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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
June 10, 2007
Published as Fiction
in a WIP dated November 21, 2000.
© 2000 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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“Paneful,” 1974
© 1974 by Bud Grossmann
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HAVING A NERVOUS BREAK-IN
The wall behind the desk of Randolph R. Rasmussen is neatly adorned with the usual array of framed diplomas, licenses, photographs, and certificates that an attorney can’t help but collect over the years. In addition, Rasmussen displays, in a narrow, plain, black frame, a simple printed notice. Crisp, black letters on yellowing, cracked cardboard announce:
VISITING HOURS
9:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M.
1:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M.
Do Not Walk in Halls Unnecessarily
Please Do Not Request Exceptions
The notice was stolen from a mental hospital.
Some years ago, when Randy Rasmussen was attending a small Midwestern college, he held an evening job at a service station. There he met a fellow who knew a fellow who knew a fellow who worked at—or knew a fellow who worked at—Marionville State Hospital & Training Center and who claimed that when the new State Hospital had been completed, the state employees had hauled away a fortune in antique furniture from the offices and wards of the old buildings of the hospital. A fortune they had taken for themselves, the fellow claimed, but a fortune, too, they had left behind.
Randy, laboring beneath the greaserack, pumping 90-weight lubricant into a VW transaxle, felt in the back of his mind the first little nudge of a crazy urge to break into a nut house. To hell with the furniture—he just wanted to see the inside of the place.
Late one crisp autumn afternoon, Randy and a classmate approached the hospital from the wooded tract to the north and easily scaled the brick-and-spiked-wrought-iron wall. They saw no one anywhere near. Far down the still-green, well-trimmed, gently sloping grounds, a couple of “residents” (or staff?) were tossing a football back and forth, next to the box-like, new administration building.
Armed with a concealed crescent wrench, screwdriver, and five-cell flashlight, Randy and the friend strolled across the grounds as though they belonged there. They went directly to a three-story brick dormitory with a vast porch. At eye level beside the heavy double doors of the entrance, a bronze plaque with raised lettering said, “Woodstock Hall—1902.”
The ground-floor windows were boarded; the doors were secured by heavy hasps and locks. Ivy wandered across the porch steps, crabgrass flourished between floorboards, but the building seemed solid, in excellent repair. Woodstock. The legendary rock festival was not long past. Randy tapped the plaque. Built to last.
No one in sight. The wind washed leaves against the bricks. A squirrel hid her winter hoard: nuts buried in a nut house lawn. Randy shivered and headed for a “secret entrance” described by the man at the garage. He and the friend ducked into a tunnel-slide fire escape and spidered their way up to the second floor. A door at the top did not resist when they pushed it.
They roamed through the abandoned building, from the echoing, damp dungeons to the stillness of the empty attic where the only sounds were the creaking oak floorboards, the cooing of doves, and the boys’ shallow breathing. Sunset’s gold gleamed on the glass of the ornately framed windows in the dormers high above. When the boys descended the attic steps, the flashlight batteries occasionally rattled out of position and plunged the trespassers into a dusty darkness.
The building had been pretty well picked over already, and Randy salvaged only two souvenirs. The first was a small card he found taped to a bedroom wall. It bore a lovely little singsong poem entitled “Bless This House.” Randy blushed with surprise and humility at his realization that this cold prison had once been someone’s home.
The second souvenir, of course, was the notice of Visiting Hours.
Do Not Walk in Halls Unnecessarily
Please Do Not Request Exceptions
The words stunned young Rasmussen. So cold, crude, and commanding, they closed around him like a strait jacket tugged tight. Randy whispered to his friend that he had seen enough, and with the poem in his pocket and the framed notice under his arm, he sprinted to the fire exit and glided away to his freedom.
Freedom, ah, yes, Freedom. Freedom, a keen observer might say, has increasingly slipped away from Randolph R. Rasmussen. He’s been blessed with professional honors, a huge house, a fine family, and the usual array of material trappings associated with an American attorney in the ordinary course of a career. But a perspicacious person would perhaps perceive a growing restlessness about this man. A slight sagging of his shoulders, a twitch or a twist in his smile, an absence of calm in his eyes which once were bold and sure. “You’re heading for a heart attack, Mr. R.,” his secretary cheerily warned one morning just last week.
“Well, choose a date, Bernice, and put it on my calendar,” Rasmussen replied, “but we can’t possibly work it in before the Parker trial.” He whisked past the gray-haired woman’s desk and stepped into the corridor outside his office. He had no destination in mind.
Bless this house
O Lord, we pray,
Make it safe
By night and day.
Bless these walls...
Freedom, ah, slippery Freedom. Within grasp at least barely, of anyone with license to Walk in Halls Unnecessarily. ♦
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