Disturbing the Peace

  The other boy looked puzzled. “How come you didn’t tell ’em the truth?”

  “I did! I did! I told ’em and told ’em, and everybody just laughed. ‘Cause it was just my word against his, see? And this Kovarsky’s such a big shot, who’s gonna believe me?”

  “Mm. Man, that’s a tough story.”

  “And then my father hears about it.”

  “Your father? Your father didn’t believe you either?”

  “Well see, he got it from the other kids’ fathers. He says ‘Ralph, I want you to tell me exactly what happened up behind that sign.’ So I tell him and he says ‘That’s not the way I heard it,’ and I says ‘I swear! I swear! ’ He just sits there and looks at me like I’m some kind of – some kind of – I don’t know. And ever since then, ever since then—” Ralph couldn’t finish; he turned his face against the wall mat, wholly expressionless, and began fingering his pimples. All his fingernails had been bitten to the quick.

  “Man,” said the Negro boy. “I mean, that is one tough story. Hey listen, though; I got an idea. Let’s play a game. Let’s play pictures. You know how to play pictures, Ralph?” Ralph didn’t answer. “How ’bout you, man? What’s your name?”

  “John.”

  “I’m Francis, John; this here’s Ralph. You want to play pictures? It’s easy. I say somethin’, you all try and tell me what picture it’s in. Here’s an example. I say ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ What picture is that?”

  “Well, I guess I don’t—”

  “You don’t know? Shit, man, that’s Gone With the Wind. Clark Gable says it to Vivien Leigh. You want another one?”

  “Okay.”

  “Here’s another one. Wait a minute.” Francis screwed up his eyes in concentration. “You got another one, Ralph?”

  “No.”

  “You got one, John?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, wait a minute. We’ll think of one. Plenty of good pictures.” But his downcast, brooding face had begun to suggest that there weren’t plenty of them at all. “Some pictures I don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like that Psycho, you know? Anthony Perkins? I mean that’s a bad picture, know what I mean?”

  “Mm.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s think.” He thought for a while and then he said “Shit, I don’t want to play pictures any more. You like music, John?”

  “Sure. What kind of music?”

  “Any kind. You like this?” He bunched himself into an athletic squat and began slapping his flexed thighs as if they were bongo drums; when the rhythm was established he threw back his head and closed his eyes as he sang, or rather wailed and howled, in what could have been an ultra-progressive style of jazz or an African tribal chant. Ralph seemed to like it: his own eyes glazed over and he wagged his head to the drumming.

  “Hey,” said the man with the newspapers. “Take a look at this.” He had neatly torn out a sports headline from the New York Post: CAN MARIS TOP THE BABE? “Got that?” he said. “Well, watch. Wait.” Out of his raddled sheaf came half a dozen other scraps of newsprint, which he shielded from view. “Wait,” he muttered over his work, carefully tearing and smoothing and adjusting, and then “Look now,” he said. “Look at there.”

  He had laid out a big photograph of Marilyn Monroe. The headline above it read: CAN pARIS sTOP THis BABE? And beneath it, in many different typefaces, ran the caption: Tired Blood? TALK ABOUT SUMMER VALUES! IKE VOICES ‘CONCERN’ AS Thousands Flee City’s Heat; F.B.I. Joins State, Local Police in Massive Effort to FLY AIR FRANCE.

  “Well, that’s – quite something.”

  “Ah, it’s not a very good one. I’ll do a better one. Wait.”

  Francis’s music had grown louder and seemed to have put him in a trance. The effort of singing had brought up two gouts of phlegm from his throat, but he’d caught them both without missing a beat, one on the back of each flying hand.

  “Mr. Wilder?” Charlie called from the corridor. He was holding Spivack close by the upper arm, either in restraint or affection, and Spivack glowered with narrow eyes, breathing so hard through his nose that his head wobbled slightly with each breath. “Mr. Wilder, Dr. Spivack would like you to join him for supper this evening.”

  “… Okay, you can eat with me, Wilder,” Spivack said as they filed into the stifling mess hall, “but no more questions; no more fucking talk, is that clear?”

  On Sunday morning Wilder was shot out.

  It happened so quickly that he could never afterwards put it straight in his memory: there was no coherent pattern of helplessness and resentment and anger rising to rage. He’d had his breakfast and his Nourishment and his ward cigarette; he was standing alone at one of the grey windows looking out on nothing, and he heard the shouted word “Shit! … Shit!” before he recognized his own voice. He stepped back from the window, raised the sole of one dirty foot and slammed it against the steel-mesh grid, denting it, and the sight of that dent was so invigorating that he hauled off and slammed it again and again, making it deeper, while his raw throat burned with the cry of “Shit! Shit! Shit! …” He was only dimly aware of other voices around him – “Watch it, fella”; “Easy; easy” – and not until two orderlies grabbed his arms did he know he was in trouble. “Hey, Charlie!” somebody called. “Charlie!”

  And there he came, lumbering down the corridor with his face pressed into a frown. He paused under a light to squint at his upraised needle until the drop gleamed on its point; then the orderlies tore down Wilder’s pants and Charlie sank the shot into one buttock. “I did warn you, Mr. Wilder,” he said. “I told you to watch that temper of yours.” The door of a padded cell was opened just enough for Wilder to be flung inside; it slammed shut and he heard the lock click. He couldn’t breathe and it took a great deal of work to pull up his pants and secure them while scrabbling on all fours around the soft floor; then the drug went to work in him – heavy waves of sleep as deep as drowning – and the last thing he knew as he turned and floundered and sank was that nothing in his life had ever been as bad as this. This was the worst.

  “… Wilder? Hey, off your ass, man.”

  It could have been ten minutes or ten hours later.

  “Wilder?”

  “Mm? … Wha’? …”

  “Get up outa there, man. You got visitors.”

  Visitors.

  He stumbled up the corridor like a drunk, colliding with other men, reeling against one wall for support and then against the other. Even when he found his balance he had to stop and run furtive fingers down the fly of his pants to make sure it was closed while his free hand clawed hair away from his eyes.

  The mess hall had been transformed into a visitors’ room – tables shoved out of the way, benches hauled around in conversational groupings – and he stood blinking in the doorway for some time before discovering his wife and Paul Borg. He tried not to wobble as he sat down with them and said hello.

  “Oh, this must be awful for you, John,” Janice said, putting her hand on his knee. “This place.” She looked troubled and affectionate – she had even worn what she called his favorite dress, a blue-and-brown print that emphasized her breasts – and for a second or two he could see the girl who’d made all other girls unnecessary long ago.

  “Yeah. Well, how’ve you been? How’s Tommy?”

  “We’re fine. Except that we miss you.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I said you’d been held over by business in Chicago.”

  “Well, but the trouble is you can’t possibly say when I’ll be back. I won’t even see a doctor till Thursday, and God only knows what’ll happen after that. Might be two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and I mean whaddya gonna tell him?”

  “Sh-sh.” She squeezed his knee. “Why don’t you let me worry about Tommy? He’ll be fine; I promise. You just concentrate on getting rested and getting well.”

  “And I can’t even call him because there’s no phone here. Look, you bette
r call the office Tuesday; tell George I’ve got the flu or something.”

  “Oh, of course, dear. That’s no problem.”

  Paul Borg had been gazing around at other patients as if trying to assess the degree of insanity in each case; then he turned the same cool scrutiny on Wilder for an instant before they both lowered their eyes, and that was when Wilder saw a carton of cigarettes on Borg’s lap.

  “Jesus, are those for me? Can I have ’em?”

  “… One thing I still fail to understand,” Borg was saying, “is this nuisance about the Labor Day weekend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “An institution of this size, a public institution; surely it’s reasonable to expect at least a partial psychiatric staff to be on duty over the holidays.”

  “Yeah. Sure is.” With a cigarette in his mouth, a pack in his pocket and a carton under his arm he was ready to forgive anybody for anything.

  At the end of visiting hour they went out into the pressing, overheated crowd near the front door. Borg shook his hand and Janice put her arms around him to kiss him goodbye. “John?” she said. “You know what I thought we might do? When you do come home? I thought we might drive up to the country with Tommy – he can skip a few days of school – and just relax and be together and have a little vacation. Maybe a whole week. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds fine. I – Yeah, that sounds fine.”

  And the door was locked behind them.

  “Hey, save me, buddy, okay?”

  “Save me, man.”

  “Save me …”

  He was the center of attention, passing out cigarettes, until Charlie said “Mr. Wilder? Will you come with me, please?” and led him to the KEEP OUT room. “That carton won’t last very long if you carry it around,” he said. “What we generally do when a man gets a carton, we keep it for him in here. I’ll write your name on it.” And while writing he said “Was that lady your wife, Mr. Wilder?”

  “Yes.”

  “A very nice-looking lady; very well dressed. You have children? … Well, that’s fine; a son. I have three little girls, myself,” he said when they were back in the corridor. “Seven, eight and nine years old. They’re the joy of my life.”

  “All right, how d’ya like that, Charlie?” Spivack demanded. “Explain that to me if you’re so fucking smart.”

  “Explain what, Doctor?”

  “What the hell d’ya think? My father and my sister. I gave ’em every chance. I waited at that God damned door for a solid hour and neither one of ’em showed up. You know what I think?” His eyes were as wild as when he’d been shot out for shadowboxing. Charlie laid one hand around his shoulder as if to guide him away for a private talk, but he held his ground. “You know what I think? That jerk-off spook of a husband of hers’s got ’em both by the short hairs. He’s got ’em both convinced I’m a dangerous lunatic and they’ve written me off ! They’re gonna let me rot in here!”

  “Oh, now, I imagine there’s any number of reasons why they couldn’t make it today, Doctor. One thing, you have to remember your father’s getting on in years and it’s a long trip for him, all the way down from White Plains. Your sister has her family to look after, and she’s probably—”

  “Charlie, you’re a great big chocolate sweetheart but you don’t know shit about human nature. Even a dumb little asshole like Wilder knows more’n you. Gimme your pen.”

  “I don’t believe I’ll give you anything, Doctor, until you apologize to Mr. Wilder and to me. For your language.”

  “Ah, Jesus fucking Christ. Language. Apologize. All right, all right, I apologize. Let’s try it this way. Nurse, would you please be so kind as to lend me your invaluable twenty-nine-cent ballpoint pen for approximately twelve seconds?” He tore a dirty scrap of paper from his pajama pocket, held it flat against the wall and wrote a set of numerals. “Here. Now listen carefully. This is my sister’s phone number. When you get off work tonight I want you to call this number and give her the following message. Tell her—”

  But Charlie was shaking his head. “You know I can’t do anything like that.”

  Spivack backed away three steps and stood there – legs apart, fists clenched and eyes blazing. “So what the hell can you do? Smile? Preach? Make everybody’s ass feel good? What the hell can you do, you big, dumb, motherfucking—”

  “Doctor!”

  “Yeah, ‘Doctor.’ Shit. Why don’tcha just shoot me out and get it over with?”

  “I’ve considered that,” Charlie said, “but I believe you’re playing games with me. You know I don’t play games. What’s more, you’ve taken up too much of my time. There are a good many other patients on this ward besides yourself.” He turned and walked away into one of the shuffling columns, soon surrounded by other talking, favor-seeking men. Spivack slumped alone against the wall, and that gave Wilder a chance for escape.

  He ducked quickly into the latrine. He had a comb in his pocket now – another gift from Paul Borg – so he dampened his head and restored it to the carefully casual shape of everyday: a clean part on the left, short front hairs combed sideways across the brow, longer side hairs back and down. It was a style he had copied from the actor Alan Ladd after years of experimentation, and it looked all right. He had to admit, studying himself from several angles in the dim, white-and red-flecked mirror, that this was a sound, manly, reliable face. Troubled, maybe, but not openly neurotic and certainly not mentally ill. It was nothing less than absurd for him to be here, in the Men’s Violence Ward, and the absurdity made him toss his head with a wry, amused little smile.

  “Hey, what the hell you doin’, man?” said a voice behind him. “You tryna look pretty for yourself ?”

  “… I mean it may be understandable in my sister’s case,” Spivack said, coming up beside him in the supper line. “She lets that slippery bastard fuck her every night. He works the old cock up in there and shoves it around till she screams, and I guess you can’t blame her for believing all the Sigmund Freud horseshit he gives her in the daytime. But my father; that’s something else. And my brothers. They’re intelligent men! They’re medical men! They know I was railroaded in here on some half-assed, trumped-up charge of – Ah, never mind. Let’s go eat up our goody-good macaroni and cheese.”

  One of the new patients brought in on Monday – or was it Tuesday? – was a grey-haired Negro so badly injured around the head and face that bloodstained bandages covered his eyes. They couldn’t make a blind man walk, so his bunk stayed down and he lay on it all day as the column on that side of the corridor detoured around him. Wilder passed him twice before noticing that his wrists and ankles were secured to the bunk by heavy restraining bands. He writhed constantly, groaning and muttering; several times he struggled up to a half-sitting position and screamed.

  “D.T.s,” Spivack explained.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Obvious. Anyone with medical training can spot ’em. Lot of the drunks in here have ’em all the time. Hear what he was yelling just now? When Charlie went over to him?”

  “No.”

  “‘Ah! Ah! Ah got lucidations! Ah got lucidations!’ Didn’t you hear that? He means hallucinations. Bastard’s been soaking up a quart a day for twenty-five years and now his brains have turned to shit. You drink, Wilder?”

  “Some.”

  “How much? Four, five, six drinks a day?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Eight? Ten? Fifteen? More’n that? Huh?”

  “Look, Spivack: in the first place I don’t think it’s any of your fucking—”

  “Wow! Boy! Talk about hitting a sore spot – So that’s your trouble. Well, it figures: you do look like a lush; funny I didn’t notice before.”

  “Yeah, funny,” Wilder said. “Fuck you.”

  And Spivack’s reply was to thrust a triumphant middle finger high in the air and say “Fuck you” as he turned and disappeared into the column of walkers.

  For the rest of that day – Tuesday? – they avoided each
other. Wilder tried to renew his acquaintance with Ralph and Francis, but Ralph didn’t seem to recognize him and Francis didn’t want to play pictures even when Wilder fed him a good one – “Hey, what picture is this: ‘Play it again, Sam’?”

  He helped the newspaper man lay out a spread that didn’t work at all, and after that he kept to himself, walking the corridor, peering at his double image in the cop’s sunglasses, smoking cigarettes and saving people, wondering in a quiet panic if he really might be out of his mind.

  But sometime during the next afternoon he heard the blind man saying “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and found Spivack crouching low over his bunk.

  “What’s the matter, Sambo?” Spivack inquired softly. “You got them old lucidations again? You want a drink? Well, I’m afraid that’s tough, Sambo, because we don’t got no drinks in here.”

  “… Oh! Oh! Oh! …”

  “No, we don’t got nothin’ here but Peraldehyde and straitjackets and shots in the ass and …”

  “Why don’t you cut that shit out?” Wilder said.

  Spivack straightened his spine and turned around in a great display of surprise. “Well, I’ll be God damned.” His gaze ran from Wilder’s eyes to his bare feet and back again. “Look who’s preaching at me now. I thought I’d taken just about every kind of holy-Joe shit there is, from every kind of fool; and now some pipsqueak, some drunken little salesman starts telling me ‘kindness,’ starts telling me ‘compassion,’ starts telling me—”

  “You’re an arrogant, insolent, overbearing son of a bitch, Spivack. You’re a prick …” Wilder walked backwards, letting Spivack advance on him, but it wasn’t a retreat; he was withdrawing to a wider part of the corridor where the crowd was thin and he could take a stand.

  “And whaddya think you are? Some Boy Scout? Some faggot social worker? Some saint? Christ himself ? Huh?”