Maybe I'll Call Anna

by William Browning Spencer

  Parrish warned Bobby that, when the time came, he would have to act quickly, because Baby Lisa would certainly try to kill him. “As soon as you have killed her,” Parrish said, “you must take a pill that will prevent Baby Lisa from entering your body, from leaping into your living flesh. I will give you that protection.” Parrish smiled to himself, for this was the fail-safe part of the plan, a brilliant touch.

  This lurid, outrageous scenario was just right. It was too bizarre to ever be presented in any court as a plan for murder. And yet, Parrish knew, it entered the logic of Bobby Starne’s mind with flawless ease.

  12

  Parrish checked the wires again. He wasn’t sure if he had it right, but he certainly didn’t want to consult anyone else on this critical part of the conditioning. He could hardly tell someone what he was up to. He could hardly say, “I am trying to drive a crazy person farther around the bend.”

  Parrish got up and walked out of his office and down the hall to the dayroom. The ward cat, Alice, was sleeping on the sofa, and Parrish reached down and picked her up. He looked at his watch. It was ten-twenty. Group would be out in another ten or fifteen minutes, and he would be seeing Bobby Starne in his office at eleven. Plenty of time.

  Whispering in the cat’s ear, Parrish walked back to his office. He put the drowsy animal on the chair where Bobby Starne would be sitting. He petted the cat and cooed over it. “Good Alice,” he cooed, scratching its ears. The cat purred, stretched, and curled into a tight black ball. Satisfied that the cat wasn’t going anywhere, Richard carefully moved away from the animal. He waked over to the light switch near the sofa. He waited a moment, then flicked the switch. The cat leaped into the air, magically levitated, and darted across the room. It ran in small, frenzied circles, mewed piteously at the door, and finally skulked under the sofa. A coppery smell that reminded Parrish of childhood train sets lingered in the room.

  Parrish grinned broadly. Not bad for a guy whose electrical expertise had formerly extended only to the changing of light bulbs, the replacing of frayed electrical cords.

  He went over to the closet and took out the movie screen and projector. He took the film canister out of his briefcase and carefully threaded the film into the projector.

  He drew the blinds. He sat in the dark and watched a cartoon about a mouse outwitting a cat. The mouse was tiptoeing around a corner with a burning stick of dynamite when suddenly Anna’s image appeared on the screen, smiling, laughing. She was reacting to the camera, waving it away with her hand. She laughed. Then her image disappeared, replaced by the cartoon. Now the cat was locking the mouse in a trunk. The trunk, however, had no bottom.

  Parrish stopped the projector and rewound the film. He was proud of himself, but not overly confident, not yet.

  He hunted the cat down and took it back to the dayroom. Then he returned to his office and waited for Bobby Starne.

  “I have a special treat for you today,” Richard told Bobby. “I know how you love cartoons. I thought we could watch a cartoon together. What do you say?”

  “That would be okay,” Bobby said. Since Bobby’s medications had been reduced, he was more wary and jittery than ever. He looked weirder too. As one of the ward nurses put it, “He looks like he’s going to blow a fuse.”

  Bobby sat in the chair, but he was restless, and he grunted when the lights were turned off.

  “It’s okay,” Parrish said, and he started the cartoon. Bobby was soon laughing, a heavy, huh, huh noise, and gripping the arms of his chair.

  Anna’s face jumped on the screen, and Parrish flipped the light switch and Bobby jolted out of the chair.

  Parrish calmed Bobby down, returned him to the chair, and they continued to watch the movie.

  But the third time Anna’s face appeared, the third time Bobby Starne felt his body invaded by hissing, electric serpents, there was no calming him down. Parrish turned the projector off and turned on the room lights.

  Parrish hugged the boy on the sofa. Bobby Starne was shivering, mumbling.

  Parrish smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s right. Baby Lisa. She’s getting stronger. I think it’s time to do something, don’t you? I think we have to kill her quickly, or it will be too late.”

  When Bobby Starne was taken back to his room, shaking and whining incoherently, Richard told the orderly that Bobby’s session had been traumatic, and that he should be isolated from the other patients for the rest of the day while he quieted down. No, he was not to be medicated heavily.

  After the orderly left, Parrish locked his office, turned the projector on again and watched Anna’s laughing face. The camera moved away from her to reveal her surroundings, the rushing water, the sun-white pines. He remembered the day they had gone to the Yurman River and he had filmed her. That had been a fine, inviolate day. Anna had been flattered by his attention.

  He rewound the film and put it back in the canister and replaced the canister in his briefcase. He methodically dismantled his “electric” chair and then he walked to his desk and called Anna at work.

  “I want to play hookey,” he told her. “I’m sick of work today. I know you get off at one. What do you say I meet you at our river? Around two, okay?”

  Anna, delighted, said she would be there, and Parrish hung up with a sense of satisfaction. Events were moving properly toward their conclusion. All that remained was for Bobby Starne to escape.

  This was the part of the plan most apt to go awry, the one risky part of the business. Bobby had to “escape” from Romner Psychiatric Institute. Patients did escape occasionally, and Bobby wasn’t on a high security ward—although he would have been transferred to such a ward had Dr. Parrish failed to intervene on his behalf after the arm-breaking episode—but some precautions were still observed. Parrish waited until one o’clock when lunch was over and most patients were either downstairs in occupational therapy or in private sessions with assigned counselors. Bobby would have been downstairs with the others if Parrish hadn’t requested that he be isolated. This meant that Bobby would be locked in his room for the afternoon.

  Parrish pushed through the swinging doors and walked down the middle of the corridor. This ward had the feel of a college dorm, brighter, more hopeful, with dressers, desks, carpet in each room. Bobby’s room was 118, and Parrish stopped in front of the door. He looked up and down the hall, and, seeing no one, he quickly bent and unlocked the door. Bobby was sitting on the bed, and he looked up when Parrish entered.

  “Hullo, Dr. Parrish,” he said.

  “Hello, Bobby. You are going to have to be very quiet now. You have to do just what I tell you, okay?”

  Bobby nodded his head.

  “Good. We don’t have much time. We have to kill Baby Lisa today or we will never have another chance. She will jump again, and we will never find her. We won’t know where she is until she comes looking for us.”

  Bobby nodded grimly.

  Parrish took the scissors blade out of his inside coat pocket and hacked at the wood around the door latch. It was the sort of latch that could be burgled with a credit card, so no one would be surprised that Bobby had managed to force it. They would wonder how he had managed to conceal the scissors (stolen over a week ago from the nursing station) through two room searches, and they might wonder how it came to be so sharp (for Parrish had lovingly honed it with a stone). They wouldn’t wonder for long; they would dismiss the mystery, for, as Parrish had observed, a certain number of inexplicable events occurred weekly at Romner, as though the craziness contained in the place worked its way out of the patients’ minds and into the walls, warping natural law.

  For the same reason they would quickly cease wondering how the double doors at the end of the hall, the ones facing an expanse of rolling hills and green woods, had come to be open.

  Having told Bobby what to do, and having had him repeat it, Richard peered out into the still-empty hallway, quickly slipped into the hall, closed the door behind him, and walked briskly in the direction of the nurs
es’ station. He was prepared to talk to the ward clerk, but as he approached, he saw her turn away to answer a phone. The orderly was slumped in a chair, reading a paperback. He didn’t look up as Parrish went by.

  In the parking lot, Parrish looked at his watch again. It was one-twenty. He climbed in his car and drove off the lot. He drove slowly down Burnett Avenue and turned into the park at Burnett and Weaver. The park was named Hammet Field Park, and it had fallen into disrepair when the larger community center had been built a quarter of a mile to the south. Today, as usual, it was nearly empty except for a teenage couple sitting on a bench looking disconsolate and a fat woman dragging a small, shaggy dog behind her. The dog’s small feet pinwheeled and it leaned against a taut leash. The woman gave it an occasional ill-tempered yank.

  Parrish drove past the people and down a residential street and back into the L-shaped end of the park, now scrub vegetation and twisted, tormented trees. He waited.

  He waited for fifteen minutes, and the heat of the day sparked perspiration on his forehead. He felt a tickle of panic. The whole plan seemed ludicrous. Bobby had been too crazy to understand, too lost in his convoluted world.

  Then Bobby lurched out of the dark woods, his head bobbing oddly, his huge chest heaving. Parrish waited, and Bobby saw him and ran to the car. Parrish reached behind the seat and opened the back door.

  “Lie on the floor,” he told Bobby. “We can’t let her see you.”

  “Baby Lisa?” Bobby said. Bobby scrambled in and lay down on the backseat. Parrish could hear his heavy, scratchy breathing as the car pulled out of the park and he maneuvered it through residential streets, into the busier, downtown district, then out onto the highway. He rolled down a window and let the hot summer air race in. It felt like freedom.

  13

  Bobby Starne forgot where he was, lying there in the backseat with the sound of the wheels whirring in his ears, then he thought maybe he was dead, and the sound was a saw, coming to cut him like cord wood, to stack him for the fires of hell. But he couldn’t move. He was held down by a fierce magnet that locked his bones to the scratchy, buckled floor.

  He lay there for a long time, and then the saw sound stopped and the sunlight flooded in and Dr. Parrish was bending over him saying, “Bobby. We are here. It is time to do what has to be done.”

  He got out of the car, and he remembered that they were going to kill Baby Lisa, and the thought frightened him, but he didn’t want Dr. Parrish to think he was afraid, because Dr. Parrish was counting on him, so he took the special killing blade that Dr. Parrish gave him, and he held it close to his leg, blade pointed down. His hands were wet with sweat, and the sunlight buzzed around him like angry gnats, and there was too much of everything in the air, too much of trees and grass. Dr. Parrish stood too tall against a hissing blue sky, and when Bobby looked down the hill, he could see the river, and it was white and fierce. The river twisted wildly, and he remembered when J.D. had nailed a garter snake to the ground with an ice pick. The snake had whipped and fought in the dirt. The river was like that, trying to free itself. He didn’t want to go near the river, but he knew he would have to before Dr. Parrish said anything. Bobby knew this: If you hated a thing, it would call you.

  “She mustn’t see the blade,” Dr. Parrish said. “We don’t want her to run away. We have to trick her. If she knows you mean her harm, she will kill you with a look.”

  Bobby transferred the blade to his back pocket with the blade pointing up. Then he smiled. “Hi,” he said, practicing. It wasn’t easy, because Dr. Parrish was watching his performance with a scowl. The truth was, Bobby knew he wasn’t much of an actor, and Baby Lisa would surely know he had come to kill her, so Baby Lisa would kill him.

  But Dr. Parrish reassured him. “She will think you are fooled,” he said. Parrish smiled. “She thinks she has us all fooled.”

  Bobby made a real smile, imagining the joke on Baby Lisa when the killing blade leaped into her heart.

  As soon as Bobby Starne entered the trees and began to descend the hill toward the river, Parrish climbed back in the car, threw it in reverse, backed up, and drove away. Whatever happened now was meant to happen. He did not want to watch it happen, did not want to think much about it at all. Oddly enough, he felt no fear of failure. Certainly Bobby Starne’s damaged brain was capable of misfiring. The crazy giant might simply march off into the woods, forgetting what he was supposed to do. Anna might not show. Or Anna might show and, seeing Bobby, bolt immediately.

  He had set events in motion. He had done what he could, and now he felt that he was relieved of the burden of action, of thought. His part in it was over, and he felt fine. Perhaps he felt a little sad, as God might feel watching His inexorable machinery move.

  It was a beautiful day. He had to get out more often, get away from the hospital. He drove past a pond with two cows plunged up to their stomachs in the sweet, dark water. A delicate net of willow trees exhaled a pale, tentative green against the darker green of hills dotted with yellow dandelions. He turned the radio on, buzzed the dial through the obscene rock stations, and landed on a classical station where garbled but majestic Beethoven sang in God’s ear.

  14

  It was five after two when Anna reached the river. She didn’t see Richard’s car, but she wasn’t surprised to find that she had arrived first. You had to be realistic in a relationship with a doctor. The world was filled with emergencies. A doctor couldn’t say to his patients, “Hey, forget it. I’ve got stuff to do this afternoon.”

  Anna was willing to wait. She felt at peace this afternoon. Yesterday had been a bad day for her. No reason why, but all day she had felt crummy like back when she was doing the heavy drinking. She had tried to sleep her way through yesterday, and it hadn’t worked, and she had kept burrowing into the mattress, hearing the muted voices of other Villa residents, and she had finally slept and dreamed of her mother and her mother was saying, “Anna Shockley, you are hell-bound without Jesus,” in that flat, hopeless voice that Anna had always hated, hated even before she understood the words.

  Anna woke up yesterday and tried to erase the vision of her tight-lipped mother by saying the words Father Walker had given her for her own Dance, and that had helped, but it was a day when her mind kept going back to that ugly little town of her birth, the Jesus-haunted wheat fields, the immensity of sky, the cruel, long highways and flat, child-hating storefronts.

  She should have run away from there sooner, that was all she regretted about leaving. She stayed too long, stayed for fifteen long years, and then she heard the voice of that preacher, a fat man with one of those reedy, moist voices that the Lord gives preachers, saying, “Look to your children, my friends. Raise them so that they may know right from wrong. Satan drives up and down this highway, and all our young folks have to do is put out their thumbs and they are gone, flying off into perdition.”

  The preacher hadn’t meant it as advice, but that’s how Anna took it, and she eyed that highway with great intensity and confusion, and then, on the edge of the tenth grade, with autumn in the air and a feeling of change that the dying town refused to acknowledge, she stuck her arm out, and if it was Satan who stopped for her, it was a sorry kind of a Satan, a skinny auto mechanic pretending to be a big shot. He was on his way to see some folks in Charlotte, North Carolina, and it was in Charlotte that Anna met Larry in a bar—she had always looked older than her age, what her mother had called “physically mature”—and Larry had impressed her. He was real sure of himself, carried himself like somebody. He had a way of laughing that didn’t hold back anything and the world’s whitest teeth. The drugs hadn’t turned him mean back then, and right off he bought her this silk mini-dress that she admired although the price was way out of line and she wouldn’t have let him buy it if she’d known.

  Larry had style.

  Anna pushed all these thoughts away, because they were beginning to make her feel the way she had felt yesterday, and she didn’t need that. She didn’t need the
past, not any of it, and you couldn’t get her to talk about it, because talking about it might draw her back somehow.

  Father Walker agreed. He said the past was like a room where all the oxygen had been breathed already. You went back into a room like that, you’d suffocate.

  It was too bad that Richard hated Father Walker and the Dancers so much. Richard just refused to listen when she talked about the Dancers. She knew to stop when his eyes narrowed that way. Well, they’d have a lifetime to get that straight. A person’s religion was important, and she wasn’t going to let it go just because Richard didn’t approve.

  David hadn’t approved either. But she didn’t want to think about David either. She had sent him a letter. Maybe he would understand and be happy for her. Some things just happened, like lightning hitting a tree. Anyway, she had never been any good for David.

  Anna leaned over the car’s backseat and hauled out a frayed orange blanket. She took the suntan lotion out of the glove compartment and got out of the car. Richard would know she was here and join her down on the riverbank.

  Bobby Starne crouched under a large, lichen-mottled boulder in the shadow of the trees. He blinked out at the grassy, naked expanse that lay between him and the river. Grasshoppers in the tall grass cluttered, mocking him. The white water looked hungry and fierce.

  He didn’t see Baby Lisa anywhere, and he wanted to turn and run back up through the trees and leap in the car and forget about it. He was afraid, and there wasn’t any strength in him. He took the killing blade out of his back pocket and held it in his hand. Sun jumped on the blade, and he put his fingers through the handle, and he felt slightly better.

  He looked up, and there was Baby Lisa, coming out of the woods no more than fifty feet to his left. All the goodness and strength that the blade had inspired went out of him, and the terror of Baby Lisa’s presence, the rays from her, penetrated his bones. He could feel the rays, like worms, sliding in the hollows of his bones.