Cell: A Novel (29 page)

He heard Alice give a choked cry of horror, but hardly noticed. Feeling like a passenger inside his own body, Clay walked to the desk and looked at the sheet of paper that rested on the blotter. Although it was stained with blood, he could make out the words on it; the Head’s cursive had been fine and clear. Old-school to the end, Jordan might have said.

aliene    geisteskrank

insano

elnebajos   vansinnig   fou

     atamagaokashii   gek   dolzinnig

hullu

gila

meschuge   nebun

dement

 
Clay spoke nothing but English and a little high school French, but he knew well enough what this was, and what it meant. The Raggedy Man wanted them to go, and he knew somehow that Headmaster Ardai was too old and too arthritic to go with them. So he had been made to sit at his desk and write the word for
insane
in fourteen different languages. And when he was done, he had been made to plunge the tip of the heavy fountain pen with which he had written into his right eye and from there into the clever old brain behind it.

“They made him kill himself, didn’t they?” Alice asked in a breaking voice. “Why him and not us?
Why him and not us? What do they want?”

Clay thought of the gesture the Raggedy Man had made toward Academy Avenue—Academy Avenue, which was also New Hampshire Route 102. The phone-crazies who were no longer exactly crazy—or were crazy in some brand-new way—wanted them on the road again. Beyond that he had no idea, and maybe that was good. Maybe that was all for the best. Maybe that was a mercy.

FADING ROSES, 

THIS GARDEN’S OVER

1

There were half a dozen fine linen tablecloths in a cabinet at the end of the back hallway, and one of these served as Headmaster Ardai’s shroud. Alice volunteered to sew it shut, then collapsed in tears when either her needlework or her nerve did not prove equal to such finality. Tom took over, pulling the tablecloth taut, doubling the seam, and sewing it closed in quick, almost professional overhand strokes. Clay thought it was like watching a boxer work an invisible light bag with his right hand.

“Don’t make jokes,” Tom said without looking up. “I appreciate what you did upstairs—I never could have done that—but I can’t take a single joke right now, not even of the inoffensive
Will and Grace
variety. I’m barely holding myself together.”

All right,“ Clay said. Joking was the farthest thing from his mind. As for what he had done upstairs… well, the pen had to be removed from the Head’s eye. No way were they going to leave that in. So Clay had taken care of it, looking away into the corner of the room as he wrenched it free, trying not to think about what he was doing or why it was stuck so fucking tight, and mostly he had succeeded in not thinking, but the pen had made a grinding sound against the bone of the old man’s eyesocket when it finally let go, and there had been a loose, gobbety plopping sound as something fell from the bent tip of the pen’s steel nib onto the blotter. He thought he would remember those sounds forever, but he had succeeded in getting the damn thing out, and that was the important thing.

Outside, nearly a thousand phone-crazies stood on the lawn between the smoking ruins of the soccer field and Cheatham Lodge. They stood there most of the afternoon. Then, around five o’clock, they flocked silently off in the direction of downtown Gaiten. Clay and Tom carried the Head’s shrouded body down the back stairs and put it on the back porch. The four survivors gathered in the kitchen and ate the meal they had taken to calling breakfast as the shadows began to draw long outside.

Jordan ate surprisingly well. His color was high and his speech was animated. It consisted of reminiscences of his life at Gaiten Academy, and the influence Headmaster Ardai had had on the heart and mind of a friendless, introverted computer geek from Madison, Wisconsin. The brilliant lucidity of the boy’s recollections made Clay increasingly uncomfortable, and when he caught first Alice’s eyes and then Tom’s, he saw they felt the same. Jordan’s mind was tottering, but it was hard to know what to do about that; they could hardly send him to a psychiatrist.

At some point, after full dark, Tom suggested that Jordan should rest. Jordan said he would, but not until they had buried the Head. They could put him in the garden behind the Lodge, he said. He told them the Head had called the little vegetable patch his “victory garden,” although he had never told Jordan why.

“That’s the place,” Jordan said, smiling. His cheeks now flamed with color. His eyes, deep in their bruised sockets, sparkled with what could have been inspiration, good cheer, madness, or all three. “Not only is the ground soft, it’s the place he always liked the best… outside, I mean. So what do you say?
They’re
gone, they still don’t come out at night, that hasn’t changed, and we can use the gas lanterns to dig by. What do you say?”

After consideration, Tom said, “Are there shovels?”

“You bet, in the gardening shed. We don’t even need to go up to the greenhouses.” And Jordan actually laughed.

“Let’s do it,” Alice said. “Let’s bury him and have done with it.”

“And you’ll rest afterwards,” Clay said, looking at Jordan.

“Sure, sure!” Jordan cried impatiently. He got up from his chair and began to pace around the room. “Come on, you guys!” As if he were trying to get up a game of tag.

So they dug the grave in the Head’s garden behind the Lodge and buried him among the beans and tomatoes. Tom and Clay lowered the shrouded form into the hole, which was about three feet deep. The exercise kept them warm, and only when they stopped did they notice the night had grown cold, almost frosty. The stars were brilliant overhead, but a heavy ground-mist was rolling up the Slope. Academy Avenue was already submerged in that rising tide of white; only the steeply slanted roofs of the biggest old houses down there broke its surface.

“I wish someone knew some good poetry,” Jordan said. His cheeks were redder than ever, but his eyes had receded into circular caves and he was shivering in spite of the two sweaters he was wearing. His breath came out in little puffs. “The Head loved poetry, he thought that stuff was the shit. He was…” Jordan’s voice, which had been strangely gay all night, finally broke. “He was so
totally
old-school.”

Alice folded him against her. Jordan struggled, then gave in.

“Tell you what,” Tom said, “let’s cover him up nice—cover him against the cold—and then I’ll give him some poetry. Would that be okay?”

“Do you really know some?”

“I really do,” Tom said.

“You’re so smart, Tom. Thank you.” And Jordan smiled at him with weary, horrible gratitude.

Filling in the grave was quick, although in the end they had to borrow some earth from the garden’s nether parts to bring it up to dead level. By the time they were finished, Clay was sweating again and he could smell himself. It had been a long time between showers.

Alice had tried to keep Jordan from helping, but he broke free of her and pitched in, using his bare hands to toss earth into the hole. By the time Clay finished tamping the ground with the flat of his spade, the boy was glassy-eyed with exhaustion, all but reeling on his feet like a drunk.

Nevertheless, he looked at Tom. “Go ahead. You promised.” Clay almost expected him to add,
And make it good, señor, or I weel put a boolet in you,
like a homicidal bandido in a Sam Peckinpah western.

Tom stepped to one end of the grave—Clay thought it was the top, but in his weariness could no longer remember. He could not even remember for sure if the Head’s first name had been Charles or Robert. Runners of mist curled around Tom’s feet and ankles, twined among the dead beanstalks. He removed his baseball cap, and Alice took off hers. Clay reached for his own and remembered he wasn’t wearing one.

“That’s right!” Jordan cried. He was smiling, frantic with understanding. “Hats off! Hats off to the Head!” He was bareheaded himself, but mimed taking a hat off just the same—taking it off and flinging it into the air—and Clay once more found himself fearing for the boy’s sanity. “Now the poem! Come on, Tom!”

“All right,” Tom said, “but you have to be quiet. Show respect.”

Jordan laid a finger across his lips to show he understood, and Clay saw by the brokenhearted eyes above that upraised finger that the boy had not lost his mind yet. His friend, but not his mind.

Clay waited, curious to see how Tom would go on. He expected some Frost, maybe a fragment of Shakespeare (surely the Head would have approved of Shakespeare, even if it had only been
When shall we three meet again),
perhaps even a little extemporaneous Tom McCourt. What he did not expect was what came from Tom’s mouth in low, precisely measured lines.

“Do not withhold Your mercy from us, O Lord; may Your love and Your truth always protect us. For troubles without numbers surround us; our sins have overtaken us and we cannot see. Our sins are more than the hairs of our heads, and our hearts fail within us. Be pleased, O Lord, to save us; O Lord, come quickly to help us.”

Alice was holding her sneaker and weeping at the foot of the grave. Her head was bowed. Her sobs were quick and low.

Tom pressed on, holding one hand out over the new grave, palm extended, fingers curled in. “May all who seek to take our lives as this life was taken be put to shame and confusion; may all who desire our ruin be turned back in disgrace. May those who say to us, ‘Aha, aha!’ be appalled at their own shame. Here lies the dead, dust of the earth—”

“I’m so sorry, Head!” Jordan cried in a breaking treble voice. “I’m so sorry, it’s not right, sir, I’m so sorry you’re dead—” His eyes rolled up and he crumpled to the new grave. The mist stole its greedy white fingers over him.

Clay picked him up and felt the pulse in Jordan’s neck, strong and regular. “Just fainted. What is it you’re saying, Tom?”

Tom look flustered, embarrassed. “A rather free adaptation of Psalm Forty. Let’s take him inside—”

“No,” Clay said. “If it’s not too long, finish.”

“Yes, please,” Alice said. “Finish. It’s lovely. Like salve on a cut.”

Tom turned and faced the grave again. He seemed to gather himself, or perhaps he was only finding his place. “Here lies the dead, dust of the earth, and here are we the living, poor and needy; Lord, think of us. You are our help and our deliverer; O my God, do not delay. Amen.”

“Amen,” Clay and Alice said together.

“Let’s get the kid inside,” Tom said. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

“Did you learn that from the holy Hannahs at the First N.E. Church of Christ the Redeemer?” Clay asked.

“Oh, yes,” Tom said. “Many psalms by heart, good for extra desserts. I also learned how to beg on street corners and leaflet a whole Sears parking lot in just twenty minutes with
A Million Years in Hell and Not One Drink of Water.
Let’s put this kid to bed. I’m betting he’ll sleep through until at least four tomorrow afternoon and wake up feeling a hell of a lot better.”

“What if that man with the torn cheek comes and finds we’re still here after he told us to go?” Alice asked.

Clay thought that was a good question, but not one he needed to spend a lot of time mulling over. Either the Raggedy Man would give them another day’s grace or he wouldn’t. As he took Jordan upstairs to his bed, Clay found he was too tired to care one way or the other.

2

At around four in the morning, Alice bid Clay and Tom a foggy goodnight and stumbled off to bed. The two men sat in the kitchen, drinking iced tea, not talking much. There seemed nothing to say. Then, just before dawn, another of those great groans, made ghostly by distance, rode in on the foggy air from the northeast. It wavered like the cry of a theremin in an old horror movie, and just as it began to fade, a much louder answering cry came from Gaiten, where the Raggedy Man had taken his new, larger flock.

Clay and Tom went out front, pushing aside the barrier of melted boom-boxes to get down the porch steps. They could see nothing; the whole world was white. They stood there awhile and went back in.

Neither the death-cry nor the answer from Gaiten woke Alice and Jordan; they had that much to be grateful for. Their road atlas, now bent and crumpled at the corners, was on the kitchen counter. Tom thumbed through it and said, “That might have come from Hooksett or Suncook. They’re both good-sized towns northeast of here—good-sized for New Hampshire, I mean. I wonder how many they got? And how they did it.”

Clay shook his head.

“I hope it was a lot,” Tom said with a thin and charmless smile. “I hope it was at least a thousand, and that they slow-cooked them. I find myself thinking of some restaurant chain or other that used to advertise ‘broasted chicken.’ Are we going tomorrow night?”

“If the Raggedy Man lets us live through today, I guess we ought to. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t see any choice,” Tom said, “but I’ll tell you something, Clay—I feel like a cow being driven down a tin chute into the slaughterhouse. I can almost smell the blood of my little moo-brothers.”

Clay had the same feeling, but the same question recurred: If slaughtering was what they had on their group mind, why not do it here? They could have done it yesterday afternoon, instead of leaving melted boom-boxes and Alice’s pet sneaker on the porch.

Tom yawned. “Turning in. Are you good for another couple of hours?”

“I could be,” Clay said. In fact, he had never felt less like sleeping. His body was exhausted but his mind kept turning and turning. It would begin to settle a bit, and then he’d recall the sound the pen had made coming out of the Head’s eyesocket: the low squall of metal against bone. “Why?”

“Because if they decide to kill us today, I’d rather go my way than theirs,” Tom said. “I’ve seen theirs. You agree?”

Clay thought that if the collective mind which the Raggedy Man represented had really made the Head stick a fountain pen in his eye, the four remaining residents of Cheatham Lodge might find that suicide was no longer among their options. That was no thought to send Tom to bed on, however. So he nodded.

“I’ll take all the guns upstairs. You’ve got that big old .45, right?”

“The Beth Nickerson special. Right.”

“Good night, then. And if you see them coming—or
feel
them coming—give a yell.” Tom paused. “If you have time, that is. And if they let you.”

Clay watched Tom leave the kitchen, thinking Tom had been ahead of him all the time. Thinking how much he liked Tom. Thinking he’d like to get to know him better. Thinking the chances of that weren’t good. And Johnny and Sharon? They had never seemed so far away.

3

At eight o’clock that morning, Clay sat on a bench at one end of the Head’s victory garden, telling himself that if he weren’t so tired, he’d get up off his dead ass and make the old fellow some sort of marker. It wouldn’t last long, but the guy deserved it for taking care of his last pupil, if for nothing else. The thing was, he didn’t even know if he could get up, totter into the house, and wake Tom to stand a watch.

Soon they would have a chilly, beautiful autumn day—one made for apple-picking, cider-making, and touch-football games in the backyard. For now the fog was still thick, but the morning sun shone strongly through it, turning the tiny world in which Clay sat to a dazzling white. Fine suspended droplets hung in the air, and hundreds of tiny rainbow wheels circulated in front of his heavy eyes.

Something red materialized out of this burning whiteness. For a moment the Raggedy Man’s hoodie seemed to float by itself, and then, as it came up the garden toward Clay, its occupant’s dark brown face and hands materialized above and below it. This morning the hood was up, framing the smiling disfigurement of the face and those dead-alive eyes.