Granite and Grass

"No Junior, you have it ass backwards like always," Corky says with an imaginary cigar between his fingers.

"You don’t even know the rules. You’re just making them up."

All day they argue like this while playing an ongoing game of battleship. Thick as thieves, they are. Out of the corner of my eye, I see them conspiring in whispers now, as if their argument was meant to conceal a more private conversation. With white faces and four gray eyes, they are a pair of hooded demons conspiring to cut organs out of the other residents while they’re sleeping. One night I heard someone unlock the steel door of the dormitory and within ten seconds somebody started screaming. I think it was Jimmy Uliano; even his screaming had an Italian accent. Then I remember a pricking sound coming from under my bed. I’m almost certain it was one of them sharpening a knife on a block. Whether my organs were on that night’s dinner list or someone else’s, I couldn’t be sure. There’s no way of knowing, and no way of proving anything if it happened. That’s how this place is. A secret slaughterhouse. People go crazy here, if they’re not crazy to begin with. Or mysteriously die while taking a bath, disappear between the dining room and the lounge, or go out for their evening walk and come back bruised and bleeding.

The clichés I hear from the family members are always the same, whether coming from someone’s mother, aunt, cousin, whether they’re old, young, white or Asian. They talk about us to each other in a private language of raised eyebrows, hand gestures and lip-synching. "Don’t pay attention to him," a father says to his milk-faced son as they walk down the main hallway to a relative’s room, uncertain of what they’ll find and too terrified to even guess.

Claude is coming toward me now with a twisted look on his face. I know what just happened to him in the clinic. I know because it happened to me last Friday and happens to all the men in here once a year. It’s not like any of us would choose this place over colon cancer, I tell them. But state regulations are their explanation for every dark occurrence at Heathe House Mental Health Facility.

"You’re walking all right," I say looking out onto the lawn through the steel bars.

"Wasn’t as bad as last time. Got a new doctor."

"Better than Doc Minkins?"

Claude shoots me a look.

"I know. You didn’t like Minkins."

"He messed with my meds. Did I ever tell you about that? Tell you what he did with my meds?"

"Yeah, Claude, a thousand times," I say rolling my eyes.

"You weren’t at breakfast this morning," he comments as if he’s my keeper. The fact that we sleep in the same quad gives him tacit permission to mother me. He likes doing this and I could care less about it. So I let it go, like everything that used to matter to me. I’m thinking, no, wishing I could tell him about the wad of money I found stashed behind the radiator, but I know better. I remember the time I told him about Nurse Lucy’s pocketbook being left in front office, and instead of the obvious response of rummaging through it to find her set of keys, he ran around the building telling every orderly and aide that was on duty.

"I just wanted to be alone," I say about breakfast.

Claude looks at the floor, wounded. "Do you want to be alone now?"

I look at the unnatural tufts of hair growing out of his scalp like weeds through a concrete sidewalk, crooked yellow teeth and crazed green eyes, and I want to give him everything I have. The sum total being a bedside table, a pair of shoes, toothbrush and a black plastic comb. But I know he doesn’t share my vision, nor does he possess the zeal to actually carry it out. So I select a worthy substitute.

"Hey Corky." He ignores me at first. Typical. Sonofabitch. "I gotta talk to you, alone," I say and emphasize the last word for Junior’s sake. Junior looks up with a vacant expression and walks to the window ten feet away. His chair is hot when I sit down. Corky’s shuffling an imaginary deck of cards. I learned from one of the old orderlies that Corky pretends to be crazy so he won’t be expected to do any chores. Though too late for me, it’s really an effective scam. Because the house staff doesn’t think he’ll remember any directions, they give all the toilet cleaning chores to guys like me who still have some gray matter left.

"Weasel," he says in acknowledgement. "You know I’ll do anything for a price."

"Yeah yeah, I know the drill. So you used to be a welder, right?"

Though I already know the answer, I’m curious where he is on the insanity continuum. It’s Tuesday. He’s usually good till about Wednesday afternoon.

"For twenty-four years I worked in that sweat shop with a bunch of bums. Absolute bums." He’s shaking his head.

I snap my fingers. "Corky, pay attention now. I need someone to keep a door locked for me."

"How much?"

"Fifty dollars."

"Fifty thousand."

I allow myself to smile a little as I resist the urge to strangle him. "Seventy-five’s all I have. If you don’t want the job I’ll do it myself."

"What you need a welder for? You can’t weld a wood door to a wood frame."

I smile again, this time for real. "No, but you can weld a steel door to a steel frame."

"You got a blow torch? And how about the rest of the gear you’d need?"

I think about this and wonder why he’s not asking for specifics. Georgia, the tall black lady who works in the office, says Corky’s got the highest IQ of any of us here. So there could be just one reason why he’s not asking me what my plans are – because he already knows.

"I guess not," I reply, and then wait.

He shifts his large body mass around several times in the chair and draws in a long breath. "I got a chain."
"How would it work?"

"They only got one pair of bolt cutters in here and it’s not big enough to clamp through this chain me and Junior found in the basement. I figure it was used for interrogation somehow, when Cadman’s car disappeared from the lot."

"You got a padlock for it or something like it?"

He nods, and a sick grin takes form on his lips. "It’ll only work on the front entrance, though. I could hook it between the wrought iron bars on the small windows on each side of the door."

"That’s the first one they’d be going out of. What about locking the other doors?"

"That’s Uliani’s area."

"Was he a locksmith?"

Corky lets out a round, jolly laugh and lets the echo linger on the empty, white walls. "Jimmy was a thief for most of his life, until he got caught. He stole everything you could think of. Cars, boats, drugs, money. Even jewelry. That’s what got him into this place. Give him half of what you’re giving me and you won’t have to worry about a single door in this whole joint."

After we shake on it, he pulls out a business card from his back pocket. It reads, "Corky Bowlin, The Man For Any Job."

As if a gift from the gods, it pours for the next three days. This gives me time to answer the thousand questions swarming my brain like locusts. What time will I go? How will I plan for the unexpected? What will I take with me and what’s my destination? My first thought is to take a small bag of clothes, and a different pair of shoes. The one thing visitors notice as universal is the same shoes worn by all the residents. Old fashioned, heavy black shoes. I guess in the old days, they were made of leather and had smooth, waxy laces on them. Nowadays, we’re lucky if the belts they beat us with are leather.

Nurse Lucy’s boyfriend, Gil, wears a pair of clean white sneakers sometimes when he picks her up. Those would be perfect, but the closest I ever get to him is watching him run across the front lawn when he’s late picking her up. The next best thing is Perez, a middle-aged Spanish orderly assigned to the west building. Skinny and lanky, he hums as he sweeps the speckless floors with a perpetual cigarette in the corner of his mouth. By his height, I guess he might wear a size ten. And he works on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Perfect.

In five steps, I have it all worked out. I buy three cartons of cigarettes from Uliani’s roommate, and for another ten dollars I pay a man named Willie to fake an illness while Lucy’s on duty so I can assign Perez another day off later in the month. I know from Lucy that none of the management staff ever check the monthly calendars and rely solely on the discretion of the head nurse. And since Lucy hates the head nurse, I really could have saved ten dollars and just told her what I was doing. But this way she’s not implicated and won’t be suspicious of anything. Might not even notice.

Perez is the kind of man you want to confide in. You want him to admire you and look up to you because he has a strong presence and nothing surprises him. But all of the orderlies used to be plain old residents here, like me and poor Claude and Corky. So, considering this fact, his sanity is in question. I also wasn’t sure he wouldn’t turn me in and send the cops after me. No one knows my plan so far. Not Corky Bowman, not even me for that matter.

Now it’s Thursday night. I hear Perez shuffling down the hall to where he keeps his white shirt and pants in a hall locker. I hear the rain pounding on the metal roof. A great buffer for an attempted escape, which overall negates the necessity for sneakers. After a minute, Perez goes to the utility closet to get his broom and turns on all the lights. Twenty feet away, I flip them off.

"Hey, who’s over there?" he yells. "Turn the lights back on."

I emerge from behind the corner waving the cigarette cartons. He shows a rack of straight white teeth. "Wea-sel? Is that you?" he says with his head cocked sideways.

As I approach, I motion him to follow me down the side hallway. I hear the crackle of lightening out in the front entry. It sends a frozen chill down the length of my spine.

"Where’s Ray tonight?" I ask.

His face becomes long and drawn. "You didn’t hear?"

Not again, those murdering bastards. All he did was try to find himself another job, and I was one of the ones who encouraged him. Poor Ray.

"What happened?" I ask him. "Let me guess. He just didn’t wake up one morning? Or he slipped and fell on something and broke his spine?" Perez doesn’t seem to get the sarcasm.

"No," he leans toward me, "he suffocated himself in his garage. Turned on the motor and closed the door and the windows. It was three nights ago, man. I couldn’t believe that would happen to him. He was always singing, that Ray. Singing or humming old rock and roll songs, like The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. He loved music."

I want to shake Perez’s shoulders and scare him with what I know as the truth, that people die here from unnatural deaths and it’s been going on for over ten years. People come to work here and never leave, and the same goes for the residents. Doctors come in once a week to diagnose our mental illnesses and dispense prescriptions for medication, but it’s the only hospital in Connecticut without a rehabilitation program. There are no counseling sessions, no wellness programs, no chance of undoing what a lifetime of grief and loss does all on its own. Of course on paper, many fictitious programs are in place. First Night Out program. Community Buddy System. Work in Progress program. All bullshit. All lies to satisfy the state’s requirements for a mental health facility. First Lonnie. Then Gerry Bradley nine months later, and now Ray. The sadness I feel only strengthens my resolve to leave. I look at Perez and know he’s only half-there, half conscious of what’s going on around him, and I know at least the same is true of most of them. Most of us. The people I’d like to take with me, like Junior and Claude, are the only ones here that still have a soul, but they’d never make it on their own. Maybe if they got put in a good group home with regular daily care and medication, but I know I don’t have the resources to pull something like that off. Not even with the thousand dollars I found in the radiator. I’m not a miracle worker after all, and only have one life to risk.

"I’d like to make a trade."

Perez eyeballs me thoughtfully, trying to guess my question.

"A new, polished pair of shoes, three cartons of menthol cigarettes and a day off."

"For what, Weasel? What do you want?"

"Your sneakers. I know some things you could be doing with that young Juanita of yours on a day off. I picked the same day off that she has two weeks from now."

He couldn’t hide his smile. I knew that to a middle-aged man with a twenty-one year old girlfriend, sex more than anything would be my bargaining tool.

"Why do you want them? They’re brand new and not even broken in yet."

Think quick. "They’d have to be better than these old clunkers. Every night I have new blisters on my toes."

He nods. "You leave the stuff with me and I’ll bring you my sneakers tonight after my shift. If I finish work with those black shoes on, someone will notice. I’ll put them under your bed tonight before I leave. Don’t worry," he says. "No one will hear me."

Juan Perez’s shift ends at three o’clock a.m. I lie wide-eyed on my back waiting for the creak of the steel door but hear nothing but the rain spilling over in sheets from the roof onto the saturated ground. I’m making mental plans of running out to the Duck Pond Road, then through that little patch of woods on the other side of it near the park. From there I’ll hitch a ride to the Hartford bus depot and buy my ticket to a normal life, if there’s one left anywhere in the world by then. Now that I have a thousand dollars, my options are limitless. I sometimes think about who might have hidden it there, but in a place like Heathe House it’s likely whoever did forgot about it the next day.

At three thirty, I start counting ceiling tiles like I do when I can’t sleep, which is most nights since Claude, God bless him, sleeps on his back with his mouth wide open. At three forty-seven, I hear a "Psst!" from the doorway. With my shoes off, I run undetected down the long white hallway between two rows of beds to the corner and then slide the rest of the way to the steel door. Perez’s gaunt face is visible through the crack in the door.

"I know you found the money I left."

I try to swallow the golf ball in my throat but can’t. Shit. So much for a good plan.

"I’m going with you."

I look at Perez, at the lines etched deep in his face and the sullen cast to his eyes, and wonder if he ever woke up feeling good about the world and about himself. If he ever had a really good job, a good meal, a woman who loved him, and a warm pair of gloves in the winter. I am sure he hasn’t enjoyed any of these simple luxuries, and here he is giving me his money.

"Why don’t you just go yourself? What do you need me for?"

Perez scratches his chin and tilts it sideways as if he doesn’t understand what I’m saying. Then he knocks on his head with a cockeyed expression. "Don’t you see what’s going on here, man? It’s not just Ray who disappeared and died in his car. I been here longer than you. There’s been, from what I remember, ten in the last five years."

That’s two a year. Murdered in their sleep, in the bathtub, in their cars, on the way to their rooms, even poisoned in the dining hall, one of them, according to Corky. We talk about it sometimes. And Claude and me talk about it sometimes, too. This graveyard folklore is the undercurrent beneath every occurrence and conversation at this facility. Scary thing is none of us ever know if we’ll be around to wake up the next morning. I’ve wondered if Heathe House could be owned by the mob, but what would organized crime want with a hundred and fifty or so highly sedated crazed lunatics?

"Who do you suspect?" I ask Perez, and then we both jerk our heads in the direction of footsteps coming from another part of the building. A minute later we hear nothing. That’s how it is in this place. You see a shadow, then you don’t. You hear footsteps and then silence. I struggle every day with the question of whether I see or hear anything at all, or if my condition makes me see manifestations of what lurks in my subconscious.

"Cadman. Who else has access to every resident in the home, to their medical records, their roommates, schedules, medication, and the same goes for us, the staff. Only one person here has the power to change my schedule, change things about my benefits or hourly wage, and knows where I live. I’m not going home tonight, Weasel. I’m going with you. It’s the only way I’m gonna ever leave this place alive, and it may be the only way I’ll wake up tomorrow morning."

Joel Cadman has been the president and chief finance officer of Heathe House, Connecticut’s last remaining state-run mental health facility, for eighteen years and it’s rumored he was treated in a home for mental illness in Michigan years ago before he moved here. That was the only detail that Perez left out. Motive. Why would he want to kill his own residents? If a resident dies, Heathe house can’t charge the family and the state agencies their exorbitant monthly fees any longer so he’d be cutting his own damned throat.

Unless he can’t help it.

I tell Perez my plan, about the road, the park, the bus station, the change of clothes. We decide to meet back in the same place at three o’clock a.m. two days from now.

Claude’s quietly staring outside in the chair by the window. Corky Bowlin, on the other hand, is smoking a real cigarette and blowing polluted smoke rings in the air above our heads. His expression betrays guilt, or malice at least.

"Where’d you get those?" I yell from my bed.

"There’s a surplus of them among the orderlies, I guess."

Corky glares at me with a devious grin as he says it, and I know immediately that Perez is dead. All thirty-six feet of my intestines contract into the size of a tennis ball. For a second I can’t see or smell or breathe. No Perez, no sneakers, no more commiserating, camaraderie. No more understanding or hope for escape. Without him, nobody knows what’s going on here. Nobody but me.

"You still have the money," he says.

I jerk my head around the room nervously, then realize no one’s paying attention nor would anyone understand what we’re saying or even remember it five minutes from now.

The hallway is flooded with the most angelic spray of morning sunlight, which contrasts with the sooty, foul gloom everywhere else. I go to my locker and just gaze into it, because it is the one small thing that’s entirely mine. My magazines, my soap and toothpaste, cookies that the neighbors sent for my birthday, jacket, and my favorite book, Treasure Island, worn on the hinges from being read so many times. Back at my bed I open the cover, grateful for a small mental escape. There’s a note scrawled on thin white paper. I recognize it. Not the handwriting but the paper. It was torn off of one of the pads in the office with a Zantac insignia at the top of it.

"I’m a dead man," it begins. "Listen to me Weasel, it’s not Cadman after all. It’s his assistant, Monty. I know because when I was walking out to my car late last night, there was a policeman trying to talk to Monty as he was walking out with a bag in his hands, and when he saw the cop he started running. He’s either the one or he’s in on it. I tried to be quiet but I think someone saw me. I’m sure I won’t be here tomorrow. And I’m scared. It’s up to you now."

Corky watches me walk back into the lounge and seems to be waiting for a report. More than I need oxygen for my lungs, I want to tell him or someone what I know, what Perez told me and that something has to be done about it now. Claude shuffles across the floor looking sadder than usual.

"Game o’cards, Weasel?"

He has no cards with him. The deck is locked up in Nurse Lucy’s top right drawer. So I get an idea, and then change my mind. Perez is dead, I’m fairly certain now, and everything makes my stomach roil. The smell of Claude’s unwashed hair, Corky’s disgusting menthol cigarettes that I bought for Perez until he found out I stole his money and someone whacked him. This place is getting to me the way it does sometimes, where the walls seem closer together every few minutes and the lights keep dimming. Is somebody doing this to keep us all feeling crazy, or tampering with our meds or with the tiny crumbs of sanity some of us have left after living here in this institute of repression? Then the idea comes to me again. Claude is standing in the same place, looking at me and scratching his crotch.

"Sure, Claude. But before we play, maybe you could go ask Monty something for me."

I see his brain spinning. "Go see Monty?" He looks at the linoleum tiles. "Monty doesn’t like me too much. You know, he has a scar on his head."

"I know about the scar, Claude. Monty likes you better than me," I say working every angle I can think of. "I just want you to ask him when Perez is coming in again."

Corky hears the name Perez and shoots me an amused look from his vantage point on the windowsill. Damn him.

"What you want to know about Perez for, Weasel?"

"Because he borrowed my Treasure Island book and I want to get it back from him."

Claude’s eyes cross for a moment like they do when he’s unraveling something in his mind. "But I saw you pick up that book out of your locker a few minutes ago."

"No, that was another book." The lies spill out like jelly beans from a glass jar. Claude’s my oldest friend here. I don’t know anything anymore.

Claude regards Corky and then me in a back and forth configuration for several minutes before leaving the lounge. I can’t be sure he’ll actually do it without following him, and he seems suspicious enough already so I have to leave it to chance. What choice do I have, really, but to trust someone who plays poker with an invisible deck of cards to hold my fate in his hands. It’s the difference between grass and granite, I guess. Having the freedom to feel freshly mowed green grass under my bare feet on hot, summer days, or lying beneath it beside a granite tombstone.

Claude returns after fifteen or twenty minutes with his hands sunk low in his pockets. I take this as a bad sign.

"Did you see him?"

"See who?" he says even though he knows the answer.

"Did you talk to Monty, Claude? Monty?"

"He wasn’t there. You said he was in his office but he wasn’t there. So I talked to Nurse Lucy." He smiled showing two rows of small, yellowish teeth. "She’s wearing that tight little pink sweater today."

"Did you ask her about Monty?"

"No, but I asked her about Perez. She said Monty told her Perez had the flu and wouldn’t be in for a few days."

My hands begin sweating, so I wipe them on my pants. This doesn’t help. "Where’s Monty today?" I ask casually.

"Lucy seemed real upset about it, and said Monty called the office from the police station. She said they had some questions to ask him."

"The police? When was this?"

"When was what?"

I imagine putting my hands around Claude throat and squeezing till the whites of his eyes turn red. But I can hardly blame Claude for not being too bright. It’s my own failure as a human being that’s frustrating me more than anything now. My own fault for lying and using Claude as a sacrificial lamb. Because, after all, Monty could have been there and wanted to know why he was asking about Perez and killed Claude right there. At least the police are on to him now.

"When did Lucy say Monty called in?"

"Said early this morning. Are you worried about Perez, Weasel? Cause your face looks kinda squirly."

"If he’s sick, he might need help. I might try to sneak out tonight and see if he needs anything. You okay with that, Claude?"

Corky Bowlin’s still eyeballing me out of his periphery, smoking those cigarettes in an obscene, almost sexual way. I feel sick watching him.

Ray, and now Perez. That’s two of them gone, one pronounced dead for sure and the other one supposedly dead. I have to get there, to see for myself what happened to Perez and his cartons of cigarettes and his brand spanking new white sneakers. Before it even starts getting dark, I slip out one of the back doors that lead from the basement to the backyard of the property. I stay hunched over outside the bulkhead until the sky starts to gray over and then walk among the thick grove of oak trees on the west side of the property. Claude will see me if I’m not careful, since all he does is watch what moves out the window of the lounge. Tree branches blowing in the wind, birds, squirrels, occasional deer, and cars crawling up the dirt drive.

After a few more lumes of light start to darken the fabric of sky, I run up the grassy hill toward Duck Pond Road and make it into the woods. It occurs to me now that I don’t know where Juan Perez lives, though I remember the phone booth on the edge of the road by the parking lot that leads to the grassy picnic area. In what feels like ten seconds, I find the deserted phone booth and look behind me as I step into it. I’m scared of everything now. Street noise, silence, light and dark. But this doesn’t stop me. The White Pages directory dangles awkwardly from a thick wire cable strung through the middle and is oddly opened already to the p’s. There are two columns of Perez’s, and only two listings in Wallingford. J. Perez on Ramble Road and J.L. Perez on Broad Street. Because I know something about Wallingford and I know even more about Juan Perez, I decide on the second listing. I know of three other Spanish families who live on Broad Street, so as I walk in that direction I decide that this is the right choice.

A trembling starts in my bowels that I can’t distinguish right away between the exhilaration of freedom or fear of becoming Heathe House’s next victim. After all, I am on to them, aren’t I? I’ve made Cadman, I’ve made Monty who’s probably pacing the five-foot square floor of his jail cell now, and this forbidden knowledge makes me a liability. But I don’t care about anything anymore except seeing the truth in its freakish, decomposing flesh.

Broad Street is on the north side of Wallingford near the shopping mall. I take long strides through the darkness and hear only the sound of my rubber soles slapping the concrete. For the last half mile I conjure up every probability of what I will find in Apartment 13D at 2557 Broad Street. I start thinking of Monty and recall a television show I watched once on legal procedure. If Monty were arrested for suspicious behavior, the police would have to nail down the fact that he’s suspected of killing four members of the Heathe House staff for him to be held in jail until the arraignment. But if they had no evidence other than suspicious behavior, he’d be let out. Now I’m looking behind me every two seconds in that nighttime fear frenzy that plagues anyone who spends long hours camping in the wilderness. I remember this from my youth and adolescence. Camping in the dark, chaperoned by parents who no more knew how to find their way out of the woods than a rabbit could outrun a leopard. In this scenario, Monty is clearly the leopard, but I’m not sure who better fits the rabbit profile – Perez or me.

Rain falls undecided in tiny spits upon the top of the head. My hair is thin now so I feel the coolness against my scalp. As I cross over Bent Street, I know that Broad is the next one over. Under the circumstances, I enter a neighbor’s backyard that’s mercifully unfenced and slip through the space between apartment buildings to a large gray one with paint chipping off. I use the slivered moon to help me calculate which apartment belongs to Perez. Counting up from the bottom, it’s the third apartment from the left on the fourth floor. The back staircase creaks when I step on the stairs, but I keep going. I’ve come this far; I might as well go further. Though nothing about my future now seems worth it. Perez was my hero all this time, and I put him in danger by involving him in my plans. Whatever I see in apartment 13D will be my fault. I brace myself and say these words again. My fault.

Naturally, the window facing the backyard is locked. I try the handle on the back door and it too is locked. Juan Perez is not the type of man who would leave his apartment unlocked unnecessarily. I hear a car pull up in front of the building and its high beams reflect off of the windows in Perez’s living room enough for me to see in. Leaning down, I look in through the kitchen to see a chair in the living room. There are limbs draped over each side of it, and a head is cocked to one side. Afraid to look again, I peer into the apartment again and focus on the head and notice that I don’t see Juan Perez’s full, lush head of black hair parted on one side and wiry on the top. The head is bald with a purplish scar in the center of the scalp. I think of Claude when I see the scar. As I run down the back stairs of 2557 Broad Street in Wallingford, Connecticut, I think to myself that Juan Perez has escaped the invisible and dismal stronghold of Heathe House and is on his way to a new life somewhere. I smile at the sight of Monty’s lifeless head leaning off the side of Perez’s armchair, not because I am happy at the sight of another man’s death, but because of what this death represents – a broken chain and a sliver of hope.