Loving Time

twelve

The old fire room on level B3 where Bobbie Boudreau spent his breaks had been too small to rehabilitate during the many improvements and additions to the Stone Pavilion since its original construction in 1910-13. The room, a space of about eight feet by ten feet down a rarely traveled jog off a main passage, had been passed over again and again. Its door was green like all the others, but without a label to designate its purpose. Without a label, the room was ignored. It hadn’t been of use to anyone for many years until the day six months ago Bobbie found it in one of his janitorial ramblings.

When he found it, the dust in the little room was so old it was no longer furry. It had hardened into a gritty crust that refused to come off even with soap and water. Stacks of red fire buckets with clumps of ancient sand still clinging to their sides and bottoms lined one wall. A large axe and a smaller one, both badly rusted, hung on the wall above three folding stretchers made of wood and canvas piled one on top of the other. Rolls of rotting fire hoses almost prevented Bobbie from opening the door. That first day when he pushed inside and breathed the hot stale air of the forgotten room from the hospital’s distant past, he’d felt as if he had discovered another country for himself—almost like the cardboard box he’d jerry-built into his own space in a corner of the ramshackle structure the Boudreau family called home when he was a kid.

He’d stumbled on the place only a few days after his mother died in a room not so very different from this in a brownstone a dozen blocks downtown. And it was there, camped on the only cot still strong enough to support his weight, that he brooded on the bitter humiliations and injustices he had suffered in his life, culminating in the final ultimate castration by the bitch Clara Treadwell, who ruined his life and killed his mother.

It made Bobbie’s jaws hurt—set his throat afire, his whole head and brain, in fact—to think how evil that bitch Clara Treadwell was, how much he wanted her dead. After all his years of faithful service at the hospital, caring for the craziest of the crazy, people so vicious and dangerous the other nurses were scared to handle them. He’d cleaned up their shit, their vomit, dressed their wounds when they stabbed or burned themselves, stopped them when they pulled out their hair. He’d sedated them, calmed them with his touch. They’d loved and depended on him, and she’d swatted him down like a fly for a death he had had nothing to do with. Nothing to do with. He’d been scapegoated, humiliated, drummed out of his whole life when all he’d done was his job as he was told to do it, nothing more, not a thing more.

And it wasn’t the first time in his life this had happened, not by any means the first. How could life be so unfair? The answer was that people like Clara Treadwell always abused their power. They always hurt little people. They hurt anybody they felt like hurting. And good people had no way to protect themselves.

It was actually a photograph of Clara Treadwell in the Medical Center’s newspaper that gave Bobbie the idea of cutting out letters, pasting them into messages, and delivering them to the bitch herself. Her picture appeared with some regularity. He’d seen it in the Post when she was appointed to the President’s commission. The same picture appeared in the Medical Center newspaper. A month later there was an article about her condom lectures and her proposal to put condom machines in the adolescent clinic and inpatient departments of the Psychiatric Centre to prevent AIDS. The article talked about the furor her proposal caused.

That photo had also featured Dr. Harold Dickey, Chairman of the Quality Assurance Committee—the other fuck who deserved to die. Years ago Bobbie had walked into an empty patient room on a locked geriatric-depressive ward and found Dickey and the young Clara Treadwell groping each other behind the door. Lots of things just didn’t change. In the recent newspaper photo they stood beside a condom presentation on a blackboard. Dickey’s hand cupped Treadwell’s shoulder. Both were smiling.

For a few weeks after that photo appeared in the newspaper Bobbie put condoms in Treadwell’s files, left them on her chair in the boardroom, in her desk, in the toes of the running shoes in her closet. The locks were changed in the executive suite, but that never kept him out.

He sat on the cot, staring at his collection of bitch photos taped to the wall. The one that galled him the most was the one with the smiling arrogant foolish hypocritical Dr. Dickey. Those two thought they could get away with anything, thought no one knew what their relationship really was, what they were up to. Bobbie felt powerful, knowing about them and knowing they didn’t know he knew.

Like the colonel years ago who never knew how close he’d come that day to dying, Clara Treadwell didn’t believe she was in mortal danger. She didn’t believe in Bobbie’s power. He could see it in the way she walked, in the smile in her publicity photos. Foolish woman was going to lose her old lover. He stuck the photo back on the wall. Since the bum had had his accident and fallen off the bridge, Bobbie had felt very calm. The pieces of his shattered life were coming together again. He didn’t like messes, knew exactly how to kill so no one suspected a thing. Accidents were his speciality. He’d gotten a bonus he hadn’t expected with the bum, and the next two were scheduled. He checked his watch. One-twenty-five. Time to go to work.