Erik finished his Macke cheese dog. He always ladled them with onions—the kind that came in the little tubes—to get the taste out of his mouth. Not the taste of the cheese dog, the taste of Duke.
“What happened what?” Erik asked.
“You know, your voice. How come your voice is so fucked up?”
Suddenly, he tasted memory, salt and copper. Blood. He’d tried to break away from them several times. They hadn’t liked it.
We offer you everything, Erik. And still you rebel.
That had been weeks before the police had caught him. Holy Mother of God, Chief Bard had said, staring into the pit. They all called him “Chief Lard”; he had a belly like a medicine ball. Rumor was he’d been chief of some town in Maryland; a state sting operation had caught him laundering mob money through the town bingo games at the fire hall. They’d told him he could be prosecuted or he could move on quietly. It had been Bard and Byron who’d caught Erik that night. Whatchoo doin’ with that shovel, boy? Byron had demanded. Holy Mother of God, Bard had said.
Erik knew he had been set up. They no longer trusted him.
We love you, Erik, one of them had whispered.
We want you to be good, whispered the other.
So we’re going to give you a little reminder.
So that whenever you talk, you’ll think of us.
They’d tied him down. The one had been blowing him while the other went to work on his throat. The doctor at the emergency room had said that he only had one vocal cord left. He was lucky to have lived.
“A scratch awl,” Erik finally answered Duke. “They stuck a scratch awl in my throat.”
“Christ,” Duke muttered. “Who’s they?”
“Muggers,” Erik lied. That’s what he’d told the people at the hospital and the police. That muggers had done it.
Duke picked his nose. “Bummer.”
The girl named Dawn walked in, approached the candy machine without looking at them. She’d recently made Class III status too. Duke chuckled under his breath. They’d heard Dr. Greene talking to one of the techs about her. “Katasexual,” he’d said. “Sexual obsession with a dead person.” Erik had heard that before they got her on the right medication, she would masturbate ten times a day. There were a lot of winners on the ward. The three hundred pound schizophrenic who claimed she was pregnant by her collie. “I’m going to give Dr. Greene the pick of the litter!” she’d rejoiced. One night the city police had brought in a raving PCP overdose. “I can fly anything that God can make!” he’d informed them as he strapped him into a jacket. Lots of the pats had religious fixations. Many were hypersexual yet devoutly religious, like the prostitute who was “tricking for Jesus,” or the unipolar serial killer they’d brought in from Tylersville who forced women to accept Christ as their savior and then killed them before they could change their minds. “Lotta people in heaven who wouldn’t be if it weren’t for me,” he’d bragged.
“God loves you,” Dawn turned with a Snickers and said to Duke.
“If He does, tell Him to let me the fuck out of this dump, you floppy tit psycho bitch. How about sucking my balls?”
Dawn hmmffed and left.
“Fizzlehead!”
Erik tried the phone again. No answer. Where are they? he wondered. “See, that’s how I know I ain’t queer,” Duke was analyzing himself when Erik returned. “That fizzlehead there? I could have her right on this table. Boy, I could tear her up.”
Erik didn’t need to be convinced. He was thinking. Duke was a fat, disgusting sociopathic slob with bad teeth and hair like a mop. But he’s strong, Erik thought. Three times a week the techs took all Class II’s and III’s to the gym in the other building. Erik had seen Duke bench press 250lbs ten times. Yeah, real strong, he mused.
“I been thinking, Duke,” Erik’s ruined voice grated.
“About what, faggot?”
“You and me, we’ll never get out of here. Greene’s review board wouldn’t okay us for the street in a hundred years.”
“I know that.”
Erik leaned over the table. “I got something I gotta take care of, on the outside.”
“What, kill more babies?”
“I never killed any babies. It was a setup—”
“Sure, faggot. That’s what they all say, ain’t it? Just like I never chopped the arms off that bimbo.”
“Would you listen to me, goddamn it. I think I know a way we can get out.”
Suddenly, Duke was listening.
Erik took Duke to the window, pointed out the “safety barrier.” A high fence surrounded the hospital grounds, yet beyond was a parking lot where the staff and contractors parked their cars. “See that white van?” Erik asked. “And the pickup trucks beside it?”
Letters on the van read “Lawn King.” “Big deal,” Duke remarked.
“They’re groundskeepers. I’ve been watching them. They get here every morning at seven thirty and start cutting the grass. The hospital grounds are huge, these guys are all over the place. They don’t have to come in and out the front gate ’cause the trailers they haul their lawn mowers on are too big. There’s a service gate, right over there behind those trees. If we can get past that gate, we can drive out the main entrance.”
“In what? Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?”
“In one of their trucks. See all those pickups parked next to the van? They belong to the crew.”
“Awright. Keep talking.”
“At eleven thirty they start breaking for lunch. They break for lunch in four shifts, three at a time. They get to the parking lot through the service gate. The supervisor has to let them out. He’s the only one authorized to have the key to the service gate. See that guy there? He’s the supervisor.”
Duke peered through the wire window. Several workers were fueling tractors which hauled the cutting platforms. A man in overalls stood in attendance. He was tall. Broad shoulders and back. Knurly.
“Big fucker,” Duke commented.
“Yeah, but so are you.”
Duke continued to peer out the window.
“I’ve been watching him regular,” Erik grated on. It hurt just to talk. “He’s got a routine. They start breaking for lunch at eleven thirty, like I said. But at eleven he eats his own lunch. He doesn’t leave like the others—he brings his own in a bag. That’s what he does every day at eleven. He sits down by those trees all by himself and eats his lunch.”
Very slowly, Duke nodded.
“No one else is around. All the workers are still out on the grounds cutting the grass. And this guy, like I said, I been watching him. He’s the boss, so he’s the first guy out here every morning at seven thirty. He drives that blue and white Ford pickup right there. We wouldn’t have to waste time looking for which truck is his ’cause we already know.”
“But the gate, the service gate. I don’t even see it.”
“That’s why this’ll work,” Erik came back. “You can’t see the service gate from the grounds because it’s behind those trees, the same trees where that big guy sits and eats his lunch every day at eleven o’clock.”
“Eleven o’clock,” Duke murmured.
“That’s an hour from now. And you know what we’re doing an hour from now?”
“What?”
“The techs are taking our whole wing outside for volleyball.”
«« — »»
Duke had his duties down pat. II’s and III’s achieved their privileged status by demonstrating good behavior for protracted periods. Nothing ever happened because no one ever expected it to. Three techs supervised the volleyball games: Nurse Dallion, who was so thin she looked like she might blow away, and Charlie and Mike. They would have to take all three of them out before someone could get back inside and hit the security button. Mike would be tough—most of the male techs were hired for physical size, and Mike was young and strong—but not stronger than Duke. And Charlie, the black guy, was huge. Erik figured they had maybe two minutes after the fight broke out to overpower the lawn supervisor, get his keys, unlock the service gate, and take off in the pickup. Duke’s job was to take out Mike quickly, then get over to the trees, while Erik took out Nurse Dallion and Charlie. Though Charlie was big, he was also hopelessly myopic. Without his soda bottle lens glasses, he couldn’t see past his face.