Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

It sat in the air like dead weight.

“Easy,” Sully said, finally. “Walk up behind him, say, ‘Hey George,’ and see if he jumps.”

Eddie folded his arms across his chest and tucked his chin down and tilted his head slightly to the side, irritation rising across his face.

“Our boy is currently being held in the heavily secured grounds of one of the most notorious mental hospitals in the United States. He is, further, in the most secured building on that godforsaken campus, on the lockdown ward of the hall for the criminally insane. How, exactly, do you plan to just walk up to him and say, ‘Hey, George?’”

Sully had seen this coming since he’d pulled out of the motel in Stroud the night before, blowing the rental up Interstate 44. It had come to him in its simple brilliance.

He nodded, more to himself than Eddie. “I got a guy for that,” he said.

SLY HASTINGS SAIDhe had two words for the idea, then, wait, no, it was three: “Oh, hell no.”

“You always telling me you go up to St. E’s all the time,” Sully said, “that your mom used to take you to see her brother, dear old Uncle Reggie-”

“You the one needs to be locked up in there.”

“-and you still go, look in on him and all, ’cause your momma made you promise.”

“You going to do a lot better in life, you don’t mention my momma to me,” Sly said. He fiddled with a toothpick. “The thing about that place, it’s not hard to get in , never has been. But it always used to fuck with me, being a kid, you know, getting back out . They close them gates and shit, who’s to say they won’t call you as crazy as the rest of ’em?”

They were sitting at the usual meet-up, Kenny’s BBQ Smokehouse on Eighth and Maryland Avenue on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from Sully’s house. They sat at a steel table with an umbrella in the shade. It was muggy, overcast, a few hours after he’d left the meeting at the paper. Felt like rain. Sully had been working on Sly with the idea since three in the afternoon, and now it was coming up on five.

“So I just don’t see the reason, if it’s so easy to walk in there, why it’s a big deal to bring one lousy visitor with you one time.”

“Why you want to talk to this man if he crazy?”

“He tried to kill me.”

“Maybe he’s not crazy.”

“Why is Reggie up in there, anyhow? Canan Hall, right? The baddest of the bad?”

“Why is Uncle Reggie in St. E’s,” Sly said, leaning back in the chair, pausing to watch a lady walk her dog past the restaurant, then cross Maryland Avenue, heading for the corner store. It was a weird little dog, all the hair poofed up around its neck, the rest of him looking like he’d been skinned. “Used to not see white people ’round here at all. Now you got girlfriend here, walking the dog. My grandfather, he got himself killed just after the riots in Red Summer, 1919, you know about that?”

Sully nodded.

“He, his name was Lester, Lester Hastings. Sold life insurance to the black folks. Did real well at it, had been to Howard. A race man. He knew Du Bois, I mean, for real. The Talented Tenth. Then he got hisself killed and we wasn’t the talented shit.”

“What happened?”

“Got pulled off a streetcar. Year after the riots. Crackers beat him like a dog in an alley. Left him there. He crawls out, some brother sees him, take him home, he dies two days later. Intestinal, no, internal bleeding. Septicemia. Blood poisoning. Not a good way to go. They had their own house, over in Anacostia. He died and Grandma went broke in ten minutes. Get this. He sold life insurance? But he didn’t have any hisself. Just, I mean, Jesus. House repossessed, the family went to boarding houses, back rooms, public housing.

“Grandma’s a drunk by then, you know? Worked at a saloon, gave it up for extra cash, to pay the rent, whatever. Reggie, he got born in ’35, not even after a year after my mother got born. Different fathers, so my mom always said. Who knows. Reggie wasn’t ever right in the head. Got sent up to St. E’s in 1981, I think it was. Drunk or high or crazy or all three all the time. Got through fifth, maybe sixth grade. Stabbed two niggers and shot another, was doing life on the installment plan at Lorton. So one day they send him up to St. E’s for evaluation.”

“And been there ever since,” Sully said.

“And been there ever since. But, look, the real story, you want it straight up, is that we couldn’t take him back, hear? He’s family, but you know what a pain in the ass crazy people are? Tearing shit up, yelling at three in the morning, eating the neighbor’s flowers, barking at they dog, getting a gun and shooting up the house, pistol-whipping other crazies in the parking lot of that whore hotel on New York Ave.? My mother, she had her own shit to deal with, me and a drug habit, both. She passed, there wasn’t nobody left for him.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

“How often you go see him?”

“Once a month. Sometimes twice.”

“For how long?”

“Since 1981, the year he went in.”

Sully sat back. That was nineteen years, nineteen times twelve visits a year, that was, what, a little short of two hundred and forty visits. Well, exempting the times Sly had been in lockup himself.

“I didn’t know this.”

Sly looked over at him. “Why would you?”

“I’m, I’m just saying. That’s a hard thing.”

“You, you, don’t know the half of it. I… it’ll… eat you alive, that place. I won’t lie to you. Uncle Reggie is my one tie to all that came before me, my family, my history, my people. Last of that generation. And he’s in there, that shithole. He ain’t ever coming out.”

He sat there, looking across the street. Sully had not seen Sly this way. It was a raw nerve, as deep as it was unexpected.

“I-”

“Shouldn’t come out,” Sly said, softly.

“Shouldn’t?”

“You don’t know the man. You don’t know the place.” He looked up at Sully. “There’s places worse than prison.”

Sully let it sit.

“That’ll work on you, brother,” Sly said, “the last of your people living that way, you let it sit in your head.”

“Does he know who you are? I mean, is he on this planet?”

“Depends. Half the time they got him on lockdown for trying to fuck somebody up in there. You know they don’t call them inmates, right? It’s patients . Motherfucker in a locked ward and ain’t ever leaving, he’s a patient. My black ass.”

“So, how you get a visit?”

“You family, they got days. You call ahead.”

“Do family members have to sign their name, state a relationship?”

“They know me. They don’t know you. You don’t look like family.”

“I’m the cousin you don’t talk about.”

“And why is it you think,” Sly said, “once I get you in, that I can fix it for you to get in a room with this ice-pick motherfucker?”

“You just said they know you.”

He let that hang in the air. Nobody who knew who Sly Hastings was and what he did and what he could do to them with a flick of his finger was going to get in his way, particularly not anyone whose best job in life was emptying piss pots at the crazy house.

Sly looked back across the street. “It ain’t for free. I mean, I got to take care of some people. You’n pay for this? I thought you guys couldn’t pay for news, like that.”

“We can’t.”

“Then you shit out of luck, brother.”

Sully took a deep breath.

“Noel,” he said, softly as a whisper in the dark.

A car pulled up to the traffic light and stopped. Birds flapped around in the tree above. Far above, a plane left ice trails across the sky. Sly’s face did not move, not an eyebrow. He just kept looking at the corner market across the way, the door clanging open, like he was waiting for the lady with the crazy-looking dog to emerge. “Noel who?” he said.