Best Boy (8 page)

“Yes.”

“Martine?”

Martine said nothing and instead slowly raised an arm, swiveled her middle finger towards her mouth and then stuck it between her lips and began sucking on it.

“Show her the grounds,” said Raykene to me, “the gardens, the Main Hall, the woodshop and some of the other places she might be working. Introduce her to people, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Great!” said Raykene. “I'll meet you both back here in exactly one hour. We good?” she asked Martine.

Martine said nothing but stared at the ground and swayed, while holding her finger in her mouth. Finally to no one in particular she said, “Ngggh!” softly. Raykene squinted at her for a second.

“I'm taking that as a yes,” she said and shook her head a little bit. Then she left, fanning herself with a hand. The door shut behind her with a hiss. Tommy Doon had gone that morning on an overnight to his parents' so there was no one in the house. I stood for a while listening to the sounds of water gurgling in pipes. Something ticked inside the wall like a clock.

“Do you talk?” I asked.

Martine took her middle finger out of her mouth. Her face looked tired.

“Only if I want to,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“I shouldn't be here,” she said.

“Payton is nice,” I said.

She looked at me with the eye.

“No it's not,” she said.

“Are there parts of the campus you want to see more than others?” I asked, because I remembered that this was what Ambassadors were supposed to say.

“I'm too high-functioning to be here, but my mother said I had to because I have intrac”—her mouth caught up on one side—“table problems. But she's wrong, as usual.”

“We have bingo every Friday night in the Main Hall,” I said.

“They're hateful.”

“Who?”

“My parents.”

“I wish my Momma was still alive,” I said.

“You've gotta be kidding.”

“I miss her.”

She snorted and rolled the one eye. “What's your die?”

“My what?”

“Diagnosis.”

“I have autism and anxiety disorder. Also I'm developmentally disabled,” I said.

She shut her eye and in a fast, bored voice she said, “First they thought I was an Aspie, and then they thought I was an Addie. I had six different syndromes at the same time, plus being depressed. But it was all a lie anyway because they knew I had brain damage from being pushed out of a car when I was a girl.”

Her eye opened. “You're kinda fat.”

“What?”

“So are you taking me on a tour or not?”

I couldn't follow what she was saying and I felt my head lightly moving to and fro as I tried to look at the words going by quickly, zoom.

“Yes,” I said finally, “a tour.”

“Okay let's go.”

We walked out the door and I began by slowly walking with her to the cottages. Each one had something special about it that you would only know if you'd been here a long time. She was staying in cottage number seven. It had a sewing machine in it. I told her that.

“I thought every cottage had a sewing machine,” she said. “What does yours have that's special?”

“A back door,” I said, “and a big TV.”

We cut across the main lawn to the library. It was a little darkened building and I turned on the lights.

“Out the windows you can see Peace Cottage,” I said, “where if you're high-functioning you stay and maybe even work at McDonald's.”

She looked at me with her one gray eye.

“Do I seem disturbed to you?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“My father thinks I'm making it up. Do you know how I convinced him I wasn't making it up?”

“No.”

She tapped the patch over her eye. I thought it was soft but it was actually a hard shell because it made a hollow sound.

“That's how.”

“Sometimes we also play Monopoly here on the weekends,” I said and pointed to a wooden table.

“Actually I poked it out with a rock.”

“You can take DVDs out on a two-day loan,” I said. “And there's also a magazine rack.”

“Don't you think that's a sad story?”

I felt my eyebrows pulling together.

“I guess.”

“Or how about this one: I had a brother who died. I think maybe someone killed him. That's not true. My brain damage from falling out of a car? That's not true either. I jumped. Why do you wear your hair so long? You look old.”

“Do you want to see the horses?” I said.

“You're funny,” she said.

“There's one named Bob,” I said.

“A horse named Bob? Yes I do.”

As we walked across another lawn to the barn I realized I wasn't only nervous but I was also excited. She made me excited because she talked fast and I didn't know what she was going to
say next. Also she was a tall person, almost as tall as me. Also she was a girl and even if the wind in my pants barely blew anymore, still I wanted a girlfriend. The excitement made me talk more than I had in a long time.

“This is Zoysia grass we're walking on,” I said. “It comes from the Philippines.”

She laughed and said, “Have you always been so tall?”

I said nothing.

“You know lots of junk,” she added.

Then her face stopped what it was doing and yanked up on one side and her lips pushed forward and her tongue stuck all the way out of her mouth. She held one hand up in the air.

“Are you—” I started to say.

She shook her head like she couldn't speak. Her face began to get purple. But after a moment her face suddenly relaxed, her arm fell and she let out a breath.

“I can't
stand
those!” she said. “I get them at least once a day. It's from my crash.”

“What?”

“Seizures,” she said. “Sometimes you feel like you have to pee when you get them. Where's the nearest bathroom?”

I took her to a bathroom in a nearby building. She went in while I waited outside and then came out a minute later, smiling.

“Better,” she said.

After I took her to meet Bob and the other horses I showed her the Main Hall where we had the singalongs. I showed her the painting studio and the bakery and the woodshop. I always introduced her to people inside the places by saying, “This is Martine and I'm her Ambassador. She's brand-new.”

Sometimes she would shake people's hands, and sometimes she wouldn't. Sometimes she would act very scared and look at
the ground and other times she would laugh loudly when the person I'd introduced her to said something like, “How are you?”

Finally we were done and I'd shown her everything I could think of. I was tired and happy. I said, “We're supposed to be back to meet Raykene at the cottage soon.”

She looked at me with the eye.

“You really should cut your hair.”

I reached up and touched it where it hung off my head.

“This?”

She looked up over my shoulder and made a confused face. “Do you know,” she said, “there's been this kind of weird metal hummingbird thing in the air following us for the last few minutes?”

FIFTEEN

M
IKE THE
A
PRON CAME UP TO ME LATER THAT
day, as I was walking across the lawn. I saw the mouth moving around below the striped coyote beard and moustache before I heard the words.

“Well, if it ain't Romeo,” he said.

“Hello.”

“You have fun?”

“When?”

“With the girl?”

“Which girl?”

“Don't play dumb,” he said and frowned and forked his fingers and stabbed them towards his face. “With the eyepatch, guy.”

“Martine.”

“I know her name. Smart as a whip, according to her papers.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“A real talker too,” he said. “Not that I heard all that much. But I could see that mouth moving from far off.”

I thought of the stick in the woods, hidden in a fold of green earth. I thought of the way the scythe hissed and gobbled the grass when I swung it. I was trying not to be too frightened of Mike the Apron. But he was looking at me in a way that made me uncomfortable.

“You going to singalong tonight for the new staff?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

“You throwing a little shade at me maybe?”

“What?”

Mike looked around again to see if there was anybody nearby. He said, “I really like you, Todd, you know that, right?”

“I guess,” I said.

“We're all family, here,” he said and put his arm around me and drew me close enough so that I could smell the meat-cloud of his breath. “But I want you to remember that you and me, we have a special understanding. You do stuff for me and I do stuff for you, and it's a beautiful thing. That's what makes us,” he said, pulling his lips back so that I saw his teeth covered with a kind of yellow rust, “brothers.”

“Right,” I said.

“Good man,” he said, and then to my relief he turned to walk away and I could hear his laughing and snorting as it dwindled into the distance.

I went back to my house, ignored Tommy Doon who was getting ready to say something, took my meds and went to bed. The next morning I worked in the woodshop and during Free Time I walked in the woods. The trees with their long necks and big heads went sideways past my eyes like they always did but I didn't yell. I thought instead. What I thought was that something interesting was happening inside me, and that something was that I wanted to spend more time with Martine Calhoun. I
was thinking that it was fun to be around someone who spoke to you out of the surprise places in conversation and had a girl-voice like a bunch of warm hands that pleasantly handled your insides. I couldn't remember having my insides handled like this by someone for a very long time.

Over the next few days, I began looking for Martine whenever I walked outside. I did this by constantly sending my glance out across the campus to see if there was a tall person walking. In woodshop, or from the van leaving for the Demont cafeteria, I hoped I'd see her. Even when I was alone and listening to music on my bed I'd find her stepping out of the voices of the Beach Boys or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or especially Neil Diamond and coming up to me and into my thoughts like a woman walking out of a lake.

Then one evening while I was crossing a lawn on the way to bingo, I saw her moving very slowly from far away. I immediately changed my direction to meet her. As I got closer I saw that her hair was funny. I realized that it had been cut. Actually it had been kind of chopped. Also her face seemed very tired and hung from her head in a way I thought I recognized. As I watched, I saw her mouth drop open. I recognized that too.

I went over to her.

“Hi,” I said. She stopped walking and her one eye went slowly sideways and then met mine. It took a few seconds while her brain did the work of recognizing me. Then she blinked.

“Hello,” she said softly.

“How are you, Martine?” I asked.

“Dead,” she said.

There were other people walking by and I didn't want them to hear what we were saying. I leaned closer.

“What?” I said.

“I feel,” she said very slowly, “like a parking lot.”

“Risperdal,” I said softly.

“I didn't know I could feel this way,” she said.

“Risperdal,” I said, louder.

“What?”

“The red one.”

“Red what?”

“The pill.”

“I'm taking all new meds.”

“At the beginning,” I said, “you're tired a lot.”

“Does it get better?”

I put my hand out flat in the air and then waggled it like I'd seen people do to mean “so-so.”

“Maybe a little,” I said.

“Unh,” she said. “I've been on lots of different stuff. But not like this.”

“I know,” I said.

“I've been in a lot of places too,” she said.

“Me too.”

“But not like this.”

“I've been at Payton for more than forty years,” I said.

“I mean people here are really sick.”

“I'm the ‘grand old man' of Payton.”

The eye turned tiredly to me.

“You're old all right,” she said.

“Are you going to bingo?”

“Only because they told me I have to.”

“Do you want to sit next to me?”

“Maybe,” she said. And then she added, “But I'm going to get off.”

“What?”

“The Rasperdoll.”

“What?” I said again slowly. We were still standing there.

“I'm gonna stop taking it.”

I didn't know what she was saying exactly.

“Stop taking it?” I repeated.

“Now that I know what's making me feel so bad, yes I am.”

“Um,” I said, as we started walking again.

“Because if I take it anymore,” she said, “I'll die. I'll just go away and I'll be dead.”

“I don't want that,” I said.

The eye fixed on me and squinted a little bit.

“Aw shucks,” she said. We were getting close to the Main Hall and I could see people moving through the lighted windows, playing bingo.

“You wanna stop taking pills?” I repeated as we walked. The idea of doing this had never occurred to me. I was a Best Boy who did everything I was supposed to do down to the last detail and always had.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “But I'm a newbie so they're watching me kinda closely.”

“They sometimes watch me too,” I said, because I remembered that every once in a while someone from staff came in to “monitor” me taking my meds. Plus, once a month we had our blood draws and they checked our meds that way also. But no one had to monitor me taking my pills every day. I did it just because it was the Law.