Thrust (12 page)

"What was Jasper doing at your place?"

"He'd come by with some chicken soup.
 
Apparently his mother sent him over for a visit.
 
Lovely woman.
 
She's overprotective with the boy, as some single mothers tend to be, but he's making progress in getting out from beneath her shadow."

Chase thought about the kid, depressed and quiet but usually hyper too, sort of bopping in his seat and bursting with excitement to read his poetry.
 
Doing the rap patter about his father.

The dead Dads of the world never let go.

Shake had been drinking, and the odor of Jack Daniels made Chase cringe.
 
That tickle in the center of his chest began to act up again.
 
You found your satisfaction wherever you could.
  

Shake glanced over, plucking at his chin.
 
"What did you think?"

"About what?"

"The new piece."

You had to either lie or criticize very carefully.
 
Chase wasn't much good at either, but he made the effort.
 
"It's got verve."

Shake drew back, cocked his head like he'd heard a funny sound.
 
"What did you say?"

"
Uhm
… verve."

"Uh huh."
 
Shake toyed with the edges of his mustache, watchful.
 
Shake always took his reviews too seriously.
 
"Why don't you explain that for me?"

"The words sort of… you know… absolved and redeemed me."

In the days when Shake was still
Babawanda
Mugwanda
, he would've swung out of his seat and stood proudly in his dashiki and turban, maybe blown a tune on his kudu antelope horn.
 
Something to show the injustice of having to suffer such narrow-minded reproach.
 

But now Shake Sunshine Jr. frowned at the small notebook in his lap, the pages covered with scratchy words that didn't look like his own handwriting.
 
When he wrote about George and Jeff you knew he was coming unstrung.

"I have a half bottle of
Haldol
if you want a few."

"I don't need that shit," Shake said with a tremble in his throat.
 

Isaac resettled himself in the bed.
 
"I found the verse quite provocative."

"Oh bullshit, old man, don't patronize me."

"Fine, then let's watch
Pride & Prejudice
and everyone can relax."

"Tell me about the mugging," Chase said.

Pulling a face, Isaac looked away.
 
"There's nothing much to tell you, really."

"This happened right after we spoke at the Palace last night?"

"About a half hour later.
 
I was walking home.
 
I sensed a presence moving in behind me."

"And?"

"And before I could look my head exploded.
 
That's what happens when you get mugged.
 
Have you ever been mugged?"

"No."

"That's what happens.
 
I've been mugged four times in the last thirty-five years."

Now Shake was staring at Chase, cool, indifferent, but with his real feelings percolating beneath.
 
A sliver of suspicion, some of that true dread you feel when the sneaking possibility slithers and whispers that your friends might be more than mischievous, they might be criminal.
 

Chase knew how it must've looked.
 
Isaac explaining to Shake how the discussion had gone down with Chase in his office.
 
The way Chase had been a little hostile, distraught.
 
Sort of an argument but not really.
 
And Shake sitting there thinking, yeah
yeah
, wondering about it all.
 
Trying hard not to believe the worst but too afraid not to take it under some consideration.
 
You always had to be ready for anything.

"Did you get a look at him?" Chase asked.

"No, nothing."

"Any sound you can remember?
 
Did he say anything to you?"

"No.
 
I didn't realize anybody was there until I was already down on the sidewalk.
 
Then, the bastard kicked me.
 
That I felt a remote kind of anger.
 
It pissed me off like nothing else in my life.
 
He kicked me again and I blacked out."

"What is it?" Shake asked.
 

Chase turned to him.
 
"What do you mean?"

His voice was still calm, even.
 
"All the questions.
 
You sound like a cop.
 
Like you want to go out after the guy."

"If I knew who to go after I would."

"That's idiot talk, seriously."

Chase shrugged off the comment, leaned in on Isaac a little more.
 
"What did the police say?"

"What could they say?
 
Or do?
 
Nothing was even taken from me."

So then, it had been personal.

Was Joe Singleton making his move already and coming at Chase like this?
 
From the side, keeping his malice off the stage.

"Grayson?" Isaac said.
 
"Would you like a nice plate of
babaganoush
with some pita bread?"

"Jasper's mama makes a mean pot of chicken soup," Shake told him.
 
"None of that consommé shit."

Isaac's wiry, steel-gray hair was on fire, the bald patches bubbling with blisters that burst and turned black.
 

The skin kept frying, the reek of broiling flesh wafting into Chase's face.

O George.
 
O Jeff.
 
Where were your loving ministrations?

"No," Chase said.
 
"I need to get going."

Shake aimed his forked beard forward and his eyes grew distant until he looked the same way he did the day Chase met him on the ward.
 
Somebody had offered Shake a piece of gum and Shake had instantly gone catatonic.
 
It flipped him over the big edge because he couldn't chew gum thirty-two times and be finished with it.
 
Something that small shattered the pattern.
 

"Are you feeling well enough to perform at the Palace tonight?" Isaac asked.

So here was the old man, after a mugging and caroming his head off a toilet, lying in a hospital bed with bandages on his ancient coconut, burning down to the bone, asking if Chase were capable enough to read his poems.

"Yes," he said, keeping the sting out.

Shake nodded and said, "I'll check in with you later.
 
We'll have a good show tonight."

"Sure."

Chase walked into the corridor as the smoke began to throb against his knees, rising to twine against his throat, nuzzling, almost loving.

The walls swung down around on him and he was back in the Falls.

Turning, staring around, looking down and seeing—yep, he was wearing the blue cotton
jammies
and slippers.

The psychiatric facility had its own history, going back nearly sixty years to when the World War Two vets came home shell-shocked and smashed.
 

Back in the early 50s the facility had housed eleven thousand patients.
 
Now there were fewer than two thousand faces up there behind the leveled rows of cube windows.
 
Mostly drunks, coke fiends, nervous breakdowns, and a few masturbation addicts who had to be watched when they went outside or they'd drop in the mud and screw a wet gopher hole.

Garden Falls.
 
It was the thing to do, when you were a kid, to head down those back roads bordering the grounds and watch how the twining shadows cut into the skyline and carved alongside the moon.
 
Teenagers performed primitive ceremonies of passage, knocking down barbed-wire fences in pickup trucks.
  

The empty stunted woods that bordered the large fields cut straight swathes against the tree line.
 
The parkways crossed half a mile away, the well-maintained lanes so neat and prim as the commuters passed by heading into the city.
 
Chase used to cruise by at midnight and look for escapees running off in their rags.
 

The Falls continued to rise into the darkening sky, silhouetted in the lustrous moon as black and silver clouds roiled onwards.
 
Looking up at the buildings, it didn't take a serious leap of imagination to believe every rumor you'd ever heard about the place must be true.
 

Chase watched a lot of television his first couple of days in the Falls, between his group therapy sessions and remedial treatment, while he dried out cold turkey and took his meds and did his best not to start licking the walls.
  

He checked the other patients around him—no, scratch that, the psychiatric industry liked to call
consumers
.
  
Nobody was a patient anymore, the emphasis was no longer on illness.
 
They were all merely consumers of health care resources.
 
You had to be fed, cleaned, diagnosed, deloused, given a bed, guarded,
tranqued
, spanked, and banked.
 

His fellow consumers were made up of ladies in pink
pjs
who sat quietly and wept while they paged through photo albums or met with their families.
 
Gray men in blue robes who had slipped their gears after their third divorce was finalized, their fourth kid graduated college, their second heart attack hit.
 

These were the target groups, the clients, the
shoppers
.
 
Chase prowled the halls and kept expecting to see lobotomy scars, ultra-intelligent killer rats, and folks smearing themselves with their own feces.
 
But everywhere he turned he saw only the sad and the lonely.
 
The angry and the fired.
 
The beat, the bitter, and the stained.
 
Christ, was he really the craziest person here?
 
Well, besides
Arlo
Barrack.

Singleton's ex-wife came for a visit when he'd been there about two weeks.
 

He watched her hobble in, using a cane, chaperoned by one of the attendants.
 
He'd never seen her before but knew it was Annie Singleton because she looked so much like her daughter Stacy.
 

Blonde hair curled and coiling in clumps over her forehead, the same small space between her front teeth.
 
He'd read that she was only twenty-nine, but if he had to guess he'd say she was pushing against forty and forty was shoving back a lot harder.
 
Ashen
crows
feet corrugated the corners of her eyes.

Okay, so here it comes.
 

Plant yourself, get ready.

The harsh repetitive noise of the cane thumping pounded into Chase's head as she moved towards him.
 
He reared back, trying to hold on, but knowing he was this close to making a run for it.
 

How do you look into the eyes of the woman whose daughter you've murdered. Criminally negligent homicide
boffo
.
 

What a way to give up the game.
 
He had to force himself to breathe.
 

Somebody shoved a seat under his ass and violently pressed him down into it.
 
He turned and saw the severe face of
Arlo
Barrack sort of grinning at him, realizing what was going on and making sure he squeezed every ounce of pleasure from it.
 

Barrack said, "Make yourself comfortable, Killer.
 
If she takes a swing at you, you'd better not lift a finger.
 
I'll snap your neck if you so much as back a step away."

Well then.

Chase sat at this little table where some other consumer had scratched in the words

GOD ISNT WATCHING

BUT HE LISTENS TO YOUR SCREAMS

Chase had always believed that anyway.
   

Annie Singleton, led by the attendant, approached.
 
Petrified of what she might say, and knowing it would only confirm every
icepick
of self-loathing he had, he imagined the jagged taste of scotch cutting down his throat.
 
Maybe he could fake himself out, get drunk on delusion.
 

But it wasn't working.
 
Leave it to his schizophrenia to run out on him when he needed it most.

Annie Singleton sat heavily in the small metal chair across from him.
 
Beads of sweat slid though the soft creases just under her left ear, weaving along her jaw line.
 
The bruises on her face had almost completely faded.
 
She did a fair job of concealing the dusting of
crows
feet beneath her eye shadow.
 
She must've been very pretty just a few years ago.