Lucky Leonardo (17 page)

Leonardo and Joan reconvened at the end of the tour, outside admissions. “I know where he is,” Joan whispered.

“Locked in his room?”

“In the infirmary.”

“He's sick?”

“Psychiatric observation.”

“How do you know?”

“A kid told me.”

“Did you say who you are?”

“Of course not. I said I knew a new boy who I heard tried to run away. I fished around for his name until the kid said ‘Harvey.'”

“Psychiatric observation?”

“Right. But the good news is…” Joan said, but she shut up as Chuck passed by.

“Thanks again for the tour,” Leonardo said to him.

“My pleasure,” Chuck answered in stride. “Nice to meet you both.”

“Good luck with your Harvard application,” Leonardo added.

Joan watched Chuck out of the corner of her eye until he was safely behind the closed door of the admission office. Then she continued, still whispering: “The good news is that they give kids in psychiatric observation time out for good behavior…”

“Oh?”

“They let them watch the basketball game.”

“Oh.”

“Uncle Lenny,” Joan said, looking around, shivering, “this place gives me the creeps. It feels like a prison. Let's just find him and take him home.”

“I…I want to make a call.”

“Who?”

“My lawyer.”

“My dad?”

“Another lawyer. You go to the basketball game and look for Harvey. I'll meet you there.”

“What if I see him?”

“I don't know…”

The perky woman observed Joan and Leonardo from between the slats of her blinds. They looked like they were in the usual parent-child post-tour discussion, where the child promises never to do a bad thing ever again if she doesn't have to go here, and the parent says he's heard that song before, too many times. Sometimes the child cries like she hasn't cried since she was a little girl. Sometimes that works. “What do you think, Chuck?” she asked.

“I think Mr. Eisenberg is ready,” he replied.

She nodded, and turned from her window as Joan started walking back down to the gym and Leonardo dialed Abigail's cell phone and, for better or worse, got her. “Did you get my message from yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes, I'm sorry I haven't retu….”

“I've got a life crisis going here…”

“Legal issue, Leonardo? Or should we call in Dr. Ziggamon?”

“Very legal. I'm in Maine, at the school that my ex-wife put my son in without my permission, and I want to take him home. Any problem with that?”

“Hold just a second Leonardo, I have to find a quieter place. I'm at my son's basketball game…”

“Sorry to disturb…” He watched Joan disappear down the path. He was alone in the cold with his cell phone, loosely connected like a kite at the end of a mile of twine.

“OK…This is better,” Abigail said. “Your son is Harvey?”

“Yes.”

“Thirteen?”

“Yes.”

“Joint custody?”

“Yes.”

“Did you consent to this school?”

“No.”

“Did you receive any court papers about moving him?”

“No.”

“Did your divorce attorney?”

“I spoke with him yesterday and he's like…”

“Did he tell you about papers?”

“No.”

“Is this your weekend for custody?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Leonardo, maybe you win at trial, or on appeal, but that doesn't mean you won't get arrested, and maybe you lose because you're not supposed to resort to self-help, or whatever. I haven't researched the law. I don't know all the facts. Is there some good reason for not waiting until Monday, and going to court in an orderly way?”

“I don't want to.”

“Have you called Dr. Ziggamon?”

“I don't need his permission to cross the street, Abigail. I may have a few fucking symptoms, but I'm not a fucking loony.”

“Maybe you should call him…”

“This isn't a Ziggamon thing. This is an Abigail thing.”

“Leonardo, you're talking about precipitous action that may have long-term negative consequences. I think you should be cautious…”

“My son is being abused.”

“Or are you just pissed off at your ex-wife?”

“Fuck her.”

“Why don't you call her up, and see if you could talk it through?”

“Are you kidding? Did she call me before she put him here?”

“Is she around?”

“I have no idea where she is. It wouldn't surprise me if she put Harvey here so she'd be free to lie naked on some exotic beach…”

“Come on, Leonardo, don't start giving me your childish fantasies.”

“I…”

“Listen, I can't evaluate the consequences in two seconds. The best I can do is advise you to be cautious. You can probably straighten it out on Monday without putting yourself at risk…”

“Abigail, I'm not saying you don't have balls, but in similar circumstances, and when I was in the room, Bill Brockleman advised his bimbo client to drive to the front door of the elderly care storage facility and put the old guy she wanted to marry in her car and drive him straight to the justice of the peace.”

“So call Brockleman.”

Leonardo paused. Time was slipping. “Are you saying absolutely not, under no circumstances do this?”

“I'm saying why do you have to do it today?”

“What would you do if it were your son?”

“I don't know.”

“That's my point.”

“But if you do it, call the school when you're on the road.”

“Why?”

“To try to convince them that he's safe and you're not a kidnapper.”

The blue team was beating the gold team ten to six when Leonardo reached the old-fashioned gym. A crowd of fifty or so clustered along the narrow sidelines, mostly students, but also some adults in plaid shirts and corduroys who were either faculty or lost on the road to L.L. Bean, and a scattered handful of unidentifiables who could be anyone, Leonardo figured, except basketball scouts. This looked like the happening event at Harriford Academy at the end of a dark afternoon in the middle of winter, a long way from home unless this was home.

He didn't see Harvey. Or Joan. Or Barbara.

He loitered in a corner near the door and waited, collar up and hat down. For one minute. For another minute. For almost a full third minute until he couldn't stand it, and walked out of the gym and up the slushy path to the Main House. He had no plan whatsoever.

Not unlike the way he started toward Stan's house on the night of the Big Bang. Just following his nose, not thinking beyond the next step, grim and determined. “In country,” he muttered, like a Huey was dropping him to a rice paddy in Bao Trai, in the rocket's red glare. “What are the odds of me coming home vertical?”

———

“You may be happy to know,” Dr. Ziggamon told him, “that you're not the only non-combatant in your age group with a Vietnam fantasy…”

“Oh.”

“A colleague tells me of an ex-draft dodger who spends his Saturdays at the VA Hospital, watching TV and making small-talk with the lifers.”

“What's he do the rest of his week?”

“Teach.”

“Admirable.”

“My point,” Ziggamon continued, “is that he fits the Vietnam piece into a defined time-slot, rather than let it drift in and out like a melody…”

“Doc, his demons sound like good soldiers. They follow orders.”

“Yes…”

“I doubt they would recognize mine.”

———

The Main House was a hundred yards up the path. Some students were coming down the path, in the direction of the gym, the fields, the woods. They were laughing, although they shut up and put on the sullen face as they passed Leonardo. He gave a thought to where they might go and what they might do late on a Saturday afternoon, if they kept going beyond the gym.

He assumed that a secret life caused the students to laugh, a vivid and romantic secret life that was invisible to school authorities unless they inadvertently tripped over it, which they would from time to time but not often enough to eliminate it. He also assumed that when all their tough love was peeled away, the school authorities had no more clue than parents locked out of their daughter's room. Which pleased Leonardo, in a morbidly pleasing way.
Even here in this gulag there are building blocks for a life. If Harvey's mother keeps him here, over my dead body, he could still survive. It's not what I wanted, but it could work...

…And I'm not a dead body yet, although I wouldn't be surprised if I turn into one before too long since, anxiety disorders aside, I'm soaking in my sweat and shaking from the cold, and I don't have a hat or gloves, and I can feel the slush seeping through my shoes…

Father found dead. Blames self.

———

Leonardo didn't question the passing students. Better to be obscure and unidentified, and travel clandestinely, like them. If the authorities intervened he would deny he knew he was breaking the rules. “I'm sorry. I must have taken a wrong turn back there.” Although he knew, and knew they knew he knew, and knew they knew he knew they knew he knew. They invited him to the basketball game, not to wander their campus, and comfort their dissidents, and liberate their jails like a latter day Che Guevara.

“Why, Mr. Jeepers, or whoever you are, did you cross the line you weren't supposed to cross?”

“What line? I didn't see any line.”

“The line to be crossed with consequences.”

“Oh, that line.”

———

He trudged onward and upward. The farther he got from the gym and the comforts of dry land and plausible deniability the closer he got to Stan's house, to incoming fire at Khe Sanh, and to acquiring more of the experience that post-traumatic stress syndrome is made of.

The path emptied into the circular driveway in front of the Main House. There was an island in the middle of the driveway, five yards wide, where a waist-high hedgerow surrounded a larger-than-life granite statue of the Reverend Emanuel Lamb, holding John Milton to his breast and gazing sternly to the mountains, as if he had a dream. The driveway was the last stop for Leonardo's stretched alibi.

Where the hell is Joan?

Joan was in a pickle. Like Leonardo a few minutes later, when she didn't see a familiar face at the gym she saw no point in staying to watch the basketball. She thought she had time to extemporize an investigation, and take advantage of the way she blended with the native population. So she walked up the path to the Main House to see what she could see, and maybe be a hero. She kept walking across the circular driveway, through the front door of the Main House, into the reception area, past mingling students, past the guard station, up the grand staircase, and to the infirmary door without being questioned or even looked at funny.

But things slowed down and got worrisome as she stood in the corridor outside the infirmary door, a protrusion in the stark, wide, empty space, like Bambi in a clearing, feeling exposed on account of the fact that she was.

The top half of the door was smoked glass. She could see light inside, but the door was locked. She knocked, delicately. No one came. She knocked again, with a little more knuckle. Still nothing. She sensed the risk of staying put was greater than the sum of the risks of the several ways out, even though some of those ways out were sure to be disastrous. So she picked the lock.

Not a problem for her nimble fingers, and her father's Mastercard which she promised to use only in an emergency, but as she pushed open the door she heard footsteps and noise coming at her from the inside, and a second later was confronted by a big boy with a pimply face. He wore a hospital-type smock, but was definitely a kid, so probably a student proctor, and he looked more surprised to see her than she him. He was holding toilet paper in his hand which he put in his pocket.

“I have cramps,” Joan said. “Terrible menstrual cramps.” She clutched at her abdominal section, and doubled over from the pain, and hobbled her way into what looked like the infirmary's reception area, allowing the corridor door to swing closed behind her. The big boy obviously didn't want to get within arm's reach of any menstrual cramps, and Joan didn't want whatever was on his hands to get wiped off on her, so she got to a chair without any assistance.

“I'll find the duty nurse,” the big boy said after a flustered and speechless moment. “I think she's in the cafeteria. Don't move…” He hurried out, and as soon as he was gone Joan straightened up and hurried in, past an office, past an examination cubicle, through a large room with four beds and two patients, both boys, neither of them Harvey, to the television room where Harvey was sitting in a bathrobe and pajamas watching
The Dirty Dozen
starring Jim Brown and Lee Marvin.

“Harvey,” she screamed softly, and pounced on him with a big hug.

“Oh my God,” he said. “What are you doing here? How'd you get in? My mom said I was never going to see you again…”

“I'm here with your dad. We're going to break you out…”

Harvey didn't move.

“Dr. Ziggamon?”

“Yes. Is this Leonardo?”

“Yes.”

“Could you speak up, Leonardo?”

“I don't want to draw attention to my position…”

“What?”

Leonardo was calling in his coordinates from behind the hedgerow on the island at the center of the circular drive in front of the Main House, crouched at the base of the statue of Reverend Lamb, and not the first desperate person in that spot either. The graffiti on the base read like the diary of a shipwrecked crew:

“Save me, mom.”

“Bad dreams now.”

“Button broken. Picture won't change.”

The island wasn't Leonardo's destination resort. He lingered at the top of the path on the outer rim of the circular drive in the fading light, waiting for the coast to be clear so he could cross unobserved to the front door, remembering the time he was stranded across the street from his house under strict instructions not to cross unless he was absolutely sure there were no cars coming, and not being sure for a long time, to the point it was getting dark and he wasn't sure any more what it meant to be sure, and exasperatedly deciding he could be sure enough after a long time went by with no cars coming, and was almost killed. The car came at him out of nowhere, like they waited until he stepped into the street and then cued the phantom car. Or like he didn't, for some elusive reason, look and listen when it mattered most. Or like he waited until he heard the car coming before he started to cross.

He once told the story to Dr. Ziggamon. “Dr. Ziggamon,” he asked, “were you driving that car?”

“Do you remember the license plate?” Ziggamon answered.

When he thought the coast was clear, because it had been clear for a long time, he started across the circular driveway to the Main House, with confident strides, like he'd been there before, like he owned the place. But halfway across, the big door swung open and released one student, then another, then another, and they traffic-jammed around the door, then one went back in while another held the door open for two more to come out, then another popped in and another popped out, and another and another, so that a sociable crowd formed between Leonardo and his destination which was when, like he was dodging a car with his name on the bumper, he hurdled the hedge.

“I think you should call your lawyer on this one,” Dr. Ziggamon said after Leonardo explained what he was thinking about doing, and asked whether it sounded like he was crazy. And if crazy, how crazy.

“Good idea,” said Leonardo. “Why didn't I think of that?”

“But I also think,” Ziggamon added, “that you should pay some attention to how angry you are at your former wife…”

“Another good idea. Very helpful to worry about poor little Barbara…”

“…because your son may be stuck in the middle.”

“She's right, I'm wrong, and you're a big help,” said Leonardo.

“…And you should also pay some attention to how angry you are at me…”

Which was when the alarms started ringing, with loud, high-pitched, repetitive bursts which caught Leonardo like a sucker punch to the jaw and stunned the wits out of him. ARREEPPP. ARREEPPP. WHOOP. WHOOP. WHOOP. He hit the ground thinking this was pay back time from Dr. Z. “Doc,” he squealed, “I'm not angry at you. Why are you doing this to me?”

“What? I can't hear you.”

Then it dawned on Leonardo, as the blast of sound went on and on, that this could be his 'Nam flashback, that he was on his belly in the muck at Quang Tri, and not merely on his belly in the muck behind the hedgerow in the center of the driveway to the Main House of Harriford Academy with his eyes closed and his head wedged against the stone feet of the Reverend Lamb. Like he could smell the napalm.

“Leonardo? Leonardo what's all the noise?”

“Doc, they're zeroing in…”

“Leonardo…”

“Doc, did you tell them where I am?”

“What? Leon…”

Leonardo fumbled the phone and lost the connection. “Doc? Are you there?”

ARREEPPP. ARREEPPP. WHOOP. WHOOP. WHOOP.

The sound repeated and repeated, but Leonardo's recognizer mechanism was fritzo, brain-damaged, shooting off crazy explanations like sparks in the wind. 'Nam. Dr. Z. Like a kid scared shitless by his nightmare who mistakes the billowing curtains in the dark corner of his room for the stone-cold devil emergent from his dream.

Leonardo found a place to hide.

Just for a moment, but long enough to bury it, and leave a gap on his memory tape like when your eyes shut on the interstate until you're stunned back awake by your head smacking into the steering wheel, hopefully before the bridge abutment, or like a shell-shocked grunt not sure how he got to wherever he was. Joan found him, almost ran him over, as he stumbled out of the hedgerow.

She was on the home stretch of her own exit strategy, which began when she exited through the back door of the infirmary which had a sign saying that if you open this door an alarm will sound. It was either that or crawl under Harvey's bed or jump out his window or have her menstrual cramps and the rest of her complicated situation examined by the nurse who was back with the fat boy in the outer office, and moving in her direction less than five seconds away. Four. Three. So who would have guessed it would be such a loud alarm?

Even more surprising to Joan was Harvey, who wasn't moving. “Do they have you on pills, Harv?”

“Yuh, bunch of stuff.”

“What do they do?”

“Chill me out. Calm me down. You know…”

“Don't you want to get out of here?”

“I don't know. I did, but now I'm here, and it isn't so bad, and my mom said she'd be back in two weeks…”

“Where's she?”

“Some business trip. She called me after they found me walking down the road. She said if I stay good until she gets back she'll let me out if I still want out. So, you know…”

“What about your dad?”

“Mom says don't talk to him, he's crazy…”

“No. He's great.”

“Mom said he's as crazy as you…”

So Joan, with two seconds left on the clock and no time-outs remaining gave Harvey a good-bye hug even though he wasn't quite the Harvey she was looking for, looking instead like he had quit the cousin's club, and pushed her way through the rear door, triggering the alarm. “Oops,” she said as the horns started whooping, and red warning lights started flashing, and all hell otherwise broke loose and accompanied her down the exterior fire escape to the ground, and along the gravel path to the front of the Main House where she ran through a crowd of milling students smack into her drifting uncle.

“Uncle Lenny,” she said, “we got to get out of here.” She grabbed his arm and gave a tug.

“I'm not going without Harvey.”

“Harvey's not coming.”

They stood for a frozen frame in front of the building's flashing red lights, and the WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP of the alarm, and the milling students, like Scarlet and Rhett downstage from burning Atlanta. “Uncle Lenny,” Joan recapitulated, “Harvey's drugged and he's not coming, and I'm the one who pulled the alarm, so we got to go.”

“What alarm?” he asked.

Which was when Joan realized his eyes were blank, and the rest of his face had turned to clay, like they replaced Uncle Lenny with a zombified look-alike.
Like, holy shit, as if the Harvey stuff isn't bad enough now I'm living with the night of the living dead.

“I'm not going to be pushed around by my god-damn ex-wife any more,” Uncle Lenny said. “I want my Harvey back right now. I need to find the person in charge…” He spun around like he was looking for the person in charge, around and around.

“Uncle Lenny,” Joan said, “you're lost. You're missing what's going on. We've got to get out of here.”

“Hell no. I won't go…”

She was a bulky teenager, getting more frantic with each passing second. She pushed into him sumo style, and crowded him off the circular driveway with big bangs from her belly and chest, and once she built his momentum she grabbed an arm and ran with it, assuming the rest of him would follow. The rest of him, not including the pieces of his mind which were beyond her grasp.

The minivan loomed straight ahead. All by its lonesome in the admission office parking lot. “I need the keys, Uncle Lenny.”

“Are we going to the person in charge?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a driver's license?”

“Don't worry. I can drive.”

But even still, Joan had to fish the keys out of her uncle's coat pocket, losing more time, thinking this was one of those movie break-out scenes where the bad king orders the gates closed to seal the good intruders in, and it's so very close as to whether the getaway car or horse or prop jet can slip out ahead of the iron jaws clamping shut. “Oh, baby, let's keep this moving,” she said as she stuffed her uncle into the passenger side and ran around to the driver's side, and pulled him back in as he tried to jump out, and ignited her engine, and drove down the hill toward the gate house thinking she might have to risk violence to get through.