The Sleepwalkers (20 page)

D
ESPITE HIS DISCOMFORT
, by the time the doctor walks in, Caleb is fast asleep.

The doctor clears his throat. “Young man?”

Caleb starts and sits up fast, gripping the crunchy exam-table paper hard with his unbroken hand.

The doctor backs up a step, blinking fast.

“You scared me,” Caleb murmurs.

The doctor, “Doctor Rodgers,” according to the embroidery on his white coat, smiles warmly, and Caleb likes him instantly. He has salt-and-pepper hair, overgrown eyebrows, and must be sixty years old or so. He’s short of stature, round of body, and red of face.

“Well, don’t worry about a thing,” he says. “Nothing to be scared of here. We’ll fix you right up. Now, I heard something about an arm.”

Caleb presents the arm.

“Oh, ouch. That doesn’t look too healthy, now does it? Okay, I’m going to touch you now, it might hurt a little. Tell me what hurts, okay. Does that hurt?”

Caleb nods.

“Okay, how ’bout now? Not really? Okay, what about this? Ouch, okay, sorry. That’s it, then. Let me just feel around here for a minute. Okay. Well, we’re going to have to X-ray it first, and then I’m going to set it, which is going to hurt a little bit, but we have to do it to make sure you heal right, okay? I’ll just order the X-ray and my nurse will be in soon to take care of that for you.”

Doctor Rodgers sits on the stool with wheels, puts on his glasses, and writes something in a file.

“I imagine that hurts a good deal, doesn’t it? I’m going to order you something for pain as well. That might make setting the bone a little easier to take if the painkillers have set in.”

Caleb hears all this from inside a black hole. He doesn’t care if his arm is amputated. He doesn’t care if his arm never heals again. The problem isn’t that his arm is broken, it’s that the world is broken.

For the first time, he notices that one of Dr. Rodgers’s eyelids is violently twitching. Blink-blink-blink-blink-blink.

It’s disconcerting. He wonders how Mrs. Rodgers, if there is a Mrs. Rodgers, can stand it.

“ . . . Are there any medications you’re allergic to?”

Caleb shakes his head.

“Are there any medical conditions we need to be aware of?”

“No.”

“Have you ever experienced shortness of breath? Loss of vision? Dementia? Anmesia? Chest pains? Leg pains? Chronic headaches? Chronic joint pain? Nightmares? Back pain?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Well, nightmares, yes, I guess, sometimes. All the rest, no.”

“Alrighty!” Dr. Rodgers says, his left eye snapping open and closed like the wings of a dragonfly. He claps the folder shut and stands. “The nurse’ll be right in.”

The door closes behind the doctor and the room is silent.

Caleb marinates in his own confusion, disbelief, grief, even restless apathy. It’s disbelief that wins out, though. He just can’t believe in his own experiences. Reality seems as fragile as a spiderweb.

The nurse comes in. She doesn’t say anything, just half smiles and sets something down on the counter, rolls up Caleb’s sleeve and begins making a small, circular scrubbing motion with an alcohol swab on his shoulder.

“Dang, you’re filthy,” she says. “What you been doing, campin’?”

“Yeah,” Caleb says absently.

“Uck. Look,” she says, showing him the blackened alcohol swab. “You might shoulda jumped in the river for a swim,” she says and tosses the swab into the wastebasket.

She gets out a syringe and a tiny bottle. Caleb watches her hold the bottle upside down, draw the clear medicine out from it, then pull the long needle free again.

“You from around here?” Caleb asks.

“Born and raised,” she says.

“You ever know a pair of twin girls, Christine and Anna?”

“I did at one time,” she says, flicking the syringe. “But one’s dead or something and the other one’s over at the Dream Center getting her head shrunk. That’s who you meant, right?”

“Yeah,” Caleb says.

“Well, maybe you’ll see her there. Little prick now, honey.” She sticks the needle in his arm, pushes hard, empties the syringe and pulls the needle out again fast, replacing it with a cotton ball.

“Hold that there,” she says, turning away to dispose of the syringe. “Now,” she says, “a handsome boy like you ain’t from around here, I know. You got a girlfriend back home?”

One time, Bean had dared Caleb to ride a wildly spinning fair ride, the Gravitron, ten times in a row. Now Caleb feels just like he did getting off from that tenth ride.

“What did you give me?” he asks.

She raises her eyebrows sensually. “Sup’m that’ll knock the pain right out of you, and then some.”

Red panic is leaking into Caleb’s brain. He can’t feel his feet.

“What did you say a minute ago, about seeing Christine?”

“Well, I don’t know as you’ll see her, but you’ll sure be neighbors.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Caleb says. He tries to get up, but his legs give out from under him. The nurse’s quick hands are the only thing that saves his face from smashing on the tile floor.

“Hold on now,” she says, “before you hurt yourself again. There’s worse things than going to the Dream Center . . . like going there a virgin.”

She smiles her sexiest smile, the one she practices in front of the mirror sometimes, but it’s too late. The guy is already passed out on the floor, drooling.

No real point in getting his number anyway. Even though the Dream Center is supposed to be a great place and all, she hasn’t seen it cure anyone of bad dreams yet. Come to think of it, she hasn’t heard of anyone being let out at all, cured or not.

Creedence Clearwater Revival. Let people call rock and roll the music of the devil all they want; some of it, not all but some, is divine. Like blades of sunlight cutting through treetops is divine, like ice cream is divine, like Keisha was—is, is—divine. Rock and roll. Beautiful.

Who knows how people miss the implicit meaning behind all these little miracles, but they do. And Ron knows he’s no exception. He’s lived in the dark for years, wandering the catacombs of disillusionment, looking for the stairway back up to faith. And today, for some reason, as he beats out the rhythm to the song with his “hook” on the steering wheel, he feels a little closer.

Bitter clouds litter the sky, fluffy white on top and heavy gray on the bottom, portending rain, but the sun is still out, the sky is still mostly blue, and Ron feels better than he has in a long time. More awake. More real. He continues tapping “the hook” on the steering wheel, and with his good hands hoists the last bite of a Whopper into his mouth, then takes a sip of iced tea. Hudsonville’s only fast food restaurant, an outdated Burger King, is dead now, at eleven AM. Ron looks next door, through the drive-through, at the sign of the doctor’s office next door. “Dr. Rodgers” is all it says. He eats some fries. The back lot where he sits is empty, save for a few stray burger wrappers skittered across by the wind. Some seagulls pick at stray fries by the Dumpster.

Ron tries to think of the next step, the road ahead.

Probably, he’ll go back to Panama City. The next check from good old Uncle Sam should be arriving any time, and the wallet’s getting a little thin.

Still, there’s something here. Something going on, something happening. For the first time in years, the dismal still life of his world is churned up, like a shaken snow globe.

And Keisha might yet be near, yes she might.

But where to turn? Not to the sheriff. He’s tried the police for years and all they seem good for is putting paper into files, drinking coffee, nodding, and looking at their watches. But where then? Maybe the FBI should step in. After all, they’re the big dogs, the Saint Bernards of law enforcement. And maybe they could crack the whip on these lamebrained, limp-dick, small-town, Barney Fife pigs.

He takes a deep breath to calm himself. No use getting his piss boiling again. That wouldn’t lead to anything but indigestion.

No, the FBI isn’t the answer. He’s tried them. He’s written letters to the DA, to the governor (that worthless jackass), he’s seen the FBI agents—Marley and Grovner were their names—take down his statements and stash them away in a nice, neat manila folder, never to be seen again. Never a call returned. Never a letter acknowledged.

Piss in the wind, Dirty Dan would’ve said.

Still, there’s something going on here, all around him; he can feel it in the air, in the ground. Like getting near a big machine— even with the earplugs in, you feel the vibration. (Ron Bent knows about machines. He ran a printing press for almost three months in Dothan. Wasn’t much good at that, though.)

The truth is all around him, and it’s big, big as the miracle of life, big as God, and just as hard to see, praise him.

And that kid. If somebody took his friend, then at least there’s an ally. Somebody on the same road, somebody else who maybe knows a piece of the truth.

Ron shovels a handful of fries into his mouth, and for the first time in years, maybe in his life, he wallows in the possibility that he’s lonely. Really, desperately lonely. Because right now, the thought of a brother-in-arms is as tempting as a beer is to a drunk. And Ron Bent knows something about that. He was always a pretty good drunk.

There’s only one problem, and that’s the fact that the kid didn’t seem too eager for a friend or too interested in the handicapped old bastard who had given him a ride to the doctor’s. The kid had hardly uttered a word. And why should he? Why would somebody want to take up with a bitter, crotchety old screwup like Ron anyway?

Lord,
Grant me the humility to face myself
And the strength to walk my road alone,
Because that’s the path you’ve laid out for me,
Hard as it may be,
And—

Ron freezes in the midst of his sip of iced tea.

He almost laughs—it’s that strange a sight he sees through his windshield.

The pretty young nurse and a small, timid-looking doctor appear at the back door of the office, looking over their shoulders like a couple of spies in a pulp magazine, hauling a limp, heavy object to the waiting door of a silver Lincoln Town Car. And that object is a body. And that body—Ron knows without knowing, since it’s too far to see for sure—is the kid he dropped off half an hour ago.

Ron is very still, staring. He breathes in slow, and as he does his mouthful of sweetened tea jets down the wrong pipe. By the time he stops choking, the town car is already pulling onto the street. But no amount of coughing or blurred, teary-eyed vision will stop Ron Bent, not now, and he slaps his car into gear and lurches forward, spilling some tea on his lap, not caring. As he pulls onto the road with a bottom-thunking “whack” and punches the throttle, he can almost hear little Keisha laughing, and sweet damn does it sound good.

Praise God.

He bubbles up into consciousness, like oil rising to the surface of water. Later, he’ll remember that his name is Caleb, that he lettered in track for the last three years, and that his best friend was stolen by sleepwalking apparitions. Right now, though, all he knows is that his head is vibrating with poisonous agony. When he opens his eyes—it isn’t for a few minutes—the world is blurred, like a sidewalk chalk drawing after a storm. This would be very frightening if he could formulate the thought of panic, but it seems his brain has shattered and the piece holding fear, along with the piece that focuses his eyes, is missing. Instead, the guy who’ll soon realize he’s Caleb lies still, listening. There’s the rattle and hum of an electric fan. A bird sings far away, and a heavy door closes. Footsteps echo in a hollow place.

The guy who is Caleb tries to get up, but his legs are liquid, and a sizzling brand of pain slashes through his arm and he falls back. The clacking stops, and there’s a voice, smooth and even and deep.

The guy who is Caleb remembers a wood-shop teacher he used to have, a really odd, skinny guy with buggy eyes, thick glasses, and a million bizarre quips. His main focus in life, it seemed, was getting pieces of wood very smooth. That was all that seemed to get the fella off. He’d rub the project, whatever it was, a cedar box, a pine cutting board in the shape of a pig, or a small stool, and shake his head, “Needs more sanding, needs more waxing.” But when he was finally pleased, there was only one phrase he used without fail: “Slicker’n snot on a doorknob,” he’d say.