The Thomas Berryman Number

I was starting to feel guilty about grilling him too much. “OK, I’m sorry,” I said. “I only have one more question, Ben.”

“Shoot,

Ochs.”

“I’m not trying to condescend to you. I’m really not.”

Toy smiled as though we were only playing a little game anyway. A lot of Joe Buck Conneroo came through with the smile.

“You said that Wynn wasn’t hiring you himself …”

“No. He was a front man. Always said, ‘They said’ this; ‘They said’ that. He was a small fish. Just like me.”

“OK then, do you know who hired Berryman?”

Ben Toy looked over at Asher, then at me. “Can’t say.”

My palm came down hard on the floor. “We’ve come a long ways tonight to start that shit now,” I said.

“I really don’t know,” Toy said then. “I never knew who it was. Berryman knew.”

Toy closed his eyes for a full two or three minutes after that answer.

Asher and I sat in total, eerie silence, just watching him breathe. The young aide had a dazed, tired look on his face. I figured I was probably pop-eyed myself.

Toy licked his chapped lips again. He shivered as though he were dropping off to sleep.

Rock and roll erupted in a nearby room and his eyes popped open again. He seemed annoyed that we were still in his room. Annoyed and slightly wild-eyed.

“Can I go to sleep now?” The soft, southern voice again. “Would you turn on the dimmer, please?”

“I’ll talk tomorrow if you want.” He turned to me.

For no reason I can imagine now, I reached over and shook Ben Toy’s hand. I wished him good night.

Maybe the reason was that our first interview had completely caved in my mind … Right from when Toy had begun to describe the money transfer in Provincetown, I’d known I had a big story.

Walking beside Ronald Asher, coming down the hallway from the quiet room, I flashed a bad scene I’d been part of five days earlier at the

Citizen-Reporter

offices.

A copy cub, an arrogant nineteen-year-old black, had come up to my desk and sat down all over my paperwork that afternoon. The young writer’s name was John Seawright, and he was in the habit of riding me about verisimilitude in my Horn articles. I was just about to tell him to get off the desk, and out of my life, when he grabbed hold of my shoulders and began to cry. “They just shot him,” he sobbed. “They shot Jimmie Horn, man. He’s dead,” the boy told me. That was how I’d found out about Horn. Zap.

Someone somewhere on the hospital ward was playing an out-of-tune piano. “A House Is Not a Home” was the song.

I was still fairly shell-shocked from the interview.

The high yellow corridor lights were turned down low. It made it difficult for me not to peek into the brighter bedrooms we were passing.

Two middle-aged men who appeared to be twins were playing chess in one room.

A boy in his underwear was sitting in bed reading a mathematics text in another.

A young boy in hornrims was reading

Shockproof Sydney Skate

by Marijane Meaker.

I looked down at Asher.

The Beard.

There was something about the scraggly face growth that appealed to me.

“I’ve been thinking about a beard.” I broke our mutual silence. “I don’t understand my motivation though.”

“You want people to know how smart you really are,” the aide grinned. “Beard’s a pain-in-the-ass way to do it though. Always getting spaghetti and cake in mine.”

“I don’t want people to think I’m smart.” I watched the dull ceiling lights pass over my head. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Not that, though.”

We stopped at the patients’ kitchen and he went on about the physical hardships of a beard. It was the kind of conversation people have at wakes down South—you talk about anything but the wake and the wakee.

Asher poured out some of the blackest coffee I’d ever seen. He had kind of an intriguing job, I was thinking.

I was also watching a pimply teenager who was in the kitchen with us. The boy was shoveling tablespoons of sugar into a tall glass of milk. He had fuzzy, electric hair and looked burned out at sixteen.

A fairly good (pragmatic) idea occurred to me in the kitchen. I began building up the nerve to ask Asher for an important favor.

“How much do you know about all this?” I asked for starters.

“The whole.” Asher sipped the black coffee. “Just about, anyway. Shulman took me to dinner tonight. He told me the

hospital

position. He said I’d be the only one to supervise visits between you and Ben.”

I put cream and raw sugar in my coffee. All motions. I wasn’t going to drink the muddy geedunk. It reminded me of the Mississippi River.

“So you’re pretty tight with Shulman?”

“We agree. We disagree. He generalizes too much for my taste. Textbooks sometimes. Basically he trusts my instincts, though. Believe it or not, I was in Columbia before this.”

“He told you about Jimmie Horn?” I said.

“Yes, he told me. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I heard back there with Toy. Most of us hadn’t taken him all that seriously before.”

I decided to ask Asher for a big favor. I was close to blurting it out anyway.

I started by moronically sipping some coffee.