A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (39 page)

THE CHROMIUM HOOK

JACK CRAMBLE

EVERYBODY KNOWS
this, that we pulled in the driveway and I found the hook when I went around to Jill’s door. It was caught in the door handle, hanging there like I don’t know what. I didn’t know what it was at first, but when Jill got out she knew, and she started screaming, for which I don’t blame her. Her father came out and made like where had we been and did we know it was almost one o’clock. He’s a good guy, but under real pressure, I guess, since his wife had her troubles. Anyway, he looks at the hook, and then he looks Jill over real good, suspicious-like, like we’d been up to something, which we definitely had not. We had been, as everybody knows, up at Conversation Point with our debate files, and the time got away from us. I was helping her with her arguments, asking questions, like that, things like, “What are the drawbacks of an international nuclear-test-ban treaty?” And she would fish around in her file box and try to find the answer. Her one shot at college is the debate team, and their big meet with Northwoods was a week from that Saturday. It was Mr. Royaltuber who called the police, and the word got out.

JILL ROYALTUBER

IT WAS
the scaredest I’ve ever been, and when I think of how close that homicidal maniac came to getting us and doing whatever he was going to do with that big vicious hook, my blood runs cold. Jack was really brave. He wanted to get out of the car after we heard the first noises, the scrapings, and see what it was, but I wouldn’t let him. Sometimes boys just don’t have any sense. We’d already heard about the escaped homicidal maniac on the radio. They’d interrupted
Wild Johnny Hateras’s Top Twenty Country Countdown
with the news bulletin that some one-armed madman had escaped the loony bin on Demon Hill and was sort of armed and dangerous. And of course Discussion Point is right there by the iron fence of the nuthouse. We had gone up to Discussion Point to work through some problems I’d been having since my mom left, and Jack was talking to me about being strong and saying he’d be there for me and not to get too depressed and to look on the sunny side of things, that Mom was better off in the hospital—she certainly seemed happier. So Jack was being that thing, supportive, which I love. A boyfriend who is captain of football is one thing, and a boyfriend who is captain of football and supportive is another. But I kept him from getting out of the car after we heard the noises. The wind had come up a little and it was dark as dark, and I said, “Let’s just get out of here.” Jack wasn’t afraid. He wanted to stay. But I told him it was late, and then we heard the scratching closer, against the car, and it felt like it was right on my bare spine. “Pull out!” I yelled, and he gunned the engine of his Ford—it’s a wonderful car, which he did all the work on—and we headed for home.

DR. STEWART NARKENPIE, DIRECTOR,
THE SPINARD PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE

IT IS NOT
a loony bin. It is not a nuthouse or a funny farm. It’s not even an insane asylum. It is, as I’ve been telling everyone in this community for the twenty-two years I’ve lived here, the Spinard Psychiatric Institute, a center for the treatment of psychological disorders. It is a medical hospital, the building and grounds of which occupy just under two hundred acres on the top of Decatur Hill, and it employs thirty-eight citizens from the lovely town of Griggs, including Mr. Howard Lugdrum, who was injured seriously in last week’s incident. I have spoken to the Rotary Club once a year for forever, as well as to the Lions and the Elks and the Junior Achievement and the graduating class of the high school and the Vocational Outreach in the Griggs Middle School, explaining what we do and how we do it and that the Spinard Psychiatric Institute is not a loony bin or any other kind of bin, and I am not getting through. It is not a bin! Even though a large portion of our community has had family and friends enter the Institute as patients only to be returned to the community after treatment in better shape than before, and even though most everybody has visited the grounds—if not for personal reasons, then certainly at our annual Community Picnic on the South Lawn—there still persists this incurable sense that once you pass under the Spinard stone arch you are entering the twilight zone. Yes, we do have a big iron fence, because some of our patients get confused and could possibly wander away, and yes, the buildings, some of them, have bars over the windows for the safety of our patients, and some of our patients wear restraints when out-of-doors, but they are dangerous to no one but themselves. I cannot say how weary I am of setting the record straight. It is not a nuthouse, and I am not a mad scientist. We don’t have any mad scientists, mad professors, or mad doctors. No one’s mad. We don’t use that term. We do have some disturbed patients, but we’re treating them, and there is a chance—with rest counseling, and medication—that they will get better. We do not perform operations except as they become medically necessary. We had an appendectomy last fall. We do not operate on the brain. We do not—as the high school paper suggests regularly—do brain transplants, dissections, or enlargements. Most recently I had to speak with Wild Johnny Hateras at KGRG, the radio station in Griggs, about the prank news bulletin on Halloween, which is just the kind of thing that keeps any understanding between the Institute and the town in tatters and is responsible, I think, for the harm resulting from last Saturday’s incident, about which we’ve heard so much.

MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

IT HURT
. Don’t you think that hurt? Everybody talks about the kids: oh, they were scared, they were frightened and nervous, oh, they were terrified. Well, think about it—had two trespassers yanked off
their
prosthesis? In the course of doing their job, were either of
them
pulled from their feet and dragged till an arm came off, and left there tumbling in the dirt? As it turns out, I was lucky I was wearing my simple hook and the straps broke; if I’d been wearing my regular armature, those two little criminals would have dragged me to death, and we’d have murder here instead of reckless endangerment.

ROD BUDDAROCK

IF ANYBODY
, one person, says anything, one thing, about my buddy Jack Cramble being up there at Passion Point to do anything, one thing, besides help little Jill Royaltuber with family problems, such as they are, I’ll find that person and use his lying butt to wipe up Main Street. I’m not joking here. I know Jack from being co-captain of football, and I know what I’m saying. Of course, he could have come to the team party out at the Landing, but here was a girl who had some troubles and he was there to help. There’s been a lot of talk about what they were really doing. Jack made that crack about debate, which was too bad, because he couldn’t get within two miles of the debate team—I’m a better debater than Jack and Jill put together—but he only said that to protect Jill’s reputation, such as it is. She’s a nice girl, but a little confused. It was only last year that her mom went bonkers, and Jill herself went a little nuts about that time, but she is no slut. If anybody, one person, says anything about Jill Royaltuber being a wide-mouthed, round-heeled slut, I’ll find that person and trouble will certainly rain down upon his or her head like hot shit from Mars.

MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

I’D SEEN
the car before. It’s a two-door Ford, blue and white. There are five or six cars I see there by our north fence in the pine grove. They bring their girlfriends up from town in the good weather, and we find the empty beer bottles and condoms. The kids call it Passion Point. We had a timed light system there until a few years ago, but the Environmental Protection Agency asked us to dismantle it because of the Weaver’s bat, a protected species that hunts there at night. The deal about the parking is that the grove is our property and we stand liable for any harm. Two kids climb in the backseat of some old clunker with a faulty exhaust and the Institute would be sued until the thirteenth of never. I mean, these are kids at night in old cars. What we’ve done is put the grove on the watchman’s tour, and one of us takes the big flashlight and shines it on a few bare butts every night of the week. Until last week, it’s been kind of funny—I mean, you see some white rear end hop up, and then the cars start up and wheel out like scurrying rats. Once interrupted, they don’t come back. Until the next night. Like I said, these are kids.

I’m in charge of the buildings and grounds at the Institute, and I like my work there; it’s been a good place to me.

SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK

THE MOST
frequently asked question is “When you bust a beer bust, do you keep the beer?” For Pete’s sake. Every weekend I roust one or two of these high school beer parties, most often on the hill or down at Ander’s Landing. Sometimes, though, there’ll be a complaint and I’ll be called to a private residence. A lot of these kids know me by now, and they know that about eleven-thirty old Sheriff Mansarack will slip up in his cruiser and flash the lights long enough for every drunk sophomore to run into the bushes so that I can cite the two or three seniors too drunk to flee.

I was in the middle of such a raid last Saturday night, Halloween, a night when I know for a sure fact that there is going to be trouble, and I got the call from Oleena Weenz, our dispatcher. There had been, in her words, a “vicious assault by a pervert,” and she directed me to the address on Eider Street where I found Mr. Rick Royaltuber and the two young people and heard the story. I knew the boy, Jack Cramble, and had seen him play football earlier that night when Griggs beat Bark City, and I was kind of surprised that he wasn’t down with the rest of the team drinking beer at the Landing. I also knew Mr. Royaltuber, as I had taken the call when his wife went off the deep end a year ago. When a guy helps you subdue his wife and pries her fingers off a rusty pair of kitchen scissors while you hold her kicking and screaming on your lap on the front porch in front of all the neighborhood, you remember him. That was a bad deal, embarrassing for me to get caught off guard. I mean, she looked normal. I hadn’t seen the scissors. And it was bad for old Royaltuber too, with her shrieking out about him porking what’s-her-name, the wife of old Dr. Dizzy up at the loony bin, and rattling those scissors at us. Hey, sometimes kitchen tools are the worst. And she was strong.

Anyway, I spoke to Mr. Royaltuber and I saw the hook there on the car door. It was a regular artificial arm, straps and all, one of them torn, and it scared me too. I mean, when that thing came off, it had to hurt. I took the report, but it wasn’t all in line, and to tell the truth neither was the front of the Royaltuber girl’s shirt. She was misbuttoned the way you are after putting away your playthings in a hurry.

The Cramble boy kept at me to get back up there right away before the pervert got somebody else, saying things like Wasn’t I the sheriff? Wasn’t I supposed to do something? Well, I could see
he
wanted to do something, something that had been interrupted up at Passion Point, so I just told them all it was going to be all right, which it was, and I headed back to the Landing, where I was able to run off about ten kids and confiscate a case and a half of Castle Moat, which is not my favorite, but it’ll do.

MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

I NEVER
married. Years ago, after my accident, I changed my plans about a career in tennis and went up to college near Brippert and got into their vocational-ed program in hotel management.

I was pretty numbed out after Cassie’s family moved who knows where. This is a long time ago now. Her girlfriend Maggie Rayne hung around with me for a while, and then I think she saw the limits of a man with one hand and moved on. Her father was a professor at the medical school, and I was clearly outclassed. So, anyway, I never married. I didn’t realize the torch was still lit—or really how alive I could feel—until I saw Cassie again a year ago, when she was carried up here kicking and screaming, spitting and cursing, her eyes red and her hair wild, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in, let’s see, seventeen years.

MRS. MARGARET RAYNE NARKENPIE

I HAD
not planned on a mountaintop in Bushville. I had not actually thought I would—after seven years of graduate study and three years at the Highborn Academy—find myself banished to the left-hand districts of Forsaken Acres, dressing for dinner at the macaroni-and-cheese outlet, opting for the creamed tuna on special nights. I had lived in a wasteland as a girl, and I thought I was through with it. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that marrying the highest-ranking doctor in my father’s finest class, a tall, good-looking psychiatrist of sterling promise who could have written his ticket anywhere in the civilized world, I was expecting to live in a place where there was more than one Quicky Freeze and a Video Hut. I had dared to think London, New York, even Albuquerque. I had not imagined Griggs. My husband—who has his Institute and his staff and his many duties and all his important vision for psychiatric health care—can’t even see Griggs. So, the way I live here and whom I associate with in this outpost of desolation is, it would seem to me, my business.

Mr. Royaltuber handles all the television and monitor maintenance and repair for the Spinard Institute. He has also helped us with the satellite dish and the cable connections we use at home. He’s a nice man, and I have lunch with him from time to time. We’ve become, under the circumstances and in this barren place, friends. I met his wife only once, when I was at his home. It was less than pleasant.

MR. WILD JOHNNY HATERAS,
RADIO PERSONALITY, KGRG

IF ANYBODY
pretends to be hurt or surprised by our little prank, they’re bad actors. Everybody in this burg knows what we do on Halloween with the “important news bulletin” and the hook. We’ve been doing it since I started spinning platters here twelve years ago. Nick goes out and slips a dozen of the phony hooks on car doors, and then I interrupt the program with my announcement about the maniac. I think of it as our little annual contribution to birth control, all those kids jumping up when I cut into “Unchained Melody” with my homicide-and-hook news brief. When we started, we used those plastic hooks from the costume shop in Orpenhook, but, sad to say, gang, it’s impossible to scare anybody anymore with a plastic hook. Don’t tell
me
the world’s a better place. So now we get them in Bark City, little steel hooks that at least look authentic for a few minutes. But this will probably be the last year we send Nick out with anything at all, because of the trouble up by the nuthouse, and because he’s afraid of getting shot. Can you believe that? You go out on Halloween to have a little fun anymore and you run a good chance of getting plugged? Hey, Griggs, wake up, all is not well. If you can’t harass the teenagers without running the risk of getting killed, this town is in trouble.