Willnot (10 page)

“Nursing assistant. Marcia.”

“She’s a sweetheart. And except for that ring that makes it look like she’s got a booger hanging out of her nose all the time, damned attractive.”

“I don’t think you’re currently on the market.”

“Never have been, Doc. Never likely to have a two-car garage, a nice gas grill for the patio, or a PTA membership either.” He looked up at the TV, where a bulky dark form peered from behind trees that were little more than another bulky dark form. “Second day of a horror-movie marathon. With the sound off, it’s almost watchable. Loved these things when I was a kid.”

His head turned to the IV bags. “Peeing like a son of a bitch, all this stuff they keep running into me.”

Back my way. “Like I said—we call it landing. Always a hard one. You come in off mission, everything’s been so focused, now it’s all loose and unconnected, flapping in the wind. You can’t get hold of it, can’t make sense of how pale it all is. Because the color’s gone.”

I’d heard bipolars say much the same things about their manic phases.

A cluster of organ notes broke through the lowered volume, pulling our eyes back to the TV. Hikers had come across an eviscerated body. One of them caught sight of movement behind the trees, but when he looked that way, there was nothing.

“That’s another thing we’re trained to do well,” Bobby said.

“Find bodies?”

“Bodies are never in short supply. Disappear, I meant. Here one moment, gone the next.”

“But not truly gone.”

“Unseen.” Bobby nodded toward the window. “What’s over there, behind those doors?”

“Cardiac care.”

“They’ve been having trouble, couple or three hours now. X-ray’s been here twice with their backhoe. Multiple guys and gals toting red plastic trays. Lab, I’m thinking.”

“Probably so.”

“Someone over there about to find out how frail our hold is.”

On-screen, sheriff’s men had come across a shallow cave, its floor scattered with the remains of small mammals, its rear wall half-covered with what looked to be the script of some unknown language.

“It’s the beast’s journal,” Bobby said. “How it got to be where and what it is.”

Not understanding, I shook my head.

“The writing on the wall.” He gestured to the screen, reached for the urinal. “Sometimes I wish they’d left the damn catheter in. Or maybe,” he said moments later, capping the urinal and returning it to the bedside table, “maybe it’s just advertising. A legal disclaimer of responsibility. A recruitment poster.”

He settled back, eyes on the ceiling.

“You grow up in Willnot, you hear a lot of stories about the government and its agencies. Covert activities, clandestine agendas. Surveillance. Assassination. Gets so you don’t give it much thought. And eighty percent of it’s bullshit, of course. But then someone gets swelled up with attitude, all indignant and shocked, and all you can do is look at them and think: You’re surprised that the powerful do whatever they can to stay that way? That they justify it as somehow being for the greater good? What fucking world do you people live in?”

Bobby’s eyes closed.

“Never once do you suspect that someday the world’s going to flip head over ass.”

On-screen, the creature stood on a hill in moonlight, listening. To traffic sounds from the interstate far away? To the howl of another like itself from deep within the woods?

“I know you’re not a psychiatrist, but you had some training, right?”

“In med school, sure. Kibble. No meat.”

“And you know most of these kids. Figured I’d sound you out, get your take on this.”

Behind Sheriff Hobbes, the radio crackled into activity.

“It’s what, nine? And you’re still at the office?”

“Sue’s in Minnesota visiting parents, took the dog with her. House is like walking around inside an empty oil drum.”

What he’d called to tell me was that over the past week people had been finding deep, freshly dug holes. Back in the woods, on dormant farmland, behind the long-shuttered Boat-n-Bait—all around. First one he was called to see, he just shook his head. Along about the fourth he made the connection: it looked like the hole out by the gravel pit where we found the bodies. So he started random patrolling, late last night caught Seth and Cissie Reynolds in the act, hauled them home for a sitdown with parents, and learned that this was the new go-to among the town’s teenagers. They’d sneak out at night, do their best to replicate the hole by the gravel pit.

What, the sheriff wanted to know, was that all about? “They can’t just get tattoos like other kids? TP houses? Con someone into buying them a six-pack and have a party?”

“Did you ask them?”

“Five or six times.”

“And?”

“Shrugs.”

Typical adolescent fascination with death and the forbidden stepping up to the plate? But also an offbeat sense of connection to peers and, ultimately, to the community. Identification by transgression. Not sentiments that I shared with Sheriff Hobbes. Instead we talked about what could be done, counseling, school assemblies and the like, agreeing in the end that it was best to let it run its course, the kids would soon be on to something else.

John Updike wrote that while we all remain tragically alone, it’s imperative to go on making signs through the glass. The kids were doing that with their diggings. None of our attempts at communication amount to a lot more.

And going on is what it’s all about.

I hung up thinking about Jules Mawby the day before, and Bobby that afternoon, people who go on when it all gets to be too much. Then Ted Holmes.

Ted was Richard’s partner before me. Ted had contracted HIV but was doing well with the new-generation drugs till esophageal cancer came along in its wake, early signs and symptoms initially attributed to side effects from the meds so that the cancer was well along when discovered. After months of treatment, a battery of drugs, and enough radiation that he claimed to glow in the dark at night and keep Richard awake, Ted showed up one day with a T-shirt that read
I’VE HAD ENOUGH
,
THANK YOU
, copies of which he distributed to friends. Richard still has his. He wears it whenever things go their bleakest.

Yesterday in the school cafeteria of a nondescript small town in Ohio, a sixteen-year-old pulled a gun from his Fender Champ lunchbox and began firing, while at a restaurant just down the street an anonymous man called the waitress over and paid the check for a family of four seated nearby, two of the children with special needs.

In Willnot, Richard and I sat over a late breakfast of biscuits (late because I had a compound fracture to attend to following an early-morn automobile accident, biscuits because I hadn’t made them in weeks and decided to put an end to Richard’s mawkish complaints) listening to news.

Saturday. The day stretched out ahead of us, Richard remarked, like a sun-shot mesa. This came after he urged me yet again to tell the story of my grandfather pouring blackstrap molasses over the saucer-sized biscuits served up by my grandmother every morning for sixty-plus years of his life.

“And just what have you been reading, to come up with that?” I asked. He hadn’t lifted it from what was currently on his bedside table,
My Life with Pygmies
, a collection of comic essays over
which he had snorted so terribly that I once took the book away from him and hid it under the clothes hamper.

“I’ll footnote the source later.”

“You’ve gone postmodern on me?”

“We must stir the pot, or the stew will stick and burn.” And with a finger he sketched a backward 2 in the air. Second footnote.

But the languidly unrolling afternoon, mesa, midden, or otherwise, was not to be. There it lay in the rearview mirror. I was back at the hospital by 1
PM
.

“We don’t know,” Clay told me, working charge that shift. “Marcia was in for vitals at eleven. He was watching TV, nothing amiss. She DC’d monitors then, per orders.”

“And he DC’d himself sometime thereafter.”

“Between then and lunch, which came around twelve thirty.”

“He couldn’t have walked out in his hospital gown without being noticed. His own clothes were ruined.”

Clay nodded. “And it’s not like everyone here didn’t know who he was.”

By this time the FBI had joined us in the person of Theodora Ogden, the fourth estate close behind as she and Joel Stern stepped from elevator and stairwell within moments of one another. Before the elevator door fully opened, Agent Ogden was asking about the officer assigned to Bobby.

“Bathroom break apparently,” Clay said. “Then a set-to broke out down the hall, guy’s wallet is missing, he’s screaming at his roommate, blaming him. Officer Shubb interceded, calmed them both down.”

Joel Stern spoke up. “A diversion.”

“Of course it was. The wallet turned out to be misplaced, right?”

Clay nodded.

“And clothes will be found missing elsewhere.”

Shortly thereafter we learned from Officer Shubb that Bobby had left by a service entrance wearing scrubs. He’d given a kid hanging out there $5 for his bike, told him he’d leave it at the diner on Marvel Street.

“After which,” Officer Shubb said, “he’s gone. Vaporizes.”

No footprints. No afterimage.

Scrubs later found balled up in the trash of the bathroom at KwikStop, Cindy at the dollar store nearby recalling someone who was in doctor pajamas, yeah, bought khaki pants, a flannel shirt, $14.98 according to the ticket she fished out of the register, shoes didn’t fit she remembered, he was slopping around in them.

“Bulletins are out all over,” Agent Ogden said. “But these guys don’t get seen unless they want to.”

Joel Stern had been eavesdropping on a conversation across the room. Now he turned back. “Of all the places Sergeant Lowndes might have gone, he came back here. Not too wild a surmise to think he
did
want to be seen.”

Something moved in the darkness, something I almost but not quite caught sight of. Something I could hear breathing. There at the edge of consciousness for a time, then inescapable.
Stentorious
came to mind. As the sounds of breathing grew ever louder.

As the breathing became Richard’s beside me.

I got up to pee. Prostate showing signs of wear and tear. Time to check my PSA. Dickens had come with, and followed me into the kitchen. Planes and edges in the backyard grabbed at slivers of the full moon’s light.

Other people have dreams that they’re naked in the classroom, lost on almost-familiar streets, fleeing the unseen. I hadn’t been fleeing the unseen, I’d been peering into dark corners and recesses looking for it. Rooting about in cupboards, closets, and clothes hampers. Then in the dream was at some conference among attendees with unkempt hair, impeccable credentials and terrifying sincerity, sitting on a folding chair on an expanse of darkly floral carpet chewed by thousands of such chair legs.

“It all depends,” a moderator says, and I realize the moderator is Richard, “on whether you believe that governments form to protect individuals from implicit violence, establishing order by forcibly restraining those impulses, or that governments in fact centralize and monopolize violence to themselves. Does the nation exist to serve its citizens, or to regulate, to proscribe? In a word, is the state’s primary purpose to allow—or to prevent?”

From the stage he points to me for response. All heads turn.

“Can’t sleep?”

It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t the dream, wasn’t my memory of the dream, any longer.
Now
had bled back in. Richard stood in the doorway, one eye half-closed, the other squinting.

“I was having a dream misdelivered from some social scientist’s head.”

“The horror! At least you had Dickens to keep you company. What time is it, anyway?”

“Sixish, I’m guessing. Light outside’s just starting to change.”

“So I have to be up in an hour anyway. Whatever could we do with that hour?”

Life is filled with choice and challenge.

Monday was blowout day. Hernias, bleeding varicose veins, Charlene Spencer’s “beauty mole” that popped and started oozing something that looked for all the world like guacamole.

“Not good?” Charlene said.

“Questionable. Green’s great in the wild, not so much in bodies.”

By 1:40 we’d cleared the office and Maryanne went down the street to Frisky’s, just under the wire since Mabel closed down at two so she could catch her TV shows, to bring back lunch. Five bites in, moments after Maryanne and I had opened the accounts-payable file to go over it as we ate, the phone rang. Maryanne answered, listened, then said “Principal Chorley wants to know where you are.”

“Obviously he knows where I am.”

“You’re supposed to judge the science fair.”

“Did I say I’d do that?”

“
Someone
said you would.”

And I had a pretty good idea who that someone, who’d forgotten to tell or remind me, was.

“I’m really not much of a science guy, you know.”

“Lamar … You’re a doctor.”

“Different game. Different gloves.”

“Okay, then you’re the closest thing we have.” Shaking her head, mock amusement floating above like a cartoon caption, she said to the phone “He’ll be right there” and to me “They’re waiting.”

Blowups were big at the science fair too. Two model active volcanoes (though one more closely resembled a lava lamp), a self-invented, all-natural bug bomb and, in true patchwork Willnot-libertarian-leftist form, the four-step diorama of a nuclear power plant disaster. First prize went to the last, which deserved it on the basis of effort and invested hours alone, never mind imaginative content. Exacting as the scale was, you could make out terrified features on the tiny faces of those fleeing the plant and, in the final representation, set ten years later, evidence of physical deformity and disease.

The entry’s creator, Bo Johnsson, who went by BJ, was a model himself, the guy we all secretly hated in high school, good at everything: first-chair clarinet, quarterback on the football team and star player on the basketball team, straight-A student, beloved by teachers, the very stuff of “why can’t you be more like” heart-to-hearts. By way of snarkily thanking him for volunteering me, I brought that up with Richard and he said Yeah, he knew that guy, briefly he’d been that guy.