Percival Everett: Damned If I Do

Harry took the rook with his king.

“I didn’t see that,” Harold said. “He’s a pig, all right, that guy, and all these little sluts he porks are his piglets.” Harold chuckled. “His piglets. The way he grunts. He grunts and they squeal.” He made a barrage of pig noises. “It’s your move. But I didn’t wander off frequently like they claimed. I slept in the street right in front of their house.”

“I’m going to break out of here,” Harry said.

“Sure you are. Sure you are. It’s your move. Besides, what would you do out there? Work? You fucked up and now you belong in here with me, God. God will take care of you. I’ll take care of you and send my daughter to stinking, sweaty hell where she can cook burgers for her friends. And another thing, if you were to ‘break out,’ as you put it, where would you live? You never did have any family or so you tell me. Where would you go? The only place you know is here.”

“I’m not crazy.”

Harold looked at him. “I know that, but it doesn’t matter. I’m crazy and I can see plain as day that Gillis over there is crazy and I can see that Greenfeld over there is crazy and I can even see that our orderly stud with the short and crooked pecker is nuts, but you’re not crazy.”

Harry couldn’t tell if Harold was joking.

“I’m a fucking expert on crazy. I know how it happens and I know what it looks like. Your fucking problem is that you’re not crazy. Your fucking problem is that you’re too fucking sane.” Harold’s cheek was beginning to twitch the way it did whenever he got excited, and soon he would be spitting on the floor. “You’re all right and that’s why you don’t belong out there. If you go out there, you will be crazy. Look at me,” he paused to let Harry find his eyes, “I know.”

Harry didn’t play basketball out in the yard with the others, it being no fun, crazy people not being very good at games, certainly never understanding or even caring about the rules. With basketball they comprehended that the ball was to go through the hole, but when Harry put the ball through the hole they all got mad and asked why he was in the hospital anyway since he wasn’t crazy. So he avoided the basketball court and walked around to the side of the building where the gardeners had planted bearded irises along the walk, but he stayed well within the path because beyond the irises, between the azaleas and the wall of the building, a number of the homosexual inmates sometimes gave each other blow jobs.

Harry walked to the low brick wall above which stood high iron bars like the ones bolted to the windows. He looked at the row of houses across the street, tattered two-story houses that shared walls, only twice in the block were the buildings separated by driveways. A couple of teenagers who were sitting on a stoop pointed his way and shared a laugh and on the street, a couple of houses down, Harry thought he saw a drug transaction. A skinny woman in a crocheted skirt gave money to a man in a mid-seventies Chevy sedan with a vinyl top. Harry would find the other side of this barrier, but he was, of course, afraid and, of course, quite certain that what he would find on the other side would be just room enough to run to the next barrier, and there would be more crazy faces to mock and confuse him. He didn’t know how he knew the things he knew, didn’t know how it was he recognized place names in the newspaper or how it was he knew the car just pulling away from the skinny woman was a Chevy or how he knew that the skinny woman would suck a cock for ten dollars. He didn’t know how he knew that the welds on the wrought-iron bars were sloppy, though more than sufficient to keep him from pushing his way to freedom. A garbage truck rolled by, consigning to the air a momentary stench, and when it was gone so were the teenagers on the stoop and so was the skinny woman and her day’s fix, leaving the street empty, cold, lonesome, and desolate, and Harry knew somehow that was the place for him.

Harry was not asleep, a welcome pause from the dreams. He was lying on his bed, smelling the bleach in the sheets, knowing that the old man beside him had wet himself again, knowing because of the way he was not snoring, but whimpering and whispering his dead wife’s name. The orderly was making his way down the hall with the heavy nurse with red hair who was the only woman he fucked who truly seemed to like his brutish humping. Her nails twirled the hair on his back and near the end she spat out the word fuck over and over, not as instruction but as exclamation, and once when she was barking out the word, Harry saw her glancing about the ward, even pausing to offer him a brief smile as she caught him looking. Tonight they fumbled in through the darkness the way they always did, the orderly’s sneakers squeaking on the linoleum tiles, their giggling coated with the timbre of a few drinks from the bottle of Jim Beam that everyone knew the orderly kept in his locker. Once, the vet who sat in the corner was caught sneaking a nip from the stash and the orderly punched and kicked him until he bled from his ear. The orderly fell on top of the nurse on the empty bed between Harry and the vet, the frame squeaking as the whole of it scooted across the floor an inch or two, the nurse letting escape a loud and suddenly swallowed laugh. Harry watched them work off their clothes, panting and grunting, the smell of the alcohol wafting over to him, his eyes opened only to slits so that they would not see him watching; not that he was concerned with their discovering him, but he wanted them to assume that he was asleep. Their clothes off, the orderly was on top of the nurse, his fat ass rising and falling and she was staring at the ceiling like she was counting the cracks, but moaning all the while. The orderly’s face was buried in her neck and hair on the side away from Harry and so he didn’t see when Harry stood up, didn’t see when Harry reached under his bed and came back with the unopened can of soda pop that he had gotten from the canteen earlier that day, didn’t see when Harry raised it high over his head, but the nurse saw, her eyes growing wide, her mouth opening without a sound, and perhaps because she stopped moving or stopped breathing, the orderly began to come up. Harry brought the can down onto the back of the orderly’s head with the force of a baseball pitch, striking just below the bald spot, the dull thump of the blow not sounding real, the repercussion of it shooting through his arm to his chest, and the target fell limp over the woman, still motionless, still voiceless. Harry waited for the orderly to move, poised to strike again, but the orderly didn’t move and so Harry put down the can on his bed, picked up the man’s trousers from the floor, and stepped into them, pulling the cloth belt tight as the waistband gathered around his middle. He put his fingers to his pursed lips, signaling the nurse to be quiet, and she nodded. He then pulled the orderly’s smock over his head and felt for the ring of keys in the pant pockets.

Harry stepped down the hall away from the ward and to the first door and, after trying a couple of keys, had it open and locked behind him. To his surprise, his heart was not racing and this fact alone was exhilarating. He was in the familiar corridor of the doctors’ offices, where every Tueday and Thursday for the last too-many-to-remember years he had met one shrink and then another, a string whose faces and names had all run together, all offering up the same assessment that Harry was fairly bright, possessing an overly active ability for detecting irony, which Harry found ironic, and was without doubt paranoid and certainly schizophrenic.

There was one guard at the door, a fat man whom Harry had never before seen, a black man with his hair done in braids, sitting behind the desk that he made appear small. He was drinking diet soda from a two-liter bottle and then holding the plastic vessel in his lap while he watched the little television that sat on the corner of the desk. Every several seconds he belched out a high-pitched laugh and then sucked down more soda pop. Harry waited, crouched down behind a broad-leafed plant about thirty feet down the hall. The lights were dimmed and Harry managed to make it to the door of the public lavatory another fifteen feet closer to the exit doors without being detected. He removed the key he had used to unlock the ward door, then threw it as far as he could down the hall away from the guard’s station. Behind the closed door of the restroom, Harry could hear the fat man groan to his feet, then the heavy falls of his boots toward him and past. The man was well down the corridor when Harry opened the door and peeked, and he took that time to move quickly to the front door.