we were in the way.
So we moved on quickly, in the company of the lanky short-haired girl in untucked blouse and blue jeans who had let us in and was apparently a nurse. She had the expression of a disillusioned social worker: compassion slowly curdling to boredom and worse.
Everybody wore street clothes, except the doctors, and I only saw one of those, briefly. It was an attempt at creating an atmosphere of normalcy, I guess. The large, high-ceilinged room we were now in was another attempt at a normal, even casual environment: couches, coffee tables, easy chairs, lamps, all designed to make you feel right at home. The catch was the furniture seemed to have been picked up at a Salvation Army Store clearance sale, but what the hell. It was better than a snake pit.
Over to one side was a quadrangle of couches where patients lounged, some reading old magazines apparently imported from a doctor’s waiting room, one middle-aged lady writing a letter, a kid in his late teens or early twenties with a guitar in his lap that now and again he looked at but did not play, a gray-haired man doing a crossword puzzle, a woman about thirty with dishwater blond hair and a round face sitting watching the rest of them. Over by the windows were some cardtables, one of which was in use, three people playing Scrabble, a man and two women, all in their forties, the man and one woman playing silently, the other woman rattling on about her children.
The expressions on the faces in the room were mostly blank. Or full of happiness that was false, or sadness that was real. But mostly blank. Empty.
“This way,” the short-haired girl said, with the enthusiasm of a tour guide in a dog food factory.
She led us down a hallway, past a glassed-in office, past a small cafeteria, and into a dormitory area, doors on either side of the hall open and revealing rooms with six or eight beds each in them. We stopped at the last room on the right.
She squeezed out a smile, like that last bit of toothpaste, and said, “Frank’s alone today, Mr. Tree, except for Roger, of course.”
She left, and we went in. The overhead light in the room wasn’t on; it was like an overcast day in there. The beds were covered with dark gray blankets, the word PSYCHO in gray stencil letters across the pillowcases. There were desks wedged in between beds, and some other desks huddled together in the middle of the room, old, scarred wooden desks, but every patient had his own, and in a room that slept this many, that could be important.
Sitting at one of them, by a window, was a boy about eighteen, in a robe.
He was a younger version of Tree. The major difference, besides years, was dark, longish hair. And the nose was a little different, smaller, the mother’s nose, probably.
It was Frank Tree, Jr., and he turned as we came in, and smiled, and turned back to the window.
I didn’t see the big guy, at first, standing over in the far corner like a suit of armor, though looking back I don’t know how I could have missed him. Seven feet tall and two or three feet wide. You could’ve hung a billboard on him. He had on a gray tee-shirt that said IOWA on it and brown slacks and white tennis shoes a family of five could’ve kept their belongings in.
“Is that Roger?” I asked Tree. Quietly.
“That’s Roger,” Tree said.
And Roger was currently shuffling over toward us like the Frankenstein monster coming to shake his creator’s hand.
Which is exactly what he had in mind: shaking our hands. He shook Tree’s first, as he seemed to recognize him, and made a sound that didn’t resemble any word I know of. When he shook my hand, he made no sound, not even that of bones breaking. Truth is, while he had a hand like a catcher’s mitt, Roger’s grip was anything but powerful. Limp is the word.
But limp or not, he held on, longer than any sane handshake should, and I had to pull free, grinning back at him as I did, my grin every bit as mindless and shit-eating as his, not wanting to make an enemy of anybody seven feet tall, even if he did shake hands like a dress designer.
“Roger,” Tree said, very friendly, “I’d like to talk to Frank Jr. alone now, please.”
Roger thought about that a while. He narrowed his eyes, which were wide-set and an eerily beautiful shade of green, in a face with otherwise large, irregular features that seemed to have exploded into being, like a kernel of popped corn. Despite that, it was a young face. Roger couldn’t have been older than twenty.
And right now he was pointing a thick finger at me, and looking at Tree, puzzled, saying, “Ah low?”
Alone.
“This is a friend of mine,” Tree said. “I’d like him to stay and talk to Frank Jr. with me.”
And Roger nodded his head, his shaggy black hair flapping like a cheap wig, and shambled off.
“Retarded, of course,” Tree explained.
“I didn’t think this place was designed for that kind of thing.”
“He’s a special case. He gets violent.”
“Terrific.”
“They have him sedated, now. He’s gentle as a kitten.”
“Yeah, but does he know that?”
“There’s one person he’d never hurt, in any circumstance, and that’s Frank Jr. It’s pathetic, really, the way he’s taken to Frank.”
I’d almost forgotten about Frank Jr., who was still sitting silently at the desk, staring out the window.
“Roger is Frank Jr.’s protector,” Tree said, in a tone that mixed melancholy and irony. “Doesn’t let Frank out of his sight. Always stands nearby, watching him, guarding him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’ve asked Dr. Cash and he doesn’t understand it, either. Maybe it has something to do with Roger feeling sorry for Frank Jr.”
That didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t ask him to explain. I was getting uneasy, talking about Frank Jr. like somebody who wasn’t around. The fucker was a few feet away from us, sitting at a desk, listening to everything we said, even reacting a little, if I was reading my body language right.
Tree took a tentative step toward the boy.
“Son?” he said.
The boy was silent.
“Dr. Cash tells me you joined the exercise group this week. He says you’re hanging right in there. I can’t… can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
The boy turned and smiled, almost imperceptibly, and turned back toward the window.
“Looks like you’re putting on some weight. That starchy hospital food, I suppose. Good thing you’re taking up that exercise thing.”
The boy was silent.
“It’ll be getting warm soon. Maybe we could get out and play some tennis together. Dr. Cash says there’re some courts near here, and we could use one, if you like, when it warms up.”
And it went on like that, for fifteen minutes, Tree struggling painfully to maintain the one-sided, small-talk conversation, while his son sat staring, reacting occasionally, usually with that small smile, but nothing more.
“Well,” Tree said, finally, with reluctance, in relief, “gotta go now. See you next Monday. I… I love you, son.”
The boy turned and nodded and turned away. Roger waved to us in the hall as we left. He was on his way back to Frank Jr.’s side.
I didn’t ask Tree anything till we were out of there, iron doors shut behind us, in the cool outer corridor of the hospital.
“He never says anything?” I asked. “He just sits there and looks out the window and smiles now and then?”
Tree’s eyes were glazed. “You don’t know how much those smiles mean to me. It’s taken him four months to get that far.”
Half an hour later, in a bar in downtown Iowa City, Tree told me the story.
