Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“Listen,” he said, “all I did was I picked the broad up in Palm City. Okay? I was bumming to Montgomery, Alabama. I’m stationed in Key West and I got ten days. She has a car, this broad, and I changed my mind about going home. Okay?”

When he began to comprehend what they were telling him, the surliness and the defiance disappeared and he began to look younger, earnest and alarmed. “You mean she’s nuts? You telling me she’s a crazy? Honest to God, how would I know that? She doesn’t talk much. She laughs a lot. We’ve been drinking some. Mostly, I never seen anything like it, all she wants to do is scr... Geez, I’m sorry, sir. You being her husband, I shouldn’t say stuff like that. But how the hell would I know she was a nut?”

They told the boy what they wanted him to do. He agreed to get out of the way until they’d taken her away. He turned over the key. They said they would leave it unlocked, and he could come back for his gear after she was gone.

He went in with the doctor. She was asleep. A lamp was burning on the bedside table. Her face was puffy. She woke when he touched her shoulder. She looked at him without surprise and sat up and looked at the doctor. “Hello, Jimmy,” she said. “Hello, Dr. Sloan.”

“Better get dressed, honey. We’re taking you home.”

“Sure,” she said, showing neither gladness nor regret, only a childlike obedience. She dressed quickly, used the sailor’s comb on her hair, made up her mouth and came out to the car and they took her home.

That was back in the days when the doctors had thought it was psychological, when they were trying, with drugs and patience and depth analysis, to reach down into her darknesses and find the cause of this destructive behavior. Those were the days when they questioned him at great length, dredging up every detail of the sexual relationship between them, finding nothing of significance. Most of the time, under treatment, she was as mild and dutiful as a child, but when they would reach her with an awareness of what she had done, she would be torn by grief and guilt.

Then it was Sloan who had made the significant discovery about her, detecting the deterioration of intelligence and memory, then proceeding to other tests and pinpointing the parallel decay of manual dexterity. (She said her fingers felt thick.) They looked eagerly for the expected tumor and found none. Elmo helped get her into the special setup at Oklawaha.

“It would be God’s mercy to let her go,” Aunt Middy had said.

But she was gone. She was beyond torment. Dr. Freese at Oklawaha had explained the prognosis. “From her history we know there have been periods of progressive degeneration alternating with periods of stasis. She is in a period of stasis now, and if there are no other physical complications she might live a long time. The next period of degeneration, if we have one, could easily affect the motor centers of the brain, and death would follow, very much like the sort of death which occurs when the motor centers are gravely depressed through, say, the use of a heavy dosage of barbiturates.”

“Why was the first symptom the sex thing, Doctor? I didn’t know she was sick. I’m ashamed of what I did to her, the way I acted toward her when that started.”

Freese had turned back to the first pages in the file. “But the sexual incontinence was not the first symptom, Mr. Wing. It was the first to come forcibly to your attention. There was a parallel deterioration in her eating habits, her personal cleanliness, her attire, her speech. To attempt layman terms in this thing, you thought she was becoming crude and sluttish out of choice. Actually it was a deterioration of the ability to make choices. She was slowly retrogressing to an animal level of awareness. Animals, my dear fellow, have no table manners and no codes of morality. They sleep when they are sleepy, eat when they are hungry and copulate when there is an opportunity to do so. Many primitive peoples are on this level of existence too. Don’t blame yourself for your inability to detect a condition which baffled several competent professionals for a relatively long period of time. Actually, Sloan caught the scent when he began to realize how closely her condition resembled that which we can expect after a successful prefrontal lobotomy, if that procedure can ever logically be called a success. In her case, of course, it has progressed far beyond that aspect.”

When he arrived at the paper he was alarmed to see that Brian Haas was not in the newsroom. But they said he had gone down the hall for a moment. Borklund had left, saying he would be back about ten-thirty. Haas looked gray and his eyes were dull, but he had kept up with the duties assigned him. Jimmy Wing stepped into the situation and halved Brian’s work load, giving the scarred man a chance to breathe between tasks.

“It’s like housework,” Brian said dolefully. “You try to keep it cleaned up, but all the muddy kids keep galloping through.”

“And somebody keeps shaking the house.”

“Every man does the work of three, and Ben Killian seeks tax shelters. What about this grapefruit release?”

Jimmy scanned it. “Pure flack, but cute. Let’s run it.”

“This is a magazine? A throwaway sheet?”

“Don’t get the impression it’s a newspaper. They don’t have those any more. This is a write-cute outlet for wire services and syndicates, man. Fellow wants the news, he watches his TV and reads Time . If he wants think pieces, he buys Playboy .”

“Grapefruit is good for you,” Brian Haas said.

“Want to go eat?”

“I might not come back.”

At a little after ten most of Monday’s jigsaw was complete. The other departments were finished and gone. Pages one and two were the only ones still loose, with details on a TWA crash in Illinois still to come in, with fillers to piece it out if not enough came over the wire. And the page-one coverage of a meeting in Berlin could be readily truncated to insert a late box if anything came in worth it, wire or local. The press crew had come on, dour skeptical men who believed only in the rich full life of a tight union, despised the printed word and everybody who had anything to do with any other aspect of the business aside from feeding and operating the automatic presses.

Jimmy went to Vera’s and brought back a sandwich and coffee for Haas. Haas said, “I just called Nan. First chance I had. To tell her I think I’ll make it.”

“It’s a joke, isn’t it?” Jimmy said.

Brian looked at him, his expression suddenly cautious. “What does that mean?”

“It’s so jolly and boyish. Like in fraternities. Boy, was I ever hung! But I hit the biology exam for a C.”

“It seems like that to you?”

“Sometimes, Bri. Sometimes.”

“Then why try to help, you superior son of a bitch? So you can feel like an adult?”

“I almost never feel like an adult. I have my own little capsule dramas. Mine just aren’t quite as obvious.”

Haas picked up a pencil and put it down. He picked it up again and broke it, studied the pieces and dropped them into the wastebasket.

“You waited a long long time to give it to me, Jimmy.”

“What am I giving you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to know too much about it. With you, I had to make a guess about what was underneath. Everybody does, with you. There aren’t many clues, you know. I made some bad guesses, maybe. You better get away from me for a while.”

“More drama?”

“Not for me, Jimmy. I lost the drama way back. These days I adjust. To the job, to Nan, to you. That’s all. Now I got to make a new adjustment to you, and it’s easier if you stay away for a while. Just say I’m immune to drama, but not to loss.”