Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  I didn’t think he’d believe me about the bandanna. I opened my mouth, but I didn’t speak. I needed to tell him about the bandanna, but all I was thinking about was the Sativex, and about Bimini, and about Kol being Nicole.

  He hung up. I whispered a profanity. At myself, not at him.

  I carried the phone with me as I went out onto the deck off the great room. The night had turned cool. Appropriate to the season. Spring, not fall. Sam thought I was being set up and he didn’t even know about the missing bandanna.

  Michael McClelland. If he’s setting me up, I thought, the guy is good.

  THIRTY

  FIVE MINUTES later the phone rang again. It was Diane. She’d heard, of course, about the events of the day. Her domestic intelligence put the NSA to shame.

  She wanted to know how I was. She also wanted to know if she knew the suicide victim from crossing paths in the waiting room. She described a number of my patients who wore their depression like some Muslim women wear burkas. I told her no, it was none of those. She didn’t come close to describing Kol. Diane was sweet and supportive and she even managed to briefly make me laugh. But Diane was fragile. She didn’t try to inject herself into my crisis, something she would have done in the past. I didn’t consider inviting her to join the fray. She remained much too raw.

  The phone rang yet again seconds after I hung up. This time the caller ID read OUT OF AREA. I guessed Sam had something else to say. “Good,” I said aloud, allowing myself a pumped fist of triumph without any recognition that the gesture was fueled by alcohol. I picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”

  “Dr. Gregory? Dr. Alan Gregory?”

  I didn’t know the voice. But it definitely wasn’t that of an Iron Ranger.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is he.” The vodka had a little trouble with the s’s in “this” and “is.” The one in “yes” hadn’t been so much of a problem. I was inebriated enough to find that interesting.

  “My name is Tharon Thibodeaux. I’m a psychiatrist at IFP. I apologize for calling so late; I hope I’m not intruding. Your phone’s been busy for much of the evening. I assumed that meant you were awake. I thought it was important that we talk.”

  My reaction? I loved his name. I loved the way he spoke his name. Thibodeaux, while a common enough surname in the South, was one of those rare American monikers that immediately identifies a person not only with a heritage, but also with a region and with a particular city. Dr. Tharon Thibodeaux had roots near New Orleans, Louisiana.

  But because my conversation was taking place with Dr. Thibodeaux and not with Sam, as I’d been expecting, I felt as though I had to switch the language I was speaking. Thibodeaux’s soft melodic accent helped cushion the shock, but I had to goad my brain to make the transition. I wasn’t going to be hearing caution or comfort, or insults, from a northern plains friend. Instead, I needed to prepare to speak with a southern gulf mental-health colleague using the peculiar vernacular we employ with each other in professional circumstances.

  Why is this guy calling? I wondered, finally. “Hello, Dr. Thibodeaux,” I said. “I’m not familiar with IFP.”

  “Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. It’s the inpatient treatment facility at the Colorado Mental Health Institute that deals with offenders with psychiatric illnesses.”

  Meant nothing. Then I realized that the Colorado Mental Health Institute was the recently sanitized official name of the old Colorado State Hospital. I didn’t know anyone in the field who referred to the facility down south as anything other than the “state hospital” or simply “Pueblo.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard anyone say the “Colorado Mental Health Institute” before. I blamed the vodka for the delay I’d suffered in making the translation.

  My solitary connection to the Colorado State Hospital was Michael McClelland. He was most definitely an offender with a psychiatric illness. Or two.

  Thibodeaux was calling about McClelland. “It’s not too late, not at all,” I said.

  Thibodeaux must have known Michael McClelland, must have learned about his escape from custody, and knew enough about McClelland’s criminal and psychological history to track me down. But why track me down? I didn’t know that. Good news? Bad news?

  My gut said bad news. Late at night on a weekend? Bad news.

  From his brief introduction I thought Dr. Thibodeaux sounded young. Maybe it was the Cajun/Creole/Bayou undertones that sang in his voice. But I also allowed for the possibility that my assessment was just a reflection of the fact that at that moment I was feeling old.

  We had lapsed into silence. By training, we were both people accustomed to waiting for other people to talk. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, finally.

  Don’t go soft on me now, Tharon. You picked up the phone, now talk.

  I began to smell decay again. What was decaying was my hope. Whatever reservations Thibodeaux was having about whatever he was doing and shouldn’t be doing, he would have to confront on his own. I wasn’t going to help him resolve his dilemma. I had too many of my own to contend with.

  He said, “I don’t have a release to share any clinical information with you. That should come as no surprise.”

  Figured that. Don’t think I’m going to help you corral any deviant impulses. I want whatever you’re willing to give. Tell me all about McClelland, Dr. Thibodeaux. Tell me what I need to know to find him. To protect my family. To keep them from the sands of Bimini.

  Tharon Thibodeaux was driving north to Denver the next day to attend a basketball game. He was meeting friends to see the Nuggets play the Hornets and asked me to join him before tipoff at a coffeehouse on Evans near the University of Denver.

  Two hours and an additional inch of vodka later I found restless sleep while I was formulating the lie I would offer Lauren the next morning.

  On my way to Denver I stopped at a pay phone on Federal near the turnpike and called Sam’s cell. He didn’t pick up. I had decided to tell him about the bandanna.

  I didn’t leave a voice message. Messages could be subpoenaed. I called Kirsten’s home and left her a voice-mail with the bad news that I hadn’t even known the sex of the patient who had killed herself the previous day. Voice messages to lawyers couldn’t be subpoenaed.

  Traffic was no problem. I got to Denver around twenty-five minutes later and stopped at another pay phone in a strip center just off I-25 and University near DU. Sam answered after a couple of rings.

  The signal was crappy. Even his “Yeah?” broke up.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “You at a pay phone?” he asked. I heard only about half the syllables. That’s what I guessed he asked.

  “I am. Where are you? You’re breaking up.”

  “Someplace I’m not supposed to be. At the moment, I’m just hoping I’m upwind from some damn dogs. This is the first signal I’ve had up here.”

  “You working?” I asked.

  “What do you want, Alan?”

  “It’s about yesterday.”

  “Am I going to regret hearing it?” Sam asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. That’s when the mobile-phone lottery decided to kill the call.

  I tried twice more to reach him without success. Whatever cell tower his phone had been kissing was no longer in the mood.

  I parked on the street near the place that Thibodeaux had chosen for our rendezvous. I was familiar with the neighborhood from previous visits to the University of Denver, mostly for professional meetings. I didn’t know the coffeehouse he had picked, but it was immediately apparent that it was not a close relative of the Starbucks across the street. In the careless ambience department, Kaladi put even the most determinedly déclassé Boulder java roost to shame. The walls were painted the color of the flesh of a blood orange and the red oak on the floor was scratched beyond its years. The place was thrown together as though someone had accumulated enough battered tables and chairs to crowd the back
room at a small family-run coffee roaster in Brooklyn or San Francisco’s North Beach in the late 1960s.

  None of the patrons—mostly hungover DU students and neighborhood types—fit my preconception for a state-hospital psychiatrist. I ordered a drink from the counter and felt fortunate to snare a table. The coffee tasted like mid-morning at a stand-up coffee bar in Siena.

  A stained copy of that morning’s Rocky Mountain News offered a parsed account of what had happened in Peter’s barn the day before. I learned the interesting fact that Nicole Cruz had been employed as a maintenance worker at one of Boulder’s cemeteries.

  I read between the lines: my patient had been a gravedigger. Great. I appreciated the irony, even though the tally of my ignorance about her was beginning to reach a sum that in any other circumstance I might have registered as tragic.

  My pizza-box-size table was stuck at the bottom of a man-made cliff of sixty-nine-kilo burlap sacks of raw organic coffee beans. The bags were piled high on rolling carts stacked double on a steel frame. Once I’d finished turning the pages of Denver’s tabloid I’d spent a few moments reading the labels on the burlap and doing the arithmetic necessary to try to decipher why the bags weighed sixty-nine kilos, and not sixty-five or seventy, and what sixty-nine kilos equaled in pounds. It took me longer than it should have to compute the answer—151.8.

  The sixty-nine-kilo mystery consumed me until Thibodeaux walked up a few minutes later. Although Thibodeaux was younger than I, he wasn’t much younger, nor was he as young as I expected. When I looked up in response to his greeting—“Dr. Gregory?”—my initial guess was that that he’d been out of his residency just shy of ten years. I’d been expecting someone only a few years out of training. That he wasn’t young meant—if he possessed any skill whatsoever—he had enough experience to know what he was doing clinically and was coming perilously close to having had enough experience to have grown a little jaded while doing it.

  If he had appeared to be a few years younger I would have had an easier time answering one particular question that kept running through my mind: Why the hell would an established, presumably reasonably competent psychiatrist be providing clinical services in the chronically underfunded frontier outpost that was the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo, or whatever its current name was?

  Once I rejected all the benevolent explanations—research opportunities, fascination with serious mental illness, dedication to public service, pathologic affection for dying high-desert mill towns—I was left with the likelihood that at some point in the recent past Dr. Tharon Thibodeaux had fucked up professionally almost as badly as I just had.

  My clinical future passed in front of me: when the lawsuits were over and my humiliation was complete, I would end up doing psychometrics and running group-therapy sessions in a state institution—excuse me, “institute”—in some town like Pueblo.

  “Dr. Gregory?” he said pleasantly a second time.

  I stood up. “Alan, please.”

  “Tharon,” he said.

  I slid his name into the mental file where I stored baby names for the second child I hoped to have with Lauren. Tharon Gregory. Yeah.

  He placed his café au lait on the table and we shook hands. Once we sat, he looked me in the eyes in a way that’s peculiar to mental-health types. I stifled a sigh; I consider the eye-lock thing to be a ritualistic pissing contest intended to determine professional advantage—the mental-health practitioner version of the touching of swords by opposing fencers, the tapping of gloves by boxers.

  It’s basically an eye-contact challenge. Can you match my intensity, my ability to connect? I despised the little game and whenever I lost I considered it childish. I lost much more often than I won—which probably said something about my clinical cojones that I wasn’t eager to admit.

  I was in no mood for a new-age joust with some psychiatrist from the state hospital who considered me an elitist clinical psychologist from elitist Boulder. I had just enough ego-observation skills remaining to recognize that given the likelihood that I’d just lost a patient to an absolutely unanticipated suicide, the idea of anyone considering me an elite therapist was as ironic as it was ridiculous.

  I held Tharon’s magnetic gaze for only a couple of seconds before I looked away, my hope for the meeting evaporating along with my abdication of the eye-lock duel. I’d thrown in the figurative towel. The most attractive option in front of me was also the pettiest—gulping down my coffee and walking away. But if I did that, I knew I would never hear what this guy wanted to tell me about Michael McClelland.

  And there was my personal anti-pettiness campaign—which was in some disarray—to consider.

  He said, “You’re wondering why you’re here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You agreed to meet me without many questions. You must have some idea.”

  I was too drunk to ask them, I thought. I said, “Some.” The advantage was all Thibodeaux’s.

  I was growing more and more accustomed to that posture.

  He sat back, supporting his big cup with outstretched fingers the way the prongs of a setting support a diamond. “I grew up in New Orleans,” he said. “All my family is still there. Kaladi”—he smiled—“is no Café du Monde, but I like it here. I come whenever I’m in town.”

  I felt the change in tone viscerally. The wrangle was over. I exhaled, and nodded.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIBODEAUX MAY or may not have recognized that my nod contained all the assumptions he’d corrected a hundred times, and all the questions he’d heard a hundred times, or a thousand times, since the storms. Maybe he thought it was easier just to get the story out of the way whenever he met someone new. Regardless, he was ready.

  “We had water only a foot deep on the first floor of my parents’ house on the edge of the Garden District. Not much wind damage. They were fine, they had evacuated early on. Looters came but only took things that could be replaced. Had to rip up the floors, clean out mold. House is almost the same. City isn’t.”

  He was talking about the destructo-twins, Katrina and Rita. In his voice I heard the kind of stoicism that accompanies the salty crust of dried tears. Katrina had left New Orleans an amputee. The city was alive, but she was missing limbs. The eventual rebuilding of the annihilated neighborhoods would be like fitting New Orleans for prostheses. The city of New Orleans might be able to walk again but Tharon’s jury was out as to whether she would ever strut the way she once had.

  I thought he might stop his tale right there, but Tharon wasn’t done.

  “My mama’s mother lived in Creole. That’s in Cameron Parish. She survived Katrina. But Rita? People forget about Rita, but Rita was hard on the folks to the west. My grandmother died a week to the day after Rita passed. She broke her leg evacuating before the storm, but she died of a broken heart. After the funeral we found a piece of her house—the same house where my mama grew up, the same house where we all used to gather on holidays—we found her parlor where it had floated inland almost a half mile. The table where we sat for family feasts and celebrations, that big mahogany table was still inside the crushed parlor.”

  I felt the discomfort I feel when I’m in the presence of someone who has suffered a senseless tragedy. Had a child killed by a drunk driver. Had a sister or daughter victimized by a rapist. I didn’t know what to say.

  He rescued me. He said, “That’s the postscript to my story. Here’s the Pueblo connection: I went to college and medical school in Florida, made my way back to New Orleans for my residency,” he said. “Matched at Charity. That’s where I met my wife. As fate would have it, she was from Rocky Ford.” For my benefit, he added, “That’s east of Pueblo.” I already knew—in Colorado if you like sweet melons you know where Rocky Ford is. “She had followed a boyfriend to New Orleans after she finished nursing school up in Greeley. Didn’t take long for the boyfriend to become an ex. He was a bit too fond of some of the seamier aspects of the Quarter.” He mimed an
injection into his forearm.

  Tharon’s family history was his way of explaining how he’d ended up in the clinical and geographic backwater represented by Colorado’s primary psychiatric inpatient facility.

  “We had two kids right away. Boy and a girl. I had a good practice. My wife—Willis—asked me to move to Colorado when her mother got ill three years ago. She reminded me a hundred times that she’d agreed to live in Slidell—against her wishes—when I was setting up my first office.” He looked up. “Slidell’s not that bad, but Willis…’’ He left the thought unfinished.

  “That’s where we were during the storms—Slidell. Our house survived. But it was the last straw for Willis. I gave in. We rented our house to my brother and his wife. Katrina had taken theirs. I agreed to try Colorado for a year. That’s where my grandmother’s dining-room table is now, by the way. In Rocky Ford.” He smiled ironically. “Dry air here is murder on old mahogany. I think the desert’s going to end up proving harder on it than Rita ever was.”

  I nodded. I agreed with him about the effect of Colorado’s dry air on fine furniture, but I nodded to keep him talking.

  “I admit that I came here thinking Willis’s mother would die soon enough and we’d head back to Louisiana, or maybe Florida. I hated it here from day one. Staying was never the plan.”

  I hadn’t made the drive down the turnpike to argue with the man about the relative value of cities. If Denver, let alone Pueblo or Rocky Ford, had to go toe-to-toe with New Orleans on cuisine or atmosphere the fight would be a first-round knockout.

  “Five months after we got here my wife’s mother died. Complications of emphysema. Three weeks later Willis filed for divorce. She filed”—from his lips the word “filed” rhymed comfortably with “wild”—“in Pueblo County.”

  “You’re stuck,” I said. I’d done enough work with divorcing parents to understand the ramifications of custody and visitation prerogatives on parental freedom. If Tharon wanted to see his kids frequently and regularly he would have to find a job in Pueblo County. Or, if he didn’t mind a numbing Front Range commute, he could choose to live up the interstate in Colorado Springs.