The Traveller (17 page)

Then he shook his head, inwardly, and said to himself: Of course you can stand it. Not only that, you love it.

For a moment, though, he wondered idly what it was like to see life through a lens.

‘Oh, we’re closer than you think. Much closer.’

Is it that different? he thought suddenly. Surely. He sees with an immediacy defined by the event, the moment. I hear the story told long after the fact.

He was dismayed by the quick realization that he could not remember his brother’s first camera. It seemed that Doug had always had one, from grade school on. He wondered where and how Doug had acquired the first; surely not from their parents.

The only thing they gave out in substance was misery, Martin Jefiers thought.

The two brothers had never disagreed about that.

He suddenly remembered the night they’d been taken in,

and wondered instantly why it had been so long since he had thought of it. He thought of the wild rain that had beea driving against the police station windows rattling in the summer storm’s wind. Night had surrounded the building, but the hard wooden bench that he’d sat upon, gripping tightly to his brother’s hand, had been awash in artificial light. It had been late at night and they had been very young; not filled with Christmas Eve excitement over staying up late, but filled instead with a complete dread, aware somehow that they had been caught in some adult mystery that had taken place when their own little boys’ eyes properly should have been closed and their minds captured by sleep; seeing something not meant for them to see at an hour not meant for them to be awake. His stomach tightened at the memory of looking up through the light at his first view of his cousin, face set, rigid and unwelcoming, remembering her first words: ‘Your mom’s gone, which is as we expected for some time. You’re to be with us now. Follow me.’ And the sight of that small, bent back, turning and leading them out into the storm. I was four, he thought, and Doug was six.

He tried to shake the memory loose, wondering why it was that they’d never talked about their real mother. He stared out the day-room window and tried to recall the features of her face, but could not. He remembered only that she’d lacked tenderness and seemed forever angry. She’d not been that much different from the cousin who’d become their mother. He saw her easily, wispy brown hair pulled back in a severe bun, contradicting wide lips covered in bright lipstick that never creaked into a smile. In the car, in the rain, the wipers making a dirgelike drumming sound, this new woman-mother had turned to them and said, ‘We’re your parents now. I’m mom. He’s dad. There won’t be no talk about any other.’

He remembered his own therapist asking once, ‘But what did happen to your real mother?’

And of his reply: ‘But I never really learned.’

The therapist had been silent. A classic doubting silence; he’d used it himself a thousand times.

What did happen? he asked himself.

It was simple: She was gone. Dead. Run away. What difference did it make? They both had to work in their parents’ drugstore. He had to clean the medicine bottles and keep the stacks of prescription drugs arranged neatly on the shelves, and he’d become a doctor. Doug’s job had been to sweep out the darkroom and then mix the chemicals for the film-developing service and finally to do the developing himself, when he got older, so he became a photographer. It was simple.

We turned out fine, he said to himself.

But what did we become?

Nothing is simple.

He knew that. It was the first thing he’d learned in his residency. Things of the mind may seem clear-cut and direct, but they rarely stayed that way. If the formulations of psychiatry made sense - the theories and diagnoses and treatment plans — the realities of behavior always seemed to him strangely inexplicable. He understood why the Lost Boys were sex offenders, in a clear-cut clinical way, but he felt defeated by some greater why that eluded him. He could picture the physical strength it took to seize a victim by the arm and force her, but could not imagine the power of will that it also took.

He shook his head.

Doug understands realities, he thought. I understand theories.

He thought of his own life. I survived, he thought. Hell, we both did. We’ve done well. Damn well. Then he considered how extraordinary it is that one can acquire all the education and experience of human frailties and suffering and fail to be able to apply any of that knowledge to oneself.

He laughed at himself: You’re a liar, he thought.

And not a good one.

He wondered why it was that his brother’s visit stirred so many memories, then thought how silly a question that was; of course his brother’s visit would prompt introspection.

He felt hot and realized that sunlight was slipping through

the window and hitting his chest. He shifted in his chair, unsatisfactorily, then moved his chair slightly.

‘You know what I hate the most,’ said one of the Lost Boys. ‘It’s being treated like we’re some kind of freaks in a sideshow, huh.’

Jeffers looked up to see who was talking. His eyes caught a glimpse of Simon, the hospital orderly assigned to keeping order among the Lost Boys. Simon seemed to be dozing in the sunlight, unaffected by the conversation. He was an immense black man whose build was well concealed by the loose-fitting white smock the orderlies wore. Jeffers knew, too, that he possessed a black belt in karate and had fought professionally as a kick-boxer. Simon’s presence was the ultimate deterrent to violence.

‘Freaks, freaks, freaks, that’s what we are.’

It was Meriwether speaking. This was one of the small man’s favorite topics. Meriwether was a slight, sallow, middle-aged man who had owned a meager accounting business and who had pleaded guilty to the rape of a neighbor’s daughter. It was only after entering the Lost Boys that Jeffers uncovered a compulsive affection for youth in the man. Meriwether was on the doubtful list: Jeffers doubted that the crime he was condemned for was his sole one, and he doubted that the program could do anything for him. Someday, Jeffers thought, he will cruise down some street and pick up some teenage boy who is more than he can handle and will get his throat cut for his pocket change. Jeffers refused to be ashamed by his unscientific guesswork.

‘I can’t stand the way they look at us,’ Meriwether said.

‘At you,’ said Miller, sitting across the circle. Miller was a bona fide criminal in addition to being a rapist. He had twice killed men in barroom brawls, three times served prison terms for assault, robbery, and extortion. Jeffers particularly liked him for his straightforward approach to the therapy sessions: Miller hated them. He was, however, not on the doubtful list; Jeffers thought it possible that Um man could learn not to be a rapist. What would remain however, was a regular full-time criminal.

‘You see, little man, they can sense something about j

Something slimy just beneath the surface. We all can, little man. We all can. Makes you think, don’t it?’

Meriwether didn’t hesitate: ‘Well, maybe they can sense something about me, but all they got to do is take one look at your face and they know, you know what I mean? They know.’

Miller growled, then laughed. Jeffers appreciated the fact that Miller was unbaitable, although he wondered what force of restraint the man would have with a drink in him.

The other men sitting in the loose day-room circle laughed or smiled as well. Wright; Weingarten; Bloom, who seemed to prefer boys; Wasserman, who was the youngest at nineteen and had raped a prom queen who refused him a dance; Pope, at forty-two, the oldest, intractable, malevolent, gray-haired, with trucker’s muscles and tattoos. Jeffers believed that he had committed far more crimes than the police suspected. He remained silent, mostly, leading the doubtful list. Parker and Knight completed the Lost Boys. They were a matched pair, acned, angry, in their mid-twenties, both college dropouts. One had been a computer programmer and the other a part-time social worker. They sneered at much, but, Jeffers thought, would eventually come to realize that they had a chance at a life.

The laughter faded and Meriwether jumped into the quiet.

‘I still don’t like it.’

‘Like what, little man?’

‘We’re not crazy. What are we doing here?’

Several voices jumped in quickly:

‘We’re here to get fixed …’

‘We’re here for the program …’

‘We’re here, you dumb fuck, because we were all sentenced under the state’s sex-offenders act. That clear enough for you, slime?’

‘Man, maybe you don’t know what you’re doing here, but I sure do …”

The last comment gained laughter. It subsided after a moment and Jeffers watched Meriwether wait until he had clear silence.

‘You guys are stupider than I thought …’ he started. There were hoots and meager catcalls. Again Meriwether waited. Jeffers noted the wry grin that the little man wor clearly enjoying being the center of the group’s attention.

‘Think about it for a minute, freaks. Here we are in a loony bin, but are any of us really crazy? If we were really criminals, don’t you think they’d just lock us up? Instead they got us here in this carrot-and-stick world. Do the program, they say, learn to love right. Learn to hate what you were. Then we’ll straighten you out and head back to the world …’

He paused, watching for effect.

‘You know what gets to me? Every time I walk through one of the psych wards everyone steps out of the way. For me! It’s enough to make you laugh, isn’t it, Miller, you tough guy? But they know, don’t they? They know.’

He laughed.

‘All of us here, inside, huh, way inside where we figure the shrink can’t see, figures we’re gonna beat this. We just hang on long enough and say the right things … well, we’re gonna walk. They aren’t going to be able to change me!’

He turned to Jeffers.

‘Screw your aversion therapies. Screw your peer-group pressures. I’m smarter than all that.’

‘Is that what you think?’ Jeffers replied.

Meriwether laughed.

‘What a wishywashy question. Can’t you see it’s what all of us think deep inside …’

He thought. ‘Way inside. Way, way inside. Where you can’t touch it.’

Miller growled. ‘Speak for yourself, asshole.’

‘I do,’ said Meriwether.

The two men stared at each other and Jeffers thought again of his brother. He remembered how surprised he had been when he learned that Doug routinely robbed the drugstore’s register for pocket money. He had thought that wrong, he realized, not because it was wrong to steal fa because the consequences would be so severe if discovered.

He recalled his brother’s easy laughter and insistence that the money was only partially the reason.

‘Don’t you understand, Marty? Every time I take something I feel like I’m getting back at him. His precious money. A little here, a little there. It makes me feel like I’m not just his victim.’

Doug had been thirteen. And he had been wrong. We were his victims.

He beat Doug, Jeffers thought. Why not me? He supposed it was his brother’s insistent, obvious rebelliousness. Then he shook his head, thinking that was probably only partially true. Certainly Doug had been irrepressible, but there was something else, something further that their father had seen, which had catapulted him into red-faced anger and savagery.

‘Little man,’ said Miller, ‘you piss me off.’

‘The truth,’ replied Meriwether, ‘always hurts.’

‘Tell me what you think is the truth,’ Miller said. ‘You know so much, you squirrelly little numbers runner, you tell me what you know about my life!’

Meriwether laughed.

‘Let me think,’ he said. He eyed Miller like an appraiser looking over a cracked piece of goods.

‘Well,’ he started slowly, aware that he had the entire group’s attention, ‘you probably hated your mother …’

Everyone laughed except Miller.

‘She loved everyone except you …’

Meriwether smiled at his audience and continued.

‘And now, unable to punish her …’

The room laughed at the truism.

‘You punish others.’

Meriwether hesitated, then, smiling to the audience, said, ‘Tah-dah! Basic truths illuminated!’

Miller did not smile. Jeffers found himself again trying to picture his own mother’s face, but unable. When he spoke the word ‘mother’ to himself, all he pictured was the druggist’s wife, their cousin-mother, who would sit in the afternoons in a corner of the house, fanning herself, drinking tea, regardless of whether it was summer or winter.

‘Keep going, hot shit. You’re in a world of trouble already, might as well shoot the moon,’ Miller said.

Jeffers wondered briefly whether Miller would explode, then doubted it. He was too con-wise. If he feels he needs revenge, he’ll take it at his convenience. He’ll wait and bide his time; all cons knew that what they had in abundance was time, and the savoring of revenge could be as much enjoyment as the homemade shiv firmly wedged between the ribs itself. Jeffers scribbled a note on the daily session log to watch out for conflict between the two men.

‘Well,’ said Meriwether, ‘how old was that last chick? The one you beat up and robbed in addition to, how shall we put it? Delicately, of course, ah, enjoyed… . Could she have been twenty? No, perhaps more. Thirty, then? No, still a mite shy. Well, forty? Lord, no, not close … fifty? Sixty? How about seventy-three years old? Bingo!’

Meriwether closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.

‘Old enough, I daresay, to be your mother.’

He was quiet before turning to Jeffers.

‘You know, doc, you ought to pay me for doing all your work here.’

Jeffers said nothing.

‘So,’ Meriwether continued, ‘tell us, tough guy. How was it?’

Miller’s eyes had narrowed. He waited until there was quiet.

‘You know, mouth. It was perfect. It always is.’

Miller paused.

‘Right, freak?’

Meriwether nodded. ‘Right.’

Jeffers stared around the room, halfheartedly hoping that a voice would be raised in opposition, but doubting he would hear one. He had come to realize that there were certain qualities the group could not frustrate, one being the idea of pleasure. He made a note for follow-up in each man’s regular individual session. The group, he thought, only serves reinforce the ideas imparted through the daily therapeaw sessions. Sometimes-he smiled to himself-the magic worts. Sometimes it doesn’t.