Thrust (9 page)

When the Falls first opened back in the 60s, people could stay for years, even decades.
 
But that was over unless you were sentenced by the court.
 
Lots of cons think they'll float through the system faster acting crazy, but once they're in the state hospitals they can wind up inside twice as long as they would've in prison.
 
While the psychiatrists played with experimental drugs and continually toyed with the dosages.
 
New treatments, trial surgical procedures, the shit could get funky.

The waitress brought him a beer.

"I ordered milk," he told her.

"Excuse me?"

Staring at the glass and still seeing beer.
 
"I wanted milk."

"That's what this is."

"Thank you."

Chase had once been a binge drinker, like his father.
 
He'd go months without liquor and then, without any reason he could name, he'd stop at the store and buy a bottle.
 
The cap would be off before he got back into the car and he'd take three or four long slugs as he was pulling out of the parking lot.
 

There was no sense to it.
 
He hated the taste and would grunt while the sickening heat coursed into his stomach.
 
He'd groan and want to die as the nausea hit, but he couldn't stop.

At the time, he'd been a substitute English teacher out on Long Island, giving a few poetry readings in the city on the side.
 
The life suited him.
 
They shuffled him across the district from school to school.
 
Eleventh and twelfth grades.
 
You had half a classroom full of punks who just wanted a free day and another half filled with kids so well-trained that they actually had expectations of him.
 
He kept his meds in a cotton-packed plastic bottle so the pills wouldn't rattle.
 
He worked the chalkboard while the troublemakers made their noise, playing sick, moving seats around, and slipping out the door.
 
He waved as they left.
 
Nobody gave a damn.

Chase's worn briefcase bulged in the middle and the corners would creak when he flipped the locks.
 
He'd read them the poets that the school boards were terrified of—Ginsberg,
Bukowski
,
Corso
.
 
Maybe he was looking to get fired, but it never happened.
 
The kids got
weirded
out, expecting centuries-old English romantics and instead getting verse about the racetrack, the skids, the vagaries of suicide, urges you got when on your knees.
 
It sure kept them quiet.

He'd spend hours circling town, driving back and forth between the community college and the library, heading out on the parkway to gun past Garden Falls, where the shadow of the buildings sliced down alongside the moon.
 
He'd stop off at bars and have a few more, speaking to no one.
 
He did that for a couple of years, biding time, feeling a slow movement and rise under his skin.
 
That was all right.

The end came on an autumn night, with the leaves drifting in heavy patterns like snowfall.
 

The kid, still holding his knife and fork in his right hand, gave his girlfriend a playful half-jab with the left, like he was this close to slapping her for real.
 
Letting her know he could do it any time he wanted.
 
Nothing too rough in public, just enough to keep her in line.
 
She flinched and dropped her gaze to the table, pulled her shoulders in.
 

Chase came out of his seat in one fluid motion and covered the ground to the other booth in two strides.
 

He grabbed the boy by his collar and hauled him up until he was on tip-toes, clawing at the air.
 

"Jesus Christ, dude!"

Chase smacked the silverware from the boy's hand.
 
The music masked the clatter.
 
He yanked the kid closer until they were nose to nose, and stared into his eyes.
 
Chase let out a noise that wasn't far up the evolutionary ladder than a snarl.
 
Primal.
 

So was this it?
 
Was this where he finally did it?

"Let him go, Gray," Shake said, standing behind him.
 
Rubbing Chase's back with that wide, powerful hand, a gently loving motion.

"Not just yet."

"You said you'd stay calm."

"You think I'm not?"

The boy was scared but not enough.
 
Already he was getting used to this, falling back into his cool Manhattan attitude, his hipness, whatever it might be.
 
"Dude, the hell's up with you?"

"I don't like bullies," Chase said.
 

"Bullies?"

"Yes."

"What do you mean?
 
What?"

"You should be nicer to your girl, otherwise she might castrate you one night while you're sleeping."

The kid glaring now, but still panicky.
 
"Castration?
 
Her?
 
Are you crazy?"

"Yes," Chase said.
 
"I am."
 
He loved when they fed him the straight lines.

With this kind of rage always seething, you couldn't trust yourself.
 
There was too much inside always ready to take you over at any minute.
 
You never knew when someone else might put on your skin, cause all kinds of hell wearing your face.

"Just sit back down, man," Shake told the boy.
 
Then, leaning in on him, asking, "You hit your old lady?"

She said nothing, sort of enjoying the scene.
 
Her fists left her lap, and she began eating her food.

"No," the kid said meekly, but realized it wasn't enough.
 
"No, ah, sir.
 
No, I don't do that.
 
Really.
 
I don't."

"Respect your woman.
 
You hurt her, and I'll find and hurt you.
 
You dig that shit?"

"Yes.
 
Ah, yes, sir.
 
I do."

"You cannot believe I'm lying."

"No, sir.
 
No
no
."

"That's right."

Shake led Chase back to his seat, past a waiter down on one knee crooning
Sea of Love
.
 

With the leaves drifting in heavy patterns like snowfall, the end came on an autumn night.

The bottle, that time, was scotch.
 
Chase sat in the school lot, his car idling a little too high, with the heater blasting out against his knees.
 
He'd been set off again, but at least he could trace it to a small reason.
 

He'd gotten between two jocks fighting over a girl with limp frowzy hair and sorrowful eyes, thin wrists and no bra.
 

She turned to Chase in the hall and whispered, "Stop them, please stop them," and he immediately moved in between the boys.
 

It was stupid.
 
He took a shot to the ribs from one guy, a roundhouse to the chin from the other.
 
His head snapped back.
 
Blood splashed against his teeth.
 

Both boys quit instantly, watching him, waiting for repercussions.
 
Chase said, "Beat it before a teacher comes."
 

Forgetting that he was one.
 
Supposed to be one.

He searched the hallways the rest of the afternoon looking for the girl.
 
He still tasted blood at the end of the day, and the spot under his heart hurt.
 

She found him after the last bell as he moved down the staircase towards the gym, where he parked.
 
He was wary—he still had enough of his senses to be careful in moments like these—but she only stood there staring at him.
 
This could be ominous.

A dozen lines of poetry flashed through his mind and she turned the other way and disappeared down the hall.
 

That night he drove along the back roads behind the shopping centers that had gone out of business, passing dimly-hit homes of former classmates who were too scared to turn up the heat because of gas bills.
 

He'd failed somehow and didn't even know at what.
 
He had more white hair than his
father'd
had in his casket.

Around nine p.m., with the traffic thinning and the kids tucked in, middle America comfortably settled on the couch to watch sit-coms.
 
Chase was still thinking about the girl.
 
The ache in his chin had dulled into a slight warmth that warmed his whole jaw the way caresses had once done.
 
It still threw him.

He passed Garden Falls again, whispering along to slow songs on the Oldies station.
 
He saw only the rows of darkened cube windows of the hospital, but could imagine faces peering down at him.
 

Clawed fingers tapping at the glass and dusty mouths saying his name, dried lips cracking.
 

Chase sang louder trying to press back the images and he reached for the bottle of scotch between his legs.
 
It was empty.
 

The music changed to another era and he felt himself rising through time.
 

He took the exit a little too fast, coming back through the wide lawns and perfectly shaped hedges of the Falls, as the curve brought him around to the entrance ramp of the parkway.
 

A viciously bright white light swept over and engulfed him.
 
At the edges, in the distance, weaker gleams of red and blue flashed.
 
The brilliant high beams immersed the car as he jerked the wheel hard to the right.
 

The liquor had shaved a second off his reflexes and kept him from stomping on the brake in time.
 
The explosive sound of sirens swallowed him whole—why hadn't he heard them before?—and the blaring of a single enraged truck horn cut through everything else.
  

My God, Chase thought, looking over.
 

It was a pickup on a deadly angle not even ten feet away, and then only five, then two.
 
Christ, that fucker is—

The thunderous noise of metal smashing metal was like nothing that had ever existed before.
 

He felt—he knew—that for an instant he had somehow ceased to exist, as the pain erupted across him all at once.
 
His neck, shoulders, and legs burned in agony even while his hands were doing magnificent things without him.
 

He didn't understand it and simply watched while he wrenched the wheel and tried to ride out the mad careening spin.

Plumes of dirt spit up across the hood and brush toppled before the vehicles.
 
His driver's door had buckled inward and the pressure against his knee made him groan and gnash his teeth.
 

He looked out the window and saw a child's frightened eyes, cheeks tear-streaked and nubby fingers pressed into the hollow of her throat.
 

"Christ!"

Beyond her the driver of the truck glared at Chase with his top lip curled over his teeth, mouth dropping open into a howl of fury.

They had run off the parkway and were cutting back towards the Falls.
 
Chase looked away and tried to turn the wheel farther but the column had locked.
 

The Oldies tunes continued to play and he sang along for two words, "…here…we…" before hitting the stone wall that surrounded the south side of the hospital grounds.

There was a final tearing of steel and rattling blast of breaking glass, the crumbling of rock and a fitful wheeze of steam, before the vehicles separated slightly and then converged once more to crash.
 

A crescendo of insane silence burst around Chase and became, forever, a part of him.

A minute later:
 
the child's moaning for her Daddy, that guy shushing her and promising murder, the sloshing of gasoline and other liquids pouring over the brutally hard earth, and then nothing at all to remind him that he might be alive.

Shake was staring hard at him, chewing 30, 31, 32, and said, "Where've you been?"

"Back where it started."

"That's a long way to go, man."

Chase nodded.
 
There was a half eaten omelet on the plate in front of him.
 
The waitress brought the check.
 
Written on it with a hasty scrawl were the words

not my fault