Damned If I Do Part 3

Harry didn't go to the common room as he usually did to sit and watch televison game shows in which people always appeared a bit green. Instead, he went back to his bed on the ward where he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, smelled the urine that had collected on the floor of the bathroom just twenty feet away, counted the watermarks on the green walls. He pressed his eyes shut and searched for sleep, tried to remember how it was done, sleeping, was pleased he had lied to the shrink about his dreaming.

It was exceedingly difficult for Harry to find sleep on the ward, what with the snoring of the asthmatic old man in the bed to his right and the more than occasional meeting of one particular orderly and any of several nurses in the empty bed to his left. Tonight, the orderly was grunting away over the short nurse from the medication dispensary. Harry had always liked her and didn't think she would become one of the string, but he could hear her breathing now, could smell her sweat and the orderly's. He could hear her fingernails as she clutched at the bedding and he knew she didn't want to be there, didn't want that hairy orderly inside her and he wondered why she was there then. He knew that the image of her white hose flowing from the mattress to the tiles of the floor would stay with him and also the way her stocky, smooth thighs seemed so clean compared to the hairy legs between them. They were done in just a few minutes, but the sound of it all remained in the room, the mussed sheets seeming to glow in the darkness. Harry had watched them begin, but had then quietly turned away, turned away when for a sharp second the young nurse saw his eyes, saw him watching her, recognizing her.

The following morning as Harry stood at the window to receive the medication, blue and white capsules he never swallowed, the young nurse was abrupt with him, avoiding his eyes, and when he didn't immediately step away from the station, she cut him a keen glance that embarra.s.sed him. He could see beyond her into the office, the venetian blinds slicing the light coming through the window, and there was the orderly, strutting around, all pumped up like a peac.o.c.k, his open shirt offering a glimpse of chest hair. Harry felt the smooth scars that halfway encirled his forearms, as he sometimes did for comfort. He then stepped away into the middle of the common room. Harry gave his medication to the quiet vet who always sat in the corner near the window, the vet who constantly tapped his foot, chanting, "One, two, three, boom," and then went to sit at the card table with the old man, Harold.

"You know, of course, that I'm G.o.d," Harold said, as he always said. "They all pray to me. That's why they say, 'Harold be thy name.' Want to play chess?" Harold didn't wait for a response, but started arranging the pieces on the folding hard-paper board. His pajama top was stained with the morning's breakfast. "You'll be black and I'll be white because, frankly, that's the way it is." He laughed. He said the same thing every day and every day he laughed the same way. Harold pushed his king's p.a.w.n forward two squares. Harry made the same move. "Hmmm," Harold said as if the move were some complicated trick, then he giggled like a boy and said, "Did you hear them last night?"

Harry shook his head no.

"You must have. They were right there next to you. He was grunting away over her like a dog." Harold picked up his queen and moved her in spirals through the air before setting her down on the square in front of his king's knight's p.a.w.n.

Harry studied the illegal move.

"I bet he's f.u.c.ked every one of them by now."

"He's a pig," Harry said.

"Well, of course, he is." Harold didn't wait for Harry's response on the board, but moved his king's rook over its p.a.w.n, across the board, and captured Harry's king's bishop. "Check. My daughter is a s.l.u.t. I told her so and she put me in here. I said, 'Doris, or whatever your name is, you are a s.l.u.t, a S-L-U-T,' and then she and that n.a.z.i boyfriend of hers put me in the back of their Toyota four-wheel-drive piece-of-s.h.i.t pickup truck and brought me here. They told everyone I was violent and that I wandered off frequently and slept in the street."

Harry took the rook with his king.

"I didn't see that," Harold said. "He's a pig, all right, that guy, and all these little s.l.u.ts he porks are his piglets." Harold chuckled. "His piglets. The way he grunts. He grunts and they squeal." He made a barrage of pig noises. "It's your move. But I didn't wander off frequently like they claimed. I slept in the street right in front of their house."

"I'm going to break out of here," Harry said.

"Sure you are. Sure you are. It's your move. Besides, what would you do out there? Work? You f.u.c.ked up and now you belong in here with me, G.o.d. G.o.d will take care of you. I'll take care of you and send my daughter to stinking, sweaty h.e.l.l where she can cook burgers for her friends. And another thing, if you were to 'break out,' as you put it, where would you live? You never did have any family or so you tell me. Where would you go? The only place you know is here."

"I'm not crazy."

Harold looked at him. "I know that, but it doesn't matter. I'm crazy and I can see plain as day that Gillis over there is crazy and I can see that Greenfeld over there is crazy and I can even see that our orderly stud with the short and crooked p.e.c.k.e.r is nuts, but you're not crazy."

Harry couldn't tell if Harold was joking.

"I'm a f.u.c.king expert on crazy. I know how it happens and I know what it looks like. Your f.u.c.king problem is that you're not crazy. Your f.u.c.king problem is that you're too f.u.c.king sane." Harold's cheek was beginning to twitch the way it did whenever he got excited, and soon he would be spitting on the floor. "You're all right and that's why you don't belong out there. If you go out there, you will be crazy. Look at me," he paused to let Harry find his eyes, "I know."

Harry didn't play basketball out in the yard with the others, it being no fun, crazy people not being very good at games, certainly never understanding or even caring about the rules. With basketball they comprehended that the ball was to go through the hole, but when Harry put the ball through the hole they all got mad and asked why he was in the hospital anyway since he wasn't crazy. So he avoided the basketball court and walked around to the side of the building where the gardeners had planted bearded irises along the walk, but he stayed well within the path because beyond the irises, between the azaleas and the wall of the building, a number of the h.o.m.os.e.xual inmates sometimes gave each other b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs.

Harry walked to the low brick wall above which stood high iron bars like the ones bolted to the windows. He looked at the row of houses across the street, tattered two-story houses that shared walls, only twice in the block were the buildings separated by driveways. A couple of teenagers who were sitting on a stoop pointed his way and shared a laugh and on the street, a couple of houses down, Harry thought he saw a drug transaction. A skinny woman in a crocheted skirt gave money to a man in a mid-seventies Chevy sedan with a vinyl top. Harry would find the other side of this barrier, but he was, of course, afraid and, of course, quite certain that what he would find on the other side would be just room enough to run to the next barrier, and there would be more crazy faces to mock and confuse him. He didn't know how he knew the things he knew, didn't know how it was he recognized place names in the newspaper or how it was he knew the car just pulling away from the skinny woman was a Chevy or how he knew that the skinny woman would suck a c.o.c.k for ten dollars. He didn't know how he knew that the welds on the wrought-iron bars were sloppy, though more than sufficient to keep him from pushing his way to freedom. A garbage truck rolled by, consigning to the air a momentary stench, and when it was gone so were the teenagers on the stoop and so was the skinny woman and her day's fix, leaving the street empty, cold, lonesome, and desolate, and Harry knew somehow that was the place for him.

Harry was not asleep, a welcome pause from the dreams. He was lying on his bed, smelling the bleach in the sheets, knowing that the old man beside him had wet himself again, knowing because of the way he was not snoring, but whimpering and whispering his dead wife's name. The orderly was making his way down the hall with the heavy nurse with red hair who was the only woman he f.u.c.ked who truly seemed to like his brutish humping. Her nails twirled the hair on his back and near the end she spat out the word f.u.c.k over and over, not as instruction but as exclamation, and once when she was barking out the word, Harry saw her glancing about the ward, even pausing to offer him a brief smile as she caught him looking. Tonight they fumbled in through the darkness the way they always did, the orderly's sneakers squeaking on the linoleum tiles, their giggling coated with the timbre of a few drinks from the bottle of Jim Beam that everyone knew the orderly kept in his locker. Once, the vet who sat in the corner was caught sneaking a nip from the stash and the orderly punched and kicked him until he bled from his ear. The orderly fell on top of the nurse on the empty bed between Harry and the vet, the frame squeaking as the whole of it scooted across the floor an inch or two, the nurse letting escape a loud and suddenly swallowed laugh. Harry watched them work off their clothes, panting and grunting, the smell of the alcohol wafting over to him, his eyes opened only to slits so that they would not see him watching; not that he was concerned with their discovering him, but he wanted them to a.s.sume that he was asleep. Their clothes off, the orderly was on top of the nurse, his fat a.s.s rising and falling and she was staring at the ceiling like she was counting the cracks, but moaning all the while. The orderly's face was buried in her neck and hair on the side away from Harry and so he didn't see when Harry stood up, didn't see when Harry reached under his bed and came back with the unopened can of soda pop that he had gotten from the canteen earlier that day, didn't see when Harry raised it high over his head, but the nurse saw, her eyes growing wide, her mouth opening without a sound, and perhaps because she stopped moving or stopped breathing, the orderly began to come up. Harry brought the can down onto the back of the orderly's head with the force of a baseball pitch, striking just below the bald spot, the dull thump of the blow not sounding real, the repercussion of it shooting through his arm to his chest, and the target fell limp over the woman, still motionless, still voiceless. Harry waited for the orderly to move, poised to strike again, but the orderly didn't move and so Harry put down the can on his bed, picked up the man's trousers from the floor, and stepped into them, pulling the cloth belt tight as the waistband gathered around his middle. He put his fingers to his pursed lips, signaling the nurse to be quiet, and she nodded. He then pulled the orderly's smock over his head and felt for the ring of keys in the pant pockets.

Harry stepped down the hall away from the ward and to the first door and, after trying a couple of keys, had it open and locked behind him. To his surprise, his heart was not racing and this fact alone was exhilarating. He was in the familiar corridor of the doctors' offices, where every Tueday and Thursday for the last too-many-to-remember years he had met one shrink and then another, a string whose faces and names had all run together, all offering up the same a.s.sessment that Harry was fairly bright, possessing an overly active ability for detecting irony, which Harry found ironic, and was without doubt paranoid and certainly schizophrenic.

There was one guard at the door, a fat man whom Harry had never before seen, a black man with his hair done in braids, sitting behind the desk that he made appear small. He was drinking diet soda from a two-liter bottle and then holding the plastic vessel in his lap while he watched the little television that sat on the corner of the desk. Every several seconds he belched out a high-pitched laugh and then sucked down more soda pop. Harry waited, crouched down behind a broad-leafed plant about thirty feet down the hall. The lights were dimmed and Harry managed to make it to the door of the public lavatory another fifteen feet closer to the exit doors without being detected. He removed the key he had used to unlock the ward door, then threw it as far as he could down the hall away from the guard's station. Behind the closed door of the restroom, Harry could hear the fat man groan to his feet, then the heavy falls of his boots toward him and past. The man was well down the corridor when Harry opened the door and peeked, and he took that time to move quickly to the front door.

Harry got to the door, that familiar inst.i.tutional door, the kind he had run to at the end of the day in grade school, the kind he had opened for his mother after his father was p.r.o.nouced dead at Jackson Memorial, the kind they have at the DMV and the sports arena, the kind that you can always open from the inside by pressing the long bar. He opened the door to the chilly air, but he didn't pause to let it intoxicate him, he pushed on, letting the door quietly to, and then ran across the circular drive lined with empty parking slots and down the walk to the street. Now his heart was racing, his slippers not thick enough to quiet the sting of the asphalt as he sprinted across the street. His breath was gone and though he hadn't run very far, he could run no farther and he sat on the first stoop he found and stared back at the facility from which he had just escaped.

Harry watched as an ambulance rolled through the circular drive, lights flashing but without a siren, up to the door of the hospital and he wondered if he had perhaps killed the hairy orderly. A couple of police cars followed, with lights and also no sirens, but Harry made no move to his feet, just looked on as car doors opened and slammed shut and people ran into the building.

"h.e.l.l of a lot of commotion," a deep voice came from the door behind him.

Harry looked back and saw a smallish man with gray hair and a gray beard and dark gla.s.ses standing behind the screen. "I guess."

"Some loon probably tried to hang himself with dental floss or something," the man said.

"I hope you don't mind me sitting on your stoop."

"Are you a robber?"

"No, sir."

"Then I don't mind." The man tilted his head slightly. "Can you tell me what's going on over there?"

Harry didn't understand the question. How was he to know what was happening over there? Then it dawned on him that the man had maybe seen him escaping. "I don't know."

"Just tell me what you're seeing."

Harry studied the man, the way he seemed to stare at nothing, the way he tilted his head, and Harry came to the determination that the man was blind. "Well, there's an ambulance from Mercy Hospital and a couple of cop cars. The lights are flashing and sweeping the grounds and the empty parking lot with red and blue."

"Thank you. You did that very nicely."

Harry stood up, keeping his eye on the people gathered in front of the hospital and said, "Well, I guess I'd better keep moving. And thanks for the use of your stoop."

"Good night," the old man said and then he closed the door.

Harry glanced back and saw the stretcher being brought out with the orderly laid out on it, his face uncovered and leading Harry to believe that the man was still alive, though from a hundred yards he looked none too good. As he stepped away from the stoop he looked back and saw that there was s.p.a.ce under the steps, a s.p.a.ce big enough for him to crawl into, a place to hide, to sleep. He thought the police would be looking for him soon and that the last place they would search would be across the street from the hospital. He got down on the ground and squeezed into the s.p.a.ce, tried to fold himself into as small a ball as possible, trying to use his own body heat to get warm, rubbing his arms and legs. He closed his eyes and knew that the dream would continue, knew that he couldn't stop it.

Alluvial Deposits.

People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid. So hopeful were people attempting to tame the arid plains of the West they believed that rainfall would be divinely moved to increase with their coming, that rain followed the plow. Law was at one time you had to plant one quarter of your section in timber, the thinking being that trees increased rainfall. Of course the timber stands did nothing to make the land wetter and served mainly to provide activity for settlers when crops would not grow, that being clearing fallen trees, the steady, powerful wind being the only predictable meteorological event of the great basin and plains.

Indians accepted the natural condition of things and so were nomadic, going to where water, food, and agreeable climate promised to be. The settlers, refining and reaffirming the American character, preferred to sit in one place and wait for nature to change. To sit still for so long required food. To raise food, they needed land. Since 160 acres of Western land could support only five cows, they needed more land. More land, more cows. More cows, more money. More money, more land. More land by hook or crook, usually by adhering to the letter and not the spirit of the law. More land, more cows, more people, no water.

There I was, driving through southern Utah, as dry as it was a hundred years ago, but having benefited from the ambitious efforts of polygamists to irrigate anything flat. A remarkable job, but ca.n.a.ls and ditches don't make water. And if you pump it out of the ground faster than it fills, then the aquifer soon becomes almost empty, or as the hopeful like to say, "not very full at all." I'd driven from Colorado to do some contract work for the Utah Department of Agriculture and the Fish and Game Commission, to perform flow-projection a.n.a.lyses on a couple of creeks. For all the anxiety over water and too little water and no water, all the complaining and worrying, not many people want to be hydrologists.

In order to carry out my first business at the confluence of Talbert and Rocky creeks I had to get the signature of a woman named Emma Bickers for permission to cross her property to get to where I needed to be. The woman lived at the bottom of the mountain in the town of Dotson. She had been sent the form requesting her signature by Fish and Game, but it had been mailed back unsigned. To save time, I would ask her to sign the form and then finish my work in hopefully two days.

I pulled into a gas station and stepped out to fill my tanks. A skinny fellow with wild red hair watched me from the diesel pump and folded a stick of gum into his mouth. The afternoon sun was bright but the air was pretty cold, the wind steady.

"You ain't from around here," he said.

"Pretty good," I said. "Was it my Colorado tags or the fact that you've never seen me before that tipped you off?" I put the nozzle into my front tank.

"Nice truck," he said.

"Thanks, I like it." He didn't say anything. I moved to my rear tank and continued to pump gas. "Maybe you could tell me where Red Clay Road is."

"Keep on out this road here, past the motel, past the Sears catalog store, two streets on the left." He folded another stick of gum into his mouth. "What you want over there?"

"Nothing. I was just wondering where it was. Such a pretty name for a road. Red Clay."

"You're a funny guy."

"That's me." I finished with the gas, replaced the nozzle, and then gave him thirty-five dollars. "Gas is high around here."

"Always going up."

"Well, thanks." I climbed in behind the wheel and he walked to my window. "What is it?" I asked.

"Yeah, this is a nice truck."

I nodded, started my engine, and drove away.

Dotson was a small town without threat of becoming a city. The nearby molybdenum mine that had spurred the growth of the town, had died and taken the downtown and all promise of prosperity with it. The main drag was now a row of boarded-up storefronts, but it was close. For reasons too familiar and too tiresome to discuss, I was a great source of interest as I idled at the town's only traffic signal. I followed the gas-station man's directions to Red Clay Road and turned the only way I could.

I parked and walked the twenty-yard dirt path to the front door where I gave a solid but polite knock. A woman yelled for me to come in and so I did. I was met by a fluffy, purring white cat and reached down to pet it. The chill of the April air outside was lost and I found myself growing uncomfortable in my coat. The heater or a fire was roaring somewhere. An old woman of medium height and an angular face appeared at the end of the hall and she stared at me as if I was naked. I stood up from the cat and asked, "Are you Mrs. Bickers?"

She just stared.

"I thought I heard someone say come in."

"Well, you can just get on back out." She took a half-step toward me.

"Ma'am, I'm from the State Department of Agriculture and the Fish-"

She stopped me with her staring and I began to understand what was going on.

"Okay." I backed through the doorway and onto the porch. She was at the door now. "Ma'am, I need your signature on this-"

But she slammed the door and managed to squeeze the word n.i.g.g.e.r through the last, skinniest gap.

I sighed and walked back to my truck.

I don't get mad too much anymore over s.h.i.t like that. It doesn't make me happy, but it doesn't usually make me mad. It doesn't do any good to get mad at a tornado or a striking snake; you just stay clear. But I couldn't really stay clear. I needed her signature, probably especially now. Who knew how many misshapen offspring she might have roaming that blasted mountain with no more elk to hunt. My next stop would have to be the sheriff's office to see if I could get some help obtaining the woman's scrawl.

As much as I love the West, the character of its contentious dealings with the rest of the country has been defined by a few rather than the many. The few being a self-serving, hypocritical lot who complain about the d.a.m.n welfare babies of the cities and take huge subsidies to not plant crops and to make near free use of public lands to raise cattle where, if there were a G.o.d, no cattle would ever be found. But Westerners, perhaps a function of living in such a harsh landscape, perhaps a function of living in such isolation and distant interdepedence, stick together and so, blindly, the desires of the few become the needs of the many. A man with one section and five sickly cows is a cattleman just the same as a man with four thousand head and a lease on a hundred thousand acres of BLM land. But d.a.m.n it's a pretty place.

I drove back to the main street with the intention of returning to the gas station and asking where the sheriff's office was, but I spotted it on my way. I parked in a diagonal s.p.a.ce and walked up the concrete steps and inside. The deputy was a big man, even sitting, and he watched me coming toward his desk.

"What can I do you for?" he asked.

"I need some a.s.sistance." I produced my papers from the Department of Ag and Fish and Game. "I'm supposed to go up and perform some tests on Rocky and Talbert creeks. I've got to get Emma Bickers' signature on this piece of paper so I can take my readings and go home."

"So, go get it. Her address is right here."

"I tried. It seems she has a bit of a problem with my complexion."

The deputy observed my complexion. "Yeah, I can see. I think you've got a pimple coming on." He laughed.

I didn't, though I appreciated his attempt at humor and his demonstration of something other than sheer amazement that I was there.

He picked up the phone and dialed. "Mrs. Bickers? This is Deputy Harvey ... ma'am? ... yes, he's fine ... ma'am, I've got a fella here from Fish and Game who needs you to sign a paper ... yes, ma'am, that would be him ... well, yes, but I think it won't hurt for you to sign ... just going to check the water in the creeks ... yes, ma'am ... yes, ma'am ... I reckon, they'll get a court order and he'll get to go up there anyway ... yes, ma'am." The deputy hung up and looked at me.

"Well?"

"She said she'll sign it, but you can't come in."

I stepped into the air. It was nearly four and I was hungry. There was a restaurant across the street and so I left my truck where it was and went in and sat at the counter. There were a couple of men sitting at a booth in the back. They gave me a quick look and returned to their conversation. The menu was written on poster boards over the shelves on the wall facing me.

"Coffee?" the waitress asked. She was a pie-faced young woman with noticeable, but not heavily applied, makeup. She held her blond ponytail in her hand at her shoulder while she poured me a cup. "Know what you want?"

"You serve breakfast all day, like the sign says?"

"All day long, every day," the waitress said.

"Are the hotcakes good?"

"They're okay," she said. Then, quietly, "I wouldn't eat them."

"Eggs and bacon?"

She nodded. "Toast or biscuit?"

"Toast?"

She nodded. "I'll bring you some hash browns, too."

"Thank you, ma'am,"

She moved to the window and stuck the ticket on the wheel, then talked to me from the coffee machine where she seemed to be counting filters. "Visiting or just pa.s.sing through?"

"I'm working for Fish and Game, doing some work up mountain."

"What kind of work?"

"Checking the streams, that's all."

"We used to go up that mountain all the time when I was a kid. My daddy taught me to fish there." She came back over and wiped the counter near me. "It was good fishing then."

"What about now?"

"I don't know really. I hear tell it's not good like it used to be." She looked over at the men in the booth. "You all right back there?"

"Fine," one of them said.