Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

“So all that stuff that was leaked during NeverTom’s run for the select board, about how Junior’ll do anything to pave his brother’s political future, is bullshit?”

“I don’t know,” Ted answered. “But I don’t think there’s any love lost between them.”

“How does NeverTom treat him?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, but Tom could be pretty awful when they were young. Word was he tortured pets, pulled cruel jokes on people, and once ‘accidentally’ broke the arm of a rival football player so he could play first string. Pretty sociopathic behavior, all in all. I wouldn’t guess he’s a great guy to live with.”

Ted smiled at my expression. “You seem disappointed.”

I stood up in the small room and ran my fingers through my hair. “I am. We’ve been getting nowhere trying to nail this on NeverTom. I was hoping you could give me something on Junior.”

Ted gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry. From everything I know about them, Junior’s just your classic repressed nerd.”

Beverly Hillstrom was uncharacteristically jubilant. “Congratulations, Lieutenant, your hunch was correct. We located an injection site at the base of Milo Douglas’s skull, just above the hairline. He was definitely exposed to rabies artificially. You can rule his death a homicide.”

“Thanks, Doctor. I appreciate all the hard work.”

But she sensed the flatness in my voice. “Is this not good news?”

“It is. I’m sorry. I’m just not sure how to use it anymore. Things have been unraveling a bit down here. We’re trying to regroup.”

She tried to fill the awkward pause that followed. “I hope it’s not a major setback.”

Painfully aware of the effort she’d made, I tried to lighten up a bit. “It’s not. We’ll get this nailed down, and what you just gave me will be a big help. I’ll keep you updated.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and checked my watch for the fourth time.

“Don’t tell me,” Gail smiled at me. “He’s still late.”

I gave her a sour stare. “Typical doctor-and he even chose the time.”

She returned to the law book she’d brought along, and I began another tour of the lobby’s paintings and citations. We were waiting at the Skyview Nursing Home for Bernie’s psychiatrist, Dr. Andrews, who’d finally called to schedule “our little experiment,” as he phrased it.

With a sudden bang of the front door, a tall young man, athletic and wild-haired, came striding in from the night. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and a sheaf of loose papers in the other. A wide smile split his face at the sight of us, defusing my irritation.

He marched by without pause, talking as he went. “I’m so sorry-had somebody on a bender, couldn’t pull out before she landed. Let’s duck into one of these offices here. I want to bring you up to snuff on a little of Bernie’s history.”

Gail and I exchanged glances, both of us struck by his congenial energy, and fell into step behind him. He stopped at a door about halfway down the hall, fumbled in his pocket for a key, and ushered us into an office whose blandness suggested a large number of short-term tenants.

There were three armchairs grouped around a low coffee table, across the room from a more formal arrangement of a desk and three ladder-backs. Andrews chose the former, dumping his paperwork on the coffee table.

“Sit, sit,” he urged and took his own advice, not bothering to remove his coat. “What did you do to your head?”

I unconsciously fingered the bandage. “Just a cut.”

He absorbed that with a nod, enigmatically adding, “Might come in handy tonight. Okay-I’ll make this fast so I won’t waste any more of our time. I visited Bernie this afternoon, just to make a quick appraisal, and found that the recent snowfall has set him back a little, which could be to our advantage. Fresh snow reminds him of the war and therefore throws him into his soldier mode, as I call it, but since that’s the mode in which he chooses to reflect on Mrs. Sawyer’s death, that may be good news.” He looked intensely at Gail, his smile broadening. “You’re Gail Zigman? Thank you for all the time you’ve spent with him. It’s had a great impact. He keeps talking about the cat. You have it with you?”

“Harry’s got it upstairs. Seemed easier to let him keep her.”

“Right. Well, the ‘lady with the cat’ is a big hit. He can’t place you in time-keeps thinking you’re either his daughter or wife or an old girlfriend-but I like the fact that he’s taken a current image-you-and placed it back in the historical time frame he’s comfortable with. It shows he might’ve done the same thing with Mrs. Sawyer’s murder.”

He picked up the papers and settled them in his lap. “Right. Either of you know much about the Battle of the Bulge?”

“Hitler’s last-ditch effort to stall the Allied invasion of Germany in December, 1944,” I answered, feeling like I was back in school.

“Right-that’s the big picture. From Bernie’s perspective, it was an eighty-mile-wide patch of dense forestland, flat up against the German border, where green troops were supposed to get a gentle introduction to being on the front. They called it the ‘Phantom Front,’ because everyone knew the Germans were basically whipped, and that even if they did put up a fight, it wouldn’t be in a thick forest with a few narrow roads.”

“Bernie was a seventeen-year-old PFC, attached to the Hundred-and-Sixth Division. He’d been in place five days, had only fired his rifle on the range, and was part of a combat group that was way under-strength. When the Germans attacked, they did so with a massive one-hour artillery barrage-complete with batteries of searchlights to both blind and light up the American positions. For the GIs, the result was instant bedlam-not only because of the incredible noise, but because the shells knocked out many of the telephone cables they depended on for communications. Before they knew what was going on-or could figure out if this was a ‘spoiling attack’ versus an all-out counteroffensive-German tanks and troops were suddenly mixed in with their own. Inexperienced American officers found themselves giving orders to German soldiers and getting shot at for their trouble. Infantrymen ran for cover behind tanks from the wrong side.”

“Bernie was a part of all this.”

“Unfortunately for his mental health,” Andrews continued, “he didn’t get captured along with most of his buddies. Somehow, he slipped through and ended up as part of the retreat, without a unit, without leadership-lost, confused, and pardon my French, scared shitless. This was when the roots of his PTSD took hold.

“Needless to say, no one knows the exact details of his life for the next two weeks. There were more American casualties in that battle than in any other we’ve been in before or since, including both sides at Gettysburg. So Bernie was swept along like a snowball in an avalanche-cold, abandoned, terrified, not knowing who to trust, not knowing the local language or geography. The weather was terrible-freezing and snowing hard. Artillery or tank shells exploded in villages and among the trees making shrapnel out of bricks and wood. Frozen body parts were found for weeks afterward, tossed about like confetti. Some soldiers used stiff enemy corpses as benches when they sat down to eat.

“In the end, after the Americans had gained the upper hand and were pushing the German bulge back to the border, they started finding people like Bernie-wide-eyed, shell-shocked ghosts of their former selves, walking around like robots. They called them ‘ragmen,’ which may be the best description I’ve ever heard. Many were brought back to some form of mental stability, others were less lucky. Bernie was a mixture of both-long-term hospitalization, a few years of supposed normalcy, during which he hid his symptoms in booze, and a final surrender to his condition, where he is to this day. We have a bunch of fancy-sounding terms for what may or may not be ailing him, from PTSD to Korsakoff’s to alcohol-induced dementia-and they may all be right-but the final result is as unique as his own personality.”