by Brian Hodge
"Of course it checks out. If you'll take a minute to call my wife—"
"What's your name, fella?"
"Uh, Judson. Bledsoe." Painstakingly enunciated; his jaw felt wired. "What's it supposed to be?" A not-at-all insincere question, that one.
"You tell me, fella. You tell me."
"Look. This my Cadillac. I am on my way to my office at" what was it? "Westward Dynamics. Check it out. Go ahead. If you'll just let me sign your God damned ticket—"
Snickers, waggling heads, sounds like the wheezing of disappointed schoolmasters. "It never fails to amaze me, you know? In broad daylight. You would have had better luck trying to get away with stiffing a liquor store. Don't you guys ever get it? All right, you're under arrest. Just a minute and somebody will read you your rights."
"What charge, for Christ's sake?"
"You want to watch your mouth, little man. How about grand theft auto, breaking and entering, two counts of kidnap, let's see, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted rape. How's that grab you, smart guy?"
"Attempted what?"
"We'll think up some more, don't you worry." Clipped, close-mouthed, orders to a stick, an object, a spot on the sidewalk.
"I don't get it."
"We don't have to tell you anything yet, you got that?" Then, taken in by dumbfounded life mask but probably not, probably more out of a long-suppressed yearning to swing weight behind such words: "The lady notified us an hour ago. The story seems—" What panache on that word! "—Seems to be that you flagged down the lady's chauffeur in one of those halfway settlements, forced him to drive over the County line, that you proceeded to hold them both at gunpoint—" Again, a liquid familiarity with such a word. "—At her residence until this morning, when Mr. Bledsoe arrived home from a business trip, at which time you took him hostage and fled the premises with over ten thousand dollars in cash. And the car. Let's have a look at that coat."
Lapels flailed as if by a professional pickpocket.
Monogrammed.
JB.
"These are his clothes."
You have such a way with words, officer. And that about wraps it up. Mark it and strike it. Move 'em out.
"Just one more thing."
Yes? Yes?
"What did you do with your hostage?"
Dum-da-dum-dum.
He broke and lunged at the car for proof, papers, ID, a picture, something, anything with which to identify himself. The glove box rattled open.
In the gaping shadow, a revolver.
Struggle in handcuffs. Jerk and strain your back, raging until the blood bursts like drums in your ears over the traffic and the crackling radios.
"Sergeant, you want to take a look at this."
Bent knees, tops of caps. Trail of oil oozing from the car. Dark oil, spreading in a pool under the trunk.
"Yeah," volunteered the boy, "his transmission's throwin' oil like a sieve."
The sergeant knelt, dipped a finger, smelled. "This isn't oil, son." Dramatically. "Get that trunk open."
The trunk yawned.
Luggage, flight-tagged.
Shoe.
Foot.
Leg.
Body, contorted like an uncooked pretzel in a gray suit. Dead, of course.
Of course.
Blood from single bullet wound trickled from death mask skull, still congealing, to asphalt.
Cop: "Well, shit." Crowded like actors silenced by an unexpected entrance, huddling for a next line. "All I can say," says one of the cops, "is I sure hope his old lady had plenty of life insurance on him."
Get it. Get it now, almost all of it, enough, enough. Too much. How they must have planned the murder, searching for someone, the only kind of fall guy who would, who could play along with them; at last, realizing in a cold flash the only place they could hope to find such a one. And Allen had even picked someone the right size. They were good. Oh, were they good! "You're God damned right! How right you are! Don't you guys get it? You can bet your asses she had plenty riding on this! Oh ho, the plan of the cen-tu-ry!" You laugh maniacally, a man who has been handled and knows it at last, set up only to be flattened again, a moment of clarity, until a club at your throat takes you out.
On the blacktop, blood melting and coagulating with spilled gasoline and motor oil, a shimmering rainbow beginning and ending in its swirling depths.
The trial: hired flagellants relive your crimes in the courtroom, pick them over as meticulously as worms spawned within the deed. (You didn't do it, the Pentothal sessions in the Medical Center prison ward prove it; such evidence is inadmissible, of course.) The defense: doctors hover, mercenary angels in metallic suits and half-boots, in conference with wire-sideburned lawyers. (The Clinic pays for them all with impotent, reluctant, constipated dedication; bad publicity, a guilty verdict could, just might, will scare potential customers.) The back story: (There was no back story until the moment you sprang up like a ripe dragon's tooth in the road, the five hundred survival dollars in fives, tens and twenties provided in a shiny new wallet; there never is.) Like any other voluntary, emphasize voluntary customer/patient at NeuAnfang Clinic, you paid, in advance, naturally, to have your memory selectively "cleared"—read: a sequence of protein injections, primarily puromycin and 8-azaguanine, into the cerebral cortex. (The cost: a basic $33,000; more or less depending on the stipulations in each personalized contract.) You were then shoved gently, professionally out the door, pointed quite fail-safely down the only road, along which the rehabilitation communities, halfway settlements like Drop City are sown every few miles across the floor of the isolated valley; no through traffic, no campers allowed, only an occasional bus to and from the Clinic like the one on which you hitched a ride (had you stepped off the road, stumbled, fallen, panicked, waved him down?) free again to take your chances on the neurological pathway (no forks other than those you make yourself). The verdict: the Clinic must take no chances. Guilty or not, you are pled mentally incompetent to stand trial.
"You would have come to see it for what it was, by the way, sooner or later anyway, Jack. (Do you want to keep that name?) Nobody gets it right off. I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish. The answers come in their own time, and not until the questions start to pop up on their own. After all, questions come out of some kind of order in words, and the answers, I guess, have to come out of the order of your life. You wouldn't, you couldn't come looking for me until you'd already found me, in a sense. Too much in the beginning only keeps the client confused, so he starts to fall back on the great mother Clinic and all us witchdoctors. You didn't pay your money to get turned into an invalid. A new chance is what you wanted. We try to see to it that you make one for yourself. The way you want it.
"We're supposed to keep you under observation for ninety days. Then the court will be wanting a report on your, let's say sanity. Hah! 'Course there's nothing wrong with you now. But who'd believe it? We've had too much bad press to convince a jury that people like you come for the treatment for any reason except to hide something. Your record's clear—you weren't wanted for anything or we couldn't have taken you—but try to explain that, try to convince 'em on the stand. Every doctor on our staff could talk till he's blue in the face and it wouldn't make much difference. Far as they'd be concerned, you were running from something or other—you had to be, see?—even if the law hadn't got wind of it yet. It would have, they'd think. They don't believe in innocence, Jack. They can't. It's the way they think.
"Now, your observation can be handled in different ways. That much is left pretty much up to us, under the law. But I'll tell you something, Jack. We feel a responsibility to our clients. Yes. As much protection as the law allows, and then some; that's not altruism; it's just good business. You came over to us because you woke up one day and found you'd got turned around into something you couldn't live with anymore, a kind of person that sickness of theirs had made into a thing that only knows how to get in its own way.
"You go on,
sleep, Jack. It's dark out. I'll be giving you a few more of these injections, and then you can give it another try. That's one detail they didn't specifically prohibit us from doing for you."
"No." You try to raise your head but the light is everywhere, so you can't even see Dr. Leveland. "No more injections. I—" You are struggling to make a decision, one that seems all of a sudden to be the most important you've ever made, more important even than the first one. "I already had one new deal. Nobody," you realize, startled at yourself, "promised me anything when I came along the first time, the very first time, I mean. I—I think I'd like to play this one out to the end."
You are very sensitive to the pressure of the bed supporting you, the sound of wheeled appliances carting along the halls outside your door; so many, each going as silently as possible through his appointed rounds. You hear the soft ringing of an elevator in the hospital, a sound you seem to know, people coming and going within its confines, and if stretching face muscles, the 13 steps of a grin can be heard by your human ear, then you hear that, too, there in the room close to you.
"You're going back to a place where there's just no model for the kind of behavior I was talking about. What you do after that is up to you. I can tell you, though—I guess you expect me to—that a certain young lady was knocked down a few notches when you left. Far as I know she's still waiting."
"Roland." Your mind is starting to turn over, to move like an electromagnet and you feel the energy spiraling outward from a core you weren't sure you possessed until this moment. "What about the ninety days?"
"Well, they'll want a diagnosis at that time, from me, I guess, since I'm the acting physician in town. I'll hook you up to all that mumbo jumbo and they'll get a print-out back here at the Clinic. But hell, how can I diagnose you? I open my mouth to tell you it's raining, and in the middle of the sentence the sun comes out!"
You're planning already, how to find a way to get at the truth about Linda Bledsoe and that son of a bitch Allen, how he worked it getting into the valley past the detours, just to pick up someone like you to take the rap, someone whose word, they knew, would have a value approaching absolute zero in the eyes of the law. There must be a way. Ninety days isn't going to be much time.
"Now," says Roland, "don't go too fast right off. I know you're brave enough to be scared, but you might still be a little too humble to win."
You look up. His face is completely washed out by the brightness of the light.
"On the other hand, Jack, old boy, you don't want to use Drop City to hide out. Now why did I bother to say that? I think you already know, or I wouldn't be taking a chance on you."
You make a questioning sound in your dry throat.
"Just what you already know, Jack. That a place a man can hide in can be something else, too, when he needs it. It can be a haven."
But his voice fades. His voice fades and you are already there, coming up over the reeds and sage into a wine sky, stopping on the edge where nobody ever gets off to wipe your face with your own good handkerchief before turning into it once more. Hear his words, circle his office and begin again, you are circling the town, the lights coming on over the movie marquee, it is one you have seen before but never stayed through to the end but there is no rush, it will be there tomorrow night and the night after; you are relieved that she is not yet there on her stool behind the glass, doling out tickets like brightly colored lies, ones which those who choose to enter will be happy to live by, as you cross the empty street to the bright blue sign misting in the haze of a warm day turning slowly toward evening. Inside, to the right, the fish still thriving under glass, to the left, the old dark wood and leather crescent railing, and moving somewhere in front of the jukebox that looks like nothing so much as an overstuffed chair sprung through with lights, a woman dances with herself, a coin ready for one more in an endless succession of plays, twenty-thirty pounds overweight and ready for the winter, fingers wet with beer. The door thumps securely behind you as you go to the bar and order the first in a series of very stiff drinks, and when Eleanor comes over you turn your back not unkindly on Mr. Shiply, the barkeep who is nothing of the kind but who has found a way of being that suits him well enough for the present, as he says "Well hello there, Mr., what was it?" But he is too late, Eleanor is against you and your feet are moving already to a music that seems to be playing just for you.
green, green, promenade in green
And you will not sleep in the hotel this night and you will not sleep in the boarding house, it is still too soon, it is time to lose yourself in order to come back to where you began, and as you take her arms in the dance you remember another arm, the uniform sleeve drawn up: old, almost healed, the knots of hematomas and the scar tissue where the hardening had been surgically removed, years ago, in another life long past, and mercifully so, mercifully forgotten, a life which you saw then and understand now had been tracked relentlessly by endless hypodermic needles… But it is too soon to think of that now, too soon.
tell me who you love,
tell me who you love
You do not try to speak to this woman of any of it. It is something too sharp and too wild. For you cannot, you know, use words to get beyond words.
THE CHAIR
"Marty," she said, "I need you."
He studied the lips. The air was opalescent with cigarette smoke, the lights too far away to make it easy. Her complexion was smooth and taut; a faint bloom of perspiration glittered in the shadows below her cheekbones. It was impossible, of course. And yet…
“Christy?” he said, incredulous.
He wanted to reach out and touch her to be sure. At the same time he was seized by a desperate impulse to leave his chair and run: between tables to the bar, even to the dance floor where faces he seemed to know had been grafted onto bodies he would never recognize, bodies which now gyrated feverishly to music he thought he had forgotten long ago.
"I've been looking for you all night," she said. "I—I was afraid you wouldn't come." He heard her voice masked by the noise, as though through a wind tunnel. "Can we go somewhere? We can’t talk here."
Martin rose uncertainly and followed. The crowd surged. Her form grew smaller and was lost to him. He threaded a path between abandoned chairs, his arms brushing a table, upsetting a half-finished glass of wine. A red blot spread across the white linen. He righted the empty glass and tried to move on.
A powerful hand stopped his wrist.
"Didn't think you'd get away that easy, did you?"
Martin looked up. A smudged copy of a face from his childhood towered over him. Around the eyes grainy skin crinkled with amusement, emphasizing preternaturally blue contact lenses.
"Bill Crabbe," said the tall man expectantly.
Martin gaped. It was true. Crabbe, the baseball star from high school. Martin shook his hand.
"How ya doin', buddy?" Crabbe pumped his arm. "My gosh, Jerry Marber! You're sure lookin' good. What you been doin' with yourself all these years?"
Martin realized he had been mistaken for someone else.
He considered correcting the tall man. At that moment there was a pause in the music and hyperventilating couples pressed back between the wooden pillars to their banquet tables. An intoxicating cloud of hair spray and cologne blew over him. He gazed through the crowd to the polished walls and round windows, searching for Christy's face. He cleared his throat.
"Excuse me, Jer," said Crabbe abruptly, "but there's Wayne Fuller. I gotta say hi. My gosh, look at him. He hasn't changed a bit, has he? Old Wayne. Hey, over here!"
Crabbe moved on, paddling against the throng with his big pitcher's hand outstretched.
Martin spotted an exit. Christy or someone very much like her was leaning against the lacquered door, trying to light a cigarette while her eyes grew whiter, sweeping the ballroom.
For me, he thought. She's waiting for me, even after so many years. I should have known. I should have kept the faith. Well, maybe I have without realizing it.
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We'll find out now, won't we?
Couples swept past in a frenzied rush. The room seemed to tilt as bodies hurried to one side. The backs of men with polyester suits and indeterminate waistlines bobbed six deep in front of the cash bar. Martin took a deep breath. He felt drunk. He steadied himself against a chair and aimed for the other side.
"Jimmy!" called a booming voice.
He pressed on through the louvers of crepe paper strung from the bandstand, a wall of voices closing in. Heads streaked with graying sideburns and permanent-wave curls blocked his way. When they moved aside, he noticed that Christy was gone from the doorway.
"Jimmy Madden! I knew it was you!"
The gravel voice of a bull-necked football coach boomed again. This time it jarred him to a standstill.
Martin turned and was confronted by a short-sleeved sport shirt, the same print he remembered from school. He scrutinized the face above and nodded, smiling impatiently.
What was the coach's name?
Then he realized it was not the coach's face, after all. It was Warrick. Mark Warrick, once star lineman for the Greenworth Buckskins. He had made it to the state playoffs, if Martin remembered correctly.
"Nice to see you, Mark," said Martin reflexively. "Only I'm not…"
A sweet-smelling woman disengaged from the pack and took possession of Martin's left arm. He felt her breast push into his side.
"Gail!" said Warrick. His lantern jaw dropped open and uneven teeth shone there wetly. "Are you still with Bob? I mean—"
"Not for a year-and-a-half," announced Gail. She kneaded Martin's forearm as if measuring it. "And how are you, Joe?"
The man in the sport shirt plowed ahead. "Guess what, Gail? I'm head coach at GHS now. Did you hear? Uh, are you, I mean, did you come alone?"
She said, "Don’t I see your wife, Mark? That sweet little thing over there in the corner, waiting for someone to ask her to dance? What was her name?"
Martin was aware of the underwiring of her bra prying his ribs apart. She turned on him again, inches away, and blinked into his eyes from beneath lids heavy with raccoon mascara.
