Crabbe

by William Bell

  “Thank you, Nurse Owens,” said Three-piece.

  The door closed quietly.

  “Sit down, young man,” he said to me.

  “No thanks. I’ll stand.” Since we were out of the ward I got the pipe out of the deep pocket of my bathrobe and began filling it.

  Three-piece reacted quickly. “No smoking, if you don’t mind.”

  “What about him?” I said, pointing the stem of the pipe at the big guy, who had a cigar sticking out of a round, friendly face. I wasn’t sure, but I think I saw a shadow of a smile cross his features.

  “He is a police officer. And an adult,” answered the official from behind the desk. “I may be old fashioned, but I see no reason why your elders need follow the same rules as you.”

  Three-piece looked offended as the big guy blew a great cloud of acrid smoke into the room. He was enjoying this. I kept packing the bowl — a difficult job with one hand bandaged.

  “Well, I don’t know ‘bout you but I gotta get a load off my feet.” This from the big guy as he lowered himself into an imitation leather armchair and leaned forward, resting thick forearms on his legs. From that position he couldn’t crane his neck enough to see me so he talked to the floor.

  “You got any objection to telling me your name?” he said casually to the carpet.

  “Yes.” It seemed stupid to talk at the guy’s balding head so I sat down, immediately realizing I’d been tricked. I took some time lighting up.

  He straightened up, took a long haul of the cigar and shot the smoke out in a jet stream toward Three-piece, and crossed his arms over his wide chest. The leather coat creaked.

  “Why?” came from behind the cigar.

  I was stunned, because I couldn’t think of an answer.

  You know how you get into a habit of thought and you forget why you think that way? I’d been secretive so long it was automatic. I’d had no time to think about my situation too much and his simple question broke through the habit of the last few months. Really, I thought at that moment, there was no point in hiding my identity any more. I felt a little dumb, as a matter of fact.

  “Crabbe,” I said. “Franklin Crabbe.”

  The cop smiled. Three-piece looked triumphant.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” he crowed, picking up his pencil. You could tell he had been going nuts because of all the empty blanks in the chart in front of him. Well, one blank filled, two thousand to go.

  “Where ya from, Franklin?” said the cop.

  I took the pipe out of my mouth.

  “Crabbe. Don’t call me Franklin.”

  The cop held up his beefy hands, palms toward me, and smiled again.

  “Whatever you say, Crabbe.”

  I told him my parents’ address, adding that I didn’t live there anymore. Three-piece looked over at the cop, impressed with the officer, and buttoned up his jacket before filling in some more blanks.

  “Now,” continued the policeman, “ya wanna fill me in on why you were found out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s all you get.”

  Three-piece looked up, his face reddening. He pointed his pencil at me.

  “Now you just listen, Mister” — at least I had graduated from young man — ”we have to know the circumstances of your injuries and we have to know now, so stop all this childish nonsense.”

  Pleased with his cutting tone, he prepared to write.

  “Mind your own goddam business,” I said evenly and stood up.

  As I fumbled with the doorknob, the cop said, “I’m gonna bring your parents over here. I have to.”

  “If you have to do it,” I said on my way out, “do it.”

  Digression

  One thing I noticed when I was pretty young is that people have no imagination. I don’t mean the kind of imagination you need to watch T.V. or read a book and go along with the story. I mean the kind of imagination you need to tolerate something different. For most people, if things don’t fit their mental framework there must be something wrong with the things. Everything that doesn’t conform is strange or crazy or “sick.”

  Take most teachers: they just can’t accept you if you won’t go along with the system. Oh, they have fancy words like “behavioural problem” - I’ve overheard that one a million times! - but in fact that kind of language is a cover for their lack of imagination. I knew lots of kids during my four years at high school who were independent. They made up their own minds about what they considered important and went their own ways. When their own way crossed the path of a teacher or got them at cross purposes with the system, everybody figured they were “problem” students. Nobody accepted the kids’ right to set their own values. So the teachers came down on them. And that only made them more rebellious.

  I always envied those kids, I guess because I decided years earlier to play the game. People like you to play the game, even if you cheat. They almost expect that. What they don’t like is someone who refuses to play. The cheater is accepted; the spoil-sport is considered to have “something wrong with him.”

  The students are worse than the teachers. Anyone or anything is either in or out with them. If you’re out, you’re considered insane and fair game for all sorts of attack and abuse. They’re like a wolf-pack, snarling and snapping at everything “alien.”

  For instance, we had this teacher at my school who was very kind and harmless, but very different. For one thing, he refused to drive a car, or to own one. Called them landscape eaters. He rode an old, beat-up Raleigh to school. For another thing, he was a vegetarian. Every once in awhile one of the kids would get him going by asking him why he didn’t eat meat or drink alcohol. Because he was very naive this caused more viciousness from the kids than any other characteristic -you always had to be in the know) he would stop whatever we were doing - irregular Latin verbs or something equally thrilling -and jam his hands into his jacket pockets and head off on a sermon about the wonderfulness of eating no meat. The poor guy really thought we were interested.

  Can you imagine what they thought of him? All those dynamos fuelled with greasy hamburgers and barbecued steaks, who’d sell their souls for a slab of gooey pizza, a box of warm beer, or a tear around town on Friday night in the Old Man’s Buick? They called him “The Veg” in honour of his eating habits and as a comment on his mind. They were certain a man like that must be crazy.

  Well, I ran into that crap at the hospital, too. Somebody decided I must be off-balance. I could just see Mr. Three-piece yakking about hostility and repressed whatnot. (I read some psychology last year.) That’s how I got set up with Dr. Browne. I guess when he found out I was a person with a Mysterious Past he was overjoyed. And when he “dropped by” one afternoon, in the middle of a checker game I was having with this old guy in my ward, he “Hummed” every three seconds and raised his bushy little eyebrows every two.

  What a find I must have been! Added to the pneumonia and mangled hand were a strange attachment to a pipe and a vivid red scar on the right wrist. But I wasn’t going to end up in some boring article in a psych magazine. Not on your life.

  Crabbe’s Journal: 22

  The cop brought my parents in a few days later. Nurse Owens got the honour of leading the prodigal son down another hallway, through a couple of sets of swinging doors, to a single door with “Lounge” painted on it in very unloungelike letters.

  I stopped just before Mrs. Owens reached for the door handle.

  “Wait,” I said “I don’t want to go in yet.”

  She turned to look at me, searchingly, right into my eyes. I thought I caught an understanding flicker in hers. She walked back the way we had come, her loose uniform sort of floating on those skinny old bones of hers.

  I stepped up and looked through the small pane in the door. My parents were standing in the middle of the empty lounge, close together, not talking, surrounded by chairs and sofas covered in cheap, pastel plastic. Harsh morning light splashed in through the panoramic window, filling
the room with a white glare. Outside the wind shook the trees that stood in lonely rows.

  My Mother had on her full length mink, as usual, but something looked wrong. My eyes were drawn to her thin legs. They were bare. And on her feet she had a pair of old, scuffed chestnut penny loafers that she wore around home when she was puttering around the garden, tying and clipping the roses, on those rare moments when she seemed relaxed. But here she was wearing them in public, with her mink: this woman who wouldn’t answer the door to pay the paperboy unless she was made up and dressed like a rich dowager from a lost empire or something.

  When I thought that unkind thought my eyes rose to her face. The hard light from the window was not kind. She looked old: skin tight over her cheekbones and sharp nose but a bit loose under her chin, wrinkles around her tired blue eyes. She was pale and worn. There was no joy in that tight, rigid face.

  My Father had on one of his dark, pinstriped lawyer suits, not quite so well pressed as usual, a bit wrinkled in fact; He was a little heavier around the middle now, a little greyer around the top. My Father has a round, healthy-looking face, with large brown eyes and a wide, thin-lipped mouth that made him look friendly but tough. This day, he looked simply careworn and old.

  You know, I never thought of my parents as people who would get old. But as I saw them looking so isolated standing together in the middle of that room, my Father with his arm around my Mother’s thin shoulders, staring out the window, they became, suddenly, people to me — people getting older, looking worn and beaten down at this moment. What was going through their minds? I wondered. Why had my Mother faced the world in such a state, bare-faced, bare-legged, in a mink and gardening shoes?

  ‘What a son of a bitch you are, Crabbe. What a son of a bitch,” I said under my breath, “to bring them to this.” Tears streamed from my selfish eyes over my selfish face. I sobbed, my fists clenched in shame. I wept for the guilt I had caused them to feel.

  I couldn’t face them, drowned in shame. I turned and headed quickly down the hall, bursting through the first set of double doors.

  “Stop, Crabbe.” It was Mrs. Owens. She stood in the hall blocking my path. Quickly I wiped my eyes.

  “Let me by,” I spluttered, my voice cracked, childish.

  “No,” she said gently, “You have to go back. You have to. You have to tell them it’s not their fault.”

  “But it is, dammit.” I shot back, shouting. “It is their bloody fault.”

  A young nurse with a bundle of laundry in her arms was approaching us. She looked aside and scurried past.

  Mrs. Owens said nothing as she took my rigid arm in her skinny hand and turned me around. She began walking me back slowly.

  “You don’t think that. If you did you’d not be crying, Crabbe. Those tears are your guilt and it’s grief speaking to you.’’

  I stopped, pulling my arm free as my anger flared.

  “What do you know about it?” I snapped, immediately regretting my outburst.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “‘Course you didn’t,” she replied. She began to shepherd me along again. “You’re not such a bad young fellow, you know,” she said. “These old eyes of mine see more than you think. I’ve watched you in the few days you’ve been here, playing checkers with those old fellows that nobody wants to bother with, that nobody visits but maybe on a Sunday; running to the tuck shop for them on errands. Oh, you’re not perfect, by any means. You can be nasty if it pleases you. To yourself most of all.”

  She was probably remembering the time I bit her head off because she wanted to get me back to bed and take my temperature when I was in the middle of a conversation about canoes with Old Ed, who lived in the bed directly across from mine. I realized later that it was Ed she wanted to rest.

  “But you’ve something inside you,”Mrs. Owens continued as we walked slowly along the hall toward the lounge, “that has to get itself born soon. I’ve raised five kids, Crabbe, three of ‘em boys, and I know the signs. If you want to be a man you’ve got to get things straight between your parents and yourself first.”

  “Yeah, be a man,” I said bitterly. “You sound like my Father.”

  We stopped. She turned to me, dropping her arm.

  “Well, yes, there’s a lot of nonsense mixed up with that idea, to be sure. But it’s not such bad advice, you know. You do have to learn to be a man. You must decide what being a man means to you, and you needn’t take your Dad’s definition by any means.”

  Mrs. Owens paused and looked right straight into my eyes, crossing her thin arms on her chest.

  “You see, young man, it’s like you were a seed and there’s new life inside the shell, and it has to break the shell to get out. And when the shell splits from the force, well, that’s a confusing and hurtful time. It’s different for all of us, but we must all break free.”

  She took me by the shoulders, turned me to face the door and said, “Now, it’s time to go and do what must be done.”

  I could hear her walking away down the hall in the opposite direction as I stood there facing the door. I knew if I wanted to, I could scratch the whole idea, never see them, go away as soon as I got out of the hospital. After all, I had no legal reason to see them again.

  But all that was just excuse-making. I had to go in. I owed it to them. And to myself.

  Crabbe’s Journal: 23

  All that stuff in the T.V. shows and soapy novels — you know, the long lost son rushing joyfully into his parents’ forgiving arms, honey and syrup dripping all over them -is strictly nonsense. When I walked into the room and shut the door behind me and stood there, the lounge filled with sharp tension. They turned and looked at me, my Father’s arm slipping from my Mother’s shoulder. She had a lace hanky in her hand, all wrinkled and damp, and she began to worry it with her fingers.

  Nobody spoke. I walked over and stood before them in the centre of the room.

  “Hi,” I said, immediately feeling stupid at the emptiness of the greeting. “Let’s sit down,” I sat immediately in an armchair so nobody would fumble around, not knowing whether to hand out hugs or handshakes.

  They took the couch opposite me. There was about eight feet of ugly worn beige carpet between us.

  Silence again. My Mother blew her nose. She kept looking at me, then away, like you do at a party when you want to check out a stranger but you don’t want to seem obvious about it. My Father unbuttoned his coat and looked at the floor.

  “How have you been?” he said after clearing his throat noisily.

  “I’m okay, now, thanks,” I answered. “I’ll be leaving in a couple of days.”

  “No, Dr. Browne says you should stay for another week,” he said. “I think — ”

  “I’m alright, really,” I cut in. “I’ll leave when I think

  I’m ready.”

  “Now listen Franklin — ” The old look I knew so well had invaded his face, so I cut off what I knew was going to be an order.

  “Dad, I’m sorry to interrupt. Let’s not start like this, okay?”

  He accepted that and settled back into the sofa, crossing his ankles, an old habit. The plastic covering squeaked under his weight.

  Silence again.

  My Mother continued to twist her hanky around and around her thin hands.

  “Will you …” she began. “Will you be coming home, then?”

  This question was quite a statement. The very fact that she didn’t assume I’d come back or that my Father didn’t demand it told me that things had changed. A breakthrough.

  I realized then, looking at their uncomfortable postures and hesitant, almost embarrassed faces that they were as confused as I was. Who was this stranger who confronted them, puffing away on a little pipe, sick and bandaged? Was he crazy? as Dr. Browne had probably told them. Would he blow up in front of them or fall down in a fit?

  Mary once told me that the person who cares least about a relationship controls it. I realized that, i
f I wanted to, I could control this situation. But I didn’t want to. And I especially didn’t want to hurt them anymore, or get revenge, or any of that crap. I just wanted to be taken seriously. I thought about what Mrs. Owens had said and it fit exactly with Mary’s advice. I was a different person than the one who left these two parents months (or was it centuries?) ago. I did not intend to go back.

  “I don’t know,” I answered my Mother. “I…maybe... I don’t know what I want to do yet.”

  More silence.

  “It’s not too late to go back to school, Franklin,” said my Mother hopelessly, like she felt she ought to try at least once. “The university would probably accept you as a late registration. Your Father could speak to them.” She rushed on, “You could come home and…” She trailed off after looking at my face.

  “No, Mom. That’s out. Definitely. Besides, I missed my diploma. I didn’t write the finals.”

  “They gave it to you on your term work. But you missed the scholarship,” said my Father bitterly.

  “I don’t care, Dad, I just don’t.”

  He looked away, out the window. This was hard for him. He and my Mother had had it all planned and I wrecked it.

  “Mom and Dad,” I began a new tack, remembering Mrs. Owens, “I want to say something and I’m not sure how to. I’m sorry I did this to you.”

  My Mother began crying, silently.

  “I just want you to know it wasn’t your fault, my running away. I thought it was, but it wasn’t. It isn’t anybody’s fault.”

  “Oh, Franklin,” her voice cracked. “We were afraid you were dead. The police … We had to check all the hospitals…; the morgue…;” She broke down. Then anger swept into her voice. “How could you? How could you do that to me?”