13 1/2 (12 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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“Ahh,” said Kowalski with satisfaction.
“You ever drop acid, Doc?”
“I . . . I have taken it experimentally.”
Kowalski was lying again. He wanted to seem cool for some reason, wanted to impress a teenage axe murderer. How pathetic was that?
“Good thing you got lab stuff. That street shit’s got some kinky side effects. A kid in detention over in St. Paul got hold of some. His brother said it was pure angel dust. This kid, he’s like Superman all of a sudden. Ripped the door off its hinges. Then ripped the face off a guard.”
Kowalski’s skin paled.
Be scared, you piece of shit,
Dylan thought, and enjoyed his petty victory. Meanness and fear were the only kind of power left to Drummond’s inmates.
The doctor pushed his chair back the three inches he’d infringed upon.
“Okay, Dylan, we’ve got work to do. Today, we’re going to go back year by year until we get to the night of the murders. Are you ready to start?”
He was talking in the voice of a TV hypnotist, dreamy and smarmy. It didn’t strike Dylan as funny. It creeped him out. The whole thing, saying fuck, threatening—and there was no way it wasn’t a threat; people on the outside might mistake it but a kid in juvie, never—then acting like everything was normal, was majorly creeping Dylan out. Anxiety, the scalp-crawling, bone-breaking kind he’d learned in the courtroom, started pouring into him, freezing his blood.
Shit. Not on acid,
he begged the cosmos. This crap on acid, and a guy could live in la-la land for good.
“You don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you,” Dylan said desperately.
The doctor had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s right,” he said soothingly, doing Dr. Kildare now instead of a hypnotist on Ed Sullivan.
Kowalski’s left eye snapped from gray to green, then flashed red. It was happening. “Jesus,” Dylan breathed and wondered how many hits were on that scrap of blue.
“Close your eyes,” the doctor crooned.
Dylan did, not because he was told to but to shut out the red eye and whatever else was to come. It didn’t help. The colors were in his mind.
“Go back.” Papers rustled like snakes uncoiling. One began to uncoil in Dylan’s skull. He didn’t see it; he felt it. Great scaling scales sliding over one another. Then he saw it: blue sparks in the black, sparks struck from the snake’s back as the huge metallic sheets of its skin slid over each other. He opened his eyes.
“Close,” Kowalski murmured.
“Fuck you.” The last letters of the word “you” trailed out of Dylan’s mouth in smoke rings and broke apart around the doctor’s face. Around the still-red left eye. Dylan closed his eyes. Better the snake within than the one without. Panic was growing inside him along with the snake. Eventually it would be too big for his cranium and the bones would shatter, splatter out.
“Good boy,” Kowalski said. More rustling. Then the doctor began to read from his notes. “You remember going to trial. Go there now. Go back to your trial. Are you there?”
“No.” Dylan forced his eyes open. Stared at the doctor’s eye. It cooled to gray. He was going to be alright.
Before the thought could stop the rising storm of panic, the psychiatrist’s face melted and reformed into that of the judge but wrong, pulpy; bits of it could fall off and drip onto the floor. “Shit,” Dylan whispered, then said, “I’m guilty,” because that was what he’d said when he was eleven.
Judge Kowalski smiled. The snake rustled and sparked. “Gooooo oooood,” the judge said with the
o
’s flowing out of his mouth in pinks and greens. “Go back to the night it happened.”
“Murder,” Dylan said. The word was red, blood red. It was such a cliché, he laughed. The wall behind Judge Kowalski, the one with the bad painting Dylan had grown familiar with during years on the couch, leaned in until it was almost touching Kowalski’s head. “Duck,” Dylan said.
“You’re seeing ducks?”
“I wasn’t.” But now two of them flitted past the corner of his eye.
“Forget the ducks.” The judge was annoyed. He looked around, maybe for a gavel. Grabbed up snake pages instead. They slithered through his hands, making blue sparks.
Spawn of the snake coiling in Dylan’s brain. The wall came closer. The door on the adjacent wall leaned in to meet it. Dylan put out his hands to hold them back.
“You had the flu the night before. Remember?” The judge sounded peevish, and the peeve scoured the judginess from Kowalski’s face. He was just Kowalski again.
“Goooooooood,” Dylan said and watched his own
o
’s flutter out and break like bubbles against the wall.
“Go back,” Kowalski intoned, remembering he was on television.
Dylan sank into the couch. The worn cushions rose up to embrace him, pushing his outstretched arms forward into the position of a man about to do a half gainer. “Diving in,” Dylan said and looked down. The floor rippled wetly. He wasn’t far gone enough to jump. “I don’t think I can fly yet,” he said seriously. To him this was a good sign.
“Go back,” the judge ordered. “Your mom put you to bed. She put you to bed. Can you see the bed?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dylan tried to explain. Acid wasn’t like that. It did what it did. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“Your mom put you to bed,” Judge Kowalski went on inexorably. “You had on”—rustle, spark, slither—“flannel pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them.”
Dylan remembered those pajamas. Really
remembered
them. He hadn’t thought about them, not ever, and now they were on him, soft, and warm, and smelling like home. Like soap and fresh air. Cowboys on horseback, little and perfect, galloped across his thighs and his chest. He didn’t so much see as feel them. Flannel and soft and purring. Ginger the cat, purring. She was on the bed. A ginger-colored cat, she purred like a machine gun rattling. He reached out and put his hand on her. No cat. Couch.
Rich started to laugh and Dylan turned, expecting to see him in the doorway pretending to die a million ways. The door pushed closer. The laughter was there, bubbling and going farther away. “Rich!” he shouted, wanting him to come back.
“Rich was there. Good.”
Dylan focused on the doctor. Colors were rampant, raging; he squinted through them. The doctor’s lips were moving as if he chewed the air. Words fell out in chunks. They didn’t make sense. Panic rushed into Dylan until he was so cold, he shook with it, his teeth banging together.
“Yergall ley wink ang deader mom.”
“Mom.” Dylan recognized that word. “Mom,” he said again with relief. “Momma.” The room filled with butterflies. Kowalski’s words turned from chunks to butterflies; the colors stopped attacking him and painted their wings. The cubical was filled with them. Dylan looked up. The stone ceiling thirty feet above was a swirl of beautiful butterflies; they lined the blackened rafters. Their wings left trails of faint color in the air.
Dylan laughed. “Momma,” he said again, and the word broke into more butterflies, and they smelled of warm cotton and cherries. “Momma!” he cried, and the butterflies came down and lit on his arms and his hands, his shoulders, his hair. Their wings brushed his forehead, warm butterfly kisses.
“What are you seeing?” The doctor’s words cut through the butterflies, killing those in their path.
“Butterflies. Don’t talk—killing them,” Dylan said.
“Killing? You are killing. Killing Mom?” the doctor demanded.
Dylan closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the saw-toothed words hack through the bloom of butterfly wings.
“The baby, you killed her first, didn’t you? She was trying to get to her mom, and you killed her. That was first, wasn’t it? That was it.”
Even with his eyes closed Dylan could see jaws of words chewing the lovely creatures from the air, spitting their still bodies onto the floor and the walls. He raised his hands to his eyes. He had forgotten he was covered with butterflies. They turned to paste under his palms, squished between his fingers. Their bodies ran warm and thick over his face and hands. “No!” he screamed and opened his eyes. His hands were red with blood. Blood covered his thighs and arms; his face was sticky with it, his hair stiff with blood. “It’s me! It’s me, I’m killing them,” he said, aghast.
“Killing your parents, your sister.” Kowalski’s words came into Dylan’s ears sharply, cutting their way in past eardrum to brain.
“No,” Dylan protested.
The last butterfly, saved because it had hidden in Dylan’s mouth, flew out on the word and lit on his cheek, and he was home, little and in bed, a kiss like a butterfly warm from the sun, brushing across his cheek. A gold cross on a fine chain caught the light. The sweet cherry taste of syrup was on his lips, but wrong, the kind of wrong that lets you know there’s medicine under it and the cherry is supposed to fool you.
Dylan wasn’t fooled. It’s hard to fool an eleven-year-old boy, but he’d taken the medicine with good humor to please his mother, and because he knew if he didn’t get over “the dread blue mucus” as his dad called the colds and flu that tormented Rochester’s citizens from October until April, he wouldn’t be allowed to skate in Saturday’s hockey game.
The medicine made him sleepy. His mom sat on the edge of his bed and sang to him like she had when he was little. He let her, so as not to hurt her feelings. Her voice was okay, kind of deep and skritchy, but she couldn’t carry a tune for sour apples and just sort of made it up as she went along. It reminded him of the Japanese singer they had to listen to in class to prove nobody was still mad over a long-ago war. For some stupid reason, she decided to sing a second song, “Hush Little Baby.”
Singing it to Lena, who was two, was one thing, but his mom was slaughtering it and he was eleven for cripe’s sake. What was he supposed to do? Start sucking his thumb and stroking his blankie? He was about to tell her to go sing to Lena, or pester the dog, or do some other mom thing, when Rich stepped into the doorway and started “dying” all sorts of ways that cracked Dylan up: pulling up a noose and lolling out his tongue, shooting himself in the head and sliding down the door frame.
Every time Dylan laughed, his mother turned, but there Rich would be looking innocent, like he was just enjoying the music. Finally, she gave up, kissed him, and left.
That kiss was the last normal thing that happened to him. The last good thing. A warm butterfly on his cheek, someone who didn’t think he was a monster.
Next, there was yelling and bright lights, men with radios—cops. Sirens screamed from outside and more of them screamed in his head. His head was huge and broken, a piece of jagged glass slicing through his brain. Rich, limp and dead looking, his face the color of the zombies they laughed at in the old movies; but it wasn’t funny. Rich wasn’t goofing around. He was dying. One of the cops, a huge cop, like a giant with hands bigger than Dylan’s face, had Dylan by the back of the neck. He felt warm and wet and wondered if he’d wet the bed.
He’d pissed the bed and his parents had called the cops. Rich had fainted because he’d peed in the bed.
He laughed because it was too weird to be real. When he did, the cop’s hand tightened until he thought his head would pop like a ripe pimple, his brains squirting out like puss. “You fuck bastard,” the cop shouted.
“Take it easy, Mack,” said somebody.
“You crazy fuck bastard,” the giant shouted, his face so close Dylan could smell the stale coffee on his breath and see the bristly hairs on his cheeks.
He raised his hands to push the man away, and they were red. Red-red and sticky. He was covered in the cherry medicine. Too red. Blood, he was covered in blood. His chest was smeared with it. The covers on his bed were soaking in blood. It was on his face and his arms. Vomit choked off the laugh.
“Let’s go take a peek at your handiwork, you sick little prick.”
“Mack, back off!”
But Mack didn’t. Dylan felt himself being pulled from the bed by the scruff of his neck like a cat. The pain in his head brought down black around the edges of his eyes, and his legs didn’t work right. The cop, Mack the Giant, was dragging him from the room. Two men had taken Rich into the hall and were doing things to his crotch, or that’s what it looked like.
“Is he dead?” Dylan managed.
“Not yet, you fuck,” said Mack, and Dylan wondered if they were going to kill him, if maybe they weren’t real cops but men dressed as cops who’d come to kill them. They’d killed Rich, and now Mack was going to take him someplace and kill him too. They must already have killed his parents, or his dad would have gotten his double-barreled shotgun from behind the dresser and blown them into tiny pieces.
“They’re dead,” he screamed to Rich, to get him to wake up and run or fight, to let him know there was no help coming. “Momma and daddy are dead!”
“Aren’t you a proud piece of shit,” the cop said and hauled him out of the bedroom and into the upstairs hallway. All the lights were on, glaring and cold, and there was a man with a camera that flashed and burned the back of Dylan’s eyes. “Look, you lousy fuck.” The cop pushed him to his hands and knees in the hallway.

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