Free The Covenant by Jeff Crook Page A

I passed.
    â€œHave you seen my brother? He promised to take me to the party.”
    I fought the urge to pull away from her. Her hand on my arm was as light as a spider. I wondered how many years she had been waiting in this hall for a brother who was mostly likely dead. I said, “He just called. He’s on his way.”
    â€œOh good. Thank you so much. He said he’d meet me here.” She settled back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, prepared to wait until the crack of doom.
    I heard shouting at the end of the hall, so I dove through a pair of double doors on the right. The change was abrupt, from soft lines and soothing colors to harsh metal and cold hospital tiles. The floor was beige and shined as though recently mopped. It reminded me of the killing room at the dog pound, designed for easy clean up. Two naked bodies lay on gurneys—two old women as small as children, as alike in their naked anonymity as twins. Somebody had parked them here and gone to lunch. Next to them stood a shrink-wrapped case of industrial kitchen-sized cans of lima beans, and beside that a pallet of bags of rice and a cart of soiled linens. I figured Preston would want to see this, so I started snapping pictures.
    The next door I opened brought me to the hall where they piled the human wreckage before it headed out to the loading dock. The smell hit me like a garbage truck. I choked down a full bore of gorge and continued snapping the shutter at everything I saw. There was an old lady bent almost double upon herself by osteoporosis, gazing and mumbling into her own crotch. An elderly pantless gentleman pushed himself slowly along by his only foot—the other leg ended in a raw, naked stump just above the ankle. There were people picking at bleeding sores, moaning or mumbling or softly weeping or just sitting, gape-mouthed, blank-eyed, staring into the horror or the nothingness that had blasted their minds.
    Suddenly, I was thankful Mom died the way she did—suddenly, with little or no warning, in her own home surrounded by everything she knew and loved, instead of spending months or years lost in a fog of cold piss and hopeless dementia.
    As I moved slowly along the corridor shooting pictures, an eight-foot tree of an orderly caught me from behind, spun me around and yanked the camera from my neck hard enough to break the strap. I felt my head dislodge and fall against his chest, which he seemed to enjoy because he kept it there, trapped in the crook of his rough arm.
    He twisted my elbow up around my ear and rooster-marched me back into the carpeted areas of the nursing home. “You keep dragging me around like this, you’re liable to scuff my shoes,” I said. I was wearing sandals.
    â€œCan’t let you run around like that.”
    â€œAfraid I’ll trip over a corpse?”
    â€œSomething like that.” He had to stop and get his bearings for a moment. I was beginning to suspect they had built it like a maze to keep people from finding their way out.
    â€œMaybe you should have left a trail of breadcrumbs.”
    He said, “What?” Then started off, still swinging me along by one arm.
    â€œIf you put me down, I promise not to run away.”
    â€œI don’t mind,” he said. “You’re not heavy at all.”
    When we reached the nurses’ station, the warden was just buzzing somebody in. The orderly handed Nurse Ratched my camera, then pushed me into a chair. He stood beside me, one hand on my shoulder, crushing me like an empty can.
    The nurse was all smiles again, smiles that didn’t touch her eyes, smiles that she wore like a name tag pinned to her face. I wondered if she took them off at night and kept them in a jewelry box on the dresser. “As you are employed by a lawyer, I’m sure you’ll understand that we can’t let people wander the halls unescorted. It’s a liability issue.”
    â€œNobody’s escorting