“He weren’t queer,” said Kellog, his voice rising slightly. “If that’s what you’re saying, I’m telling you now that it’s not true. He weren’t a fag. Me neither. ’Cause if that’s what you’re trying to say-”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Long make a gesture with his right hand, and the guards quickly swam into view behind Kellog.
“It’s all right, Andy,” said Aimee. “Nobody’s suggesting anything of the kind.”
Kellog was shaking slightly as he tried to keep his anger in check. “Well, he weren’t, that’s all. He never touched me. He was my friend.”
“I understand, Andy,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest anything different. What I meant to ask you was if he ever gave you any sign that you might have something in common. Did he ever mention his daughter to you?”
Kellog began to calm down, but there was a gleam of hostility and suspicion in his eyes. I knew it would take a lot to make it go away.
“Yeah, some.”
“This was after he began to look out for you, right?”
“That’s right.”
“She was a patient of Dr. Clay’s, wasn’t she, just like you were?”
“Yeah. She disappeared while Frank was in jail.”
“Did Frank ever tell you what he thought might have happened to her?”
Kellog shook his head. “He didn’t like talking about her. It made him sad.”
“Did he ask about what happened to you up north?”
Kellog swallowed hard and looked away. The clicking noise came again, but this time there was no anger with it.
“Yes,” he said softly. Not “yeah,” but “yes.” It made him sound younger, as though by raising the subject of the abuse I was propelling him physically back into his childhood. His face grew slack, and his pupils shrank. He seemed to grow even smaller, his shoulders hunching, his hands opening out in an unconscious gesture of supplication. The tormented adult faded away, leaving behind the ghost of a child. I didn’t need to ask what had been done to him. It played out on his features in a series of trembles and winces and flinches, a dumb play of remembered pain and humiliation.
“He wanted to know what I saw, what I remembered,” he said. It was almost a whisper.
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him what they done to me,” he said simply. “He asked me if I’d seen their faces or heard a name spoke, but they wore masks, and they never spoke no names.” He looked straight at me. “They looked like birds,” he said. “All different. There was an eagle, and a crow. A pigeon. A rooster.” He shivered. “All different,” he repeated. “They always wore them, and they never took them off.”
“Did you remember anything about where it happened?”
“It was dark. They used to put me in the trunk of a car, tie my arms and my legs, put a sack over my head. They’d drive for a time, then carry me out. When the bag came off I’d be in a room. There were windows, but they were all covered up. There was a propane heater, and storm lamps. I’d try to keep my eyes closed. I knew what was going to happen. I knew, ’cause it had happened before. It was like it was always going to happen to me, and it wasn’t never going to stop.”
He blinked a couple of times, then closed his eyes as he relived it over again.
“Andy,” I whispered.
He kept his eyes closed, but he nodded to let me know that he’d heard.
“How many times did this happen?”
“I stopped counting after three.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about it?”
“They said they’d kill me, and then they’d take Michelle and do it to her instead. One of them said they didn’t care if they did it to a boy or a girl. He said it was just different for each, that was all. I liked Michelle. I didn’t want nothing bad to happen to her. It had been done to me before, so I knew what to expect. I learned to block some of it out. I’d think of other things while it was happening. I’d imagine that I was somewhere else, that I wasn’t in me. Sometimes, I’d be flying over the forest and I’d look down and see all of the people, and I’d find Michelle and I’d go to her and we’d play by the river together. I could do that, but Michelle, she wouldn’t have been able to do that. She’d have been there with them, all the time.”
I leaned back. He had sacrificed himself for another child. Aimee had told me as much, but to hear it from Kellog himself was another matter. There was no boastfulness about his tale of self-sacrifice. He had done it out of love for a younger child, and it had come naturally to him. Once again, I was aware that here was a boy trapped in a man’s body, a child whose development had ceased almost entirely, arrested by what had been done to him. Beside me, Aimee was silent, her lips clasped so tightly shut that the blood had drained from them. She must have heard this before, I thought, but it would never get any easier to listen to.
“But they found out, in the end,” I said. “People discovered what was happening to you.”
“I got angry. I couldn’t help it. They brought me to the doctor. He examined me. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want them to come for Michelle. Then the doctor asked me questions. I tried to lie, for Michelle, but he kept tripping me up. I couldn’t keep all the answers straight in my head. They brought me back to Dr. Clay, but I didn’t want to talk to him no more. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I kept quiet. They put me away again, but then I got too old and they had to let me go. I fell in with some people, did some bad things, and they put me in the Castle.”
The Castle was the name given to the old Maine Youth Center in South Portland, a correctional facility for troubled youths built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had since closed, but it was no great loss. Before the building of the new youth facilities in South Portland and Charleston, the recidivism rate for young inmates had been 50 percent. It was down to 10 or 15 percent, largely because the institutions now focused less on incarceration and punishment than helping the kids, some as young as eleven or twelve, to overcome their problems. The changes had come too late for Andy Kellog, though. He was a walking, talking testament to everything that could go wrong in the state’s dealings with a troubled child.
Now Aimee spoke. “Can I show Mr. Parker your pictures, Andy?”
He opened his eyes. There were no tears. I don’t think he had any left to shed.
“Sure.”
Aimee opened her document case and removed a cardboard wallet. She handed it to me. Inside were eight or nine pictures, most done in crayon, a couple in watercolor paint. The first four or five were very dark, painted in shades of gray and black and red, and populated by crude naked figures with the heads of birds. These were the pictures that “Bill” had told me about.
The rest of the artwork depicted variations on the same landscape: trees, barren ground, decaying buildings. They were crude, with no great talent behind them, yet at the same time a great amount of care had been lavished on some of them, while others were angry smears of black and green, still recognizably a version of the same locale, but created in a burst of anger and grief. Each picture was dominated by the shape of a great stone steeple. I knew the place, because I had seen it depicted before. It was Gilead.
“Why did you draw this place, Andy?” I asked.
“That’s where it happened,” said Kellog. “That’s where they took me.”
“How do you know?”
“The second time, the bag slipped while they were carrying me in. I was kicking at them, and it nearly came off my head. That’s what I saw before they pulled it back down again. I saw the church. I painted it so I could show it to Frank. Then they moved me to the Max, and they wouldn’t let me paint no more. I couldn’t even take them with me. I asked Miss Price to take care of them for me.”