“They might have already turned him out,” Mrs. Veech said.
“Or they might just still be thinking about it.” Wilson turned to face her. Round, plain and comfortable, she was a clean fifteen years older than he and normally unfazeable, though now she seemed perceptibly disturbed.
“I wonder who sent us this,” he said.
“There wasn’t any cover letter.” Mrs. Veech frowned.
Wilson stepped across and picked up the slit envelope from the stack of circulars on the desk and paced back to the window, turning it over in his hands. It was letterhead stationery from the hospital, with his own address unremarkably typed and a postmark from two days before. Absently he folded it in three and peered out the window, around the hanging vines of the plants Mrs. Veech had insisted on stringing up there. The office was on the ground floor at the corner of the square, and sighting through the letter O of his own reversed name on the glass, Wilson could see a couple of cars and one mud-splattered pickup truck revolving lazily around the concrete Confederate soldier on his high pedestal at the center. Opposite, the usual complement of idlers lounged around the courthouse steps. The office had a southern exposure, and he could feel a slight sunny warmth on the side of his face through the pane.
“Well, damn their eyes,” he said, and then, as he noticed Mrs. Veech again, “Excuse me.”
Back in his inner office, Wilson lit the cigarette and set it in an ashtray to burn itself out, then began dialing the phone with the butt end of his pencil. In some fifteen minutes he had variously heard that Pax Morgan had already been released, was not going to be released at all, or had never been admitted. He hadn’t expected to discover who had sent the anonymous notification, and so was not surprised when he didn’t. Although he did learn that a Dr. Meagrum was supposed to be presiding over the case, he could not get through to him. He left a message asking that his call be returned. The central spring of his revolving chair squealed slightly as he leaned back, away from the phone. On the rear wall of the room, behind the triangle of clients’ chairs, bookshelves rose all the way to the high ceiling, bearing about half of Wilson’s law library. Hands laced behind his head, he scanned the top row of heavy books as though looking for something, though he was not. After a moment he tightened his lips and leaned forward again and made the call he had been postponing.
He had the number by heart already because it had once been his own, the Nashville law firm where he’d formerly worked. In those days Sharon Morgan would likely have answered the phone herself, but they used her more as a researcher now, and had hired a different receptionist. She was good at the work, and with the two children there was no doubt the better pay made a difference. Still studying for her own law degree, part time; Pax had never liked that much. Wilson asked for her and waited till she came on the line, her voice brisk, as he remembered it. It had been some months since they had spoken and the first few exchanges passed in pleasantries, inquiries about each other’s children and the like. Then, a pause.
“Well, you never called just to pass the time,” Sharon said. “Not if I know you.”
Wilson hesitated, thinking, What would she look like now? The same. Phone pinched between her chin and shoulder, a tail of her longish dark hair involved with the cord some way. Chances were she’d be doing something on her desk while she waited for him to continue, brown eyes sharp on some document, wasting no time.
“Right,” he said. “Have you heard anything of Pax lately?”
“And don’t care to,” she said, her tone still easy. “Why would you ask?”
The chair spring squeaked as Wilson shifted position. The distant sound of a typewriter came to him over the line. He flicked his pencil with a fingernail and watched its bevels turning over the lines of the yellow pad. “And not the hospital either, I don’t suppose.”
“Oh-ho,” Sharon said. He could hear her voice tightening down, homing in. She took the same grim satisfaction in any discovery, no matter its purport, which was part of what made her good at her job. “Is that what it is?”
“I’m afraid,” Wilson said, “they’re letting him out, if they haven’t already.”
“And never even let me know. There ought to be a law …”
“… but there doesn’t appear to be one,” Wilson said. He picked up the hospital form and read off to her its most salient details. A stall, he thought, even before he was through with it. “The morning mail,” he said. “No date, and I don’t even know who sent it.”
“Then what are you thinking to do?” she said.
“I’ve been calling the hospital,” Wilson said. “If I ever get through to the right doctor, maybe I can convince them to hold him, if he’s not already gone.”
“If,” Sharon said sharply. “All up to them, is it?”
“I would call it a case for persuasion,” Wilson said. “So, did you have any plans for the weekend? I should be able to get in touch …”
“I’m taking the children out to the lake.”
Wilson plucked another cigarette from his breast pocket and began to tamp it rhythmically on the old green desktop blotter. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why not go to your brother’s, say? Instead.”
“What would we want to do that for?”
“Look, Sharon,” he said. “You know, it’s to hell and gone from anywhere, that house on the lake. And nobody even out there this time of year.”
“I will not run from that—” She interrupted herself, but he thought the calm of her voice was artificial when she went on. “The kids are packed for it. They’re counting on it. I don’t see any reason to change our plans.”
“You don’t, do you?” Wilson said without sarcasm, and put a match to his cigarette. He supposed he’d been expecting this, or something a whole lot like it.
“Why don’t you get a peace bond on him?” Sharon said. “If he really is out, I mean. Something. Because it ought to be his problem. Not mine.”
“I could do that,” Wilson said. “Try to, anyway. You know what good it’ll do, too. You know it better than I do.”
There was silence in the receiver; the phantom typewriter had stopped. Pax Morgan had been under a restraining order that night back before the divorce decree when he’d appeared at the house in Nashville he and Sharon had shared and smashed out all the ground-floor windows with the butt end of his deer rifle; he’d made it all the way around the house before the police arrived.
“Well, devil take the hindmost,” Wilson said. “I’ll let you know what I can find out. And you take care.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“Take care, Sharon,” Wilson said, but she had already hung up, so he did too.
Shifting the cigarette to his left hand, he picked up the pencil and began jotting a list at the foot of the pad with the blunted tip. Often he did his thinking with the pencil point; he’d discovered that sometimes a solution would appear in the interstices of what he wrote. There were only two items on the list.
—Judge Oldfield injunction P.M.
—Dr. Meagrum Central State
He added a third.
—call back S.M.
The pencil doodled away from the last initial. The list was obvious and complete, and after he acted on it nothing would be solved. A long ash was sprouting from his cigarette, but he didn’t notice until the spark crawled far enough to burn his knuckle.
For the rest of the morning he worked abstractedly on the will with imperfect concentration. Every twenty minutes or so he interrupted himself to make some fruitless call. Dr. Meagrum was perpetually “on rounds” or “in consultation.” Judge Oldfield was spending his morning on the bench. Wilson’s own phone rang occasionally, but always over something trivial. When he called Oldfield’s chambers again around noon, he found that the judge was gone to lunch. He tightened his tie, got his seersucker suit coat down from the hat rack and, with a word or two to Mrs. Veech, went out himself.
Circling the square counterclockwise, he passed the Sta
ndard Farm Store, the bank and the courthouse steps, where one man or another raised a broad flat palm to greet him. It was warm out, an Indian summer heat wave, though it was late October and the leaves had already turned. A new asphalt path on the southbound street felt tacky on his shoes as he crossed. A couple of blocks west of the square he was already verging on the edge of time; beyond the long low roof of Dotson’s Restaurant there were woods, turned fired-clay red patched with sere yellow, with a few deep green cedars standing anomalously among the other trees.
The fans were on inside the restaurant, revolving on tall poles, fluttering the corners of the checked oilcloths on the small square tables. Judge Oldfield sat toward the rear— alone, for a wonder—behind a plate of fried catfish, hush-puppies and boiled greens. As Wilson approached he put down his newspaper and smiled. “What wind blows you here, young fellow my lad?”
“An ill one, I’d say.” Wilson sat down on a ladder-back chair. “Do you remember Sharon Morgan? A Lawrence, she was, before she married.”
“Married that crazy fellow, didn’t she?”
“That’s the one.” Wilson ordered an iced tea from the waitress who’d appeared at his elbow, and turned back to the judge. “They’re letting him out of Central State, at least that’s what it looks like.” He ran down the brief of the morning’s activity while Oldfield grazed on his catfish and nodded.
“It worrying you personally?” the judge said when he was done. “For yourself, I mean?”
“Oh no,” Wilson said. “Not hardly. It wasn’t me he said he’d kill, was it? I doubt he’d remember much about me. I never knew him any too well. Even while the divorce was going on it was just her he was mad at.”
“So it’s the wife—ex-wife, I mean. She’s the one with the worry.”
“She’s the one.” Wilson frowned down at his hands. There was a small watery blister where the cigarette had burned him, surprisingly painful for its size. He turned the cold curve of the iced tea glass against it. “She asked me to get an injunction on him. That’s why I came hunting you.”
Oldfield took off his fragile rimless glasses, rubbed them with a handkerchief and put them back on. “That’s tricky, old son,” he said, “when you don’t know for sure if he’s loose or he’s not.”
“Hard to get good information out of that place, don’t you know?” Wilson said. “Seems like a lot of them are crazy, doctors and patients alike.”
“Must be that’s why they call it a madhouse,” Oldfield said with a faint smile. “Well. She does live in the county now? Full time?”
“She moved here right after the divorce,” Wilson said. “Just to oblige you, now,” Oldfield said, “I could sign you a paper. You draw it up. It happens he is out, you let me know and we’ll sign it and serve it right away. It won’t be much of a help to her, though.”
“Don’t I know it,” Wilson said. “But what else do you do?”
“Not a whole lot that you can,” said Oldfield. “You really think she’s got call to worry? Not just fretful, is she?”
“Not her,” Wilson said. “I’m the one fretting. I’m wondering, how can I get a deputy to watch over them for a couple of days?”
“You know you can’t set them on her, “Oldfield said. “Not without she asks for it herself.”
“She won’t.”
“She was a pretty thing, as I recall,” Oldfield said irrelevantly. He took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “And knew her own mind, or seemed to.”
“You mean she’s stubborn.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Wilson stood up. “I thank you,” he said.
Oldfield smiled myopically up at him, his eyes a light watery blue. “You ought to stay and try the catfish.”
“Well, I believe not,” Wilson said. “Not much of an appetite today.”
“A young man like you?” The judge shook his head. “Must be this heat.”
“Your wife called,” Mrs. Veech reported. “She’ll call you back. And that man from Central State, he called. Dr. Meagrum.”
“He would have, wouldn’t he?” Wilson said, shrugging out of his jacket. “Wait till I was gone, I mean.”
Mrs. Veech sniffed. “In a tearing-down hurry, too,” she said. “He was right cross to find you not here.”
“He’ll get over it,” Wilson said. “All right, then, would you make sure for me that Pax Morgan still has his house in Brentwood? We might want to serve a paper on him a little later in the day.”
In the inner office it was a little too warm, though not quite oppressive. He put his coat on the hat rack, cracked the single window and paced for a moment at the far side of his desk. It was a shallow room and the high wall of dark bookbindings seemed uncomfortably close. With a sigh he went back to his seat, lit a cigarette, picked up the will, put it down, lifted a list of the other items on his immediate agenda and then let that drop too.
The urge to pick at the blister seemed irresistible. He tore loose an edge of it, reviewing, in spite of himself, what little he really knew about Pax Morgan. They’d gone to the same high school, but two years apart; Wilson was the younger. Pax had played football—he remembered that—indifferently, in the line. Later on he had inherited money and started dabbling in real estate, or insurance, neither making nor losing much at whatever it might have been. Grown, he was a loud bluff fellow with a ruddy face and crinkly, almost yellow hair. At the large parties where Wilson would occasionally run into him, he was known for drinking too much and becoming not just mush-mouthed but crazily incoherent. The drinking was said to be a factor in his later, more serious breakdowns.
Wilson had gone to Sharon’s wedding but he couldn’t think if it was before or after it that he’d had the one brush with Pax he remembered with real clarity. Another party, undoubtedly some Christmas gathering, for Pax was wearing an incongruous Santa Claus tie and had managed to get quite drunk on eggnog. Shuffled together by the crowd, they somehow became embroiled in an argument over deer hunting. Wilson shot duck and dove, rabbit and squirrel, and on his father’s farm he might shoot what he had to, to protect the livestock, but he had no taste for shooting deer, which now appeared to be Pax’s ruling passion. Wilson was trying to get off the subject, but Pax wouldn’t let it drop.
“You’ve never been blooded,” he said thickly. “That’s your trouble, you’ve never been blooded.” He grasped Wilson’s lapel and twisted it, drawing himself unpleasantly near, and Wilson was a little startled by what he himself did next, a trick someone had showed him in the Army. He took hold of Pax’s thumb and squeezed the joints of it together, so that the sudden sharp pain made Pax flinch and let go. Reflexively, Wilson took a step backward, jostling someone behind him in the crowded room, but Pax’s face went from surprise to a total blank, like a television switched to an empty channel, and so the whole episode was amputated.
Real craziness there, or an early sign of it. Wilson pulled the dead skin back from the blister, creating a small red-rimmed sore. By the time of the divorce, there were many worse examples, enough to fill a dossier. Wilson had never cared for divorce work much, but Sharon was both a colleague and a sort of distant friend, and also it was in the first thin stage of his independent practice. But once it was over he swore off friends’ divorces altogether, no matter how bad he might need the work. It had been an easy case in the sense that the outcome was not in real doubt, but it was angry and ugly on Pax’s side, and there’d been some bitter squabbling over property. Sharon had held out for the house on the lake—impractically, as Wilson thought—surrendering the Nashville residence to Pax, who’d later sold it. Reaching for the phone to call the hospital one more time, he wished again she hadn’t done that.
His game of telephone tag with Central State went on for a couple more hours, unpromisingly. When the phone finally rang back around two-thirty, it was his wife.
“Not interrupting, I hope,” she said. “Is it busy?”
“Not so you’d notice,” he said. “It’s b
een pretty quiet.”
“Well, we need a gallon of milk,” she said, “and cornmeal. Would you stop on the way home?”
“I’ll do it,” Wilson said, scribbling on the pad. “Lisa driving you crazy today?” Their daughter was four years old, and frantic.
“How should I describe it?” she said, and laughed. “This time next year she’ll be in school … I’ll miss her, though.”
“That’s the spirit,” Wilson said. The light on his phone began to flash and Mrs. Veech called down the hall, “It’s that Dr. Meagrum!”
“I’ve got to take this call,” Wilson said. “I’ll be home on time, I think …” He pushed the button.
Dr. Meagrum seemed to be already in medias res.”—there’s an issue of doctor-patient confidentiality here, Mr., uh, Wilson. I don’t know who could have sent you that form but they did so without my authorization.”
“Did they?” Wilson said, catching his breath. “As you may know, I represent Mr. Morgan’s ex-wife, and given the circumstances of the case, it seems to me appropriate that both of us should have been informed.”
“I can’t agree with you there,” Dr. Meagrum snapped.
“All due respect to your point of view,” Wilson said, trying to collect himself. The conversation had taken an adversarial turn too soon. “I take it that Mr. Morgan has, in fact, been released from your, ah, custodial care.”
“My records show that Mr. Morgan has been responding favorably to a course of medication and was transferred to outpatient status two days ago.”
“I see,” Wilson said. “What medication, may I ask?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s confidential.”
“And what assurance do we have that he will actually take this medication?”
“He’s in our outpatient program now, and we’ll be monitoring him on a biweekly basis.”
“Biweekly, you say. That’s every two weeks?” Wilson creaked back in his chair, gazing up at the join of his bookcase and the ceiling. “Dr. Meagrum, I would like you to consider”—he paused, thinking over the jargon as if fumbling for a key—“consider returning Mr. Morgan to inpatient status. Temporarily, shall we say. In the interests of the safety of his ex-wife and family.”
Barking Man Page 19
