Draw the Dark (7 page)

“Who’s that?” I asked Peggy.

“The doc on call. She switches off with two other docs in town. She usually makes her rounds at the end of the day when she’s done at her office or first thing in the morning. We call her at night if we need to.”

“Do you need to a lot?”

“More than we’d like to sometimes. We can run a code and take care of someone in an emergency situation, get them stabilized, but if they get really, really complicated—like they need surgery or something—we transport them to Ashburg Memorial. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. Most times, they do. We’re set up as a hospice too.”

“You mean, people die here?”

The look Peggy threw me practically screamed
DUH
. “Where else? Believe it or not, it’s better to die here than a hospital. When I go, I want to go at home in my own bed. If I can’t do that, then I’d want a place where I can look outside and see water and trees, have my things in my room. There are worse ways to go.”

The unit was large, arranged in a big square around the nurses’ station, and held about a hundred guests in need of more intensive care, Peggy said. It was also much quieter, a place where you instinctively lowered your voice, though I could hear the occasional beep-beep-beep of machines coming from some of the rooms. A lot of the residents were in hospital gowns and lay in aluminum-railed hospital beds. The smell was really different: the antiseptic odor again, but now I caught the scent of age, the stink of diapers. The people here weren’t necessarily older than the seniors next door, but they really were frailer, all spindly arms with wattles of sagging skin. A lot of the seniors were tied up in their wheelchairs or bedside chairs with a kind of sling Peggy called a posey. A few sat in the common area where a TV chattered to itself in one corner. As we passed through on our way to the kitchen, some of the old people looked over. Their faces were blank and nearly featureless, like when I molded something out of clay that hadn’t worked and so I’d taken a loop tool and skimmed off all the detail in large curls until the clay was smooth again.

Peggy retrieved a big metal, cafeteria-style gurney loaded with covered trays. “Okay, so here’s the drill. Some people we have to feed. Other folks can feed themselves, but you have to check every couple of minutes or else you’ll be cleaning peas off their laps or the floor. Also, you’ve got to be sure to match the tray with the right person, you got that? Let’s take care of the people who don’t need to be fed first; then I’ll coach you through feeding a few of them. Oh, and be sure to say everyone’s name, and then tell them what’s on the tray to orient them.”

A half hour went by in a blur of covered trays, napkins tucked under chins, cut-up meat loaf, bowls of quivering Jell-O and mushy peas, and other bowls of colored glop that were probably pureed vegetables and looked like baby food. Still, I was getting into it a little, not so freaked, because the work wasn’t hard. You just had to get over being creeped out, and then it was easy. Well, easier.

So everything was going okay. Yeah, Mrs. Krauss was a jerk, but Peggy was okay. Lucy had been kind of sweet. I was feeling kind of good, actually—so that alone should’ve tipped me off that things were about to go really, really bad.

So I eased down to the door. To the left was a name tag, written with black Magic Marker, slotted into a metal holder:
WITEK
. To the right, I saw a strange brass tube, inlaid with colored glass and crystal, stuck at a weird angle to the right doorjamb.

Inside was a single hospital bed and there was this brittlelooking old guy propped up on pillows. His arms were sticks, and his face was so sunken his cheeks looked like axe blades about to cut through his skin. There was something wrong with his face. The whole right side drooped, like molten candle wax, like he was Mr. Eisenmann’s mirror image only not scarred and definitely not a gargoyle.

The doctor was talking to the old man. I couldn’t hear what she said, but her voice was kind, like what I imagine a mom might be like with her kid. She was leaning over the old guy, flicking a penlight back and forth across his eyes. Her back was to the door, so she didn’t see me.

But I sure saw those paintings.

There were five: all in frames and most were oils, I thought. The canvases were relatively small, maybe twenty-four- and thirty-inch squares. I was too far away to make out any of the details, but it didn’t matter—because I felt this queer little
thrum
in my head. Not quite a sound but definitely physical and

(?)

then that weird floaty feeling caught hold and then I was falling, the way I had right before those nightmares and in the barn and

So instead, I squirt to the front of the crowd of people lining Main Street to the foundry’s gates. It is still blindingly hot, so bright that everything looks bleached and bone white. Even though the prisoners have been here for a few weeks, people are still curious. Papa’s forbidden me to come. He says that these men are our enemies and we have better things to do than gawk, but I don’t understand that because Papa spends a lot of time with them. In fact, Papa told us at supper that Mr. Eisenmann has taken him out of the ceramics workshop for the time being. Papa’s only job now is to make drawings of the prisoners because that’s what Mr. Eisenmann wants. Mr. Eisenmann says that this is history in the making, and he wants Papa to record everything—and Mr. Eisenmann himself, of course, because he’s the town’s history too.

I spy Marta across the street, close to the gates. Of course, she’s there, making eyes at the prisoners, who make eyes back. She’s with some of her girlfriends, and all of them are wearing nicer clothes than normal. Marta stands out, of course, with her gypsy looks and brown skin and red hair band. Papa doesn’t want her here either, but she comes every day so she can watch when the prisoners get back from the fields. Mama and Marta have quarreled, their hands flashing, because Mama and Papa believe that Marta should be modest, but she only shouts with her hands that there are no other men in town because everyone is either away at the war or too young or too old. Besides, all her friends are there and where’s the harm?

I know where there’s harm: in making eyes with wolves. If Papa knew what she was doing, he would beat her and not allow her to work at Big Brown because the wolves are there too. Miss Catherine wants a new house, but Mr. Eisenmann says that Big Brown should do very well, only it will need a lot of work and the wolves can do that. Mr. Eisenmann and Miss Catherine have quarreled about this in public because my mother says that Miss Catherine is headstrong and willful. We’re not supposed to notice the quarrels, but everyone does. The rich are not like the rest of us; that is what Papa says.

There is a grumbling from down the street, and now the trucks are coming back in boiling spumes of red dust. The truck beds are open, and the prisoners are there, along with some guards, who cradle their rifles like babies, and laugh and joke with the prisoners. There are seven trucks and only one guard per truck, and that doesn’t seem like very much to me. A prisoner drives each truck. With no guard. I think:
All they would have to do is push the guards out of the truck or kill them, and then they could escape.
Only these men won’t do that. They’re fed and have a place to sleep and money too. Here, Papa says, they have it good and know it.

The trucks squeal to a stop at the foundry gates. I taste grit in my mouth and spit red, and my eyes sting. Pavel’s scrubbing his eyes with his fists, and muddy tears streak his face, but he is jabbing me with his elbow too: “They don’t look so tough. I heard most of these are Wolfsangels, only they’re the wolves that got caught now, aren’t they?”

I see that he is right, because all their eyes are yellow, and when they smile, they grin like wolves, showing all their teeth.

Across the street, Marta and her friends are smiling and waving and holding out little wrapped parcels of sweets. A few of the prisoners reach down to snatch at them, and that reminds me of what I’ve read from the books Mama’s brought from Poland, about knights and how a lady might hand one a ribbon or a glove or a kerchief to show that he was
hers
. That is what Marta is doing, and it makes me uneasy because there is the gemini, the golden prisoner who is Mr. Eisenmann’s right arm, and he’s taken a parcel from Marta and said something slowly so she understands and they’re smiling into each other’s eyes, and I’m thinking:
Doesn’t she see that he’s . . . ?

There is a scream, very high, like an iron spike piercing the air, and then a woman shouts:
Fritz-Fritz-Fritz Hueber!

All the men in the trucks turn and then, in the second truck, one prisoner leaps over the wooden slats and sprints toward the crowd. People start screaming, and Marta looks confused, not understanding at first, and I’m jostled as everyone lurches away, the crowd parting like the Red Sea. Around the trucks, the guards are bewildered. Then someone in the crowd screams, and that seems to throw a switch in the guards because a few bound after the prisoner, their rifles held high so they don’t shoot anyone by accident:
HALT-HALT-HALT!

The woman screams again:
FRITZ!
She pushes past, and it’s Mrs. Grunewald from our school, and then she and the prisoner are hugging and crying and she is screaming:
Oh we thought you were dead, we thought you were dead....
Everyone else is gawping, and the guards pound over now and shout:
Get back everyone get back, Hueber, let her go and come back here, back away, don’t make us shoot you, Fritz....

Then another prisoner shoves through, the one with no accent and good teeth and yellow eyes—slit eyes, eyes like a wolf. It is Marta’s gemini, and he’s shouting in his flawless English:
Get back everyone be calm he means no harm.
He goes to Hueber, who is crying with Mrs. Grunewald, and he puts his arms around the other prisoner, and they’re talking together.

Mrs. Grunewald’s face is blotchy, and there are white stripes on her cheeks from where her tears have cleaned away the dust, and she says:
He’s my cousin. We thought Fritz was dead, but he isn’t, here he is and . . . oh oh, we thought he was dead....

Then someone in the crowd—the minister at St. Luke’s Lutheran—shouts:
It’s a miracle. It’s a sign from God! These are our brothers!
And then other people start nodding, and s ome begin to weep.

Mr. Eisenmann comes running through the foundry gates into the street, and even though he is in his shirtsleeves and they’re rolled to his elbows, he is as he always is because he’s like a king: all gold, and his gold ring flashes, and his gold chain with its twinkly fobs is very bright. He talks to a few of the guards and then walks with the prison commander to speak with the prisoner with the yellow wolf eyes. They talk together, heads bent, their hair spun gold in the sun.