The Madman's Tale (17 page)

He paused, continuing to survey my wall. Then he added, in a low voice, “When I was barely nine my brother died. He was the one closest to me in age, just a year older, Irish twins was the family joke. But his hair was much lighter than mine, and his skin seemed always pale, like it had been stretched thinner than my own. And I could run, jump, play sports, stay out all day, but he could barely breathe. Asthma and heart troubles and kidneys that barely worked. God wanted him to be special that way, or so I was told. Why God decided that was considered beyond me. So there we were, nine and ten, and we both knew he was dying, and it didn’t make any difference to us, we still laughed and joked, and made all the little secrets brothers do. On the day they took him for the last time to the hospital, he told me that I would have to be the boy for the both of us. I wanted so badly to help him. I told my mother that Billy could have my right lung and my heart, that the doctors could give me his, and we’d just trade off for a while. But of course, they didn’t do that
.”

I listened, and didn’t interrupt Peter, because as he spoke, he walked closer to the wall where I’d begun to write our story, but he wasn’t reading the words scrawled there, he was telling his own. He took a drag from the cigarette and then continued speaking slowly
.

“
In Vietnam, C-Bird, did I tell you about the point man who got shot?”

“
Yes, Peter. You did
.”

“
You should put that in what you write. About the point man and my brother who died young. I think they’re part of the same story
.”

“
I’ll have to tell them about your nephew and the fire, as well
.”

He nodded. “I knew you would. But not yet. Just tell them about the point man. You know what I remember the most about that day? That it was so damn hot. Not hot like you or I or anyone growing up in New England knew hot. We knew hot like in August, when it was a scorcher, and we went down and swam in
the harbor. This was an awful, sickly hot that felt poisonous. We were snaking through the bush single file and the sun was high overhead. The pack on my back felt like it had every item I needed and every care I had in the world packed inside. The bad guys had a simple policy for their snipers, you know. Shoot the guy in front on the point and drop him. Wound him, if you could. Aim for the legs, not the head. At the sound of the shot, everyone else would take cover, except for the medic you see, and that was me. The medic would go for the wounded man. Every time. You know, in training, they told us not to foolishly risk our own lives, but we always went. And then the sniper would try to drop the medic, because he was the one guy in the platoon that everyone owed, and this would bring everyone else out into the open, trying to get to the medic. A remarkably elemental process. How a single shot gives you an opportunity to kill many. So, that was what happened this day, they shot the point man, and I could hear him calling for me. But the platoon leader and two other guys were holding me back. I was short. Less than two weeks in my tour left. So instead, we listened while he bled to death. And that’s the way it was reported back at headquarters later, making it seem inevitable. Except it wasn’t true. They held me back, and I struggled and complained and pleaded, but all the time I knew that if I wanted, I could break free. That I could go for him, all it would take was a little more effort. And that was what I wouldn’t spend. That little extra push. So, instead, we had this little charade in the jungle while a man died. It was the type of situation where what is right is what will be fatal. I didn’t go, and no one blamed me, and I lived and went home to Dorchester and the point man died. I didn’t even know him all that well. He’d been in the platoon for less than a month. I mean, it wasn’t like I was listening to my friend die, C-Bird. He was just someone who was there, and then he cried for help, and kept crying until he couldn’t cry any longer because he was dead
.”

“
He might not have lived, even if you’d reached him.”

Peter nodded, smiling. “Sure. Right. I told myself that, too.”

He sighed. “All my life, I had nightmares about people calling for help. And I didn’t go
.”

“
But you became a fireman …
”

“
Easiest way to do penance, C-Bird. Everyone loves the fireman
.”

Peter slowly faded from my side. It was midmorning, I remembered, before we got a chance to speak. The Amherst Building was filled with sunlight that sent creases through the thick leftover smell of violent death. The white walls seemed to glow with intensity. The patients were walking around, doing their regular shuffle and lurch, but a little more gingerly. Moving cautiously, because all of us, even in our mad states, knew that something had happened and sensed that something was still to happen. I looked around and found my pencil
.

It was midmorning before Francis had a chance to speak with Peter the Fireman. A deceptive, glaring spring sunshine burst past the windows and steel bars, sending explosions of light through the corridors, reflecting off the floor that had been cleaned of all the outward signs of murder. But a residue of death lurked in the stale air of the hospital; patients moved singly or in small groups, silently avoiding the places where murder had left its signs. No one stepped in the spots where the nurse’s blood had pooled up. Everyone gave the storage closet a wide berth, as if getting too close to the scene of the crime might somehow rub some of its evil off on them. Voices were muted, conversation was dulled. Patients shuffled a little more slowly, as if the hospital ward had been transformed into a church. Even the delusions that afflicted so many of the inmates seemed quieted, as if for once taking a backseat to a much more real and frightening madness.

Peter, however, had taken up a position in the corridor where he was leaning against the wall, staring directly at the storage room. Every so often his eyes would measure the distance between the spot where the nurse’s body was discovered and where she had been first assaulted, in the wire mesh enclosed station in the center of the hallway.

Francis moved toward him slowly. “What is it?” he asked quietly.

Peter the Fireman pursed his lips together, as if concentrating hard. “Tell me, C-Bird, does any of this make any sense to you?”

Francis started to respond, then hesitated. He leaned up against the wall next to the Fireman and began to look in the same direction. After a moment, he said, “It’s like reading the last chapter of a book first.”

Peter smiled and nodded. “How so?”

“Well,” Francis said slowly, “it’s all in reverse. Not reverse, like a mirror, but as if we are told the conclusion but not how we got there.”

“Go on, C-Bird.”

Francis felt a kind of energy as his imagination churned with what he’d seen the night before. Within him, he could hear a chorus of assent and encouragement. “Some things really bother me,” he said. “Some things I just don’t understand.”

“Tell me some of the things,” Peter asked.

“Well, Lanky, for starters. Why would he want to kill Short Blond?”

“He thought she was evil. He tried to assault her in the dining hall earlier.”

“Yes, and then they gave him a shot, which should have calmed him down.”

“But it didn’t.”

Francis shook his head. “I think it did. Not completely, but it did. When I got a shot like that it was like having all the muscles in my body sliced, so that I barely had the energy to lift my eyelids and look out at the world around me.
Even if they didn’t give Lanky enough, some would have done the job, I think. Because killing Short Blond would take strength. And energy. And more, too, I suppose.”

“More?”

“It would take purpose,” Francis said.

“Go on,” Peter said, nodding his head.

“Well, how does Lanky get out of the dormitory? It was always locked. And if he did manage to unlock the door to the dormitory, where are the keys? And why, if he did get out, why would he take Short Blond to the storage room. I mean, how does he do that? And then why would he”—Francis hesitated, before selecting the word—“
assault
her? And leave her like he did?”

“He had her blood on his clothes. Her hat was underneath his mattress,” Peter said with a policeman’s stolid conclusiveness.

Francis shook his head. “I don’t understand that. That hat. But not the knife that he used to kill her?”

Peter lowered his voice. “What did Lanky tell us about, when he awakened us?”

“He said an angel came to his side and embraced him.”

Both men were silent. Francis tried to imagine the sensation of the angel stirring Lanky from his nervous sleep. “I thought he made it up. I thought it was something he just imagined.”

“So did I,” Peter said. “Now, I don’t know.”

He began to stare at the storage closet again. Francis joined in. The longer he stared, the closer he got to the moment. It was, he thought, as if he could almost see Short Blond’s last seconds. Peter must have noticed, for he, too, seemed to pale. “I don’t want to think Lanky could do that,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like him at all. Even at his worst, and he certainly was at his scariest yesterday, it still doesn’t seem like him. Lanky was about pointing and shouting and being loud. I don’t think he was about killing. Certainly not killing in a sneaky, quiet, assassin’s type of way.”

“He said evil had to be destroyed. He said it real loud, in front of everyone.”

Peter nodded, but his voice carried disbelief. “Do you think he could kill someone, C-Bird?”

“I don’t know. In a way, I think, under the right circumstances, anyone could be a killer. But I’m just guessing. I’ve never known a killer before.”

This reply made Peter smile. “Well, you know me,” he said. “But I think we should get to know another.”

“Another killer?”

“An Angel,” Peter said.
Shortly before the afternoon group session the following day, Francis was approached by Napoleon. The small man had a hesitancy about him, that seemed to speak of indecision, and doubt. He stuttered slightly, words seeming to hang up on the tip of his tongue, reluctant to burst forth for fear of how they would be received. He had the most curious sort of speech impediment, for when he launched himself into history, as it connected to his namesake, then he would be far more clear and precise. The problem was, for anyone listening, to separate the two disparate elements, the thoughts of that day from the speculations about events that had taken place more than 150 years earlier.

“C-Bird?” Napoleon asked, with his customary nervousness.

“What is it, Nappy?” Francis replied. They were hanging on the edge of the dayroom, not actually doing anything but patiently assessing their thoughts, as the folks of the Amherst Building often did.

“Something has really been bothering me,” Napoleon said.

“There’s been a lot that’s bothered everyone,” Francis responded. Napoleon ran his hands over his chubby cheeks.

“Did you know that no general is considered more brilliant than Bonaparte?” Napoleon said. “Like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or George Washington. I mean, he was someone who shaped the world with his brilliance.”

“Yes. I know that,” Francis said.

“But what I don’t understand is why, when he was so roundly considered such a man of genius, does everyone only remembers his defeats?”

“I’m sorry,” Francis said.

“The defeats. Moscow. Trafalgar. Waterloo.”

“I don’t know if I can answer that question, Nappy …,” Francis started.

“It’s truly bothering me,” he said quickly, “I mean, why are we remembered for our failures? Why do defeats and retreats mean more than victories? Do you think Gulp-a-pill and Mister Evil ever talk about the progress we make, in group, or with medications? I don’t think so. I think they only talk about setbacks and mistakes and all the little signs that we still belong here, instead of the indications that we’re getting better and just maybe we ought to be going home.”

Francis nodded. This made some sense.

But the short man continued, his stuttering hesitancy dropping aside. “I mean, Napoleon remade the map of Europe with his victories. They should be remembered. It really makes me so angry …”

“I don’t know that there’s much you can do about it—,” Francis started, only to be cut off as the small man leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“It makes me so angry the way Gulp-a-pill and Mister Evil treat me and
treat all these historical things that are so important, that I could hardly sleep last night …”

This statement got Francis’s attention.

“You were awake?”

“I was awake when I heard someone working a key through the door lock.”

“Did you see …”

Napoleon shook his head. “I heard the door swing open, you know, my bunk isn’t far away, and I closed my eyes tight, because we are supposed to be asleep, and I didn’t want someone to think that I wasn’t sleeping when I was supposed to and get my meds increased. So I pretended.”

“Go on,” Francis urged.

Napoleon put his head back, trying to reconstruct what he remembered. “I was aware that someone went by my bunk. And then, a few minutes later, passed by again, only this time to exit. And I listened for the lock turning, but it never happened. Then, after a little bit, I peeked just a tiny little peek, and I saw you and the Fireman heading out. We’re not supposed to go out at night. We’re supposed to be in our bunks and fast asleep, so it scared me when you went past, and I tried to go to sleep, but now, I could hear Lanky talking to himself, and that kept me up until the police came and the lights came on and we could see all the terrible things that had happened.”