The Madman's Tale (16 page)

Gulp-a-pill didn’t answer.

“Anything else that’s fucking of critical importance that you left out, Doc?”

Gulp-a-pill shook his head negatively.

“Sure” said the detective sarcastically. He gestured at Francis. “Bring him along.”

Francis was pushed out into the corridor by a uniformed officer. He glanced to his right and saw that another set of policemen had emerged from an adjacent office with Peter the Fireman, who sported a vibrant red and raw contusion near his right eye, but a defiant, angry look that seemed to hold all the policemen in a similar state of contempt. Francis wished he could appear as confident. The first detective suddenly grasped Francis by the arm and spun him slightly, positioning him so that he could see Lanky, handcuffed, flanked by two other policemen. Behind him, far down the hallway, a half-dozen hospital security guards had cornered all the first-floor Amherst Building male patients into a tight knot, away from the spot where some crime scene technicians were photographing and measuring the storage closet. Two paramedics emerged from the pack of policemen with a black body bag placed on top of a white-sheeted gurney, much like the type that Francis had ridden when he’d arrived at the Western State Hospital.

There was a collective groan from the gathering of inmates when they saw the body bag. A few men started crying, and others turned away, as if by averting their gaze they could avoid understanding what happened. Others went rigid at the sight, and a few simply continued doing whatever they were doing, which was mostly weaving and waving, dancing about or staring at the walls.
Francis could hear some muttering sounds as they spoke to one another. The women’s wing had been quieted, but when the body came out, although they were locked away, they must have sensed something, because the deep pounding on the door resumed momentarily, like a drumroll at a military funeral. Francis looked back at Lanky, whose eyes seemed frozen on the apparition of the nurse’s body as it creaked past him on the gurney. In the bright corridor lights, Francis could see deep swaths of maroon blood on the tall man’s billowing nightshirt. “That the guy that woke you up, Franny?” the first detective demanded, his question carrying with it all the authority of a man accustomed to being in charge of things.

Francis nodded.

“… And after he woke you up, you went out to the corridor where you found the nurse already dead, right? Then you called Security, right?”

Again Francis nodded. The detective looked over at the policemen standing next to Peter the Fireman, who also bent their heads in agreement. One replied, as if to an unspoken question, “That’s what this guy said, too.”

Lanky seemed to be quivering. His face was pale, and his lower lip shook with fear. He looked down at the handcuffs restraining him, then put his hands together, as if in prayer. He stared across the hallway to Francis and Peter. “C-Bird,” he said, his voice quavering with every word, his hands pushed forward like a supplicant at a church service, “Tell them about the Angel. Tell them about the Angel who came in the middle of the night and told me that the evil had been taken care of. We’re safe now, tell them, please C-Bird.” His voice gathered a plaintive, lost tone, as if each word he spoke seemed to plummet him further into despair.

The detective instead, suddenly half shouted at Lanky, who shrank back at the force of the questions shot at him like so many sharpened spears or arrows. “How’d you get that blood on your shirt, old man? How’d you get that nurse’s blood on your hands?”

Lanky looked down at his fingers and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe the Angel brought it to me?”

As he was replying, a uniformed officer came walking down the corridor, holding a small plastic bag. At first Francis could not see what it contained, but as the policeman approached, he recognized it as the small, white, three-peaked cap that hospital nurses often wore. Only this one seemed crumpled and the rim was stained in the same color as the streaks on Lanky’s nightshirt. The uniformed officer said, “Look’s like he tried to keep a souvenir. Found this underneath his mattress.”

“Did you find the knife?” the detective asked the officer.

The policeman shook his head.

“What about the fingertips?”

Again a negative from the uniformed officer.

The detective seemed to think for a moment, assessing things, then he spun abruptly to face Lanky, who continued to cower against the wall, encircled by officers, all of whom were shorter than he was, but all of whom seemed, in that second, to be larger.

“How’d you get that hat?” the detective demanded of Lanky.

The tall man shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he cried. “I didn’t get it.”

“It was underneath your mattress. Why did you put it there?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t.”

“Doesn’t make much difference,” the detective replied with a shrug. “We’ve got a lot more than we need. Someone read him his rights. We’re out of this loony bin right now.”

The policemen started to push and prod Lanky down the hallway. Francis could see panic striking like lightning bolts right throughout the tall man’s body. He twitched as if electric current was flooding him, as if each step he was forced to take was on hot coals. “No, please, I didn’t do anything. Please. Oh, evil, evil, it’s all around us, please don’t take me away, this is my home, please!” As Lanky cried pitifully, despair echoing throughout the corridor, Francis felt his own handcuffs being removed. He looked up, and Lanky caught his eye. “C-Bird, Peter, please help me,” he called out. Francis could not imagine ever hearing so much pain in so few words. “Tell them it was an Angel. An Angel came to me in the middle of the night. Tell them. Help me, please.”

And then, with a final shove and push from the collected police officers, Lanky was rushed out the front door of the Amherst Building and swallowed up by what remained of the night.

I
suppose I slept some that night, but I cannot recall actually closing my eyes
.

I can’t even remember breathing
.

My swollen lip stung, and even after washing up a little, I could still taste blood where the policeman had struck me. My legs were sore from the blow from the security guard’s nightstick and my head spun from all that I’d seen. It makes no difference how many years have passed since that night, the number of days that stretch into decades, I can still feel the pain of my encounter with the authorities who thought—even if briefly—that I was the killer. When I lay stiffly on my bunk, it was hard for me to connect Short Blond, who had been alive earlier that day, with the gory figure that was taken away zipped up in a body bag, then probably dumped on some cold steel table, to await a pathologist’s scalpel. It remains just as difficult to reconcile today. It was almost as if they were two separate entities, worlds apart, having little, if any, relationship to each other
.

My memory is clear: I remained motionless in the darkness, feeling the restless pressure of each passing second, aware that the entire dormitory was unsettled; the usual night noises of unquiet sleep were exaggerated, underscored by a busy nervousness and nasty tension that seemed to layer the tight air in the room like a new coat of paint. Around me, people shifted and twitched, despite the extra course of medications that had been handed out before we were all shuffled back into the room. Chemical quiet. At least, that was what Gulp-a-pill and Mr. Evil
and the rest of the staff wanted, but all the fears and anxieties created that night were far beyond even the medications’ capabilities. We twisted and turned uneasily, groaning and grunting, crying and sobbing, our feelings taut and raw. We were all afraid of the night that remained, and just as afraid of whatever the morning would bring
.

Absent one, of course. Having Lanky so abruptly severed from our little madhouse community seemed to leave a shadow behind. In the days since I’d arrived in the Amherst Building, one or two of the truly old and infirm had died of what were called natural causes, but which could be better summed up in the word
neglect
or the word
abandonment.
Occasionally and miraculously someone with a little bit of life left would actually be released. More often, Security had moved someone frantic and unruly or out of control screaming into one of the upstairs isolation cells. But they were likely to return in a couple of days, their medications increased, their shuffling movements a little more pronounced and the twitching in the corners of their faces exaggerated. So disappearances weren’t uncommon. But the manner that Lanky had been taken from our side was, and that was what caused our ricocheting emotions as we watched for the first streaks of daylight to slide through the bars on the windows
.

I made two grilled cheese sandwiches, filled an only slightly dirty glass with cold tap water, and leaned back against the kitchen counter, munching away. A forgotten cigarette burned in a jammed ashtray a few feet away, and I watched as its slender plume of smoke rose through the stale air of my home
.

Peter the Fireman smoked
.

I took another bite of the sandwich, then a gulp from the glass of water. When I looked back across the room, he was standing there. He reached down for the stub of my cigarette and lifted it to his lips. “Ah, back in the hospital one could smoke without guilt,” he said, a little slyly. “I mean, which was worse: risking cancer or being crazy?”

“
Peter,” I said, smiling. “I haven’t seen you in years
.”

“
Have you missed me, C-Bird?”

I nodded my reply. He shrugged, as if to apologize
.

“
You’re looking good, C-Bird. A little thin, maybe, but you’ve hardly aged at all.” Then he blew a pair of insouciant smoke rings as he began to look around the room. “So, this is your place? It’s not bad. Things working out, I see
.”

“
I don’t know I’d say they were working out exactly. As best as could be expected, maybe
.”

“
That’s right. That was the unusual thing about being mad, wasn’t it, C-Bird? Our expectations got all skewed and changed about. Ordinary things, like holding a job and having a family and getting to go to Little League games on nice summer afternoons, those things got real hard to accomplish. So we revamped, right? Revised and retrenched and reconsidered
.”

I grinned. “Yes, that’s right. Like just owning a sofa, that’s a big achievement
.”

Peter tossed his head back, laughing. “Sofa ownership and the road to mental health. Sounds like one of the papers that Mister Evil was always working on for his doctorate that never got published
.”

Peter continued to look around. “Got any friends?”

I shook my head. “Not really
.”

“
Still hearing voices?”

“
A little bit, sometimes. Just echoes, really. Echoes or whispers. The meds they have me on all the damn time pretty much squelch the racket they used to make
.”

“
The medication can’t be all that bad,” Peter said, winking, “because I’m here
.”

This was true
.

Peter moved to the kitchen entranceway and looked over at the wall of writing. He moved with the same athletic grace, a kind of highly defined control over his motions that I recalled from hours spent walking through the ward corridors of the Amherst Building. No shuffling or staggering for Peter the Fireman. He looked exactly as he had twenty years earlier, except that the Red Sox baseball cap that he often jauntily wore back then was stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans. But his hair was still full and long, and his smile was just as I remembered it, worn on his face in the same way it would be, if someone had told a joke a few moments earlier, and the humor had lingered. “How’s the story going?” he asked
.

“
It’s coming back
.”

He started to say something, then stopped, and stared at the columns of words scribbled on the wall. “What have you told them about me?” he asked
.

“
Not enough,” I said. “But they’ve probably already figured out that you were never crazy. No voices. No delusions. No bizarre beliefs and lurid thoughts. At least, not crazy like Lanky or Napoleon or Cleo or any of the others. Or even me, for that matter
.”

Peter made a little, wry smile
.

“
Good Catholic lad, big Irish Dorchester second-generation family. A dad who drank too much on Saturday night and a mother who believed in Democrats and the power of prayer. Civil servants, elementary school teachers, cops and soldiers. Regular attendance at Mass on Sunday, followed by Catechism class. A bunch of altar boys. The girls learned step dancing and sang in the choir. The boys went to Latin High and played football. When it came time for the draft, we signed right up. No student deferments for us. And we didn’t get to be mentally ill. At least not exactly. Not in that diagnosable, defined way that Gulp-a-pill liked, where he could look up your disorder in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
and read precisely what sort of treatment plan to come up with. No, in my family, we got to be peculiar. Or eccentric. Or perhaps a little weird, or slightly off base, out of whack or off-kilter
.”

“
You weren’t even all that peculiar, Peter,” I said
.

He laughed, a short, amused burst. “A fireman who deliberately sets a fire? In the church where he was baptized? What would you call that? At least a little strange, huh? A little more than just odd, dont you think?”

I didn’t answer. Instead I watched him move through my small apartment. Even if he wasn’t really there, it was still good to have company
.

“
You know what bothered me, sometimes, C-Bird?”

“
What?”

“
There were so many moments in my life that should have driven me insane. I mean, clear-cut, no-holds-barred, genuinely terrible moments that should have added up to a nice, fine frothing at the mouth madness. Growing up moments. War moments. Death moments. Anger moments. And yet the one that seemed to make the most sense, that had the most clarity to it, was what put me in the hospital
.”