Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!” the second orderly was bellowing, and George was bellowing back at him, spewing obscenities and slurs and now the first orderly was yelling down at Sully, into his face, “What did you do? What did you do to him?”

Hands were on him, pulling him upright. He shuffled his feet, slipped, went down, was pulled back up. “I didn’t do shit,” he shouted above the din, “I didn’t do shit! I didn’t do shit!”

They were dragging him out of the room, his feet sliding. He could see Sly and Uncle Reggie and the rest of them down the hall, staring. Now George, looking straight at him from the back of his cell, bellowing over the shoulders of the orderly, “Ice picks! Ice picks! Freeman! Ice picks!!”

HE PLAYED THEtape, and replayed it, and replayed it, leaning forward from the backseat in the car so that Sly and Lionel could hear. They were driving out of the place, the gate swinging up, and they were back in the land of the relatively sane, heading down the hill. The sun was too bright. They were merging into midday traffic. Sully’s head was killing him.

“Shit,” said Lionel. Which, for him, constituted a soliloquy.

Sly didn’t even turn around. “I told you. Crazy people. What did I tell you about crazy people.”

“The sound and the fury,” Sully muttered, rewinding the tape yet again, like the man was going to say something different this time.

“Sound of bullshit, you mean.”

“Look, what does he say there? Everybody’s yelling like the place is on fire. ‘Free ice picks’? ‘Free, man, ice picks’? ‘Freeman’s ice picks’? I can’t hear shit. You roll that window up?”

Sly gave a half glare back over the seat, leaned forward to roll his window up and then turned up the AC.

“Can’t hear with that thing blowing, either.”

This time, the full glare, Sly turning in the seat to look back at him, leaving the AC just where it was. “I ain’t one to tell a man how to run his business? But you know how close you came to getting busted up in there? Setting off shit like that?”

“Thought you said you had contacts,” Sully said, still holding the recorder to his ear, squinting, like narrowing his eyes would improve his hearing, “in the plural.”

“Didn’t say I ran the place. Staff. I got contacts on staff, the help. Not with the shrinks and shit. There’s what you call protocols, that ward there in particular. That fucker is celebrity of the week. Jamal had to get back to the booth to keep them from hitting the button to call the medicals. They were halfway to getting Lantigua down there.”

“Who’s Lantigua.”

“The man what runs the place. Him, you do not fuck with. They got protocols, I’m telling you. Anything funky with psycho boy there, anything with any of them in Canan, they get Lantigua on a rope.”

“You didn’t mention that.”

“Didn’t think I needed to.”

The tape. Stop, rewind, pause, play. Again, pressing the tiny speaker to his ear. “Freeman? I think he said Freeman.”

“Lantigua’d come down there, you’d been in deep shit.”

“Me? What about you?”

“You who, Kemo Sabe? I’m a devoted nephew, visiting Unc. You, you’re-”

“The unethical hack who snuck in the place.”

“Exactly.”

Sully sat back in the seat. His shirt was half untucked, his jacket rumpled. He was lucky it didn’t get torn in that clusterfuck. Six, seven orderlies by the end, shoving him against the wall, Jamal yelling at Sly to get him out get him out get him out, the fuck was this even about.

Lionel took them down 295, across the river, bringing them the back way onto Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Capitol lay up ahead, the neighborhood around them sagging two- and three-story town houses, gloomy child-care centers, check-cashing joints, a thrift store. They were, he realized dully, taking him back to his house. Josh would be there. Or would he? Didn’t he say they had some sort of field trip? National Cathedral?

But home, no, he didn’t want to be there. The office, no, you got to be kidding, sit in there and look at people looking at him. Alexis? And tell her what, he’d just snuck into the city’s hellhole of an insane asylum with a drug dealer and killer? No, no, no. Big boys held their water.

Restless, he punched numbers into the phone, the paper’s Research desk. Susan, picking it up, sounding jumpy when he said hey. She said she was all over the family research, okay, and he jumped in, knowing he was just going to make it worse.

“Look, I hear you. I hear you. Do me a solid, though, one more? You in front of your computer? Great, that’s great. Okay, look up the name Freeman, like free man, and ice picks. You get any hits on that?” She went on for a minute until he said, “Yes, I mean, for real.”

He waited, looking out at the city, until she picked the phone back up and said, “Jesus, Sully, what is wrong with you?”

“Lots. What do you mean?”

“The pictures.”

He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. He could hear the keyboard clacking somewhere in the background, pictured her at her desk, the far back right of the newsroom, lost in a corner, a shot glass with Hershey’s kisses in them, pictures of her dog, Frank.

Finally, he said, “What pictures we talking about here?”

“I don’t even… okay, I can’t look at this.”

“Susan, hey? I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Lobotomies. Walter Jackson Freeman II, M.D., pioneer of.”

“I don’t get this.”

Clicking on the keyboard, silence. “He was the research director at St. E’s.”

Sully rocked forward in his backseat, leaning forward from the hips, his forearms coming down on his knees, forehead nearly hitting the back of Lionel’s bucket seat. “You’re saying some lobotomy lunatic worked in Washington ?”

“Yeah,” she said, still reading. “Look at this. His papers are at George Washington University, just up the street.”

“YOU WANT TOsee the pictures?”

He was halfway sitting down in the chair and Jerry, the grad student manning the special collections library in the G.W. archives, was setting out the brown boxes of Walter J. Freeman’s catalogued papers on a table in front of him.

He’d had to convince Lionel and Sly to bring him across town, Sly bitching the whole way that if he had wanted to get over to Foggy Bottom, he shoulda said so. They could have taken 395 around to Maine Avenue, come up past the monuments, by the Watergate, like that. But now, Sully being disorganized as shit, now they were slogging through town, red light, red light, red light, and Lionel going hey, where exactly is the G.W. Library.

“Just, like, Twenty-first or Twenty-second, I’ll find it from there.”

“Twenty-first or Twenty-second and what ?” Lionel said

“I don’t know. H, I, somewhere. Just go up Pennsylvania.”

“Did you see a taxi sign on the top of my car?” Sly said.

“You don’t want me to cut down Constitution?” Lionel said.

Like that, the whole way.

Then, it turned out, the Freeman stuff wasn’t in the library. It was in the medical archives, which was upstairs, which you needed a pass for, which he had to stand in line to get. His headache was a good solid throb by then. Once upstairs, an August afternoon, school not started, he was the only customer in the shoe-box-sized reception area.

Now he sat at his small wooden table, like he was back in fourth grade. The instructions for handling archival material and the rate sheet for copies were at his right. His notebook on the left. Good God. He just needed a lunch box and a cubby.