by Ron Carlson
Mrs. Kinnel, the injured man’s wife was there evidently; I think she was the spleening woman who screamed, “Assassin! Assassin!” as I entered the room. Mrs. Ellis for some acrimonious reason was there also. She didn’t yell anything; her presence was barb enough. She had, her face announced, been expecting something like this of me for a long, long time. Riddel was not there. Eldon because of his helmet was barred from the gallery. I sent him a note, finally, that said: “Please water the tomatoes. Cordially, Larry and Vanzetti.” I won’t go on. That all things are possible became gradually apparent to me as all the papers were shuffled and filed so thoroughly against me, and I, myself, amid a pointed crowd, and cries of “Assassin! Assassin!” was conveyed off to the Big House.
I loved calling it that during the trial: the Big House. In the courtroom I’d turn to Nicky, who was perversely benevolent enough to attend, and say secretly, absurdly, “Hey, big boy, don’t you worry, things’ll be different up at the Big House.” Yes, that was before. Let me tell you something: no one in the Big House calls it that anymore.
Giving Vaughn, the bald checking guard my clothes and raging watch in exchange for the “garb” as my new wardrobe was called, I said, “So … this is the Big House, eh?”
“What?”
“So, this is the Big House.” I repeated looking around at the corners of the pale green room as if I were looking clear across Montana.
“Oh,” he said. “You dumb-ass. You sad dumb-ass.” He shook his head. “This is goddamn prison, and you’re in it.” I stopped saying that for a while. The rest was like that too: My dreams of prison fell away, heck, they were ripped away like a shirt in that porn film called The Secretaries. There is, in the end nothing romantic about having no toilet seat.
At dinner we filed in cafeteria style and were dished adequate, lukewarm food by Doug, Fred, and Star. The head cook was my old acquaintance Leeland Rose, DeLathaway’s help. We sat in small groups and talked, and again I am not telling lies, about the weather. The cups were styrofoam and no one ever pounded his on the tables which were small, pastel ovals. The whole scene was so stinking, so disappointing. It reeked of the casual.
Back during the theatre of the absurd, the trial, I had thought occasionally, fine if this vicissitude among others is visited on me, fine, another new life of extremes. Wrong was I. We’d actually loiter after the ham casserole lunches, smoking and breaking our styrofoam cups apart slowly, gently, the way a schoolteacher would, and then at the sound of the moderated whistle which did not blare, but sounded, (like Muzak stuck on a xylophone note), we’d break up and go to work. I certainly would have rather had Mrs. Hatcher Kinnel, wife of the “assassinated” man, sneak up on me while I lounged in my swimming pool and drill me full of complete holes from an oversize pistol. Some kind of dramatic ending would have suited me much better, a conclusive and final event, despite the fact that I would have had to borrow someone else’s swimming pool. At Mrs. Ellis’s, we didn’t have one.
Frankly, I also expected everyone to be filing and refiling his case with teams of hip, longhaired lawyers who came and went on motorcycles, because naturally, every prisoner had been wrongly accused, tried, and convicted. I couldn’t wait to get next to any of this injustice, so I could get myself the same lawyers, and commence the real wheels of justice. After all, right is right.
No one said anything about lawyers, cases, anything.
I stood in a long line of men the fourth day waiting to see Mr. Smelter, the Vocational Rehabilitation Officer. No one talked about their lawyers. We stood in a comfortable, accepted silence. I kind of liked the shuffling, when the line moved up one man, shuffle, shuffle, but unfortunately there was no grumbling to accompany it. That we were all guilty or innocent, the same as all the pedestrians strolling freely about the metropolitan walkways, tilling the rural soil, or leaving motel rooms in the baked sunslant of afternoon, was simply a becalmed piece of data, a cold fact. The boredom drove everybody places they might not have gone otherwise, but we were all—innocent (myself, remember?) and guilty—in the same backseat.
I tried to assume the stance of the men around me: one leg at a time shifting, cigarettes dropping from mouths like smouldering caterpillars quietly to the cement floor. And soon I too, was standing as though this was any line, registration, car wash, hamburger, matinee, urinal at the ball park; soon I too was doing the great American one-step, the act in which all people in free countries spend most of their time: loitering.
It got so I kept wanting to clean my wallet, which was locked away somewhere in that complex in a manila envelope, to sort the old restaurant cards from the newspaper clippings, from the phone numbers. I thought back to that woman in Why, Arizona—lady, you were right. There is no better reason. What we were doing in that line, like everybody-everywhere, was serving time. Now there’s a concept.
Then Mr. Smelter’s mahogany door opened and it was my turn. His office was full of metallic knick-knacks, that upon closer examination showed themselves to be parts of broken tools: shards of broken shovels, rake teeth, screwdriver handles. A polished crowbar, bent into an N, weighed down the papers in his “Out” basket. The bookends were the heads of two hoes. Mr. Smelter looked at a stiff white card that must have been about me.
“Wire, eh?”
“Sir?”
“Interested in electronics?” He leaned up on his desk and picked up a smashed hammer head, feeling its weight.
“Lightning only.” He put down the hammer head definitely and leaned back and blew up at a mobile of burnished broken saw blades. It began to turn slowly.
Still looking at it, he asked me: “Well, Boosinger, tell me. Do you prefer to take two things and make them into one thing, or do you prefer to take one thing and make it into two things?”
“I prefer …”
“What?” He blew upward again. There are some questions in this world for which I do not have the answers, and so I looked blankly at Mr. Smelter who really was unfit to give advice to the lovelorn, which I guess I was, really. “Well, what do you say?”
“That’s a great question you’ve asked,” was all I said.
“Okay, then,” he said after a silent saw-twisting minute, “landscape maintenance.” I stood up. “Report to Spike in the East Yard right after lunch.” I left him there as he probed his ear with the single leg of a shattered pliers.
27
I started going to work in the East Yard. My budding best friend and next-door neighbor, Salvatore, worked in the laundry and he said I had a pretty good deal working out in the sun. I had been assigned to the landscape crew for the new wing which was being constructed as we shoveled. We were scribing out a contoured bed for small fitzers which would serve as an organic transition between the walls and the yard.
The East Yard was mostly centerfield for Dexter Diamond, the prison’s hardball field, where we played Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons. The foreman of our crew was a triple murderer named Spike Spike, a red-headed former strong man at the circus. I’ve never seen a grown man with so many freckles. He kind of liked me and gave me the pleasant chore of turning the sod in the bed mixing in the topsoil with a pretty good Acme Land Company shovel. My soft foot got pretty tough right under the arch where I’d jump on the shovel, driving it into that rare prison soil.
So May passed, and I was assumed by prison life, which as I have said, was just a life. Work in the yard, smoking in the cell, talking evenings with Salvatore, playing the fiercest kind of baseball, no real hassles. Can you believe it has come to this in this country’s prisons?
One thing I should confess that I had expected to happen was my auction: you know, the new greenhorn (they don’t use that term either), the young guy comes into prison, and all the hardened criminals cluster like a boil around him bidding with smuggled dope for the fresh flesh. My first weeks in the block, even at work, everybody ignored me. I tell you it was just like the world. And no one asked me what I was in for, ever. I had “Oh, you know, assassination,�
�� all ready for them, but no one was interested.
Spike turned out to be a good man, very helpful in the field and proud of the work our crew was doing. He came over to me one day and said quietly, “You know, Larry, my name isn’t really Spike Spike.”
“No?”
“No. It’s Randy Spike.”
“Randy, huh?”
“Yeah, but I don’t like anyone to call me that.” He set his mouth. “It’s a kid’s name.” He looked at me through nine million freckles. It was the most amazing confession I’ve ever heard. “But you can call me Randy if you want—just don’t let anyone hear you, okay?”
“Okay, Randy.”
“After all,” he said kicking a clod into dust, “It is my name.”
What I liked the most was the baseball. Getting off early those three days a week, playing the games, was incredibly pleasant. The teams had been cleverly named, proving the presence of intelligent people on that particular side of bars. My team was the “Dangerous Convicts.” Good, right? There were seven other teams in the league, but the only one that was a real threat to our squad’s taking the title was the “Escapees,” which as you can see is a clever name also.
As a team we Dangerous Convicts had spirit, but the games were quiet. We’d all sit on the bench like tired people at a dentist’s office, not talking much, but on the field everybody ran the bases and fielded the ball at dangerous velocities. No one made jokes about stealing bases, even to Lefty, who had successfully robbed eighty-one banks, all in California. Off the diamond we rarely talked to each other (except for Salvatore who played second and me, the third baseman); and even the most omniscient of observers would have had trouble telling we were a winning and somehow unified team.
Aside from that and the extensive vocational guidance and rehabilitory aid the prison offered in the person of Mr. Smelter, there were also two courses being given that summer for high school or university credit. “Body Movement: Grace” was the title of one, “Poetry Workshop” the other. I decided to take “Body Movement: Grace” because it had to be good for me and anyway teaching body movement in a prison is the kind of paradox that attracts me. Unfortunately, the instructor Roland Pound emphasized the Grace more than the Body Movement. His thesis was that a fundamental requirement of grace is never to look at your hands. Never. He showed us how to walk and sit down, and in a way it did good things to our convicted postures. But I only stayed in the course two days. It wasn’t because of the cuts I got shaving while I stared directly into my own worried eyes. It wasn’t due to those moments in class when I’d sit down on a hand and not be sure if it was my own. I quit because of the third time I lit the filter on one of my cigarettes and took a death-defying drag on all that nylon-fiberglass et cetera. In that third hacking moment as cough moved to retch, I decided to once again start peeking at what my hands were doing. Besides, the whole concept played hell with my infielding.
To compensate for dropping grace, I enrolled late in the poetry workshop which Salvatore had already told me Wesson himself was teaching. I considered wearing a disguise for a while, but then dropped it and just went in to take my medicine. Wesson was as incredible, or is it credible, as everyone else. He delivered his knowing glance in my direction for a moment and then started the class, not knowing he’d soon be drawn across the keen edge of our imprisoned imaginations. He read a poem by some character I’d never heard of, some “friend” of his, during which Wilkes, a grand larcenist from Grand Rapids, kept saying “Hey, teach, if this is a workshop, where are the tools?” The first two times he said it everybody laughed, but Wesson continued reading using his inspired baritone voice. The only part of the poem we could hear was about this guy leaving Reno for San Diego and the promise of the West, a new life, or some such geographical lie.
“Hey! Hold on!” Lefty yelled out.
“Good. Do you have a comment, Mr. Croisure?”
“Yeah, I got a comment.” He addressed the class: “Look, the guy says he’s leaving Reno, right?”
“Right.” Wesson put in. “For the site of new promise …”
“No way! I worked in Reno for six months once as a backup dealer. God, there was this girl worked in front of me. Some piece! Rode her bike to work …”
“Yes, yes, and …” The class ignored Wesson’s prompting.
Lefty went on: “Wendy was her name. Rode her bike …” Here Lefty lapsed into a blank-eyed reverie, and the class, we sat in respectful quiet in our circle. “Yeah,” Lefty came to, “this cross-eyed poet needs a roadmap. You don’t wait to get to Reno to go to San Diego. Why you can’t get there from Reno. He’d have turned left in Elko!” The class exploded in hoorays and applause.
“Lefty should know,” our coach, Oliver Panghurst, added, “he’s been there.”
“And so I conclude,” Lefty concluded, “that this here poem is full of shit.” More wild applause.
“Ahem, yes, well … the idea of promise, of moving west,” Wesson was faltering, “of starting a new life, certainly is not lost on you, you …” Oh Wesson, you are hanging over the abyss, “… you confined-type men.” Wesson collapsed on the lectern.
“Us confined-type men,” Lefty spoke for everyone, “find this kind, like any kind of shit, offensive. It’s the goddamned poet who’s lost. He ought to start a new life as a …”
“As a prison guard!” Panghurst shouted.
“Yes!” Lefty came back. “Yes, as a prison guard—that don’t take no brains!” The room, like so many I’d been in of late, disintegrated into descending debris, rising smoke and splinters of light as paper clips streamed silver toward Wesson’s shock-white eyeballs.
So I stopped going to the workshop, though Salvatore reported to me from time to time and it was clear that Wesson was being dealt the kind of cards he deserved. I know this moralistic stance here seems inappropriate, but Wesson had openly rubbed me what is known as the wrong way too long, and revenge, regardless what nonsense is uttered by rehabilitation officials and other coxcombs, is nectar, and who—given the choice—won’t sample a smidgen?
28
At night still, I’d lie in my bed, but I couldn’t believe I’d made it. In the period before sleep when people do their best thinking and from which no thought is recoverable, my mind slipped through the successive holes of thought faster and faster, like a car’s motor racing after it has stopped, the whirling centrifugal whine, metal against metal, all oil gone up in spires of tinged steam, and the clutch, wouldn’t you know it, in. That is to say, among the other fifty billion thoughts that flew by like bats in the cave of my indignant rage, I thought about my own responsibility and guilt. I had felt guilty before about different things, so I knew what it should feel like if it came. I had had black-hearted moods, entire atmospheres of guilt, in which conscience like a drunken lumberman fed the long planks of my raw remorse to the sawblade; but I didn’t feel that way now. At all. Perhaps it was the deep sense of embarrassment I felt for all the hundreds of paper readers and civil employees who thought I was guilty that led me onto that trackless train of thought, onto that rapid-fire midnight docket. The sentences flew out like the years in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing:
For ever knowing and associating with Dorothy “Dotty” Everest—five years and a thousand-dollar fine, fine suspended because of Mexican penalties paid …
For various croquet felonies—two years …
For not marrying the perfect Lenore and buying a small orchard farm in Logan, Utah, and, don’t you know, settling down—five big years … with this sentence came the conflicting maxims, “It’s never too late” and “Don’t close the barn door after the horse has fled.” It might not be too late …
For not punching Mrs. Ellis’s son-in-law—six months …
For ever gaining (what a word) employment at the Flying W and existing within the same square mile as the Waynes and Teeth—five years at least …
For coveting the vanished Lila—a clear five years …
For not taking more drasti
c measures with Lila—six months …
I ransacked the rest of the potentially guilty clutter in the desk drawer of my mind, but really couldn’t come up with any regrettable details that I hadn’t already paid for, except an incident at the Pumpkin Hop which took place with my close associate at the time, Joylene North. That was way back in junior high, and I assigned myself ninety days for it.
As my thought processes closed down for the night and sleep approached like the wolves around a diminishing campfire, I added all the debts. Twenty-four years and ninety days. Subtracting my age, I had only sixty-six days left to serve. I was determined to serve only sixty-six days more. I rolled onto my back and looked up at Bette Davis who knelt concernedly over my imprisoned self, and I said, “Sixty-six more days in Sing-Sing, baby, and I’ll be coming home.” I fell deeply asleep twenty minutes before the dark night of the soul.
29
Summer passed. I worked hard on the fitzer beds, and took firm pride along with Randy Spike in the job we were doing. Days are such small items. They merged and streamed by. It was like those scenes in the movies where they show the superimposed calendar being torn away, page by page, and blowing off into the wind. June. July. August. They also have the newspaper come spinning out at you and then it slows and stops and one headline says JOE ELECTED MAYOR; then another paper spins out at you, stops and says JOE ELECTED GOVERNOR; then a third comes spiraling out: JOE ELECTED PRESIDENT. And you know that suddenly Joe has made the big time, as they begin a shot in the oval office, and that he has forgotten all his old, dear friends. It doesn’t take long, movies tell us, for good people, the kind you and I know, to become crooks. Well, in the prison it was the same. Time whirled away and by late August the “Dangerous Convicts” were tied for the league lead with the “Escapees.” We’d have had the title clinched except our best hurler, Armstrong, got paroled; the best hitter in the league, our centerfielder Manny Bloomfield had been somewhat eviscerated in a knife fight; and our first baseman Enos Harper had escaped by walking away from the farm detail.