The Losers

  “Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?”

  “Grow up, Raphael. Their magic word is ‘programs.’ They’ve got programs for everything, and every program is based on thought control. They’ve already taken over the schools. Every teacher in the public schools has a de facto degree in social work. I doubt if you could find a real English teacher or a real history teacher anywhere in America. Johnny can’t read because his teachers are too worried about his ‘relationships,’ and their major tool is ‘the group.’ Modern Americans are sheep. They herd up by instinct. You won’t find no Lone Rangers out there no more, Kimo Sabee. Peer pressure, bay-bee, peer pressure. That’s the club they use. Americans would sooner die than do anything that runs counter to the wishes of the peer group. Before I finally threw the whole thing over, I spent hours taking notes in those group meetings. If I ever hear anybody say the words ‘y’know’ again, I’ll throw up right on the spot.”

  Raphael remembered the endless, monotonous repetition of the ‘y’knows’ during his enforced attendance at AA meetings when he’d tried playing games with a new caseworker. “They are sort of fond of that, aren’t they?”

  “It’s the Ave Maria and Paternoster of the groupie. It’s a part of the recognition system, the badge of membership in the cult.”

  “Cult?”

  “God, yes. They’re all cults, Raphael. They’re based on the mind-destroying success of AA. You can cure somebody of anything if you put him in a cult and grind off all his individuality and alienate him from such distractions as friends, families, wives—little things like that. Be glad you’re not married, my friend, because the very first thing your cute little caseworker would have done would have been to poison your wife because your marriage hadn’t been approved by the group—whatever group it is she’s hustling for.” Flood’s expression was strange, intent, and he seemed almost to have his teeth clenched together. “Have you ever noticed how much they all want you to ‘talk about it’?”

  “Of course. That’s what they do—talk.”

  “Do you want to know why? Social workers are almost all women, and women talk about problems. They don’t do things about them. If John and Marsha’s house catches on fire, John wants to put the fire out. Marsha wants to sit down and discuss it—to find out why the fire feels hostility toward them.” “Get serious.”

  “I am. Most social workers are women, and they know that they can control women by talking to them. It doesn’t work that well with men, so the first thing a social worker does to a man is castrate him.”

  Raphael stiffened. How much did Flood know?

  Flood, however, didn’t seem to notice. “Social workers have to castrate their male clients so that they can turn them into women so that they’ll be willing to sit around and talk about their problems rather than do something about them. If somebody actually does something about his problems, he doesn’t need a social worker anymore. That’s the real purpose of all the programs. They want to keep the poor sucker from really addressing his problem. If he does that, he’ll probably solve it, and then he gets away. They won’t have the chance to leech off his bank account or his emotions anymore. The bitches are vampires, Raphael. Stay away from them. The content of any social-science course is about fifty-percent vocabulary list—the jargon—and about fifty-percent B. F. Skinner behavior-modification shit. And as I said, the whole idea is to get everybody in the whole goddamn world into a program. They’ve probably even got a program for normal people—a support group for people who don’t need a support group—a group to screw up their minds enough to make them eligible for the really interesting programs. Give those bastards a few years, and ninety percent of the people in the United States will be social workers. They’ll have to start branching out then—spread the joy to other species. Guide dogs and cats through the trauma of divorce. Death counseling for beef cattle—so that we can all get happy hamburger at the supermarket. Eventually they’ll probably have to start exhuming the dead just to have enough customers to keep them all working. How about ‘Aftercare for the Afterlife’? Ten social workers to dig up your uncle Norton to find out how he’s doing? ‘How’s it going, Nort?’ ‘Bout the same—still dead.’ ‘Would you like to talk about it?’”

  “Aren’t you reaching just a bit, Damon?”

  “Of course I am. I’m doing this off the top of my head. You didn’t give me any time to prepare. I’d still like to tumble your little caseworker, though.”

  “Tumble?”

  “It’s an old-fashioned term. It means—”

  “I know what it means. You keep your hands off Frankie. I’m raising her as a pet.” That was not really true anymore, but he decided that it might be better for all concerned if he kept what he’d just found out to himself.

  “Sure you are, baby. Next time she comes around though, check real close to find out which one of you is wearing the dog collar.”

  v

  In mid-May the weather turned foul. Denise told Raphael that this was normal for Spokane. “April and the first half of May are beautiful. Then it starts raining and keeps it up until the end of June. Then it gets hot.”

  “You mean it’s going to do this for six weeks?”

  “Off and on. It makes the lilacs bloom.”

  “Why does everybody in Spokane pronounce that word ly-lock?” he demanded irritably. “The word is ly-lack.”

  “Don’t get grumpy with me, Blue Eyes,” she told him tartly. “It’s not my fault it’s raining.”

  “Oh, go sell a refrigerator or something.” He faked a scowl to let her know that he was not angry with her so much as with the weather.

  “Why don’t you go back to your little bench,” she suggested, “and take that nice stout little machine of yours and sew all your fingers together? That way you’ll have something to worry about besides the weather or how I pronounce the word lilac.”

  “You did it again. You said ly-lock.”

  “So beat me.”

  He made a threatening move toward her, and she scampered away, laughing.

  That afternoon he sat in his apartment drinking coffee and staring dispiritedly out at the dirty gray clouds scudding by overhead. He had the scanner on—more for company than out of any interest.

  “District Four,” the scanner said.

  “Four.”

  “Nineteen-nineteen West Dalton,” the dispatcher said. Raphael looked quickly at the scanner. The address was on his block.

  “Check on the welfare of the Berry children. Complainant is the children’s grandmother—states that the children may be abused or neglected. Child Protective Services is dispatching a caseworker.”

  “You want me to check it out or just back up the caseworker?” District Four asked.

  “See what the situation requires first. We’ve had calls from this complainant before. There might be some kind of custody dispute involved.”

  “Okay,” District Four said.

  Raphael realized that it was Mousy Mary that they were descending upon. The dumpy woman with the pinched-in face had finally figured out a way to get into Mary’s house.

  He reached for his crutches and went out on the roof. The rain had stopped, at least for the moment, and the gusty wind blew ripples across the surface of a puddle of water standing in a low spot on the roof. Raphael crutched over to the front railing and stood looking down at the soggy street.

  The police car, followed closely by a gray car from the state motor pool, drove up slowly and stopped. The policeman got out and put on his cap. A very nervous young woman got out of the gray car and hurried over to him, carrying her briefcase self-consciously. They spoke together briefly and then went up onto Mousy Mary’s porch.

  Across the street, in front of Sadie the Sitter’s house, Mousy

  Mary’s mother stood watching, her face gripped with an expression of unspeakable triumph.

  The policeman and the nervous young caseworker went inside, and the dumpy little woman scurried across the street to stand directly in fr
ont of the house.

  After a few moments the screaming started. Raphael could hear the anguish and the outrage in Mary’s shrieks, but not the words. Then they all came out onto the porch, the caseworker holding protectively on to the arms of Mary’s two confused-looking children, and the policeman interposing himself between her and the now-hysterical Mary.

  “It’s hen” Mary shrieked, leveling a shaking finger at her mother. “Why don’t you make her leave me alone?”

  The caseworker said something to her in a low voice, but Mary continued to scream at her smug-faced mother.

  The policeman removed the small portable radio unit from his belt. “This is District Four.” The voice came from the scanner inside Raphael’s apartment. “You’d better respond Mental Health to this nineteen-nineteen West Dalton address. There’s a female subject here who’s pretty hysterical.”

  The caseworker led the two wide-eyed, crying children down to the sidewalk.

  “I’ll take them,” Mousy Mary’s mother declared in an authoritative voice. “I’m a personal friend of Sergeant Green’s, and he said that I’d get custody.”

  “I’m very sorry,” the young social worker told her firmly, her voice louder now, “but custody is a matter for the courts to decide.”

  “Don’t let her take them,” Mary screamed. “She’ll never let me see them again. She’s been trying to take them away from me for five years now. Don’t let the old bitch have them.”

  “Don’t you dare call me that in front of the babies!” her mother scolded. Then she turned back to the caseworker. “I’m taking those children,” she announced.

  “Officer,” the caseworker called.

  “All right, ma’am,” the policeman said to Mary’s mother, “you’re going to have to stand aside.”

  “But I have custody,” Mary’s mother insisted.

  “At the moment Child Protective Services has custody,” the caseworker said, leading the children around the old woman toward her car.

  “You come back here!” the dumpy woman screamed. “Sergeant Green said I could have custody.”

  “Go ahead and take off, miss,” the officer on the porch said.

  “What are you talking about? She can’t take those children. I have custody.”

  The social worker got into her car with Mary’s children and pulled away from the curb.

  “You come back here! You come back here!” Mary’s mother shrieked.

  Then the car was gone, and she spun to confront the officer who had come down off the porch. “What’s your badge number?” she demanded. “You’re in a great deal of trouble, young man. Sergeant Green will take care of you.”

  “Just calm down, ma’am,” the policeman said to her. “We’ll get this all sorted out, but we’re not going to get anywhere if we all stand around yelling at each other.”

  Then Mary said something, and the two women began screaming again.

  Raphael turned and went back inside. The wind was brisk, and he had begun to feel chilled.

  An hour later, after the affair across the street had quieted down, Flood arrived with a pizza. He had been drinking and was in high spirits. “Bob the Buggerer got busted today,” he announced gleefully. “The temptation of budding boyish buttocks finally got to him, I guess.”

  “What’s with the alliteration?” Raphael asked. He was not really in the mood for Flood. The weather and the incident across the street had soured him.

  “Purely unintentional.” Flood grinned. “To alliterate or not to alliterate—that’s the question,” he declaimed. “Whether ‘tis fancier to consonantize constantly or to rhyme in time.” “Consonantize?”

  “Poetic license—number forty-seven eighteen. Anyhow, poor old bumbling Bob nailed a paperboy on his morning route this a.m., and then he made his getaway—or at least he thought so. But the fuzz showed the rapee a bunch of mug shots, and the kid fingered Bob. About two this afternoon three squad cars came roaring down the hill into Peaceful Valley. Hey, babee, that’s like throwing a brick into a hornet’s nest. You absolutely wouldn’t believe what happens in Peaceful Valley when the pigs come down there in force. It looked like an impromptu track meet. There were people running every which way. Two guys came running out of Polly the Punch-board’s house stark-ass naked and bailed into the river. Last I saw of them they were being swept around the bend. Guys I’d never even seen before came out of some of those houses. It looked like a convention of jackrabbits there for a while. Poor old Bob tried to run, too, but he’s a little too old and a little too fat, so the cops caught up with him about fifty yards up the side hill. He tried to fight, and they literally kicked the shit out of him—I mean, they flat stomped a mud puddle in his ass right there on the spot. You’ve got some real unfriendly cops in this town.”

  “Was he hurt?” Raphael asked, not knowing whether to believe Flood or not. In his present mood Flood could expand and embellish a simple incident into an extended narrative that would be related to the truth only by implication.

  “Hard to say. He looked pretty comfortable—lying there.”

  “Damon,” Raphael said irritably, “I don’t think I believe one single word of all this.”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “Yes, I think you would—-just to see if I’d swallow all this crap.”

  “May the motor scooter of the Almighty run over my bare toes if it didn’t happen just the way I described it.”

  “I think you’re missing the whole point, Damon. I’m just not too entertained by this unsympathetic attitude of yours.”

  “Unsympathetic? Me? What about you, Raphael? What’s your excuse for your attitude?”

  “What about my attitude?”

  “You’re playing God. You sit in splendid isolation on top of your grubby little Mount Zion here, using your injury as an excuse not to come down among the real people. You’ve created a little fantasy world instead and peopled it with these losers of yours—’and whatsoever the God Raphael called them, so were they named.’ But let me tell you something, Archangel, old buddy. You can sit brooding on your lonely mountaintop here with those seraphic wings outspread to shade these rickety streets, but your cute little fantasy names have no relationship whatsoever to these people and who they really are. Those are real people down there with real emotions and real problems, and you did not create them.”

  “I’ve never said I did.” Raphael was startled by the sudden intensity of Flood’s words.

  Flood stood up and began pacing in the small apartment, his eyes burning. “Okay, so you had a little accident—you’ve got a certain disability. Big goddamn deal! What if it had been your eyes, baby? Think about that.”

  Raphael flinched, the sudden horrid picture of a world of total darkness coming over him so palpably that he could almost feel the anguish of it.

  “You’ve created this little dreamworld of yours so you can hide.” Flood jabbed at him. “You want to sit up here where it’s safe, wallowing in self-pity and dreaming away the rest of your life. Well, I’ve got a flash for you, Rafe, baby. Jake Flood is here, and he’s goddamned if he’s going to let you just vegetate your life away like this—doped out on melancholy musings, drunk on mournful little fantasies. If you’re so damned interested in these shitty little people, get involved, for Chrissake. Go out and meet them. Find out who they really are.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business, Flood?” Raphael was getting angry. “Why don’t we just forget all this. Just go away and leave me alone. Go back to Portland—go back to Grosse Pointe—

  go to hell for all I care. Just get off my back.”

  Flood stopped, turned sharply, and stared at Raphael. Then he grinned broadly. “Gotcha!” he said exultantly. “By God, you’re alive after all! For a while there I was starting to have some doubts. You’re going to make it after all, baby. It may be in spite of yourself, but you’re going to make it. If you can get mad, at least it proves you’re not dead.”

  “Oh, go to hell!”

&
nbsp; “Anyplace, baby, anyplace.” Flood laughed. “I finally got a rise out of you. Have you got any idea how I’ve been busting my ass to do just that?”

  “Flood,” Raphael said, feeling suddenly sheepish, “don’t play games with me. Exactly what are you up to now?”

  “What’s necessary, Raphael, what’s necessary. I’ll set fire to your crutches if I have to, but I’ll be a son of a bitch if I’m going to sit back and let you lie down and play dead.”

  It sounded very convincing, but the look in Flood’s eyes was too familiar. Raphael remembered it, and it stirred doubts. It was all very complicated. Flood almost never did things for the apparent or obvious reason; his motives were usually obscure. It would be easy—even flattering—to accept this protestation of hardheaded friendship at face value, but the agatelike eyes and that faintest shadow of a sardonic smile that flickered at the corners of his mouth made Raphael cautious, uncertain. As always with Flood, he decided, it might be better to wait and see.

  vi

  The next day when he was coming home from his therapist’s office, Raphael stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few things, and as he usually did, he stopped to talk with the blond clerk. The man had a dry wit Raphael liked and an open, friendly manner that was a relief from the deviousness of Flood or the tart touchiness he sometimes encountered in the people with whom he worked.

  “Hey, Rafe,” the clerk said, looking up from the milk case he was filling, “what’s shakin’, baby?”

  “Just passin’ through, Darrel.”

  “That friend of yours was in a while ago.”

  “Damon?”

  “Is that his name?” the clerk asked, straightening. “I thought it was Jake.”

  “It is. The other is a name he used to use at school.”