Make Something Up (28 page)

That smell they'd noticed through a dozen locked doors—sweet and acrid—here was the smell's source.

Black flies circled it. They alighted on its skin, roving the back of each hand, wandering up and down its thin, bare limbs. They puckered their proboscises and kissed its arms like old-movie Romeos. A cloth bandage wrapped one wrist. Another bandage clung to the side of its neck.

A gold chain circled the other thin wrist. Little medals dangled from the links. A charm bracelet. A few of the charms, Kevin recognized. One was a tiny golden Bible. Another was two faces, the smiling and frowning masks of Drama Society. Hanging next to that was a gold baseball. Next to the baseball was the little flaming torch that symbolized high school Honor Society. The collar of the dress was frilled with lace, but Kevin could see a gold cross sitting in the hollow at the base of its throat. The cross hung from a thin thread of gold beads that looped around its pale neck.

Kevin couldn't bring himself to look directly at its face. Not yet. In case its eyes might still be open. At the sight, his scalp prickled. Every hair on his head stood up so painfully it felt as if ghosts were tugging it out at the roots.

The thing laid out on the table, it had long auburn curls. They cascaded around its ashen, heart-shaped face and rested against the shoulders of its flowered dress. Some curls fanned out. They hung over the edge of the tabletop like a lank fringe. Clearly, Kevin and his crew weren't the first kids to mess with the Betsey thing. The more his eyes adjusted, the more Kevin could see black stitches like the seams on a baseball, only sewn with black string. They showed where the thing's pale skin had been sliced open and sutured back together. Some cuts looked fresh. Some didn't. It looked as if the Betsey thing had been taken apart too many times to count. Butchered by too many boys to keep track of.

The Commander fixed them with compassionate eyes. “My young gentlemen,” he assured them, “you need not be terrified of women.”

Tomas whispered that the stitches looked like tiny railroad tracks. To Whale Jr. they looked like zippers, as if they wouldn't need to cut anything. You could just pull one thread and the thing would come unraveled.

The Commander looked down at the Betsey thing. He cocked his head as if listening. He asked, “What's that, my dear?” He put a finger to his wrinkled lips as if to shush the boys. Bowing low, he turned his face sideways so that his yellow ear hovered over the painted mouth. Its lips sparkled with pink gloss. He closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. He said, “Yes, of course, my darling.” He lifted his hand and curled a finger, beckoning them to come closer.

None of them moved.

The Commander planted his fists against his hip bones and stomped one foot in a huff. Indignant, he said, “May I remind you gentlemen that your families are sponsoring you in this program to the tune of one thousand dollars each week? Many of them have mortgaged their homes and farms.” The Commander fixed them with a reproachful eye. “The sooner you engage with the curriculum, the less of a crippling financial burden you'll impose…”

A thousand dollars a week.
Kevin knew that no health insurance in the world would pay this claim. The brutal size of the money stuck in his head. He stepped closer to the door. He felt behind his back, but his fingers couldn't find the knob. There was no knob on the inside.

In the glare from the one overhead light, he could recognize more charms hanging from the thing's bracelet. There were minuscule golden ballet slippers. A musical note, representing Choir. Future Farmers of America. The air in the room was so motionless that none of the charms moved.

The Betsey thing, her waxy eyes were open. Dull as blue paint, they stared straight up at the blazing, bare lightbulb, unblinking.

Troublemaker whispered, “This is her parents' revenge, sending her here.” He meant the false eyelashes and the sparkle-pink-painted fake fingernails glued on top of her ragged real nails.

Mr. Peanut's finger flopped forward, a knobby wand of bone, pointing at the group of them. The brittle fingertip roamed from one boy to the next as the Halloween voice recited, “He loves me…he loves me not…he loves me…he loves me not…”

That night, none of them slept. After dinner, they'd each drunk a glass of chocolate milk shake spiked with syrup of ipecac. The Commander made no secret of it. They'd each choked down a whole glass of doctored milk, and they'd been left to watch a copy of
Steel Magnolias
on television in the sixth-floor lounge. This was yet another therapy. Before Julia Roberts was even hitched, Pig the Pirate was yakking out his guts on the linoleum. By the end of her wedding reception, Troublemaker had hurled. Big foamy waves of chocolate hurl. They couldn't even hear Olympia Dukakis cussing out Shirley MacLaine, the barfing was so loud. Big syrup of ipecac gushers. By the time Sally Field was standing at her daughter's grave, the TV lounge was awash in vomit.

Now they were all back in the dorm, tucked into bed. The room, pitch-dark. Unable to sleep, Kevin was still trembling. The toxic smell of the basement hung in his sinuses. Not even the acrid stink of barf could displace it. He could hear Kidney Bean, two beds over, sobbing into his pillow.

Kevin's head hurt. He slipped out of bed and crawled to the window. It was so cold the glass was frosted over on the inside. Kneeling there, he rested his headache against it. In the dark Kevin knew they were going down another wrong road. It had been wrong to force his parents' hand. To make them prove their love, he'd done something terrible. He dreaded the possibility that he might have to do something worse to prove he was normal. Still, he held on to the hope that another lie, a bigger lie, could fix everything.

To block out the memory, Kevin muttered, “Damn.” The word hung in the silence and the dark. Tomorrow was going to be another day in the therapy room. Their second date with the Betsey thing.

Tonight, somebody said something. Brainerd. Moaning in his bed, his voice heavy with doom, he said, “We are in the hands of an elderly lunatic.” He waited, but no one took the bait. “And I don't mean just God. I mean a
real lunatic.
”

From another bed, Jasper said, “All we need to do is tell our folks what happened.”

“How?” Kevin shot back.

Pig the Pirate insisted, “The Commander will tell them we're just lying to get out of treatment.”

Gazing out the window, Kevin griped, “I'm never getting my twenty grand…”

Whale Jr. wailed, “I'm never getting my parade.”

Spitting mad, Brainerd countered, “Screw your parade. We've got to do everything that madman says, or my parents will go into debt for the rest of their lives.”

Kidney Bean went back to sobbing. “I'm not screwing dead snatch.”

“Screw all of you crybabies,” a voice shouted from the dark. It was Troublemaker. He didn't talk like a sixteen-year-old kid sharing a room with a bunch of bedwetters. His voice sounded determined. Not frightened. He spoke with a hero's voice. Like a leader rallying his troops, he said, “We've got somebody more important to rescue.”

A series of long letters arrived from Kevin's mother. She wrote that his father was killing himself with the effort to pay the weekly clinic charges. She scribbled her notes in “Get Well” cards, describing how his father had collapsed from overwork. She referred to it as a
cardiac episode,
but implied that it was akin to a broken heart. In closing, she urged him to obey the Commander and complete the program as quickly as possible.

Mr. Clayton wrote less often, but his letters were filled with details about how Mrs. Clayton had taken two part-time jobs. One, waiting tables, the other as a hotel maid. He confided that she fell into a chair, every night, and wept over her swollen, bleeding feet.

For his part, Kevin couldn't write anything that wouldn't be reviewed by the Commander's staff. It was easy to imagine the progress reports that old man was giving them. That nut-job was going to bleed everyone dry.

There were other boys in the building. To judge from the sound of their footsteps, there were mobs imprisoned here. At mealtimes and outdoors, the sixth-floor boys were segregated from them. In dry weather Kevin could see them on the basketball court outside the big window beside his bed. They looked broken-down. Their ankles showed below the frayed hems of their pant legs. A big stretch of bare wrist showed between their hands and the cuffs of their shirts. It looked as if they'd outgrown their clothes. As if these too-tight T-shirts and jeans worn out at the knees were clothes they'd brought here at least a year before.

One afternoon Whale Jr. claimed a headache and the floor guard escorted him to the infirmary. When he came back his eyes were glazed with shock. “Don't pound me,” he said. “I'm just the messenger, okay?”

The way the nurse had told it, each new batch of boys started on the top floor. In a few weeks, once they'd learned the ropes, they'd be integrated into the general population of the clinic. The nurse hadn't cared. She'd dispensed two aspirin into his outstretched palm and told him to settle in. Nobody was ever discharged from the clinic. Not for years and years. It was only when a boy turned eighteen that he might be declared officially redeemed.

Those boys they saw shooting hoops, some of them had been admitted here when they were thirteen, even twelve years old.

To Kevin, things started to make sense. The Fag Farm was a cash cow. It made a fortune for everyone who worked there. Ultimately it made families happy, but not before pushing them to the verge of poverty. Church congregations throughout the country sponsored deviants the way they'd once financed missionaries overseas. The Commander and nurses and floor supervisors, they were all complicit.

Kevin supposed that a boy could sue. Set free, a boy could take his story to the media. Upon his release, he could charge the clinic with kidnapping or holding him against his will, but that would require admitting he'd faked his perversion and catalyzed the situation by taunting his folks. Chances were good that his parents would be furious. Besides, a judge or jury could always be convinced that such a boy was merely a vengeful, incurable Rock Hudson making scurrilous charges. It would be one admitted teenage liar's word pitted against the Commander's noble authority. Besides, there were all those legal forms he'd so eagerly signed.

No, a boy would do better to bide his time and emerge a hero. His victory might be delayed, but it would be intact. In the meantime there was nothing to do except study. Trigonometry. Calculus. Rhetoric. Physics. The tough stuff. As if to soften the blow, the nurse had told Whale Jr. that boys in the program almost always scored above 1400 on their SATs.

Beyond each door the next segment of corridor was dark. When they stepped through, automatic motion detectors switched on the lights. It was so quiet Kevin could hear the microscopic ping-pinging sounds as the fluorescent bulbs flickered, before they came on steady.

The group was bunched up, following the floor guard down yet another corridor. Troublemaker lagged behind them, whispering to Kevin. Pig the Pirate walked too close behind Tomas and gave him a flat tire, and Tomas swore at him in Spanish. Tomas fell back a few paces and fixed the back of his shoe.

Whale Jr. whispered, “I wonder how she died.”

Troublemaker said, “Her name isn't Betsey.”

Brainerd asked, “Did you know her?”

Troublemaker whispered that she raced motorcycles. That's how she got the scar on her leg. She ditched during the final lap of a motocross race. Instead of winning, she died taking the turn too fast for the track conditions. Massive internal injuries. Troublemaker tells this with a wistful smile. His eyes shimmering with admiration.

Pig the Pirate asked, “Was she your girlfriend?”

“She was a badass,” responded Troublemaker.

Kevin was examining his own hand. As he walked he recognized how his whole life showed in his hand. Through his fingernails he could see the pink, fresh skin he'd been covered with, all over, as a baby. Each fingernail was a little window onto who he'd been born. Conversely, the calluses on his palm showed how he'd look when he died. After he was dead his entire body would be covered with this same hoary, yellow skin. Here was proof that time passed. Looking at the difference between his baby skin and his dead skin made Kevin not want to waste a moment.

Urged by the Commander, they crowded around the steel table. While he folded back the greasy plastic and lifted the thing's skirt and began to snip a few stitches, Kevin pretended to help. Kevin peeled back the cloth bandage that wrapped the wrist. The calluses on her palm were impressive. As were the muscles of her arms. Where Kevin had expected to find a slashed wrist, her skin was intact. Discolored but intact. There was a dark-blue bruise that more peeling revealed to be a tattoo. Inked on the inside of her wrist was a butterfly. On second consideration, it was a weird cross. At last, Kevin saw it as a double-bladed ax.

The Commander dimmed the basement lights. He took something from his pants pocket. Cigar-shaped it was, only shorter. He clicked a button on it. The device threw a red spot on the floor: a laser pointer. He directed its tiny red dot over Betsey's dull, colorless insides. “Behold the glory of the ovary!” The little spotlight pinpointed an unremarkable lump.

Kevin and Troublemaker watched as Brainerd peeled the bandage from the side of the neck. Anyone could see the hair was a wig with no real hair underneath. Just a shaved head. Under the neck bandage Kevin recognized another tattoo. It began with a dark-blue “T.” Followed by an “R.” Then an “O.” Fully revealed, it said
“Troublemaker,”
spelled out in thorny letters.

That's when Troublemaker dropped. Troublemaker of all people, the tough guy, his knees buckled, and he spiraled to the concrete floor.