Gerald’s Game

think you’d have to say he had a point.

The worst thing, however, was the sandwich lying on the passenger seat. The thing poking out from between the two slices of Wonder Bread was pretty clearly a human tongue. It had been slathered with that bright yellow mustard kids like.

“Ridgewick managed to get out of the van before he threw up,” Brandon said. “Good thing-the State Police would have torn him a new asshole if he’d puked on the evidence. On the other hand, I’d have wanted him removed from his job for psychological reasons if he hadn’t thrown up.”

They moved Joubert over to Chamberlain shortly after sunrise. While Ridgewick was turned around in the front seat of the cruiser, reading Joubert his rights through the mesh (it was the second or third time he’d done it-Ridgewick is apparently nothing if not methodical), Joubert interrupted to say he “might have done somefing bad to Daddy-Mummy, awful sorry.” They had by that time established from documents in Joubert’s wallet that he was living in Motton, a farming town just across the river from Chamberlain, and as soon as Joubert was safely locked up in his new quarters, Ridgewick informed officers from both Chamberlain and Motton what Joubert had told them.

On the way back to Castle Rock, LaPointe asked Ridgewick what he thought the cops headed for Joubert’s house might find. Ridgewick said, “I don’t know, but I hope they remembered to take their gas masks.”

A version of what they found and the conclusions they drew came out in the papers over the following days, growing as it did, of course, but the State Police and the Maine Attorney General’s Off ice had a pretty good picture of what had been going on in the farmhouse on Kingston Road by the time the sun went down on Joubert’s first day behind bars. The couple Joubert called his “Daddy-Mummy'-actually his stepmother and her commonlaw husband-were dead, all right. They’d been dead for months, although Joubert continued to speak as if the “somefing bad” had happened only days or hours ago. He had scalped them both, and eaten most of “Daddy.”

There were body-parts strewn all over the house, some rotting and maggoty in spite of the cold weather, others carefully cured and preserved. Most of the cured parts were male sex-organs. On a shelf by the cellar stairs, the police found about fifty Ball jars containing eyes, lips, fingers, toes, and testicles. Joubert was quite the home canner. The house was also filled-and I do mean filled-with stolen goods, mostly from summer camps and cottages. Joubert calls them “my things'-appliances, tools, gardening equipment, and enough lingerie to stock a Victoria’s Secret boutique. He apparently liked to wear it.

The police are still trying to sort out the body-parts that came from Joubert’s grave-robbing expeditions from those that came from his other activities. They believe he may have killed as many as a dozen people over the last five years, all hitchhiking drifters he picked up in his van. The total may go higher, Brandon says, but the forensic work is very slow. Joubert himself is no help, not because he won’t talk but because he talks too much. According to Brandon, he’s confessed to over three hundred crimes already, including the assassination of George Bush. He seems to believe Bush is actually Dana Carvey, the guy who plays The Church Lady on Saturday Night Live.

He’s been in and out of various mental institutions since the age of fifteen, when he was arrested for engaging in unlawful sexual congress with his cousin. The cousin in question was two at the time. He was a victim of sex abuse himself, of course-his father, his stepfather, and his stepmother all apparently had a go at him. What is it they used to say? The family that plays together stays together?

He was sent to Gage Point-a sort of combination detox, halfway house, and mental institution for adolescents in Hancock County-on a charge of gross sexual abuse, and released as cured four years later, at the age of nineteen. This was in 1973, He spent the second halt of 1975 and most of 1976 at AMHI, in Augusta. This was as a result of Joubert’s Fun with Animals Period. I know I probably shouldn’t be joking about these things, Ruth-you’ll think I’m horrible-but in truth, I don’t know what else to do. I sometimes feel that if I don’t joke, able to stop. He was sticking I’ll start to cry, and that it I start to cry I won’t be cats in trash barrels and then blowing them to pieces with the big firecrackers they call “can-crushers,” that’s what he was doing… and every now and then, presumably when he needed a break in the old routine, he would nail a small dog to a tree.

In “79 he was sent away to Juniper Hill for raping and blinding a six-year-old boy. This time it was supposed to be for good, but when it comes to politics and state- run institutions-especially state-run mental institutions-I think it’s fair to say that nothing is forever. He was released from Juniper Hill in 1984, once more adjudged “cured'. Brandon feels-and so do I- that this second cure had more to do with cuts in the state’s mental health budget than with any miracle of modern science or psychiatry. At any rate, Joubert returned to Motton to live with his stepmother and her commonlaw, and the state forgot about him… except to issue him a driver’s license, that is. He took a road-test and got a perfectly legal one-in some ways I find this the most amazing fact of all-and at some point in late 1984 or early 1985, he started using it to tour the local cemeteries.

He was a busy boy. In the wintertime he had his crypts and mausoleums; in the fall and the spring he broke into seasonal camps and homes all over western Maine, taking anything that struck his fancy-'my things,” you know. He apparently had a great fondness for framed photographs. They found four trunks of them in the attic of the house on Kingston Road. Brandon says they are still counting, but that the total number will probably be over seven hundred.

It’s impossible to say to what extent” Daddy-Mummy” participated in what was going on before Joubert did away with them. It must have been a lot, because Joubert hadn’t made the slightest effort to hide what he was doing. As for the neighbors, their motto seems to be, “They paid their bills and kept to themselves. Wasn’t nothing to us.” It’s got a gruesome kind of perfection to it, wouldn’t you say? New England Gothic, by way of The Journal of Aberrant Psychiatry.

They found another, bigger, wicker box in the cellar. Brandon got Xeroxes of the police photos documenting this particular find, but he was hesitant about showing them to me at first. Well… that’s actually a little too mild. It was the one and only place where he gave into the temptation all men seem to feel you know the one I mean, to play John Wayne. “Come on, little lady, jest wait until we go by all them dead Injuns and keep lookin” off into the desert. I’ll tell you when we’re past.”

“I’m willing to accept that Joubert was probably in the house with you,” he said. “I’d have to be a goddam ostrich with my head stuck in the sand not to at least entertain the idea; everything fits. But answer me this: why are you going on with it, Jessie? What possible good can it do?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, Ruth, but I did know one thing: there was nothing I could do that would make things any worse than they already were. So I hung tough until Brandon realized the little lady wasn’t going to get back into the stagecoach until she had gotten her look at the dead Injuns. So I saw the pictures. The one I looked at the longest had a little sign saying state police exhibit 217 propped up in the corner. Looking at it was like looking at a videotape someone has somehow made of your worst nightmare. The photo showed a square wicker basket standing open so the photographer could shoot the contents, which happened to be heaps of bones with a wild collection of jewelry mixed in: some trumpery, some valuable, some stolen from summer homes and some doubtless stripped from the cold hands of corpses kept in small-town cold-storage.

I looked at that picture, so glaring and somehow bald, as police evidence photographs always are, and I was back in the lake house again-it happened right away, with no lag whatsoever, Not remembering, do you understand? I’m there, handcuffed and helpless, watching the shadows fly across his grinning face, hearing myself telling him that he is scaring me. And then he bends over to get the box, those feverish eyes never leaving my face, and I see him-I see it-reaching in with its twisted, misshapen hand, I see that hand starting to stir up the bones and jewels, and I hear the sounds they make, like dirty castanets.

And do you know what haunts me most of all? I thought it was my father, that was my Daddy, come back from the dead to do what he’d wanted to do before. “Go ahead,” I told him. “Go ahead, but promise you’ll unlock me and let me out afterward. Just promise me that.”

I think I would have said the same it I’d known who he really was, Ruth. Think? I know I would have said the same. Do you understand? I would have let him put his cock-the cock he stuck down the rotting throats of dead men-into me, if only he would have promised me I didn’t have to die the dog’s death of muscle-cramps and convulsions that was waiting for me. If only he would have promised to set me free.

Jessie stopped for a moment, breathing so hard and fast she was almost panting. She looked at the words on the screen-the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen-and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn’t it. What she didn’t want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn’t delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.

Not until they’re out of your hands, they don’t, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the delete button-stroked it, actually-and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn’t it?

“Yes,” she said in the same muttery voice she’d used so often during her hours of captivity-only at least now it wasn’t Goody or the mind-Ruth she was talking to; she had gotten back to herself without having to go all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to do it. That was maybe progress of a sort. “Yes, it’s the truth, all right.”

And nothing but, so help her God. She wouldn’t use the delete button on the truth, no matter how nasty some people including herself, as a matter of fact-might find that truth to be. She would let it stand. She might decide not to send the letter after all (didn’t know if it was even fair to send it, to burden a woman she hadn’t seen in years with this ration of pain and madness), but she would not delete it. Which meant it would be best to finish now, in a rush, before the last of her courage deserted her and the last of her strength ran out.

Jessie leaned forward and began typing again.

Brandon said, “There’s one thing you’re going to have to remember and accept, Jessie-there’s no empirical proof. Yes, I know your rings are gone, but about them you could have been right the first time-some light-fingered cop could have taken them.”

“What about Exhibit 217?” I asked. “The wicker box?”

He shrugged, and I had one of those sudden bursts of understanding the poets call epiphanies. He was holding onto the possibility that the wicker box had just been a coincidence. That wasn’t easy, but it was easier than having to accept all the rest-most of all the fact that a monster like Joubert could actually touch the life of someone he knew and liked. What I saw in Brandon Milheron’s face that day was perfectly simple: he was going to ignore a whole stack of circumstantial evidence and concentrate on the lack of empirical evidence. He was going to hold onto the idea that the whole thing was simply my imagination, seizing on the Joubert case to explain a particularly vivid hallucination I’d had while I was handcuffed to the bed.

And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one; that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong… but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back not just yours or Punkin’s or Nora Callighan’s but my mother’s and my sister’s and my brother’s and kids I chummed with in high school and people I met for ten minutes in doctors” off ices and God alone knows how many others. I think that most of them would be those scary UFO voices.

I couldn’t bear that, Ruth, because in the two months after my hard time in the house by the lake, I remembered a lot of things I had spent a lot of years repressing. I think the most important of those memories came to the surface between the first operation on my hand and the second, when I was “on medication” (this is the technical hospital term for “stoned out of your gourd”) almost all the time. The memory was this: in the two years or so between the day of the eclipse and the day of my brother Will’s birthday party-the one where he goosed me during the croquet game-I heard all those voices almost constantly. Maybe Will’s goosing me acted as some kind of rough, accidental therapy. I suppose it’s possible; don’t they say that our ancestors invented cooking after eating what forest fires left behind? Although if some serendipitous therapy took place that day, I have an idea that it didn’t come with the goose but when I hauled off and pounded Will one in the mouth for doing it… and at this point none of that matters. What matters is that, following that day on the deck, I spent two years sharing space in my head with a kind of whispering choir, dozens of voices that passed judgment on my every word and action. Some were kind and supportive, but most were the voices of people who were afraid, people who were confused, people who thought Jessie was a worthless little baggage who deserved every bad thing that happened to her and who would have to pay double for every good thing. For two years I heard those voices, Ruth, and when they stopped, I forgot them. Not a little at a time, but all at once.

How could a thing like that happen? I don’t know, and in a very real sense, I don’t care. I might if the change had made things worse, I suppose, but it didn’t-it made them immeasurably better. I spent the two years between the eclipse and the birthday party in a kind of fugue state, with my conscious mind shattered into a lot of squabbling fragments, and the real epiphany was this: if I let nice, kind Brandon Milheron have his way, I’d end up right back where I started headed down Nuthouse Lane by way of Schizophrenia Boulevard. And this time there’s no little brother around to administer crude shock therapy; this time I have to do it myself just as I had to get out of Gerald’s goddam handcuffs myself.

Brandon was watching me, trying to gauge the result of what he’d said. He must not have been able to, because he said it again, this time in a slightly different way. “You have to remember that, no matter how it looks, you could be wrong. And I think you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re never going to know, one way or the other, for sure.”

“No, I don’t.”