Sweet Dream Baby (25 page)

Come softly darling, come to me, stay,

You're my obsession, forever and a day.

COME SOFTLY TO ME

—Music and Lyrics by Gary Troxel, Gretchen Christopher, and Barbara Ellis

—Recorded by The Fleetwoods

I put down my John R. Tunis novel and go to the library window. Some guys are playing kickball down on the playground. It's hot even though it's the middle of September, and they don't look like they're having much fun. I like it up here in the library. I come as much as I can, nights and weekends. It's a big room with tall windows and good-smelling oak floors and narrow aisles of bookshelves. Three big paddle fans keep the air moving. If you sit still and let your mind go into a book, you can stay pretty cool.

I go back to the library table and pick up my book and try to read, but it's not working like it should. I've read all nine books about the baseball team. I'm reading the one about the catcher again now, but it's a kid's book, and I'm not a kid anymore. I know things now you won't find in this library. The books Mrs. Cohen gave Delia had those things in them. Maybe the books Griner read did, too. I don't know.

Mr. Hale, the librarian, looks over at me kind of stern. Most of the guys think he's an okay guy, but the library has a rule: if you're not reading or studying or doing something they call constructive, you have to leave. You can't just sit up here and think or feel the cool air from the paddle fans on your skin. That's not constructive. Mr. Hale calls it woolgathering, which is all right with me. I guess I've gathered a lot of wool since I came to this place.

Dr. Janeway, the psychologist, calls it morbid self-absorption. Most of the guys here think he's a shithead. But not all of them know him like I do. I have an appointment with him pretty soon. He comes in on Saturday afternoons. He has an office somewhere else, but he talks to the guys here that interest him. The first day they pulled me out of the furniture shop to see him, he told me he was interested in my case. I told him I didn't know I had one. He said, “You don't have one, Travis, you
are
one. You did something boys your age usually don't do.” I told him not to call me a boy, so he calls me a guy when he remembers, which isn't all the time.

We have our meetings in Mr. Bronovitch's office. Mr. Bronovitch is the superintendent. The guys call him the Super, or just Soup. He was a cop before he got educated, and a prize-fighter before that. All his fingers have been broken, and his nose is as flat as Mrs. Cleary's chest. She's the night nurse. Some of the older guys here say that Soup will talk to you about boxing if he's not busy and you ask him right. They say he fought Tony Zale once, and he could have made it big but he cut too easy. I guess I know what that means.

There are some tough guys here, but they don't mess with me. They think I'm a bug, that means crazy, and I don't try to convince them I'm not. If they leave bugs alone, then I'll be a bug. Bugs get along okay. I read in a library book that bugs have been around since before the dinosaurs.

I go over to Mr. Hale's desk and hand him the John R. Tunis novel about the catcher. Mr. Hale smiles at me. His teeth are crooked and brown from all the coffee he drinks. “You finish it, Travis?”

“I read it once already. I don't think I can get through it again. The funny thing is, they're all the same. It's a different guy in each one, and he plays a different position, but they're all the same. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out.”

Mr. Hale nods when I talk. He nods too much. Some of the guys make fun of him, but I don't. So what if he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer and he doesn't make much money. Nobody that works here does. Mr. Hale's been okay to me, and I like him for that.

He says, “Maybe I'll bring in something a little more adult for you to read. Would you like that?”

“Sure,” I say. “Yeah, I would.”

I don't know what he means by adult, but anything from outside would be okay. Mr. Hale smiles and says, “I'll have to clear it with Mr. Bronovitch, but I think he might look with favor upon my request.”

That's another thing about Mr. Hale. He talks funny, like an actor or like somebody from back in history who was dropped here by space monsters or something. I give him my most serious look and say, “I hope he does. I hope he looks with favor upon your request because I'd enjoy something more adult to read.”

You have to do that in here. I learned that the first week. You have to take what they say seriously, even when it's stupid. You can't make fun of anything they do. That's the worst thing you can do in here. It's worse than fighting or getting caught in a closet with some other guy doing the reach around.

The older guys tell a story about a kid who came here, and his face was stuck in a grin. He couldn't help it. He was just born that way. He wasn't a funny guy. Even when he wanted to smile, you couldn't tell it because he was always grinning. It was written in his file, the older guys say, that the permanent grin was a birth defect, but he still couldn't make it here. The staff couldn't stand to look at him.

They didn't see the kid, only his grin. And they thought the kid was laughing at them, at the program, at all their education and good will and good works. They started finding bruises on the guy, and the injuries got worse, and pretty soon he was like the chicken the other chickens peck to death in the barnyard. Everybody was on him.

The older guys say he lasted six weeks. They say he left one night on a stretcher with the blanket pulled up to his chin and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. I don't know if that part is true. You hear a lot of bullshit in here. If it isn't true, it ought to be true.

So I tell Mr. Hale thanks again, and tell him it's time for me to go to Mr. Bronovitch's office to meet Dr. Janeway. Mr. Hale smiles and scratches his arm, and I know he'll watch me leave. I know he wonders what Dr. Janeway and I talk about, and it's fun to make him wonder. If you have to be a bug, you might as well be a mysterious one.

Dr. Janeway's waiting for me in Mr. Bronovitch's office. He always arrives first and arranges his notebook and his fountain pen on the desk and plugs in the big suitcase tape recorder and lights his pipe and leans back in Mr. Bronovitch's brown leather chair. When I come in, he's already got the room full of good-smelling pipe smoke, and he's in control. That's what he likes.

What he doesn't like is Mr. Bronovitch's office. Mr. Bronovitch is not a pipe type of guy. If he smoked, it would be big fat cigars. Mr. Bronovitch's office is decorated with framed black and white pictures of his boxing matches. There's a lot of smoke in those pictures, and a lot of it's in the eyes of the guys Mr. Bronovitch is knocking the crap out of. There's a baseball signed by the entire pennant-winning New York Yankees team of 1956. There are plaques and trophies, too, from the organizations Mr. Bronovitch belongs to. I like the office. It's official, but it's like an old coat. You could wear it pretty well on a winter day. Dr. Janeway thinks it's low-class crappy. He only tolerates it because he's getting at some interesting cases. I'm one of them. I don't know how I fit with the other guys he talks to, and I don't care. It's okay to be interesting if it gets me out of the furniture shop.

I knock on Mr. Bronovitch's door, and Dr. Janeway calls out, “Come in, Trav.” I walk into the cloud of pipe smoke that smells like flowers burning in a pile of maple leaves. I sit down in the chair across from the desk. I pull the trousers of my uniform up and straighten the creases in the brown cotton. Dr. Janeway thinks that's interesting. He calls it my need for order in a disordered world. What the hell.

He's always writing when I come in. He doesn't look up until he finishes what he's writing with his tortoiseshell fountain pen. He's got neat handwriting, I can see that. I guess the sentence he's finishing is so good he'd really lose something if he looked up when I came in.

I watch him write. He's a tall, thin guy with sandy brown hair going gray at the temples. He looks like the Hathaway Man in the ads for shirts. He wears wool sport coats and yellow or blue button-down shirts and knitted ties with square ends. He wears vest sweaters, too. I've counted six so far in all different colors. He wears saddle shoes sometimes and sometimes penny loafers, and when I'm talking he likes to lean back and pull his ankle up onto his knee and pick at the weave in his argyle socks, especially when I say something particularly interesting.

He fiddles a lot with his pipe. He empties it and refills it. He frowns when it's not packed right and doesn't burn evenly. He straightens paper clips and pokes them into it. He wears a gold key on a chain. I asked what it was, and he said, Phi Beta Kappa. He acted like I'd know what that meant.

He looks up from his notebook and screws the cap onto his pen and turns on the tape recorder. “So, how's it going, Trav?”

I don't know why he calls me Trav. Nobody else does. I don't call him Jane.

“Fine,” I say, and smile, and we start through the usual list of questions and answers. I'm doing well in school. I find my assignments interesting. I'm getting along with my teachers. I like my work in the furniture shop, except sometimes I get a little light-headed from the varnish. I haven't had any problems with the other guys. I haven't had a D.R. since my first week here. I'm getting letters from my mom and dad, and I'm writing back to them. I miss home, but I know why I have to be here, and I understand that it could be a long time before I get to leave. I know it depends on the progress I make here.

Once when Dr. Janeway said that about progress, I said I wished I just had a sentence. Just time to be here and a time to leave. He frowned like I'd missed something important. “Don't you see, Trav,” he said, “the indeterminacy of your time here works in your favor. You can't just manipulate the system until it's time to go back into society. Under the indeterminacy policy, the staff here can really evaluate your progress. They can put you under some pressure and see who you really are.”

I nodded. I made my face look like it does when I read something in a book I like, something that means a lot to me. But I was thinking what a rotten rat-bastard system it is. You're like an animal in a zoo, and there's a wild forest only miles away. You smell that forest on the wind at night, and you know you're wild, and sometimes you even dream your way out through the bars. But you always wake up with the bars and the fences around you, and you know you won't get out until someone who can't smell the forest decides to unlock your cage. Or you die.

While we're doing the usual questions, Dr. Janeway leans back and smokes and picks at the little squares in his socks. They're brown today, the squares. When we finish, he leans forward and rests the leather patches in his sportcoat sleeves on Mr. Bronovitch's desk.

“Trav,” he says, “you look uncomfortable today. Is anything bothering you? Be honest with me.”

I lean forward and smile and try to look more comfortable. I drag some honesty into my eyes. “No, really, I'm fine, Dr. Janeway. There's nothing bothering me.”

Dr. Janeway frowns. When he picks up his notebook, he sneaks a look at his watch. We have to put in an hour here.

He puts down the notebook, picks up the fountain pen, and drums it on the notebook cover. “Travis, I want to go back to the day you got into trouble. I want you to tell me again why you did it.”

It's not the first time he's made me do this. It's like the cops when they took me to the station and put me in a cell and talked to me before my dad got somebody from his law firm downtown to get me out. They kept making me go over it and over it. They kept asking me the same questions. Where did I get the bayonet? Where was the bayonet when Jimmy Pultney shot the arrow at me? How many times had he shot at me before? They acted like I was lying and they were going to prove it until I pulled apart the hair on the top of my head and showed them the scar. After that, one of them started talking about self-defense.

I look at Dr. Janeway with my best Trav Trying Hard eyes and say, “I don't know what I can tell you that we haven't already talked about. I got back from my summer in Florida, and I was feeling bad about my mom and dad and things not going so well with them, and I went into the bedroom and took the bayonet from under my dad's pillow. Jimmy already tried to kill me twice, and I knew he'd do it again. I knew his parents couldn't stop him, and I didn't want to bother my dad about it.”

I look out of my Trav Trying Hard eyes at Dr. Janeway. Maybe I should ask Dr. Janeway if he'd rather be sitting here with Jimmy Pultney talking about why he shot a steel-tipped arrow into my head. Ask him if that would be more interesting. Dr. Janeway is listening carefully. I know he wants something new. He wants something I haven't said before. And suddenly I'm tired of this, so tired of all this, and the Trav Trying Hard eyes blink and the light goes out in them, and I can't get Dr. Janeway back into focus, and I say, “You see, I learned some things in Florida, and so I knew what I had to do about Jimmy.”

And there it is. The new thing. And the lights go on again, and Dr. Janeway's very interested face comes back into focus, and I know I'm in trouble. I don't know what made me say it. I didn't want to. I didn't even know it was there. I've memorized the things I always say.

Dr. Janeway is on my words like a cat on a baby bird blown from a nest in a storm. He leans forward and points the fountain pen at me and says, “You learned something in Florida? What did you learn, Travis?”

I don't know what to say. Travis, the real one, not Trav Trying Hard, but Travis Marking Time, has fucked up. He should have kept to the story he always tells. I have to come up with something. I say, “To defend myself. I learned to defend myself.”

“What happened in Florida that taught you that, Trav?”

I don't know what to say. I close my eyes and look back, all the way back a year and a month to Widow Rock. Ronny Bishop's mean, red-headed face appears out of the dark, and there's a revolver in his hand, and then I see Bick dancing on the edge in the moonlight, and then Griner howling in the flames. I say, “I met some guys down there who taught me how to stand up for myself, that's all. I think every guy should know how to stand up for himself, don't you?”