No Contest

“Sometimes it happens this way—at least that’s what the doctors tell me. Especially in a place like this, without a lot of disturbing and loud patients that you might find in another mental health facility. I guess one of them starts screaming and sets off the others.”

They walked for a few minutes, then Sarah said, “That doesn’t sound right.”

Howard was grimacing. His leg was hurting slightly, but he had a quota to fill. His wheelchair awaited them fifty feet up the brick path.

“What else could it be?”

“You tell me, Mark,” Sarah said thoughtfully.

Mark settled into his wheelchair. “What do you mean?”

“Something is disturbing you?” she said, but she wasn’t really asking. “You’ve got something on your mind.”

“No. That’s not it. Just something—out there.”

“In the trees? In the ocean?”

“Not really.” Was she teasing him?

“In the night?”

“In the world.”

She was pushing him now, along the brick path. “Are you talking about all the bad blood on the news?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry. I snapped at you. I’ve never done that before.”

“So why did you?”

Sarah Slate, Mark decided, would make an excellent psychotherapist. “When I start feeling like I’m trying to tell myself something, and I can’t figure it out—I get frustrated. I guess I get grumpy. I didn’t realize until just now that I was feeling that way.”

“Mark,” Sarah said, “are we still talking about international tensions, or the patients of Folcroft?”

“I don’t know.”

Mr. Fyster screamed again. As muted and distant as it was, the sound cut through the peace of the evening and the steady hush of the Long Island tide.

A small bunch of bushes near the path rustled in response to the scream.

“What’s in there?” Sarah asked.

“Probably a raccoon.”

She steered Mark down the path, and they both kept their eyes on the bushes. It was quiet now. Maybe the raccoon had fled in the shadows.

When there was another scream, as quiet as the squeak of the wheelchair axle, the bushes shrieked and seemed to be tom apart. Something big took to the air and soared into the nearby trees, shrieking briefly.

“What was that?” Mark asked in disbelief. “Did you get a look at it?”

“Not a good one,” Sarah said. “It was big.”

“Must have been an owl. They get pretty sizable.”

“Mark,” Sarah said, “I think it talked.”

Lois Larson was so old that the birth year on her official documents included a question mark. “I was born on a farm way back up the hills,” she said. “Never had a birth certificate until I was in my twenties. I never saw a doctor until I was in my thirties.”

She still didn’t take kindly to doctors. She stayed in this place because it was very nice, and she didn’t want to burden her family. Lois occasionally became confused. Being ninety-six—or ninety-seven—years old, a woman was bound to get a little confused now and again. Lois didn’t take kindly to being confused, either, and tended to get angry and boisterous. They called her “Incredible Hulk” Larson. Lois didn’t quite understand the joke but, being all of ninety-eight—or ninety-nine—pounds, she was delighted to be nicknamed “Incredible Hulk.”

She was, right now, doing what some of her friends called “hulking out”.

“Come and get me, you overgrown chicken!” She shuffled a few more paces down the path, her tennis racket in both hands. “I’ve had about enough of you.”

The bushes were quiet. The nearby trees showed no signs of life. Lois kept moving. “I’ll find you. You know I will. You ain’t gonna be stirring up no more trouble.”

She stopped again. Another copse of trees. Her challenge went unanswered.

“How about we head back inside, Lois?” asked Larry, her nurse. Larry was a heck of a piece of a nurse, Lois had to admit.

“No. I have me a crow to catch.”

“We’ve been out here for an hour,” Larry complained, allowing himself to approach one step too close.

“You better not try nothin’!” Lois Larson declared vehemently. “You know what I’ll do?”

Larry knew well enough. He could still hear the crunch of Lois’s tennis racket against the forehead of Nurse Rubin. Nurse Rubin should have known better than to mess with Incredible Hulk Larson when she was hulking out.

Lois Larson was a sweet old lady most of the time. Tough, yeah, but she didn’t hurt people unless people got unreasonable with her. Like right now, she was hunting for the crow that was “skeering” the patients and nothing was going to stop her. So you just let her go hunting—with a big nurse keeping an eye on her. This was the kind of personalized accommodation that the public mental health facilities simply did not offer.

An hour was about the limit to Lois’s stamina. She reached an outdoor veranda near her room and sat down heavily on a green metal rocking chair, lips pursed in frustration.

“That bird probably took one look at you and flew south for good,” Larry said comfortingly as he took another rocker. “You do that to me sometimes, Lois.”

“You’s just trying to make me feel better,” she said, unable to hide her pleasure.

“Hello?” said a voice inches from her shoulder.