On Fire (11 page)
The road out east to Metal Springs was in horse country, all rolling hills and aspen already turning yellow for the fall. It would have been an excellent trip except for where we were going. Every time we passed a white horse I made a wish.
An appaloosa raced along beside us for quite a while. His ears were back and his tail stretched out behind him. He kept looking over at the truck like he wanted to tell us something. In a perfect world he would have been able to.
T
HERE USED TO BE SOMETHING CALLED
a spa at Metal Springs. Hot water bubbled out of the ground and people came there to soak in it and get rid of their aches and pains. Sometimes they drank the water as well.
This was all written on a sign just inside the gate to the hospital grounds. It went on to say that fifty years or so ago, they found out there was too much arsenic in the water so they shut the spa down, but left the old buildings standing.
I had no idea which one of those buildings to go in to and ask about Dan. Marsh seemed to know, though. He'd been pretty quiet on the drive out and kind of moody, but he took me up to the registration building like he knew exactly where he was going.
“We're looking for a young, white male from the Blackstone Village area,” he said to the woman at the desk. “Amnesia. Possibly in a state of agitation.” He said the same thing when we asked at the community hospital. It's amazing how you can put everything about a person in a few sentences like that.
“Are you related to this person?” the woman asked. She didn't look up.
“Yes,” I said before Marsh could open his mouth. I wasn't going to get caught being unrelated a second time.
“You would be . . . ?”
“His cousin,” I said, quick off the draw again. “Matti Iverly.”
I didn't look at Marsh's face when I said that. I fastened my eyes just below his chin and watched his Adam's apple move up and down when he swallowed.
“And the person you're looking for would be Iverly as well?”
“I . . . yes,” I said. “But he might not know that because of his . . . ”
“First name?”
“We call him Dan.” That part was the absolute truth.
“Dan Iverly,” the woman said under her breath. She clicked the keys on her desk top computer and moved her head up and down. Then she stopped, frowned and began moving it from side to side.
“I have no one by that name, of course, but I may have something. A young man â a John Doe, was brought here by the police. He'd been originally picked up in your general area.”
She clicked and read again. “Search and Rescue were alerted by a Mrs. Laverdiere that she had found him in her house in Cato City and that he was in distress.”
“That's him.” I said. “That's my cousin. Cato City is just across the lake from us. And I know who Mrs. Laverdiere is.”
“It also says he was uncooperative.” The woman looked up at me then like she wanted an explanation.
“If somebody tied you up and flew you away in a helicopter,” I said, “I imagine you'd be uncooperative too.”
While she did some more checking, we waited in a little room about the size of a chicken coop. It was the opposite of fancy. The floor was bare grey linoleum. The chairs had hard, wooden seats and there were no magazines to read, although I wouldn't have been able to settle into reading anyway. I was nervous and ticcing.
The way Marsh was looking at me didn't help. It wasn't like he was angry. More like I'd hit him over the head with a board.
“Matti,” he whispered. “What on earth do you think you're doing? You're not related to him.”
“You have to be family to find out anything,” I said. “Isn't that what they told us at the first hospital?” Marsh massaged his forehead the way I've seen him do before when he had a headache coming.
“Besides, what's a little thing like a lie when a friend's in trouble?”
“Perjury,” Marsh said.
The woman from registration came back into the room then. “Dr. Charon will see you now,” she announced.
I
DIDN'T EXPECT
D
R
. C
HARON'S OFFICE
to be any fancier than the waiting room, and I wasn't disappointed. He had a huge desk, empty except for his hands on top of a file folder. A bookcase behind him overflowed with books.
That was it except for two wooden chairs like the ones in the waiting room, facing his desk. It didn't seem like you were supposed to get too comfortable or stay too long.
“I understand you think you're related to one of our John Does?” the doctor said. He was small with an oddly shaped head. I thought his voice was way too high to be coming from a man.
He didn't ask us to sit down, but we did. I figured that's what the chairs in front of his desk were for.
“Yes,” I said. “His name is Dan Iverly and we'd like to take him home with us. Now, if possible.”
Dr. Charon's eyes popped out a little when he heard that. “He's very ill,” he said. “He's been committed.”
“What does that mean?” I turned and looked at Marsh.
“It means,” Marsh said and he narrowed his eyes, “that he can't leave here. And it would be breaking the law and also very unpopular if you tried to take him.”
“So he's a prisoner?” I turned back toward the doctor with his unusual head. “This is a democracy. You can't just lock someone up for no good reason.”
He blinked in the slow way a cat does when you've asked it a dumb question. Then he pushed back in his chair and laced his fingers across his round stomach. “How are you related to this person again?” he asked.
“He's my cousin.”
“Well,” the doctor said. “Your cousin attacked the men who brought him in. That makes him a danger to others.”
“If it's the helicopter pilots you're talking about, I think they may have attacked him.”
He went right on. “Then this same cousin assaulted a nurse while trying to fly out a third-story window shortly after he got here, making him a danger to himself, and others again. There are also signs of self-mutilation on his body. I believe that's enough reasons to keep him here for the full thirty days the law allows.”
When the doctor put it like that, there wasn't a lot I could say. I was glad Marsh finally spoke up.
“Matti's just concerned about . . . ” he flicked his eyes over at me and then back to the doctor. “ . . . her cousin. I think she'd feel better if she could see him.”
“You're her father?” the doctor asked.
“A friend of the family,” Marsh said.
The doctor scooted back up to his desk and looked through the folder of papers he had there. “I don't think that's a good idea,” he said. “He was close to death when they brought him in. His blood tests showed something like wood alcohol in his system. Would he have drunk that, do you know?”
“Unlikely,” Marsh said.
“I don't even know what that is,” I said. “Dan was just visiting us from . . . just visiting us. He went off to hike in the mountains and got lost.”
“In the middle of a forest fire?”
“Before that,” I said. “Anyway, there was no place to get any alcohol where he went.”
“Toxins can build up,” the doctor said. “The test results could have been due to lack of food and water, I suppose.” He nodded like he'd experienced that first hand.
“Can we see him?” I asked again.
“I'd advise against it.” The doctor closed the folder and laid his hands on top of it again. “He's heavily medicated. If you've never seen him like that before, it would be upsetting. I suggest you come back in . . . ” He ran the adding machine he had inside his head “ . . . a few days. They can tell you at registration which building he's in.”
I couldn't believe we'd come this far and still didn't know if Dan was the guy they had here or not.
John Does,
the doctor said, like the fire had flushed a lot of them out of the mountains and into the world.
I sat there, staring.
“Come on, Matti,” Marsh said. “We can't do any more here today.”
F
RANK CAME TO THE SCHOOL AGAIN
that night, just before lights out. He squatted down on the floor in the empty space where a family had been sleeping before. There were lots of spaces like that by then. And more every day.
He wasn't what you'd call limber and he had a steel plate in his back from his war injury so I knew he wasn't going to stay long in that position. He liked to be on the move, anyway. “I have to take you out of here,” he said. “Home isn't an option yet. Do you have any suggestions?”
He was very business-like, so I tried to be. “Mrs. Stoa is at her nephew's house now,” I said.
“I know that,” Frank said.
“She invited me to stay there.”
He raised his bushy eyebrows. “I thought she was driving you crazy.”
“She is,” I said. “Or she was, but I guess I could handle her. I have to stay in town now, anyway. I . . . something's come up.”
Since Frank had quit smoking he chewed gum a lot. He liked a kind called Chewsy U that came with individual pieces wrapped in silver paper. He unwrapped a stick then and put it in his mouth. Then he rolled the paper into a tight little pellet and put it in his shirt pocket. Sometimes I found a handful of them there when I did his laundry.
“You planning on busting someone out of Metal Springs?” he asked. He didn't bring up the subject of perjury.
“I was getting ready to talk to you about that, but I guess Marsh already has.” Frank nodded. “Did he tell you everything?”
“I believe he did.”
I took a deep breath. “Then you know we didn't get in to see . . . the guy at Metal Springs so we don't know if it's â ”
“The person you're calling Dan â ”
“Or not.”
“And if it is?” I didn't say anything. “He's a human being you know, Matti. It's not like taking home a lost animal.”
“I know that,” I said.
Frank stood up and stretched until something popped. “I don't think it's a good idea to get Marsh any further involved in this,” he said. “There are things you don't know. It's hard enough for him being in town with all these people.”
“But what if it really is Dan at Metal Springs and he's being tortured? What if they strap him down and shoot him full of electricity? They do that there. I heard you talking about it one time.”
“It isn't considered torture. It's called electro-convulsive shock therapy. And it helps some people.”
“Frying their brains?”
“There's no cooking involved,” Frank said. He looked pretty stern when he said it. “But why don't you ask Marsh about it? He had it done there. He's the one you heard me talking about.”
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “Marsh had this shock therapy on his brain at Metal Springs? Why?”
Frank rubbed the spot on his back where the plate was. “He needed some help turning the war off after he got home.”
“And that worked?”
“When nothing else would.”
So much for my theory about Marsh's heart. The more I got out into the world, the less sense anything made. If there was a story that could clear up the confusion I felt in every direction, it wasn't in any book I knew about.
M
RS. STOA CAME BY THE SCHOOL
in the morning and I filled her in on what had happened when Marsh and I went to the hospital. I even mentioned how nervous I was about what I'd see when I went there again. I said, “I don't think I can make it through the next two days.”
“Of course you can,” she told me.
We took the bus to King Koffee and walked up the hill from there to her nephew's place. It had two huge white pillars out in front with red double doors between them. Kind of like a palace, you could say.
I tried to imagine walking out that door with books under my arm and catching the bus to school. I couldn't make it happen. Mrs. Stoa wanted me to come inside and have a look around but I wasn't ready to do that yet.
Looking at it like I lived there was enough for one day.
After lunch, I watched the football team practicing out on the field behind the school. They warmed up by crashing into dummies and running up and down through rubber tires. Then the cheerleaders came out and I finally got what their main job was.
They threw each other up in the air and came down in the splits. They did somersaults and handstands. Then five girls held three other girls on their shoulders and they held one on their shoulder to make a pyramid. It was really something.
They also clapped and yelled and sang so they weren't just there for people to look at, either. Somebody should have told the guys on the football team. After the cheerleaders arrived, they gawked at them and then began crashing in to each other instead of dummies. They wore so much equipment that when they collided they sounded like bull elk locking their antlers.
It reminded me summer was almost over.
The next morning I walked around and around the inside of the school, just killing time. Finally I stopped by the railing at the top of the front stairs to tic-off and watch the tops of people's heads as they came into the building and went out again. When I turned to leave Billy Butler was coming toward me. He'd moved away when we started junior high and I hadn't seen him since.
He was smaller than I remembered. Kind of puny actually. I could have snapped him in two like a dry stick, which made me wonder why I took him seriously enough once to run him up a tree. And why even then, my tics got worse with him standing next to me.