little mistress on the side as well, and that was contributing to his unease. There had been a call earlier from Wally Manwaring, the local sheriff, making sure everything and everyone was fine out here. Did they need any help? Leslie had told him, nodding emphatically on the phone, that they were managing just fine under the circumstances. Weasel had been in ear and eyeshot of that phone call as well.

  McGovern was a portly man. He wore a red and white striped tie to match his tweed, maroon jacket. A white, nicely pressed shirt was underneath, probably gathering sweat stains, Weasel thought. The man was bald except for some hair clinging to the base of his skull in the classic horseshoe pattern. What he didn’t have on his gleaming bald dome he made up for in facial hair. Weasel wondered if that was the case with all bald men, because McGovern was sporting a thick salt and pepper beard and mustache. He wore tiny gold glasses, and his tie did not so much dangle from his neck as it sloped outward from what Weasel always thought of as a roller coaster of a belly, or a water slide. Weasel pictured a smaller version of himself cruising down—wheee—over Mr. McGovern’s enormous gut and into a huge pool of water. He smiled, thinking about it. McGovern saw the smile and gave him a deadly glare, not the least bit amused. Weasel wiped the smile off his face.

  “If it’s a safety issue, Sam. They called out here already. Everything’s been taken care of. I told you that. We got the staff on it. Yes. Yes. I’ll check, damnit. Get off my back, will ya? I told you I had it under control.”

  The man took a deep breath and sighed. “Okay. Good. Got it. Thanks. Bye, Sam.”

  He hung up. Weasel tried to go in again, but the man gave him an impatient, ‘leave me the hell alone’ gesture, then sighed, rifled through a notepad on his desk, and looked up.

  “Yes, Weasel, what is it?”

  “I was saying, Les, there are several floors leaking.”

  “So, what do you want me to do about it? We can’t very well re-shingle the roof now in this mess. You’ll just have to make do, Weez. Get some buckets for God’s sake. Do I have to do all your thinking for you?”

  ‘Weasel’ Giles Tarkington didn’t care much for Leslie McGovern. That was no secret, and neither did the rest of the staff. It was hard to like a man who drove an overly large Lincoln Continental that matched his burgundy suit and tie, and he seemed to care more about polishing the gold class ring on his fat sausage pinkie finger than he did about the residents and staff. He’d made that quite clear. But that, as they say, is the law of the land, according to Weasel.

  Les was a typical hand puppet to the state, an overbearing brute. Weasel heard he’d cheated at cards at one time, sitting in with the staff along with several patients in the activities room. He was also a two-timing, apathetic asshole. Even though Weasel knew he had to take care of the leaks by himself (he was fine with that, thank you very much) he thought bringing it to the attention of Les was the right thing to do because he was, after all, the director. The man didn’t like being called Les, either, especially not by Weasel, but it was a jab he wanted to deliver and as often as he could. Sometimes you had to poke at an asshole for a while before it gave. Weez did it to see if there was a conscience back there behind the fat, bald skull.

  There wasn’t.

  The other thing that Weasel detested, along with several staff members (he’d had it confirmed), was when McGovern took out the small white hankerchief from his breast pocket and start polishing the ring on his pinkie finger. The air of pretentious pomp in which he did this made Weasel want to throw up all over his burgundy suit.

  They were standing in McGovern’s office. Some of the residents had begun to complain about the noise, the steady drip-drip-drip of the leaks on the third floor. Some patients had leaks in their rooms. Weasel was simply trying to make them less agitated.

  Before he’d come into work, he’d been listening to the National Weather Service. There was a flash flood warning in effect until 6pm tomorrow for Hauberk, Old Hartford, Wheatridge, Idlewild, Bridgeport, and Keenesburg Counties, with one Shepherd’s Grove thrown in for good measure. Just as he was coming in from the Takamine Bridge, the Miramac was already raging. The sight of that river had always spooked him. Deep water moved a hell of a lot faster once you were in it than it looked to the naked eye. He could see that it was creeping along and overflowing into the nearby neighborhoods and farmlands . . . or so it would if it didn’t stop raining. The sandbagging hadn’t done a thing.

  “I’m just saying, sir . . . the buckets will help, but I think it’s gonna make some of the patients uneasy and hard to sleep, you know? Have you ever tried to sleep with a leaky faucet in the house? It’s kind of an annoying sound, and I just thought . . . you know, to ease them up a bit.”

  “Jesus Christ, Weez! They can’t handle the sound of a leaky faucet? They’re not children for God’s sake!”

  “Well, there is the juvenile wing . . . but I think the youngest there is around twelve.”

  “So, give them an extra dose of NyQuil and leave me the hell alone. What the hell are you bothering me for with all these stupid details? Aren’t there doctors on the staff? I got bigger problems, Weez. Maybe they should be thankful they got room and board, you know? Maybe they should be thankful their mattresses ain’t wet. They got activities, a gym, all the television they could melt their brains with, snacks, and God knows what else, and you’re worried about a few raindrops. Jesus Christ! Leave me alone.”

  “Sure thing, Les, I gotcha. Sorry to bother you with such a minor inconvenience. I understand you are a very important man of business. You’ve been a colossal help. I mean that. Have a nice day.”

  He delivered this with as much snark as he could muster, a rather pathetic victory, but a victory nonetheless.

&nb
sp; He headed down to the janitor closet along the west wing. Les said something in his defense as Weasel made his way out the door, but he didn’t stay long enough to hear it. There were several buckets he could use, but he would have to rummage through the basement to find more, or perhaps the shed out back . . . where they kept all the lawn equipment.

  ~

  The storm raged on. Lightning flashed, followed by a booming peal of thunder. Boone felt the sanitarium shake beneath his feet, and the lights flickered.

  ~

  Nancy Kessler never called Giles Tarkington, Weasel. She thought it rude, even if he said he didn’t mind. She didn’t understand how you could acquire such a nickname, and thought whatever incident had done it had probably been a questionable one. You might as well call a person Rat or Centipede.

  So, she called him Giles, which was funny, because it always threw him off. He would hear her; his ears would perk up (she saw that clearly), brows coming together, then he’d go back to doing whatever he was doing until she called him by his name again. Maybe he’d just gotten so used to it he didn’t care. She thought it was proper to call people by their birth names, not after some slippery animal that had a bad reputation. That, and the fact that she simply couldn’t bring her mouth to say it. It made her feel dirty.

  Giles was a scrawny, very tan and wiry man. He was small, but he was all hard muscle. She thought he looked funny in the baggy jeans he always wore, and he was getting up there in years, mid-fifties, she guessed, but he was a dang nice man, and he genuinely cared about the patients at the hospital. But he was also ruggedly handsome, and he was good at fixing things. He kept the grounds looking neat and clean, the hospital parking lot free of debris, and the hallways always sparkling.

  He was putting a bucket in the hallway on the third floor, where the juvenile wing was. He’d been eyeing the ceiling, as if trying to figure out how to get up there and fix it.

  “It might do all right to crawl around in the attic,” he said. “But I can get a couple more buckets, and I guess there’s plenty of bedpans. It might sound a little musical, especially if we get them all going at once. You have any drumsticks, Nancy?”

  “Huh?”

  “Drumsticks. You know, then we can get, like, a real percussion thing going. It would be like a marching band up here. Might keep the younger ones preoccupied, too. Could have ourselves a gay old time, as they used to say on The Flintstones. We could roast marshmallows and have a little sing-a-long.”

  She stared at him, not getting it.

  “Never mind,” he said, and looked away.

  She knew Giles had a crush on her, a pretty big one, and why not? She was a healthy, robust, full-figured woman. She had a pretty round face, but Nancy thought that Giles thought she might be a little slow in the belfry department, and hadn’t she just proved it when he’d tried to joke with her just now?

  “Might have to get up in the attic and see if I can find where it’s coming in. That could be a dirty job, but I’m the man to do it, Nancy. You know what I mean?”

  He looked at her, winked, then smiled, showing nicotine-stained teeth, but that didn’t bother her, either. She thought it added to his ruggedness, a man who smoked.

  “You’re a good man, Giles.”

  “Why, thank you, my dear,” he said. “You keep the youngsters calm, and we’ll get this all patched up in no time.”

  She’d gotten divorced several years ago, and she hated to admit it, but she’d had a little fling with Mr. McGovern not long afterwards. He’d practically forced himself on her, and she’d been so exhausted by the end of her shift, she simply let him do what he wanted rather than resist. It was easier that way. She didn’t want Giles to find out about it, because she was afraid it would change the way he felt about her.

  Les had also threatened her with her job. She thought of telling Wally Manwaring, the local sheriff, but she also felt it was easier to let things go until they’d blown over, and they had. Leslie had stopped making advances, and things had gone back to normal.

  The buckets were along the hall, some in several rooms. She could hear them making that hollow, plastic noise against the bottom until it filled up with water. Then, it would make a steady ploink-ploink-ploink sound.

  “That sound’s enough to drive you crazy,” he said, then slapped his hand over his mouth. He widened his eyes, not intending to make the pun, and his tan darkened.

  Nancy laughed, tittering with her own hand over her mouth. “I don’t think anyone would take offense, Giles.”

  She smiled wide and put her hand on his arm. He looked down at it for a second, then blushed again. She thought she saw him quiver, too, a good quiver. Was she flirting with him?

  She supposed she was.

  ~

  Follow me, Booner, and I will lead you home.

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard this. It could very well be his imagination.

  Boone threw his arm over his eyes and listened to the rain and thunder.

  ~

  “A flash flood warning is in effect for the following counties: Wheatridge County. Old Hartford County. Idlewild County. Keeneburg County. Shepherd’s Grove County…”

  It was the robotic male voice coming form the radio Weasel had found and plugged into the basement outlet. He’d found it amidst a mountain of rubble. There was junk down here aplenty, old filing cabinets, exam tables, old bed frames, tables with missing legs, bureaus with broken drawers. There was old equipment, lamps that no longer worked, and some things simply left to collect dust. It was a big storage area of forgotten things, and it smelled damp, cold, and neglected.

  Weasel had decided to check the basement before crawling up into the attic. The windows running along the garden level already had several inches of water against the glass. Rivulets made their way down the concrete walls and pooled onto the floor.

  “I think the Good Lord is angry with the Grove,” Weasel said, and at the same moment, a flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a crack of thunder.

  Weasel started. “Good Lord,” he said, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. An electric sizzle raced across his arms. “Someone had better appease the Man Upstairs, or we’re all in for one nasty weekend.”

  Weasel had never been a church goin’ man, but he’d always been a God fearin’ man, which he thought was just as good, if not better.

  When the lightning flashed, the first inklings of fear snaked up his back.

  There was a single light bulb in the basement, the only source of illumination. It flickered momentarily, but stayed on.

  “I don’t have nearly enough buckets,” he said, looking around at the water gathering on the floor.

  ~

  Her name was Isabelle, and she’d been in the 4th grade at the time, the same as Boone. She found him far away from the playground, sitting all by himself in the grass where the school grounds ended and the row of elderberry trees began. She had silver hair, so platinum blonde it looked like the edge of a cloud in front of the sun. Her eyes were a dark, marble blue. She reminded him of an elf in some lost fairytale with powdery white skin.

  She’d found him covering his ears, rocking back and forth for reasons she didn’t understand. But she knew he was in pain. He always looked like he was in pain, even in class. Boone had developed a sort of mechanism against it. She didn’t know what pained him, but she knew enough. Everybody in school called him Frankie, including the teachers, but Isabelle knew enough to call him Boone.

  It was a cold, cloudy, autumn day, and she had walked up to him while the other kids played on the jungle gym and pointed, making fun of him.

  “Boone?”

  He kept his hands over his ears. He did not hear her. Isabelle was wearing a thick coat that, ironically, matched her hair and eyes.

  “Boone?”

  She sat down in front of him, took off her coat and draped it over his head. She got under the coat with him, close together, making a tiny tent over them both. He didn’t notice her until she
sat down in front of him. Then he looked up, eyes wide, wondering who she was and why she was here.

  “Hi, Boone. My name is Isabelle,” she said, and smiled. He never forgot the way she smiled. No one had ever smiled at him like that. “And you’re Boone, right? You like to be called Boone, don’t you?”

  Boone nodded.

  “Are your ears hurting you?”

  He nodded.

  “What is it? Can you tell me?”

  He shrugged

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Noise,” he said.

  “Noise?”

  He nodded.

  “You hear noise?”

  He nodded again. It was the best form of communication. Isabelle looked around and didn’t hear anything but the distant shouts of kids on the playground.

  “Boone, are you hearing the kids on the playground?”

  He nodded again.

  He was hearing the kids, and for whatever reason, he was insanely sensitive to the noises they were making.

  “Boone?”

  He looked up. There were tears in his eyes. She leaned forward and grabbed his hands, pulling them away from his ears, and put her own hands there, cupping his ears. She kissed him on the forehead, and Boone closed his eyes.

  “You don’t hear anything, Boone. Except me. Okay? And when you hear the noises, the shouts, you just have to silence it. Do you understand? Do whatever you have to. With whatever you can. You just have to silence it, Boone. Okay?”

  “Silence it,” he said.