Scare Tactics (34 page)

“What men?” Ogden asked. “What did they want?” Skandy shook his head. “Who knows? They was black men who should have had a little reverence for our Billie Charmian. Instead, they hurt her. But she couldn’t tell them nothing. She ain’t seen the boy in years.”

“Boy?”

“Her son.”

“I didn’t know Billie Charmian had a son,” Practice said.

Skandy looked up at him with an unfocused anger in his eyes.

“Call him that. He never loved her or worked a day to support her. I wouldn’t call him no son.”

“What can you tell me about this boy?”

Skandy rose. “Walk with me,” he said.

As they went slowly across the loft floor with Skandy between them, he explained about the son of Billie Charmian, whose given name was Val and whose surname was Croft.

“I knowed Billie when she was young,” Skandy said. “Twelve or thirteen year old. A beautiful girl, too tall, a little awkward, shy. Never much to say. She was like that until her brother took her on tour. Saw her at the funeral, the spring of ’39, and after that, around town. Complete change in her then; she was a drinker, a lewd woman. No one was surprised when she had the baby. There was always people to take care of her, though. One good man could have made a great talent out of Billie, but the men who had that chance, they was all small-time. Billie didn’t work much; she liked the drinking, the fast life. So did I, and I still do; but I’m a man with my destiny in my own hands, and I never had that feeling about poor Billie. Something drove her, some devil inside that wouldn’t let her be. First she went blind from illegal alcohol, then the arthritis struck her. Well, when it was plain she couldn’t work, most people give up on her. Nobody cared. I took it on myself to care. Yes, I could care about Billie. But not about that boy. Nobody could be his friend, he made that plain. Do him good.
Be
kind to him. Obey his whims. And he’d stab you in the back before walking all over you.”

“What happened to the boy, Skandy?” Practice asked.

“He left town four year ago, and I ain’t seen or heard from him since. He stole two hundred dollars from me and left. Word was, he went off to California to be an actor. Some people, who thought they could use him to get to me, flattered him that way. But he wasn’t no actor. Even a new name couldn’t help him there.”

“What name did he go by?”

“Val. Val St. George.”

They left the studio and went down the iron stairs one flight, then entered a warehouse by a narrow alley lighted with a succession of fly-specked bulbs. The air was close and even chillier than it had been in the studio, and Practice shuddered.

“Who would be interested in her son?” Practice asked.

There was a hint of impatience in Skandy’s voice.

“I’ve tried to tell you that the boy is bad trouble. Who knows what he’s done? He started as a thief and a liar. Wherever he is, Billie don’t know and I don’t know. I hope we never find out.”

They had come to a partition of the warehouse apparently made from scrap lumber, with two unmatched doors a few feet apart in the wall. Skandy opened one of the doors and they went in.

The room they had entered was a large one, warmed by an
electric heater on one wall. The furnishings were simple: linoleum on the floor, several benches, bookshelves, a TV, and a sofa bed, but the effect was tidy and comfortable. To Practice it seemed the sort of room an experienced artist or decorator might provide for himself out of whim, seeing what he could do without spending more than a few dollars for paint.

A black woman sat nodding in front of the TV set, which was turned down low. She wore the blue and gray jumper of a practical nurse.

“How is she?” Skandy asked.

The nurse looked up. “I think she feels better today.”

“See if she’s awake.”

The nurse rose and let herself into an adjoining room. In a few moments she reappeared, nodded, and Skandy left them alone, shutting the door behind him as he went in to talk to Billie Charmian.

“I thought you said he was a hard man,” Practice whispered to Ogden.

“Most times he won’t do more than curl his lip at white skin,” Ogden replied. “But you handled him right.”

“He wanted an opinion,” Practice said.

Ogden chuckled. “He got it, too. Right between the eyes. Here he comes.”

Skandy approached them, but his eyes were on Practice. “I don’t ask who you are or what your business is with Billie,” he said softly. “Just you remember she is a sick woman. I’ve told her you’re coming in to see her, so she’ll talk to you if she can. Don’t stay more than five minutes. I mean what I say.”

“Thank you, Skandy.”

There was scarcely a ripple in the old man’s face. He looked directly into Ogden’s eyes for several seconds, a blood look that was without meaning to Practice, and then he let himself out and the nurse settled back into her chair in front of the television.

Billie Charmian’s room was small. It contained a full-sized bed, a toilet, and a bathtub. There was a single window facing north, but the blinds were half drawn. The air smelled of rubbing alcohol.

She sat in a wheelchair near the one window, very straight, her hands useless in her lap, a scarlet robe across the lower part of her body, sunglasses masking a third of her face. She was neatly dressed; her hair was long and straight, blue-black with one wide streak of white past her right ear. Practice was startled by the lightness of her skin, tinged with yellow from years of sickness, lined but not dull.

For a moment Practice felt awed by something he didn’t understand, then realized that it was the attitude with which she sat, cruelly immobilized in a way that trapped her energies without reducing them.

“Billie?”

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m Jim Practice ...”

“You’re white. How do you know about me?”

“John Guthrie told me about you, Billie.”

There was no visible reaction, but Practice was aware that something had happened at the mention of the Governor’s name, an indistinctly painful happening.

Practice took out the drawing. He told her about the envelope in which it had come; then he described the drawing to her, with its burden of bloody fingerprints.

“They’re your fingerprints, Billie. Made long ago. Could you tell me how long ago, Billie?”

Her head had inclined forward slightly so that the sun was full in her face. She might have been asleep.

Practice sighed. “Years ago, Billie, you bought a storybook for a boy filled with the kind of tales that children like to hear and read. Like most mothers, you’d hold your son on your lap and read to him. One story out of all the others struck his imagination in such a way that he never forgot it. There was a meaning in the story that involved his own personality to such an extent that as he grew older, he took the name of the knight who slew the dragon. In fancy he became the white knight he never could be in truth.”

For a blind, ferocious instant she bared her teeth. “What did you tell him about his father, Billie?”

“From the first I made him know what it was to be a bastard, not black, not white, to be a never and a nowhere on this earth. For such feelings, for the way I made that boy suffer from his first living hour, the good God Almighty took away what I had left of self-respect, took away all love, and then my eyes, and then my voice, and then”—her voice had become a dark passionate growling—“my power to kill the poor bastard and the poor woman who gave him birth.” He knew that in a moment she would abandon herself completely to self-torture and lose all sense of his words, and so he stepped closer and said harshly, “
Billie! What did you tell him about his father?
”

She gasped, bending over in the wheelchair, and he put a hand gently on her shoulder, aware of what the slightest pressure would do to her. Gradually she straightened and the look of horror lessened in her face.

“Everything but the truth. That I loved John Guthrie. I never told the boy a thing about love.”

“Have you seen Val, Billie? Talked to him? When was the last time you saw him?”

“Three years ago. A letter came. He said—said he would never come home until his father was dead. ‘When my father is dead, then you can love me as you should.’ ”

“Do you have the letter he wrote you, Billie?”

“In my mind I see every word. Printed, as he would have printed it when he was a child.”

“From where was it sent?”

A spasm of terror caused her mouth to slant downward in a grimace.

“From—from the insane asylum.” She choked then, and from beneath the glasses two tears rolled down her cheeks.

There was a quick, insistent knocking at the door, and Practice glanced at his watch, frowning.

“Billie, tell me something about the two men who came to see you. They knew you had a son. Is that all they knew? Did you tell them that Guthrie was his father?”

“They couldn’t make me tell. But ...”

“What, Billie?”

“They found the letter, the letter Val wrote.”

“I’ll have to go now. But I want to know something else. Does Guthrie have any idea what’s happened to you?”

Her lips thinned and she raised her head proudly, turning it a fraction of an inch to the right, then into the sun.

“He never knew.”

T
he state hospital for the mentally ill was located on a large wooded tract in a small city not far from the capital, and Practice drove back by a route that would allow a stopover at the hospital. He had phoned from Ogden’s office for an appointment with Dr. Mackerras. When he reached the grounds shortly before one o’clock, the sun had vanished and the sky was overcast with a hint of rain in the darkness to the south.

The assistant receptionist who took him back to Mackerras’s office had the typical look of institution help: bland, country, and with muscles under her jumper. She smiled automatically and held the door open for him. Mackerras rose from behind his desk, which held the waxed paper and bread crust remains of a hasty lunch, and extended his hand. He was a small man, blond, with a lady-killer’s profile.

“Hello! How are you? How’s Lucy? Haven’t heard from her in a couple of months.”

“Fine,” Practice said, and offered no additional comment.

Mackerras reached for a stack of folders on the side of his desk and selected one.

“This is the information on Val St. George. At the time of admission, three years and five months ago, he was nineteen, six feet two inches tall, weighed one hundred and forty-nine pounds. Malnourished, which condition could have accounted for part of his mental troubles. You see”—he put on a pair of reading glasses to leaf through the folder—“we put all incoming patients on a better than adequate diet, plenty of supplemental vitamins, and so forth, and some of them respond so well to the improved diet that they can be discharged in a few weeks. Anyway, Val St. George was a light-skinned black, but not the type who could ever pass for white. Definitely Negroid features and hair. One unusual feature here, he was responsible for his own commitment.”

“How’s that?”

“He came to the institution and asked to be admitted. He was examined by one of our staff psychiatrists over a period of three days, diagnosed as schizophrenic, with manic-depressive tendencies, certain patterns of hostility not unusual for someone who finds himself a racial outsider. He claimed to be an orphan, and apparently investigation confirmed that as fact. We obtained the necessary court approval and he began treatment. He responded well to analysis and was discharged ten months and twenty-four days later as cured.”

“Did you know him while he was here, Doctor?”

“Yes, I did. He was active in our drama group, as a matter of fact was virtually responsible for a good production of
Henry V,
and he played Henry with great style. I knew him through Lucy, as well.”

Practice frowned. “How do you mean, Doctor?”

“Lucy, as you know, wasn’t, by definition, a patient. She lived with my wife and me, helped out in the dispensary, and was free to come and go as she saw fit. While she was here, she took a personal interest in several of the patients—first there was the Indian girl with suicidal tendencies. They became good friends and I’m happy to say the girl was eventually discharged, perhaps Lucy had a hand in her recovery. I know that she was partly responsible for the rapid integration of personality which Val St. George demonstrated. He would gladly have given her all the credit. I don’t think the boy ever had a friend in his life before Lucy.”

“I see.”

“She’s never mentioned him to you?”

“No, she hasn’t.” He hesitated. “Dr. Mackerras, was there any indication that Val St. George was potentially dangerous?”

“Dangerous?”

“Could he have killed someone at the time he was admitted?”

“Nearly everyone is capable of killing under a given set of circumstances. In the condition in which he was admitted, Val St. George wasn’t dangerous, either to another human being or to himself. If he had continued to deteriorate mentally, it’s possible that a paranoiac syndrome may have manifested itself, which, in turn, and I qualify again,
might
have resulted in violence. On the other hand, if his schizophrenic tendencies had developed fully, it’s likely he merely would have regressed to an endurable level of adolescence or childhood, and spent the rest of his days in that state—within these grounds.”