13 1/2 (30 page)
Authors: Nevada Barr
“Go to bed. That’s what I’m going to do. Good night, brother.” Danny’s footsteps corkscrewed upward. Marshall heard his kitchen door click shut.
He stared at the tablets.
You get, you share.
The thought made him smile.
Even in the bad times, there were good times. By virtue of their rarity, they were experienced more keenly, remembered more fondly. Maybe that was why men remembered their wars with such relish. Maybe that’s why he’d never had the tattoo removed.
He pushed up the sleeve on his left arm and looked at the old marks. Crude green slashes, once sharp but now blurred and faded with age, formed the numbers one and three and the fraction one-half. A classic prison tat. He’d been anesthetized with cheap bourbon one of the “girls” had gotten from a guard in trade for a blow job. The tattoo artist had been as drunk as the rest of them. Marshall remembered the sting, and the blood, and the laughter.
“Thirteen and a half,” Draco had said. “One judge, twelve jurors, half a chance.”
Marshall pushed the sleeve back down and looked again at the pills. He’d sworn off illegal drugs a long time ago. He didn’t trust doctors and he hated “mental health professionals” of any stripe. Now he was a prescription junkie, hunkered over in a basement with a fistful of unidentified pills, joking about suicide.
How the hell had that happened?
Tippity.
After he’d nearly frozen Elaine’s dog, the nightmares had come back—not as bad as when he was a kid but bad enough—and Danny had given him something to help him sleep. Danny got them as samples that came in small brown envelopes.
Marshall had taken them for a year or so after the Tippity debacle, then quit. When he married Polly, Danny worried he’d go into whatever the hell it was he went into when “emotionally charged”—Danny’s term for love—and suggested he start again. “Keep the monsters at bay,” Danny’d said.
Though Marshall hated to admit it, after so long alone, he didn’t sleep well with someone else in the bed. And he’d been more scared of the monsters than he’d wanted to admit. So he took the pills.
“Same old thing in a new package,” Danny’d said.
Same old Butcher Boy of Rochester in a new package?
32
Thirteen and a half.
The tattoo brought back memories Marshall hadn’t allowed out of his subconscious for twenty-five years at least. Not even the good memories; for Marshall, it had never been possible to pick and choose. The flood-gates were open or they weren’t. Tonight had opened them with such suddenness, the images carried him like a leaf on a tide rushing back. The past rose around him, as the waters had risen when the levees broke, and he watched with the same sense of helpless, frightened wonder.
Draco. Dr. Kowalski. That stupid Swede, Helman or Herman. Dr. Olson. Phil. Phil Maris, his math teacher, the guy who taught him to build in his mind, the guy he’d dropped acid with. They guy who’d abandoned him then saved him.
Marshall was not merely remembering; people from his past were with him. He could smell the perennial cigarette stink of Draco’s hair. Phil smiled, and Marshall was a proud teenager. Then Kowalski leaned back in his chair.
Marshall snapped out of the living memory and into his cellar.
God, he had hated Kowalski. Most of Ward C hated Kowalski. Dozens of punk criminals, including one mass murderer and two knife wielders, and yet nobody had killed the psychiatrist. What a waste of talent. After the acid trip gone awry he’d never seen the bastard again. The joke in the ward was that since he’d tried to kill Kowalski, that proved that he was innocent.
Tried
was the key word. Draco started it, saying if he couldn’t off that spineless fuck, he was obviously a washout as a stone-cold killer, and somebody else must have done his family.
was the key word. Draco started it, saying if he couldn’t off that spineless fuck, he was obviously a washout as a stone-cold killer, and somebody else must have done his family.
He had never seen Phil Maris again either. The morning he got out of the infirmary, his brain still scummed with LSD, the warden announced that Phil had taken a better job in St. Cloud. It was midterm; Phil hadn’t said anything about any job, and he hadn’t said good-bye to anybody.
The “better job” was as much bullshit as Kowalski’s “better job” had been.
For a while he looked for letters, waited on visitors’ day, but there’d been no contact. The warden refused to give him Phil’s new address so he could write. He’d tried to talk to Rich about it, but Rich had taken a dislike to the algebra teacher.
When he asked the staff about Phil they got cagey, like people used to get when a girl got pregnant in high school. “She transferred,” they’d say, or “she’s visiting her aunt in another state.” Then they’d look at each other in that certain way.
Phil had fucked up somehow and gotten thrown out. Not fired; if that had been the case, there wouldn’t have been the slitty-eyed smirks and knowing looks.
A year or so later, he’d heard that Phil really was teaching high school in St. Cloud, so maybe it wasn’t total bullshit.
After the initial weirdness of Phil’s disappearance wore off, he’d let it drop. In juvie, weird was a way of life. Questioning it was not only a waste of time but could get a kid in trouble. Looking back, Marshall wondered why the staff had done the “little pitchers have big ears” routine after Phil left. If he’d been canned for dropping acid, they’d have said so, used it as an object lesson against the evils of drugs.
And Dylan hadn’t been a “little pitcher.” At fifteen, he was five-ten, one hundred sixty pounds, and a convicted murderer. What could be so bad they wouldn’t want to sully his underage ears with it? If they thought they were protecting his innocence, they’d been three corpses too late.
Then out of the blue, two years later, Phil gets him out of Drummond. He didn’t see Phil and Phil never contacted him. It had been done behind the scenes. Since Dylan hadn’t been into looking gift horses in the mouth at that juncture, he’d let it slide. Marshall had let it slide as well. Working hard to put “Dylan, boy monster” behind him, he’d been relieved to move out of Minnesota, change his name.
Be a “real live boy” for a change.
Marshall laughed. The sound rang hollow in the hot damp of the cellar.
Dylan Raines was never going to be a real live boy. One day, the poor little bugger was going to remember the murders, and Marshall’s house of cards, complete with a cardboard marriage and borrowed family, was going to come crashing down.
With a rush of yearning startling in its intensity, Marshall wanted to see Phil again, show him how he’d turned out, and thank him for teaching him to build with his mind. He wanted to do it before the house fell. The need was so strong, it lifted him half off the step, as if he was going to run to the phone or the train station and look up his old teacher.
Surely, with the electronic ears and eyes everywhere, trails left by each purchase, every plane ticket, telephone calls, he could track him down. Phil Maris wasn’t that much older. He was only . . .
“Nearly seventy,” Marshall said aloud. He sank back down onto the step. The man might be dead; might not remember a murderous child who’d loved him forty years ago.
Without Phil, and his brain puzzles, and the garden they’d started together that last night, Dylan would have stayed Butcher Boy.
“Thank you,” Marshall said to the dark ceiling. “Wherever you ended up. If you hadn’t gotten me out, I’d undoubtedly have more tattoos and fewer teeth.”
The day of his release from Drummond unfolded in Marshall’s mind. The man from the department of corrections, Mr. Leonard, had turned out to be alright. He’d helped with college, moving, and, though it went against his stolid Midwestern way of life, even the name change Danny had wanted.
Overweight, late forties back then, Mr. Leonard was probably dead by now
.
Marshall missed him as well. Dylan missed him not at all.
.
Marshall missed him as well. Dylan missed him not at all.
Maybe because Mr. Leonard hadn’t liked Phil. At the time, Dylan made a half-hearted effort to get Phil’s phone number so he could express what passed for gratitude in those days. Mr. Leonard refused. He said, “You’ve got no need to go contacting him. He owes you this much and more.” Dylan didn’t waste time trying to figure it out. Soul-searching—his or anybody else’s—was a pastime he never dared mess with. He was free and shaking the Minnesota snow from his boots.
Decades later, Marshall was wondering why Mr. Leonard disliked Phil so much. Leonard had seemed like a good guy, straightforward. Dylan’s release might have been won by Phil, but it was orchestrated by the Minnesota Department of Corrections. It mattered to Leonard. Why would he hate the man who had been instrumental in making it happen? And what on earth could Phil Maris owe Dylan for?
Dylan believed, while his brain was scrambled, he’d said something about them dropping acid together and that’s what got Phil booted out of Drummond. Nobody ever said anything about it; so, after a while, Dylan had relaxed on that count. Besides, a lot of the guards did a hell of a lot worse than drop acid with their little charges and they never got reported. They just disappeared.
Child molestation.
“Holy shit,” Marshall murmured.
Phil wasn’t fired for dropping acid. He was fired because he’d dropped his pants. Marshall felt the betrayal as if it were yesterday, and he was still eleven years old. Phil was doing the boys. He started to cry again, rusting machinery grinding painfully. Abruptly, he stopped. Anger flared too hot for tears. Lightning-fast he smashed his fist into the wall between the studs.
“Crap,” he yelled. “That has got to be crap.” Phil never touched Marshall—Dylan. He didn’t do anything out of line, not once, not a look, not a smirk, nothing for four years. Phil never messed with any of the other guys either, not that Marshall knew of. And he would know. Everybody would know. The algebra teacher didn’t get talked about, and in lockup, there was nothing much to do but talk. Guards never snickered or sneered when he came by. There was nothing.
Phil wasn’t buggering his students.
“Why do you care now, for Christ’s sake?” Marshall asked himself. But he did care. A lifetime later, and he cared a lot. Phil was a hero in a world where there were too few heroes and more than enough villains to go around. He’d loved Phil. He’d told him so after the acid trip that had landed him in the infirmary.
No, he’d told Danny. Was that why Phil had gotten thrown out of juvie? Because a doped up kid said he loved him, and somebody figured it was more than just spiritual?
Marshall shook his head and then lowered it into his hands, his elbows braced on his knees to take the great weight of his thoughts. “Damn it.”
His life was coming apart, his wife was leaving him, and this was the time he’d chosen to lurk in the basement worrying about Phil Maris, who was most likely dead, or retired, or had rejoined the Peace Corps and gone to some disease-ridden hole to help more boys.
Pebbles pressed into his cheek. The pills. Danny’s pills.
Something to help you sleep.
Something to help you sleep.
Marshall reached up and flipped on the stairwell light. His brother had said they were Valium. Marshall threw a couple of them into his mouth to swallow dry but a strangeness made him spit them back into his palm.
There was a wrongness about them. A wrongness about a lot of things. His on-again, off-again memory that worked fine between murders and attempted murders of small dogs; an axe that he didn’t remember using forty years ago but suddenly took to carrying up and downstairs in his sleep; Phil getting canned the day after Kowalski’s acid experiment; Mr. Leonard saying, “He owes you.”
Marshall desperately needed put the pieces together, but what he had weren’t solid enough to be referred to as pieces. Drifts of fog. Whispers in the dark. A long time ago Marshall had learned never to seek out the dark corners of his mind, never to listen to unauthorized murmurs. At eleven, he’d taken his dad’s old wood-chopping axe and butchered his mother, father, and his little sister, Lena. Then he killed Ginger, the family cat. All those years that quack Kowalski had been trying to get him to remember, Dylan had been trying to make sure that he didn’t. Not remembering was the only reason he didn’t have to be fed with a spoon or peeled off the ceiling every morning.
Dylan didn’t want to remember, and Marshall refused to look at those years. Both man and boy knew remembering would be the end of it. Nobody sane could stay sane having that knowledge in their bones.
This was the first time since the night Dr. K. and Phil had been thrown out of Drummond that he had thought about the bad old days. Or about how the bad old days had come along into the good old days, robbing him of Elaine and, now, of Polly, Emma, and Gracie, just as he had robbed himself, Rich, and the world of his mother, and dad, and little Lena.
Polly and her goddamn tarot cards.
A wrongness there as well. Marshall might be an insane mass murderer, but he wasn’t crazy enough to think a raddled old woman, subsisting on tourist donations, was privy to the secrets of the universe. Or his wife’s mind.
It was a trick. A con’s trick. It had to be. Somehow the reader had gotten hold of memories Polly thought were a secret. She must have told someone.
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