Phil was the math teacher-he told the boys to call him Phil, not Mr. Maris-and he was part of why Dylan liked math best. For one thing Phil was young. Everybody but the inmates was old at Drummond, old and musty like the walls. Draco said Drummond was an elephant graveyard where old prison staffers came to die. Most of them didn’t want to be there any more than the boys they guarded did.
Phil wasn’t more than twenty-three or -four. He wore his hair long. It was light brown and curled on his collar and over his ears. Draco called him a hippy and laughed at Dylan because he didn’t know what that was.
Math and Phil gave Dylan a place to go outside his skull. Dylan’s mom would have called that a blessing. He got to thinking maybe monsters were blessed by some kind of monster god.
They weren’t.
At half-past ten in the morning a couple months after he’d gotten to Drummond, Dylan was called out of class by one of the guards, an old man who was scared of the bigger boys and made up for it on the littler ones.
Ten a.m. was math class. Dylan hated being taken out so he didn’t move as fast or look as meek as he usually did when the guards told him to do something. The old guy made him pay by herding him down the hall with a bitter monologue: “You really think you’re something don’t you you little psycho if you’d been a kid of mine by god you’d never have picked up any axe or I’d have shown you what for and don’t think I won’t do it now you get any kind of idea… ”
Dylan didn’t listen. None of the boys listened. Still the sourness of the man tainted the air. Drummond smelled old and cold. Under the pervasive odor of the benzene the janitors used was the reek of rancid fat, sweat, sauerkraut, farts and fear. The worst thing was that it didn’t smell like home, not like anybody’s home. At first the smell had made Dylan lonely and scared. Now he was okay with it. He was okay with Drummond. Where else could a kid like him be?
On the second floor, above the classrooms and below where the Ward C boys slept, a big hall had been cobbled up into a lot of small rooms with flimsy doors letting off a narrow hallway. Rat maze, the Ward C boys called it. The rooms didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, which was built of beams with this cobwebby chandelier made to look like thorny branches.
The guard told Dylan to stop outside the third door then shouldered him aside as if he might be thinking of rushing through and murdering whoever was inside. Acting like he’d just saved the world from the forces of evil, the guard rapped on the wood. Dylan couldn’t help but look at the billy club on the old guy’s belt; it was all but sticking in his face. Maybe he wanted Dylan to try to take it so he could beat on him, or spray him with Mace and play the hero.
Maybe he was just a stupid old man.
One day it would get him killed.
“Enter,” said a voice. Not “come in” or “just a minute,” but “enter,” like he was a king and they were his subjects.
The guard pushed open the door and said, “Got your nutcase for you, Doc.” He stood aside and Dylan walked past him into a little office. Three of the walls were plywood, painted white. On one there was a nondescript picture of a foggy landscape, no glass in the frame. Dylan knew it was bolted to the wall; a bunch of similar murky paintings were bolted around Drummond. The story was they’d been done by a warden’s wife and he’d put them up. Maybe they thought it would make the place seem less like what it was.
The other wall was of granite, like a castle from the movies. Against one of the plywood walls was a couch, not fancy leather but a faded cloth couch that had once been turquoise. A wing chair was beside it with a little round table at its arm. A single deep-set window let in a suggestion of the short winter day’s light.
A middle-aged man, trim and fit looking, with carefully combed hair and long thin fingers, sat in the room’s only chair. He had a short beard and sandy graying hair. His beard was red and looked as if it belonged on somebody else.
“I’m Dr. Kowalski,” he said and gestured to the couch.
Lying down would be too weird. Dylan perched on the edge of the sofa. The doctor looked at him for a long time-so long Dylan had to stop himself from fidgeting.
“So you’re the Butcher Boy,” the doctor said finally.
Butcher Boy.
Dylan had heard it before but for some reason this time the words made his brain skid forward and back. Time warped. For a second he was back in the courtroom in black and white and Chinese. Eleven years outside seemed as if they’d never happened and the months in juvie felt like all of his life. Life before rushed in, and then receded, and it shook him.
The doctor wanted to shake him; at least Dylan chose to believe that. If it wasn’t a trick to get him to respond in a certain way, then Dr. Kowalski was “one mean fuck,” as Draco would say. One who wanted to pry Dylan’s brain out and look at it under bright lights. Fear shuddered up. He tried not to let it show.
Rich wouldn’t let anybody see him scared.
“Yes, sir,” Dylan said. The man stared at him. Edges of the fake room wavered slightly like they’d done at the trial. “Butcher Boy,” Dylan said, in case that was what the doctor was waiting for him to admit. If the man didn’t start talking soon, Dylan was afraid he wouldn’t be able to understand him, that his brain would turn on him like it had with the lawyers. Survival instinct told him Dr. Kowalski wouldn’t deal well with that.
“And you don’t remember anything. That so?” the doctor said.
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. I don’t remember.” He did remember bits here and there but he knew they weren’t the bits Kowalski cared about. Besides, he didn’t think the doctor really wanted him to answer; he sounded like he had all the answers already and was waiting to spring them.
“I’m here to help you remember that night. I’ve worked with boys like you-men too. I wrote a book on a case of a woman who had blocked out drowning her infant daughter. Didn’t make the New York Times Best Seller List, but it sold well enough.” Dr. Kowalski smiled and waited.
Having no idea what the New York Times list was or whether it was bad or good that the book didn’t get on it, Dylan looked at the murky oil painting over the doctor’s chair so his eyeballs had some place to be.
“Do you believe that?” the doctor demanded.
Dylan didn’t know if he was asking if he believed he was there to help him or that his book had sold well enough. Confusion was growing up thick as brambles in a fairytale.
Tick, and tick, and tick, the doctor let more silence clock by. Dylan knew he should say something, remember something, but since he couldn’t he went as far into the murky picture as he could. The painting wasn’t laid out very well and it made him slide in his mind toward the trees on the left side. The warden’s wife wasn’t a very good artist, he decided.
“So, tell me about your dreams,” the psychiatrist said. He crossed his legs like a girl and leaned back in his chair.
Dylan came out of the painting with a twitch. The eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses were boring into him.
“Should I lay down or something?” Dylan asked. The sofa looked clean but it smelled of damp and carbolic.
“Do you want to lie down?”
The way he asked the question made it sound important. Not knowing whether he was supposed to want to lie down or not to want to lie down, or if the doctor would think he was going to kill people if he did the wrong thing, Dylan did nothing.
Dr. Kowalski sighed.
Nothing was clearly not the right thing to do, Dylan knew then, but it was too late to do anything about it.
“Tell me about your dreams,” the doctor repeated.
Usually Dylan dreamed a lot and vividly but as he cast back in his mind he couldn’t recall a single dream. It could have been the drugs they gave him at night, but he guessed it was because the doctor was being so screwy he could hardly think.