Borderline Page 2

  “Do you want to try treatment with us or not?”

  “I’ll give it a shot.”

  “Go to the receptionist, complete the paperwork she gives you, and set an appointment for a week from today.” They shook hands and Fred ambled out. His wife was exiting at the same time. They hugged, then locked in a passionate embrace in the waiting room. Only when Roxanne and Mr. Edgars began applauding did they break their open-mouthed kiss and head out.

  In the chart room, Hanson made a few brief notes while his memory was fresh. Pearlman came in and began writing as well. The steel-shelf-lined chart room, walls packed with binders filled with tales of sorrow, was like Rick’s American Cafe in Casablanca. Somehow, everyone ended up there.

  “Think they’ll be back?” Pearlman asked.

  “Probably not until the next time they need an audience for their drama.”

  Pearlman raised an eyebrow. “My, my, you’re sounding more cynical than usual. That’s pretty hard to do.”

  “Think I’m burning out?”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Spoken like a good therapist.”

  She stared at him patiently, attentively.

  “Therapeutic silence,” he said. In their supervision sessions they could be like two veteran chess masters who knew each other’s moves, yet could improve only by playing against each other. Hanson and Pearlman had about the same number of years of experience. At one point, before she had been hired, he’d been offered the clinical director position. He had declined, saying he preferred direct service work, even though it would have meant a five-thousand-dollar-a-year pay hike. Pearlman was now the chief clinical officer for the agency, which had seventy-five case managers and counselors.

  “Yeah, I think I’m burning out,” Hanson admitted. “I mean, I can take joy in handling Fred smoothly, but I’ve got little hope of seeing him change.”

  “Maybe,” she said. The word was one of their ways of mutual acknowledgment. They both enjoyed the old Chinese story of the farmer who marries a beautiful girl, and gets congratulations from everyone. When villagers say how great it is, he replies, “Maybe.” Then she dies giving birth to their son. Everyone says how terrible that is, and he says, “Maybe.” Then he inherits her family’s large farm, and the villagers say how great that is. “Maybe.” But the locusts come, and etc., etc.

  “Maybe,” he repeated.

  During the course of the day the police brought in a man prone to suicidal gestures, whom they had once again talked down off the bridge. The first few times officers had taken him to the hospital. Now they dropped him at the center.

  Then Hanson met with a middle-aged Native American man with schizophrenia who had first been brought in by the police a year earlier, babbling an incoherent string of letters. While everyone else had been confused by the babbling, Hanson had recognized the “word salad,” and its ingredients. Prick 25, Rough and Puffs, Bloop Gun, Oodles, Law, White Mice, REMF, Victor Charles.

  Vietnam. The Salish Indian’s first psychotic break had occurred while in combat, and hadn’t been noticed for three months. Hanson had worked with him for two years, gotten him to be aware of his symptoms, take his medications, connect with his family and tribe, and maintain his own apartment. Major achievements, and they had begun to talk about cutting back service to a quarterly check-in by phone.

  Hanson’s three o’clock appointment was with a girl who had been sexually abused starting at age eight. She was now sixteen, and probably going to be in the system for life. She had made a suicide attempt after her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend forced her to get an abortion. He was now in jail for statutory rape. The girl was beginning to show glimmers of realizing that the rape was not her fault.

  This is my city, Hanson thought, ironically amused that it had been named by Money magazine as one of the five best places to live in the United States. Property values were solid and reasonably priced compared to similarly sized cities. Employment rates had been steadily growing the past few years, while the crime rate had dropped precipitously. Portland had a temperate climate, minimal air pollution, a slew of great restaurants, the best bookstore in the U.S., and an award-winning mass transit system. The Cascade Mountains, the central Oregon desert, numerous rivers, and the Pacific Ocean were within easy driving distance.

  By 4:15 p.m., he knew Tammy wouldn’t show. Which was fine, since it allowed him to clean up the inescapable pile of paperwork. Including closing her chart.

  TWO

  It was a little past noon, and Johnny D’s snores echoed through the shabbily furnished house. He was sleeping deeply after a long meth run. The last batch he had brewed was primo stuff, and he had sampled it. Then spent days sampling more.

  Wolf knew that during the week Johnny D had also sexually assaulted two women during late-night prowls. Meth made him horny, unable to sleep, and aggressive. He was skull-eyed, as twitchy as a raw nerve ending.

  Johnny D had moved to the city from Los Angeles after running his deals and assaults for years. Six months in Portland, and he was building his networks, getting to know the neighborhoods and backyards. Johnny D prided himself on being a professional criminal.

  His MO was always the same, going through backyards until he found an unlocked rear window. He had learned tricks in prison, like never to carry a weapon in case the cops stopped him.

  Wolf, noting the irony that Johnny D’s own rear window had been unlocked, padded toward the snores coming from the bedroom. Johnny D had been identified on many cases because of his poor hygiene. Rotting teeth and an aversion to showers earned him the nickname “the Stinky Rapist.” Detectives checking street names had noticed “Johnny D,” and gathered enough evidence to make an arrest. The case fell apart under a legal attack from the high-priced defense attorney he paid with meth money. Johnny D was a suspect in more than a hundred rapes in other cities and a dozen in town. Victims ranged from fourteen to seventy-two years old. Wolf knew that there was a meth lab in the garage and how much his meth sold for in pill, powder, or chunk form.

  Johnny D snorted and Wolf tensed, ready to slit his throat with the foot-long K-bar knife he carried. When Johnny D settled down, Wolf grabbed the cigarette pack and matches from the cheap wooden dresser. He moved silently to the interior garage door, just off the living room of the ranch-style house. Wolf wore shoes one size too large and disposable latex gloves.

  He found the organic solvents in big drums and chose one labeled “ether.” He spilled a rug-size puddle of ether on the floor, then uncapped the other cans. The air rapidly reeked of volatile chemicals.

  Wolf returned to Johnny D, still deep asleep. Just to be sure, he grabbed the dealer in a powerful stranglehold. After a few semiconscious gasps, Johnny D breathed rhythmically. Wolf didn’t worry about leaving marks—there wouldn’t be much soft tissue left.

  He dragged the dealer-rapist from the bed and set him in the garage next to the puddle. Then he went back to the bedroom and made the bed look like it hadn’t been slept in. As soon as the firefighters saw the lab, they would call the hazardous-materials team. By the time the firefighters, the hazmat team, and the cops were done trampling things, they would find out a meth chef had died while brewing his poison. It would not be a high-priority investigation.

  Wolf lit a cigarette, the most dangerous time in the whole operation. There was already a fair amount of flammable chemicals in the air. But he had calculated correctly, and nothing flared. He puffed until the cigarette was burning, then tucked it in the matchbook, tilted slightly up, at the edge of the puddle.

  Knowing he had less than four minutes, Wolf moved briskly. Out the back door, through the backyard, around a hedge, and onto the street. Gray skies, light drizzle, few pedestrians. He had a wool cap pulled down on his head, covering his hair and ears. Probably unnecessary, but he wore a bushy glued-on mustache, the kind an eyewitness would remember, and he could toss as soon as he was safely away from the scene.

  Two blocks from Johnny D’s house, h
e got into his 200I gray Honda Accord, as nondescript as a black shirt at a Goth gathering. It had plates he had borrowed from another Honda Accord he had found a dozen blocks from his house. He would switch plates back that night.

  He started his car, tuning the radio to the light rock station. The music came on, and he slowly pulled away from the curb, checking his mirrors and diligently observing traffic laws. As he glanced at the digital clock on his dashboard, he heard a muffled whump. Within seconds, there was another explosion, then fire burst out of Johnny D’s house. Wolf watched as pleased as a Cub Scout at his first campfire.

  Brian Hanson stood in the doorway looking into his son’s room. The bed was made, the night table clear. Shelves of books lay undusted. Fading posters for Smash Mouth and Barenaked Ladies were still stapled to the wall. Hanson had first felt like a parent and an old fogy when he’d had to order his son to “turn that music down.” With his son gone, the house was too big, too quiet.

  Jeff was a bright kid, an A student, popular, good-looking, a demon on the soccer field. Often when he had watched his son, Brian had wondered how someone as flawed as himself could have been part of something so wonderful. Always independent, Jeff had moved on to the University of Michigan. He maintained frequent e-mail contact, but was already pretty much out of his parents’ life.

  Forcing himself to turn away, Hanson moved deeper into his West Hills home. Propped on stilts, the redwood deck that surrounded the house offered an exquisite view of the west side. The house was much more than he could have afforded on his salary alone. His wife’s inheritance, and salary, made it possible. Four bedrooms, three baths, two fireplaces, sunken living room, finished basement. For many years, he’d had the habit of sitting in the hot tub on the deck, listening to sixties music, watching the sun go down. Often with his wife cuddled against him.

  Jeanie now wanted to move to a smaller place in a fancier neighborhood. She raved about the Pearl District, the gentrified downtown, an area of half-million-dollar lofts, art galleries, and chichi restaurants. Many times she’d wanted to clear Jeff’s room out, but Brian resisted.

  In the months before Jeff’s departure, Brian had seen her as a mother hawk, eager to push her baby out of the nest. Jeanie and Brian had been married for more than twenty years, but emotionally they were further apart than ever.

  Jeanie wasn’t in, of course. She’d left a message on his voice mail that she was working late. It was an unusual day when she’d get off at five.

  He padded into the kitchen, grabbed a fried chicken TV dinner, and popped it in the microwave. The spacious kitchen was a study in gleaming stainless steel, highlighted by matching Jenn-Air stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator. The room was seldom used. Jeanie was a “Let’s eat out” kind of cook. With access to a generous expense account, she was known by name at most of the better restaurants in town.

  He wasn’t hungry but ate, leaning on the counter. He heard the rain tapping at the aluminum porch awning. A soothing sound, though it reminded him of Vietnam. On good days, that was a time he almost believed hadn’t happened. It had taken him so long to accept what he had seen and done. How much pain was there still to work through? It was hard to believe that he had been the same age as his son was now. When he had been a kid and had seen interviews with World War II veterans and they’d cried over lost comrades and bloody battles he’d thought they were so lame. With his youthful innocence and arrogance, he’d thought, that was more than twenty years ago—get over it. He’d learned that some experiences once burned in would never go away.

  Hanson sat in the bedroom that had been converted into the home office-den. A large desk was dominated by Jeanie’s computer and stacks of papers she brought home from work. One wall was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with two clear themes. The lower half, Jeanie’s, held books on banking, accounting, investing, real estate law. The top half held his books on Vietnam, from classics like Michael Herr’s Dispatches and William Broyles’s Brothers in Arms to numerous volumes by lesser known and less talented writers. He had books that were long on detail and short on emotion and others that screamed like an open wound. He had photo books that he never opened, since the images were never as powerful, but yet too close, to those he held within him.

  Jeanie came in at nine. They no longer bothered to tell each other about their workday. He found what she did hard to understand. Sometimes her decisions—like to foreclose on mortgages or not extend a nonprofit’s line of credit—offended him. She found his tales of the poor mentally ill and addicted to be sleazy and depressing. He was absorbed in his world, she in hers. They had negotiated a bored detente.

  They watched TV and were in bed by eleven. She fell asleep within minutes. Whenever he closed his eyes, he flashed back to images of Vietnam. Waves of grief, remorse, and anger swept through him with tsunami-like power.

  The first person he killed, a slender teen at close range. Probably a year or two younger than Hanson. The scarlet burst of the M16 5.56 mm round hitting a thin chest at a couple thousand feet per second. The retelling with his buddies, the macho boasting, not mentioning the throwing up, gasping-for-air feelings of horror, guilt, and “What if he’d shot first?” After his best buddy was killed by a sniper, the second killing was easier.

  Juiced up on adrenaline and testosterone, then smoking marijuana and later heroin, as his personal body count climbed. He remembered the hard-eyed old guys, in their midtwenties, offering tips. Use all your senses, you can smell ’em before you see ’em at night. No smoking, no bullshitting, no time off on patrol, noise discipline. Learning the implications of dozens of different shades of green in the triple-canopied tropical foliage. The telltale disturbance patterns of a punji-stick pit in the rich loam. Differentiating the low of an alarmed water buffalo from the usual sounds. How to booby-trap a claymore so that when the VC went to disarm it, the claymore would explode. Learning to look slightly off side to maximize night vision.

  His coworkers knew he had been in the war. But not the details. Many of them hadn’t even been born. The Vietnam conflict was just a sour stain in their history books, not even a declared war. They could never understand. He couldn’t understand it himself. He had come back from the war with his body unscarred, and his mind a troubled mess. Heroin was too expensive in the States and he kicked it with surprising ease. Not so alcohol and pot, which helped control the nightmares and tremors. Then there was the anger, the fights, the nightlong wandering the streets looking for something he didn’t know.

  Bill McFarlane was only three years older, a cop, also a Vietnam combat veteran. One night when Hanson had been picked up drunk and disorderly, McFarlane had driven him to the outskirts of the city. Fear kicked in. Hanson sobered immediately.

  “What’s going on?” Hanson demanded from the back of the squad car.

  They parked on a dark road at the edge of the Columbia Gorge. Douglas firs blocked out the moonless sky. McFarlane, with thinning prematurely gray hair and a dangerous stare, took him out of the car and uncuffed him. The Mace, nightstick, flashlight, long-barreled .38 Smith & Wesson, spare ammo, and handcuff case hanging from Mc-Farlane’s Sam Browne belt rattled as he moved, making Hanson aware of how silent the isolated spot was.

  “Scared, huh?”

  “No,” Hanson snapped.

  “Bullshit. You’re scared all the time. Not scared of fucking up, scared of what you’ve done, what you’ve become.”

  Hanson said nothing, breathing in the cool night air, not sure what was going to happen.

  “I can take you in, feed you into the system. Six months from now, you’ll be another scumbag vet hanging out on the street panhandling for cheap liquor. Or worse.”

  Hanson had seen a couple of guys he knew doing just that. The image scared him.

  “In a lot of ways, the VA sucks,” McFarlane said, handing Hanson a card with a name and number on it. “But this guy is okay, runs a support group. Helped me get my shit together. If you go there with an open mind, who knows.”

&nb
sp; The two men stood by the squad car. Hanson nodded, McFarlane indicated he should get into the car, and they drove back into the city. Hanson still occasionally wondered what would have happened if he’d refused.

  Later, McFarlane would be his sponsor as he worked his way through Narcotics Anonymous. He knew McFarlane had saved his life. The anger that made him a good soldier didn’t dissipate when he was dumped back in the civilian world. It wasn’t until he got to his eighth step, and started making amends, that the pressure within him started to abate. He’d gone into a Vietnamese restaurant and apologized to the owner for what he had done in his country. The owner turned out to be a former ARVN captain. They had talked long into the night about the extremes that young men endured and were warped by. Deep down, Hanson wondered whether it was ever possible to truly make amends for past misdeeds. But if not, how could he honestly talk with clients in therapy about forgiving others, and themselves, to be able to move on?

  What had triggered his memories so vividly tonight? He decided it was having to grab Fred. It had been a while since he’d been in a scuffle. But something else was bothering him, bubbling up in his subconscious. In Vietnam, he had joked about his “spider sense,” based on the then new comic-book hero who felt a strange tingling before trouble.

  Young soldiers would get comic books mailed from the World. The Fantastic Four. Look out, creeps, it’s clobberin’ time. The Amazing Spider Man. Sgt. Fury and the Howlin’ Commandos. The comics would be passed around until they fell apart in the tropical humidity. Almost, but not quite, as popular as Playboy.

  Hanson now knew the spider sense was probably what mental health professionals labeled “hypervigilance.” In trauma survivors, it was the on-the-edge feeling that could warn of a blow before the attacker completed the thought. In part, the sensitivity was what made him an effective therapist.

  He focused on his breathing, trying to relax. It was a long time before he finally fell asleep.