by Haven Kimmel
“Still, my shrink says—”
“You don’t have a shrink, you have a social worker.”
“—my shrink says I need to express myself. Shall we fire up another one against the chill?”
“Emmy, have you had problems with the piston rings? Because look, the radiator isn’t leaking, but there’s smoke, like maybe from the engine—are you burning a lot of oil? Have you had the catalytic converter replaced?”
“I don’t know all that, don’t ask me, here—here, Puck, light this, I just want to look at something inside.” Emmy opened the driver’s door and sat down. “Okay,” she called out, “the lights still work, so it isn’t the battery, and damn! I have six thousand miles to go. Damn.” Emmy slammed the door, stomped her tennis shoe on the ground, then kicked a tire.
Puck blew out a stream of smoke. “How far are we from the hospital, Cassandra?”
Cassie looked around, then down the road. “Two miles? Maybe three.”
“We should push ahead, troops, don’t you agree, Miss Emmy? Shouldn’t we see this through to the end?”
“Fine with me,” Emmy answered, hopping up and down. “I’m game either way, but I’m freezing.”
Game. In truth Emmy had made her choice long ago, toward becoming the girl of her parents’ dreams. She’d done it by picking Brian—her boyfriend since the tenth grade, with his myriad and subtle restraints, the way he controlled her every move, even from a distance—and by leaving earlier in the fall for the nearest state college, the one her parents chose. She was studying to be a middle-school teacher, as her parents had demanded, rather than majoring in journalism, as she’d wanted. Tonight everything Emmy was doing was for show: the leather biker jacket she’d orphaned in her closet but had taken out for this occasion. The quarter bag of dope she’d scored, surely the last time that would ever happen. Even now the hopping, the coolness of saying she’d be willing to walk in the pitch darkness into an abandoned asylum in search of Dante, all were designed to suggest to Puck and Cassie that her story wasn’t over. Puck was the real thing; he would lead the stroll into a minefield, he wanted to go to the old hospital. He wanted to chase the beautiful child across the freezing landscape of Halloween night.
Cassie lifted the hood off the metal arm supporting it, put the arm down, and dropped the hood from its height. The dense explosion as it landed echoed out across the fields. “All right, then. But we take the first ride offered to us, no matter who it is, right, Emmy?”
Emmy shrugged, casual. “Sounds good.”
“Ahhh!” Puck passed the joint to Emmy, then raised his arms in the air. “By the pricking of my thumbs—”
“Dude,” Cassie said. “Enough.”
“Here, we’ll need this, too.” Emmy pulled a pint of Southern Comfort out of her back pocket. “It’s getting colder.”
They passed a pig farm squatting on a hillside and began to speak of pigs, an unfortunate topic. The house, under the waning moon, looked like the sort of place Grandpa Jones from Hee Haw would pick on his banjo as a bunch of barely dressed white-trash girls sang backup.
“That used to be Cassie’s dream house when she was little, wasn’t it, Cass,” Emmy said.
“Shut up, Emmy.”
“Oh dear,” Puck said, taking a deep breath. “It is aromatic. I’ve never taken you much for a hayseed, Cassandra.”
“I like farms.”
“Has a single car passed us yet?” Puck asked, looking around as if in disbelief.
Cassie had worked, when nothing else was available, on farms all over the county, sometimes for a day or two, and she’d done work she hated and wished to forget: bailing hay, detasseling corn, not demeaning or cruel work, but abysmally hard. She’d done things she loved: rounding cattle on horseback, delivering lambs; even building fence had a certain joy, although it nearly broke her back. She had ridden all day in an air-conditioned combine, listening to country music, and that had been good, had left her butt sore and her head clear. But there was something that arrived in the end, a kind of information you gathered working on a farm. Every day was a plundering, ripping food from the earth and life out of animals.
“What time is it?” Puck asked, stopping to feel for his watch.
Emmy pushed a button on the side of her watch, and the face lit up. “It’s eleven-oh-two, or thereabouts.”
Puck gave a stomp, which caused his heavy belly to ripple. “I have gone and missed trick-or-treat again. This is many years in a row now.”
Emmy set off walking again but made a soft humming sound. “Candy. Candy. Candy.”
Puck joined her in the chant: “Can-dy, can-dy, can-dy.” Cassie heard the van coming up behind them before the others but didn’t turn to meet the headlights. She walked straight ahead, scuffing her boots against the gravel of the shoulder. The heavy flashlight was tucked inside her jacket, and the Southern Comfort was curved securely in her pocket. Those who would stop, stopped. Rides were predetermined, like points on a compass: if you started out at A, C was set in motion. The van had been driving toward them a long time. Cassie had felt it, or the air it displaced, all the way back before the day began.
It was a white van, extra long and with no windows in the side or back. If it had been black, Cassie would have thought it belonged to a funeral-home fleet. It was probably used to deliver something, just not the newly dead. It drove past them slowly, then pulled over a hundred feet in front of them.
“This may very well mean candy,” Puck said, winking at Cassie.
She walked up to the driver’s window as he was rolling it down. He was a thin man in his late forties with dark hair going gray and an aggressive salt-and-pepper mustache. Cassie thought she’d been in line behind him at the grocery store. Him or someone like him, a man who bought only three things: cigarettes, ammonia, and honey buns. He blew a stream of smoke at his windshield, smiled at her.
“Where you headed?”
“Where are you headed, kind sir?” Puck asked from somewhere behind Cassie.
“Where are you headed?” the driver asked again, looking directly at Cassie.
“We’re going to the old state hospital,” she said.
“Climb in on the other side, I’ll take you there.”
When the three stranded travelers reached the passenger’s side, they were surprised to find a man holding the door open for them. Cassie glanced at him and said thanks as she slipped over the passenger’s seat and into the back of the van. He was handsome and cold, with pale blue eyes that seemed to have migrated up from Appalachia and the body of a high school wrestler: dense through the shoulders and small-waisted. Puck made an ooomph as he joined Cassie in the back, and Emmy slipped in silently.
The floor was uncovered, corrugated. There were indistinguishable items pushed against the walls, maybe televisions or microwaves, and a ladder hanging from two hooks. Emmy found a stack of motorcycle helmets and put one on, then handed two over to Puck and Cassie.
“May I wear one of your helmets, sir?”
The driver offered a vague wave. “Knock yourself out.”
“Oh, I can’t seem to fit—Emmy, hand me another, this one is too small. Don’t fear, sir! I’m not suggesting that your helmets aren’t big enough, it’s simply that I am quite large through the cranium.”
The cold-eyed passenger found something in the glove box, then climbed in and closed the door. Cassie sat on her helmet and leaned against one of the metal walls, slowly reaching for the knife she carried on her belt. No belt, no knife. She wrapped her arms around her knees and considered the odds. If the passenger was armed, they were doomed. If it came down to fists and feet, Cassie would be alone with her flashlight, as Emmy and Puck would do nothing but scream and dance around like nine-year-old girls. She leaned over and whispered to Emmy, “Until we’re out of the van and the situation is clear, keep your helmet on.”
Emmy nodded like a spaceman, then leaned over and said the same to Puck, who gave Cassie a sage wink. His helmet was propped atop his h
ead, the straps dangling around his face.
The driver pulled out on to Old 7 slowly, as if afraid his cargo might be disturbed, then accelerated gently, so that their passage over the first of the heart-thrilling hills passed without incident. Cassie was still trying to read the passenger’s profile (which was chiseled, square-chinned) by the dim light of the dashboard when Emmy screamed and bonked her helmet against the van wall.
“Furry! Something furry touched my hand!” She tried to get up, and fell sideways. “Fur!”
The driver laughed. “Calm down, it’s just a rabbit.”
Cassie looked at Puck, who smiled. “There’s a rabbit back here?”
“More than one.”
Cassie reached into her jacket and pulled out the flashlight, shining it on the floor of the van. At least six rabbits, a black and white one, a solid black, a beautiful deep brown, and others in combination, were hopping around freely.
Puck laughed aloud. “Isn’t this unexpected?”
The floor of the van was marked by large brown spots—rust or blood. If the passenger had a knife, they continued to be screwed. If he had a blackjack, nunchucks, Chinese fighting sticks, anything like that, they stood a chance. Cassie played it out in numerous ways in her mind: one behind her, the other in front, with a gun, with a knife, with nothing but menace and the unusual strength of the crazy. She repeated to herself the mantra that calmed her, walking out of a pool hall to her truck or down a darkened street: nose, throat, instep, solar plexus, groin. A man’s testicles can be removed from his body with eight pounds of pressure, and he will bleed to death in under a minute. A car key delivered swiftly to an eye will stop most assailants. An average man will panic if you sink your teeth into his tongue, but only if you mean it, only if you’re willing to bite it off and go on with your life. Walking out of a pool hall, however, she carried a cue in a hard case, and sometimes a .22 pistol in an ankle holster, and it was easier to be sanguine.
“What do you make of the bunnies, Emmy?” Puck asked.
“I think they’re making me higher,” she answered, pressed against the side of the van. “Also everything sounds flat inside this helmet.”
“I like them,” Puck said. “Oh, look, I caught one. It’s heavy and, my goodness, very warm. Imagine if we could gather them all up into a blanket. A rabbit blanket.”
“Imagine,” Emmy said, “lying under the rabbit blanket with morphine and candy.”
The driver used his turn signal on the empty road, then turned right on to the stretch of utter darkness that would lead them to the darker blackness of the old hospital. Cassie considered his use of the turn signal. It could be ironic. He could be saying, I am a law-abiding citizen, with the glint in his eye that marked the onset of a heinous crime. It could be unconscious, the reflex of a careful driver. Now that she knew they were there, Cassie could smell the rabbits strongly, but above or below them, little else. Gasoline, as if in a closed container. Something like a hot transistor. Puck and Emmy. But no alcohol on the driver or the passenger; no jittery junkie smell; nothing like the sharp chemical leak that came from the skin of a meth addict.
The lane they were on was rough, mined with holes, unattended by any bureaucracy. The van sank a few inches, came back up. Emmy bumped her metallic helmet against the side of the van four or five times in a row. The springs sang; rabbits skittered and hid behind the mystery boxes.
“Man oh man,” the driver said, flipping from his high beams to his low, trying to determine the best course of action. “What do you want back here? Why would you come back here?”
“Thank you for asking,” Puck said, coming to attention. “We are searching for someone, a friend called Dante.”
“I know Dante,” the passenger said, and his voice was surprising, breathy and boyish.
“You do?”
“We went to school together before.”
“My heavens,” Puck said. “A surprise to meet you. I’m Puck, by the way, and who would you be?” The van hit a hole, and Puck lost control of his rabbit.
“Jeff,” the passenger said, turning around in his seat and shaking Puck’s hand.
“And this is Cassie, this one with the flashlight, and over there is Emmy, she’s a college gal, and oops, she’s, maybe she’s asleep.”
“Nice to meet you. This here’s Wally, he used to be my stepdad.”
“Hello,Wally who used to be my stepdad.”
“Howdy,” Wally said without taking his eyes from the road.
Howdy was always ironic, except when it became a habit. And then it was the speaker’s entire life that descended into irony, and later into self-parody. Cassie studied Wally’s face in profile but couldn’t tell where he stood.
They passed the first of the institutional buildings, built in the late 1940s and situated under a row of hundred-year-old maple trees. It had served as the office of the director and the counselors and was the part of the sprawling camp most often shown in the newspaper and in television reports. All the buildings were variations on a theme: the large lake cottage, covered in cedar-shake shingles painted green, with screened porches. There was a humane vision, Cassie thought, in the construction and in the location. The land was beautiful, lonesome, on a knoll overlooking a strip of forest a mile long and hundreds of acres wide. In the summer the inmates would have found themselves above a green canopy; in the fall they would have seen the drama of hardwoods in the weakening midwestern sun. The county had closed the place a few years before, after an intrepid newspaper reporter went undercover as an orderly and audiotaped an old man being beaten for wetting his bed. The reporter had gone on to disclose the names of dozens of people who had died by accidental drowning since the 1950s, most of them mentally retarded and suffering from seizures. And many more dead from unknown causes.
They drove past the medical facility, a squat block rectangle that could serve in any historical atrocity. Wally turned right again, following the gravel lane along the edge of the knoll.
“There’s light back here,” he said, “behind that last house.”
Cassie leaned forward between Wally and Jeff as the van slowly made its way deeper into the compound. They passed the residence of the former director; a swing set, mostly dismantled, sat mute at the edge of the yard. Then a building on the left, larger, longer than the other cottages. Something flashed white in a window, but Cassie couldn’t have said what it was.
“Looks like a fire back there,” Wally said. He parked in the drive next to the last building, and he and Jeff got out quietly.
Cassie sat back and touched Emmy on the shoulder. “Em, we’re here.” She shone the flashlight above her friend’s sleeping face.
Emmy opened her eyes and stretched out an arm; her eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and she seemed disoriented. “Yikes. Sleeping in a helmet isn’t half bad.” She sat up and adjusted her jacket. “I’m dying of thirst, I’m dying, seriously.”
Puck was feeling around on the floor for his rabbit, but it had gone missing. “Here, alien girl. Don’t drink it all.” He handed her a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew from his jacket pocket.
By the light of the fire Cassie could see Wally and Jeff peering behind the empty house, then conferring. She got out of the van and walked toward them, cold again, surprised by the air.
“There’s nobody here,” Wally said, looking around him, “but that fire is pretty big.”
“They’re here,” Cassie said.
Puck stepped out of the van and thrust his stomach forward, causing his helmet straps to swing to and fro, then marched toward the fire. “What is this?” he shouted. His voice rang out across the silent valley below. “A fire with no one tending it? Have our educational institutions been entirely remiss in teaching fire safety?”
Shapes began to emerge, one at a time, and approach the fire. A girl—maybe it was a girl, a person in a skirt, anyway—crept out from under a black tarp at the edge of the cottage, a boy from behind a tree. A screen door on the cottage creaked open, a
nd three more people came out.
“Puck!”
“Hey, dude!”
“Where you been, man? We’ve missed you!”
Puck threw his arms around each of them in turn. They squatted by the fire.
“These friends of yours?” Wally asked Cassie, tipping his head toward the scene.
“Not so much.”
“But you know them.”
“Some.”
“But this … Puck? He’s your friend?”
Cassie nodded. “We go way back.”
Wally was wearing faded blue jeans and an old sheep-lined leather jacket. Standing this close to him, Cassie could smell the leather and hear it creak when he moved. She relaxed. Jimmy had worn a flight jacket; she remembered hiding in the closet and breathing it in when he was gone.
“You looking for a boyfriend?” Wally asked, raising his eyebrows not quite lasciviously.
“Nope.”
“Already got one?”
“Nope.”
“You gay?”
“You tryin’ to piss me off?”
Wally shook his head and reached inside his jacket, pulling out a pack of filterless Camels. A book of matches was tucked inside the cellophane. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.” Cassie took Emmy’s bottle of Southern Comfort from her back pocket. “Drink?”
They stood that way awhile,Wally and Jeff passing the bottle back and forth, Cassie watching the fire. Jeff didn’t smoke, didn’t speak, wasn’t wearing a coat, just a thick hooded sweatshirt with a school logo on the front, something Cassie couldn’t quite make out. A Trojan, a Viking.
Emmy wandered up, and the firelight reflected off her silver helmet in flashes. “Somebody stop me next time,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
Cassie watched Puck with his ragtag army. She wondered what they thought of his living in the immaculate ranch house in the deathly subdivision off the highway. His middle-aged and overweight mother was generous in her grief; she had been waylaid by widowhood, and now Puck had, in addition to his midnight-blue Camaro, a snowmobile, an expensive stereo system, a wardrobe that changed constantly to accommodate his ever expanding girth. He had gadgets: handheld video games and walkie-talkies, TVs and VCRs, a motorbike he was too fat to ride. His mom had finished the basement in his honor and filled it with shiny electronics and a wide, sturdy bed. He had his own bathroom down there, his own phone line. But these children, as he liked to say, were his chosen people.
