dropped him off at John Gaston ER on his way to the psych ward. By that time it was nearing shift’s end and the station house loomed before us, this sudden cliff of bright lights, as we pulled up in our little hiccoughing skiff with side mirror flapping like a tiny, useless wing. Randy told me he’d do the paperwork.
“No way in hell.”
“Hey-”
“Go home, Randy. Go home and hug your daughter, fix breakfast for your wife. Talk to them.”
He didn’t, of course. But at the time I wanted to think he might.
He called in the next day and again the one following. Captain pulled me over the third morning to see if I’d say anything about what was going on. He didn’t ask outright or push, just told me he hoped Randy’d be back on his feet soon, that he’d never missed a single day before.
That night, I called.
“Hey. Turner. Good to hear your voice,” Randy said. “Just I’m spending some time at home,“ he told me. “Taking your advice. Taking it easy.”
“You doing okay, then?”
“Better than that. Home-cooked meals every night. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy. Have the leftovers with biscuits next morning. Sorry to cut out on you like this, though. How’s the bad guys?”
“Still winning. Don’t stay out too long or we’ll never catch up.”
“I won’t, then. See you soon, partner.”
Two days later I went over there. It was twilight, color draining visibly from the world, leaves blurring on trees, shadows stepping in everywhere. Through a window set high in the front door I could see over the back of the couch to a coffee table piled with plates, glasses, hamburger wrappers and potato-chip bags. The TV was on, some local talent show for kids, picture rolling like clockwork every three seconds.
I rang the bell twice more, then opened the screen and banged on the door. Maybe try around back? Check with neighbors? I looked to the right, where a window curtain in the house next door fell closed, and looked back just as Randy’s face came up over the couch. Kilroy. Just this half a face and the fingers of two hands. When I waved, one of the hands lifted to answer. Randy glanced at it in surprise. I expected him to get up and come around the couch, but instead he clambered over the back and, hitting the floor, did a little off-balance shuffle and recovery, Dick Van Dyke on a bad day. Closer to the door he stumbled for real.
“Hey,” he said, “you want some coffee?” and without waiting for a reply went off opening drawers and closet doors and looking under chairs. “Got some here somewhere.”
I went out to the kitchen. Sure enough, there it was. In a Corningware pot with blue flowers on it. The pot was full, and it had been sitting there for some time. But Randy wasn’t drunk, as I first thought. It was worse.
When I walked by him, he’d followed me like a lost kitten. Now he went eye-to-eye with the little red light atop the handle.
“There it is!”
Took me over an hour to start getting any sense out of him. I poured Randy’s vintage coffee down the drain, made more, and we sat at the kitchen table knocking it back. He was like a child. Like a boat cut loose, drifting wherever wind and current took it. I don’t think he had any idea whether it was day or night, how long he’d been here like this, even that something might be wrong. Alone in the house with the world shut out, without landmark, limit or margin, he had drifted free.
Momentarily, intermittently, Randy came into focus and was able to tell me what happened.
Dorey had moved out a month ago. We’d been on second-shift rotation then, and he’d come home just after midnight to find the house dark, a single lamp burning in the living room on the long table inside the door where they always dropped mail. At the table’s far end was a stack of freshly ironed shirts. Beside that, Dorey had laid out bills in the order they would come due, with postdated checks attached. Her note was leaning against the lamp.
I love you but I won’t be back. I’ll send an address when I have one. You’ll be welcome to see Betty any time, of course.
Please take care of yourself.
It was signed, rather formally, “Doreen.” Randy took the note out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was broken-backed at the creases from much folding and unfolding. There were stains.
“I did all right at first,” he said. “I’d come home, eat something, have a beer, and be okay. Start thinking: I’m gonna get through this.”
“You should have told me.”
“Yeah, well… Lots of things I should have done.”
We talked a while longer, much of our dialogue making little sense, some of it making none, connectives torn away, grammarless sentences left dangling for the listener to punctuate or parse as he would. Eventually I left Randy at the kitchen table and went out to the phone in the hall. He was still in there talking to me.
I didn’t bother calling Sally Gene at home, but after a number of tries tagged her at the Baptist psych unit. When a nurse handed the phone over, Sally Gene took it and said, “I’m busy.”
“You always are. I’m looking for my favorite social worker.”
“Turner?”
“Your favorite driver. But this time, I’m the one who needs a ride-along.”
I told her about Randy.
“Is he oriented?” Sally Gene asked.
“Comes and goes. Rest of the time, it’s hard to tell.”
“He knows you?”
“Yes.”
“And once you started talking to him, he was able to lay out a sequence of events?”
“More or less.”
“Has he been eating?”
Yes again. I’d looked in the refrigerator and found stacks of TV dinners.
“Alcohol?”
“Not that I know. I’d be surprised. Never much of a drinker, two or three beers’d be his limit. And I think he only did that to fit in.”
“So what are we looking for here?”
“I don’t know. We’re on your ship, with this. You’re the skipper.”
“Little outside what I’m used to, what I do day to day. And it’s been a while since I trained. We want to get him some help, obviously. Observation, at the very least… Any sign he’s a danger to himself?”
“Not that I can see.”
“We don’t want to jam him up on the job, so we’ll be wanting to keep it off the public record.”
“If that’s possible, great. But the most important thing’s to help him dig out of this, whatever it takes.”
“Okay, listen. Let me make a few calls. I’ll get back to you. What’s the number there?”
I gave it to her and went out to the kitchen, where Randy, quiet at last, had fallen asleep with his head on the table. On the refrigerator, magnets shaped and painted as miniature vegetables held up sheaves of coupons and grocery receipts. A drawing his daughter Betty had done years ago hung under another magnet that first looked to be an angel or cherub but on closer inspection turned out to be a pig with wings.
“Hey, you’re here!” Randy said.
Within the hour, we were checking him in at Southside Clinic. Set up to care for the indigent, Sally Gene told me when she called back, by a young doctor from up east, an idealistic sort, but damned good from all she heard. She’d made inquiries of colleagues, pretending she needed the information for one of her clients. Southside was expecting us. She’d meet us there.
Chapter Fifteen
“The thing we can’t understand is who could possibly want to kill Carl. He was harmless, sweet. It would be like crushing a kitten. Nor do we have any idea what he was doing here, or how he got here in the first place, or
