When they had finished their recital-Shaun’s last comment had been “… and so we’d like to go now, please”-the doctor frowned.
“Attempted suicide,” he said to Nurse Vigue. “Or perhaps senile dementia. You had better put a call in to the police.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she said, nodding her approval at the doctor’s performance. She captured Shaun and Russ again and sailed them back through the swinging doors into the waiting room. “You boys sit here. The police will have questions about this incident.”
And if they don’t, Russ thought, she’ll make sure to tell them they ought to.
“But,” Shaun began.
“Sit.” She arched a thinly plucked brow at them and seemed to soften a little. “We have quite a few back issues of Boy’s Life magazine. I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading them.”
“For God’s sake, sit down and read,” Russ muttered to Shaun, taking a chair himself and opening the first magazine at hand.
Two issues of Popular Mechanics later, the emergency-room doors opened and Russ looked up to see the weather-beaten face of Chief Liddle. He was neither large nor intimidating-in fact, he looked more like a farmer than a cop-but both boys sank in their seats when he glanced their way.
The chief spoke briefly with Nurse Vigue and then vanished into the examination room. “Now you’re screwed,” Shaun whispered. “He’s had his eye on you ever since he caught us torching tires at the dump.”
Russ shook his head. “I’m not scared of him,” he said, and it was true. He had seen the chief a few too many times, back before his dad passed away, gently steering the incoherent and maudlin Walter Van Alstyne up the front walk and into the parlor. The chief always said the same thing: “He’s had a few too many, Margy. I guess he needs to sleep it off.” Then he’d look real close into Russ’s mom’s face and ask, “You be all right here with him while he’s like this?”
And she would get all brisk and efficient and tell him they would make out fine, and then they’d help Dad to his bed and she’d press a cup of coffee-usually refused-on the chief.
It wasn’t until after his dad was dead that Russ realized what the chief had really been asking his mom, and when he did, it enraged him, that anyone could think his gentle, soft-spoken father would ever harm his mother. But later, he thought about how the chief had always acted as if Walter Van Alstyne’s drunkenness was a onetime thing, and how careful he was of his mom’s pride. And he realized the question wasn’t that far-fetched after all. Because in his own way, his dad had hurt his mom a lot.
When the chief had caught him drinking Jack Daniel’s and leading a group of seniors in lighting tires on fire and rolling them downhill from the dump, he had hauled Russ behind his cruiser for a talking-to. To the rest of the guys, it must have looked as if Russ had missed getting arrested by the skin of his teeth. But in truth, Liddle hadn’t threatened him with the lockup. Instead, he had looked at Russ as though he had been stealing from a church, and said, “Russell, don’t you think your mother’s been through enough without you grieving her with this kind of foolishness? How are you going to look her in the eye if I have to bring you home…” he didn’t say just like your father. He didn’t have to.
Russ didn’t have the words to tell this to Shaun, so he just grunted and snapped open a year-old Life magazine. It showed pictures of a massive antiwar demonstration. He shut it again, leaned back against the vinyl seat, and closed his eyes. This was supposed to have been a fun day fishing, one last day when he didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. Now it was all turned to crap.
“You boys want to tell me what happened?”
Russ opened his eyes. Chief Liddle stood in front of them, his thumbs hooked into his gun belt. Russ and Shaun clambered to their feet, and Russ let Shaun rattle on about the fishing and the old woman and the rescue and the resuscitation. He wound it up by explaining how they had driven the old woman’s car to the hospital, then said, “Can I please go and call my mom to come get us? Because I just now realized we need a ride back to the lake to pick up my car.”
The chief looked at both of them closely. He sniffed. “You two smell like the Dew Drop Inn on a Saturday night.”
Shaun’s eyes got wide and white.
“It’s me, sir,” Russ said. “I had a couple beers. But it’s not as bad as it smells-I knocked ’em over when I took my jeans off to go after the old lady. That’s why I stink so bad.”
The chief shook his head. “Russell-,” he began.
“Russ is leaving for the army next week,” Shaun blurted. “You know what they say, Chief. ‘If you’re old enough to fight for your country…’”
“You aren’t going, are you?” Chief Liddle asked Shaun.
“Ah, no.”
“Then I suggest you hush up and stay away from booze where I can smell you. Go on, go call your mother.” Shaun didn’t have to be told twice. He took off for the pay phone at the other end of the hall. Liddle looked straight at Russ, and the fact that the chief now had to look up to meet his eyes gave Russ a weird, disoriented feeling, like the time after his dad’s service when Mr. Kilmer, the funeral director, had asked for ‘Mr. Van Alstyne’s signature’ and he had realized that that was him, that he was ‘Mr. Van Alstyne’ now.
“Is it true?” the chief said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You volunteer, or did your number come up?”
Russ paused. “My number came up.”
“And you’re leaving next week?”
“Wednesday.”
The chief bit the inside of his cheek. “How’s your mom taking it?”
“About as well as you’d expect.”
“I’ll make sure to drop in on her now and again. To keep an eye on things.”
To do Russ’s job for him. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”
The chief looked as if he were going to say something else, but he merely extended his hand. “Good luck to you, then.” They shook. “I don’t need you to make a statement. You can go.”
“Sir?”
The chief cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Who is that old lady? And why was she going into the reservoir like that?”
The deep lines around the chief’s eyes crinkled faintly. “Curious, are you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Liddle glanced toward the emergency-room doors. “That’s Mrs. Ketchem.”
“Ketchem? Like the clinic? And the dairy?”
“That’s the one.”
“But she must be rich!”
The chief smiled at him. “If she is, you can’t prove it by me. Rich or poor, all folks have troubles, Russell.”
“Was that why she was trying to, you know, kill herself?”
The chief stopped smiling. “I’m going to call that an accident. She’s an old woman, working out in the sun, getting up and down… it’s natural she became disoriented. Her daughter and son-in-law moved back to the area recently. I’ll have a talk with them. Maybe we can persuade Mrs. Ketchem that it’s time to give up her house and move in with them.”
“But she wasn’t disoriented. She was walking into that water like you’d walk into the men’s room. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
Chief Liddle gave him a look that somehow made him draw closer. “Attempted suicide is a crime, Russell. It might require a competency hearing and an involuntary committal at the Infirmary. Now, as long as she has family to take charge of her, I don’t think she needs to go through that, do you?”
“But what if she’s… I don’t know, sick in the head or something?”
Liddle shook his head. “She’s not going off her rocker. She’s just old and tired. Even her sorrows are older than most of the folks around her these days. Sometimes, the weight of all that living just presses down on a person and sort of squashes them flat.”