Ronald “Butch” Dafoe. Killed six family members. 1974. Now this guy is one mean son of a bitch. You look at old Butch, and the rest of us seem like the boys next door. Six! I thought three was bad. Looks like I’m Snow White. Okay, I can sort of see doing it. Here’s old Butch kid. Dad is always whaling on him. Mom’s a doormat. His dad tells him not to take any shit off the kids at school but heaps shit on him at home. Heaps shit on the mom and the other kids. Yelling all the time. Huge fights. Four brothers and sisters. So Butch turns out to be a chip off the old block. He starts hitting back, and it works great. Gets him all this stuff, this boat, and his own room, and stuff. Dad kind of secretly respects him. I mean, he’s been preaching this Butchie’s whole life, right? Now, not only is Butch not getting the tar smacked out of him, but his dad is paying him to be cool. Big money, too. I can see where Butch might think he earned that money, what with getting whaled on and listening to screaming matches and whatever. But after he gets used to that for a while, he thinks, Hey, I could get more. These fucks owe me more. Way more. First thing is, he’s got to kill the old man. No biggie; he’s been hating the bastard forever. Then, probably Mom should bite the dust, too. She watched his dad beat up on him when he was little, so fuck her. The little kids. That’s harder. But why not? I mean, who is going to look after them? Not our Butch. Hell, he’s doing them a favor. Shoots them in their sleep. I think he’s sorry about the little kids. You know, like when Dad had to kill a kitten we had because it got sick and went blind, and he felt sad about that.
But he got over it.
Dr. Kowalski had grown old treating Dylan. A few years with Butcher Boy, and the psychiatrist’s sandy gray hair was thinning, the incongruous red beard flecked with dull white hairs.
Dylan had grown, if not wiser, then more cunning. He figured he’d learned more than Kowalski had. For one thing, he’d learned that Kowalski was not so much treating him-as if there were any treatment for boys who ran with axes-as exploiting him. He also realized that the thinning hair and graying beard had little to do with the fact that Dylan was a murderer, or even a poor tragic boy in juvie, and all to do with the fact that Dylan still wouldn’t remember.
As the doctor’s decline became more pronounced, he’d taken to looking at Dylan with piercing need. Every boy in Drummond knew that look. They saw it on the faces of the “girls” who wanted to love them and the users who wanted to fuck them. It was so sharp in the faces of the boys whose folks came to visit that it hurt to look at them. Gangs of kids stared hungry like that when he and Draco peddled the drugs they’d scored. When that kind of naked hunger manifested, Dylan’s hackles rose. Either the beast was fed or there was trouble.
In the ward, in the yard, trouble could be met with fists or knives. Fists and knives wouldn’t work with Kowalski.
They’d work, Dylan thought with a half smile. They’d just cost too much.
Kowalski was still lusting after his New York Times best seller. That first day Dylan hadn’t known if that was good or bad. Now he knew. It was life and death for Kowalski. Life was when people thought he was a big deal; death was shrinking delinquents in the middle of Piddlesquat, Minnesota.
The “hook,” Kowalski had told him in an unguarded moment, was when Dylan, like Kafka’s cockroach boy, had metamorphosed into a hideous beast. The climax would be when Dylan remembered his transformation and spewed it forth for the delectation of his brilliant and kindly doctor. Right there in Dylan Raines’s brain was fame and fortune. And the little psycho fuck wouldn’t fork it over.
Dylan smiled, slumped down until his butt was nearly off the couch and his head at a sharp angle to the backrest, widened his eyes, and stared vacuously at the psychiatrist.
Kowalski knew the Ward C boys called the warren where his office was located the Rat’s Maze. What he didn’t know was that he was their pet rat. They conducted experiments on him. The result of one such experiment, conducted over a period of six weeks with four Ward C boys, was eye movement. The conclusion was that narrowed eyes excited the doc-not sexual excitement, Dr. K. wasn’t AC/DC-but the way a cat gets excited when it sees a bird. The doctor saw a challenge and it goosed up his energy. Avoiding eye contact bored the shrink, and a bored head examiner was a bad thing. He’d start in with the do-you-smell-your-own-shit routine. The way to piss him off most effectively was the idiot stare. All the boys had perfected it.
Maybe Kowalski’s book should be about mental retardation brought on by psychoanalysis, Dylan thought.
He could have given Kowalski what he wanted, or a facsimile thereof. Under the guise of getting him to remember, he had been forced to study his crimes as assiduously as other boys his age were made to study English, science, and math. He knew exactly what he had done, how he had done it, how long it had taken, where the blood spatters were, and how many steps there were from one body to the next. There probably wasn’t a felon in America who knew as much about himself as Dylan did.
But he wouldn’t remember it.
He would remember his mom and dad, weekends at the lake cabin. He would remember school and his friends. His last best memory was of his mother’s lips pressed like butterfly wings against his forehead the night she died, the tiny gold cross falling from her robe onto his cheek, the fresh-out-of-the-dryer smell of her nightgown, how cool her hand felt when she held his chin and spooned the cherry-flavored flu medicine into his mouth, the tired smile as she said, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Pseudomedical brain battering had reduced those memories to dull, sepia-toned images. Since he wasn’t likely to be gathering a whole lot more warm fuzzy memories in the near future, it pissed Dylan off that the mental health professionals had pawed over what he had until they were threadbare.
Dylan could have told a hell of a good story, complete with adolescent angst and revelations to get Kowalski off his back, but there was no way he’d let the pompous self-serving fuck make a dime off of him. And he’d gotten to where he kind of enjoyed the game.
So Dylan idiot-stared and Kowalski sat, one knee crossed over the other, hands steepled, fingertips to his lips, pretending he could see through Dylan’s bones.
Dylan opened his eyes a fraction wider and cocked his head to one side. Kowalski recrossed his legs. There was a moth hole in his right trouser cuff. The left lens of his glasses was badly scratched.
Kowalski was in debt, broke, Dylan realized. Wednesdays and Saturdays the loser parents of loser JDs came to visit. Poverty oozed from their pores, leaked onto their clothes; they stank of it. Kowalski was stinking of it now.
Psychiatrists were rich; they didn’t go broke unless they were owned by something-gambling, coke, heroin.
Heroin had been the hot item in Ward C a few years back, but Dylan laid off the stuff. The first time it was offered him, he’d turned it down.
Draco asked, “Saving your virginity for the big house?”
Dylan missed Draco. He’d gotten out when Dylan was thirteen or fourteen, but they still heard from him occasionally. He was doing time in a California state prison for getting caught in a men’s room trying to peddle a dime bag to a cop.
Big-time drug dealer, going to “go ‘to the coast’ and sell coke to the stars.” Dylan smiled.
“I’m glad to see you’re in such a gay mood,” Kowalski snapped from his preshrink silence. He recrossed his legs and checked his watch-the signal that the session was to begin. “I won’t be able to come back to Drummond as often as I’d like,” he said in his reserved, we-both-know-I’m-God sort of way. “I have other commitments-a new job, better.”
Kowalski was lying.
In Drummond, lying wasn’t a sin; it was an art form. Guys in for more than a six-month vacation got to where they could tell when the shit was being shoveled. There was some natural talent nobody could see through. The retard Dylan had been in psych with was too stupid to know whether he was lying or not. Herman, a big Swede kid, dragged off the family farm for raping a ten-year-old girl-nobody could tell when Herman was lying. He’d learned it young, like a second language. Herman probably dreamed in lies.
Kowalski was an amateur.
“There’s no job,” Dylan said bluntly. “You screwed the pooch didn’t you?” Mostly he didn’t call people on their lies. What would be the point? He wasn’t sure why he’d done it this time. Maybe because Kowalski was so fucking full of himself. Whatever the reason, the instant it came out of his mouth Dylan knew he’d joined old Kowalski in the pooch-screwing department.
Kowalski hadn’t come to Drummond to bid his favorite psycho boy good-bye; he’d come to do something or not do it. Dylan’s mouth had just decided Kowalski to do it.
“We’ve gotten nowhere with your… amnesia,” the doctor said. He leaned back and the frayed cuff of his trouser rode up over his sock exposing a white, nearly hairless calf. “Given that our time is limited, we’re going to have to take a more aggressive tack.”
The last time Kowalski had taken an aggressive tack, about a zillion volts of electricity had been pumped through Dylan’s head. Talk about amnesia. After that, he’d had a hell of a time remembering his own name, let alone what happened when he was eleven.
Rich had put a stop to it. Dylan was just a kid; his brother wasn’t all that much older. Vondra Werner was still driving him. The Saturday after Kowalski strapped Dylan down and fried his brains, Rich came to see him like he did every Saturday.
Not wanting to be a pussy, Dylan tried to suck it up, not let his brother see what a mess he was. He thought he was pulling it off until Rich started yelling, “What did you do to my brother? What the fuck have you done to my brother?”
Draco said it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Dylan sitting flopped over the table, limp as a noodle, drooling and babbling, and Rich standing on his chair doing the avenging angel thing. After that Rich got his adopted mom, Sara, to lean on real doctors, and one leaned on a senator, or judge, or cop, or somebody, and Kowalski had backed down.
Until now.
“There’s a new experimental drug we’ve been having some success with,” Kowalski said. “It’s called lysergic acid diethylamide.” He paused as if to let the momentous cutting edge of his intellect crash into Dylan’s consciousness.
Dylan had dropped acid three or four times, once with his algebra teacher, Phil Maris. They’d lain on the floor of the math lab after lights out and watched formulas take wing and mate. The first couple times it made the pictures in his head of the things he built more vivid. The last time, though, numbers came alive-not in a good way, but like people were alive-with emotions, likes and dislikes. Dylan hated the rational world of mathematics infected with the stuff of humanity. After that he’d stuck pretty much to dope.
When a new kid, Purvis Something, was moved permanently to psych after dropping a hit of Window Pane, Dylan swore it off completely. His brain was nothing to fuck with. People learned that the hard way.
“Ell-ess-dee,” Kowalski said, playing Timothy Leary’s best pal.
“Cool,” Dylan said and again thought of Draco: You get, you share. If he got a chance, he’d score a few hits for pocket money.
“You seem to be looking forward to it. We shall see… ” the doctor said with more than a hint of malice. “I have cleared the remainder of the afternoon.”
Explaining that the drug had been formulated in a lab at the National Institute for Mental Health to be used for experimental purposes, Kowalski took a vial from his briefcase. There was no label on the glass container. Inside was a square of blue paper with a slight discoloration in the middle. Dylan had been medicated, overmedicated, and eternally messed with; he knew the rituals of medical protocol from the inside. Kowalski was bullshitting him. The hit had been bought on the street. It could be cut with anything-speed, Drano-whatever the cook thought would give more bang and save him a buck.
Kowalski hated him. Dylan read the certainty of it in the set of his mouth, the aggressive jut of the bearded jaw, as he plugged in a tape recorder and arranged the microphone on his desk.
Dylan was unimpressed. Most people hated him. Regular people would have to be crazy not to hate him. He slid down on the couch another six inches, his long legs, strong from ice hockey and Drummond’s stone stairways, taking up more room than Kowalski liked.
“Sit up,” the doctor ordered peevishly.
Dylan didn’t move. His idiot stare grew more vacuous.
Dr. Kowalski flipped the tape recorder on and held out the blue square of contaminated paper.
Dylan’s last acid trip hadn’t been all that great, but it hadn’t freaked him out. And though he remembered the look in Purvis Whatshisname’s eyes after he’d dropped and hit the wall-like something had reached in through his nose with red-hot tongs and tried to pull out his soul-he’d never been particularly scared of the stuff. Most of the guys did it, and, other than Purv, who was determined to go nuts one way or another, nobody seemed too busted up by it.
He was scared now, though, that was for damn sure. All gloved-up like he was handling nuclear waste, Kowalski was poking the blue square of paper at him on the end of a pair of tweezers he’d probably used to pull his nose hairs out that morning.
Street shit. Even that didn’t put the fear into him. It was Kowalski’s eyes. The doctor looked crazy, bug-shit, a kind of hungry, desperate crazy. The monkey on his back-the addiction, the need, the lust, the whatever-had been working the doctor over.
For half a second Dylan thought of refusing the acid, of getting up and running out. He was bigger than the doctor. Kowalski couldn’t stop him.
He couldn’t stop Kowalski. Doctors were gods at Drummond. They did what they wanted with the kids, whatever they wanted. Dylan pinched the paper from the tweezers and popped it in his mouth. What the hell? It had to be better than electroshock.
He dry-swallowed, smiled slowly, and said, “Thanks, Doc. The warden know you’re my drug dealer now?”
Kowalski sat down on the edge of his chair, hitched it a couple of inches closer to the couch, and leaned forward.
The doctor was out; the man on the chair was not a psychiatrist or a medical professional. He was scarcely even a man. He was a big fat zero waiting for something to come make him count, fill up the hole.
Welcome to monster world, Doc.
“You are going to fucking remember,” Kowalski said, the obscenity jarring not only because it was the first time Dylan had heard him use anything stronger than “heck” or “darn” but because the word was uttered with the same smooth, pseudocaring voice Kowalski used when he was shrinking kids in front of visitors.
“You are going to fucking remember every whack,” he said, then leaned back and waited.
“Eighty-one,” Dylan said.
“Is the LSD taking effect?” Kowalski checked his watch, as if he genuinely thought he could time street-drug reactions.
“Forty, done. Father, forty-one,” Dylan said to remind Kowalski of the Lizzy Borden poem.
“It’s starting,” the doctor said.
What a stupid fuck. Dylan could say or do anything he damn well pleased, and the fool would write it off to the acid. “Your beard’s on fire.”
“Ahh,” said Kowalski with satisfaction.
“You ever drop acid, Doc?”
“I… I have taken it experimentally.”
Kowalski was lying again. He wanted to seem cool for some reason, wanted to impress a teenage axe murderer. How pathetic was that?
“Good thing you got lab stuff. That street shit’s got some kinky side effects. A kid in detention over in St. Paul got hold of some. His brother said it was pure angel dust. This kid, he’s like Superman all of a sudden. Ripped the door off its hinges. Then ripped the face off a guard.”
Kowalski’s skin paled.
Be scared, you piece of shit, Dylan thought, and enjoyed his petty victory. Meanness and fear were the only kind of power left to Drummond’s inmates.
The doctor pushed his chair back the three inches he’d infringed upon.
“Okay, Dylan, we’ve got work to do. Today, we’re going to go back year by year until we get to the night of the murders. Are you ready to start?”
He was talking in the voice of a TV hypnotist, dreamy and smarmy. It didn’t strike Dylan as funny. It creeped him out. The whole thing, saying fuck, threatening-and there was no way it wasn’t a threat; people on the outside might mistake it but a kid in juvie, never-then acting like everything was normal, was majorly creeping Dylan out. Anxiety, the scalp-crawling, bone-breaking kind he’d learned in the courtroom, started pouring into him, freezing his blood.
Shit. Not on acid, he begged the cosmos. This crap on acid, and a guy could live in la-la land for good.
“You don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you,” Dylan said desperately.
The doctor had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s right,” he said soothingly, doing Dr. Kildare now instead of a hypnotist on Ed Sullivan.
Kowalski’s left eye snapped from gray to green, then flashed red. It was happening. “Jesus,” Dylan breathed and wondered how many hits were on that scrap of blue.
“Close your eyes,” the doctor crooned.
Dylan did, not because he was told to but to shut out the red eye and whatever else was to come. It didn’t help. The colors were in his mind.
“Go back.” Papers rustled like snakes uncoiling. One began to uncoil in Dylan’s skull. He didn’t see it; he felt it. Great scaling scales sliding over one another. Then he saw it: blue sparks in the black, sparks struck from the snake’s back as the huge metallic sheets of its skin slid over each other. He opened his eyes.
“Close,” Kowalski murmured.
“Fuck you.” The last letters of the word “you” trailed out of Dylan’s mouth in smoke rings and broke apart around the doctor’s face. Around the still-red left eye. Dylan closed his eyes. Better the snake within than the one without. Panic was growing inside him along with the snake. Eventually it would be too big for his cranium and the bones would shatter, splatter out.
“Good boy,” Kowalski said. More rustling. Then the doctor began to read from his notes. “You remember going to trial. Go there now. Go back to your trial. Are you there?”
“No.” Dylan forced his eyes open. Stared at the doctor’s eye. It cooled to gray. He was going to be alright.
Before the thought could stop the rising storm of panic, the psychiatrist’s face melted and reformed into that of the judge but wrong, pulpy; bits of it could fall off and drip onto the floor. “Shit,” Dylan whispered, then said, “I’m guilty,” because that was what he’d said when he was eleven.
Judge Kowalski smiled. The snake rustled and sparked. “Gooooo oooood,” the judge said with the o’s flowing out of his mouth in pinks and greens. “Go back to the night it happened.”
“Murder,” Dylan said. The word was red, blood red. It was such a cliché, he laughed. The wall behind Judge Kowalski, the one with the bad painting Dylan had grown familiar with during years on the couch, leaned in until it was almost touching Kowalski’s head. “Duck,” Dylan said.
“You’re seeing ducks?”
“I wasn’t.” But now two of them flitted past the corner of his eye.
“Forget the ducks.” The judge was annoyed. He looked around, maybe for a gavel. Grabbed up snake pages instead. They slithered through his hands, making blue sparks.
Spawn of the snake coiling in Dylan’s brain. The wall came closer. The door on the adjacent wall leaned in to meet it. Dylan put out his hands to hold them back.
“You had the flu the night before. Remember?” The judge sounded peevish, and the peeve scoured the judginess from Kowalski’s face. He was just Kowalski again.
“Goooooooood,” Dylan said and watched his own o’s flutter out and break like bubbles against the wall.
“Go back,” Kowalski intoned, remembering he was on television.
Dylan sank into the couch. The worn cushions rose up to embrace him, pushing his outstretched arms forward into the position of a man about to do a half gainer. “Diving in,” Dylan said and looked down. The floor rippled wetly. He wasn’t far gone enough to jump. “I don’t think I can fly yet,” he said seriously. To him this was a good sign.
“Go back,” the judge ordered. “Your mom put you to bed. She put you to bed. Can you see the bed?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dylan tried to explain. Acid wasn’t like that. It did what it did. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“Your mom put you to bed,” Judge Kowalski went on inexorably. “You had on”-rustle, spark, slither-“flannel pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them.”
Dylan remembered those pajamas. Really remembered them. He hadn’t thought about them, not ever, and now they were on him, soft, and warm, and smelling like home. Like soap and fresh air. Cowboys on horseback, little and perfect, galloped across his thighs and his chest. He didn’t so much see as feel them. Flannel and soft and purring. Ginger the cat, purring. She was on the bed. A ginger-colored cat, she purred like a machine gun rattling. He reached out and put his hand on her. No cat. Couch.
Rich started to laugh and Dylan turned, expecting to see him in the doorway pretending to die a million ways. The door pushed closer. The laughter was there, bubbling and going farther away. “Rich!” he shouted, wanting him to come back.
“Rich was there. Good.”
Dylan focused on the doctor. Colors were rampant, raging; he squinted through them. The doctor’s lips were moving as if he chewed the air. Words fell out in chunks. They didn’t make sense. Panic rushed into Dylan until he was so cold, he shook with it, his teeth banging together.
“Yergall ley wink ang deader mom.”
“Mom.” Dylan recognized that word. “Mom,” he said again with relief. “Momma.” The room filled with butterflies. Kowalski’s words turned from chunks to butterflies; the colors stopped attacking him and painted their wings. The cubical was filled with them. Dylan looked up. The stone ceiling thirty feet above was a swirl of beautiful butterflies; they lined the blackened rafters. Their wings left trails of faint color in the air.
Dylan laughed. “Momma,” he said again, and the word broke into more butterflies, and they smelled of warm cotton and cherries. “Momma!” he cried, and the butterflies came down and lit on his arms and his hands, his shoulders, his hair. Their wings brushed his forehead, warm butterfly kisses.
“What are you seeing?” The doctor’s words cut through the butterflies, killing those in their path.
“Butterflies. Don’t talk-killing them,” Dylan said.
“Killing? You are killing. Killing Mom?” the doctor demanded.
Dylan closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the saw-toothed words hack through the bloom of butterfly wings.
“The baby, you killed her first, didn’t you? She was trying to get to her mom, and you killed her. That was first, wasn’t it? That was it.”
Even with his eyes closed Dylan could see jaws of words chewing the lovely creatures from the air, spitting their still bodies onto the floor and the walls. He raised his hands to his eyes. He had forgotten he was covered with butterflies. They turned to paste under his palms, squished between his fingers. Their bodies ran warm and thick over his face and hands. “No!” he screamed and opened his eyes. His hands were red with blood. Blood covered his thighs and arms; his face was sticky with it, his hair stiff with blood. “It’s me! It’s me, I’m killing them,” he said, aghast.
“Killing your parents, your sister.” Kowalski’s words came into Dylan’s ears sharply, cutting their way in past eardrum to brain.
“No,” Dylan protested.
The last butterfly, saved because it had hidden in Dylan’s mouth, flew out on the word and lit on his cheek, and he was home, little and in bed, a kiss like a butterfly warm from the sun, brushing across his cheek. A gold cross on a fine chain caught the light. The sweet cherry taste of syrup was on his lips, but wrong, the kind of wrong that lets you know there’s medicine under it and the cherry is supposed to fool you.
Dylan wasn’t fooled. It’s hard to fool an eleven-year-old boy, but he’d taken the medicine with good humor to please his mother, and because he knew if he didn’t get over “the dread blue mucus” as his dad called the colds and flu that tormented Rochester ’s citizens from October until April, he wouldn’t be allowed to skate in Saturday’s hockey game.
The medicine made him sleepy. His mom sat on the edge of his bed and sang to him like she had when he was little. He let her, so as not to hurt her feelings. Her voice was okay, kind of deep and skritchy, but she couldn’t carry a tune for sour apples and just sort of made it up as she went along. It reminded him of the Japanese singer they had to listen to in class to prove nobody was still mad over a long-ago war. For some stupid reason, she decided to sing a second song, “Hush Little Baby.”
Singing it to Lena, who was two, was one thing, but his mom was slaughtering it and he was eleven for cripe’s sake. What was he supposed to do? Start sucking his thumb and stroking his blankie? He was about to tell her to go sing to Lena, or pester the dog, or do some other mom thing, when Rich stepped into the doorway and started “dying” all sorts of ways that cracked Dylan up: pulling up a noose and lolling out his tongue, shooting himself in the head and sliding down the door frame.
Every time Dylan laughed, his mother turned, but there Rich would be looking innocent, like he was just enjoying the music. Finally, she gave up, kissed him, and left.
That kiss was the last normal thing that happened to him. The last good thing. A warm butterfly on his cheek, someone who didn’t think he was a monster.
Next, there was yelling and bright lights, men with radios-cops. Sirens screamed from outside and more of them screamed in his head. His head was huge and broken, a piece of jagged glass slicing through his brain. Rich, limp and dead looking, his face the color of the zombies they laughed at in the old movies; but it wasn’t funny. Rich wasn’t goofing around. He was dying. One of the cops, a huge cop, like a giant with hands bigger than Dylan’s face, had Dylan by the back of the neck. He felt warm and wet and wondered if he’d wet the bed.
He’d pissed the bed and his parents had called the cops. Rich had fainted because he’d peed in the bed. He laughed because it was too weird to be real. When he did, the cop’s hand tightened until he thought his head would pop like a ripe pimple, his brains squirting out like puss. “You fuck bastard,” the cop shouted.
“Take it easy, Mack,” said somebody.
“You crazy fuck bastard,” the giant shouted, his face so close Dylan could smell the stale coffee on his breath and see the bristly hairs on his cheeks.
He raised his hands to push the man away, and they were red. Red-red and sticky. He was covered in the cherry medicine. Too red. Blood, he was covered in blood. His chest was smeared with it. The covers on his bed were soaking in blood. It was on his face and his arms. Vomit choked off the laugh.
“Let’s go take a peek at your handiwork, you sick little prick.”
“Mack, back off!”
But Mack didn’t. Dylan felt himself being pulled from the bed by the scruff of his neck like a cat. The pain in his head brought down black around the edges of his eyes, and his legs didn’t work right. The cop, Mack the Giant, was dragging him from the room. Two men had taken Rich into the hall and were doing things to his crotch, or that’s what it looked like.
“Is he dead?” Dylan managed.
“Not yet, you fuck,” said Mack, and Dylan wondered if they were going to kill him, if maybe they weren’t real cops but men dressed as cops who’d come to kill them. They’d killed Rich, and now Mack was going to take him someplace and kill him too. They must already have killed his parents, or his dad would have gotten his double-barreled shotgun from behind the dresser and blown them into tiny pieces.
“They’re dead,” he screamed to Rich, to get him to wake up and run or fight, to let him know there was no help coming. “Momma and daddy are dead!”
“Aren’t you a proud piece of shit,” the cop said and hauled him out of the bedroom and into the upstairs hallway. All the lights were on, glaring and cold, and there was a man with a camera that flashed and burned the back of Dylan’s eyes. “Look, you lousy fuck.” The cop pushed him to his hands and knees in the hallway.
Lena, little Lena, lay face down in the middle of the skinny rug that ran down the hall to protect the hardwood. Her head was in two pieces, like in the cartoons when somebody unzipped somebody else and they fell into halves.
“Happy?” Mack yelled and shook him. “Lots more to see.”
He was lifted by the neck again. His feet tried to keep up so the cop wouldn’t pull his head off. Mack, the cop giant, was taking him to his parents’ room. Dylan didn’t want to see what they’d done to his mom and dad. With a strength born of sheer terror, he began to kick, and bite, and scream. He did wet himself then and didn’t even care. The world had gone insane.
But it hadn’t. Dylan had.
“No!” he screamed.
“Look,” Kowalski insisted. “Look. I found it for you.”
Dylan looked hard through the falling colors, through the blood in his eyes, through the dark from the walls leaning too close. Kowalski had something across his knees. He was holding it in his lap like a child.
“Look what I brought for you,” the doctor said. “I brought this to help you remember. This is the axe. The one you used to hack your family to pieces. Look at it. Look at the axe. Remember the axe? Here it is. See the axe. I brought it for you.”
Dylan looked. The axe. Blood poured from his eyes; he could feel it hot on his face. Panic clanged in his ears so loud he couldn’t hear anything else. The axe lay there, alive, waiting. Dylan looked at Kowalski’s face. It changed again. No judge. A cop. Mack, the giant cop, the fake cop, the bastard cop who had dragged him from his bed. This time he wouldn’t be afraid. This time he wouldn’t stop. This time he would get them all.
With the power of the snake in his brain he rose from the couch on a clear, cold wave of revenge, rose like a god, shooting up. His hands caught the axe from Mack the Giant’s grasp. It weighed nothing. He was a man now, not a little boy. He was strong. The axe swung high over his head, the blade glittered. The butterflies were coming back. He could save them.
With an exultant cry he brought the blade down onto Mack the Giant’s skull.
Again and again Dylan chopped. The axe blade sang; the butterflies flashed brighter and faster. Dylan could feel the muscles working beneath his skin. If he looked, he could see them, see through them to the bones, hard and long, wielding the axe.
Mack, the giant cop, the fake, bastard, fuck cop, fell from the chair but wouldn’t die. Dylan swung harder, driving the blade through the crawling back, hacking where arm met shoulder, down again through spine and base of skull.
Still, the man crawled, scuttling crablike, making for imagined safety beneath the desk. Dylan followed, his legs strong now, not the skinny pins of a little boy. The floor shuddered with each mighty step, and Dylan laughed. This time Mack wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t drag Dylan down the hall and show off his grisly work. With Mack dead, the butterflies would be safe. Everybody would be safe.
The last of the cop disappeared beneath the old battered metal desk, his feet tucking up inside like a kid hiding from his brother, like the Wicked Witch’s toes curling under Dorothy’s house. Axe held loosely in his right hand, Dylan grabbed the edge of the desk with his left and heaved. His strength was a hundredfold. The heavy metal desk rose up and smashed against the wall. The murky painting broke loose and fell.
Again, Dylan raised the blade.
“There is no axe! There is no axe! The axe was a joke. There is nothing in your hands! Guard! Guard! Help! There is no axe. Your hands are empty. Jesus! Help me-somebody help me. Guard!”
The curled thing on the floor, the cowering coil of flesh, screamed these words, had been screaming these words. Noise became language; language became English and began to make sense.
“Your hands are empty, you fucking psycho. There is no axe!”
Dylan brought his hands down from over his head. He held nothing. Nothing. His fingers curled around empty air. He stared down through where the axe handle had been to the man at his feet. The cop was gone. Mack the Giant was Kowalski. Nobody was dead. Nobody but his family. And the butterflies.
Dylan shut down so hard and fast he never even felt himself falling.
He came to slowly, nausea rising out of the depths to meet a shrieking headache. His mouth was sour with bile and the faint taste of decay heavy sedatives leave behind. He twitched, wanting to raise his hand to scrub the cobwebs from his face. His arms were strapped down. Dylan knew the feel of them; leather cuffs lined with sheepskin and chained to the bed. Kowalski favored them for shock therapy.
For a hellish heartbeat, Dylan thought he was there for that purpose, that any minute the volts would rage through his brain, ripping thoughts and memories out by the roots.
If it hadn’t already happened.
Then he remembered the acid: the acid, and the axe, and the butterflies. He couldn’t remember if he’d killed Kowalski or not.
But then he wouldn’t remember, would he?
“Fuck,” he groaned. Whether Kowalski still breathed or not didn’t change the fact that he was still alive. His throat was so dry he could scarcely swallow, and his bladder felt full to bursting.
“Hey,” he croaked. He started to turn his head but it hurt too much to move. “Hey!” he shouted again after a moment. “I gotta take a piss.”
That brought an orderly running. They hated like hell to clean up piss.
They hated like hell to do anything for the inmates.
Dylan listened to the shuffle of rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. He was in the psych ward. It was the only place other than the infirmary where they used the leather and sheepskin cuffs. After Kowalski had fried his brain, he’d woken up here. Even without the cuffs Dylan would have known where he was without bothering to open his eyes. The psych ward had a distinctive odor. The usual smells of bodily effluvia and pungent cleansers were there, as was the stink of stale food and medicines, but added to that familiar brew was a scent Dylan had identified in his mind as hopelessness. The odor, slightly like that of rank earth, came into the brain as a low note into the ears-dust dropping into a place where there was no wind to blow it away. Breathing the mixture made it hard to believe the sun shone anywhere on Earth, that all cats did not eat their kittens, and that there passed a single parade unrained on.
“Hey!” Dylan called again.
“Keep your pants on,” came a bored voice. “I’m coming.” It was Clyde.
That was good. Clyde was okay. He was old, slow and stupid, but he wasn’t full of hate. In Dylan’s world that qualified a person for near sainthood.
“You going to go chopping me up with an invisible axe if I take you to the toilet?” Clyde asked, as he undid the cuffs. Dylan guessed the orderly was under orders to have him use the bedpan. But that would mean Clyde would have to wash it. Grateful for the old man’s laziness and the shred of salvaged dignity, Dylan assured him he would not chop him to pieces but, indeed, would give him an invisible twenty-dollar bill if he could close the bathroom door.
“No dice.”
Dylan had only asked to be asking for something. Since he’d been put away he’d done nothing in private, including dream. Sometimes he wondered if, when he got out, he’d need an audience to get himself to take a dump.
Clyde held open the door to the little toilet off the recovery room and Dylan brushed by him to step inside. Contact with the old man was alarming. The sensation of life that close was too much stimulus. Inside, Dylan had the burnt-out-hole feeling a bad trip left.
Clyde had to steady him so he could hit the john. As they’d done when he was tripping, the walls wavered and leaned-the acid was still in his system-but now, added to it, was whatever they’d given him to bring him down, so the wavering and leaning was in slow motion. He kept jerking as if he were toppling over, only to find that he was still on the level; it was the walls that were sneaking out.
“That was some bad shit,” Dylan said in hopes his own voice would make him seem more like himself to himself.
“Bad as in baaaaad, meaning good, or bad as in bad, meaning bad?” Clyde asked seriously. The inmates ragged him because of his desire to keep abreast of the current slang.
“Bad, as in shit,” Dylan said and dropped the skirt of his hospital gown.
“Ah,” Clyde said.
Through the skin on Clyde ’s bald head, Dylan could see the gears in his brain working that one over. An impulse close to kindness-a sensation pretty much alien to Dylan-hit, and he wanted to explain but couldn’t; he’d forgotten whatever the hell they were talking about.
As Clyde helped him get back into the bed without toppling onto it face first, Dylan chanced the question he’d been avoiding since resuming this twisted brand of consciousness: “Did I kill anybody?”
“Nobody that matters,” Clyde said.
A stab of fear so visceral it caused him to clutch at his gut flashed through him. Clyde saw it. “No, kid, you didn’t kill anybody. You didn’t kill anybody at all.”
Relieved, but still shaking, Dylan lay back on the pillows. “You have to cuff me again?”
“I got to.”
Dylan put his arms in the leather cuffs, palm up so Clyde could find the buckles more easily. “Is Dr. Kowalski okay?”
The orderly chuckled, a whispery winter leaf sound. “Nope. The warden threw his scrawny ass out in the snow. Fired him. Warden Cole doesn’t hold with that kind of thing, not without the proper whatnot. Like he’s always saying.”
Clyde didn’t have to voice it; Dylan had heard the warden on the subject a number of times. In juvie, it was surprising how many experts wanted to use the inmates-all in the name of helping them, of course.
“These are not guinea pigs,” the warden was fond of saying. “They are boys. Real live boys.”
If Pinocchio had known what it was like, he wouldn’t have been so hot to trot on the real-live-boy thing, Dylan thought as he drifted back into the black drug place that sufficed for sleep.
When he woke again, he wasn’t alone. It was full dark outside, and a single lamp burned on the little table bolted to the floor by the hall door. Two hands held onto his right wrist. He opened his eyes the barest slit. Phil Maris, his algebra teacher, was holding his wrist; his head was bowed as if in prayer. Phil was slender and short, maybe five-eight. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail. The warden let him get by with it because, under the radical trappings, Phil was a good, solid, Midwestern boy and an excellent teacher. Dylan closed his eyes and let himself enjoy the comfort of the man’s touch. Phil was nearly thirty and still unmarried, but he wasn’t queer. You didn’t spend four years in Drummond without figuring out who wanted to jump your bones. Phil was as straight as they came.
“I am so sorry, man.” Phil had sensed Dylan was awake.
“He mind-fucked me bad,” Dylan said, and was shamed by the nearness of tears in his voice.
“Hey, man, you know better than that.”
Phil never let the kids use that kind of language in his presence. He said four-letter words only served to let others know you were too stupid to come up with something better suited to human discourse.
“I’m sorry about the acid,” Phil went on. “I never should have dropped with you. I don’t do that stuff anymore. I’ve seen too many burnouts.”
“If I hadn’t dropped with you, I would never have found my way back from this trip,” Dylan said truthfully. “Kowalski, Doctor Kowalski, was taking me some bad places. Real bad places.”
“He said you flipped out and tried to kill him.”
“I guess.” Kowalski would have told them what he thought would get him off the hook. Dylan didn’t bother to defend himself. Matricide, patricide, killer of little girls versus The Doctor; nobody would believe him.
“Promise me you won’t do it again.”
“Flip out?”
“Drop acid.”
Phil asked Dylan for the promise as if he thought Dylan would keep it. Dylan promised. He would keep it. Not only because he’d been offered the chance but because the acid had pushed him too close to the edge.
“Jesus,” Phil said, and dropped his head as if talking to the man himself. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”
Dylan said nothing. Nobody could get him out of Drummond. From here, he went to the state pen. Still, he appreciated the sentiment.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. Dylan was watching the walls. For the most part they were staying upright. There were things at the rim of his consciousness, nasty acid things, but they were not coming forward at the moment.
There’d be flashbacks from this one. He could feel them like storms building just over the mountains of his mind.
“Dylan, you’re a good kid. A smart kid. In here, you’ll end up garbage. No kidding. Garbage. If you don’t fight like a panther the doctors will make you crazy, or the crazies will make you like them. These boys-most of these boys-never had a chance. They lie because they have no idea what the truth is. They steal because they can’t picture tomorrow, so what the heck, take what you want today. You could be different, but you’ve got to get out. You’ve got to have a place to go that’s sane.
“A safe place,” Phil said. “Are you up to building?” Phil taught all the math sciences: algebra, trig, geometry, calculus. Trigonometry was his favorite, and he often set Dylan to building something in his mind. That skill had been the foundation of the walls he’d made to contain his evil.
“I’ve got a safe place,” Dylan said. Phil was the only one he’d told about the fortress in his head where the beast was caged.
“No, man, a beautiful place, a good place. A garden maybe. Yeah, a garden.”
Dylan had never considered a place of peace, of beauty. The idea warmed him and, in Drummond, in January, the cold bones of winter broke brittle in the soul.
“I don’t know how to… ” he began and faltered because the tears wanted to come back into his voice. When he’d frozen them, he went on. “I mean, shit, man, what do I know about gardens?” What did he know about beauty, was what he’d been going to say, but it sounded like such bullshit in his brain he didn’t.
“We’ll do it from pictures. How hard is that? Come on, man. Do it. You got to do it or you’ll die here,” Phil pleaded. “We start with dirt. Jeez, man, you know dirt, don’t you?”
“Dirt.” Dylan closed his eyes to please his friend and teacher. He and Phil picked a place with gentle rolling hills, like those that could be seen from the third-floor windows. They laid out a wandering path. That was enough; it was a start.
The door opened, and a guard stuck his head in. “Got a visitor.” Dylan returned from the survey of his interior garden. Visitors were never allowed in any deeper than the reception area.
Surprises in Drummond were not a good thing.
This one was. Rich pushed in behind the guard. Time was screwed by acid, but it seemed to Dylan as if he stood too long staring at him and Phil. He felt the warmth of Phil’s hands leave his wrist and, in the drug residue, he saw the warmth flit away, gold and fragile.
“You two look cozy,” Rich said with a smile.
“Hey, brother,” Dylan said. “This is Phil, my math teacher. I’ve told you about him.”
“Yeah.” Rich shook hands with Phil Maris and took his place by Dylan’s bedside.
The math teacher stood awkwardly for a second, then left with a “Later, Dylan.”
“Phil’s a good guy,” Dylan said. “He’s about all that keeps this place from being hell.”
“I’m glad you have somebody you can talk to,” Rich said, but he didn’t seem all that thrilled. “How you doing, brother? One of the guys bribed a guard and called me. I had to raise holy hell to get in. Sara pulled some serious strings. They manage to completely fry what little brain you’ve got?”
“’Fraid so,” Dylan said. “Goddamn fucking weird. Kowalski’s crazier than the kids he works on.”
“No shit. The warden said he’s history.”
Acid residue was turning the stain patterns old leaks had left on the ceiling into ugly things. Dylan closed his eyes. The garden he and Phil had been planning appeared, rolling hills, the serpentine path they’d laid out, marked with stakes, each tied with orange surveyor’s tape. Dirt.
“I love old Phil,” he said, the sedatives overlaying the LSD slurring his words.
“Yeah?”
Rich, the room, the cuffs slid away. Dylan held out his hand, a shovel came into it, and he began to dig. He’d plant butterfly bushes so they would come back.
“I love Phil.”
Dylan passed out after that. Richard watched his eyes. He was dreaming, the eyeballs twitching under the lids. “Brother,” Richard said, then louder, “Dyl!” but got no response. Richard had never dropped acid, didn’t touch pot, and drank sparingly; drugs weren’t what got him high.
“You got to clean up your act,” he said affectionately to his brother’s inert form. “What kind of creep gives a sixteen-year-old kid LSD? I should have gotten the bastard fired when he tried to electrocute you. Fuck.” Richard turned from where his brother lay in uneasy sleep and crossed to the window. It was dark out, the heavy wire mesh dulling even the searchlights around Drummond.
“What kind of creeps give an eleven-year-old kid seventeen years in prison?” he whispered. Dylan could be locked up until he was twenty-eight. He looked back at his brother, pale and sweating under the room’s single light. What kind of a man would Dylan be by then?
“You going to be a drug addict, brother? Go with the gangs when you get to the big house? You can’t do that to me.” If juvie had changed Dylan, Richard did not want to see what the state pen would do to him.
Dylan’s hands were moving spasmodically in the padded cuffs and there was a slight smile on his face.
Dreaming of old Phil?
The thought soured Richard’s already dark mood.
It was a hell of a long drive to Drummond from Rochester, and he’d had to cut school to do it. Not that he gave a damn about school. He’d surpassed those morons when he was in eighth grade. And that was just the teachers. He’d been born smarter than the pimply fools he sat in homeroom with. He maintained a 4.0 average just to let them know he could.
“Brother,” he tried again, but Dylan was still in Never Never Land. “I drive four hours, and you pass out on me. What a deal.” Dylan’s hand, palm up where it threaded through the restraints, convulsed, the fingers grasping. Richard took it between his own. Flesh on flesh was not a sensation he usually enjoyed, but he did with Dylan. Maybe because he was family.
His brother’s hand was rich with life. Richard felt it coursing under the skin, touching up against his own life with such force the two flowed together. He could feel the acid burn leaking into his blood, the dulling of the sedatives blanketing his thoughts. He didn’t remember being this close to his brother when they were kids. The whole power thing between parents and children worked against it. The night of the killings something had happened. Their blood had mixed on the blade of the axe and they’d become more than brothers-they’d become blood.
Richard took back his hand. “Got to quit the drugs, brother. They’re killing me.” He laughed, then said, “I’m not kidding.” He leaned back and stretched his legs. He was six feet even in his stocking feet, taller than Dylan by two inches, though he doubted that would last. Dylan had a couple years to catch up.
Richard had fought against sending Dylan to Drummond, but, fourteen and wounded, no way was he effective. In hindsight, Drummond was probably the right choice. He’d been too naïve to realize after the killings that Dylan would probably have been beaten to death by the good citizens of Rochester if he hadn’t been locked up. They paid lip service to the tragedy of his extreme youth, but they were scared to death of him. Scared their own little boys and girls would flip out some night and start butchering the family.
Drummond was giving Dylan a better education than he would have gotten at the jail in Rochester -as good as he would have gotten in public school. The warden was a cutting-edge kind of guy. Until he’d let a berserk psychiatrist mess with Dylan’s brain a second time, Richard had been cool with him.
The state penitentiary was going to be a different ballgame. Richard had heard stories of what happened to guys in the pen. Dylan said it wasn’t a problem in juvie, that there were “girls”-boys who were into it-and they took the pressure off. In the penitentiary, rape wasn’t about sex. Sex wasn’t about sex; it was about dominance. Richard knew that instinctually. The thought of anybody touching his brother made his skin clammy. For a miserable heartbeat he could feel the rape inside of himself.
“Shit,” he said to banish the visceral image. “Dylan! Wake up, man. Talk to me!”
Dreaming his dreams, Dylan slept on.
Richard settled back into his slouch. Four and a half years had passed since his brother was locked up. Richard was old enough to get custody of him as a minor, if he was free and if Sara would vouch for him. Sara was a nurse. That was about as solid as a citizen could get. She wouldn’t like it; Dylan frightened her.
I would be my brother’s keeper, he thought.
The door behind him creaked open. “Hey, man, give us a few more… ” Richard stopped. It wasn’t the guard; it was the math teacher.
Good old Phil.
“Sorry,” Phil said. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“Where else would I be?”
Phil didn’t answer that. He pulled up a second chair and sat too close, studying Dylan’s face. “Rest will do him good,” he said.
“Yeah.”
For a minute they sat in silence. Richard waited for the fool to go and got the feeling Phil was waiting for the same thing. It pissed him off. Good old Phil could wait until hell froze over.
“Dylan ever talk to you about that night?” Phil asked.
“He doesn’t remember it,” Richard said coldly. “I nearly bashed his brains out with an axe.”
“So they tell me.”
Richard didn’t like the math teacher’s tone.
“I’ve seen your brother nearly every day for four years. Dylan’s a good kid.”
“For a killer,” Richard said.
Phil looked at him hard.
Richard said nothing.
Phil kept staring at him. “You don’t live with a kid for four years without getting to know him.”
Phil, good old Phil, was heading toward something. Richard watched him warily.
The hippy hair, the I’m-your-best-friend note he took with Dylan, what kind of teacher was that? “What are you getting at?” he asked.
“Long drive isn’t it? Four hours or something?”
“Something like that.”
“Never miss a visit, do you?”
“You have a problem with that?” This guy was getting on his nerves in a big way. “I’ve got a good barber I can recommend,” Richard said.
Phil ignored the cheap shot. Rose above it, Richard thought acidly.
“Eight hours round-trip twice a week. Lot of time and energy. Most kids your age wouldn’t do that.” Phil’s pupils widened slightly as if he wanted to look past Richard’s eye sockets and into his mind. “Why do you?”
“Because he’s my brother,” he snapped. “What are you getting at?”
“Nothing, man, just talking is all.” He stood up. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ll look after your brother.”
He left.
Goddamn stupid fuck, who did he think he was talking to? “Fucking cunt,” Richard whispered. “Guard!”
An old man in a gray uniform stuck his head in the door. “We’re counselors now, didn’t you know that boy?” The old guy grinned, but Richard wasn’t in the mood.
“I have to see the warden.”
“Warden’s gone home. Having his supper about now, I expect.”
“I don’t care if he’s having his goddamn hair done, I need to see him. Now.”
The guard looked uncertain, deciding whether Richard’s rage or tearing the warden away from his dinner would go hardest on him.
“The warden will want to hear what I have to tell him,” Richard said. “Trust me on that. And trust me, if you’re the one makes him hear it later rather than sooner, you’re going to be out of a job.”
The guard blinked then. “Okay, kid. You win. Come with me.”
Richard left without saying good-bye to his brother.