The Song of David

“Mad. Crazy. Don’t they mean the same thing?” I murmured. Madness and genius were closely related. I wondered what skills he was talking about. He hadn’t seen me paint.

“Nah, man,” he said. “They aren’t. Crazy people need to be in places like this. You don’t belong here.”

“I think I probably do.”

He laughed, clearly surprised. “You think you’re crazy?”

“I think I’m cracked.”

Tag tilted his head quizzically, but when I didn’t continue, he nodded. “Okay. Maybe we’re all cracked. Or bent. I sure as hell am.”

“Why are you bent?” I found myself asking. Molly was hovering and I drew faster, helplessly filling the page with her face.

“My sister’s gone. And it’s my fault. And until I know what happened to her, I’m never gonna be able to get straight. I’ll be bent forever.” His voice was so soft I wasn’t sure he meant for me to hear the last part.

“Is this your sister?” I asked reluctantly. I held up my sketch pad.

Tag stared. Then he stood. Then he sat down again. And then he nodded.

“Yeah,” he choked. “That’s my sister.”

And he told me everything.

David Taggert’s father was a Texas oil man who’d always wanted to be a rancher. When Tag started getting in trouble and getting drunk every weekend, Tag’s father purchased a fifty acre ranch in Sanpete County, Utah and moved the family there. He was sure if he could get Tag and his older sister, Molly, away from their old scene, he would be able to straighten them up.

But the kids hadn’t thrived. They’d rebelled. Molly ran away and was never heard from again. Tag struggled to stay sober, but when he wasn’t drinking, he was drowning in guilt and eventually tried to kill himself. Several times. Which landed him in the psych ward with me.

I listened, letting him talk. I didn’t know how his sister had died any more than he did. That wasn’t what the dead wanted to share. They wanted to show me their lives. Not their deaths. Not ever. When Tag finished talking he had looked at me with sorrow-filled eyes.

“She’s dead, isn’t she? You can see her, so that means she’s dead.”

I nodded, and he nodded too, accepting my answer without argument, his head lowering, my esteem for him rising. So I showed him the things Molly showed me, drawing the images that flitted through my mind whenever she was near.

Then Tag told his father about me. And for whatever reason—desperation, despondency, or maybe just a desire to placate his adamant son—David Taggert Sr. hired a man and his dogs to cover the area I had described. The dogs caught her scent quickly, and they found her remains. Just like that. In a shallow grave piled high with rocks and debris, fifty yards from where I’d once painted her smiling face on a highway overpass, the remains of Molly Taggert were uncovered.

Tag had cried when he told me. Big, wracking sobs that made his shoulders shake and my stomach tighten painfully. It was the first time I’d ever done something like that. Helped someone. Found someone. It was the first time my abilities, if that’s what they were, made sense. But Tag just had more questions.

One night after lights out, he came and found me, creeping down the hall undetected, the way he always did, seeking answers that none of the staff could give him, answers he thought I had. Tag was usually quick to smile, quick to anger, quick to forgive, quick to pull the trigger. He didn’t do anything in half measures, and I wondered sometimes if the facility wasn’t the best place for him, just to keep him contained. But he had a maudlin side too.

“If I die, what will happen to me?” he’d asked me.

“Why do you think you’re going to die?” I’d responded, sounding like one of our doctors.

“I’m here because I tried to kill myself several times, Moses,” he confessed.

“Yeah. I know.” I pointed at the long scar on his arm. It hadn’t been a hard deduction. “And I’m here because I paint dead people and scare the livin’ shit out of everyone I come in contact with.”

He grinned. “Yeah. I know.” He’d figured me out too. But his smile faded immediately. “When I’m not drinking, life just grinds me down until I can’t see straight. It wasn’t always that way. But it is now. Life sucks pretty bad, Moses.”

“Do you still want to die?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Depends. What comes next?”

“More,” I answered simply. “There’s more. That’s all I can tell you. It doesn’t end.”

“And you can see what comes next?”

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t see the future, if that’s what he meant.

“Can you see the other side?”

“No. I only see what they want me to see,” I said.

“They? They who?”

“Whoever comes through.” I shrugged.

“Do they whisper to you? Do they talk?” Tag was whispering too, as if the subject were sacred.

“No. They never say anything at all. They just show me things.”

Tag shivered and rubbed the back of his neck, like he was trying to rub away the goose flesh that had crept up his back.