Nightjack Page 2

  This one you had to be careful with.

  You couldn’t say get laid, get drunk, get high, take a shit, call some friends from the time before you were sick. You couldn’t tell her you wanted to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling until the roof peeled back and you saw a hundred faces peering down at you. You couldn’t admit to your rage. You couldn’t go chat with the other lunatics and plan the revolution. Couldn’t mention Jane, say how he wanted to see her grave, wail and rip out chunks of weeds from around her headstone. Come back and teach Ernie a few manners. Kill anybody in the Ganooch syndicate he’d missed before.

  “Will?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me what you’re going to do.”

  Her voice had a shrill, anxious quality to it, but he sensed it had nothing to do with him. She was nervous all right, but about what? A flicker of fear filled her eyes and then dispersed. Her smile was rigid and sexless. He got the feeling she was asking questions that didn’t matter to her.

  He said, “Introduce myself to the administrator of the house, have an early dinner, read the newspaper and catch up on the sports scores”—sports were okay, current events weren’t—“and get a good night’s sleep before work in the fish cannery tomorrow. I’ve got to be there nine a.m. sharp.”

  It was a good answer. You couldn’t say you were going to sit on the bed and read the Bible all night, even if you really were. There was too much of a chance that they’d think you might start hearing the voice of God coming out of the paperboy’s ass, run around shooting people in their naughty bits.

  Again, the flash of disappointment in Dr. Brandt’s expression even though he knew he’d given her what she wanted. She nodded sadly, her wet hair flapping around her shoulders.

  Christ, if they didn’t beat you with the meds then they went and did it with this vague look of shame. He was obviously doing something wrong here, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Do you miss teaching?” she asked.

  “Teaching?”

  “You remember. We’ve talked about this. You used to be a high school teacher. You taught twelfth-grade English literature.”

  “Yes, I know. And no, I don’t miss it. Not much.”

  When they got to the train station, the place was empty. Water puddled around them on the tile floor as she visibly relaxed and even allowed herself a relieved smile.

  He grinned back at her feeling very stupid. What the hell, let’s stand around and be happy, tomorrow I start canning fish for the rest of my life. The joy can’t be contained.

  She took his hand and squeezed. He tightened his fingers around hers and thought about how weak he’d become, even if he had broken Ernie’s nose and hadn’t quite seen it. Once his hands had been strong, he thought. Almost unbelievably so.

  Perhaps it was true. These fists weren’t entirely his anymore. Maybe they never had been.

  Dr. Brandt led him over to the automatic ticket booth and she started punching numbers and feeding bills into the machine. He wondered if he should pay, but he didn’t know if he had a wallet or any money on him. He stuck a hand in his pants pocket and pulled free a folded piece of paper.

  The note, written in a ornate cursive handwriting, read:

  Don’t take any more of your medication, no matter what they tell you. Protect Doctor Brandt, she’s in danger. They all are. Remember Cassandra and Kaltzas and Pythos. The dead will follow.

  Dr. Brandt couldn’t get one of the bills to work in the machine. It kept spitting the dollar back out at her. Her fingers trembled. “Oh, damn.”

  “Flatten it.”

  “It is.”

  “Uncurl the edges,” he said.

  “They are.”

  Pace shrugged. That was about it so far as his ability to help went. He wasn’t sure where they were going, which button she intended to push for the tickets.

  Where did they can fish? He’d never seen a fish cannery before.

  The things you had to worry about, one second to the next. Didn’t they have robot slaves to do that sort of shit yet?

  A scraping sound drew his attention to the left.

  He turned and, shoving his hair from his eyes, watched as three figures rose from the corners of the waiting area. A girl scuttling out from beneath a distant bench, two men unfolding from behind the ATM across the station. Even muggers would never lower themselves to hide in such spots. Nobody in their right minds would.

  He tapped Dr. Brandt on the shoulder and she said, “The edges are uncurled!”

  “Don’t worry about that now.”

  “I hate these stupid things.”

  “Forget that.”

  For a moment the station seemed filled with people. A cacophony of voices and noise erupted around him. Pace bit back a yelp and steadied himself against the side of the ticket machine.

  The benches and aisles suddenly overflowed with people and animals. Wings flapped past, brushing his neck. A dog howled forlornly. A woman with blue skin and obsidian eyes began writing flaming runes in the air. A nun was running around with a yardstick screaming, “Don’t eat paste!” Kids laughed. An Indian with lengthy braids twirled a pair of six-shooters and aimed here and there, practicing taking the tops of skulls off. There were others Pace couldn’t focus on, who moved in and out of his vision, shifting and fluctuating. Blurred colors and activity swept across the station, through his head, and appeared to reach some kind of a peak as he went to one knee, then stopped altogether.

  Dr. Brandt couldn’t handle wrestling with her dollar bills anymore and started checking the bottom of her purse for coins. “Maybe I have enough change.”

  “Really, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

  The three figures that had climbed from their hidden corners continued forward, faces unclear as they approached. His eyes were focused, everything else was distinct, except for their faces. They came at him sort of frolicking, what they used to call gamboling when people would do that sort of thing. Silently easing nearer. Features dim and clouded, but their names somehow known to him.

  Pia.

  Faust.

  Hayden.

  The closer they got, the more obscured their features became. Pace stepped out in front of Dr. Brandt. Change fell to the floor and she said, “Will?”

  “I think we should leave.”

  “What?”

  “The fish cannery is going to have to do without me.”

  She turned and the three figures slid past him and were on her. Pace thought, This is why she was afraid, she must’ve been expecting this. He shook his head. But if that were true, then why didn’t she let Ernie escort her? Why didn’t she just give me a train ticket to the halfway house and drop me off at the curb?

  Dr. Brandt let out a shout—a strangely feminine sound that was part annoyance, part indignation. He threw a wild punch and missed all three of the intruders, no easy achievement considering how close they were to him. Somebody took one of his wrists and somebody else took the other.

  “My God,” Pia said. “He’s so slow.”

  “He’s not going to be any good to us in this state,” Faust said. “Our father who art inhibited.”

  “He can hear you just fine though,” Pace told them.

  Hayden twisted Pace’s arm. “There was a time when nobody could put a hand on you, if you didn’t want it there.”

  “When was that?” Pace asked, genuinely curious.

  “You were stupid to let them do this to you.”

  “I think I might have to agree.”

  He looked at where the guy’s nose would probably be, waiting for his hands to snap out and break it, but they didn’t. He expected Dr. Brandt to scream or start speaking in that cold, indifferent way, but she didn’t. He couldn’t figure out what was going on and kept hoping something else would happen that he wouldn’t be responsible for. Something that might reveal a truer nature.

  Faust almost came into view for a moment before fading again. The faceless figure approached, inch by inch. Wi
thout features it managed to peer into Pace’s eyes and say, “Ah, our father who art indifferent. I think they may have cured him.”

  two

  His first week in Garden Falls he spent mostly in the straitjacket, tied to the bed for twelve to fourteen hours at a clip. Dr. Brandt kept shooting him in the neck with something that calmed him enough so they could let him loose most of the evening.

  Pace would wander the corridors of the ward wearing a blue bathrobe Jane had bought William Pacella for Christmas four years earlier. There were matching slippers somewhere at the back of his closet at home. He kept wanting somebody to bring them to him, but he couldn’t form the words. Whenever he tried to speak he would drool on himself, and the crystalline fury within him would continue to grow beneath the docile exterior. Some outrages can never be forgiven.

  Garden Falls had hallways so bright that they made you flinch, like you were dying and starting to head into the light. All you wanted to do was scream it wasn’t your time yet.

  That first week, the cops kept stopping in and questioning him. They’d come in pairs, detectives with gold shields, mostly older guys, from some kind of special mob-related task force. Six in total. Each team asking him the same questions. Pace answered everything the same way.

  They asked about some guy named Big Joe Ganucci, called himself the Ganooch. Pace said he’d heard the name before, in the papers, but that was all. Inside himself something shuddered with a crazy glee.

  The detectives had a prescribed way of interviewing him. All three pairs asked the same questions in the same fashion. First about the Ganooch, then what they called the Ganucci crime family. Then they mentioned the fire at the restaurant and Jane’s death, and then they talked about his burns. As soon as he started discussing his scars they asked him if he knew how to use a serrated Trident field knife with a stacked micarta handle.

  Pace said he didn’t even know what a serrated Trident field knife with a stacked micarta handle was or how to use one or where he might get one. The cops always leaned in when he said that, searching his eyes. He stared back at them, complacent, bearing his truth, and again there would be that tremor within himself, somebody giggling.

  The detectives would thank him for his time and shake his hand. All six of them eventually. It seemed very important that they each make some kind of contact and squeeze his hand as hard as they could, trying to crush it. Every time he let out a pained gasp and flinched away. The cops would try to hide their smug smiles, but they couldn’t keep the arrogance out of their faces.

  Once he woke up in his room seated at the table with these strong plastic cuffs tying his ankles to the legs of the metal chair. Dr. Brandt sat on the other side of the table watching him, jotting notes, already involved with a conversation that Pace was only now coming in on. She said, “You don’t remember?”

  “What don’t I remember?”

  “Why you’re here.”

  “No.”

  “We think you’ve...hurt several people.”

  “You think so? You don’t know?”

  “At this point the police aren’t certain. That’s why they’ve been interviewing you so frequently.”

  “Isn’t it a violation of my civil rights to be held here then?”

  Dr. Brandt smiled at Pace, that same condescension mixed with that same something else. Jesus, she must’ve really practiced it. Her face, so lovely it had become a kind of devastation. Between moments of falling in love with her he thought, this lady is going to destroy me, or I’m going to snuff her. He looked over the side of the table at the curve of her thigh beneath the plaited skirt. The pulse in his ankles throbbed against the plastic cuffs. “You’re under extreme emotional duress. And you signed a voluntary committal.”

  “I did? When?”

  “When you were brought in.”

  “While I was under extreme emotional duress? Wouldn’t that nullify the ‘by choice’ quotient of the word ‘voluntary’?”

  Dr. Brandt said nothing, but her smile reached her eyes and grew more authentic.

  “I think you folks are definitely exploiting the situation and abusing my civil rights,” Pace said.

  “Do you feel persecuted?”

  “Only to the extent that I’m currently tied to a chair.”

  “That’s for your own protection as well as our staff and the other patients.”

  He touched his throat and felt the bruises and needle pricks there. He thought if Jane were here right now, she’d probably break Dr. Brandt’s jaw. It was a soothing image for a second, until the stink of burning flesh filled his nostrils. He turned his head aside and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Dr. Brandt was in a different position. Time had clearly passed. He couldn’t tell how much. He wondered if it was the same day, the same conversation. The drugs they were pumping into him were fouling up his sense of time. It was called aphasia, and they were giving it to him.

  He took the chance that only a minute had passed by. “Who am I supposed to have hurt?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Who is?”

  She cocked her head. “Pardon?”

  “Who is at liberty to say?”

  “I’m not at lib—” She cut herself short, caught her bottom lip between her teeth and worked it back and forth A defensive, delaying tactic. It stymied her, being forced to repeat herself. “We’ll get to that later.”

  “So you’re not at liberty to tell me who I’m supposed to have hurt which has, consequently, nullified my civil rights?”

  If you said the term “civil rights” enough times you can break down anybody working in a state-run facility.

  Dr. Brandt shifted in her seat and cleared her throat. Another sign of distress. “You also attacked one of the orderlies.”

  Using the word “also” to denote a separation of circumstance, community, and situation. So, presumably, he hadn’t only injured a member of the staff.

  “Why would I hurt one of the orderlies?”

  “He said something you didn’t like.”

  “Which was?”

  “I won’t repeat it.”

  Pace let out a sigh. It was easy to get the feeling that she liked keeping him in the dark, tied down, powerless.

  “Well, if I didn’t like what he said, then I’ll surmise I was provoked.”

  “Do you remember doing it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Did it have something to do with a knife?”

  She couldn’t write that down fast enough, hunched over her pad circling and underlining words. “Why would you say that?”

  “It was important to the police.”

  “No, it wasn’t about the knife. Not directly.”

  “Indirectly?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  If you weren’t already confused before you went into the nuthatch, they sure did everything they could to baffle the shit out of you once you were inside.

  Pace concentrated and fought backward through the fog inside his head. Memories surged up, snippets of images and voices, but it was like chasing snowflakes. Every time he got close to one it evaporated or disappeared into the storm. He squinted, screwed his face, and dropped his chin to his chest. Jane whispered in his ear, Will, don’t let them do this to you.

  Yeah, he remembered it now.

  The orderly’s name was friggin’ Brutus, if you could believe it. He was six-feet-two and went two-forty of muscle going to fat. He demanded that everybody call him Brutus. It was some kind of badge with him, a sign of toughness. Who knew what the hell it meant, but he insisted on it even from the most delusional patients.

  There were old women on the ward who would shuffle past, smiling at him like a long-lost grandson, calling him Johnny or Fred or Erasamus. This Brutus, he’d get right into their withered faces and snarl at these righteous elderly ladies, Call me Brutus, you loony old bags.

  He had this thing where he’d lean against the w
all and actually sniff at a pretty nurse as she went by, get her to giggle, then mock the patients to amuse her. Corner some schizophrenic who thought rats were gnawing at his belly, rats with the face of his father, his daddy chewing through his bellybutton. The nurse going, Tee hee hee.

  Brutus grinning while the schizo son of a bitch stared in terror at his own stomach. Brutus pretending his fingers were the mouths of vermin, then running his hands over the schiz’s skin. The nurse going, Tee hee hee. Brutus would squeak and hiss like he was a rat, and the patient would suck air deeper and deeper into his lungs getting ready to screech. Then Brutus and the girl would skirt into a corner and the schiz would shriek about his father crawling all over him tearing his guts out.

  The nurse going, Tee—

  Fed up with it, Pace threw himself at Brutus one day, but he didn’t know how to fight. He held his hands up in front of himself and this Brutus, he just laughed and took a step forward and hit Pace five times hard in the guts. Pace threw up on himself and staggered around in a daze. Brutus smashed him in throat, clipped his chin, and threw another punch that would’ve broken Pace’s neck if it had connected.

  But it didn’t. Pace was already on the ground by then, staring up, knowing that in the next thirty seconds or so he was going to be beaten pretty fucking badly, maybe to death. They hired maniacs to look after the lunatics.

  Odd, the way you meet yourself. Pace didn’t know it before then, but he had a guy named Jimmy Boyd living inside him, a welterweight born in Dublin in 1883. Jimmy’s family moved to Pittsburgh a decade later and by the time Jimmy was twelve he was working the mines alongside his father and two older brothers.

  Jimmy Boyd was embarrassed by how poorly Pace fought and how easily he bled and folded up. It was a question of manhood, always struggling to get back onto your feet.

  Boyd had fought such Hall of Famers as Joe Blackburn and Harry Greb, and in 1906 he’d lost a fifteen-round decision to John “Honey” Mellody, whose left jab Boyd couldn’t weave away from. A year later, at the Portland Athletic Club show, during the ninth round of a feature bout, Boyd killed Douglas Burke with two stiff punches over Burke’s heart.