Riders on the Storm

“It’s a heating coil for smoking,” Lindsey said. “This is the only place they’re allowed to light up.”

“Are you afraid of fire?”

“That’s the first concern. Falling asleep with a cigarette going. But there are also patients we wouldn’t be comfortable with having matches or a lighter.”

A pair of the men playing chess waved to Lindsey. None of the others here took notice of her. Or me.

The patient rooms were small and functional. Bed, bureau, shower, TV, closet. Soft blue colored walls. The room had no particular odor, certainly not a hospital one. The only window was large relative to the size of the room and at a glance looked over the far east side of the town where housing developments and a sprawling mall were under construction. If there was solace in the view it would be in the distant piney hills where horses and short-haul trains still ran.

Will had angled the chair so that he could easily turn to see somebody come into his room. He must have heard us enter but he showed no interest in identifying who we were. He wore a handsome wine-colored robe. His hair was mussed. You could see that he — or more likely a nurse — had worked with a comb or brush to give it some shape but it hadn’t worked.

“Will, guess who’s here? This’ll make you very happy.”

She spoke to him as if he would respond with jovial interest. She took both sides of his chair and said, “Why don’t we move you around so you two can have a nice talk?”

“Here,” I said, “I can do it.”

I got behind him and slid the chair around so that it faced the plain wooden chair against the west wall. His chair had thick cushions and wide wooden arms.

I stepped back then and got my first good look at him.

Though I knew this was impossible, he seemed to have lost some serious weight. Maybe ten pounds or more. Impossible. But he was so gaunt, his cheekbones sharper than they’d ever been and the flesh around his dark eyes so bruised from exhaustion they looked as if someone had punched him. He peered out at me from another realm, an unimaginable space that only he inhabited. Not the world we normally shared.

I thought of all the stories I’d heard from the vets. How wounds and grief alike would send soldiers into the kind of shock that sometimes nobody could bring them back from. They just died in that realm.

Or maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe in Will’s realm he wasn’t alone. Maybe the ghost of the little girl he’d killed was with him. Maybe this retreat from reality didn’t have much if anything to do with Steve Donovan. Maybe it was the little girl who’d drawn him irretrievably back into himself.

“Say something to him, Sam.”

I picked up the wooden chair and moved it closer to him. After I sat down, I said, “I’ve been thinking about you, Will. I just wanted to stop by and see how you were doing.”

I felt silly. When I was very small I had a plastic Roy Rogers figure that I probably got for a box top and a quarter from whatever cereal sponsored him. It was probably six, seven inches tall and showed Roy all decked out in his fancy cowboy attire. He was then the most popular cowboy on radio and in comic books. My dad used to laugh about me talking to Roy before I went to sleep at night. Dad said I carried on a lot of one-way conversations.

Will wasn’t any more responsive than Roy had been all those long years ago.

He scratched his nose, he blinked a few times, he sneezed, he sighed and he shifted in his chair trying to get more comfortable. What he didn’t do was show any recognition of me in his vacant gaze.

“Remember when we beat Taylor school in softball, Will?”

Over the next twenty minutes I tried a number of those memory shakers. None worked. Lindsey had left soon after I’d started in on them. She popped back in every few minutes.

I had the feeling I was talking to an alien life form. One of those invaders who look exactly like us but are unable to pass because they don’t react the way they should.

Poor Karen; even worse, poor Peggy Ann.

He narrowed his eyes once. He was assessing me, that was what it felt like anyway. He could talk but he chose not to. I was sure of it.

On her reappearance Lindsey said, “You’ve certainly done your best, Sam.”

“I think he sort of acknowledged me at least. In his eyes. And a couple of times when I mentioned something we’d done together I saw his lips tug at the corners as if he might be trying to smile.”

“That’s very good news.”

“So now what?”

“Doctor Rattigan has another drug he’d like to try.”

“You think he knows what he’s doing? Shouldn’t you be in the lead here? You’re a shrink.”