Once those policemen were safely away, I decided to check on Logan first thing. All this talk about him had me feeling nervous. When I came inside, I found him out in the living room picking through the ashtray. He must of heard me coming because he made a mad scramble to hide behind the couch. I picked up a throw pillow on my way around the couch. He crouched in the corner, clutching a handful of cigarette butts. I chucked the pillow at his head.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you crazy?”
“I am.” He made a fake-crazy face that really did make him look a little insane. “I’m loony. Ha, ha. Bippy as a beaver hat.”
“No, really. What the hell are you doing, Logan?”
Out in the daylight, he looked even dirtier than I remembered, and I’d just given him another bath. The rash on his inner thighs had spread to his chest. I noticed he had scabs in the corners of his mouth.
“Nothing.” He chewed on his lower lip and smiled with his mouth only. His eyes looked glazed and empty, like my mom’s after she’s had her fourth beer. “Just getting some air.”
“Well, I just spent the last ten minutes talking to a mean M.P. and a policeman who were looking for you.”
“Shit,” Logan said, looking suddenly bashful. “Again?”
“Last time it was only the regular police, not the M.P. type,” I said. “You know they know you’re around here somewhere. And what do you do? You hop around the living room with the blinds open.”
I grabbed his arm and dragged him back to the closet. He came along without any trouble, but he wouldn’t speak to me at all. My room reeked of cigarette smoke, which was better than Logan stink but still worrisome. So he’d been sneaking out and swiping butts before. When we got inside his little room, the smell was overpowering.
“You can’t smoke in here. There’s nowhere for it to go. You’ll choke to death,” I said. “Besides, you don’t smoke. I thought you said you hated open flames.”
“I’m trying to get over my fears,” he said, grinning with half his mouth. He’d already stuck another little butt between his lips. “And besides, I’ve got to do something with myself. You ain’t got a fucking clue how bored I am.”
He lit up, but the butt was so short he burned the tip of his nose with the match. When he saw me watching him, he wheeled around and hunched over. It was a strangely chimp-like move.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s talk about it. Just put the cigarette out.”
“It’s out,” he said, grinning that strange grin again. He held up his arm and showed me a red mark on the inside of his wrist. It took me a second to realize what it was.
“Jesus, Logan, why didn’t you just put it out against the wall?”
“And mess up your painting? Shit.”
I gave him a worried look.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I borrowed these.” Logan held up an old bleach bottle with part of the top cut off. I’d kept my crayons in there when I was a kid. He shook it so it rattled.
“Where’d you find that?”
He gestured at one of the boxes against the wall and then picked up a half-dry felt-tip pen and started scratching out lines on his thigh with it.
“Just wait till you see my masterpiece when it’s done,” he mumbled, jerking his thumb at the wall behind his head.
I hobbled over and lit up that side of the room with my flashlight. He’d turned one wall into a cartoon strip. In the first panel, men in turbans chased a girl who looked a bit like me. In the next, they cut off her breasts. The blood formed a huge waterfall down the wall and he’d even colored a bit of the floor red. It looked like he’d melted a red crayon and let it drip and pool. In the final panel, the turban men chucked the girl’s boobs in a bonfire. The drawings were crude and brightly colored. The turban men had fangs. I felt sick.
“Jesus, Logan,” I said.
“I told you it ain’t finished,” he said, his voice small and sullen. “I have two more squares to fill. Just wait.”