Pandemonium

“So what have you boys been up to?” he asked. “Your mother says you’ve moved out west, Del. Colorado. I hear it’s real pretty.”

“In the dark, it’s a lot like Illinois.” My stock answer. He nodded, not really hearing me. “Those mountains are beautiful.”

Lew put away the groceries while the pastor and I talked about nothing. Most of the nothing was handled by Pastor Paul. Whenever I started to answer a question or make a comment, his attention seemed to immediately move on to the next thing he was going to say. After five minutes he announced that he had to be going, and five minutes later he announced it again. We gradually made our way to the front door, where he pulled on his elaborate winter coat and talked some more as he zipped, buttoned, snapped, and cinched. He pumped my hand again. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years,”

he said. It was almost exactly what Dr. Aaron had said. “I’m glad to see you doing well.”

I almost laughed at that.

He clapped me on the shoulder again. “I swear, you look just like your father. He was one of the ‘Chosin Few,’ you know. Not many men survived that battle.”

“That’s true.” I didn’t know what else to say to that. I don’t remember my father talking about Korea.

“I always said, he was the one you wanted behind the wheel of the bus in a snowstorm.” He nodded. “Well, I’ve got to be going.”

I stayed on the porch, getting colder in the breeze, as he finally climbed into the Buick. I watched him pull away and then shut the door behind me.

“I don’t like that guy,” I said.

Lew laughed. “Pastor Paul? Come on, he’s a nice old man.” Mom shook her head, frowning. “What?” Lew said.

“How often does he come over?” I asked.

She shrugged, and carried the coffee cups to the sink. “Once a month. Maybe every few weeks.”

Lew laughed. “Hey, he got the hots for the Widow Pierce?”

Mom gave him the look that Lew and I called the Brush-Back Pitch.

I followed her. “What’s he want? Do you like him visiting you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then why do you put up with him?”

“He’s just doing his job.”

“What job? You’re not even in the congregation anymore. Is he trying to get you to come back?”

“Oh no.” Her voice was hard. “I’ll never set foot in that church again.”

I looked at Lew. Lew looked at his hands.

“Oh, and your friend Bertram called,” Mom said. Her voice had shifted instantly back to normal. “He said he really needed to talk to you.”

“Bertram?” I hadn’t spoken to him since the nuthouse. How the hell had he gotten this number? Maybe the slans had beamed it to him.

“He said he really had to talk to you. I wrote his number on the fridge calendar.”

“Mom, listen, if he calls again, just tell him I’m not in, okay?”

Mom gave me the Brush-Back Pitch (which Lew enjoyed—we were tied now at one apiece). She wasn’t going to lie to anybody.

“Did you remember the sour cream?” she said.

Lew was already heading toward the door.

3

I awoke with a start and immediately groaned in pain. I was on the floor, my right arm and leg stretched up onto the bed, where my wrist and ankle were manacled to the frame. My elbow fired tracer shots of pain up the back of my arm.

“Del, open the door!” My mother. This wasn’t the first time she’d called my name, I realized. Either her shouting or my fall had woken me up.

“It’s okay,” I said. My throat was raw. So I’d been screaming again. I pushed myself off the floor, got a knee under me. The dimly lit room whirlpooled around me—the Nembutal was still in my bloodstream—

but the pain in my elbow lessened.

Louder, I said, “It’s okay! I just fell out of bed.”

I crawled back onto the mattress, my right arm and leg clumsy and dead as prosthetics. Circulation started to return, and every joint on the right side of my body ached in unison: shoulder to wrist, hip to ankle.

The foam-padded manacles were padlocked with Kryptonite combination locks. Blue polymer-wrapped bicycle chains looped from the manacles to the crossbars in the bed frame.

“You were yelling,” Mom said. “Are you sure . . . ?”

I fumbled with the lock at my wrist. It was upside down, and my vision was fuzzy at the edges. I dialed the first number, and dragged my finger to the next tumbler. “It was just a nightmare,” I said. I pushed the last number into line, until I was looking at “9-9-9.” I pulled, and the lock opened. I tugged my hand free of the manacle.

“It’s okay. Just go to bed, Mom.”

I lay facedown, my heartbeat rushing in my ears, until she walked away from the door. I almost drifted asleep again, but forced myself to sit up, rub my face until I was awake enough to unlock my leg and get out of bed. The red LED alarm clock read 3:50. I was sleepy, but sleepy wasn’t good enough.

I turned on the light, found my duffel bag, and swung it onto the bed. I fished out the orange pill bottle from the right-hand side, rattled it. Three pills. I’d taken only one before going to bed, but that had been a mistake. I needed to be either awake or out. I looked at the clock again. Only a few hours until dawn. I dropped the bottle back into my bag without opening it. When I came back from my walk, my mother was in the laundry room, moving my clothes from the washer to the dryer. I stopped short, then saw that they were the clothes I’d put into the washer before I left. It didn’t look like she’d gone into my duffel bag.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

I turned sideways to move past her in the narrow space, a coffee cake under one arm and the three-pound Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune under the other. The laundry room was really a breezeway that connected the garage to the house and did double duty as a mudroom. My dad had built it, under close supervision by my mother. She said he had hands of concrete, hell on anything smaller than a 2x4 or more fragile than sheet metal. He never worked on a piece of wood trim that didn’t snap.

“You already got to the bakery?”

“Seven o’clock Sunday morning, and it was packed.” I went into the kitchen, set the box on the counter. “Same old Polish ladies. That place hasn’t changed a bit.”