Rainbird had looked the term up in a medical dictionary and understood it at once-because of his own experiences as Indian and warrior, he understood it perhaps better than the doctors themselves. Sometimes the girl ran out of words. She would simply stand there, not a bit upset, her mouth working soundlessly. And sometimes she would use a totally out-of-context word, apparently without realizing it at all. “I don’t like this dress, I’d rather have the hay one.'. Sometimes she would correct herself absently-I mean the green one”-but more often it would simply pass unnoticed.
According to the dictionary, aphasia was forgetfulness caused by some cerebral disorder. The doctors had immediately begun monkeying with her medication. Orasin was changed to Valium with no appreciable change for the better. Valium and Orasin were tried together, but an unforseen interaction between the two had caused her to cry steadily and monotonously until the dose wore off: A brand-new drug, a combination of tranquilizer and light hallucinogenic, was tried and seemed to help for a while. Then she had begun to stutter and broke out in a light rash. Currently she was back on Orasin, but she was being monitored closely in case the aphasia got worse.
Reams had been written about the girl’s delicate psychological condition and about what the shrinks called her “basic fire conflict,” a fancy way of saying that her father had told her not to and the Shop people were telling her to go ahead… all of it complicated by her guilt over the incident at the Manders farm.
Rainbird bought none of it. It wasn’t the drugs, it wasn’t being locked up and watched constantly, it wasn’t being separated from her father.
She was just tough, that was all.
She had made up her mind somewhere along the line that she wasn’t going to cooperate, no matter what. The end. Toot finnee. The psychiatrists could run around showing her inkblots until the moon was blue, the doctors could play with her medication and mutter in their beards about the difficulty of successfully drugging an eight-year-old girl. The papers could pile up and Cap could rave on.
And Charlie McGee would simply go on toughing it out.
Rainbird sensed it as surely as he sensed the coming of rain this afternoon. And he admired her for it. She had the whole bunch of them chasing their tails, and if it was left up to them they would still be chasing their tails when Thanksgiving and then Christmas rolled around. But they wouldn’t chase their tails forever, and this more than anything worried John Rainbird.
Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens…
“The point is,” Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, “those two thieves didn’t beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don’t beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were assholes and the safe beat them.”
Rainbird had got the point.
There were better than sixty college degrees in on this, but it still came down to safecracking. They had tried to drill the girl’s combination with their drugs; they had enough shrinks to field a softball team, and these shrinks were all doing their best to resolve the “basic fire conflict'; and all that particular pile of horseapples boiled down to was that they were trying to peel her from the back.
Rainbird entered the small Quonset hut, took his time card from the rack, and punched in. T. B. Norton, the shift supervisor, looked up from the paperback he was reading.
“No overtime for punching in early, Injun.”
“Yeah?” Rainbird said.
“Yeah.” Norton stared at him challengingly, full of the grim, almost holy assurance that so often goes with petty authority.
Rainbird dropped his eyes and went over to look at the bulletin board. The orderlies” bowling team had won last night. Someone wanted to sell “2 good used washing machines.” An official notice proclaimed that ALL W-I THROUGH W-6 WORKERS MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING THIS OFFICE.
“Looks like rain,” he said over his shoulder to Norton.
“Never happen, Injun,” Norton said. “Why don’t you blow? You’re stinking the place up.”
“Sure, boss,” Rainbird said. “Just clockin in.”
“Well next time clock in when you’re spozed to.”
“Sure, boss,” Rainbird said again, going out, sparing one glance at the side of Norton’s pink neck, the soft spot just below the jawbone. Would you have time to scream, boss? Would you have time to scream if I stuck my forefinger through your throat at that spot? Just like a skewer through a piece of steak… boss.
He went back out into the muggy heat. The thunderheads were closer now, moving slowly, bowed down with their weight of rain. It was going to be a hard storm. Thunder muttered, still distant.
The house was close now. Rainbird would go around to the side entrance, what had once been the pantry, and take C elevator down four levels. Today he was supposed to wash and wax all the floors in the girl’s quarters; it would give him a good shot. And it wasn’t that she was unwilling to talk with him; it wasn’t that. It was just that she was always so damned distant. He was trying to peel the box in his own way, and if he could get her to laugh, just once get her to laugh, to share a joke with him at the Shop’s expense, it would be like prying up that one vital corner. It would give him a place to set his chisel. Just that one laugh. It would make them insiders together, it would make them a committee in secret session. Two against the house.
But so far he hadn’t been able to get that one laugh, and Rainbird admired her for that more than he could have said.
2
Rainbird put his ID card in the proper slot and then went down to the orderlies” station to grab a cup of coffee before going on. He didn’t want coffee, but it was still early. He couldn’t afford to let his eagerness show; it was bad enough that Norton had noticed and commented on it.
He poured himself a slug of mud from the hotplate and sat down with it. At least none of the other nerds had arrived yet. He sat down on the cracked and sprung gray sofa and drank his coffee. His blasted face (and Charlie had shown nothing but the most passing interest in that) was calm and impassive. His thoughts ran on, analyzing the situation as it now stood.
The staff on this were like Rammaden’s green safecrackers in the supermarket office. They were handling the girl with kid gloves now, but they weren’t doing it out of any love for the girl. Sooner or later they would decide that the kid gloves were getting them nowhere, and when they ran out of “soft” options, they would decide to blow the safe. When they did, Rainbird was almost sure that they would “kill the money,” in Rammaden’s pungent phrase.
Already he had seen the phrase “light shock treatments” in two of the doctors” reports-and one of the doctors had been Pynchot, who had Hockstetter’s ear. He had seen a contingency report that had been couched in such stultifying jargon that it was nearly another language. Translated, what it boiled down to was a lot of strongarm stuff: if the kid sees her dad in enough pain, she’ll break. What Rainbird thought the kid might do if she saw her dad hooked up to a Delco battery and doing a fast polka with his hair on end was to go calmly back to her room, break a waterglass, and eat the pieces.