TWENTY-SIX
“Where are we going?” I asked. He stood up as I walked into the living room. I followed him to the door.
“The Hospital,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. He fished in his pocket and came out with his keys. He handed them to me.
“Why—?” I started to ask.
“Because I like it when someone else drives,” he said, and opened the door. I opened the driver’s side door, and it squeaked loudly. I sat down and began to adjust the seat. I hadn’t noticed how much shorter than me he was. As I was adjusting the mirror, he opened the glove compartment and took out a tiny white plastic bottle. As I started the car, he opened the cap and sniffed, then closed the top. “Want some?” he asked, offering the bottle my way.
“What is it?” I asked.
He grinned in a way that made my stomach tense.
I took the bottle. The label said Video Head Cleaner. “This is the stuff you use to clean the readers on your VCR,” I said.
He leaned back against the seat, his face relaxed and clear. “No, it’s not; just like it says on the label, it’s to clean your head,” he said, and giggled, “Drive.” He took the bottle back and kept it in his palm. I wanted to say something, but realized anything I could say would sound like some lecture. It was that moment above all others in my life, sitting there in the car with the ruin of a boy who had once terrorized me, that I realized I knew nothing about how life works. I started the car, and backed out onto the tiny dirt road.
“Did you want him?” Kevin asked as I made the turn onto Hitt road from the trailer park.
I looked over at him; his head was turned toward the window, and he was staring blankly at the trees and houses as the floated by. The window fogged every time he exhaled.
“Who?” I asked.
“The little boy,” he paused, “Randy.”
“What?” I asked.
His head rolled lazily over toward me as I pulled to a stop light. “The McPherson kid; did you want to touch him?”
“No!”
He smiled at something, and his head rolled lazy back over toward the window. He took the bottle, opened the cap, and sniffed again. He rubbed the back of his head against the headrest, and his eyes closed. The light changed, and I drove. I turned on the stereo, and that same voice came on.
“What is it with this guy?” I asked.
“Who?” Kevin asked from somewhere far away.
“Johnny Cash or whoever; what is it with this guy?”
Kevin inhaled loudly in that way someone does when they think a question you’ve asked is stupid, and said “He’s lonely, Mikey.” On the stereo, the man was singing about how hard it was to walk a straight line.
“So why do you want to listen to him?” I asked, turning off Hitt road onto Cadence. The hospital wasn’t far away.
“It’s nice to know that someone is as lonely as me,” he said. “After the hospital,” he said, inhaling loudly again, “you’ll understand.”
“Who’s at the hospital?” I asked.
“The only one that ever wanted it,” he said, drifting back to someplace far away.
“Ever wanted what?” I asked.
“This will all be easier to explain once you’ve been there,” he said, and raised his hand to hold off whatever I was about to say next, “I promise, I will explain it all when we get there.”
After a moment, I said, “If something so awful is going on around here, then why do you stay?”
He laughed, and leaned his head back against the headrest. He turned to look out the window, and I couldn’t tell if he was staring at the clouds, or his own reflection. “Mikey, you were never from here. I know that. When you get to know people, you figure out some things. I can’t explain it any better than that. The second I saw you walk into Sully’s with Doc Gantner, I could tell you weren’t from here.”
My stomach tensed. “You knew who I was?”
“I know who everyone in that bar is. Most of the guys I go with, though, are the people who just came in off the train. The locals, well,” he said, inhaling and exhaling loudly, “they tend to avoid me unless I’m there at last call.”
“There at last call?”
“Turn right up here,” he said, without even looking forward, “it’s a shortcut.”
“What do you mean by ‘there at last call’?” I asked. Something in me knew, but I had to hear the words.
“If I haven’t gotten anyone by then, one of the boys will get brave enough to come over, buy me the last beer of the night, and we’ll go home together,” he said.
I flinched. I had almost managed to forget, or maybe though—maybe I had thought he’d give it up. His voice didn’t show any signs of regret or shame. The same way I would describe changing someone’s oil or rotating a tire, he was talking about going “home together”. I didn’t feel like talking, anymore.
“Everyone keeps talking like they aren’t sure who those bones belong to, but I know,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Stop being naive, Mikey; it doesn’t suit you,” he said, “Turn left here.”
I turned along the side street. It was what we’d always called a “Back alley” as a kid. We didn’t have any alleys in a town this small, but we’d seen them on television so often, we tried to make our town more normal. We added things like alley and downtown to our vocabulary, even back then. There were no such things in Placerville; just streets and dirt roads. This was a small street which, from the looks of it, had only recently been paved. Several blue dumpsters lined up along the small wall running along the sides.
“Up ahead, turn into the little opening in the wall,” he said, sitting up and leaning forward.
“Where is this?” I asked.
“This is the garbage truck service entrance,” he said, “the doctors figured it wouldn’t look so good for guys to come hauling garbage out the front door, so they had this built about six or seven years ago.”
“How did you know it was here?” I asked. He didn’t answer or even look over at me. He just stayed leaned forward, staring ahead, and I got the strange image of a man on the bow of a boat in a thick fog for a moment; he seemed to be steering us through rough water. I turned into the small service entrance that opened up behind the hospital. Several more blue dumpsters lined up back here, along with two green ones marked with a strange symbol. I pulled the car up next to that one and asked “here?” He didn’t say anything, but opened his door. I put the car in park and shut it off. He closed his door just as I opened mine. When I closed mine, it sounded like a gunshot had gone off. He turned sharply toward me, sucking air in over his teeth. I shrugged.
As he walked, I noticed he didn’t stumble or sway. I found myself watching how his body moved, and I shook my head. I remembered thinking about him when I’d first seen him in his boxing trunks; watching how his body twisted and flowed. Back then, I thought about it with envy—I’d always been klutzy. I recognized it in hindsight, though; I’d been admiring him.
He opened a white door. I followed him in, and he closed it slowly, his whole body tense. The corridor was well-lit, but no other doors opened onto it. It led straight to a turn.
I followed him in everything; the way he stepped, the way he breathed. This was all very familiar to him. I was burning to ask how and why, but I had a feeling I knew what the answer was. In a way, that made me want to ask more, but I knew that piercing ache in my stomach would start, and shortly after, the pictures.
The corridor kept getting wider, and then opened into an elevator lobby. Only one set of doors, here, but they seemed very wide. He pressed the button.