by Glover, Dan
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Allison.”
Billy could feel her shaking in his arms.
“What happened to Alex? Was he killed too?”
“No… that’s the worse part. He escaped. The police found a woman not far away who’d been assaulted and had her car stolen. They found the car a few hundred miles to the east… abandoned and out of gas… but they never found Alex. He’s still out there. I think I see him everywhere I go. But it’s never him. I dream about him… the most surreal dreams… nightmares, really. That’s one of the reasons I left my home in Malibu Hills… I kept dreaming Alex broke into the house and attacked me. I’d wake terrified.”
“You’ll be safe here, Allison.”
Billy wanted to reassure this girl as she snuggled close to him with a fresh drink in her hand. He had only met her but he was ready to sell his life in order to protect her.
“I’ll watch out for you… I promise. If I ever see a man who resembles you, I’ll know who it is. And I’ll stop him. You can depend on me, Allison. I understand now what Yelena wanted to tell me.”
“I believe in you, Billy Austin… thank you for listening.”
They drank the first bottle of vodka and most of the second before Billy noticed light peeping through the window and the birds beginning their pre-dawn chitterlings.
“I should go, Billy.”
Allison stood up and staggered ever so slightly.
“You can stay here, Allison. You can have my bed. I'll sleep here.”
He started to get up and then settled back into his chair. He couldn’t remember being more drunk. He wondered how a small woman like Allison could drink as much as she did and still walk.
“No… I have to sleep in my own bed and the Victorian is only five minutes from here… but thank you for a wonderful night, Billy. I really enjoyed it. And please, don’t take anything I said as gospel… I lie to people… I lie all the time… especially to people that I like. And I like you, Billy Austin. I like you a lot. Remember that, okay?”
She leaned over kissing him again, hungrily, and then she vanished.
Billy expected they would see each other again. He wanted to believe in Yelena's words… that they'd be great friends. Allison seemed reluctant to get close to him though, and he was too shy to press the issue. He wondered if part of her hesitation was rooted in her confession about having sex with her older brother.
He wanted to go to her and tell her it didn't matter… that she could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge her. But the sense that he didn't belong in her circle of friends—she drove a red Mercedes convertible and wore expensive clothes and shoes that cost more than he made in a month—fed Billy’s insecurities.
When Billy saw Allison working in the tavern she smiled her gorgeous smile and sometimes winked at him but otherwise she said nary a word… after a while he came to believe that he had just fancied their one night together… that it was only a vivid dream like the others he was prone to.
But he kept his promise to her watching for a man who resembled her, ready to do what he had to do to protect his great friend, Allison Johns.
Alex… could he be the same man he'd met in Oklahoma State?
Chapter 20—Little Boy Found
“Lisa.”
She couldn’t help but notice how his voice sounded more like a whine than she would have liked… but she supposed he couldn’t help it.
“Do you really have to go back home?”
It was February. Lisa remarked earlier that the weather finally turned nice and Billy said he couldn’t believe the warm winters in California. Lisa laughed and said he would get used to northern California in a hurry. He said how he used to hate the horrid winters in Oklahoma.
He still lay in bed, naked, watching Lisa pull herself into her tight jeans. Her ample chest jiggled as she bounced into her pants. She’d better lay off the beer, she thought, or else she should perhaps consider buying a size bigger blue jeans.
“Are you asking me to move in here with you, Billy?”
She sucked in her stomach by drawing in her breath and holding it to button her jeans. She loved the way Billy's eyes ate her body up like a starving man eating for the first time in months.
“Yes.”
“Then I'll stay!”
She felt as if something important finally settled in her mind to her satisfaction. She wanted to stay before but she wanted Billy to ask her to stay, not to ask for herself. She liked men who were assertive. They’d been having sex now for almost a month… often times Lisa slept over but she always went home the next day. And the emptiness of the old Victorian house where she lived wore on her psyche more and more of late… even with her room mate, Allison Johns, living there with her.
“But I do have to get to work. I start early today.”
“Well, at least you don't have far to go.”
“That’s right, Billy.”
She thought how she might sound as if she was placating a child… telling him what he wanted to hear. God… she hoped she didn't sound like that to Billy…
“Do you love me, Lisa?”
“We have what we have, Billy. Can't that be enough?”
She almost said yes automatically but caught herself. She hadn’t been in any relationship since her husband died… unsure she could ever invest herself in someone so deeply and completely like that again, the hurt in her heart was still too palpable… she wondered if some wounds went too deeply to ever heal.
She thought of Allison, of how she was unable to express the love she felt for her, either. She had put that off to Allison being a girl and the disdain people in her life had always expressed for gays. She remembered Mr. Green who ran the grocery store back in Kansas where she grew up and how the whole town gossiped about him having a boyfriend and how her father called them faggots and how her mother just said hush as if such things were better not discussed at all.
“I guess it has to be, when you put it that way...”
Billy had quit looking at her, instead staring out the window, as if feigning nonchalance.
“Hand me my tee shirt."
She snapped on her bra, adjusting herself.
“Billy, don’t sulk. I hate that. I like you. I like you a lot. And maybe...”
She couldn’t help but notice his mood lighten visibly with the maybe.
“Yes maybe, I even love you. But give me some time. I just got out of a really bad relationship.”
She was lying about the bad relationship but Lisa found it easy to lie to guys. They invariably believed her. They wanted to believe her.
Jesus Christ, how she hated the thought of going to work and facing the taunts. She loved her job but the customers were all such little boys. Like Billy. Most men she knew seemed like spoiled brats when they didn't get their way. She needed a real man; someone who'd sweep her off her feet, rescue her, take her away from all this madness. And instead she became involved with a man just released from an insane asylum. She had to be part crazy herself.
”Sometimes, I see things and hear things that aren't really there, Lisa.”
Billy told her about himself the first night they met... the first night they spent together... the first night they made love… when Billy touched her it seemed to her that an electric current ran across her skin and she jumped, imperceptibly she hoped. It had been so long since a man touched her but more, no one had ever touched her like that. Not even her late husband.
“What do you mean, Billy?”
He told her about his being institutionalized for attempting suicide… how they locked him up the last time for a year.
“Why did you try and kill yourself, Billy?”
“I remember the voices telling me about how my life would be ending badly… I'd die in agony lying in my own filth… to make it easier I should take a razor blade now and slice open my wrists.”
He heard voices speaking that no one else did. He thought at the time that God was speaking to him. He couldn’t exactl
y remember why he thought that, however. The therapy they gave him erased a lot of his memories but over time he recalled bits and pieces.
“What kind of therapy, Billy?”
Billy told her how they first gave him lots of different colored pills that made it hard for him to think straight.
“When the doctors talked to me, I thought they talked backwards on purpose, to fool with me. I couldn’t make any sense of their words. Later they came up with something called ECT treatments. I can't recall what they did though. I think it hurt. I woke up one day believing I was ten years old. I couldn’t understand why my body was so much bigger than I remembered it being and I wondered where my mom had gone to.
"The nurse there told me that I wasn’t ten years old at all. I was twenty nine. I remember the same nurse cried when she told me my wife had divorced me. The doctor said my memory might return and it has… a little. I remember things that happened as a kid but not as an adult."
"You don't remember your first wife?"
"No… not even what she looked like."
"Did you have children with her?"
"Not that I know of… I like kids, though. I met a little boy on the bus while I was traveling here. He must have been nine or ten years old. He called himself Johnny. He reminded me of myself at that age. He told me how the ocean frightened him and things hiding in the deep water. He thought they were watching him. I thought of my fright at that age too, but not of the ocean, of what hid deep inside me… voices urging me to do things I didn’t want to do. I heard voices as a boy too. I thought it was God who spoke to me. My mother being religious woman told me to always listen for God’s voice and do what He urged. I thought she heard the voices too but now I don’t think she did.”
“How did you know God spoke to you, Billy?”
Billy told her that when the voices spoke, he remembered his head hurting. He put his hand behind his left ear touching the bone there with his index finger to show Lisa where. He told her how he'd see colored spots floating in front of his eyes and how he'd smell a weird odor that he knew he smelled before but couldn’t recall when or where.
“It didn’t smell bad but it didn’t smell good either.”
He had said when he tried to talk back to the voices he never got an answer, so he thought how it must be God… God would be too busy to answer anyone. Billy said that he could never understand though why God would take the time to talk to him, of all people.
“So I made up a name for one of the voices I heard. I called it the wolf. I thought of the wolf as a caricature of God… the opposite of God… not exactly the devil or Satan, but something in my head playing at being God… fooling me, lying to me.”
Billy showed Lisa a bible that he kept in a drawer in his kitchen, very old… the cover worn from handling and the bible full of photographs. He told her how his mother always kept the bible with her after his father left as if it gave her comfort.
“She would read to me from it… especially from the Old Testament.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Listen to God and cut your wrists. Try to kill yourself.”
Billy had taken off his long sleeve shirt and held up his arms for her to see. Long suture-jagged scars ran from his wrists to nearly his elbows. Lisa read somewhere that scars like those meant business… that Billy shouldn’t be here right now talking to her but rather six feet under the good earth sleeping where all dead people slumber. She thought too how much resolve a person must have to do something like that. She found herself envying him.
“I should have died; I did die for a while.”
Billy told Lisa that his wife… now his ex-wife… called the police when she found him bleeding to death.
“She saved my life.”
He said how he could remember watching it all… hovering over his own body as the paramedics worked frantically to quell the bleeding and restart his heart with a defibrillator.
“I remember there were others there too.”
“What do you mean… others? Do you mean like ghosts? Like dead people?”
Billy had nodded. He said he could sense people that he used to know but who had died hovering close to him… people who loved him and who he had loved. He told her how they didn’t say anything to him but rather they seemed to be accusing him of something.
“I could feel their annoyance directed toward me.”
Billy said how he felt ashamed of himself when he remembered what he had done and that he got the distinct feeling it wasn’t his time to die.
And now, here she was, getting ready to move in with this crazy guy who talked to God and saw dead people. What are you thinking, Lisa, she asked herself. But she needed to get out of that house for a while. And there was something about Billy Austin. He was like no one she'd ever met… such a little boy, but there was more to him than that. When he looked at her, he seemed to be seeing things in her that no one else could see. And the way he listened to her… like he heard her for the first time. And, oh, when he touched her… she’d never been touched by anyone like Billy and she’d been touched plenty.
Jesus Christ, she hoped she could keep from falling in love again...
Chapter 21—Frogs
“You can call me Cindy.”
He disliked going to the psychiatrist but since it was a condition of his release Billy Austin dutifully made the appointment, and what's more, he kept it. He preferred doctors who wanted to be called by their last name but this doctor—the framed certificate hanging on the wall said her name was Cindy Rasmussen… she was not a real doctor but a qualified physician’s assistant... he painstakingly read all the certificates hanging on the wall while waiting for her to arrive—said that she wished for him to call her by her first name.
“How's the new job going, Billy?”
Fat and older and not overtly pretty but attractive enough Billy wondered in passing what it'd be like to make love to her. Looking at her a memory flashed across the surface of his brain.
As a young child, Billy’s father told him a Cherokee tale of three frogs that came upon a pail of fresh milk. Two of the frogs jumped into the pail while the third jumped onto the rim watching. The two frogs in the pail swam about desperately trying to get back out. But they couldn’t jump out. The third frog croaked out for them to give up… it was no use to keep struggling.
Finally, one of the frogs did just that and sank to the bottom of the pail, drowning in the milk. But the second frog kept swimming and swimming, ignoring the frog on the rim who kept croaking: give up, give up, give up. Eventually, the second frog’s feet found purchase on a yellow substance and it climbed out of the pail. The frog’s swimming had churned the milk into butter.
“Okay, I guess.”
Billy was unsure how much to share. A thought in the back of his mind told him that if he shared too much, she might send him back to the asylum. On the other hand, if he didn’t share enough, she might still send him back. She smelled of chocolate and cigarettes and the way she puffed out her enormous chest before speaking reminded him of the frog on the rim of the bucket, big, fat, and throaty… a frog prone to urging others to give up rather than to continue the struggle. The wolf said how good she would taste.
"I like my job."
“You don't sound too sure...”
Cindy croaked while, sounding as if she was fishing for something more, like the real doctors used to do, back at that place…
“Actually, work is going good. I met someone... a woman.”
“Oh?”
Cindy seemed surprised.
“Tell me about her.”
He heard an edge of concern in her voice.
“Her name is Lisa. We work at Twenty Nine Katz, the tavern below where I live. She asked if she could see my apartment. We were working late one night closing up the place and she started talking to me. We’d been working together for a month and I really liked watching her but I was afraid to say anything to her. I thought she�
�d laugh at me. But she’s really nice.”
“I see.”
Give up, give up, give up.
“We...”
Billy stammered and blushed.
“I mean, she, moved in with me last week. You know, to help out with the rent.”
“And how is that going?”
“Great. Well, not really great. She says I am too clingy. But I like being around her. There's nothing wrong with that, right Cindy?”
He didn’t feel right using her name like that but he thought it might soften her up enough to agree with him. And he wanted… he needed… someone to agree with him at this moment… he felt as deflated as an old birthday balloon left taped onto the wall three days too long.
“Well, Billy, it really might be too soon to form a long-term relationship with anyone. You were only released...”
She flipped madly through her notebook. Billy noticed that she always took notes as they talked. She puffed out her chest.
“Let’s see… you were released last month. You've been on your own for just over four weeks. Wouldn't you like to form a more stable foundation for yourself before diving into something as formidable as having a live-in girl friend?”
“I'm stable. I have my own place. I have a job. I work every day.”
He felt the need to defend what he had done, all on his own. They had turned him loose into a world he knew nothing about with only a hundred dollars and a bus ticket. Now, he made something of himself. He thought of the frog on the rim of the bucket telling the others to give up.
“I’m not giving up.”
He didn’t mean to say it aloud.
“And you have a right to be proud of all you've accomplished. And I’m not telling you to give up. What I mean to say is... let's try this: Lisa told you that you are too clingy. Those are your own words, Billy. Why do you feel that you have to cling to her?”
“Because I like being around her?”
Billy realized as he said the words that they seemed more of a question than a statement. He thought of telling Cindy how it seemed to him that Lisa might be just a figment of his imagination and when she left she might never return, like some dream he dreamed that he could never seem to dream again… like Allison Johns. Billy thought of telling Cindy how he imagined sometimes that all the people he ever met were only figments of his imagination, unsure how to explain such a notion though.
