Читать книгу A Clean Heart - John Rosengren - Страница 8
ОглавлениеOscar sauntered down the hall, hips stiff, shoulders swaggering, hands cuffed behind his back. Contempt crusted his face. He looked neither left nor right at the calligraphy slogans framed on the walls: “First Things First,” “Live and Let Live,” “Easy Does It.” His eyes bored straight ahead, cleared his path. The other kids watched from their bedroom doorways in quiet awe, reverence almost. They shrank back when he passed. Even with his hands cuffed and a cop at his elbow, Oscar sauntered down the hallway with savage independence. His eyes fixed on the counselor waiting for him: Fuck you.
Carter knew the look. The defiance, the determination. His mother, after a few drinks.
Once inside the counselor’s office, Oscar’s granite-gray eyes alone sliced the silence. He would not speak. The tough ones usually didn’t. His glare dared Carter to try to make him.
Oscar embodied defiance. More than the dirty brown hair shaken over his shoulders, more than the faded jean jacket with the Guns ‘N Roses patch emblazoned across the back, more than the torn black jeans—the spirit of his defiance was greater than the sum of these singular details. He looked like many of the kids who had sat in Carter’s office, but a violence smoldered in him that made the other kids seem like Gandhi in their noncooperation.
Officer Patterson packed the handcuffs back into his belt. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Thanks, Charlie.” Carter regarded Oscar. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
Patterson shrugged. Carter noted the slight shake of his head on the way out and knew he was muttering to himself. Patterson was old school. He saw only the ones who didn’t make it.
Oscar’s glare followed the cop out the door.
Carter faced Oscar, now seated on the chrome-frame chair, the handcuffs gone, his hands poised unseen in his jean pockets. Carter was sure they were packed in fists. When he addressed Oscar, the punk clenched his jaw.
“So, Rock Lake or this place, and you chose the lesser of two evils. Why?”
Oscar fixed him with a look of scorn. What do you think, dumbfuck?
Carter continued as though he had answered politely. “If you finish treatment, the judge might suspend your sentence. But you’ve got to finish treatment. We’re under no orders to keep you. It’s up to you whether you stay.”
Oscar snorted. His street clothes clashed with the hospital decor. He belonged to the street—roaming alleys, preying upon car stereos, staking his territory with spray paint—instead of being boxed within the lime-green walls of Carter’s office.
“Another thing,” Carter said. “There are no bars, no locks here. You can walk anytime. If you stay, it’s because you want to.”
Oscar nodded sarcastically in agreement. He wasn’t buying the tough guy, this-is-the-way-it-is approach.
“If you decide to stay, we’re here to help.”
The gentle tone achieved no better effect. Oscar scoffed at Carter, taking in his slender build, blond curls, and thin nose. Wimp.
Oscar’s eyes paced the room, surveyed its contents. The olive-drab metal file cabinet, a pedestal for the yellowed Mr. Coffee; the particleboard desk with the faux mahogany veneer; the ficus in the corner; the hanging ferns; the orange, closely cropped carpet—“a shag with a crew cut,” Carter joked. Oscar’s eyes did not break stride. The North Stars pennant, the Far Side 1991 calendar (still on February; Carter had not yet flipped it to March), the cluttered desk.
“When I was seventeen, I sat in your chair and wanted out,” Carter said. “You know what made me stay?”
Oscar gazed out the window. The university campus lay across the river, a shadow through the falling snow.
“I thought if I stayed long enough, they would teach me how to smoke pot without getting caught.”
Oscar stared at the snowflakes swallowed by the icy black water six floors below.
“Instead, they taught me I didn’t have to be a slave to drugs,” Carter continued. “I’ve been sober since. Seven years.”
Oscar turned to him. Is this bullshit over yet?
Self-disclosure wasn’t going to work, Carter realized. They were too different. On the surface at least. He sensed they were the same deep down. He could sniff the addict in this kid.
The two sat for a moment locked in a silent showdown, Oscar smoldering, Carter pensive. He searched for a hidden door through Oscar’s defiance.
“You hungry?”
He didn’t flinch.
Carter buzzed the nurses’ station. “Judy, I need a favor. Would you please bring me a sandwich, uh, roast beef and Swiss—” Carter raised his eyebrows at Oscar, who shrugged his shoulders almost imperceptibly. “And a pop.”
“Carter, is this your idea of a joke?”
“For the new admit.”
“Mustard or mayonnaise?”
Carter looked to Oscar.
“Mustard,” he muttered.
“And an extra slice of cheese,” Carter added.
“Coming right up.”
Carter wasn’t fooled. He knew Judy was still pissed that Sister Mary Xavier had asked Carter specifically to handle Oscar’s admission. Judy had already laid out all of the forms on the countertop waiting for Oscar’s arrival when he told her.
“We don’t ask to do your work,” she had said. “Stay away from ours.”
“Sister X asked me to do it. I didn’t volunteer. Believe me, I’ve got enough work of my own.”
“Is that why you don’t do your charting?”
“I’m behind because I get asked to do extra work.”
“So stick to your own work if you can’t finish it. Patient admissions are a nurse’s responsibility.”
“Come on. How hard can it be? Ask a few questions from a form.”
That had been the wrong thing to say.
“Fine. Do it. Have it your way. But if you don’t get it right, don’t expect me to fix it for you. After all, it’s only a few questions from a form.”
“Judy, what I meant was—”
She shoved the forms at him. “I’ll stay out of your way. Live and let live.”
Thinking of Judy slapping mustard onto a slice of bread and chastising him under her breath, Carter wondered if he would have been better off making Oscar’s sandwich himself. He shuffled through the clutter of papers on his desk without finding what he wanted. Finally, his hand landed on a purple folder. He handed it to Oscar. “Inside you will find the scout rules and campfire songs. Memorize your cabin cheer.”
Oscar didn’t smile, and he didn’t take the offered folder.
Carter knew his jokes wouldn’t earn him a living, but he thought they might loosen up this kid. Instead, Oscar sat before him amused as stone.
“Seriously, read this. It’ll tell you all about Six West: the daily schedule, the level system, consequences, privileges, et cetera.”
Oscar scowled at the folder.
“Don’t think of it as submission to someone else’s rules. Think of it more as a willingness to try someone else’s way that might work better than yours has—or hasn’t.”
The fight came back into his eyes.
“Give it a chance.”
Oscar contemplated the folder, finally snatched it, and placed it under his thigh.
The knock on the door startled them both. Judy smiled past Carter with a plastic tray in her hands: the sandwich on a plate, neatly sliced into quarters, decorated with potato chips and a pickle, accompanied by a glass of Sprite with ice and a straw. As a bonus, she had added a pudding snack. “Room service.”
“Thanks, Judy. Meet Oscar.” Then, to him, “Judy is the head nurse on Six West.”
Judy handed Oscar the tray. “Welcome.”
He balanced the tray across his thighs and stuffed a full quarter of the sandwich into his mouth.
“Whoa. Judy dropped everything to make that for you. I want you to thank her, or I’ll have her take it away.”
“Oh, Carter, don’t be silly. The poor boy’s just hungry.”
“Judy, please. Oscar?”
“Thanks,” Oscar mumbled without looking up.
“Don’t mention it,” Judy chimed on her way out.
Carter resolved not to let her interfere with Oscar. The new admit gobbled chips while he chewed the last bite of his sandwich. Carter wondered if he had the munchies. Other kids had come over from Juvenile stoned, but Oscar didn’t have that distracted air. Carter figured he probably was simply reacting to real food after a week of jail slop. He had yet to meet a teenage boy who wasn’t perpetually hungry. The urine test would show whether Carter’s hunch was correct.
“So, what’s it going to be?”
Oscar dug into the pudding with the spoon. Carter noticed the stump below the knuckle of his right middle finger. It looked more like a scar than a birth defect.
“Well?”
Oscar raised his eyes slowly, pained. “What’s what going to be, dude?
“You going to stay or not?”
Oscar slammed the pudding down on the tray. “You ruin my fucking appetite.”
“Does that mean you won’t be staying?”
A tense moment passed before he finally shrugged.
“What’s that mean?”
“What the fuck you think it means?”
Stay calm, Carter told himself. Just another angry kid. “Not sure. I don’t read shoulders.”
“Then read my lips, fuckhead. I’ll stay.”
Carter couldn’t help grinning to himself. Guess I walked into that one. But at least he committed. “Carter.”
“What?”
“Carter. That’s my name. Carter Kirchner. See, up on the wall.” He pointed to the Chemical Dependency Practitioner certificate in the cheap, black metal frame hanging on the wall. Oscar’s eyes didn’t budge. “That’s what you call me. Try it.”
“Carter. Carter Kirchner,” he said in a mocking tone. Then added under his breath, “Faggot.”
Carter let it pass. “You’ll get used to it. Let’s get down to business.” He pulled out one of the forms Judy had given him. He hated these forms, the endless piles of mundane paperwork, but sometimes they served as useful props, giving him an excuse to pry. “I need to get some background information. Full name?”
“Peter F. Pan.”
Carter looked up. Oscar glared back.
“How do you spell your last name, Oscar?”
He spoke in the tone that adults use with small children, “D. U. R. A. N.”
That’s the way they got through much of the rest of the biographical data: Mother’s maiden name? “Eve.” The last time you saw your father? “The day he left home.” Which was? “The last time I saw him.” Oscar begrudgingly provided the most basic information. Until Carter asked, “How did you get arrested?”
A wave of sadness flickered in his eyes. He quickly averted them, but not before Carter glimpsed it.
Oscar pulled a pack of Marlboros from his jean jacket pocket, slid out a cigarette, tamped it against the meaty part of his palm, then clenched it between his lips. He didn’t take his flat eyes off Carter. He slipped a pack of matches from his pocket, pried one match loose, and closed the book, slowly turning it in his hand.
“You can’t smoke in my office.”
Oscar spread his hands apart in surprise. “I can’t?” He set the match against the book to strike it. “Watch me.”
Carter hated this part, having to be the enforcer. “Part of the program. One of the rules. Without them, it wouldn’t work. We’ve all got to live by them.”
He struck the match and raised it to his cigarette. “And if I don’t?”
“You forfeit smoking privileges for a full day, twenty-four hours.”
He shrugged his eyebrows, amused, and moved the lit match toward the tip of his cigarette.
Carter snapped. “Don’t you understand? You’re here on a prayer. This is your last chance. You fuck up here, that’s it, you’re in jail, ten months minimum. You think you don’t like me telling you not to smoke, believe me, it’s a lot better than some fat fuck bending you over a toilet.”
Carter paused to catch his breath. “Give yourself a chance.”
Oscar glowered at him. Carter met his eyes evenly. The lit match still beside his cigarette, Oscar let it burn down to the stump of his middle finger. He did not flinch when the flame extinguished against his flesh. Slowly he spread his fingers and let the match drop to the floor. He kept the unlit cigarette clamped between his lips.
“So, tell me how you got arrested.”
“Ask Officer Handcuffs.”
“I’m asking you.”
Oscar began the story of the night a week earlier. It was late, past midnight, when he found his way back to the mission downtown. The doors were locked, so he went halfway round the block to a doorway in the alley. He had slept there before when he’d shown up too late at the mission. Often. Others knew it as his place. Called it “Oscar’s crib.” But that night he found an old man crouched in the doorway, asleep. Oscar nudged him in the ribs with the toe of his boot, but the man was out. He didn’t budge. So Oscar grabbed him to his feet and shook him. The guy was all coat and bones, nothing more. Finally he came to, but could barely stand on his own. Oscar told him to beat it. The man mumbled he was too exhausted and bent back down to sleep. Oscar seized him by the collar and gave him a shove, but the old man couldn’t keep his feet and hit the pavement face first. The blood leaked out of his head into a swelling puddle.
So far, his story matched the police report. Oscar recited the details of the murder with the same matter-of-fact callousness.
“He was bleeding all over the place. I freaked and ran.”
“How’d they arrest you?”
“Later that night, I cruised into White Castle, drunk off my ass. There must’ve been an unmarked out front because two pigs in a booth watched me stagger in. I tried to be cool, knew I couldn’t ditch right off. But they got up, and I ducked for the door. I tripped off the curb, and they nailed me. I never should’ve gone into that Castle. Stupid.”
Carter scribbled notes on the form. Oscar stared out the window streaked by the wet snow. “When can I smoke, dude?”
Carter checked his watch. Mickey’s big hand rested on the eight, his little hand between the three and four. The other kids would still be in group, so they couldn’t use the lounge. Carter might have let him smoke in his office, but Judy would be all over the telltale smell. He glanced out the window at the snow. “You want a cigarette badly enough to smoke one outside?
“What’s wrong with here?”
“The rules, you know. Technically, the entire hospital, building and grounds, is smoke-free—except for one lounge currently in use—but I think today, because of the, ah, circumstances of your arrival, we can make an exception if we go outside.”
Oscar eyed Carter suspiciously, sizing up what might be expected in return. “Whatever.”
They couldn’t sneak out without Judy noticing. Carter told her he was giving Oscar a tour and marched out quickly before she could ask questions. Carter knew he could be in trouble like the time when he brought the kids back late from their A.A. meeting and Judy detected the Dairy Queen coffee cup that one of the kids still carried. She had asked Sister Mary Xavier if caffeine had recently been approved for the kids without the nurses knowing it. Sister X had put Carter on a week’s probation for taking the kids to a location that the director hadn’t approved in advance.
Carter led Oscar downstairs past Medical Records and out a back door behind the cafeteria. He sometimes used that door as a shortcut when he couldn’t find a spot in the ramp and parked his car in the back lot. Even in this out-of-the-way location, he ran a risk. If word got back to Sister X that he let one of the kids smoke on hospital grounds, it would be at least a week’s probation, probably worse.
They hunched beside the dumpsters where the thick snow gathered in gray puddles. Sneaking a cigarette reminded Carter of junior high school, when he and his buddies smoked outside the pool door between classes. Oscar, picking up on his nervous glances, cupped his cigarette in his hand between drags and said, “Dude. It’s cool.”
The admission paperwork called for a patient’s drug history—they still had to justify his stay there. Carter figured this was a good time to start it.
Oscar surprised him by talking fairly openly about the drugs he had used, how often he had used them, where, and in what situations. Usually at the first interview, kids minimized the amount they used, thinking they still had a chance to avoid treatment. Other times, they exaggerated their past, boasting with junkie pride about gigantic quantities of drugs they had consumed. But Oscar spoke of his use neither in swaggering terms nor in understatements. He spoke in a realistic tone that let Carter know he had thought about drugs and was aware of how they had turned on him.
“When’s the first time you got high?”
“High or drunk?”
“Either.”
“Kindergarten.”
He had snuck sips of adults’ drinks and discovered the magic in them. In third grade, he got stoned for the first time on some pot he stole out of his mother’s purse.
“That was better than drinking.”
“Didn’t make you sick?”
He dragged on his cigarette then said without letting out the smoke, “Felt better.”
In fifth grade, he began running crack for the older kids, but never touched the stuff himself because he saw what it had done to them. In sixth grade, he discovered acid and began a love affair with it. “Everything makes sense when I trip.”
The most he ever took was seventeen hits at a Grateful Dead concert two summers ago. He held up his right hand. “They told me I cut off my finger to experience what it would be like to be Jerry Garcia.”
Carter shuddered.
“I didn’t feel a thing—not even in the emergency room the next day.”
Not long afterward, he tried ecstasy and thought it was the ideal drug. “X, when it works…” His eyes glittered. “Nothing better.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to screw everybody.”
“What about afterward—the aches, the depression?”
“I’ve had worse hangovers.”
“And when it doesn’t work?”
“You want to fuck people over.” He sucked on his third cigarette. “But I never lost a fight on X.”
When ice came around, he liked that the high came quicker and more intense than with ecstasy.
“What else?”
“‘Shrooms, coke, ‘ludes—whatever was around.”
About the only drug he had not taken was heroin. “I don’t like needles, dude, but if it was that or nothing, I’d probably try it.”
Carter leaned against the hospital’s brick wall, out of the snow’s way, but he could not escape its chill. Oscar finished his cigarette, snubbed it out against the wall, and placed it back in his pack. Talking seemed to have calmed him. His shoulders had softened some. When they got back upstairs in Carter’s office—again hurrying by Judy before she could ask questions about Oscar’s jacket and Carter’s sweater being wet (she inhaled deeply and suspiciously at their passing)—Oscar seemed almost willing to be there. He complied with the urine test and did not fight the obligatory strip search. He protested only with a silent grimace when Carter flushed the joint he found in Oscar’s cigarette pack down the toilet. But it was too much for him when Carter told him the nurses would store his cigarettes.
“Thought you said this wasn’t a fucking jail.”
“I know it’s a pain, but around here smoking is considered a privilege.”
“Seems more a punishment to take away my cigs.”
“The nurses will give them to you at scheduled smoking breaks.”
“That sucks.”
But he did surrender his pack.
Carter still had one more detail to arrange with Judy before he could turn Oscar over to her and finish the admission paperwork.
“I know we had talked about doing it differently, but I want to put Oscar with Rodney and move Archie to Chip’s room.”
Judy, perched behind the raised counter that marked the nurses’ station, peered at Carter over her half-rimmed glasses with a look of pained annoyance that she might have directed toward a small boy at the beach who would not stop throwing sand in his sister’s hair. Mid-forties, her age showed more in a general impression of poor health than in any particular feature. She had a small face, dotted by two beady eyes and lined by thin lips. A weak jaw gave her the appearance of an overbite, though her teeth lined up orderly. At the base of her neck grew a mushroom-shaped wart, the size of a fingernail, with a cauliflower texture. When Carter’s eyes fell upon it, which was often—they seemed to be drawn to it—the wart repulsed him.
“My orders were to put the new admit in room 612 with Chip.”
It was such a simple request; Carter hadn’t expected a conflict. It further annoyed him that she insisted on referring to Oscar as “the new admit” when he stood right before her.
“I’m not here to give you orders—”
“Sounds to me like you’re trying.”
Sister Mary Xavier had routinely signed the order for Oscar to take the open bed in 612, probably without thinking about it. If Carter explained the situation to her, she would have taken his side, but he didn’t want to make that much out of it. The problem was Judy considered a written instruction akin to a commandment.
“I’m merely suggesting that, for therapeutic reasons,” this he underscored with raised eyebrows, “we place Oscar with someone who is further along in the program.”
“I suppose you also consider smoking therapeutic?”
“Smoking?” Oscar said. Until that point, he had observed the quibble with a silent, mocking smirk as though watching two parents argue over a point of complete indifference to him. “Who’s smoking?”
Judy, startled, as though she had forgotten he was there, turned her look of annoyance on him while she said, “Nothing is as simple as you seem to think when you make your ‘therapeutic suggestions,’ Carter. Besides, Clarence is occupied at the moment.”
As though that settled the matter, she returned to the entry she had been making in the chart opened before her. The cauliflower wart on her neck leered back at Carter. He wanted to pluck it off.
Just then, Buddha ambled out of the kitchen and lumbered toward the nurses’ station slurping a strawberry shake from a plastic water bottle marked SlimFast, completely undisturbed by any pressing obligations. “Hey, Carter. Whaddya say?”
Judy sneered at him.
Unaffected by her look, Buddha, the recreational therapist, turned to Oscar and stuck out a meaty paw. “You must be the new kid on the block. Whaddya say?”
Oscar ignored the hand extended to him, ran his eyes up and down—and around—Buddha, then scowled at the beefy, open face smiling down on him.
Buddha withdrew his hand as calmly and as happily as if Oscar had pumped it with the joy of seeing an old friend and tugged a long slurp from his shake. His soft round body rested atop two enormous thighs the size of hundred-pound flour sacks that slumped together at the knees. When Buddha walked—waddled, actually—his thighs rubbed against each other emphatically. The shape of his round, brown face made him appear to be always smiling. Judy was the only one who called him by his given name, Clarence.
Carter appealed directly to him. “Buddha, do you have a moment to help Archie move his things into 612 and change the sheets on his bed in 610? We’re going to place Oscar in 610 with Rodney.”
Buddha took another enthusiastic slurp from his shake. “Sure, no problem.”
Judy scribbled furiously in her chart.
Instead of feeling vindictive, Carter walked back to his office wondering if he had acted too impulsively in showing up Judy. He had achieved the desired result without considering the long-range implications. By the time he sat back down at his desk to finish the paperwork of Oscar’s admission, he realized she had gotten the better of him again.
As he filled out Oscar’s drug history, Carter had little doubt that the kid needed treatment. The question was whether Oscar would accept the help, or if he had survived on the streets for so long that he couldn’t surrender.
Something else puzzled Carter: why Oscar had lied about how he was arrested. The police report stated that Oscar had shown up at the emergency room of Saint Jude’s, about seven blocks from the mission, with the old man on his back, shouting and screaming that the wino couldn’t be dead. A police officer admitting a domestic violence victim arrested Oscar for his belligerence when the emergency staff’s repeated efforts to quiet him failed. Later that night, Oscar confessed to killing the old man.
