Authors: Jon Bassoff
And it wasn’t far, he was right about that. Two miles, maybe less. The location of the building was kinda strange. What I mean by that was the neighborhood, how it was surrounded by blocks and blocks of single-family residences, sad little ranches, and then all of a sudden this big brick building, and it didn’t look anything the way I expected, in fact it looked just like any other building, and I decided that was a pretty good metaphor, how crazy people look like everybody else, sometimes it’s hard to pick them out of a lineup, if you know what I mean.
Well, the sun was setting over the mountains, dropping faster than you might think. I took off my hat and gloves and combed my hair with my fingers, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t looked in a mirror in some weeks, and I walked toward the front door, and my shadow was long and crooked and it was howling even though I was quiet.
The inside of the hospital wasn’t anything, and I couldn’t hear any screaming, which I guess surprised me. There was a woman behind the counter and her hair was black and her clothes were white and her smile scared me something terrible. May I help you, she said, but the way she said it, I knew she didn’t really want to help me, nobody really wanted to help me.
I’m looking for my dad, I said, and there was a momentary glimmer of pity in her parakeet green eyes, but that disappeared quickly and then it was the usual meanness that I’d been noticing lately. Who’s your dad, she said and I told her his name. She tapped on a keyboard for a few moments, and I could see the glow of the monitor reflecting in her glasses.
Ah yes, she said, and then she typed some more and I waited for her to let me in on the secret. After a couple of minutes she said: Flan Faulk. He’s under the care of Dr. Polson. Right now the visitor policy is restrictive.
What does that mean? I asked.
It means your father can’t have visitors. Not even you.
Oh, and there was glee and vindication in this devil nurse’s voice! I asked for more information: Why couldn’t he have any visitors? What was the treatment plan? Because I’d heard about lobotomies, knew the drill. Lift the eyelid and place the icepick against the top of the eye socket, pound through with a mallet…
Well, the nurse couldn’t give me any answers, couldn’t help me one bit, so I let slip a vulgar comment about the size of her ass, and she said that I needed to kindly remove myself from the premises, and if I didn’t go willingly, security would be summoned. It didn’t take long for me to realize I had made a mistake, and I became emotional, apologizing and apologizing, saying I don’t know what the fuck got into me, I’ve been under pressure, so much goddamn pressure. But the nurse wasn’t impressed and her eyes narrowed to slits and with a certain amount of contempt she said, the sins of the father are the sins of the son. Then she grinned, baring incisors all coated with blood and plaque.
I felt a wave of anger, a slow-burning rage that started in my face and traveled all the way through my body; I was about to lose control again, and this time with fireworks! The nurse picked up the phone and I slapped it out of her hand. Then, with the Soldier leading the charge, I leapt over the secretary’s desk and made a dash for the corridor…
CHAPTER 22
And then I was barreling down the hallway, past doctors and orderlies, past walls of brick and floors of linoleum, witnessing a parade of the maimed and insane flashing before my eyes at warp speed: a young man, quiet and obedient, left hand flexed into a claw, right hand flapping uselessly at his side; a woman, twenty or forty or sixty, face wide and short, head balding, eyes venomous, mouth spitting and cursing and shrieking; a gentle-looking fellow with a sweater-vest and an Irish accent, acting as a watchman, neck strained forward, head turning slowly back and forth, peering down the hallway; a woman with a bone jutting from the center of her forehead, believing herself to be the Virgin Mary; a man with thinning red hair and a bent nail in his mouth, talking about a recent murder (I hit him on the back with a piece of wood. So nicely was it done that not a drop of blood was spilled. I only laid him to sleep.); a grotesque man or woman, twitching terribly, eyes wild and bloodshot, mouth covered by a respirator mask; an elderly woman, recently transferred from the House of the Aged and Infirm, in a state of terror about a man upstairs planning to shoot her to death; a Mexican calling himself El Presidento running the hallway completely nude, claiming to be tainted with syphilis and the yellow fever, corneas opaque and encrusted with blood vessels…
And soon they were all after me, the employees and sick alike, a George Romero production, while I ran and slid down the linoleum floor, pounding on doors, calling out my father’s name. But the corridor went on forever, and electroconvulsive shock treatment was in vogue, and then I saw the rats crawling out from beneath a particular doorway and I knew he was in there, and I was shouting Dad…Dad…Dad, but it was no use, it was never any use, and they soon caught me and tied me to a gurney and shot me full of medicine, and I said to the nurse any idea when I’ll be able to see him, I’m lost without him, and she shook her head and said she would be more than happy to contact me when the time was right, and I thanked her a million and left and there had been no shouting or cursing, no calls to security, no sprints down the corridor.
* * *
That night I stayed in a little motel and it was called the Lamplighter and they had termites and bad plumbing and towels with lipstick smudges and a swimming pool painted black so they’d never have to clean it. I called my aunt and uncle, told them I was safe, told them I’d gone on a little trip, nothing to worry about, and I could tell they were relieved, they weren’t bad people, if only there were more people like them, I thought, and then I closed the blinds and locked the door, and I slept well, like an anesthetized log as they say, didn’t have dreams of madhouses and lobotomies, did have dreams of the Soldier and Constance, my beautiful Constance, woke up sad and wishing that the world was maybe prettier a little bit.
Used the last of my borrowed money to buy a breakfast burrito with black beans and chicken and pepper jack cheese, then got lucky again and hitchhiked partway up the mountain with an elevator salesman who’d been married to the same woman for twenty-eight years, and not once had she been true to him, he finding matchbooks in her purse from every bar and motel in Denver, he wondering how she’d gotten pregnant when he’d had a vasectomy at eighteen years old!
And finally home after a long hike, relieved in a way, Aunt Rose loving on me more than ever before, hugging me and kissing me, saying we were so worried about you, sweet Benton! She made me macaroni and cheese smothered in ketchup (yum my favorite) and even Uncle Horace was kind, saying I could talk to them about anything, do you understand, anything, that I didn’t have to worry about them being disappointed in me, etcetera, etcetera. What it really came down to, of course, was that they wanted me to spill the beans about my little field trip, they wanted me to tell them where I’d been. But despite their assurances of unconditional love, I wasn’t about to let them know that I’d been in search for my father, because then they would have made me see some Dr. Sigmund (don’t deny it, it’s a fact) who would have made me talk about my insecurities and neuroses and Oedipus fantasies and all the rest of that crap, would have pried into the deep recesses of my mind through therapy or hypnosis or torture, probably the latter.
So I went to sleep that night with a packed belly and clarity of thoughts, knowing full well that tomorrow everything would change, that maybe some people would fall to their knees begging for mercy, begging for reconsideration.
* * *
Uncle Horace owned a Winchester 1200 shotgun and it was for self-protection. He kept it on the top shelf of his closet but it wasn’t a secret or anything, because he’d shown it to me before and shown me how to load it and all of that stuff. I’d never fired a gun, not even hunting, but I figured it wouldn’t be very difficult, just load the shells into the magazine, pump them into the chamber, and squeeze the trigger to fire. Not that I’d need to shoot it, I only needed it because I was slight in frame and lacked the instant authoritarian standing that a Winchester did.
And so when Horace and Rose were gone at work and I was supposed to be back at school, I went into the closet and borrowed that shotgun and several rounds, and then I went outside to the shed and sawed it off nice and short with a hacksaw. It fit okay underneath my jacket, which was good because I didn’t want to scare Constance, not right away anyway.
It had started snowing again, and I was glad about that, because my feet were quiet when I walked, and I wasn’t worried about footprints because I’d never worn these boots before and I’d get rid of them as soon as I was done—I had thought about most everything. And I imagined that I was The Soldier, and I was talking to the rest of my platoon, telling them Godspeed and all the rest of that crap, but then I figured I’d better stop talking out loud in case anybody was listening, so I had those conversations in my head.
And I knew Constance’s schedule, knew she wouldn’t be getting home for another hour at least, but I wanted to make sure I was positioned properly in plenty of time because, as they say, to win a war quickly takes long preparation. I huddled behind a tree, the same lodgepole I’d always huddled behind, and the snow was falling and the sky was the color of lead.
You sing songs, ancient lullabies, and you tell yourself bedtime stories, the same ones your mother used to tell you, the one about the parents who leave their children in the woods hoping that the wild animals will get them, and you wait for your Love to make an appearance with that garland of flowers in her hair and lips all blood-red and mascara dribbling down her cheeks…
Time passed slowly, seconds taking hours, and then she was there, different than I expected, no flowers in her hair. She walked slowly to the side of the cabin and grabbed an armful of wood, a hardy woman. I could hear myself breathing and it was getting louder and louder and I worried that she might hear too, so I pinched my lips tight and stopped breathing for a time. And how I longed to lay my head on her chest, how I longed to feel the softness of her skin, how I longed to taste her sweat, taste her tears. She opened the screen door and lost her grip on the firewood and it came crashing to the ground, and then I could hear her mumbling and cursing. She didn’t know, probably, that she was being watched; she didn’t know, probably, that the big bad wolf was camouflaged nicely into the snow. After a while she got all the wood gathered up again and managed to get inside, allowing the screen door to slam shut behind her.
I waited and then I waited some more. The music from inside started playing, that Beethoven piano, all muted and hazy. The sky was turning black, the wind was blowing hard, and the world was a Christmas snow globe. My hands were buried deep in my carpenter jeans and my hat was pulled on tight, but my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. I knew the things I needed to do.
And suddenly a preacher shouting: You will hear the moaning, the cries of anguish. You will feel the skin peeling from your body. You will smell burning hair and flesh. You will taste the blood and bile. You will see a world in flames, a landscape of filth, and you will say give me one more chance, Lord, one more chance to be redeemed. And the Lord will say, You fool! I sacrificed my only son to free you, offered you a place in the House of the Lord, and you spat in my face, you pissed on my shoe. And now you come begging for redemption, for everlasting pleasure? The Lord is generous, but only to those who have served. You sinners, you whores, you shall get what is coming to you and then some!
Move forward: smoke was billowing from the chimney and the windows were dull orange and the air was shivering and a wounded coyote was shrieking and the ground was knee deep with icicles and the cabin was ready to explode and I was ready to explode and the door was open and I was standing there and I was holding the shotgun and Constance was screaming, tears welling in her eyes.
CHAPTER 23
Where is he? I shouted, and then I felt bad, shouting, holding a shotgun, so I calmed down a bit. I lowered the weapon, but she was still in a panic, still shaking and crying. I’m not gonna hurt you, I said. Understand me? I’m not gonna hurt you. I love you. But that sounded so ridiculous, pledging my love to her here, now, that I shook my head, started laughing all uneasy like.
What do you want? she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. What are you going to do to me?
You don’t have to be scared, I said. He’s not gonna hurt you anymore. He’s the one, isn’t he? He’s the one who killed your baby. He’s the one who made you get that restraining order.
No answer.
It wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been you.
Please, she said. Just go away. I won’t tell anybody that you’ve been here. Nobody needs to know.
But I just shook my head. I’m not leaving without you. I can’t face myself without you anymore. Maybe you can understand that, maybe you can’t. It doesn’t matter. I know a place. It’s up yonder a ways. Nobody will ever find us there. We can be happy, maybe. It’s worth a shot, maybe.
By this point I had entered her cabin and shut the door behind me, and I was raising the shotgun every once in a while, waving it around a bit, but it was out of nervousness, not meanness.