On the River Styx (15 page)

“Ernie, Ernie! Shuffleboard! Ernie, Ernie!”

She started to cry, and he came forward and took her hand.

“Why am I crying?” she mumbled, enraged at herself. “I’m being so silly, Ernie. You just have to write that hospital and ask for a review of your case, that’s all …”

“That’s all,” Ernie said.

“… and it won’t be long before they develop some safe new operating technique, you’ll be out of here in no time.” She wiped her eyes and attempted a cheerful smile.

“That’s right,” Ernie said.

She had never seen such an expression in her life.

She plunged onward, hopelessly. “And you’ve got to be careful in the meantime, Ernie, not to bump your head, you’ve got to have patience and courage.”

“How did you know about my head?” Ernie said.

“Dr. Sobel. You’ve got to be very careful, you’ve got to—”

“Dr. Sobel. He’s okay, Doc Sobel.” Ernie nodded his head. “Thanks anyway. I’ll see you later.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t you hear them calling to me? I’m going to play shuffleboard with the boys.”

“Ernie!”

He waited.

“Ernie, everything’s going to work out fine! And afterwards, maybe you and I, we can celebrate together—”

She saw that instant that she had made still another mistake. Instead of cheering him, she had made him face the facts, Dr. Sobel’s facts, and his face quivered on the point of tears. He turned and fled, and she did not talk to him again.

Anne found a student nurse to take her place. She went for a walk between the rufous buildings, driven faster and faster until she found herself running, going nowhere. The day was cold, it was nearly December now, and the sharp air seared her lungs.

Afterwards, Ernie came less frequently to her ward.
When he did come, he avoided her, and she did not seek him out. She had only worsened things with every effort to assist him, and was frightened of her own ineptitude. Yet she watched him, and when he imagined she was not looking he watched her. He helped with the patients less and less, and they in turn called out to him less, as if they now included him in their ranks and meant to treat him with the same suspicion and superiority with which, unpersuaded of their own conditions, they treated the other sick around them. Only once she went to him and asked him how he felt, and he said shortly, “I feel dandy.” In the way that, once, his presence in the ward had given her confidence, it now inhibited her.

She was startled by her new assertive self, the self that stood up to Harry Marvin, tried to bully Dr. Sobel, coerced poor Mac into visiting the director. True, it had brought her confidence when she needed it most, and she had Ernest Hamlin to thank for this. But it had also betrayed her into errors she would never before have had the courage to consider.

Harry Marvin was right, she told herself. I don’t belong here.

O
NE NIGHT EARLY IN
D
ECEMBER
she was awakened by the telephone and made her way downstairs to answer it. “We need everyone out here, Anne,” came Harry’s voice, trying not to sound excited. “We’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

“I’ll be right there,” Anne said aloud, although he had hung up already.

It was nearly midnight.

On the highway by the main gate were a number of cars
with motors running. A state policeman held up a white-gloved hand in the beam of her headlights.

“Authorized personnel only, miss.”

“I’m a volunteer worker here. They telephoned me.”

Their voices were loud in a noise like heavy wind. He consulted a list.

“No Pryor listed, miss. Authorized personnel only. You better move your car, miss, you’re blocking the entrance.”

“Officer, they need people up there, they telephoned me—”

“C’mon, girlie, I told you once, no sightseers, no visitors. I got my orders! Now let’s move along!”

“I’m not a sightseer! I work here, I really do!” Anne’s voice broke, she was shaking with nervousness and cold as a second angry officer came forward and Mac drew up alongside.

“McKittredge, Miss Adelaide,” Mac barked, seeing the list. “What’s the matter, Anne?”

The second officer said, “Oh, Jesus,” and waved Anne after Mac. She drove haltingly through the milling faces, which were shouting above the din, a din which rose out of the night behind the trees. Then she traced Mac’s blood-red taillights, which cut up the hill into the darkness like two fast angry insects. Her heart moved violently, and she felt sick.

There were lights in the Administration Building but the other shapes crouched back into the night. People ran in all directions. “They’ve cut the lights,” Mac shouted in Anne’s ear. She had a cigarette stub in her mouth, trotting clumsily along the driveway.

“What’s happening, what’s happening!” Anne cried, her voice picked up and whirled away in the avalanche of noise,
a noise of endless feet in flight across a waste of concrete, of objects smashed against high iron windows, a noise of screaming.

The sound ricocheted around among the buildings, breaking out to surge like wind along the barren hillside, down across the frozen winter woods, the highway, and the town beyond.

Anne was sent with a student nurse to help in the children’s ward. They ran together over the bare ground, forsaking the cement sidewalks.

“What’s happening!” Anne cried again. “What’s happening!”

“Rioting!” the girl shrieked back at her. “It started in the men’s wards and spread all over!” The girl was beside herself with excitement, yet apparently unafraid. “We’ve got the doors locked, they can’t get out, but they’re breaking everything, the director says, he’s getting the fire trucks up here with fire hoses!”

The children’s wards were nearly under control. The children had been herded into corners. Most of them were badly frightened, and some of these were hysterical and screaming. A few were still running wild, hurling clothes and toothbrushes and bedpans; one little boy kicked furiously at an idiot huddled by the broken window. A big nurse reached him and he cursed and struck at her. Like most of the others he was naked in the winter drafts which swept the room. This little boy was named Robert Esposito, and he still bore scars inflicted by his father before and after he had finally set fire to his school.

Anne went from there to the women’s wards. Here, too, the worst of the riot was over, and she wondered fleetingly if she would ever find a chance to be of use. The clothes
of the women had been ripped to pieces, and they wandered aimless in their nudity, complaining. One was in a catatonic state and had attached herself, in frenzy, to another. The victim was a nice old woman known as Happy who was sent lollipops from home. She suffered a slight heart attack as the other woman was pried from her. Helping the frail body to a bed, Anne smelled the forsaken age of her and knew at last the love for these patients that the others felt. “Ah, dearie, thank you,” the old woman gasped. “It isn’t fit for folks like us to see such terrible sights, and I thank the Good Lord that my children never will.”

By five in the morning, the men’s wards had been subjugated. The midnight dark was turning towards a winter gray. Anne, standing in the cold, smoked a solitary cigarette and wondered about Ernest Hamlin. Before her the fire trucks, red lights still flashing, backed across the frozen earth, and the hoses nosed through the end doors of the buildings. The men inside were shouting still and pounding the bars on the upper floors, but the cries were more protesting now and less excited. The roar sagged slowly to a fretful moan and finally to a whine, until only now and then a metal object clanked without spirit on the bars, and the water pumps on the fire trucks commandeered the silence of December dawn. She learned from Harry later that an old man named Herbie Collins had been hurled against the wall by the rush of water and had died within minutes of a fractured skull.

“Poor old Collins staggered into the way,” Harry Marvin said, “but that hose was aimed at your friend Ernest Hamlin.” Harry was drawn and in need of a shave, and upset about Robert Esposito, who had been making progress, Harry said, considering the fact that twice before being
sent to Lime Rock he had been hospitalized after discipline by his father.

They were having coffee in the basement of the Administration Building.

“Why Ernest?” Anne said.

“Because he started the whole business. The guy with the hose didn’t know that, of course, he only saw that this big ox with the plumbing pipe in his hand and pounding his head against the wall was the man to stop. That’s why.”

“How is he?”

“Who?”

“Ernie.”

“I don’t know how Ernie is. I don’t care how Ernie is. I care about Robert Esposito and poor old Collins.”

“He’s hurt himself,” Dr. Sobel told her, and his interruption was a clear rebuke to Harry. He had been silent until now, staring at his coffee. “Hamlin had an attack, and he didn’t give us warning. I think he knew he was going to have it. I think he hit his head on purpose. But,” he said to Harry Marvin, “I don’t think he started the riot on purpose. What he did to himself frightened the others, got them excited.”

“That’s right,” another doctor said. “I talked to one of my patients in there. He said this Hamlin started yelling, that he got into the washroom and wrenched this pipe loose and started breaking things. Then the men in his ward got excited and started yelling for help, and the other wards just sort of picked it up. Of course certain patients joined Hamlin in pounding on the bars and breaking, it was a release for them in a way, and finally the whole place was infected. Like a plague.”

“Where is he now?” Anne whispered.

“We have him under phenobarb,” a nurse said briskly. “He’s upstairs right now, in the in-patients room. But we’re transferring him to the disturbed ward.”

“He’s going to stay there, too,” Harry Marvin said.

“He’s hurt himself. I don’t know why, but he’s hurt himself. On purpose.” Dr. Sobel tapped a small sad finger on his temple. “Probably permanently. I’ve talked to him already.”

“Did he hurt anybody else?”

“No,” Harry Marvin snapped. “Just got them killed, is all. He was much too normal, as you know, to hurt anybody.”

“Harry,” Mac said, “why don’t you shut up?” She got to her feet and left the room, and Anne followed her.

“I’d like to see him, Mac,” she said.

Mac nodded approvingly.

“Good for you, go right ahead. He’s receiving, as you know, in the in-patients room. Poor bastard.” She banged through the supply room door.

Anne climbed the stairs and went to see Ernest Hamlin. His head was on a pillow, bandaged, and his body was strapped to the metal cot. When she entered the room, he opened his eyes and constructed a sort of smile.

“I made it, kid,” he said. “The varsity shuffleboard team.” He started to laugh, a laughter high like crying. Then he frowned. “They hurt me in there. I told you they were out to get me because I wasn’t nuts like them, and now they hurt me. My head hurts, see. They knew it was dangerous for me to hurt my head, and they hurt me anyway!”

He seemed surprised.

“Who, Ernie?” She wanted to reach out to him but could not. Through the window behind him she could see
the fringe of trees down to the east, etched black by the sharp rising light of winter sun, and she thought, Beyond there, far away, the outside world encircles us and pins us in.

“They. Those guys. All those guys.”

“The doctors, you mean? The firemen?”

“Yeah, everybody,” Ernest Hamlin muttered. “Them, too. All those guys.” He was staring straight at the white ceiling, frowning, and took no notice of her when she bent and pressed her forehead to the cool iron of his cot.

1963

O
n the pale flats the lone trace of man was a leaning stake marking some lost channel that a storm or shift of current had filled in. On the end of the stake perched a ragged cormorant, its drying wings held wide in a black cross against the wind. The archaic bird, the rampant mangroves, the hidden underwater life raising ghostly puffs from the white marl dust of ages of dead creatures, deepened Burkett’s sense of solitude, of pointlessness. Earlier that day they had seen a silver horizon off to the west, where the Ten Thousand Islands opened out onto the Gulf, and this window of light, for a little while, had dissipated a vague dread that had been gathering for days.

The marl reaches were too shallow for the outboard, and the skiff moved so quietly across the flats that Burkett could hear the minute fret of water on the hull.

Facing astern, he tried to befriend the black man standing on the thwart, who always worked as if he were sneaking up on something, even in the open water, staring about him, catching his breath, as if emptiness itself were a thing to fear. On his sculling pole, leaning out over the stern, as far away from the white people as possible, the bony figure—the shadowed face under the straw hat, the tattered shoulder of his faded shirt, the unnameable odor—swung in arcs on the hot white sky, back and forth and forth and back against the wild green walls. The water, browned by mangrove tannin, turned gray when the sun clouded over, and the dark islets spread away, parted, regathered, always surrounding. With their silent boatman, his wife had said, it was like traveling the River Styx.

Behind him, Alice sat unprotesting in the bow. Her rag-doll smile, still pretty and fresh at forty-three, required no lipstick, and she rarely wore it. Why, he wondered, had she worn it to go fishing? The red smear of lipstick on her bucktooth, the funny sun hat, the white sun paste on her nose, the incongruous earphones of the tape player clutched too tightly in her hand—her eccentric aspect intensified his instinct that they had no place here. (She knew what she looked like and performed a whimsical fishing routine when he asked how she was doing, brandishing her rod, crying fiercely, “Fisher Woman!”) If only for her sake—since she was no fisherman—they should have gone deep-sea fishing out of Fort Lauderdale, or bonefishing out of Islamorada in the Keys, where there were friendly people to relax with, drink with, where she might have spent a day around the pool. In this wild region the inhabitants held them away, even this guide, who was too makeshift in his
preparations to bring along his lunch and too uneasy to accept a part of theirs.