13 1/2 (13 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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Lena, little Lena, lay face down in the middle of the skinny rug that ran down the hall to protect the hardwood. Her head was in two pieces, like in the cartoons when somebody unzipped somebody else and they fell into halves.
“Happy?” Mack yelled and shook him. “Lots more to see.”
He was lifted by the neck again. His feet tried to keep up so the cop wouldn’t pull his head off. Mack, the cop giant, was taking him to his parents’ room. Dylan didn’t want to see what they’d done to his mom and dad. With a strength born of sheer terror, he began to kick, and bite, and scream. He did wet himself then and didn’t even care. The world had gone insane.
But it hadn’t. Dylan had.
“No!” he screamed.
“Look,” Kowalski insisted. “Look. I found it for you.”
Dylan looked hard through the falling colors, through the blood in his eyes, through the dark from the walls leaning too close. Kowalski had something across his knees. He was holding it in his lap like a child.
“Look what I brought for you,” the doctor said. “I brought this to help you remember. This is the axe. The one you used to hack your family to pieces. Look at it. Look at the axe. Remember the axe? Here it is. See the axe. I brought it for you.”
Dylan looked. The axe. Blood poured from his eyes; he could feel it hot on his face. Panic clanged in his ears so loud he couldn’t hear anything else. The axe lay there, alive, waiting. Dylan looked at Kowalski’s face. It changed again. No judge. A cop. Mack, the giant cop, the fake cop, the bastard cop who had dragged him from his bed. This time he wouldn’t be afraid. This time he wouldn’t stop. This time he would get them all.
With the power of the snake in his brain he rose from the couch on a clear, cold wave of revenge, rose like a god, shooting up. His hands caught the axe from Mack the Giant’s grasp. It weighed nothing. He was a man now, not a little boy. He was strong. The axe swung high over his head, the blade glittered. The butterflies were coming back. He could save them.
With an exultant cry he brought the blade down onto Mack the Giant’s skull.
15
Again and again Dylan chopped. The axe blade sang; the butterflies flashed brighter and faster. Dylan could feel the muscles working beneath his skin. If he looked, he could see them, see through them to the bones, hard and long, wielding the axe.
Mack, the giant cop, the fake, bastard, fuck cop, fell from the chair but wouldn’t die. Dylan swung harder, driving the blade through the crawling back, hacking where arm met shoulder, down again through spine and base of skull.
Still, the man crawled, scuttling crablike, making for imagined safety beneath the desk. Dylan followed, his legs strong now, not the skinny pins of a little boy. The floor shuddered with each mighty step, and Dylan laughed. This time Mack wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t drag Dylan down the hall and show off his grisly work. With Mack dead, the butterflies would be safe. Everybody would be safe.
The last of the cop disappeared beneath the old battered metal desk, his feet tucking up inside like a kid hiding from his brother, like the Wicked Witch’s toes curling under Dorothy’s house. Axe held loosely in his right hand, Dylan grabbed the edge of the desk with his left and heaved. His strength was a hundredfold. The heavy metal desk rose up and smashed against the wall. The murky painting broke loose and fell.
Again, Dylan raised the blade.
“There is no axe! There is no axe! The axe was a joke. There is nothing in your hands! Guard! Guard! Help! There is no axe. Your hands are empty. Jesus! Help me—somebody help me. Guard!”
The curled thing on the floor, the cowering coil of flesh, screamed these words, had been screaming these words. Noise became language; language became English and began to make sense.
“Your hands are empty, you fucking psycho. There is no axe!”
Dylan brought his hands down from over his head. He held nothing. Nothing. His fingers curled around empty air. He stared down through where the axe handle had been to the man at his feet. The cop was gone. Mack the Giant was Kowalski. Nobody was dead. Nobody but his family. And the butterflies.
Dylan shut down so hard and fast he never even felt himself falling.
 
 
 
He came to slowly, nausea rising out of the depths to meet a shrieking headache. His mouth was sour with bile and the faint taste of decay heavy sedatives leave behind. He twitched, wanting to raise his hand to scrub the cobwebs from his face. His arms were strapped down. Dylan knew the feel of them; leather cuffs lined with sheepskin and chained to the bed. Kowalski favored them for shock therapy.
For a hellish heartbeat, Dylan thought he was there for that purpose, that any minute the volts would rage through his brain, ripping thoughts and memories out by the roots.
If it hadn’t already happened.
Then he remembered the acid: the acid, and the axe, and the butterflies. He couldn’t remember if he’d killed Kowalski or not.
But then he wouldn’t remember, would he?
“Fuck,” he groaned. Whether Kowalski still breathed or not didn’t change the fact that
he
was still alive. His throat was so dry he could scarcely swallow, and his bladder felt full to bursting.
“Hey,” he croaked. He started to turn his head but it hurt too much to move. “Hey!” he shouted again after a moment. “I gotta take a piss.”
That brought an orderly running. They hated like hell to clean up piss.
They hated like hell to do anything for the inmates.
Dylan listened to the shuffle of rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. He was in the psych ward. It was the only place other than the infirmary where they used the leather and sheepskin cuffs. After Kowalski had fried his brain, he’d woken up here. Even without the cuffs Dylan would have known where he was without bothering to open his eyes. The psych ward had a distinctive odor. The usual smells of bodily effluvia and pungent cleansers were there, as was the stink of stale food and medicines, but added to that familiar brew was a scent Dylan had identified in his mind as hopelessness. The odor, slightly like that of rank earth, came into the brain as a low note into the ears—dust dropping into a place where there was no wind to blow it away. Breathing the mixture made it hard to believe the sun shone anywhere on Earth, that all cats did not eat their kittens, and that there passed a single parade unrained on.
“Hey!” Dylan called again.
“Keep your pants on,” came a bored voice. “I’m coming.” It was Clyde.
That was good. Clyde was okay. He was old, slow and stupid, but he wasn’t full of hate
.
In Dylan’s world that qualified a person for near sainthood.
“You going to go chopping me up with an invisible axe if I take you to the toilet?” Clyde asked, as he undid the cuffs. Dylan guessed the orderly was under orders to have him use the bedpan. But that would mean Clyde would have to wash it. Grateful for the old man’s laziness and the shred of salvaged dignity, Dylan assured him he would not chop him to pieces but, indeed, would give him an invisible twenty-dollar bill if he could close the bathroom door.
“No dice.”
Dylan had only asked to be asking for something. Since he’d been put away he’d done nothing in private, including dream. Sometimes he wondered if, when he got out, he’d need an audience to get himself to take a dump.
Clyde held open the door to the little toilet off the recovery room and Dylan brushed by him to step inside. Contact with the old man was alarming. The sensation of life that close was too much stimulus. Inside, Dylan had the burnt-out-hole feeling a bad trip left.
Clyde had to steady him so he could hit the john. As they’d done when he was tripping, the walls wavered and leaned—the acid was still in his system—but now, added to it, was whatever they’d given him to bring him down, so the wavering and leaning was in slow motion. He kept jerking as if he were toppling over, only to find that he was still on the level; it was the walls that were sneaking out.
“That was some bad shit,” Dylan said in hopes his own voice would make him seem more like himself to himself.
“
Bad
as in
baaaaad
, meaning
good
, or
bad
as in
bad,
meaning
bad
?” Clyde asked seriously. The inmates ragged him because of his desire to keep abreast of the current slang.
“
Bad
, as in
shit
,” Dylan said and dropped the skirt of his hospital gown.
“Ah,” Clyde said.
Through the skin on Clyde’s bald head, Dylan could see the gears in his brain working that one over. An impulse close to kindness—a sensation pretty much alien to Dylan—hit, and he wanted to explain but couldn’t; he’d forgotten whatever the hell they were talking about.
As Clyde helped him get back into the bed without toppling onto it face first, Dylan chanced the question he’d been avoiding since resuming this twisted brand of consciousness: “Did I kill anybody?”
“Nobody that matters,” Clyde said.
A stab of fear so visceral it caused him to clutch at his gut flashed through him. Clyde saw it. “No, kid, you didn’t kill anybody. You didn’t kill anybody at all.”
Relieved, but still shaking, Dylan lay back on the pillows. “You have to cuff me again?”
“I got to.”
Dylan put his arms in the leather cuffs, palm up so Clyde could find the buckles more easily. “Is Dr. Kowalski okay?”
The orderly chuckled, a whispery winter leaf sound. “Nope. The warden threw his scrawny ass out in the snow. Fired him. Warden Cole doesn’t hold with that kind of thing, not without the proper whatnot. Like he’s always saying.”
Clyde didn’t have to voice it; Dylan had heard the warden on the subject a number of times. In juvie, it was surprising how many experts wanted to use the inmates—all in the name of helping them, of course.
“These are not guinea pigs,” the warden was fond of saying. “They are
boys.
Real live
boys.
”
If Pinocchio had known what it was like, he wouldn’t have been so hot to trot on the real-live-boy thing,
Dylan thought as he drifted back into the black drug place that sufficed for sleep.
 
 
 
When he woke again, he wasn’t alone. It was full dark outside, and a single lamp burned on the little table bolted to the floor by the hall door. Two hands held onto his right wrist. He opened his eyes the barest slit. Phil Maris, his algebra teacher, was holding his wrist; his head was bowed as if in prayer. Phil was slender and short, maybe five-eight. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail. The warden let him get by with it because, under the radical trappings, Phil was a good, solid, Midwestern boy and an excellent teacher. Dylan closed his eyes and let himself enjoy the comfort of the man’s touch. Phil was nearly thirty and still unmarried, but he wasn’t queer. You didn’t spend four years in Drummond without figuring out who wanted to jump your bones. Phil was as straight as they came.
“I am so sorry, man.” Phil had sensed Dylan was awake.
“He mind-fucked me bad,” Dylan said, and was shamed by the nearness of tears in his voice.
“Hey, man, you know better than that.”
Phil never let the kids use that kind of language in his presence. He said four-letter words only served to let others know you were too stupid to come up with something better suited to human discourse.
“I’m sorry about the acid,” Phil went on. “I never should have dropped with you. I don’t do that stuff anymore. I’ve seen too many burnouts.”
“If I hadn’t dropped with you, I would never have found my way back from this trip,” Dylan said truthfully. “Kowalski,
Doctor
Kowalski, was taking me some bad places.
Real
bad places.”
“He said you flipped out and tried to kill him.”
“I guess.” Kowalski would have told them what he thought would get him off the hook. Dylan didn’t bother to defend himself. Matricide, patricide, killer of little girls versus The Doctor; nobody would believe him.
“Promise me you won’t do it again.”
“Flip out?”
“Drop acid.”
Phil asked Dylan for the promise as if he thought Dylan would keep it. Dylan promised. He would keep it. Not only because he’d been offered the chance but because the acid had pushed him too close to the edge.
“Jesus,” Phil said, and dropped his head as if talking to the man himself. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”
Dylan said nothing. Nobody could get him out of Drummond. From here, he went to the state pen. Still, he appreciated the sentiment.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. Dylan was watching the walls. For the most part they were staying upright. There were things at the rim of his consciousness, nasty acid things, but they were not coming forward at the moment.
There’d be flashbacks from this one. He could feel them like storms building just over the mountains of his mind.

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