The Sleepwalkers (8 page)

The woman from the corner booth is still speaking to the old waitress in a hushed, raspy monotone. It’s taking forever. In his boredom, Caleb tries to overhear their conversation but it’s tough to make out the words. He takes a small, shuffling step forward and hears:

“. . . it ain’t what Jesus wanted for ’em. I know that in my heart.

Jesus hates what’s going on here. It ain’t natural. And nobody will do nothing about it. You knew him. You knew Keith. He called you Grandma. He was nine years old. Nine years! Like he was suckin’ off my tit yesterday, that’s how I remember him. Like my baby. He
was
my baby. Well now the devil’s got him, and ain’t nobody to stand up, just like nobody stood up for Jesus when he was nailed up. Just like you ain’t standin’ up now. Margie, come on with me and tell the sheriff that Keith wouldn’t run away. He wasn’t that kind of boy, and you know he wasn’t. He didn’t run away.” Here, the voice that had until now been as resolute as stone wavers for the first time, withers into a broken falsetto.

“You know he didn’t. You know he didn’t, Margie.”

Margie, the old waitress, has been staring at the counter, never looking up once. Caleb can see her clearly over the other woman’s shoulder. Only Margie’s lips move as she says: “Five eighty-one.”

The woman with her back to Caleb raises a hand up and clubs it down on the Formica counter with a dead thud, so hard that the cash register jumps and the phone belches a tiny dinging sound. She releases the handful of bills locked inside her fist and sniffs. Margie still stares at the counter. She hasn’t moved, except for a tiny flinch when the woman’s fist fell. Now she moves, but only her lips again, and she says very low: “I’m sorry, Lee. But your son ran away.”

The other woman doesn’t speak. She shudders as she takes in a breath, turns and strides out of the restaurant, shoving the glass front door wide on its hinges as she departs.

Caleb looks back at the old waitress: Margie. He remembers her now. It was perhaps eleven years ago, but she looked at least twenty years younger back then. She used to laugh so loud you couldn’t hear your dinner conversation, and sing Dolly Parton tunes under her breath as she slapped down your plate of steak and eggs. She had watched Caleb sometimes when he was a kid, when his parents would head over to Tallahassee for the drive-in movie. She would make popcorn in a saucepan over the stove and let him sit up late watching scary movies like
Swamp Thing
. As far as babysitters go, Margie had been the best. Now, as she stands there, still staring at the counter, Caleb wonders where that jovial young woman went. And what made her so . . . old.

She gathers up the bills on the counter with trembling hands, puts the money in the register, and utters a lifeless: “Next.”

Caleb steps forward, money and check in hand.

“Hi, Margie,” he says. She looks up at this, and he can see her eyes are budding with moisture in the corners, but no tears fall. “I bet you don’t remember me, but you used to give me free vanilla pudding every Sunday. I’m Billy Mason.”

Chapter Four

M
ARGIE DOES REMEMBER
B
ILLY
M
ASON
. Now she sits in a booth across from Caleb and Bean, laughing and rattling on in her raspy Southern drawl. Her wispy, whitish-blond permed hair bobs strangely as she seems to nod her head with emphasis on every syllable. The heaviness of her altercation with the corner-booth woman has been shuffled off like a winter coat on a spring day, and as she tells her story, she gestures wildly enough with the fork in her hand to make Caleb lean back in the booth, fearing for his eyeballs. A triangle of key lime pie rests on the table in front of each of them, “on the house.” This is the Hudsonville Caleb remembers.

“So the pie-baking contest was down to three finalists; it was Billy’s mommy, Jane Pierce, and Genie Barowski, and Billy’s daddy is one of the judges. So they bring out the first pie, and they all eat it, and it’s good and all. And they bring out the next one and eat that one all up, and now they’re fixin’ to bring out the last pie. Well, old Billy is—aw hell, not quite two, I guess, and I was watching him for his folks. I look away for a second and Billy’s gotten away from me—he was prone to do things like that. And he goes toddling over next to his daddy with a load in his britches, stinkin’ to high heaven. And Billy’s daddy says . . .” Margie is already gasping for air, holding back laughter. “He says, ‘Mmm, something smells good—that must be my wife’s pie next.’” Margie erupts into laughter, and so does Bean.

Caleb smiles and chuckles. “Guess that explains the divorce,” he says.

Bean, still red with laughter, points to the remaining bite of pie on his plate. “This stuff should have won the blue ribbon. This pie kicks ass, ma’am.”

“Why, thank you, young man,” says Margie, then to Caleb, “It’s a shame you left, Billy. The young ladies of Hudsonville sure missed out on a handsome young man. Everybody knew you was gonna be a good one.”

“Thanks,” says Caleb.

“You went to California with your ma?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t miss us? You never came back to visit.”

“Well, I guess I did miss you all,” Caleb says, “but Mom was never too keen on my coming back, and with track and debate and journalism, I was pretty busy, even during summers.”

“Well, what a fine young man you turned out to be,” says Margie.

“Yeah,” says Bean around his last mouthful of pie. “We’re hella proud of the little guy.” He tries to put an arm around Caleb’s neck, but Caleb shoves him away, smiling.

“So, what brings you back now,” Margie asks, “after all these years?”

“Well, I was going to see my dad, for one thing.”

Margie nods, but keeps her lips pressed tightly together.

“Do you know where he is?”

Margie just looks at him, still as a statue. Little crescents of moisture build up under her eyes, but she still doesn’t speak. She looks down at her piece of pie—it’s still largely uneaten.

“No,” she says. “I ain’t seen him in a while.”

Caleb studies her. Even Bean is silent.

“What about Christine?”

“The Zikry girl?” Margie asks, looking up again.

Caleb nods. “I got a letter from her. And, uh, thought I’d come visit. Any idea where she is? Does she still live in the same place?”

Margie shakes her head. “Not since the accident.”

“What accident? Is she okay?”

Margie shrugs. “I ain’t seen her since. It was a while ago, though, I imagine her legs would have healed up by now.”

“What happened?” Caleb asks.

“It was at the prom—well over a year ago, I guess. She went with the Davis boy, Zachary, though they wasn’t going as boyfriend and girlfriend—there’s a lot of folks that think Zach Davis ain’t the type who likes girls at all, but I don’t believe it. Anyhow, she was sitting in a chair—so they say—I wasn’t there, so I don’t know nothin’ for sure—you know how rumors can run like locusts once they get goin’. Anyway, they held the dance in the gym. They say she fell asleep in a chair above the dance floor, up top of the bleachers, where they keep the punch bowl and where the concessions are during basketball games, and they say she stood up while she was still sleeping and started walking with her eyes still shut, then started running—still sleeping, mind you, not sleepwalking but sleep
running
—and they say she run herself right off the bleachers. Landed on the dance floor, ’bout twenty or so feet down, and broke both her legs. After that, her momma sent her to the Dream Center.”

“Dream Center?” Caleb asks.

“Big-shot doctor from Chicago or someplace—I don’t know him, I never met the man—came into town a while ago and started it up. He’s supposed to be very good. He’s got all kinds of new methods, but I guess he’s mainly just another kind of shrink. That’s what Sheriff Johnson says, anyway. Gets a lot of business, though. You’d be surprised how many folks don’t sleep right, especially nowadays. Seems like everything’s corrupted now, even folks’ dreams. Not like when I was a girl. We used to—”

“Where is this Dream Center?” Caleb interrupts.

Margie looks surprised. “Why, it’s right behind your house, Billy. They renovated the old mental hospital.”

The sky is a blue canvas, accented by a few huge, billowing, black-laced clouds. The air is still. As they turn down the drive, the hum of insects rises, an infectious clamor. This is not as he remembers it. There are palm trees, for one thing. They line the drive. And flowers stand row upon row in perfect, neat beds where there used to be only tangled weeds and moist clumps of rotting pine needles. The half-grassed-over dirt drive has been replaced by an arc of clean, black pavement, which cuts its way through the vivid green of the neat-trimmed lawn before disappearing amongst the trees. The driveway is long. The day is getting hot, but somehow rolling the windows up and turning on the air-conditioning would dampen the spirit of exploration.

Bean has both of his bare feet up on the dash and is patting one of them at superhuman pace.

“So what do you think the deal is? You think this chick, Christine, is a nut-job, or what?”

“I don’t know. From her letter, it sounded like there was something else going on, like she was being held against her will or something,” says Caleb.

“Yeah, but that’s what everybody who’s nuts says,” Bean is quick to point out. “They all think the world is out to get them or something. My aunt had a nervous breakdown and she thought my uncle was secretly becoming a Republican behind her back. They almost got divorced because of it. Later on, they did get divorced, but that was because she screwed two sailors and—holy shitburger . . .”

As they pass from the cover of trees into a clearing, the Dream Center rises before them.

It’s an imposing place. There are six stories if you count the windows, but that’s deceiving—it’s much taller than six stories, because it was built in probably the 1920s, with high ceilings. But the height of the building isn’t as impressive as its length. It has to be at least six hundred yards long. The windows are simple squares, but there are thousands of them, many of them covered with bars. The façade of the building is painted a stark off-white. It reminds Bean of the
Titanic
. Far away, at either end of the building, there are glass sun porches on every level. A banner is hung from the roof that proclaims dream center in red letters. The driveway curves around and they stop near the front entrance. Caleb shuts off the car and they get out, their heads tilted upward, taking the place in.

Bean tries to determine what makes the Dream Center so remarkable. Certainly, he’s seen much bigger buildings; when he was a kid his dad had an office in the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, and there are plenty of buildings in Los Angeles that dwarf this one too. But now it comes to him: it’s not the size of the place, it’s the
stillness
. Nothing moves. There’s no lawn mower, no sound of laughter, no dog barking, no radio playing, nobody poking their head out the window to see who’s pulled up out front. There’s only the stir of insects in the dark of the forest all around, and the huge, silent edifice.

The hairs on the back of Caleb’s neck are standing up too. He fights the urge to jump back into the car and lock the door. He had thought when he came back here it would be different, that his childhood fears would have been shed along with the Tonka trucks and the LEGOs. He realizes now, it doesn’t always work like that. Looking around, he had thought everything had changed. Flowers supplanted the weeds, pavement smoothed the approach. The gnarled, clawing branches had been trimmed back from the driveway; but now he sees that a fresh coat of paint, like makeup on the face of a whore, changes nothing. This is the asylum, the same as it was when he was a kid. A broken place. A ruined place. Abandoned. Maybe even haunted.