John List. Killed wife, mother, and three kids. Sure. I can see killing like this. This List guy had God on his side. That makes it work for him. He wants out of this family thing. He’s pussy-whipped, and his mother’s a nag, and he doesn’t have the balls to leave-that or he thinks a godly guy like him can’t leave the kiddies-he figures all these folks he’s responsible for are going to go to hell if they keep on sinning the way they have. So, he figures he’ll just send them up to heaven quick and save their souls. Like a good daddy. He throws in mom and wife for good measure. It makes sense to me. What kind of louses it up is John takes a powder. If he’s Mr. Godly, why doesn’t he stay and take the hit? Maybe he thinks, God’s got to love me for shipping him five nice angels. Maybe he has other jobs for his good buddy John, so I better keep my ass out of prison.
Yeah, I can see doing the List list. Is that what you wanted to hear?
Richard was hurt bad. He knew it with the awful certainty one feels in that second when he steps back off a cliff and realizes it will be the last mistake he makes on this earth; that eternity of horror before his body smashes on the rocks.
Freakish light filtered through the snowstorm, the bright orange of sodium arc lamps picked up and tossed back by ten billion ice facets: sky, ground, tree limbs, air. Rooms in the house were orange, the whole world the inside of a Halloween pumpkin.
In light the color of fire, Richard couldn’t tell how much blood he was losing. A lot. Too much. He could feel it pumping, little squirts against the palm of his hand. For a giddy second he believed the blood flowed into him from the night and out of him from his veins, a pool, a lake, rising.
His little brother lay across the bed where he had fallen. On Dylan’s pajamas cowboys and Indians were drenched in red, a war on flannel. Blood ran in a sheet down the right side of Dylan’s face.
Dylan looked dead.
“Dyl?” Richard tried to call out but he hadn’t strength for more than a whisper. “Dylan, don’t you die on me.” Richard started to cry, then stopped himself. Taking a deep breath, he tried again. “Dylan, if you’re awake, call the operator, the police.”
His brother didn’t move.
From boy scouts and television, Richard knew if he took his hand away from the gaping wound on his inner thigh, he would bleed out. For a heartbeat or two he considered letting go, lifting his hand, and watching his life pump out of his body. It seemed so eager to leave him, and there’d been so much carnage, why not give in? Drift into the abyss?
Dylan moaned softly. Despite the muffling effect of death dreams, in the absolute stillness of a snowy midnight it grated loud in Richard’s ears. He hadn’t killed him-his brother was alive.
Dream evaporated; abyss ceased to beckon. Suddenly Rich wanted to live. “Brother,” he whispered. Dylan’s eyelids twitched. Richard saw a flash of white eyeball, startling in the drying red mask. “Wake up, buddy. Please.”
Using one hand and his uninjured leg for propulsion, the other hand clamped tightly over his wound, Richard tried to move across the bedroom floor. Fabric and blood stuck him to the hardwood. By inches-one, three, five-he moved toward Dylan. The effort was so great there wasn’t room left for thought. Each tiny movement brought a calamity of pain. The pain had ceased to be localized; his entire being was on fire.
Don’t. Pass. Out. He forced the words through the clamor of nerve-death in his mind.
Dylan’s head lolled off the edge of the mattress at an unnatural angle.
His neck was broken. Dylan would be in a wheelchair, peeing through a tube. A ragged end of strength rippled through Richard. Dylan would be helpless; he would need his brother. More than anything Richard wanted to be there.
Push your chair, brother. Take you for walks in the park. An inch. Two. Behind him on the hardwood was a smeared trail of red. The room was so damn big.
Richard’s arm was failing; his uninjured leg cramped. Blinking to stay conscious, he tried to remember why he was bleeding across this wasteland.
The phone. Dial 0, the operator, and ask for the police. The phone on the nightstand looked impossibly far away, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Dylan!” Richard screamed. Dylan didn’t move and Richard was out of air.
Rest. He would rest a moment. Leaning against the bureau, he watched the orange light pulsate deeper, then paler. It made him sleepy.
Don’t sleep; stay awake, he warned himself. Never sleep; your hand will come loose. Sleep is death. He would just rest a second or two; then, when he was stronger, he would continue his journey to the telephone, to 0 and rescue.
“Water,” he croaked, seeing in his mind the parched desert crawlers of late-night TV Westerns. He was so thirsty he could have cried. He licked his lips and tasted Vondra. After he’d left her, he’d showered and brushed his teeth, but the taste was still there.
Vondra. He had been with her when he should have been with Dylan. He had not been a good brother. Now Dylan was going to die.
The thought was intolerable, more so than bleeding to death.
Anger gave him strength. By inches and screams, he reached his brother’s side. He smoothed back Dylan’s hair and kissed him.
Before he passed out he managed to dial the operator.
Richard woke to white lights and the low constant noise of controlled urgency. The first face he saw was that of a beefy policeman, his skin red and fissured from too many late nights in subzero weather.
The ruddy mask cracked, and from between lips thinner than a snake’s came the words, “Hey kid.” The tone was fatherly, warm and strong. It brought tears to Richard’s eyes. He didn’t fight them. If ever there was a time when being seen crying was okay, this was it. Hot and tickling, they trickled from the corners of his eyes and down his temples.
A pair of flat callused thumbs smeared them into his hair. The cop was comforting him, wiping away his tears like he was a small and precious child. This unexpected kindness lent Richard a sense of control. He smiled shakily.
“Hey,” he managed.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the cop said.
Alive. In a rush, Richard remembered everything that had happened. “Where am I?” he asked stupidly. Halfway through the question he realized he was in a hospital, the emergency room. Embarrassed to sound so predictable, he waved a hand at the white privacy curtains surrounding the bed and asked, “Am I in a sheet factory?”
Rather than being annoyed, as his dad used to be when Richard played the fool, Beef Cop gave the appearance of being charmed. His eyes, a glacial shade of blue, warmed. The thick shoulders rounded in to create a less threatening silhouette. Lowering an oversized haunch, he sat on the edge of the hospital bed.
Richard winced.
“Oh, sorry, did I hurt you?” the cop asked anxiously and, to Richard’s relief, removed his rear end from the vicinity.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” Richard said because his brain was foggy and he couldn’t think of anything anywhere near witty to say.
The cop seemed to think this was high comedy. A hearty laugh was followed by a clumsy hair-ruffling.
“No, son, you’re not in a sheet factory. You’re at the Mayo Clinic. The best there is.”
Son. He called him son.
With that, he remembered his leg, the wound on his thigh. “My leg.” The words came out high-pitched and scared. That bothered him but he didn’t try to cover.
“He cut you bad,” the cop replied, looking around for a place to sit. Richard was prepared to scream if he put his butt back on the bed. He didn’t. Condemned to stand, he went on, “The docs’ll tell you more, but the short of it is they got you stitched up, and you’ll be good as new pretty near. You don’t worry about that leg. You don’t worry about a thing. We got you covered.”
The policeman liked him. The belle of the policemen’s ball, Richard thought idiotically.
“You’ll be running track in no time,” Beef Cop said.
Richard nodded weakly and said, “Good.” And “Thanks.” He had no idea what he was thanking the cop for, but people liked to be thanked.
“Yep, the Mayo. The best there is,” the cop reiterated.
Richard needed to see who else was in the room, but, what with beaming Beef and the sheet factory, he couldn’t see more than three feet. The last thing he remembered was Dylan, bleeding, his neck twisted, but still breathing.
Crippled, Richard remembered. His neck looked broken.
“Dylan… ” he began.
“Your brother’s alive. At least for now,” the policeman cut in. His eyes reverted to their arctic shade of blue, and his cheeks went from flab to granite. He sounded pissed off, but he wasn’t pissed off at Richard. He was pissed off at Dylan.
“Excuse me.” Like a leaf on the first winds of winter, a cool voice blew the cop out of Richard’s line of sight. A woman in white replaced him, a nurse of forty or so. She, too, smiled at Richard, a real smile, the kind mothers save for favorite sons. “My name is Sara.”
Richard liked her voice. It was warm, like she thought he was okay. He tried to smile at her and failed.
“Your brother is fine,” she said kindly.
Fine. Going to be fine. Fine meant nothing. Fine was a cover-up, pabulum for kiddies.
The fear that had shortened his patience with the policeman jerked his jaws together and locked them.
“Is he crippled?” Richard demanded, nearly lisping through clenched teeth.
“No, no. Just a concussion,” the nurse assured him quickly. “He’s going to be just fine.” She reached out as if to pat him on the head, then snatched her hand back. Richard was pretty sure his teeth were bared, and he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have bitten her if she hadn’t pulled away.
Their “fine” was not his “fine.”
“Is he crippled?” he yelled, trying to sit up and barely succeeding in lifting his head. “His neck looked broken. Goddamn it, is he going to be a cripple?”
“Shh, shh,” the woman hissed, thinking snake sounds would comfort him. “Your brother has a concussion. He’s not crippled. I don’t know who told you that. Breathe now. You’re going to be fine.”
Now, he was going to be “fine.” She filled a hypodermic needle and squirted liquid out the end just like he’d seen in a hundred TV shows. Inserting the needle in a port of his IV tube, she squeezed the plunger a half an inch or so.
“Just fine,” she whispered.
Warm. Motherly.
But only for him. The way she’d said “your brother” told him that. Try as she might, she couldn’t entirely keep the loathing from her voice.
“You just worry about getting yourself well,” the nurse said as she pushed the plunger all the way in. “That brother of yours will be right as rain in a day or so. And don’t you worry; we’re going to take good care of you.”
Right as rain, white as snow, Richard thought, and wondered where the words came from. Drugs?
“This is going to put you to sleep,” the nice, motherly Sara was saying as she pulled out the hypodermic needle. “When you wake up again, we’ll have your leg all fixed up.”
“I’ll be right as rain?” Richard heard himself murmur.
The nurse smiled as if he were the cleverest boy in the world.
In the space of a night, maybe not even a night-he had no idea how much time had elapsed-the world had changed utterly. Richard hadn’t. They had. They, them, everybody else had.
Beef Cop edged the nurse out of his range of vision. “Son, was it you who hit your brother?” he asked.
Tears started again. “I hit him,” he said. “I had to.”
“Good kid.” The cop’s voice turned flinty. Richard imagined words striking sparks when he talked. “What did you hit him with? That axe? The neighbor girl… ”
Morphine, or Darvon, or whatever it was furred the edges of Richard’s tunneling vision. Through this black fuzzy sleeve he watched the cop pull a notebook from his coat pocket.
“Vondra Werner,” the policeman verified. “Vondra Werner said you spent most of the night with her.”
At first Richard didn’t see the ghost of a grin behind the cop’s words. Then he did, and he knew the man thought he was a hero.
Not just a survivor, but a hero.
“That’s enough,” Nurse Sara said. “Look at him, poor, poor, beautiful boy… ” was the last thing Richard heard.
Nothing was ever going to be right again, Dylan thought.
Except Rich. Rich didn’t die. He almost died, but he didn’t.
The first time Dylan saw him again was at the trial. It wasn’t held in Rochester because everybody there hated Dylan too much for it to be fair. They were trying him in a little town called Hammond about three hours away. He had to get up at five every morning so they could drive him there in time. The courthouse was small and looked like it was supposed to, with benches and a fence between the audience and the lawyers. Every day it was packed, mostly with newspaper and TV people.
Rich, looking like his old self with color in his skin and everything, his hair a little longer than their mom would have let him wear it and waving in that surfer-boy style he liked, was pushed down the aisle of the courtroom in a wheelchair. His leg was wrapped in so many bandages they’d had to cut open that side of his pants even though it was probably twenty below zero outside. He’d gotten skinnier.
Though Dylan knew Rich would spit on him, or ignore him like he was a bug, or scream he was a psycho, or worse, he didn’t look away. He kept watching the rolling chair. When it first came through the double doors, everybody got quiet. Then, as it got closer, flashbulbs started flashing and people started murmuring.
Rich was so cool-academy awards, the red carpet. He was smiling for the cameras but kind of sadlike. Dylan loved him more at that moment than he ever had. Nothing Rich had done in the past mattered. This was what mattered. The love hurt Dylan, it was so big.
Since that night the whole inside of him felt black and crusty like the inside of a lightning tree. Mostly, Dylan stayed in the burnt-out hole and didn’t think or feel. He didn’t know what to be or how to be anymore. No one else seemed to know what he was either. Or what to do with him. Doctors, lawyers, cops asked questions. A newspaper guy got in, and flashed, and questioned until the cops chased him out.
Dylan hadn’t been able to answer the questions, so he’d coiled up in the black and hid. Until he saw his brother. The pain of loving Rich felt almost good; it made him feel like a person. He didn’t look away as the wheelchair rolled down the aisle toward him but steeled himself to take the hit. Maybe it would kill him, but he doubted it. Nothing he wanted to happen had happened for a while now.
Then Rich was opposite him on the other side of the wooden railing. He held up his hand, and the nurse stopped the chair. Dylan felt like crying, his brother was so cool. He’d made the nurse do what he wanted without saying a word, like a cop stopping traffic. Bracing against the armrests, Rich struggled to get up. The nurse, all done up for the trial in her crisp uniform and hat, put her hands on his shoulders to make him stay down, but he shrugged them off.
Dylan stood too. If Rich wanted to hit him, he could. For a weird jag of time, Dylan experienced his brother’s fists hammering him, his feet smashing into his ribs and belly, and he welcomed it. He craved being beaten to death like he craved air when he’d been under the water too long.
Getting up must have hurt Rich. His face lost color, and he swayed like he was going to pass out. Holding onto the railing to keep himself up, he made it the two steps to where Dylan stood waiting.
The muttering in the courthouse dried up. Nobody was even breathing. Time stopped, and the people were hanging on the second hand, wondering if the clock was going to work ever again. Dylan wasn’t breathing either. He was waiting to die. Not the good kind where everything is over, but to be killed inside.
Rich balanced himself against the rail so he could stand on his bad leg, reached out both arms, and said, “Brother.”
The sere, cinder-lined core of Dylan filled with warm liquid. He was melting from the inside out. Time flowed backward. He hurtled from eleven, to eight, to six. A little boy threw his arms around his big brother’s neck and bawled like a baby. Rich didn’t have to be so good to him.
Rich was crying too.
People in the courthouse didn’t know what kind of noise to make. Their murmuring fattened up with awe and pity, then morphed into white-hot fury. Dylan smeared the tears and snot from his face into the crook of his arm as the sound grew into the feral growl of a mob working up to a lynching. Except he was eleven. So they couldn’t even enjoy being mad at him. He was a little kid. They had to pretend to be sad at the same time.
Rich fell back into his wheelchair. Mrs. Eisenhart, Dylan’s court-appointed attorney, pulled him from the rail. The judge was pounding his gavel for quiet.
They were all mad for Rich, because he wouldn’t be mad for himself. They hated Dylan. They needn’t have bothered; he hated himself more than they ever could.
He sat down. Mrs. Eisenhart had brought him the suit and tie his mom got for Lena ’s baptism. He’d been nine then, and the suit was too small. He squirmed trying to get the crotch to stop crawling up his butt.
Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him under the table. Rich was being sworn in; Dylan forgot about wedgies.
The other lawyer, the one against Dylan, began asking questions. Rich didn’t want to answer, but he’d sworn on the Bible and had to. He hadn’t seen Dylan do anything. He insisted on that. He’d been next door necking with Vondra Werner. When Rich said that, he looked at Dylan and kind of shrugged.
Dylan turned around with a great big, sheepish grin plastered on his face, looking to see what his mom and dad thought of that. Men in the courthouse were smiling; when they saw his face the smiles whispered out, leaving only the scratching sound of dead leaves in the air. His big old grin brought the undergrowl back into the ambient noise.
The parched silence, the sudden remembering that his parents weren’t there, froze Dylan’s smile in a creepy kind of way. Like a supervillain had zapped him with an ice ray. Flash bulbs popped. “Butcher Boy,” one of the newspaper reporters whispered, and a bunch of them scribbled in their notepads.
Mrs. Eisenhart closed a sharp-nailed hand on his shoulder and turned him back toward the judge.
Rich told the jury, the judge, and the lawyers that he’d come home and found Dylan drenched in blood. He’d tried to get the axe away from him, and Dylan had nearly hacked his leg off. Thinking Dylan was possessed, or might hurt himself, or was sick, Rich, even though he was bleeding to death, got the axe away from him and bonked him on the head. Then Rich had passed out and didn’t remember anything until he woke up at the Mayo. That was it-the whole story.
The prosecutor made Rich tell it different ways. He tried to make him add to it, say he saw things he didn’t, but Rich wouldn’t do it. Everybody was listening so hard Dylan could feel his brother’s words being sucked past his ears into the gallery.
No one listened harder than he did. Mrs. Eisenhart had told him the story when she’d rehearsed him for the trial-it wasn’t at all like on television; the lawyers were supposed to tell each other what they were going to say and do and not surprise the other guy; but it was totally different hearing it from his brother. When Rich said it, Dylan finally believed. Until then he thought he didn’t remember it because it didn’t happen.
It happened. This hit him like the axe had-a slam into his head that scrambled his brain. Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him again. She didn’t like him any more than anybody else did.
It had happened. He’d gotten hold of his dad’s axe, and it had happened.
He stared down at the table he and his lawyer were sitting behind. It started to spin and tip like the deck of a boat in a windstorm. Dylan grabbed one edge to keep from smashing his face against the tossing wood surface. With his other hand he took hold of the seat of his chair lest he be pitched onto the floor.
“I tried to kill my brother with Daddy’s axe,” he whispered. This time Mrs. Eisenhart’s kick hurt. He guessed he hadn’t spoken loud enough for anyone else to hear because nobody was looking at him. The words hadn’t been a confession; he’d said them to see if it would make him remember. Because he didn’t. He didn’t remember a thing. Not one thing after his mother had put him to bed.
He’d told them that over and over, but even his own lawyer didn’t believe him. When she got to talk, she argued that people suffering head injuries from accidents often couldn’t remember events that happened immediately before the trauma, that the blow had given Dylan a severe concussion, that he’d been in intensive care, and that, since the incident, he suffered severe headaches.
Nobody felt sorry for him; Dylan didn’t even feel sorry for himself. He’d tried to kill his brother.
Rich was on the stand for over an hour. Talking so long cost him. Lines of pain aged his face. During the whole thing, even when the prosecutor pushed, Rich refused to say anything bad about Dylan. Looking straight at the jury the way Mrs. Eisenhart told Dylan he should if she decided to put him on the stand, Rich told them that Dylan never hurt anybody, didn’t hit or pinch or call other kids names, minded his mother and father, was kind and protective of Lena, their thirty-month-old sister, and brought home injured animals to take care of. The more good he told them, the less the jury believed it. It didn’t even sound like Rich believed it himself.
When the prosecutor was finished, Mrs. Eisenhart didn’t ask Rich a single question. As he was being wheeled out, Rich whispered, “Hang in there, brother,” and gave Dylan a thumbs-up. Dylan didn’t respond; he knew if he so much as nodded he would be six years old again, bawling like a baby.
After Rich testified, things in the courtroom pretty much stopped making sense for Dylan. People came and went without reason. Colors got brighter and brighter until Dylan had to squint to keep them out. Voices were superloud. He could smell things with a dog’s nose: traces of his lawyer’s perfume would choke him; the stink of an old cigarette on somebody behind them would make him sick to his stomach. The walls crept in, making the room smaller.
This whole-world cacophony made him crazy.
Crazier.
One day the prosecutor called Vondra Werner. Dylan pulled hard on the places where his brain was being sucked out of shape so he could pay attention. Vondra and her family had only lived next door six months or so, but she was always around, snooping and trying to talk to Rich. Dylan didn’t think she knew he existed.
“Pink, of course,” Mrs. Eisenhart hissed.
Vondra had on a pink dress. She looked pretty, shy, and nice. Dylan didn’t know why that made his lawyer mad. In a low voice, Vondra told everybody how she and Rich had been together. Except she didn’t say they were necking; she said they were “making love.”
When it was her turn Mrs. Eisenhart made Vondra tell how she was always watching, and following Rich around, and maybe was jealous of his family, and maybe didn’t like Dylan. Dylan thought for a minute the lawyer was going to get Vondra to break down like Perry Mason got confessions at the end of the show, and Vondra’d confess she’d done everything.
Then the lawyer said, “Richard didn’t like you spying; Mrs. Raines didn’t like you watching.” Vondra went white like Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“Richard loves me,” she said. “Mrs. Raines didn’t like him.” She pointed to where Dylan sat. “I overheard her once saying he did things that scared her.”
Panic flooded Dylan, filled his brain until there wasn’t room for anything else. People’s lips would move but he wouldn’t hear anything-or the words made no sense. They could have been speaking Chinese for all he knew.
Except he knew he was supposed to understand.
Terror sharpened, began cutting the inside of his skull; he could feel it knife into the bone. Then he could no longer see, not like he should have been seeing. Lights would grow dimmer or brighter, except they didn’t. Nobody else saw them do it. Walls, especially pale walls, changed color from white, to pink, to grey. Faces mutated subtly to become frightening.
The fifth or sixth day of the trial, Dylan woke up too scared to look into the mirror. His reflection might melt, become monstrous, and his mind would snap, the kind of crazy snap that showed and got people stuck in rubber rooms with canvas coats that tied in the back. Dylan knew he couldn’t be shut up all by himself, all in himself. He had to seem okay.
At least, okay for a monster.
He shut down. He moved hardly at all, then carefully, robotically, nothing flapping or wriggling out of control. Food tasted like sawdust. It stuck in his throat halfway down, a glob of paste. He never looked at his plate. If he looked too long, the noodles or whatever might begin to writhe. He ate to stay alive, and he wasn’t truly committed even to that. The people who made his meals, the people who served them, they all hated him. They could poison the food or, worse, pee or spit on it.
“I don’t know what you think you’re proving with this stoic act you’ve started. You’re not doing yourself any good,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. “People look at you and see indifference. You won’t get the death sentence. I’m a better lawyer than that, and, besides, nobody likes to kill kids, but playing Marble Man is hurting you.”
Dylan knew she was right. He was eleven, not stupid. If he let the jury and the judge see his pain, they might take pity on him. Pity might lead to forgiveness. He couldn’t hope for the good Bible kind where the Prodigal Son is loved, but there might be a version of “forgiveness lite,” where they could tell themselves he was redeemable.
“There’s an old Chinese proverb,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. “You keep on the way you’re going, and eventually you’ll get where you’re headed. You’re a smart boy; you know where that is.”
When he didn’t respond, she dug newspapers out of her briefcase and spread them on the table between them. On the front pages there were photos of him locked in his panic catatonia. “Butcher Boy Shows No Remorse.” That was the headline on the tabloid. The respectable paper was more circumspect but the message was the same.
“Have it your way,” Mrs. Eisenhart said abruptly. Leaving the papers for him to enjoy, she snapped her briefcase shut and stalked away, her high-heeled shoes noisy on the linoleum. At the door she turned back and Dylan wondered if she watched that new show Columbo and was doing that almost-gone-wait-one-more-zinger move. “You’re killing me,” she said. She didn’t even see why that was funny.
Dylan knew he was killing his chance of any kind of leniency. And he knew he could not show them his pain. Should the least tiny little droplet of it leak out it would breach the dam; the trickle would become a stream, and the stream, a flood. He would be washed away in it.
The last day of the trial a cop took the stand and told the jury Dylan had gone insane and peed in his pants rather than look at what he’d done. He told them how Dylan had laughed. Then two more cops repeated the story. Dylan sort of remembered doing that, but it wasn’t the way they said it was.
When the last cop was telling how Rich nearly died from the hack job on his leg and how Dylan had laughed, Dylan shut down his ears. It was too weird. Somebody else did all those things, not Dylan. A monster got in. Maybe Rich was protecting that monster. His girlfriend. Vondra was always peeking out the windows at them and making up excuses to come by. Maybe she was psycho.
Maybe he was.
Voices washed around him as he sat straight and stiff and stared at the tabletop and tried to remember stuff-not the bad stuff-just stuff. Searching his mind, looking way back into the dark places where dead-and-over things were stored, he saw only fog, thick and white the way fog was from the machines they used in high school plays. But he wasn’t going to go to high school. Even a moron could figure that out.
That afternoon the trial ended. “Dylan, the judge asked you a question!” Mrs. Eisenhart’s voice dragged him out of himself. When she called him, he was seeing a picture in his mind of the butterfly kiss his mom had given him that last night, the tiny gold cross she always wore cool on his cheek. It made him smile.
“Look at him! He’s grinning!” a whisper hissed loud in the courtroom.
“Huh?” It took him longer than it should have to make sense of what she’d said. He sounded retarded.
“We are going into the sentencing phase now. Judge Farnsworth wants to know if you want to say anything in your own behalf.”
Then he did a stupid thing. He meant to ask if the jury had found him guilty. He meant to say, “I’m guilty?” with the end of the sentence going up, so everybody would know it was a question. What came out was, “I’m guilty.”
After that he got so confused he decided not to say anything else.
Dylan was sentenced to a juvenile detention center in Drummond, Minnesota, until he was eighteen years of age. On his eighteenth birthday he was to be transferred to the state penitentiary where he would be imprisoned until the age of twenty-seven.
The gavel rapped and the judge rose. Mrs. Eisenhart stood as well, chunked her papers into order on the top of the desk and fed them to her briefcase. Dylan watched as the leather jaws clamped shut on their catch.
“That, as they say, is that,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. She found Dylan’s dead-fish right hand and shook it perfunctorily. “Call me if you need anything.” Clack, clack, clack, and the double doors ate her as neatly as the leather had swallowed the papers.
A quiet man, maybe the bailiff, with a big gut and eyes that were kind even when he looked at Dylan, said: “Come on, boy. Let’s get this over with.” For a horrible second, Dylan looked around desperately for his mom and dad. The bailiff cuffed him, putting the manacles on carefully so the sliding part wouldn’t pinch his wrists, and asked, “That too tight?” This casual kindness was too rich to bear. Dylan couldn’t even say thank you and, seeming cold and ungrateful, he walked toward the door.
As before-the before between the night the things happened and the trial-Dylan was put in rooms. Taken out of rooms. People talked over and around him. He held himself tight and still so he wouldn’t blast apart and hurt them with the shrapnel of his bones. Finally he was escorted to a big van, the kind church groups use, but with iron mesh and seats where handcuffs could be locked.
For the first part of the four-hour drive to the detention center the bailiff rode in front with the driver. From what they said Dylan guessed the bailiff was getting a lift home. They pretty much ignored him, and when they did talk to him, they were nice enough. If he could have made their words line up in his brain, he would have answered them; but he couldn’t, and trying made the panic so bad he was afraid he was going to vomit. Then they’d think he was carsick, like a little kid.
After the bailiff got out the driver started talking to Dylan. “So you’re the famous Butcher Boy, eh.” He didn’t sound mean, just making conversation, the way somebody might say, “So you’re Frank Raines’s boy.” The thought of not being Frank Raines’s boy anymore caught crosswise in Dylan’s mind, and he bit down hard to keep from screaming and banging his head against the side of the van.
“Not many little kids in juvie. None as young as eleven as a matter of fact. Lots of half-grown men acting like little kids, if that’s any consolation to you. Eleven!” He whistled long and low. For a while, he didn’t say anything, and Dylan stared out the window. The snow was deep and silent and blue from the bit of moon. Trees edged the fields like jagged teeth. Every few miles a house showed lights.
No axe boys there. Sleep tight, Dylan thought. Craziness gnawed at him. He forced his mind to make a movie where he could stay sane. He did the television show The Fugitive, with the van sliding on ice, crashing, and him getting out. He was going to make it so that he found the one-armed guy, but instead the mind-Dylan who escaped the van lay down in the snow and let the cold freeze him quiet.
Having flicked through a bunch of radio stations and finally gotten bored, the driver started talking again. He told Dylan the juvenile facility wasn’t really in Drummond but on the prairie about twenty miles outside of town. That it looked like an old city hall from the outside but it was for really bad kids. “The place was built in nineteen twenty-nine,” he said, sounding like a tour guide. “That was before the crash, but then a whippersnapper like you wouldn’t care anything about that. When they built it, it was considered real modern, but it won’t look like that to a sharp young town boy like you. The architect… You know what an architect is?”
Dylan didn’t answer. Maybe he could have put the words together, but he didn’t want to. The driver was turning mean. Must be past his bedtime, Dylan thought in his mother’s voice.
“The architect was an Englishman. He went nuts with all the granite here and built the thing with arches and towers that would have looked right at home in merry olde England.” The driver told Dylan the guards were pretty good Joes, but it was thankless work, and he wouldn’t do it if wild horses dragged him. “Most are okay, but not all.” Then, as if embarrassed that he’d slipped into being nice, he threw in, “You better not try any funny stuff. These old boys won’t put up with that kind of thing. You’ll find yourself in a box no bigger than a coffin eating nothing but bread and water for a month.
“I don’t know where they’re going to put you,” the driver said. “Little skinny stick of a boy like you, put in with some of them big boys and… ” He stopped the way Dylan’s parents would stop when they realized “little pitchers have big ears.”
Dylan went back out the window into the snow where the cold could numb his heart and cool his head.
The next time the driver talked, his voice had changed, the way people’s do when they are talking to themselves instead of somebody else. “My gosh. What happened to make you do a thing like that? An axe of all things. I can’t imagine what must have been going through your head.”
He’s scared of me, Dylan realized. A grown-up, frightened of a little kid. They were all scared of him. That’s why they called him names. And not just him. He made them scared of all little kids. Dylan wanted to tell him not to be afraid, but he didn’t know how to do it without being “impertinent.” His mother’s word.
“I’ve heard that rock and roll music works on young people’s minds,” the driver went on. “That crazy stuff from England about the drugs and whatnot. But it would take a whole lot more than that to get most kids to go off the deep end.”
This time Dylan purposely scrambled the words. He didn’t want to think about what the driver was saying. He didn’t want to think about anything.
They arrived late at night. Snow was falling fitfully, tiny ice flakes with no substance but only sting to them. The van drove through big gates with a booth just inside. The driver stopped and rolled down the window. Dylan was aware of voices, people deciding what to do with him. Another short drive down a tree-lined road, branches bare and scratchy against floodlights, and the van pulled in front of a stone building that looked like a medieval castle. The front doors had glass windows, which Dylan thought was odd; in movies, prisons never had any glass, only bars. Two men in dark green uniforms-guards, he guessed-came out of the doors and took him from the van. The guards didn’t have guns, but they had sticks and handcuffs on their belts.
For a long time he waited in a room with plastic chairs and green walls. The guards stayed with him. Finally Dylan was taken to a room where there was nothing on the walls but a mirror of wavy metal. The one chair was bolted to the floor, and the window had heavy wire mesh over it. There was a tiny eyeball window in the door that led into the hall so people could peek in at him anytime they wanted. Already faces had come and gone.
A zoo, he thought, and I’m the wild animal.
A while later a lady, maybe forty-older than his mom-came to the room. He guessed she was a doctor by the way she moved and smiled, like she was so powerful everybody would do what she wanted so she could just relax and enjoy it.
Dylan was sitting on one of two hospital beds with white covers and metal roll bars. His back was flat against the wall, and his legs stuck out over the edge into the narrow aisle between the beds.
He would have stood when she came into the room so she wouldn’t think he hadn’t been brought up right, but he was cuffed to the frame.
The doctor sat on the other bed. She crossed her legs and absently pulled the crease of her trousers straight. Most ladies didn’t wear pants, not at work anyway. Maybe lady doctors were different.
Her fingernails were short like a man’s. They looked strong. She looked strong all over: iron gray hair and wire-rim glasses, a square face and a chunky body. She wasn’t ugly, just solid.
“I’m Doctor Olson,” she said. “I work with the boys two days a week. I’m sure you are aware of the difficulties of finding a place for a boy your age. Most of our juvenile offenders are at least fourteen or fifteen. Some of the bigger boys are… Oh, Lord.”
When she said “Lord,” she took off her glasses and put her thumb on one temple and her fingertips on the other and looked into her hand as if God might be there and she wanted to shut out the light to get a better look at his tiny self.
After she had communed she went on: “I’m one of the on-call psychiatrists. The other, the one you will probably work with, is Dr. Kowalski. You will be housed here for the time being. When you’re ready we’ll move you in with the other boys. Are there any questions you’d like to ask me?”
Dylan meant to answer, to say no or ask something to be polite, but he didn’t.
She waited a moment or two then said, “Okay, then. I guess I’ll say goodnight. An orderly will be in to get those cuffs off of you. He’ll bring you a pair of pajamas and so forth. The kitchen is closed but, if you’re hungry, I’ve arranged for you to have a snack.” Again she waited. Dylan chased after sentence fragments, wanting to say something because she wanted him to, but it was as if he’d forgotten how to speak, how to catch a thought and make it into a sound.
Doctor Olson turned and left. A snick-clunk sound followed-the lock on the door being put into place.
Dylan was home.
For three days, Dylan stayed in the room with the observation window. Nobody told him but after a while he figured out he was in Drummond’s infirmary. A lot of the time they left the little hatch door on the peep hole open and he could look out. There was a desk with a nurse at it and twice he saw a guard bring a boy there to get bandages or aspirin or something. From what he could see there wasn’t any other room for sick people but the one he was in, and since he wasn’t sick he didn’t know why they were keeping him there. Since he didn’t care why, he never asked.
A guard took his clothes. That bothered him. Sitting with the covers over his legs felt weird, like he was sick and should be throwing up. He was afraid he’d have to stay like that and when he got up to pee, people could look in and see him running around in his underpants, but in an hour or so the same guard brought him blue jeans and a denim shirt. They were too big but not as bad as the jockey shorts. Plain, white cotton, they reached to his knees. The slot in the front he was supposed to use was so low it was easier to go over the top. He also got a pair of stiff leather shoes. This last offering was left by an “orderly.”
Even in his self-imposed hermitage of the mind, Dylan knew he wasn’t a proper orderly like on Dr. Kildare. For one thing he was fourteen or fifteen and they didn’t make kids orderlies in regular hospitals. For another thing he whispered, “Hey, blood brother,” and “How ya doin’, axe man,” and occasionally mimed chopping when none of the real people were around. That was a major tip-off. He also had a tattoo on his arm. A stupid one, just numbers, that looked like a spaz had done it with a ballpoint pen. Dylan guessed he was what in old movies was called a “trustee,” another prisoner who has earned certain privileges.
Dylan knew the taunts should bother him but by the time they permeated the blanket of fog he’d swaddled himself in they’d lost any power they might have had when they were still warm. The trustee told Dylan his name was Draco but the staff called him James. Dylan didn’t call him anything. Before he’d ended up in Drummond he would have liked to talk to Draco. Not that his mother would have let them be friends. Draco was what his parents called “a bad crowd” all by himself.
Draco kept up the chopping and saying stuff. Dylan watched without a lot of interest. Even when Draco pinched him once and, one time, held a plastic fork to his throat, Dylan couldn’t generate enough energy to speak.
Two days and six meals later, when Dr. Olson came and asked him how he was doing, he found himself answering. Dylan was as surprised as she was.
“Fine,” he said, and then laughed because there was no “fine” left in his universe. Dr. Olson looked worried, said some more things and left.
That night when Draco’d come with the supper tray and reached for the pudding cup to eat Dylan’s desert like he always did, smacking his lips and saying how good it was and too bad he didn’t get any, Dylan said, “Don’t.”
The voice that came out wasn’t his old voice, his boy’s voice; this one was flat and dull and cold, like a knife left out in winter. Draco squeaked like a big fat mouse and jumped a foot in the air. It was funny but Dylan didn’t laugh. For some reason he only laughed at sad things now. Then Draco put both hands in the air as if he was a bad guy and Dylan was Marshall Dillon. “Hey, man, no problem,” he said. “I’ve just been kidding around. No hard feelings.” He backed out of the room without taking his eyes off Dylan. Dylan was tempted to look in the mirror to see if he had changed into Butcher Boy so completely it showed on his face but he wasn’t up to looking in mirrors yet.
When Dr. Olson came again she said, “James says you’re taking more of an interest in things than you have been. That’s a good sign. That means you’re getting stronger.” She smiled and fiddled with one of her earrings. It was the kind Dylan’s mother used to wear, clipping on tight and leaving a red mark when it was taken off. “If it were a perfect world you would be going to a hospital to live, a place where you could be taken care of better.”
Dylan knew what she meant. An insane asylum. He’d never been to one, only seen them in the movies and on television. The thought of being locked up with crazy people jarred him out of his indifference.
“I want to stay here,” he said. She blinked at him from behind her glasses and he remembered that what he wanted didn’t matter any more. “I’m a danger to others,” he quoted the judge. “You have to keep me in jail.”
“Unfortunately, you’re going to get your wish,” the psychiatrist said. “There doesn’t seem to be a place for you in the system, so you will stay where you are for the time being. I’m also afraid we can’t let you have the sick bay for much longer. There are a hundred and seventy-three boys here at the moment and we have just these two beds that can be secured. You’ll be moved to the psychiatric ward, then if all goes well, to Ward C with the other boys.”
“You’re afraid I’ll chop them up into little pieces and flush them down the toilet,” Dylan interrupted.
“Not that,” she said quickly, but she was lying. That’s exactly what she thought. That’s what everybody thought. “Most of the boys here are here… for different reasons and we want to be able to take better care of you.”
“What kind of care of me?” he asked.
Dr. Olson sighed. She was tired, maybe tired of monstrous boys or maybe just because she worked other places besides Drummond. “We have discussed your case a lot,” she said.
“The ‘Royal We’?” Dylan asked because his mother used to joke, saying, “The Royal We,” and, though he’d never really understood what she meant, she’d always said it in a way that he knew it was supposed to be funny. In his new voice it didn’t sound funny at all.
“Sort of,” she said. “The care I’m talking about isn’t care for your body but for your mind. I have read your case, and I believe you really can’t remember what happened, just that it did happen.” She quit talking then and stared at him with that hungry-dog look like she was expecting him to throw her a bone. Dylan had no bones.
“Stop me if I’m chasing down the wrong rat hole,” she said and smiled again.
Dylan liked her for talking to him like he was a human being. “No, that’s my rat hole,” he said seriously. “I know it happened. Mack the Giant showed me.”
Dr. Olson’s face settled into an older mask; what he said made her think he should be put in the insane asylum, and he couldn’t find the words to tell her he wasn’t seeing things. Mack the Giant was a giant cop named Mack.
She took off her glasses and waved them back and forth the way his dad used to when he came in from the cold and his lenses steamed over. “Mack the Giant showed you,” she said carefully.
A flash memory of blood on the carpet, staining the walls, of Rich’s ashen face hit Dylan so hard he doubled over and clutched his middle as if he’d been struck by a baseball bat.
The hit passed. He straightened up.
“Are you alright? Do you want a glass of water?”
“I’m alright,” he said and suppressed the urge to laugh like he had at “fine.” He was a monster, but he wasn’t a crazy monster. She had to see that.
“What I think-and Dr. Kowalski, the other psychiatrist, agrees-is that you will not be able to begin healing until you can access those memories. That night, bad as it was, needs to be dealt with if you’re ever to be a whole boy again.”
A whole boy. Maybe a real boy like Pinocchio wanted to be. All he had to do was remember. That had been what the lawyers, the policemen, and the judge had wanted. They’d hammered at him to remember and gotten mad and mean when he didn’t.
Wouldn’t, they said. He wouldn’t remember.
If they made him remember, then he would go insane; he would be a crazy monster, a crazy-ass, bug-shit Butcher Boy. If he was crazy maybe he’d grab any old axe he found and start hacking people’s legs off. When he was sent to jail he’d thought the questioning would be over. He would have prayed for it to be over but that would have been blasphemous.
He started to cry.
“That’s a beginning,” Dr. Olson said kindly.
The beginning of what terrified him.
Richard turned fourteen in a private room at the Mayo Clinic. Nothing but the best for Richard Raines. Minnesota could not do enough for her injured children, her orphans, or her celebrities, and Richard was all three. Flowers and balloons from total strangers filled the room, their colors painfully bright in the diamond-hard winter sunlight. Out his second floor window was ice-blue sky, the bare branches of trees spider-webbing against it like cracks in the universe.
In the tradition of gout-ridden kings, Richard reigned propped up on three pillows, his leg swathed in bandages and immobilized. It had hurt like a son of a bitch at first but the drugs took care of that.
Took care of everything. The thought drifted through a warm morphine haze.
Kids at Rochester middle school thought they were big deals with a joint or two pinched from their big brothers and here he was mainlining morphine.
Rock star. Dylan would think it was cool.
A whisper of sound pulled his mind from the morphine summer. The skirt of a highly starched pink-and-white dress poked through the partly opened door like a tongue through lips. Richard leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
From beneath his lashes he watched as a doe-eyed face followed the skirt into his room. This candy striper was new, a girl not much older than he, and so pretty if they’d met in the school lunchroom she probably wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Letting herself in silently so as not to disturb the king, she fussed with the covers tented over his wound.
Slowly, he let his eyes drift open. “Could you get me a drink of water?” he whispered.
She refilled his water carafe then poured a glass and held the straw to his lips. The scent she wore was sophisticated. The side of her hand brushed softly against his cheek as she dabbed a drop prettily off his chin, leaning closer than she had to.
“Will you lose your leg?” she asked timidly.
“Maybe.” There was a dimming behind her eyes, a darker shadow pooling in the brown irises.
She was shallower than he’d thought. A one-legged boy couldn’t ski, skateboard, or whatever she thought was cool.
“Naw,” he amended truthfully. “I won’t lose it. Might have a limp is all; the doc says I lost a chunk of thigh muscle the size of a softball.” The doctor had actually said tennis ball but tennis sounded wimpy.
Her child-woman face softened in pity. It was an act. Since he could remember he had been watching people. His mom thought he was psychic but ESP wasn’t necessary to read the minds of ninety-nine percent of people or predict what they were going to do or say. They broadcast their thoughts for anybody paying attention to read.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Bad, real bad,” Richard said and grimaced as he remembered how cutting the pain had been in the beginning.
At the moment he felt terrific. Really terrific.
Acutely aware of how much he liked the sweet-dream sleepiness of the morphine dripping into his arm he promised himself he’d start telling the nurses and doctors that the pain was better. When he got out of the Mayo life was going to be hard enough without an addiction.
“Would you like me to rub it for you?” Candy smiled coyly.
The smile had probably been practiced, but Richard wasn’t sure. It might have been self-conscious rather than fake. It didn’t matter either way. Stupidity turned him off. Rub it? His leg was nearly sliced in half.
“That’s awful nice of you but I need to get some rest.” He closed his eyes and felt her pat his feet through the thin hospital coverlet before she tiptoed from the room, closing the door with exaggerated care.
As soon as he heard the latch click he opened his eyes again. His room looked like a florist shop: flowers, cards, stuffed bears, balloons. The outpouring of Minnesotans’ inherent kindness had manifested in cash as well as gifts. One of the doctors told him more than two hundred thousand dollars had been sent to the hospital for Richard Raines. The doctor imparted this important fact offhandedly, as if Richard was a child who wouldn’t know what to do with more than movie money.
Even if he could get the money, there was no way they were going to let a freshman in high school live on his own, even though he had a home. The Raines house had belonged to his grandparents; it should be paid for by now, or close to it. It wouldn’t matter; until he was eighteen he’d have to have a guardian. Social workers were having hushed conversations about where to put him, as if he were a towel they could fold and stick on this or that shelf. Their whispers were about as subtle as theatrical asides meant to be heard in the last row.
No one bothered to include him in these sotto voce chats.
An orphanage had been mentioned, but foster care was in the lead so far. People could dress foster care up any way they wanted but they did it for the money: more kids more money. And kids got shifted around. On the radio he’d heard this whole thing about foster kids being given suitcases as presents because at the drop of a hat they were forced to play musical houses.
Vondra’s parents, the Werners, were a possibility. Vondra would try to help, but Mr. Werner didn’t like him. Not that he said anything; Richard had read it behind the man’s eyes. That he’d been with his daughter in the middle of the night when her parents were out didn’t make it any better.
There was a nurse in the ER he remembered. He remembered everything about that night with surreal vividness. Weeks later it still seemed more immediate than the time he inhabited from moment to moment. He’d liked her. She was smart and quiet and gentle with him. Her name was Lackey, Sara-with-no-h Lackey. Nurse Lackey was in her forties and didn’t take care of herself: she was underweight, her hair was a mess, and her nails had been bitten down to pseudopods.
Depressed, he guessed.
The next time a nurse came into his room, a hefty woman with an honest face and strong hands, he said, “There was a nurse who was extra nice to me that… that night. A Miss Sara something. I’d sure like to thank her.”
Hefty beamed approval at him as she deftly set about changing the dressing on his thigh.
“Oh, yes, that’s a sad story, that one,” she said.
When the nurse finished her bandaging and her story, Richard asked if she thought Sara would come see him sometime. “I liked her voice.” Saying it he remembered how good it had felt to hear that warmth, how good it had felt to be the center of her attention when the world was screwed up.
For nearly three weeks not much happened except that Dylan was moved from the infirmary into the psych ward. It wasn’t like he’d imagined, with people thinking they were Napoleon and sneaking around at night smothering each other, but it was pretty bad. There were three other kids. One was always screaming because he saw spiders. After half a day of it Dylan was looking around for the spiders himself. A couple times he thought he felt them on him but he didn’t let that show. He didn’t want to be stuck in the psych ward forever.
Not that he deserved anything better; he wasn’t stupid enough to pray for it or pretend he had a right to get out. Still he didn’t want to spend his life with loonies. Another kid was a great big retard, big as a man. There was nothing else wrong with him that Dylan could see. He was stupid but he was nice enough as long as you didn’t try to touch his things. The third boy just sat and plucked at his eyebrows and eyelashes, or where they’d used to be; he was bald-eyed as a bunny and blinked rapidly. At first Dylan thought he was staring at him, but Carl didn’t stare at anybody; he just stared.
Dylan did his share of staring too. Out the windows mostly. Psych was on the third floor on the backside of the building. Outside nothing but snow-covered fields stretched all the way to the snow-white sky. Dylan put himself in the snow and numbed out as much as he could.
After a while, Dr. Olson decided he could go to classes with the sane kids and eat with them in the dining hall. Given that he shouldn’t feel happy or good anymore he felt guilty for being glad to be out of the nut ward. There wasn’t enough snow in Minnesota to numb him clear past boredom. It was so bad he was actually excited about going to the school they had for the inmates. He still spent nights with the crazies and had to shower and use the bathroom there.
Being crazy-Dylan supposed he was and it wouldn’t have mattered if he was as sane as apple pie, crazy was like cooties, highly contagious, and he was living at cootie central-got him picked on by the sane boys. They didn’t beat the crap out of him-not like he’d wanted Rich to that time-but they were always poking and pinching and shoving, making him drop his tray in the dining hall, pushing him so he fell down.
It was still better than doing nothing with the loonies. Being left alone with only his brain to play with was too weird. He’d think about the other kids and what they’d done and he’d think about himself and what he’d done, and then he’d think that they were humans and he wasn’t, that he was this other thing, this monster thing, and if he kept on like that he knew he’d be screaming about invisible spiders before long.
At first Draco was the worst. Then, after a while, he got tired of it and decided to be Dylan’s friend. “Don’t go thinking I like you,” he warned. “But, man, you’re like Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday, Jesse James. These sad fucks think they gun you down, they’re hot shit. More laughs fucking with them than fucking with you. So you’re this big axe murderer. Big deal. My bet is you did them in their sleep. Or somebody else did them and you took the rap. No way a little fart like you could get it up for forty whacks. You know about ‘forty whacks?’ Lizzy Whatsername slicing and dicing her folks? Worse kids than you been through Drummond. Me for one.”
Draco was always going on like that, like they were all big criminals. Except for Dylan, nobody much was. The other guys were in for stealing cars, or running away from home too many times, or shoplifting. One kid knifed another kid and a couple of older boys were in for armed robbery.
Draco was in for selling marijuana and then stealing the police car when they tried to arrest him. At least that’s what he said. Dylan suspected maybe the police car part was just something he liked to think he did.
After he started hanging around with Draco things got better.
Class was good too. Dylan liked school now. Looked forward to it. He pretended not to because crazy cooties got him in enough trouble. If he started doing teacher’s pet he’d get the crap beat out of him, Draco or no Draco.
English and history weren’t all that great-people could twist them and Dylan was scared of twisty. He’d gotten twisted and twisted and ended up in a psych ward in a jail and didn’t remember doing anything wrong. That meant he didn’t know when he might do it again. That’s why they wouldn’t let him sleep in Ward C. Nobody else knew when he was going to start hacking people up again either. Drummond slept better when Dylan was locked down for the night.
What he really liked was math. Outside, he’d hated it. Now he loved the order of it and that it was always the same. Nobody could twist it. A number stayed the same and if it was added to another number it always, always came out the same way.
Phil was the math teacher-he told the boys to call him Phil, not Mr. Maris-and he was part of why Dylan liked math best. For one thing Phil was young. Everybody but the inmates was old at Drummond, old and musty like the walls. Draco said Drummond was an elephant graveyard where old prison staffers came to die. Most of them didn’t want to be there any more than the boys they guarded did.
Phil wasn’t more than twenty-three or -four. He wore his hair long. It was light brown and curled on his collar and over his ears. Draco called him a hippy and laughed at Dylan because he didn’t know what that was.
Math and Phil gave Dylan a place to go outside his skull. Dylan’s mom would have called that a blessing. He got to thinking maybe monsters were blessed by some kind of monster god.
They weren’t.
At half-past ten in the morning a couple months after he’d gotten to Drummond, Dylan was called out of class by one of the guards, an old man who was scared of the bigger boys and made up for it on the littler ones.
Ten a.m. was math class. Dylan hated being taken out so he didn’t move as fast or look as meek as he usually did when the guards told him to do something. The old guy made him pay by herding him down the hall with a bitter monologue: “You really think you’re something don’t you you little psycho if you’d been a kid of mine by god you’d never have picked up any axe or I’d have shown you what for and don’t think I won’t do it now you get any kind of idea… ”
Dylan didn’t listen. None of the boys listened. Still the sourness of the man tainted the air. Drummond smelled old and cold. Under the pervasive odor of the benzene the janitors used was the reek of rancid fat, sweat, sauerkraut, farts and fear. The worst thing was that it didn’t smell like home, not like anybody’s home. At first the smell had made Dylan lonely and scared. Now he was okay with it. He was okay with Drummond. Where else could a kid like him be?
On the second floor, above the classrooms and below where the Ward C boys slept, a big hall had been cobbled up into a lot of small rooms with flimsy doors letting off a narrow hallway. Rat maze, the Ward C boys called it. The rooms didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, which was built of beams with this cobwebby chandelier made to look like thorny branches.
The guard told Dylan to stop outside the third door then shouldered him aside as if he might be thinking of rushing through and murdering whoever was inside. Acting like he’d just saved the world from the forces of evil, the guard rapped on the wood. Dylan couldn’t help but look at the billy club on the old guy’s belt; it was all but sticking in his face. Maybe he wanted Dylan to try to take it so he could beat on him, or spray him with Mace and play the hero.
Maybe he was just a stupid old man.
One day it would get him killed.
“Enter,” said a voice. Not “come in” or “just a minute,” but “enter,” like he was a king and they were his subjects.
The guard pushed open the door and said, “Got your nutcase for you, Doc.” He stood aside and Dylan walked past him into a little office. Three of the walls were plywood, painted white. On one there was a nondescript picture of a foggy landscape, no glass in the frame. Dylan knew it was bolted to the wall; a bunch of similar murky paintings were bolted around Drummond. The story was they’d been done by a warden’s wife and he’d put them up. Maybe they thought it would make the place seem less like what it was.
The other wall was of granite, like a castle from the movies. Against one of the plywood walls was a couch, not fancy leather but a faded cloth couch that had once been turquoise. A wing chair was beside it with a little round table at its arm. A single deep-set window let in a suggestion of the short winter day’s light.
A middle-aged man, trim and fit looking, with carefully combed hair and long thin fingers, sat in the room’s only chair. He had a short beard and sandy graying hair. His beard was red and looked as if it belonged on somebody else.
“I’m Dr. Kowalski,” he said and gestured to the couch.
Lying down would be too weird. Dylan perched on the edge of the sofa. The doctor looked at him for a long time-so long Dylan had to stop himself from fidgeting.
“So you’re the Butcher Boy,” the doctor said finally.
Butcher Boy.
Dylan had heard it before but for some reason this time the words made his brain skid forward and back. Time warped. For a second he was back in the courtroom in black and white and Chinese. Eleven years outside seemed as if they’d never happened and the months in juvie felt like all of his life. Life before rushed in, and then receded, and it shook him.
The doctor wanted to shake him; at least Dylan chose to believe that. If it wasn’t a trick to get him to respond in a certain way, then Dr. Kowalski was “one mean fuck,” as Draco would say. One who wanted to pry Dylan’s brain out and look at it under bright lights. Fear shuddered up. He tried not to let it show.
Rich wouldn’t let anybody see him scared.
“Yes, sir,” Dylan said. The man stared at him. Edges of the fake room wavered slightly like they’d done at the trial. “Butcher Boy,” Dylan said, in case that was what the doctor was waiting for him to admit. If the man didn’t start talking soon, Dylan was afraid he wouldn’t be able to understand him, that his brain would turn on him like it had with the lawyers. Survival instinct told him Dr. Kowalski wouldn’t deal well with that.
“And you don’t remember anything. That so?” the doctor said.
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. I don’t remember.” He did remember bits here and there but he knew they weren’t the bits Kowalski cared about. Besides, he didn’t think the doctor really wanted him to answer; he sounded like he had all the answers already and was waiting to spring them.
“I’m here to help you remember that night. I’ve worked with boys like you-men too. I wrote a book on a case of a woman who had blocked out drowning her infant daughter. Didn’t make the New York Times Best Seller List, but it sold well enough.” Dr. Kowalski smiled and waited.
Having no idea what the New York Times list was or whether it was bad or good that the book didn’t get on it, Dylan looked at the murky oil painting over the doctor’s chair so his eyeballs had some place to be.
“Do you believe that?” the doctor demanded.
Dylan didn’t know if he was asking if he believed he was there to help him or that his book had sold well enough. Confusion was growing up thick as brambles in a fairytale.
Tick, and tick, and tick, the doctor let more silence clock by. Dylan knew he should say something, remember something, but since he couldn’t he went as far into the murky picture as he could. The painting wasn’t laid out very well and it made him slide in his mind toward the trees on the left side. The warden’s wife wasn’t a very good artist, he decided.
“So, tell me about your dreams,” the psychiatrist said. He crossed his legs like a girl and leaned back in his chair.
Dylan came out of the painting with a twitch. The eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses were boring into him.
“Should I lay down or something?” Dylan asked. The sofa looked clean but it smelled of damp and carbolic.
“Do you want to lie down?”
The way he asked the question made it sound important. Not knowing whether he was supposed to want to lie down or not to want to lie down, or if the doctor would think he was going to kill people if he did the wrong thing, Dylan did nothing.
Dr. Kowalski sighed.
Nothing was clearly not the right thing to do, Dylan knew then, but it was too late to do anything about it.
“Tell me about your dreams,” the doctor repeated.
Usually Dylan dreamed a lot and vividly but as he cast back in his mind he couldn’t recall a single dream. It could have been the drugs they gave him at night, but he guessed it was because the doctor was being so screwy he could hardly think.
Kowalski nodded sagely. “You’re afraid to dream,” he said. “Your unconscious mind is afraid to let you relive the bloodshed.” He jotted something down on a little note pad.
Dylan flinched. A dream jerked loose from his brain. He had dreamed. A vivid dream. “I remember,” he said excitedly.
The doctor leaned forward, his eyes intense.
“I was outside,” Dylan said. “Me and Rich were playing a game or something and Mom called from the backdoor for us to come in. When we went in she was putting supper on the table and a dog was sitting at the table in a chair like a person and we all laughed.”
Doctor Kowalski waited, pursed his lips so his whiskers fanned out around his mouth, then leaned back again.
“That’s it,” Dylan said. “That’s all I remember.” The doctor didn’t believe him; he thought Dylan made up the dream to prove his unconscious mind or whatever wasn’t hiding the things that happened.
“Shall I lay down now?” Dylan asked desperately. Dr. Olson had been hinting he might get out of the psych ward soon and he needed to do one right thing before the psychiatrist pushed him down the rabbit hole and his head shut down.
“Do you want to?” the doctor asked disapprovingly. He was just asking; it didn’t mean anything now.
For a while longer the psychiatrist asked questions. They weren’t the kind of questions anybody should ask. He wanted to know how many bowel movements Dylan had every day and if he liked the way they smelled and if he touched them. When the hour was over, Dylan thought he might actually be glad to get back to the psych ward.
The guard didn’t come for him. Draco did.
“You get any good drugs?” Draco asked.
Dylan didn’t know he was supposed to but he didn’t want to seem like a dork. “Nothing good,” he said.
“You get, you share.”
“Sure.”
“You’re alright,” Draco said. They walked down the narrow fake hall where partitions chopped up the once gracious room. “You gotta get out of psych,” Draco said suddenly. “You stay in psych you’re gonna be crazy as a loon in no time. Seriously. They make you one crazy fuck in there. Get out.”
Dylan believed him. He could feel himself becoming one crazy fuck after just an hour with the psychiatrist. “How do I get out?” he asked.
Draco thought for a minute. “What you gotta do is act like you want to stay. You know, like you’re sane but you want the easy life, the extra food, the bigger space, like that. You got to ask for drugs, not like you need ’em but like you like ’em for the high. They don’t know squat; they don’t know those aren’t, like, recreational drugs, you know. Catch 22 man. You do that and they’ll put you in Ward C before you can say, ‘Lithium.’”
“Will I still have to talk to Dr. Kowalski?” Dylan asked.
“Nothing is going to get you loose from Dr. K. He’ll suck your brain out and use it for toilet paper.”
Dylan believed it. “I’m already a few squares low,” he confided and Draco laughed.
“This candy-assed shrink is going to duh-rug you, fill you so full of pills you aren’t going to know whether you’re saluting the flag or beating your meat.” Draco let out a whoop like this was good news.
“You’re so fucking crazy, we’re going to end up millionaires.”