Vern was confused about the charges. They tried to convince him that what he had done was wrong and after a while he pretended to believe them. But he knew that he was being punished for his failure. After all, they had been lined up. Absolutely in line, and he—the story of his life—had missed.
He liked the State Hospital. He didn’t mind the steel mesh on the windows. He had a room of his own and three sets of green pajamas. He swept his floor every morning, ate the food on the tray, and had a nap on his neatly made bed. When he woke up the tray and the broom were gone and his room was bare and tidy again. He slept a lot and managed to forget nearly everything.
After a year or so he started thinking again, though he didn’t much want to. What he thought about was children. Teddy and Brenda had been six years old and five when he last saw them. First he remembered their voices saying “Dad.” He dreamed that his only real name was Dad and the other things that people called him were either aliases or insults. He remembered seeing a whistle on the shelf of a variety store and wondering if Teddy would like it, wondering if he should get one for Brenda too.
Then he dreamed that he was in the open door of a plane several thousand feet above the earth and he had to jump holding a baby in his arms. It was his baby. He jumped, pulled the rip cord on the parachute, and it didn’t open. The emergency release didn’t work. He was falling fast. The wind tore at him fiercely. He was gripping the baby as tightly as he could but the wind pried under his arms, strained at his muscles, and suddenly the baby was loose, falling beside him, just out of reach. He flailed and groped in the air, trying to reach it. The baby was falling just a little bit faster than he was. It was below him, falling away from him as he fell after it. The earth screamed up at him. He knew that the baby was going to hit first and he would see it, would know it for a whole fraction of a second before he was smashed into a pulp himself. The terrible millisecond of that grief burst in him and he woke shrieking. He couldn’t get the dream out of his head. He prayed that he would have the dream again but that this time he would fall faster and be allowed to die first.
The dream was not to be monkeyed with. It did not come again and it would not go away.
Emily did not answer his letters. He got a formal letter from a lawyer “reminding” him that the divorce had gone through and that he had been denied all communication with the children.
That was when he remembered the freaks in the parking lot. Their strange twisted forms danced viciously in his head. They were cruel and jeered at him.
He decided that Teddy and Brenda were going to become freaks like that if Emily was allowed to raise them.
About that time Vern’s mother visited him and he was required to spend every morning and afternoon in the day room with the other patients. His mother made him think of the old lady at the trial. She never talked about why he was there. She talked about her farm, the dairy that Vern’s dad had built up and left to her when he died. She said she could sure use a man around the place. The hired hands were shiftless sneaks. She said Emily never let her see the children.
Vern hated the day room. He wanted to be alone again. Then he decided that he wanted to leave the hospital altogether. He started paying attention to the doctors and nurses.
He was released from the hospital three years and six months after he had entered it. His mother met him in the lobby and walked out with him. She led him to a big car and they got in. She drove him home to the farm where he had grown up. Mrs. Bogner took Vern on a tour of the farm and introduced him to the hands. It was spring and the garden needed a lot of work. While his mother fried chicken, Vern sat at the kitchen table and sketched a plan for the vegetable plot on a scrap of notebook paper.
That was Thursday. The following day was a payday for the hands Mrs. Bogner stuck to the old ways and paid her men and her bills with cash. Just after midnight Vern got out of bed, put on the tan work clothes his mother had bought for him, packed a brown paper bag with more clothes and shaving gear, and eased out of his room. He slipped past the old lady’s door and down the stairs. Vern’s father had always kept the cash box in a drawer beneath the flour bin in the kitchen. The key had always hung on a small nail in the door of the hall closet. Vern’s mother hadn’t changed anything.
He was parked outside the grade school at 8:30 on Friday morning. His mother’s car was newish and respectable. Vern pretended to read a newspaper and smiled to himself as he watched the kids straggle into school. A little before nine he began to worry that they might have gone in another door. For a moment he wondered if they might have changed so much that he wouldn’t recognize them. Then he saw them. They were together but arguing about something. Teddy gave Brenda a push and she stamped her foot and yelled at him. Vern rolled down his window. His whole body was suddenly flooded with sweat. His voice shook and came out too soft. They didn’t hear him. Brenda tried to stomp on Teddy’s sneakered foot and grab a book from him. Teddy laughed and held the book up out of reach. Vern found his old voice. He disliked their bickering. He always had.
“Teddy! Brenda!” The pair, caught in their quarrel, looked guiltily toward him. He was calm again. He knew them well, after all.
“Dad?” said Teddy. And Brenda, confused and not remembering, looked at her brother and said, “Dad?”
Disneyland was fine. They drove straight through two days, put up in a motel across the street from the enormous amusement park, and then spent three days from breakfast until bedtime glutting themselves on the wonder of it.
Vern was calm and happy. The kids were in a daze of ecstasy. They collapsed at night too tired to watch the television in their motel room. After they were asleep Vern would turn the set on, keeping the volume very low. Crouched close to the set he would watch the late news, listening carefully for mention of himself or the children. There was nothing. He knew the police would be looking whether the news mentioned it or not. He sat up late watching the kids sleep.
When they climbed into the car on the day after they had finished with the amusement park they obviously expected to be taken home. Brenda was bouncing a toy crocodile on a stick. “Mama will like this. I’m going to give it to her.” Teddy announced that he would give Mom the photo of himself in the race car. Vern had sidestepped their questions like a bullfighter for days. Now he took a slow breath and said he thought they ought to take a look at the Grand Canyon before they headed back. Maybe ride some horses down the trails.
They kept talking about their mother. Brenda started to worry about school. Her class had planned a roller-skating trip and she suddenly realized that she had missed it. She came out of a gas station toilet crying pitifully. Vern was convinced that she’d been frightened by a molester and he roared through the door marked WOMEN to find nothing but a little room with cracked plaster, a damp, bitter smell, and a trail of sodden tissue paper on the floor. When he got back to the car Brenda was sobbing in the back seat with Teddy sneering at her and the station attendant, a plump teenager with a red oil rag hanging out of his hip pocket, was staring suspiciously at all of them. Vern handed him money and slammed his way into the driver’s seat. He flicked the engine on and whipped around in the seat to stare at Brenda. “Why are you crying? What happened?”
The child’s crumpled face opened. She wailed. She buried her head.
“She misses her friend Lucy,” chortled Teddy.
“Oh, for …” Vern put the car into gear, ripped out of the station and into the road, just missing a trash can and a flashy new motorcycle parked at the edge of the lot.
She cried for ten miles. When they stopped for lunch, Vern took his first bite of sandwich and chewed twice before he realized he was staring at a huge glossy poster of an armless, legless creature smiling out of a hairless head. Fish flickered beside the worm thing and the wavering blue background made it appear to be underwater. Silver letters marched across the bottom. “QUESTIONS?” they glittered. “ASK AQUA BOY!”
Of course he must have seen those posters before, as well as
the red and silver ones of the twins that were scattered all down the coast and in every desert town, but he hadn’t recognized them.
Now he saw it, flush in the window of the drive-in burger joint—flaring out at the parking lot with fat girls and little kids trailing past on their way in and out.
• • •
He made up his mind right then, changing directions, and drove for two days without sleeping. The kids were silent now, wary. He wasn’t talking, couldn’t talk. He stopped in Redding and went into a sporting-goods store while they stayed in the car. He came out with a long box, put it into the trunk, and got back into the car and drove on. Teddy and Brenda were very good. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t fight. They got out at gas stations to pee and didn’t ask for Cokes. They said, “Chocolate,” or “With cheese please,” when he looked at them in drive-in grub joints, but they said these things very quietly and humbly.
When they passed the “WELCOME TO SEAL BAY” sign on the coast road Teddy’s voice came drifting up over the back seat. “Dad …” softly. And then, “Dad.” Vern nodded at him in the rearview mirror. He could see the boy’s pale, grimy face in the early-morning light. They were both dirty. Brenda’s hair was tangled, hadn’t been combed in days. The T-shirts and jeans he had bought them in Anaheim were stained and wrinkled. A tang of puppy smell filled the air around them.
Vern had seen several posters now that he knew what he was looking at.
“Everything’s going to be all right, son,” Vern nodded cheerfully at the road. “I’m going to fix everything.”
“Dad … Are you taking us home to Mama?” Teddy’s voice was as shaky as a man with a snake on his chest. Brenda’s eyes were huge in the rearview mirror and she didn’t say anything.
Vern scowled at the road, “No. She’s not good for you.” And then they were on their own street and every house and bush was familiar to Vern except that the Bjorns had painted their house blue and put a greenhouse on their side porch. Vern was talking very fast.
“You’re going to stay in the car and I’m going in to fix your mother and then we’re going to see the Grand Canyon like I said and you’re never coming back here again and you’ll stay with me always. Now you stay right in the car.” He pulled into the driveway and Emily’s car was in the garage and the curtains weren’t opened yet and she had let the grass go and the milk and the paper were on the step and he didn’t even hear Teddy’s voice saying, “Dad, what are you going to do? Dad? Dad? Dad?” or Brenda beginning a strange little song of “No Dad, please Dad, no Dad, please Dad,” because he was slinking out of the car, leaving the door open so Emily wouldn’t hear it close and he crept back to the trunk and opened it and was taking the shotgun out of its box and breaking it and shoving in shells from the box of ammo and he didn’t even notice the two small bodies beside him, tugging at him, yelping, “No, Dad, don’t hurt her—no, Dad!” and “Please please no no please please.” He swung his arms once to get clear and then pushed through the door that led from the garage to the kitchen and he saw the plastic cabbage that Emily had stuck in a frame on the kitchen wall as a joke years ago and he was reaching for the knob on the bedroom door and when the door opened Emily was there. She was pulling a pair of pants up her thick legs and her blouse wasn’t buttoned yet and she looked up at him with her hair flying around her head and he saw her fear in her heavy face and he saw the fear spot just where her neck joined her body—the deep dent where the life eddied close to the surface and he brought the shotgun up and it reached all the way to her, which made him realize she had been right all those years when she complained that the room was too small, and the tips of the barrels almost rested in the hollow of her throat and he squeezed and one economical barrel went off and a lot of Emily went out through her back onto the unmade bed and all the way across to break the big mirror over the dresser and spray the pale lavender wall with dark splotches.
Vern offered Arty a tattered envelope crammed with news clippings to fill in the gaps. Teddy and Brenda had run screaming to the neighbors, a retired couple who had known the children since they were born. Mrs. Feddig called the police while Mr. Feddig held the hysterical kids in his arms. When Mrs. Feddig got off the phone, she took the kids and her husband slid into his gardening boots and was just opening the door to look out when they all heard another blast, louder this time, from the yard next door. Mrs. Feddig had a good grip on Brenda but Teddy got away and was right behind the old man when he poked his head through the shrubs and looked into the Bogners’ front yard.
Vern Bogner was wandering around the middle of the overgrown lawn. He was staggering—gently waving his arms. When he wheeled around Mr. Feddig saw no face at all, just a black and red fountain of jumping, bubbling meat with shreds of what might be bone, and the whole front of the man’s tan work clothes was covered with it. Teddy screamed until the police came.
Vern was always a lousy shot. His aim had been a disappointment to his dad in the woods and fields when he was a kid. He’d been just that hair off true when he had the Binewski bambini lined up in his sights. He managed to blow his wife out through her own back by dint of a 12-gauge within two inches of her breastbone, but when the final big shot came due he stuck the second barrel of that same 12-gauge under his chin and managed to blast off 75 percent of his face, including his mouth, nose, larynx, one ear, and one eye, and still miss—MISS, mind you—the vital areas that could have finished him.
Certainly he would have bled to death soon if left to his own devices, but the Seal Bay paramedics had been having a slack season. They were full of enthusiasm and delighted at the chance to use all their shiny equipment. Vern lived.
Vern never did have much sense of humor, and after he’d transformed himself, by this clumsy method, into what was known ever after as the “Bag Man,” he was downright maudlin. He spent a year in the hospital and had a lot of surgery. But there are limits to what even an imaginative plastic surgeon can do.
The “Bag” moniker originated in the plastic pouches that hung from the ends of various tubes running into and out of what was left of his head. Since he had no jaw left, neither upper nor lower, eating, when he finally got off IVs, was a delicate liquid process accomplished with various protein solutions and a squeeze bulb attached to the appropriate tube. Breathing was also tricky, and he dripped and gurgled into one of those plastic bags all the time.
Later, when he was required to keep company with people other than medical professionals, he wore a kind of heavy grey veil draped from his forehead with only his right eye peeking out. The bottom of the veil was always tucked into his collar and the whole thing was bulgy and lumpy from the tubes and bags inside. He had sight in that right eye and he could hear with his right ear. He couldn’t talk or taste or smell. He had a hard time if he caught a cold, and he needed more surgery and constant medical supervision.
The murder trial was brief. He lay on a rolling cot in the courtroom and pled guilty by writing the word on a pad of lined yellow paper. He was sentenced to life.
He spent a while in a screened-off corner of a ward in the State Prison Infirmary and made weekly trips by ambulance to a hospital. Then he got evicted from jail. There were budget cuts and congressmen complaining about how expensive it was to keep the Bag Man. After a lot of heeing and hawing they threw him out.
The Bag Man went back to his mother’s dairy farm. He hadn’t got over the idea of the children. Teddy and Brenda were living with Emily’s parents and he was not allowed to see them. He wrote them long letters full of advice and apple-pie wisdom and complicated descriptions of his garden and what to do for slugs and how marigolds related to bush beans and how that was a lesson in being a man.
Emily’s mother picked those letters out of the regular mail with her kitchen tongs and slid them into a big manila envelope. When the envelope was full she sent it to the kids’ welfare office and started on another one.
The Bag Man sat next to his mother on the sofa every night and watched the news.
It was 2 A.M. The last stragglers had been herded out of the gates an hour before and the show was bedding down. The midway was dark but all around us there were lights in the trailers and vans. Horst was hosting a card game. The candy girls’ barracks was full of redheads coming out of the showers with their hair in towels, ready to put their feet up and smoke a little weed and bitch about the townies and about their men, old, new, used, broken. Al and Lil were winding up the night’s count and having a drink together with their legs tangled under the dinette table in their trailer. The twins would be brushing each other’s hair and chattering on their bed.
It may seem odd that I have no idea what town we were in, but when the show was alive and functioning—especially at night—it felt like the whole world and it always looked the same no matter where we were. In the daylight we might notice that we were in Coeur d’Alene or Poughkeepsie, but at night all we knew was us.
The Bag Man had scribbled and handed us pages for an hour and a half or so. I stood beside Arty, taking each sheet and holding it up for him to read, reading over his shoulder, then adding the sheet to the pile that grew up on the console table. Arty was silent, waiting, reading patiently. Occasionally the Bag Man would pause while we read a certain page, watching anxiously to see if we understood. When Arty nodded at him he would go back to the furious scribbling. Sometimes the print was so hurried that it was hard to read. Once Arty read the page out loud and asked the Bag Man if that was what it said. The Bag Man gurgled and bobbed gingerly and went on writing. Twice Arty asked questions that the Bag Man answered on paper. I had never seen Arty so patient for so long with one norm. Finally the Bag Man stopped writing and sat back. He watched us read the final page. It said, “I keep my mother’s garden and watch TV.”
Arty edged around in his chair and took a sip from his straw.