Raphael stiffened. How much did Flood know?
Flood, however, didn’t seem to notice. “Social workers have to castrate their male clients so that they can turn them into women so that they’ll be willing to sit around and talk about their problems rather than do something about them. If somebody actually does something about his problems, he doesn’t need a social worker anymore. That’s the real purpose of all the programs. They want to keep the poor sucker from really addressing his problem. If he does that, he’ll probably solve it, and then he gets away. They won’t have the chance to leech off his bank account or his emotions anymore. The bitches are vampires, Raphael. Stay away from them. The content of any social-science course is about fifty-percent vocabulary list-the jargon-and about fifty-percent B. F. Skinner behavior-modification shit. And as I said, the whole idea is to get everybody in the whole goddamn world into a program. They’ve probably even got a program for normal people-a support group for people who don’t need a support group-a group to screw up their minds enough to make them eligible for the really interesting programs. Give those bastards a few years, and ninety percent of the people in the United States will be social workers. They’ll have to start branching out then-spread the joy to other species. Guide dogs and cats through the trauma of divorce. Death counseling for beef cattle-so that we can all get happy hamburger at the supermarket. Eventually they’ll probably have to start exhuming the dead just to have enough customers to keep them all working. How about `Aftercare for the Afterlife’? Ten social workers to dig up your uncle Norton to find out how he’s doing? `How’s it going, Nort?’ ` ‘Bout the same-still dead.’ `Would you like to talk about it?’ ”
“Aren’t you reaching just a bit, Damon?”
“Of course I am. I’m doing this off the top of my head. You didn’t give me any time to prepare. I’d still like to tumble your little caseworker, though.”
“Tumble?”
“It’s an old-fashioned term. It means-”
“I know what it means. You keep your hands off Frankie. I’m raising her as a pet.” That was not really true anymore, but he decided that it might be better for all concerned if he kept what he’d just found out to himself.
“Sure you are, baby. Next time she comes around though, check real close to find out which one of you is wearing the dog collar.”
v
In mid-May the weather turned foul. Denise told Raphael that this was normal for Spokane. “April and the first half of May are beautiful. Then it starts raining and keeps it up until the end of June. Then it gets hot.”
“You mean it’s going to do this for six weeks?”
“Off and on. It makes the lilacs bloom.”
“Why does everybody in Spokane pronounce that word lylock?” he demanded irritably. “The word is ly-lack.”
“Don’t get grumpy with me, Blue Eyes,” she told him tardy. “It’s not my fault it’s raining.”
“Oh, go sell a refrigerator or something.” He faked a scowl to let her know that he was not angry with her so much as with the weather.
“Why don’t you go back to your little bench,” she suggested, “and take that nice stout little machine of yours and sew all your fingers together? That way you’ll have something to worry about besides the weather or how I pronounce the word lilac.”
“You did it again. You said ly-lock.”
“So beat me.”
He made a threatening move toward her, and she scampered away, laughing.
That afternoon he sat in his apartment drinking coffee and staring dispiritedly out at the dirty gray clouds scudding by overhead. He had the scanner on-more for company than out of any interest.
“District Four,” the scanner said.
“Four.”
“Nineteen-nineteen West Dalton,” the dispatcher said. Raphael looked quickly at the scanner. The address was on his block.
“Check on the welfare of the Berry children. Complainant is the children’s grandmother-states that the children may be abused or neglected. Child Protective Services is dispatching a caseworker.”
“You want me to check it out or just back up the caseworker?” District Four asked.
“See what the situation requires first. We’ve had calls from this complainant before. There might be some kind of custody dispute involved.”
“Okay,” District Four said.
Raphael realized that it was Mousy Mary that they were descending upon. The dumpy woman with the pinched-in face had finally figured out a way to get into Mary’s house.
He reached for his crutches and went out on the roof. The rain had stopped, at least for the moment, and the gusty wind blew ripples across the surface of a puddle of water standing in a low spot on the roof. Raphael crutched over to the front railing and stood looking down at the soggy street.
The police car, followed closely by a gray car from the state motor pool, drove up slowly and stopped. The policeman got out and put on his cap. A very nervous young woman got out of the gray car and hurried over to him, carrying her briefcase self-consciously. They spoke together briefly and then went up onto Mousy Mary’s porch.
Across the street, in front of Sadie the Sitter’s house, Mousy Mary’s mother stood watching, her face gripped with an expression of unspeakable triumph.
The policeman and the nervous young caseworker went inside, and the dumpy little woman scurried across the street to stand directly in front of the house.
After a few moments the screaming started. Raphael could hear the anguish and the outrage in Mary’s shrieks, but not the words. Then they all came out onto the porch, the caseworker holding protectively on to the arms of Mary’s two confused-looking children, and the policeman interposing himself between her and the now-hysterical Mary.
“It’s her!” Mary shrieked, leveling a shaking finger at her mother. “Why don’t you make her leave me alone?”
The caseworker said something to her in a low voice, but Mary. continued to scream at her smug-faced mother.
The policeman removed the small portable radio unit from his belt. “This is District Four.” The voice came from the scanner inside Raphael’s apartment. “You’d better respond Mental Health to this nineteen-nineteen West Dalton address. There’s a female subject here who’s pretty hysterical.”
The caseworker led the two wide-eyed, crying children down to the sidewalk.
“I’ll take them,” Mousy Mary’s mother declared in an authoritative voice. “I’m a personal friend of Sergeant Green’s, and he said that I’d get custody.”
“I’m very sorry,” the young social worker told her firmly, her voice louder now, “but custody is a matter for the courts to decide.”
“Don’t let her take them,” Mary screamed. “She’ll never let me see them again. She’s been trying to take them away from me for five years now. Don’t let the old bitch have them.”
“Don’t you dare call me that in front of the babies!” her mother scolded. Then she turned back to the caseworker. “I’m taking those children,” she announced.
“Officer,” the caseworker called.
“All right, ma’am,” the policeman said to Mary’s mother, “you’re going to have to stand aside.”
“But I have custody,” Mary’s mother insisted.
“At the moment Child Protective Services has custody,” the caseworker said, leading the children around the old woman toward her car.
“YOU come back here!” the dumpy woman screamed. “Sergeant Green said I could have custody.”
“Go ahead and take off, miss,” the officer on the porch said.
“What are you talking about? She can’t take those children. I have custody.”
The social worker got into her car with Mary’s children and pulled away from the curb.
“You come back here! You come back here!” Mary’s mother shrieked.
Then the car was gone, and she spun to confront the officer who had come down off the porch. “What’s your badge number?” she demanded. “You’re in a great deal of trouble, young man., Sergeant Green will take care of you.”
“Just calm down, ma’am,” the policeman said to her. “We’ll get this all sorted out, but we’re not going to get anywhere if we all stand around yelling at each other.”
Then Mary said something, and the two women began screaming again.
Raphael turned and went back inside. The wind was brisk, and he had begun to feel chilled.
An hour later, after the affair across the street had quieted down, Flood arrived with a pizza. He had been drinking and was in high spirits. “Bob the Buggerer got busted today,” he announced gleefully. “The temptation of budding boyish buttocks finally got to him, I guess.”
“What’s with the alliteration?” Raphael asked. He was not really in the mood for Flood. The weather and the incident across the street had soured him.
“Purely unintentional.” Flood grinned. “To alliterate or not to alliterate that’s the question,” he declaimed. “Whether ’tis fancier to consonantize constantly or to rhyme in time.”