“I played Ping-Pong a lot,” said Rovanna. “Every rec room in every loony bin in California has one. No pool tables though. They’re afraid we’ll skewer each other with broken cues. Isn’t that a hoot? They worry about us with pool sticks, so they cut our brains away. Mr. Hood, can I tell you my deepest fear? My very deepest fear is of Dr. Walter Freeman and his orbitoclasts. It’s difficult for me to say that word out loud. The tool I refer to is a long, slender piece of steel they use to perform lobotomies. It’s sharpened on one end like a small chisel, and the other end flares into a heavy butt about the size of a quarter. This is where, after they’ve inserted the blade between your eyeball and your brain, they tap it with a mallet to get it in. Then they move the orbitoclast back and forth to sever the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobes of the brain. Dr. Walter Freeman performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the United States. My body shivers when I hear his name. It literally quakes. Truly, it did just now. And listen to this, Charlie Hood-that first prefrontal lobotomy performed by Freeman was on a woman named Hood! Alice Hood. Hood. Funny how all things circle back sooner or later, isn’t it? How they connect to form a pattern. I hear her voice sometimes, oddly enough-Alice’s. Now the story gets even stranger, Charlie. Later, Freeman simplified the prefrontal into the transorbital lobotomy for patients in insane asylums. It was a cost-cutting measure. There were around six hundred thousand asylum patients in the nineteen-forties. He wanted them all to have lobotomies. Freeman got rid of the need for cranial drilling and anesthetic by using electroshock, much cheaper, then going in behind the eyes. So what had been a surgical procedure became an outpatient office visit. Freeman drove a van around the country, from mental institution to mental institution, performing lobotomies and giving lectures on his miracle procedure. He called his van the ‘lobotomobile.’ He charged twenty-five dollars for each one. He personally did three thousand four hundred of them, though he was never trained as a surgeon. His partner finally left the practice because of the cruelty and overuse of the lobotomy.” Rovanna went silent for a long moment. Hood heard the ice crunch and a loud swallow. “Say the word orbitoclast, Mr. Hood. Hear the way it lends itself to clear, syllable-by-syllable pronunciation, the way the tongue strikes the palette just behind the front teeth, not once but three times. That, Mr. Hood, is what I live in terror of. Of Freeman and men like him, of horrors sold cheaply and pushed upon all.”
“I understand your terror, Lonnie. But lobotomies are not performed anymore.”
“Don’t be naive. There are many forms and manifestations. Remember Alice Hood.”
“Do you have information I don’t?”
“The more I think about Stren, the more I think he’s linked to Dr. Freeman and of course to the Identical Men. It makes sense if you think it through, one connection at a time.”
“I’ll write down those three things-Finnegan, Freeman, and the Identical Men. I’ll see if I can connect them like you do.” Hood wrote them down on a legal pad.
“Are you mocking me? You think I’m crazy.”
“I think you’re at a disadvantage but still in the game, Lonnie.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“That you can get better. Look at the progress you’ve made since the hospital years. You’ve got your home and a car. You might be able to get some work you like. There’s nothing stopping you.”
“Like when they hire defectives to be greeters or push brooms around the big discount stores?”
“It’s just work, Lonnie. Work is good. It puts you in the world again. You’d be good in the world, I think. Otherwise it’s just yourself and all the things that torment you.”
• • •
Hood took his own advice and drove out to Castro Ford in El Centro. He didn’t expect to see Israel’s Flex parked out front, and it was not. He drove along the parts-and-service yard and the used cars, then the rear of the staging lot where the new cars were brought in from the plants. There sat a tractor-trailer rig, its double-decker ramps loaded with twelve new cars. A silver Flex, freshly washed and agleam in the bold dealership lights, was parked up close to the prep bay. There were lights on inside and one of the rolling doors was open. Hood drove a hundred yards, then swung around and parked on the sandy shoulder of the road. He pulled his camera from behind the seat and brought the staging area into focus. The telephoto lens was powerful and the picture very clear.
Castro came through the rolling door of the prep building wearing chinos and a bright aloha shirt, trailed by a tall man wearing an olive suit. Last came a shorter man in a white short-sleeve shirt with a blue Ford patch on the front, jeans, and work boots. Castro and the tall man stood away from the trailer as the short man climbed up into the cab and lowered one of the ramps.
Hood heard the hydraulics moan and saw the glittering new Fords, still in their white protective wrap, descending to the ground. They strained against the straps. The truck driver climbed back down, then got into the white Fusion at the far end of the lower ramp and backed it off the platform and into a place near the prep building. Castro and the tall man pitched in with the front cars-another Fusion, a Ford Taurus, and two Lincoln MKZs. Then the short man backed out the last two MKZs, one blue and one a dark red. When the top double-decker ramp had been lowered and relieved of its cargo, twelve new cars waited in two neat rows outside the prep bay. Hood timed it at twenty-four minutes and he shot eight pictures.
For a moment the men stood facing the cars. They seemed to be discussing what to do next and through the telephoto lens Hood saw that all three were talking at once and gesticulating at the cars and the prep bay to make their points. The tall man looked Mexican and his olive suit hung expensively. He seemed angry and impatient. The shorter man was nearly bald and he had a thick mustache and an open, humorful face. Castro looked as if he were trying to give orders. Hood had the idea that they’d never done exactly this before, that the situation was different, or maybe altogether new. But how many thousands of factory cars had Castro Ford received in its twelve years of business, Hood wondered. How many hundreds of tractor-trailer deliveries had the short man made? What was the suit doing there? What was the controversy?
A few minutes later Castro and the short man had moved six of the cars into the prep building while the tall one smoked and looked on with an air of disapproval. He checked his cell phone. Then they gathered inside and the roll-up door clattered down. It was 10:42 P.M.
There was a row of windows high up on the prep bay, but Hood had no way of getting up there to look in. He watched the building and tried to keep himself from running his tongue over the diamonds in his tooth. The scar at his hairline itched and he scratched it. He was hungry. Half an hour later the door rolled back up and the men moved the six Fords back into their places on the hydraulic double-decker ramp of the trailer. The other six they moved into the prep bay and the door went down again. Nothing more happened for an hour except that bugs flew in and out of the dealership lights and bats flickered in and out after them. Hood watched, wondering whether Beth would be home on time and whether he had enough croutons for the salad. And why Castro and his men were so touchy about a delivery of cars.