The Traveller (16 page)

He watched as she dressed.

‘You’re pretty,’ he said when she stood before him.

‘Thank you,’ she replied. It seemed to her that it was someone else’s voice that was speaking. She wondered for an odd moment who could have joined them, until realizing that it was herself.

He handed her a paper bag with the name of a pharmacy on it. She opened it and saw toothbrush, toothpaste, some makeup, a pair of sunglasses and a box of Tampax. She picked up the blue box and stared at it oddly. A disquieting fear moved through her slowly, triggered somehow by the box.

‘I’m not having my …’ She stopped.

‘But you might, before we’re finished,’ he said.

She wanted to cry then but realized she should not. Instead she bit her lip and nodded.

‘Straighten yourself up and then we’re going,’ he said.

She moved gingerly into the bathroom and started using the toiletries. First she brushed her teeth. Then she dabbed a bit of makeup on her face, trying to cover the bruises. He stood in the doorway, watching her.

‘They’ll fade in a day or so.’

She said nothing.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘First use the toilet. We’re going to be on the road awhile.’

She wondered where her modesty had disappeared. Again she had the sensation that it was someone else that was sitting on the toilet as the man watched, not herself. Some child, perhaps.

‘Carry your own bag,’ he said.

She placed the toothbrush and other articles into one of the compartments. Then she hefted the bag up. It had a shoulder strap, which she placed over her arm. ‘I can carry something else,’ she said.

‘Here. But be careful.’

He handed her a battered photographer’s bag and held the door open for her.

Anne Hampton stepped out into the night and felt the evening Florida warmth overtake her, crawling into her muscles and bones. She felt dizzy and hesitated. The man placed a hand on her shoulder and pointed her toward a dark-blue Chevrolet Camaro, parked in front of the small motel unit. She looked up for a moment and saw the sky filled with stars; she picked out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and then Orion. She felt a sudden warmth, as if she were somehow at the center of all the sky lights, her own brightness melding with theirs. She fastened on one star, one amidst the uncountable mass, suspended in the dark void of space, and thought to herself that she was

that star and that it was her: alone, unconnected, hanging in the night.

‘Come along,’ said the man. He had walked to the side of the car and was holding the door for her.

She stepped to his side.

‘It’s a beautiful night,’ she said.

‘It’s a beautiful night, Doug,’ he corrected her.

She looked at him quizzically.

‘Say it.’

‘It’s a beautiful night, Doug,’ she said.

‘Good. Call me Doug.’

‘All right.’

‘It is my name. Douglas Jeffers.’

‘AH right. All right, Doug. Douglas. Douglas.’

He smiled. ‘I like that. Actually, I prefer Douglas to Doug, but you can use whichever you are comfortable with.’

She must have looked odd, because he smiled and added, ‘It is my real name. It’s important for you to realize that I will not tell you any lies. No falsehoods. Everything will be the truth. Or what passes for it.’

She nodded. She did not for one instant doubt him. She wondered idly why not, but then shook the thought loose from her imagination.

‘There is one problem,’ Douglas Jeffers said. His voice had a sudden dark edge which frightened her.

‘No, no, no, no problems,’ she said quickly.

He looked up at the sky. She thought he seemed to be thinking hard.

‘I think you need a new name,’ he said. ‘I don’t like your old one. It comes from before and you need something for now and from now on.’

She nodded. She was surprised that she thought this a reasonable idea.

He motioned to the car and she sat in her seat.

‘Seat belt,’ he said.

She complied.

‘You’re going to be a biographer,’ he said.

‘A biographer?’

‘That’s right. You’ll find steno pads and pens in the glove compartment. They’re for you. Make sure you ah have enough to get down what I say.’

‘I don’t understand exactly,’ she said.

‘I’ll explain as we go along.’

He looked down at her. Then he smiled.

‘From now on you’re Boswell,’ he said.

‘Boswell?’

‘Right.’ He smiled. ‘A little literary joke, if you will.’

He closed her door, walked around the car, and climbed into the driver’s seat. She watched him fasten his own belt and turn on the ignition. ‘Try your door handle,’ he said to her. She put her hand on the latch and pulled. The latch moved freely, but the door didn’t open. ‘One of the nicer aspects of the design of the Chevrolet Camaro is that the door latches are remarkably easy to disconnect. So, whenever we stop, you wait for me to walk around and let you out. Got it?’

She nodded.

‘I learned that in Cleveland, covering the trial of a football player who liked to pick up hookers, then expose himself. When they tried to get out, no go. That was what gave him the real kick.’

Douglas Jeffers looked at her.

‘You see, that’s the sort of thing you need to get down.’

He nodded toward the glove compartment.

She felt a momentary panic and reached out swiftly.

He stopped her. ‘It’s okay. Just giving you an example.’

He looked at her.

‘Boswell, you see, takes down everything.’

She nodded.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Boswell.’

Then he put the car into drive and gently accelerated, slowly entering the darkness of the nighttime highway. She turned and looked back up at the stars. She thought suddenly of the childhood rhyme and spoke it to herself: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.

To live, she thought.

4 A regular session of the Lost Boys

Obscenities crashed in the air around him, but he paid no attention. Instead, he pictured his brother sitting in the hospital cafeteria, grinning with an insouciance that he thought more properly belonged on an adolescent, but which on his brother’s adult face had an oddly disquieting property. He tried to remember the regimen of his thoughts, but fixated only on the moment when he’d spoken in a foolishly heartfelt way, ‘You know, I wish we’d been closer, growing up …’

And his brother’s cruel, cryptic, unfathomable reply: ‘Oh, we are. We’re closer than you think.’ How close do I think? wondered Martin Jeffers. To his right, two of the men’s voices had steadily gained in volume, swiftly escalating in tone and content, reaching to the edge of rage. Jeffers turned and eyed the men, trying to assess the nature and quality of the dispute, wary, cautious, realizing that confrontation was an integral element of the therapy, but equally that these were violent men, and that he wanted no part of the savagery he believed them capable of inflicting on each other. He had the unusual thought that they were like some angry gaggle of old women, arguing less over some idea or real conflict than for the actual enjoyment of dispute. He decided to intercede.

‘I don’t think you’re saying what you mean.’ This was one of his usual comments. He knew that the men were frustrated by his olique postures; for the most part, they were men of concrete ideas and sentiments. It was his desire to make them think, then feel, in the abstract. Once they could empathize, he thought, then they can be treated.

He remembered a professor in medical school standing before an assembled class, saying, ‘Think of the experience of disease. Consider how it controls our senses, feelings, emotions. And then remember, no matter how capable a physician you think yourself, you’re only as good as your last correct diagnosis.’ To which, a decade later, Martin Jeffers thought he would have added: And treatment, too.

Jeffers eyed the two men who were arguing.

‘Fuck you, Jeffers,’ said the first, dismissing him with a halfhearted wave of the hand.

‘Fuck yourself first,’ interceded the second. ‘And you’d better enjoy it, because you ain’t gonna be fucking anything else for a real long time…’

‘Look who’s talking.’

‘That’s right, you better look at who’s talking, little man.’

‘Whoa. I’m shaking. Look at my hands. They’re fucking shaking with terror.’

Jeffers watched the two men carefully. He checked each for signs that the argument would prompt them from their seats. He was not terribly concerned about this particular argument: Bryan and Senderling went at it frequently. As long as they were trading insults, it was likely to remain verbal. Under different circumstances, Jeffers guessed, they would probably be considered friends. It was silence that worried him. Sometimes, Jeffers thought, they stop talking. It’s not the silence of not knowing what to say, or being bored, or waiting for someone to say something. It was a silence forced by anger. Then it can be the eyes narrowing and fixing on the opposition that signals an attack, or sometimes just a subtle tensing of the muscles. Jeffers thought that he often spent his time looking for white knuckles on the fingers gripping the arm rests of the day-room chairs. There was once one man in the group, Jeffers remembered, who always sat on the front edge of a chair with his legs crossed in an X beneath him. When one morning the man unfolded his legs, Jeffers was already on his feet, moving to intercept the explosion that had arrived seconds later. Jeffers realized, as the months slid past, that he came to know each man in the group not only as a collection of memories and experiences, but with a recognizable physical posture as well. That there were twelve dossiers crammed with entries back in his office was to be expected; one did not qualify easily for the Lost Boys. It took two things: depravity and the misfortune to be caught engaged in it.

‘Fuck you!’

‘Fuck you right back!’

Obscenities were the currency of the group, scattered about like so many coins of small denomination. He wondered idly how often he heard the word ‘fuck’ each day. A hundred times? Surely more. A thousand, perhaps. The word no longer had any correlation with the sexual act for him. Instead it was used as punctuation for the group. Some men used ‘fucking’ as others would use commas. He thought of the famous Lenny Bruce routine where the comedian started out by staring at the audience and querying, ‘I wonder how many niggers are here tonight,’ before moving on to spies, micks, kikes, wops, limeys, whatever, and ultimately by commonizing the insults so profoundly that they were rendered harmless and meaningless. Jeffers imagined that much the same process went on in the day room. The men used the word ‘fuck’ with such frequency that it no longer carried any weight. It certainly had little to do with the crimes which they had pleaded guilty to, although each man was a sexual offender.

‘Ahhh, the hell with you,’ said one of the men. It was Bryan. He turned to Jeffers. ‘Hey, doc, can’t you straighten this dumb son of a bitch out? He still don’t realize why he’s here.’

‘Look, asshole,’ Senderling replied, ‘I know why we’re here. I also know that we ain’t going anyplace real quick. And when we do, it’s gonna be over to the state pen to serve some real time.’

Another man chimed in, first forming his mouth into a kiss, then smacking loudly enough to gain the room’s attention. Jeffers looked and saw that it was Steele, who sat across the room and particularly liked to bait Bryan and Senderling. ‘And you know, sweethearts, how much guys like you are appreciated over there…’

The three men glared at each other, then turned tojt He realized that they expected some sort of response frog him. He wished he’d been paying closer attention.

‘You all know the arrangement here.’

He was met with sullen silence.

The first lesson of psychiatric residency, he thought. When in doubt, say nothing.

So a benign silence filled the room. Jeffers tried to meet each man’s eyes; some glared back at him, others turned away. Some seemed bored, distracted, minds elsewhere, some were poised, anticipating, eager. Jeffers momentarily considered the mystery of the group dynamic: there were twelve members of the Lost Boys, each man unique in the mode of his offense, typical in the nature of it. Jeffers was struck with the thought that the men all suffered from the same thing: once upon a time, in each man’s childhood, they had been lost. Abandoned, perhaps, was a better term. The rocky shoals of childhood, he thought. The darkness and cruelty of youth. Most people rise and grow and leave it behind, carrying their scars internally, forever, learning to adjust. The Lost Boys did not.

And the punishment they had wreaked upon the adult world was sorry indeed.

Twelve men. Probably close to a hundred reported crimes shared among them. Easily twice that number hidden, unre-ported, unsolved, unattributed, ranging from vandalism and petty theft to a rape, or two or a half-dozen, a dozen, a score or more. There were three killers in the Lost Boys as well — men who in the peculiar weighting system of the criminal justice system had managed to take lives that somehow were less valuable and therefore required less punishment, though Jeffers was hard pressed, sometimes, to understand the distinctions between a manslaughter and a first-degree murder, especially when viewed from the corpse’s point of view.

The silence in the day room persisted and Jeffers thought

I again of his brother. It had been so typical of Doug, Jeffers

thought. Call one instant, show up the next. Three years

between visits, months between even casual telephone

conversation, acting as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Drop his apartment key off with the usual impenetrable instructions. Typical.

What was he doing? Jeffers wondered. He returned to the meeting in his mind. But first he thought: What was typical of Doug? and felt a mild uneasiness at his lack of a ready answer.

He pictured his brother sitting across from him, sunlight caught in his shock of sandy hair. Doug, he thought, has this loose, flush, good-looking appearance, easygoing, relaxed, the kind of good looks that stemmed not from any striking physical feature but from a devil-may-care approach to life. For a moment he envied his brother the blue-jeans-and-running-shoes informality that accompanied the job of the professional photographer, resenting, momentarily, the quiet formality of his own profession. I am stiff, he thought. He envied his brother’s out-of-doors life, surrounded by things that were actually happening instead of merely being talked about. Sometimes I cannot stand the constancy of small rooms and closed doors, suggestive comments and observations, and quiet, meaningful looks that make up my profession, he thought.