Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (61 page)

“She won’t let me do nothing to him,” Clara was saying as I shifted back to face her. “I make a move—I kiss him, I try to shake his fucking hand, she’ll talk me to death. Shit, I’d rather die than have her talk at me. I ain’t gonna touch him.”

Albert said gruffly, “You heard me? I hate you.”

Clara dropped her head, arms drooping, a puppet whose master had let go. She hung there, lifeless. From the street, summer sounds washed over the garden wall. A water pistol fight, the ping of a basketball dribbled fast on pavement, a radio playing rap music. A man shouted, “Hey Tony! Hey Tony! You fuck face. We have to go.” The music shut off. A girl screamed with glee. The basketball rattled on something metallic. Clara came to life. She sat up, stretched, elongating her skinny arms and neck. Under her arms, there were faint white circles, maybe from a deodorant. She slid off the steps onto her knees.

“You’re my baby,” she whispered passionately, arms forward now, fingers calling to Albert. “You always gonna be my sweet baby.”

Involuntarily, I pushed my chair back. I thought I heard the glass doors open, but our escort didn’t appear. Albert, on the other hand, hadn’t moved. His dignified face was set, cheeks puffed, eyes in a rageful stare.

Clara gushed on, low and intense, like a lover. “I know I hurt you, baby, but that was crack, that was the life, that was all the shit happening to me. I love you, baby. That wasn’t me hurt you. I’m your Mama, baby.” She moved herself: eyes brimmed with tears. I noticed her wide full lips, painted vermilion—they were luscious and innocent.

“Who you think you talking to?” Albert said. The words were tough; the sound he made wasn’t.

“I’m talking to my son. You always gonna be my son—”

“You talking trash for the Man?” Albert nodded at me. They both glanced my way, but only briefly. They locked eyes again. “You won’t fool him,” Al continued. “You’ll fool me sooner than you fool him. And that’s hopeless, ’cause you ain’t never gonna get a lie past me.”

Clara’s wide mouth was open, hands extended, fingers calling for him to come to her, tears streaming, “I’m not saying I did nothing. I’m not lying about it. I know what I did. Everybody knows what I did. There’s nothing for me to
get
out of lying.” Clara seemed to notice she was on her knees and that appeared to surprise her. She reached back to the step, and pulled herself on it. She gave us her profile as she confessed, “I know I’m bad. I know there’s no excuse—”

“You’re making excuses, that’s all you’re doing,” Albert said, again talking tough, but his voice cracked on the last word.

“I’m just saying I love you, that’s all.”

“You’re saying it wasn’t you.”

“Not the real me,” Clara insisted. “I didn’t touch you before I smoked.” She looked past him to me and said, “Explain it to him. I’m not saying I didn’t do it. I’m not saying it ain’t my fault. I’m saying I love him and I wish to God it never happened.” She had moved herself again, fresh tears running over the dried tracks.

“You say it was the drug,” I commented.

“You know it makes you crazy,” she argued with me. “You telling me crack don’t fuck you up? That what you tell him? I’m the same person now? I ain’t the same. That’s a lie too. If you be telling him that, it’s a lie.”

“No!” Albert bellowed. Clara winced. I heard a footstep behind me that I assumed came from the escort. The bass of Albert’s shout reverberated until there was complete silence, except the basketball, whining as it struck the concrete in a pounding rhythm. Only when his yell died away did he continue, in a deep tone of conviction, “You trying to say it was somebody else. That’s all you trying to say. You trying to take away the only thing I got left. People feel sorry for me and they want to help me. That’s the one fucking thing you gave me and now, you greedy bitch, you want that too.” Albert stood up. He was already turning away, obviously scared he was about to lose control. He tossed back at her, “I hope you die.” He walked past me, bumping my chair.

I got up to follow him. As I reached the escort, standing in the patio doorway, I turned back for another look at Clara. Albert’s mother sat up straight on the step, eyes dead, her stained face tranquil. She stared at me as if we had never met.

I got home late. The van leaving for Dorrit House had been delayed. In fact, that was good luck. Obviously, Albert was very troubled by the encounter and, I felt, in grave danger. I had been lax in leaving so little time between these two momentous events in his life. I had misgivings when the shelter gave us Albert’s departure day as his only opportunity to visit Clara; but he insisted he wanted to see her before leaving New York and I decided I couldn’t object to that.

We talked in a coffee shop across the street from where the van was parked. Its driver was checking under the hood for the source of the engine’s cough. Albert sat opposite me, ignoring his slice of cherry pie and glass of milk. He breathed shallowly, his shoulders were hunched, his arms half-raised, like a boxer in a fighting crouch. His barely suppressed rage was electric: the waiter didn’t linger on Albert’s side of the table. I noticed when he returned to the cash register, he kept an eye on us. I tried to get Albert to express himself directly. When that failed, I asked him to describe how he would like to kill his mother.

Most people, I suppose, would react with at least a show of disgust or horror at my question. Albert and I were old hands at these nightmare conversations. “I don’t want to,” he mumbled in his tight-lipped rage.

“Tell me how you’re thinking of killing her. Strangling?”

“Talking ain’t gonna stop me. You kidding yourself. I’m fucking kidding
myself.
I’m glad I’m going away. When I blow, I don’t want it to fuck you and my buddies.”

“I’m not trying to talk you out of killing, Albert. I know I can’t stop you with talk. I want you to tell me what you’re thinking so you’ll feel better.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Are you gonna rape her first? Or just choke her?”

“Just let me go, Rafe. I’m gone, man. I’m really gone.” Tears appeared, although he still had a warrior’s pose.

“Choking her would stop the lying.”

“I don’t wanna choke her!” he shouted, much too loudly. I sensed the quiet gather around us. I didn’t look, fearing eye contact with the waiter would imply I needed help.

I spoke low. “What then? A gun?”

“I’m gonna put Zebra down her throat. Okay? I’ll stuff her ugly face. I’ll choke her with my come.”

“You can’t kill her with sperm.”

“No, I can’t,” he smiled. “You’re right. That’s just to warm up. I’ll cut her belly open and take out her stomach. She’ll be alive. That’s how the Japs kill. They hand you your guts so’s you can watch yourself die.”

“Do you know why you’d like to kill her that way?”

“Oh fuck, man. It don’t matter. I’m still gonna do it no matter what the fuck it a symbol of.”

“You’re going to make her pregnant. Make her heal your penis with her mouth, fill her with your sperm, make a new you in her belly and open her womb to bring him out alive. You’re going to be reborn out of the monster and that will kill it.”

Albert stared for a moment and then he shook his head sadly, pitying me. “Man, that is the dumbest shit you ever said. I mean, you’ve said some dumb shit, but that’s the master dumbness.”

“She won’t die in the real world, Albert. She can only die in your head. That’s where she lives. That’s her home. That’s where she gets her mail, that’s where she cooks her meals and that’s where she hurts you.”

“Then I’ll cut my brain out.”

“With drugs? Like she did?”

“She smart. She ain’t hurting. She got them turned around, living in that nice house, showing her stuff. She probably fucking all of ’em. She probably fucking that dyke who opened the door like she was a fucking African princess. Staring at me like it’s me who did it to her. Women, man. They flicking hate us. Clara, she ain’t a monster. She just did what they all want—cut our fucking dicks off.”

He finally took a stab at his cherry pie, consuming almost a third of it in a single gulp. The danger hadn’t passed, yet it lessened with each angry word. As long as he gave the twisting rage a voice, he wouldn’t need to hurt somebody—at least not that day. For Albert, I’m afraid, most people would think all his victories to be no better than King Pyrrhus’s.

It was late when I came home to find Diane in one of my sweatshirts (it reached to her bare knees) waving a pot holder at me with a smile. “I made dinner, can you believe it? A real dinner.” Her smile disappeared. “What’s wrong?”

I told her the story, sitting sadly on one of the two tall stools at our kitchen counter, too exhausted to take off my jacket, soaked through from my travels through the hot day.

“Sounds like he’ll be okay,” she said. She touched my hand, gently stroking it. “You did great work.”

I had reported with little emotion, my voice fading from hoarseness. I felt that I wanted to cry and my legs hurt, aching as if I had run a marathon.

Diane came around and hugged me from behind. She kissed my neck and whispered in my ear. “It must have been hard on you, very hard.”

“I’m scared,” I said and I was crying.

Diane maneuvered to hug me face-to-face. I felt ready to let go of all the tears I had ever wanted to release, when she said, “Oh baby.”

That reminded me of Clara and poisoned the endearment. My tears stopped. And I wondered, since I could be given pause by so slight a contact with Clara, how would Albert ever trust love?

“I love you,” Diane was saying and I listened to her, just her, a woman I could trust. She led me to the couch, urging me out of my damp blazer, and rested my head on her lap.

“I’m tired,” I admitted, as if she had asked a question.

“Take a nap, my sweet man. Close your eyes.”

“I want us to get married,” I said and the tears were back. I sobbed into my sweatshirt, smelling bubble bath. “I want us to make a new baby,” I said in a dopey child’s voice.

Diane didn’t ask what I meant by new baby. Probably she understood. Anyway, she answered in a confident voice, “We’ll get married and make beautiful babies and be happy forever and ever.”

I shut my eyes, felt the aches burn hotter and hotter. Soon I was asleep, dreaming of dark highways jammed with stalled vans, blocking the road. Men shouted at each other in Spanish, accusing and helpless. The women laughed, showing their breasts. And children, faces pressed against the windows, waved to me to go past them, onto the empty road ahead.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE
Happiness

A
LBERT PHONED EVERY
F
RIDAY AFTERNOON, THE TIME
D
ORRIT
H
OUSE SET
aside for the boys to make a fifteen-minute call home. Within a few weeks, he sounded fine. He was enthusiastic about the sports program; he had made the freshman football squad and it surprised him that the courses weren’t daunting. “Guess I didn’t trust the tutors,” he said, meaning the people we hired to bring the four boys at our clinic up to speed academically. He was also pleased that his schoolmates respected each other’s privacy about their pasts. He could not avoid the common shower room; but no one joked or was revolted by his scarred body. The quarterback of his squad, a half-Chicano, half-Cherokee from the Midwest, looked at them openly and said, “You’ve been there, huh?”

Albert didn’t know what he meant, but he said, “Yeah, I been there.”

After that, they were friends. Albert was the coach’s favorite running back on the freshman squad, and had been promised he would make varsity next year.

“Shit, you make the football team and they respect you,” Albert said. “I gotta tell you, I love it. I put on the pads, hit everything in sight and you know what? I don’t feel pain. I smash into guys, they roll on the ground yelling, but it’s like nothing to me. And I’m beautiful in that uniform. You should see me, man. I look like a fucking god. You should see.”

I promised I would.

“This is sublimation, right?” Diane said when I told her. “Not repression?”

“I think it’s happiness for him, anyway.”

“I hate football,” she mumbled. “Couldn’t he have joined the theater program?”

“Oh yeah. That would cheer him up. He could do Greek tragedy.”

“Give me a break. I’m just saying, Al’s really a very sweet boy.”

“But it’s not a sweet world,” I said. I must have looked grim. Diane reached across—she was driving us from the clinic to meet Joseph and Harlan at a restaurant—and tweaked my nose. I jerked away, laughing.

“It’s not a sweet world,” she repeated in a mock-petulant tone.

“Well, it’s not,” I complained, still laughing.

“Thanks for the news flash.”

“I love you,” I said.

She smiled. “Oh!” she checked the rearview mirror, switched lanes to exit the West Side Highway at Seventy-ninth, and said, “I spoke to Jonas Friedman about your friend at Webster.”

“Phil Samuel?”

“Yeah. Jonas says it’s not true he’s impartial. He’s done some work for the defense in that, uh, Seattle case—the MacPherson Day Care?”

“He couldn’t have. He’s refused to testify about the mouse results for anybody.”

“That’s right, Jonas said he won’t testify. But he does consult for them. He drills the lawyers in how to take psychologists apart on the stand.”

I had stalled Phil about sending tapes of Diane’s interviews of the Peterson case. He knew about them because I let slip we had interviews of children in the target age group before talking with Diane and then had to backtrack when I decided to respect her reservations. Instead, I sent along our guidelines for a course Ben Tomlinson teaches at John Jay University to police psychologists, detailing how to use dolls and minimize prompting, especially the silent encouragement of body language and vocal cues. Samuel called the day before, asking for the Peterson tapes again. I said I needed to discuss it with the therapist involved, then promptly, and conveniently, forgot to ask Diane.

Asking her now was unlikely to meet with a favorable reception. We were stopped at the light on Seventy-ninth. I didn’t say anything until it had turned green and we were crossing Riverside, heading east.