“Well,” my mother said, thumbing through the newspaper one Sunday morning, “the person doing this is one sick individual, that much we know for certain.”
“And they eat corn,” Lisa added, patting her head with a T-shirt. The most recent victim, she had washed her hair so many times it now resembled the wiry, synthetic mane of a troll doll.
Everybody had their theories but nobody had any hard evidence. Discounting my parents, that still left six children and my grandmother, all possible suspects. I eliminated myself, and because the towels were carefully folded, I excused my brother, who to this day cannot manage such a complex activity. It must smart to use a towel for such a delicate purpose. I watched as my family took their seats at the table, waiting for someone to cry out or flinch, but nothing came of it.
My mother and sister had always thought themselves so wily and smart, but when pressed for a suspect, they said only that this case was beneath them. If someone were to be murdered or kidnapped, they’d rise to the occasion and finger the guilty party within an hour. This particular case fell under the category of “aggravated mischief” and was therefore unworthy of their professional attention. Whoever it was would listen to their conscience and confess sooner or later. In the meantime, my mother would stock the linen closet with white towels. Case closed.
Later that month someone went through my father’s top drawer, stealing a kneesock packed with one hundred and twelve Liberty silver dollars. I knew my father’s drawers as well as I knew my own; everyone did. That was how you occupied your time when you had the house to yourself — you riffled through my father’s drawers before moving on to his second hiding place in the shed. I had seen and counted these coins many times. We all had, but who would go so far as to steal them?
My father gathered us all in the dining room and listened as we each took turns denying any involvement. “Dollars come in silver? I never knew that. Does the government issue them in a kneesock or was that your idea?”
“Okay,” my father said. “All right, I understand now. Nobody took my coins. I guess they just got tired of living cooped up in that dresser and decided to roll out the door and spend themselves on candy and magazines. That’s what happened, isn’t it! Oh, they’re probably out there as we speak, having themselves a grand old time, aren’t they?” His voice visited its highest register, and he rubbed his hands together as if he were considering a tray of rich desserts.
“Free at last with their whole lives ahead of them. Can’t you just feel the excitement? Doesn’t it make you want to throw up your hands and scream?”
He lowered his voice and delivered a series of ultimatums I didn’t quite catch. My mind was snagged on the thought of those jubilant silver dollars, raucous and dizzy with their first feelings of independence. I pictured their splitting into groups and traveling by night to avoid any excess attention. It might prove difficult to roll over grass and leaves, so I imagined them huddled in the carport, deciding it best to stick to the roads and sidewalks. The thought of it made me laugh and when I did, my father said, “You think this is funny? You getting a chuckle out of this, are you? I’m glad you find it so amusing. Let’s see how funny it is when I search your room, funny guy.”
On television a search warrant guaranteed that your home would be trashed, and this was no different. Mine was the only clean room in the entire house. This was my shrine, my temple, and I watched in horror as my drawers were emptied and my closets brutally divorced of order. While searching my desk, my father came across a gold-plated mechanical pencil he recognized as his own. It had once occupied the same drawer as his coins, and I admitted that, yes, I had “taken” the pencil but I hadn’t really “stolen” it. There was a big difference between the two. You steal the things that you covet while you take the things the original owner is incapable of appreciating. The pencil had spoken to me of its neglect, and I had offered to put it to good use. Taking is just borrowing without the formality. I’d planned on returning it once it ran out of lead — what was the big deal? This wasn’t the sort of case-busting clue he was making it out to be. There were no blaring trumpets or high-speed chases, just a lousy pencil I’d used only to make me feel important. The moment my father and his pencil were reunited, I became the prime suspect, tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence. There was nothing I could say to change his mind.
“Did you spend the money already or have you got it buried out in the yard?” my sister Lisa asked. Buried? Now I was a thief and a pirate.
Falsely convicted of a crime I didn’t commit, there was only one thing I could do. The shoe polish was kept in the linen closet. I chose black, massaging it into my scalp in an attempt to change my identity.
The Fugitive’s hair always looked perfectly natural. It blew in the breeze created by oncoming trucks as he stood beside the lonesome road, bidding farewell to a town unable to appreciate his unique gifts. My natural hair looked pretty much the same way, but once the polish dried, my hair hardened into a stiff, unified mass that covered my head like a helmet. I went to bed and awoke to find my sheets and pillows smudged and ruined. My face and arms were bruised-looking, and everything stank with the rigid, military odor of a buffing rag. It was no wonder the Fugitive was a loner. I liked the sheen and color of my hair but found I needed to slick it back to maintain a clean forehead. This hair of mine was bulletproof. You could have pounded my head with a golf club and I wouldn’t have felt a thing. I carried my soiled sheets into the woods, knowing that from here on out, things were going to be different. I had crossed over the edge, and there was no turning back.
After I changed my identity, my next step was to find the real thief and clear my name. My mother and sister were fond of saying, “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.” This was a bit of dime-store wisdom picked up from one of their television programs, but I thought it might be worth a try. It was certainly true of whoever was wiping their ass on the towels, but then again, they had no choice. The bathroom was where we kept our toilet and even if the criminal had changed their ways, they’d still need to use the john. Aside from the silver dollars, my father’s drawers were home to several pocket watches, a pair of cuff links shaped like dice, tie clips, fine cigarette lighters, and a deck of nudie playing cards missing both the king of hearts and the ace of clubs.
Figuring the thief had good reason to return for more, I undertook a stakeout. My father’s closet had shuttered, louvered doors that afforded a view of the entire room. I took my place, waiting a full hour before my mother entered the room shouting, “I don’t give a tinker’s damn what they do on Mount Olympus, in this house you don’t boil a seven-dollar steak!” My intuition told me she was talking to my grandmother. Slamming the door behind her, she took a seat on the edge of the unmade bed. She stared down at her bare feet and then, as if she expected them to apologize for some trouble they’d recently caused, said, “Well, what have we got to say for ourselves?” She picked at her toenail for a moment before crossing the room to fetch a bottle of glossy polish from the top of her dresser. This was a new shade, the color of putty. Rather than highlighting the nails, it caused them to disappear into the surrounding flesh, creating a look both freakish and popular. I’d never understood why women bothered painting their toenails, especially my mother, whose crusty, misshapen talons resembled the shattered, nugget-sized Fritos found huddled in the bottom of the bag. She stood before the mirror, shaking the bottle and fretting at the sight of her brittle, frosted hair arranged into a listless style she referred to as “the devil’s stomping ground.” I watched then as she rummaged through her closet, returning with a tall plastic box secured with the sort of latches you might find on a suitcase. I’d been through my father’s closet thousands of times, but never my mother’s. “If I had something of value, this is the last place I’d put it,” she’d say. “The god-damned moths don’t even want what I’ve got.” My father’s closet and dresser drawers offered clues to his inner life. I enjoyed uncovering what I
thought to be his secrets but felt it best to honor my mother’s privacy, not out of respect so much as out of fear. I didn’t want any possible handcuffs or hooded leather mask interfering with the notion that this woman was first and foremost my mother.
She carried the box to her dresser and unfastened the latches, lifting the lid to reveal a pale Styrofoam head supporting a sandy blond wig, the hair sculpted into a series of cresting waves. This was a magnificent crown of hair, so perfect that it might have been styled by God himself on one of those off days he was feeling creative rather than vengeful. After carefully removing the pins, my mother placed the wig upon her head and studied herself in the mirror. She nodded her head this way and that, but the curls, defying all laws of physics, held their position. Fumes from the shoe polish were making me nauseous, and I had begun to perspire, the inky sweat running down my forehead and staining my shirt.
“What do you say to that, missy?” my mother asked herself. She applied a coat of lipstick and brought her face close to the mirror, cocking her head and arching her eyebrows in a series of expressions that conveyed everything from heart-felt concern to full-throttle rage. Then she stepped away from the mirror, reintroducing herself slowly, as if her reflection were a guest she was meeting for the first time. I often did the same thing myself in the privacy of the bath-room. “Who’s he!” I’d ask, admiring myself with a new shirt or haircut. Most often, my private sessions would end with my pants in a tangle around my ankles. Would my mother now unbutton her blouse? Would she lift her skirt and excite herself? At what point would I call out and put an end to this? How could I live with myself, knowing what she looked like naked? Please, I thought, don’t do it. Don’t be like me.
“All right then” my mother said. “What do you say we paint those toenails?” Opening the jar, she took a seat on the edge of the bed. I watched then as she parted her toes and set to work, pausing every so often to regard herself in the mirror. She finished the right foot and held it out for inspection. “A little on the nail, a little on the toe, a few drops on the carpet, and everybody’s happy.”
When the left foot was finished, she tossed the polish onto the dresser and fashioned a mound out of pillows, something so high that she could lie on her back without crushing her wig. It looked uncomfortable, but she seemed used to it. Spreading out her arms and legs, she closed her eyes and reclined as best she could. The room, with its unmade bed and cigarette packets littering the floor, resembled a crime scene. She might have been a nightclub hostess strangled for knowing too much or a career woman who’d choked on her popcorn while watching the late movie. How strange to put on a wig, to change into someone else, and then lie down and take a nap. Was she dreaming of all the exotic things this character might do, or was her wig nothing more than a high-maintenance sleeping cap?
Television stakeouts tend to reduce the hours of monotonous waiting into a single moment of truth. The detective arrives just in time to overhear the ransom instructions or catch the jewel thieves studying the blueprints to the museum. I stood for an hour with a head full of shoe polish, a fugitive, watching my mother asleep in disguise and waiting for something to reveal itself.
After she’d woken up, my mother returned her wig to its hiding place and left the room. I waited for a few minutes and then crept downstairs, where I washed my hair three times, taking care to rinse the tub with Comet and destroy my soiled shirt. At the sound of my father’s footsteps coming through the front door, I darted into my bedroom, slapping my face and examining my reflection in the darkened window. I wanted to be apple-cheeked, looking fresh and innocent when he rounded up the usual suspects, herding us into the dining room in an attempt to solve the greatest mystery of all: who had smeared his shirts and jackets with shoe polish?
When the time came, I’d take a seat beside the same crooks who had stolen the coins and wiped themselves on the towels and say, “Did you say shoe polish? On your suits? Today? No, sorry, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
dix hill
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the worst things you could say about a person was that he or she had a family member at Dix Hill, the common name for Dorothea Dix Sanitarium, the local state mental hospital. Designed by the same people who brought you Dreary Orphanage of Forsaken Children and Gabled House Haunted by Ghost of Hatchet Murderer, Dorothea Dix was a bleak colony of Gothic buildings perched upon a hilltop near the outskirts of town. In the winter its surrounding tree limbs resembled the palsied fingers of mad scientists tapping against the windows in search of fresh brains. Come summer these same trees, green and leafy, served to hide something unspeakably sinister. Whenever we passed the place, my sisters and I would stick our heads out the car window, expecting to hear a hysterical voice cackling, “I’m mad, I tell you, MAD!” The patient would embrace his lunacy as though it were a treasure he had discovered hidden beneath the floor-boards. “Mad! Do you hear me, I’m mad!”
I had just completed the seventh grade when my mother announced that until we were old enough to find a paying job, anyone above the age of fourteen would have to devote their summers to community service. My older sister, Lisa, signed up as a candy striper at Rex Hospital and as for me, I knew exactly where I was headed.
My mother was sixteen years old when she stood on her front porch and watched as men in actual white coats carried her father kicking and screaming to their local psychiatric hospital, where he received a total of thirty-seven electro-shock treatments. He had been suffering from the D.T.’s, a painful hallucinatory state marking an advanced stage of alcoholism. My mother visited him every day, and often he had no idea who she was. Once, thinking she was a nurse, he attempted to slip his hand beneath her skirt. The experience left her with a certain haunted quality I very much admired. She’d looked into the face of something horrible, and I wanted to know what that felt like.
Driving past the iron gates and up the winding driveway on my first day of work, my mother offered me a series of last-minute alternatives. I could, say, teach underprivileged children to trace — I was good at that. Or baby-sitting. I could do it for free, and she’d pay me on the sly — no one would ever have to know about it. But my mind was made up. This was what I wanted. She didn’t even walk in with me, just dropped me off and told me to call when I was ready to come home. “One hour, three, however long it takes you to change your mind,” she said.
The volunteer program at Dorothea Dix was so small that the receptionist doubted its existence. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want to work here for no money? Tell me, son, are you by any chance a current resident?” She lifted the telephone and stationed her finger on the dial. “Why don’t you give me your ward number, and we’ll arrange for someone to carry you back and give you your medication. Would you like that, sugar? It’s good, the medicine.”
It was chilling to have my sanity questioned by a professional. I had the name of the coordinator I’d telephoned a few days earlier, but it seemed to take hours for me to dig it out of my pocket. Once she was satisfied that I had spoken to an actual living person, the receptionist summoned a guard to lead me to the coordinator’s office. It was a short trip requiring no less than seven keys. Everything at Dorothea Dix involved locked doors, and as a result, staff members could be heard from a distance of fifty feet, their fist-sized knots of keys swinging and jangling from their belts.
If the hospital had any kind of volunteer-training program, I never knew about it. Neither did I meet anyone else introducing themselves as volunteers. I met briefly with the coordinator, who studied a list of absent orderlies before saying, “Napier’s out sick, you can fill in for him. Report to Building Seven and ask them to send you up to Banes.”
I was led to an infirmary, where a nurse named Banes paired me up with Clarence Poole, a plum-colored orderly who carried a transistor radio upon his person at all times. Clarence’s nose lay practically flat against his cheek, causing him to look like someone from a Picasso painting. In an
effort to divert attention from his face, he spent a great deal of time maintaining his hairstyle, a luminous Afro the size of a medicine ball. It was Clarence’s job to show me the ropes, and my first order of business was to accompany him to the snack machines, where he bought himself an RC Cola and a bag of salted peanuts. I watched as he then proceeded to stuff the nuts down the neck of the bottle. He did it with great concentration, as if he were force-feeding a goose. After explaining that the mixture needed a few minutes to steep, he took a seat and began fluffing out his hair with a long-handled pick. He had just raised the bottle to his lips when Nurse Banes handed us our first assignment. Tucking his radio into the back pocket of his uniform, Clarence led me across the grounds to an ivy-covered building that, except for the bars covering the windows, resembled the sort of dormitory one might find on a respectable college campus. Up close these buildings were quite nice until you went inside. This was a women’s ward, and the first thing I noticed was the stench. It was an aroma I grew to associate with all locked wards: urine, sweat, cigarette smoke, dirty hair, and cheap disinfectant, all marinated in an intense, relentless heat that never varied with the seasons. The women lay on iron cots and called out to us, begging for attention and cigarettes, as Clarence opened the door. “I have information that can save lives!” someone shouted. Everyone spoke at the same time: “She made me pee myself,” “Tell the nigger I control all the music on his radio,” “Call the embassy and have them ship the olives by plane!”
Clarence would say only, “Later, baby,” speaking as if these were young girls waiting outside the stage door for his autograph. He checked the numbers on the cots and paused before an elderly woman who shifted fitfully, her shoulder-length hair the same muted yellow as her soiled pillowcase. He prepared the gurney and unstrapped her harness. “I’ll take her up top and you get the feet,” he said. “Come on, granny, you’re going for a ride.” When the sheet was lifted, I was shocked to discover that this woman was naked. I had never before seen a naked woman and hesitated just long enough for her to lurch forward and sink her remaining three teeth into my forearm. The woman then twisted her head and growled, tugging at my flesh as if she were a bob-cat or wolverine, some wild creature used to hunting down its meals. Clarence raised his radio and then, thinking of the possible damage, removed one of his shoes and rapped the woman across the head until she let loose and sank back onto her pillow. Her teeth had broken the skin, but Clarence reassured me that he had seen a lot worse. A tetanus shot, some iodine, no big deal.