Free Live Free

Arf! Said The Greyhound

The bus that had rounded the corner as Barnes and the sailor left the station stood silent and empty now beyond the wide glass doors. Inside, the passengers who had straggled from it were nearly gone, most of them having carried their luggage to taxis, to the cars of relatives, to city busses, or down the icy city streets. A boy of about seven, wearing black shoes, navy-blue trousers, a white shirt, and a navy blazer with a crest, stood forlornly beside his little suitcase. An old man in a dirty gray sweater slept on the bench where Reeder had sprawled.

Candy had paid her driver grandly with bills; now she discovered that she had no quarters with which to rent a locker. She crossed the station to the magazine stand and asked the concessionaire for change.

“Sure,” he said. Then, as he was scooping coins from the drawer of his register, “I never seen you around here so early.”

Candy thought for a moment. “Yeah, I guess I have been here a few times, late. I was looking for somebody.”

“You usually found him,” the concessionaire said. He was a bald, wizened little man with a crooked nose, and on impulse Candy kissed his bald head as he gave her the change. The kiss left a distinct scarlet print on his scalp. “Hey!” he said. “What the hell?”

“I found him this morning too,” Candy told him. She leaned against the stand and tried to throw her hips to one side like the model of the cover of Cosmopolitan. “You’re him, Sugar. You’re going to take me out and buy me lobster and champagne, and afterwards we’ll go up to your place and listen to your record collection. All night.”

“Like hell,” the concessionaire said. “Anyway, doll, it’s too early for dinner. Only a little after ten.”

“Have it your way. A champagne lunch. Lunch from now till midnight.”

“You don’t look like you need it.”

“Sure, but you do.” Candy picked up an Almond Joy. “These free? For me, I mean?”

“Like hell. Fifty cents.”

As she returned two of his quarters, there was a tug at her skirt. “Ma’am, have you seen my dad?”

Candy glanced down at the boy. “No, ’fraid not. If I were you, kid—” She hesitated, staring. “Hey, maybe I have at that. What’s your name?”

“Osgood M. Barnes.”

“Oh, Lord,” Candy said. And then again, “Oh, Lord.” The concessionaire turned away, his back ostentatiously signaling that he had nothing to do with lost children in the bus station. Candy shrugged, took two more Almond Joys, and dropped them into her purse.

“Have you seen my dad?” the boy asked again.

“Uh huh. What’s your mother call you?”

“Ozzie or Little Ozzie.”

“Right. Well, you know, Little Ozzie, I call your dad Ozzie, so I’m going to call you Little Ozzie. That way I can keep the two of you straight. You want the other half of my candy?”

Little Ozzie nodded.

“Let’s go over and sit down on those benches for a minute. Did you get any breakfast today?”

The boy nodded. “Real early. It wasn’t even daylight outside.”

“What was it? Breakfast, I mean.”

“Cornflakes.”

“Uh huh. And then your mother took you down and put you on the bus, right? And she told you your dad would be meeting you here?”

The boy nodded.

“I know your dad, Little Ozzie.”

“You do?” His mouth was full of sugared coconut.

“I sure do. I’m Candy Garth, and I’m one of your dad’s best friends.”

“Did he tell you to come here and get me?”

“Huh uh. I just happened to come here because I wanted to check this big old suitcase in one of their lockers. In a minute we’ll do that, and we can put yours in with it so you won’t have to carry it around until you get settled someplace. Did your dad know you were coming?”

“I think so.”

“Well, I kind of wonder about that because he never mentioned it to me at all, and I think he would have. We were talking just this morning about what we were going to do today. Did your mamma write him a letter?”

“She said she’d phone him after I was on the bus,” the boy said. “She didn’t want to wake him up, and it was real early.”

“Uh huh. Only she thought he still lived at Mr. Free’s, I bet. The phone got taken out of there. It sounds like she had something pretty important to do, if she put you on the bus alone without making sure first there’d be somebody here to meet you.”

“She was going someplace with Uncle Mike.”

“Uh huh. Did she say when they’d be back?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Uh huh.” Candy sat silently, looking at the boy out of blank, china-blue eyes, a fat, pink girl in a white plastic raincoat and a good wool dress that seemed a bit too old for her.

The boy stared back at her from dark eyes like his father’s. There was much of his father, too, in his high, square forehead and expression of innocent cunning.

“I guess I promised you some candy, didn’t I?”

Ignoring the earlier half bar, Candy fumbled in her purse and brought out one of the stolen Almond Joys. “Here. Have some candy from Candy. That way you won’t forget who I am. Candy Garth.”

The boy said thank you.

“I’m going to have kind of a busy day today, Little Ozzie. I want to say I can’t drag you around while I’m doing all this stuff, but honest to God, I can’t think of anything else to do with you—anybody to park you with. I’m supposed to meet your dad tonight, and—”

“Are you?”

“Yeah, we’re all going to meet back at the Consort—that’s the hotel. After that, I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to do. And before then, I want to find a place to stay. We’ll see. Anyway, what I was going to say was that I might even run into him sooner. You never know. Meanwhile you’ll just have to tag along with me. Right now, I’m supposed to be going over to the hospital to talk to this certain person I helped doctor once. He’s kind of sick. You want to come along?”

“Okay.”

“Fine. Now you come and help Cousin Candy put the bags in the locker. You might even help me get in to see him—I’ll explain on the way over.”

Belmont Hospital was a pile of gray stone, a monument (as Ben Free’s house had been in a much smaller way) to the constructive urges of the last century. Its eight stories were overshadowed by the steel and glass towers of this one, but it spoke with every thick stone windowsill: “I will remain when they are gone. When the spades of the scholars clear my walls of the soil this city will at last become, I will yet stand whole. I will last forever.”

Belmont was psycho, of course, but it was possible it was also correct, as so many of the mad are at last discovered to be. The long-necked yellow machine might have battered those granite blocks for weeks and only disfigured them; and who would dare to use dynamite when the steel and glass towers were so near? As it was, they dropped their eight-foot panes in every wind.

Candy and the boy went up Belmont’s wide steps as though they had legitimate business there, the boy skipping ahead, perhaps because his energies had been refueled by chocolate, almonds, and coconut, perhaps only because they had been restored by a trifle of soiled affection, a hug on the bus. Candy labored after him, her cheeks puffed like Boreas’s and as red as two apples.

“I’m his sister,” she told the nurse inside. And then, recalling that she did not in the least look like Sergeant Proudy, “Not really his sister, but that’s what we always said. We were both adopted.”

“I don’t know whether that makes you a relative or not,” the nurse said doubtfully. She was a pallid, sharp-chinned woman with untidy black hair.

“Legally it does,” Candy announced firmly. “Legally, I’m his sister. We have the same mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. John Proudy.” She was already sorry she had qualified her initial assertion.

“I meant emotionally. After all, that’s what we should really consider, isn’t it? If we’re going to let visitors in and get the patients upset and disturb the whole routine of the hospital, it has to be because we feel it will do the patients some good. What does them good, we think, is seeing someone to whom they are emotionally attached.” She swiveled to face a computer terminal, and her fingers danced across the keys. “He must be quite a bit older than you. He’s forty-two.”

“I’m twenty-one,” Candy said automatically.

“That’s over twenty years.”

“He was always such a kind big brother,” Candy fantasized desperately. “He used to take me fishing. On hot days we went to the ball game.”

“Baseball?” The nurse looked interested. “Do you like it?”

“I never really cared that much about the game, but I liked the hot dogs and soda. There used to be a vendor there who’d put sauerkraut on your wienie if you asked for it.”

“Sauerkraut commonly symbolizes pubic hair,” the nurse remarked pensively. “And the phallic symbolism is almost too obvious.”

“Shut up!” Candy snapped. “I wasn’t talking dirty. I got a kid here.” She picked up Little Ozzie and seated him on the reception desk. “This is Sergeant Proudy’s little son, my nephew Oswald.”

“It’s vital that children learn to recognize their own psycho-sexual urges.”

“Listen,” Candy leaned across the desk, her face redder than it had been on the steps. “I’ve had it up to here with you. Are you going to let me in to see my brother?”

The nurse shook her head. “Your inappropriate rage probably indicates orgasmic repression. You should see a therapist. How long has it been since you’ve had a satisfactory sexual relationship? One with a male who did not recall your father?”

“You dumb bitch, you think you ought to talk like that with a little kid around? You two-bit hunk of tail!” Candy reached across the desk and grabbed the nurse by her starched lapels. Like many fat people, Candy was stronger than she looked, and she shook the nurse until her arms were pinioned behind her.

“Thank you, Parker,” the nurse said.

“Right-o,” drawled a voice behind Candy. Then, “Ow! He kick me! That li’l boy kick me!”

He kicked him again, and again and again, the square-toed black shoes flying, tears streaming down small cheeks. Candy squirmed in the orderly’s grip, mouthing words no child should hear.