Valley of Bones (13 page)
Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense
It is strange to be confessing to you instead of to God, but then I always thought it strange to confess to God, especially in writing. If God exists, He clearly must know the evil you’ve done without a spoken word, much less a written one. Still, penance is a sacrament. You have to confess, although they call it reconciliation now. The act of speaking is necessary to reconcile us with God and restore the sinner to His grace and friendship, although it is little used now and the confessional booths are either gone from the churches or stand empty. I missed all that, coming late to the faith, but you being a cradle Catholic should understand, if the cop in you hasn’t chewed all that up by now. I hope not. I am confessing to the Christ in you, you know, even if you don’t believe in it, still it works, although I think it is better if you are open to it. I know you are open to that part of life, if against your will.
St. Augustine says in a late work that he wrote the Confessions to excite his mind and affection toward God and he (modestly) admits that the book continues to have that effect upon its readers. He also wrote it to turn away scandal when they wanted him for bishop, and his enemies pointed to his misspent youth, deep in sex and heresy. It has been four years and around eighteen weeks since my last confession, an old-fashioned face-to-facer with Father Manes in the tin-roofed church at Wibok. If I’m uncertain about the time it’s because time flows differently in south Sudan and we don’t keep your calendar.
No, I can’t get into that yet, in confessing it’s important to keep to a strict chronology, as sin breeds upon sin. Sin is a vector, you know, not a scalar. It’s not a
load
of sin, it’s a velocity, either downhill or up. To return to God from a life of sin you have to retrace your steps, plot the back azimuth, undo the evil. In theory. In practice I’m not sure you can. For most people they think it’s themselves, they’re pursuing their good, oh, I’ll just take this little bit of money, oh, I’ll just take this girl to bed, and on and on, I mean all that’s just superstition, the smartest thing the devil ever did was convince people he don’t exist, but some of us can see him plain, can’t we, can feel him working in us, like watching a bug crawl up your arm, I know
you
can, Mr. Policeman, I know you can feel him hanging there just behind your shoulder, giving you thoughts you think you shouldn’t have and dreams too I bet
Avoiding again, it’s so much easier to look at other folks than your own self.
ANYWAY, I ZOOMED
over to Oystershell Road on my bicycle, following the dim pencil of my little headlamp, lucky not to be run over on the way, hearing distant sirens. Hunter was counting money and he came to the door of his trailer with a sawed-off Mossberg twelve hanging down his leg.
He let me in, and I saw stacks of bills, mostly tens and twenties, piled on the drop-down table, and a duffel bag open on the floor where he was tossing the counted stacks. I was pretty calm, considering, as I told him what had gone down at Gulf Avenue, omitting my own contributions. His response was to say holy shit a bunch of times and then go back to the table and ask me if I wanted to help him count up. Hunter was hard to believe sometimes.
I said we have to get out of here, out of Caluga, now, tonight, this minute, and he said no way are you fuckin’ crazy, and I told him what Orne Foy had said about Ray Bob being paid off and they would find out and he didn’t have protection anymore and if the cops busted his stupid trailer, which they would in about a half hour on account of looking for me and the cops knowing I was connected with him, he would go to Raiford and spend the next twenty years of his life getting fucked in the ass by big niggers. He sort of stood there with his mouth hanging open, so I turned on the spigots and said all about how much I loved him and wanted to get out of this shitty place get to a real city and have a life, a real apartment and do clubs and concerts and nice clothes and I would help him, etc., etc. The real reason, of course, was that I did not want to be around when they sliced Momma open and found all those caps with no tranquilizers in them and figured it all out. I didn’t think I had done any kind of real felony there, but it would not have been pleasant after that to be an orphan girl in a town run by the Dideroff clan and their pals.
Before long we were on his funky bed and he wanted to fuck me but I blew him instead because I didn’t want to be all sticky and sweaty for the ride downstate. I recall thinking how dumb men were, it wasn’t nothing to control them, it was like they all had like this TV remote in their pants, you could change their channel anytime you wanted. Except Orne, of course, or so I thought then.
So we were off to Miami me making Hunter drive slower than
he usually liked to so as not to risk a traffic stop. I did make him go to a mall outside Orlando, parked there in the empty lot as the dawn broke, eating a takeout breakfast, waiting for it to open. I wanted to get me some decent clothes and makeup, so I could disguise myself and look older. We also stopped at a used car place and traded the pickup for a four-year-old T-bird and cash. I had to explain to Hunter that we were through being trash and no one was going to rent us the kind of place I wanted for us unless we showed some class. I was going to drive up to the rental people in our respectable car dressed in my respectable clothes and pay the rent with a check with our names printed on it.
I spotted a storage locker place from the interstate and made him pull off and I rented a locker to keep our dope and cash in and we drove into the city and checked into a Ramada. Hunter was cranky because I hadn’t let him bring any dope along, but I made him clean up and we had a big meal at a Red Lobster nearby and then we bought some beer and I fucked him into unconsciousness. After that, I got the little book he kept the accounts in from his dope business and found Orne’s number. It was hard to get in touch with him by telephone. You had to call a little grocery store near where he lived in Virginia and leave a message. He called back in a couple of hours though. I told him what had transpired in Wayland (edited) and my thinking and he said it was the right thing to do but to hold tight and definitely do not try to sell any weed in Miami and he would get back to us real soon.
The next day I dressed in my outfit, which I had copied from the mommies of the gifted and talented girls in Wayland, a little tan suit, a white linen blouse with no sleeves, a string of fake pearls and kind of expensive tan shoes, panty hose, and a leather bag, and enough makeup to make me look not seventeen. I took Hunter’s cash ($12,580) and opened an account at a Citibank nearby, after which I drove to a real estate office and rented a furnished apartment in a town house out on Bird on the far side of the expressway, giving as my name Emily Louise Garigeau,
which was not the name on my driver’s license, but that was OK because I was a newlywed and the real estate lady cooed oh how lovely and said there were a lot of other couples just like us out in our development (Westfield Lakes), so we would be right at home. I got us a phone and turned the utilities on, although it used up a lot of our cash for the different deposits, because neither of us had any credit record or even a Social Security number. I got rid of all the paper with my old name on it and took out a driver’s license with the new one.
Well, there we were, a pair of high school dropouts from the boonies living among the striving squares, guys who ran Burger Kings, women who groomed poodles, mail carriers, airport workers, the people who assistant-managed the big stores, Home Depot, Staples, and it hit me (but probably not Hunter) that this was the life I was slotted for, this was what girls like me were supposed to aspire to if we kept our nose clean and finished high school, and I knew right then it was not for me. I was a criminal in my deepest soul, delighting in what was wrong. Getting money would not be a problem, with all that dope in the storage all just waiting for Orne Foy to tell us what to do with it, and had some other ideas which I did not share with Hunter like being a very very high-priced hooker if I could learn how.
You can take the boy out of the country, as the saying goes, and Hunter was a good example. He started slipping bricks of dope out of the stash and smoking it around the house, which was bad enough, but then he went and parked near Palmetto Springs high school and began moving product. When I tried to reason with him, he cursed me out and said if it wasn’t for me he never would’ve had to leave home, like he’d left some mansion on the hill and was living in a shithole instead of the other way around and when I pointed this out and told him I was going to tell Orne he was selling weed without his say-so, he punched me out, not that bad because I knew how to roll with it and he was pretty stoned, but that was it for me and Hunter. The next day I
called Orne and left a message, but he didn’t get back to me until it was too late.
They don’t like you selling dope around high schools in Florida, at least not right out in the open. The cops don’t like it and neither do the other dope dealers. Someone must’ve dimed us because two nights after I called Orne our door crashed in and we were surrounded by cops with lights and guns yelling and screaming, me with my bare ass hanging out of a T-shirt on the couch in the living room, and we were busted with felony weight.
They seized all our money and cars and stuff because it was the produce of drug dealing and they discovered the key to our storage locker and thirty kilos of primo sensemilla dope. Naturally they wanted Hunter to tell who his dealer was, but he didn’t, because I will say one thing for the Foys, they stick together. This pissed them off no end, and even though they could clearly see he could hardly tie his shoes they treated him like a major trafficker, and I guess he was headed for a long visit with his daddy at the Union prison up in Raiford. I pretended to be a little slow, which I knew how to do pretty well from my days with the dumb kids, and gave my name as Emily Garigeau, so as to avoid any connection with Caluga County, and they figured Hunter was this big drug mastermind and all the stuff I had planned and accomplished in Miami was me being some kind of robot obeying his orders. Juveniles don’t get real trials, so I went in front of a lady judge and cried a lot and got confused, and said I was an orphan and when they asked me where I was from I said it was a blue trailer in Alabama I didn’t know the town, ma’am, it was near a tree hit by lightnin’? They sent me to Agape House, a residential facility in Dade County for girls needing drug treatment or if they had behavioral disorders. I guess they figured dumb was one of those, close enough anyway. It was a Jesus place and we had to sing hymns. I had a six-month sentence, but it was a minimum-security facility, and after three days I was over the fence and away in just the clothes I stood up in.
In another letter we find:
You will laugh, but in the dull warm afternoons I sit here in Gravelotte and imagine what sort of nun I shall be, if I ever get my courage up to tell my father of my intentions. As you know, I am far too stupid to be a scholarly Benedictine, and too nervous to make a good contemplative. The Carmelites would not have me with a queen’s dowry! I think that what I would really like is to help the sick, as our Lord did. I have read with interest the reports of Miss Florence Nightingale and think it a shame that the English should be so far in advance of us here in Catholic France, as it was we who invented the very idea of hospitals. I know that there are now some congregations of religious who do such work not in hospitals, but in the homes of the poor and helpless, and I think I would like that. I have a strong stomach and am not frightened of blood, or troubled by horrid smells. Would you be so kind as to look into the Institut de Bon Secours de Paris, and tell me what you think. Oh, and, although it is very wicked to ask this, would you please not tell Papa!!
It is not known whether Aurore Puyot ever told her brother-in-law about these notions, but in any case, events were to overtake them all, bring an end to Marie-Ange’s girlhood in Metz and set her feet on the course they were to follow for the remainder of her life. In August of 1870, while she sat penning this letter, perhaps in the gazebo at Bois Fleury that overlooked the small river Mance, war came to her nation, bringing its dread tide to her very doorstep.
From the start this war did not go well for France. The French Army of the Rhine fell back through Metz on its way to Verdun, with the Germans in pursuit. On the morning of the 16th of August, Marie-Ange was awakened by the sound of horsemen in the courtyard of the château. As she expected the arrival of her
brother Jean-Pierre on convalescent leave, she ran down the stairs in just her robe and slippers, pausing at the door to throw on a blue uniform cloak of her brother’s that was hanging there. Yet when she burst through the door, she found to her dismay not her brother’s coach, but a troop of Prussian uhlans.
—
FROM
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST,
BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
L
ORNA FOLLOWS DARRYLA
Chambers down the Pine Sol–perfumed corridors of Jackson Memorial Hospital toward the locked ward run by the Division of Forensic Services. Darryla is a large woman, so large that much of Lorna’s field of view is occupied by her blue scrubs, the broad back and shoulders, the spectacular rolling buttocks. Darryla the Gorilla to the wards, but this is because of her size and not, as far as Lorna knows, because of either her ferocity or the color of her skin. She is actually a gentle and caring person, who brooks, however, no shenanigans from her criminous lunatics. As she walks, Lorna continues her reflections on large women. Judge Packingham is large, larger than Darryla, really, a set of shoulders like a linebacker in pads, her face flat and pale beneath a ridiculous little gray perm, those black robes accentuating the hugeness. Packingcrate they call her around the courthouse, the usual cruelty. A few decades back she had worked for Janet Reno in the state’s attorney, and they used to say that she was the box Janet had come in.
At the hearing the judge did the right thing, really the only thing she could have done given the agreement among the headshrinkers and the acquiescence of the prosecutor. Emmylou was deemed incapable of assisting with her own defense and remanded to Jackson for thirty days’ observation. The defendant sat quietly during the twenty-minute hearing and answered in a clear voice when the
judge explained to her what was about to happen. She seemed to Lorna at that moment the furthest thing from crazy.
That was the day before yesterday, and now Lorna is about to visit Emmylou for the first time. She catches up with Darryla and asks, “How is she settling in?”
“Dideroff? Shoot, give me a couple more like her I could get rid of half my staff.”
“What do you mean?”
Darryla pauses to open a locked door with one of the large ring of keys she carries at her waist. She motions Lorna through, then follows, locking the door behind her.
“Spends most of her time writing in a school notebook. Besides that…well, the population always responds to new people, usually by getting upset. There’s a new mix on the ward, in the dayroom, you know? But this time, it seems like she calms everyone down.”
“She calms them?”
There is a nurses’ station inside the door, and Lorna signs in on a clipboard.
“Yeah,” says Darryla, “she reads them stuff from the Bible. And explains it, like it was the newspaper, not preachy or anything.”
The dayroom smells of people and bleach, not unpleasant really, compared with some of the booby-hatch dayrooms Lorna has experienced; this is because the inhabitants are the dangerous rather than the incontinent type of nut, and many are not nuts at all, but mere criminals feigning madness. Darryla gestures and Lorna sees that Emmylou is sitting on a couch with a book open on her lap. Two women, one black and one white, are sitting on either side of her on the peeling vinyl, and the black woman is stroking her arm. Emmylou’s lips are moving, but Lorna is too far away to hear what she is saying and something in the scene disturbs her so much that she does not wish to come any closer. She observes, however, that of the two dozen or so people in the dayroom, somewhat more than half are paying attention at varying levels to Emmylou, while the
rest are conversing with the usual demons: some unseen, some on the screen of the television set hanging from the ceiling.
“You can use therapy room B,” Darryla says. “I’ll go get her for you.”
Lorna leaves the dayroom and walks down the hallway. A smiling figure blocks her way, and it takes her a moment to recognize Rigoberto Munoz. Rigoberto has been cleaned up and looks as normal as deteriorated schizophrenic street persons ever look: only mildly nightmarish. The man grimaces involuntarily and says, “Hi, Doc.” Lorna assumes a professional smile and they chat. Rigoberto is doing fine, is scheduled for release. To where? The man looks doubtful. He thinks his cousin in Hallandale will take him in. Lorna makes a winding gesture with her hand. “So that’s okay now?” Rigoberto shuffles and looks embarrassed. “Oh, yeah, no problem,” he says as his tongue shoots out and does an elaborate lip lick. Lorna is happy that Munoz no longer thinks his penis is being reeled into his abdomen by aliens, but she does not wish to know much more about his mental state or plans. It is not her job.
She excuses herself and enters Therapy B, which is a room about half the size of a high school classroom, containing nothing but chrome and plastic chairs in cheerful colors and a couple of Formica-topped tables. She sits and takes her notebook and tape recorder from her bag. In a minute or so, Emmylou comes into the room, dressed in a gown and a striped bathrobe and paper slippers. Lorna gestures to one of the chairs, and Emmylou sits in it. Lorna sees she is carrying the book she had in the dayroom; not surprisingly, it is a Bible.
“So you decided I was crazy,” says Emmylou, smiling, gesturing to the environment.
“We decided you couldn’t effectively help your own defense,” says Lorna primly. “Like the judge said, you’ve been sent here for observation and treatment. How are you doing on your meds?”
“They make me sleepy and dull.”
“We can have the dosage modified.”
“To zero?”
“Well…I’ll speak to Dr. Lopez and see if we can’t get you more comfortable. Meanwhile, you seem to be adjusting well. You’re writing, I understand.”
Emmylou nods and holds up her Bible, and Lorna can see that there is another, slimmer book clutched beneath it. “Uh-huh. Detective Paz got me these notebooks. I finished the first one already.”
“Well, I’m sure we’d like to read it. Darryla tells me you’re reading to the other patients. I saw you in the dayroom.”
“Yes, I like crazy people,” Emmylou says. “They do less harm than the sane, and many of them are close to God. One of the hard things about being crazy is that people stop looking at you like you’re a soul. And I touch them, and help them to pray, if they’re possessed. Sometimes it works.”
Lorna’s throat is suddenly dry, almost crackly and painful. She swallows, wishing she had thought to bring a bottle of water. She thinks she is nervous because she has not done any real therapy in a long time, assuming that is what this is. Could it be that she fears the mad? No, nonsense, put that out of the mind! A little initial nervousness, which she assuages by fiddling with the recorder. She falls back on the good old Rogerian ploy, affirm the patient by repeating her statement. She says, “Possessed.”
“Mm-huh. Of course, if I believe that, that’s another symptom of me being crazy, right?” Emmylou has been staring down at her hands and the Bible she carries, as if anxious to return to the sacred realms, but now she lifts her head and turns her eyes full onto Lorna’s. This is highly unusual. Crazy people do not go in much for eye contact. For an instant there enters Lorna’s mind the thought that Emmylou Dideroff is the furthest thing from crazy, that it is the hospital authorities and the psychiatrists and the guards and the real estate tycoons who control the city of Miami, and the people in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., running the government who are crazy; for an instant another world appears to her inward eye, a world as real as stone or bread. But just as quickly a lifetime’s
defenses against this world take charge, and although the hairs stand up on her arms and a chill runs down her spine, she is able to pretend that nothing has happened, that she is in command of the situation, she with her Ph.D. and her pass out of here and this woman is an uneducated redneck lunatic murderess….
Lorna clears her throat and says, “So…you think you can exorcise other people just by touching them?” The
e
-word in invisible quotation marks.
“Christ can,” says the other confidently. “That was the main kind of thing he did when he was among us, and he still does it. Sometimes he uses me, sometimes other people. But we can all do it our own selves, really, Christ is driving out demons from the inside of us all the time, or the world would be a much worse place than it is, if you can imagine that.”
“Mm. But…you don’t have a demon in you, do you?”
“Who says I don’t?”
“I thought you were conversing with saints.”
A stunned look appeared on Dideroff’s face. Her mouth gaped and then suddenly and surprisingly she bursts into hearty laughter, which she quickly brings under control, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry. That just struck me so funny. Lord!”
Lorna has not joined in this laugh, although the valuable word
hebephrenia
now swims up out of her memory, and she scribbles it down, followed a second later by a question mark. “Would you like to tell me what was so funny?”
“Oh, it’s hard to put into words. Just, really, you assuming that demons and saints can’t dwell in the same person, or not even that, because it’s pretty plain you don’t believe in either saints or demons dwelling in folks and you were trying to, I don’t know, catch me out with some kind of lawyer’s trick, when it’s just so plain that it’s just the ones who are most afflicted by demons who get to be saints. What you said, to a religious person, it’d be like saying, oh, because you’re sitting in the dark, that means you
can’t turn on the light!
” Here she lets out a little giggle. “That’s why I laughed. I’m sorry.”
Lorna decides to forget everything but this apology. “Emmylou, I’m not offended. I’m just trying to help you.”
“To…?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re trying to help me to…”
“I believe you’re mentally ill. I’m trying to help you get better.”
“So that I can be tried for murder.”
“Well, yes, so that you can aid in your own defense. But it seems to me that you could develop a pretty strong presumption that when you committed the crime you’re charged with, you were not legally sane.”
“I don’t see how that could happen. I haven’t got a mental disease and I sure didn’t murder Colonel al-Muwalid.”
“Well, then who did, Emmylou?” Lorna snaps. “The invisible man?” Lorna felt herself blush. The damned woman has made her lose her clinical perspective, although she immediately excuses this as another result of being out of practice. To her surprise, Dideroff seems to be considering this rhetorical outburst as a legitimate question. Her face is grave as she answers. “Yeah, I’ve been giving that some thought, all right. It’s my fault in a way. I thought I could carry it all myself, but he won’t be carried. He’s been waiting and waiting, I can see that now, he counted on my pride, and now he’s away loose, doing his work.”
“Who? Who’s been waiting?”
“The devil, of course. And his minions on earth. Another sin to my score, I guess.”
Lorna writes down “paranoid ideation” and “religious mania” on her pad.
“Minions?”
“Mm-huh. The spirit that destroys don’t ever have much of a recruiting problem, and he don’t tell me his plans. A little murder ain’t nothing to him, but as far as the why of it, your guess is as good as mine. He’ll wreck things here on earth for the pure fun of it, he likes when there’s misery and despair and for people to give up on
the Lord. Oh, my, that poor man probably hasn’t got an idea what’s happening to him.”
Lorna was lost. Her pen stuttered to a stop. “What poor man?”
“Why, that policeman. Detective Paz. I felt him fly right out of me and stick to him and he saw it too, only he’ll never admit it, that’s the pity.”
“Okay, Emmylou, let me get this straight. You think the, ah, devil that was in you jumped out of you and into Detective Paz?”
“Mm-huh.”
“And that would mean he’s no longer in you, right?”
Lorna is looking at the woman as she says this, and so she sees something remarkable happen. The person she has been talking to disappears and is replaced by someone else. The blue eyes turn from mild to icy; the very bones of the face seem to recompose themselves into something less, or more, than human. Lorna is familiar with the expression “it made her blood run cold” but has heretofore considered it a mere figure of speech, but it is actually, she now finds, a good description of what she now feels.
The new Emmylou says, in a quite different voice, one that seems to penetrate Lorna’s head without using her eardrums at all, “It don’t work that way, honey. My name is Legion.” And she smiles, showing more teeth than Emmylou Dideroff actually has in her mouth.
This cannot be happening, Lorna thinks, and closes her eyes. It is all she can do to keep from screaming. When she looks again she sees yet another change come over Emmylou. Her body stiffens, she cocks her head unnaturally to the left, as if straining to hear something, or attempting to dislocate her neck. Her mouth opens, her eyes flutter rapidly, a blur of lashes. She stands, she reaches for something invisible to Lorna, and falls forward. Lorna catches her and now she does cry out.
TO LORNA’S SURPRISE
and relief, Mickey Lopez is not particularly exercised over the day’s session with Dideroff, nor does
he regard it as a failure. They meet later that morning in the office he keeps in the mental health center. Mickey is his usual avuncular, supportive self. “Okay, you moved fast, but she challenged you, and I think you did the right thing,” he says after listening to the tape.
“I did?”
“Yeah, entering the fantasy, as if you wanted to participate in it, this cops-and-robbers game she has going, with the devil tossed in. But you can’t get distracted.”
“No.” Doubtfully.
“Right. Look, my dear, there is an impairment here, and now we know it may have a neurological basis. She had an atonic seizure, yes? Seizure, religious hallucinations, we’re now maybe looking at epilepsy with a focus in the medial temporal lobe, it’s practically diagnostic. What you need to remember is
she
is crazy,
you
are not. Sane, presenting yourself as sane, you pose to her delusional system a serious challenge. You can regard that system almost as a person in its own right. It wants to survive, yes? When you push it, as you did here, it will fight back, or retreat from contact, which is what we just saw. The devil, or whatever, is chasing her, and she can’t talk to you, so she checks out.” Lopez leans back in his chair and bridges his hands, a typical gesture, but here in the plain institutional office and not his well-appointed shrink’s lair, it seems thinner, more ticlike. Is Mickey as confused as she is? She rejects this thought. He continues, “So in these delusional cases, we must do two things simultaneously: one, we encourage the person to spin out their tale, we become confidants without ever actually validating the delusional system.” An admonitory finger: “A subtle point. It separates the men from the boys in this business.”
