“What do you think?” Teddy said. Through the archways he could see a man by the far window, hanging up on the bars, some guards dragging in a hose. His eyes were beginning to adjust to what there was of the pewter light in the main corridor, but the cells remained black.
“There has to be a set of files in here somewhere,” Chuck said. “If only for basic medical and reference purposes. You look for Laeddis, I look for files?”
“Where do you figure those files are?”
Chuck looked back at the door. “By the sounds of it, it gets less dangerous the higher you go in here. I figure their admin’ has gotta be up.”
“Okay. Where and when do we meet?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
The guards had gotten the hose working and fired a blast, blew the guy off the bars, pushed him across the floor.
Some men clapped in their cells, others moaned, moans so deep and abandoned they could have come from a battlefield.
“Fifteen sounds right. Meet back in that big hall?”
“Sure.”
They shook hands and Chuck’s was damp, his upper lip slick.
“You watch your ass, Teddy.”
A patient banged through the door behind them and ran past them into the ward. His feet were bare and grimy and he ran like he was training for a prize-fight—fluid strides working in tandem with shadow-boxing arms.
“See what I can do.” Teddy gave Chuck a smile.
“All right, then.”
“All right.”
Chuck walked to the door. He paused to look back. Teddy nodded.
Chuck opened the door as two orderlies came through from the stairs. Chuck turned the corner and disappeared, and one of the orderlies said to Teddy, “You see the Great White Hope come through here?”
Teddy looked back through the archway, saw the patient dancing in place on his heels, punching the air with combinations.
Teddy pointed and the three of them fell into step.
“He was a boxer?” Teddy said.
The guy on his left, a tall, older black guy, said, “Oh, you come up from the beach, huh? The vacation wards. Uh-huh. Yeah, well, Willy there, he think he training for a bout at Madison Square with Joe Louis. Thing is, he ain’t half bad.”
They were nearing the guy, and Teddy watched his fists shred the air.
“It’s going to take more than three of us.”
The older orderly chuckled. “Won’t take but one. I’m his manager. You didn’t know?” He called out, “Yo, Willy. Gotta get you a massage, my man. Ain’t but an hour till the fight.”
“Don’t want no massage.” Willy started tapping the air with quick jabs.
“Can’t have my meal ticket cramping up on me,” the orderly said. “Hear?”
“Only cramped-up that time I fought Jersey Joe.”
“And look how that turned out.”
Willy’s arms snapped to his sides. “You got a point.”
“Training room, right over here.” The orderly swept his arm out to the left with a flourish.
“Just don’t touch me. I don’t like to be touched before a fight. You know that.”
“Oh, I know, killer.” He opened up the cell. “Come on now.”
Willy walked toward the cell. “You can really hear ’em, you know? The crowd.”
“SRO, my man. SRO.”
Teddy and the other orderly kept walking, the orderly holding out a brown hand. “I’m Al.”
Teddy shook the hand. “Teddy, Al. Nice to meet you.”
“Why you all got up for the outside, Teddy?”
Teddy looked at his slicker. “Roof detail. Saw a patient on the stairs, though, chased him in here. Figured you guys could use an extra hand.”
A wad of feces hit the floor by Teddy’s foot and someone cackled from the dark of a cell and Teddy kept his eyes straight ahead and didn’t break stride.
Al said, “You want to stay as close to the middle as possible. Even so, you get hit with just about everything ’least once a week. You see your man?”
Teddy shook his head. “No, I—”
“Aww, shit,” Al said.
“What?”
“I see mine.”
He was coming right at them, soaking wet, and Teddy saw the guards dropping the hose and giving chase. A small guy with red hair, a face like a swarm of bees, covered in blackheads, red eyes that matched his hair. He broke right at the last second, hitting a hole only he saw as Al’s arms swept over his head and the little guy slid on his knees, rolled, and then scrambled up.
Al broke into a run after him and then the guards rushed past Teddy, batons held over their heads, as wet as the man they chased.
Teddy had started to step into the chase, if from nothing else but instinct, when he heard the whisper:
“Laeddis.”
He stood in the center of the room, waiting to hear it again. Nothing. The collective moaning, momentarily stopped by the pursuit of the little redhead, began to well up again, starting as a buzz amid the stray rattlings of bedpans.
Teddy thought about those yellow pills again. If Cawley suspected,
“Laed. Dis.”
He turned and faced the three cells to his right. All dark. Teddy waited, knowing the speaker could see him, wondering if it could be Laeddis himself.
“You were supposed to save me.”
It came from either the one in the center or the one to the left of it. Not Laeddis’s voice. Definitely not. But one that seemed familiar just the same.
Teddy approached the bars in the center. He fished in his pockets. He found a box of matches, pulled it out. He struck the match against the flint strip and it flared and he saw a small sink and a man with sunken ribs kneeling on the bed, writing on the wall. He looked back over his shoulder at Teddy. Not Laeddis. Not anyone he knew.
“Do you mind? I prefer to work in the dark. Thank you oh so much.”
Teddy backed away from the bars, turning to his left and noticing that the entire left wall of the man’s cell was covered in script, not an inch to spare, thousands of cramped, precise lines of it, the words so small they were unreadable unless you pressed your eyes to the wall.
He crossed to the next cell and the match went out and the voice, close now, said, “You failed me.”
Teddy’s hand shook as he struck the next match and the wood snapped and broke away against the flint strip.
“You told me I’d be free of this place. You promised.”
Teddy struck another match and it flew off into the cell, unlit.
“You lied.”
The third match left the flint with a sizzle and the flame flared high over his finger and he held it to the bars and stared in. The man sitting on the bed in the left corner had his head down, his face pressed between his knees, his arms wrapped around his calves. He was bald up the middle, salt-and-pepper on the sides. He was naked except for a pair of white boxer shorts. His bones shook against his flesh.
Teddy licked his lips and the roof of his mouth. He stared over the match and said, “Hello?”
“They took me back. They say I’m theirs.”
