Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  The captain of the night shift was a middle-aged man who’d served under Pershing and wore the same mustache. His best friend had been gassed in the Argonnes and spent six weeks choking to death, tied to a bed. He assigned Fred Sr. East Block—six tiers high, two ranges per tier, fifty cells per range. Twelve hundred men who showered once a week. Your sissies were on Three North, coloreds on Six South. Gangs and troublemakers were kept apart—the Settle brothers, the Latin Kings, the Short North Bandits. Fred Sr. checked the strap locks, listened for disturbances. If an inmate needed help he rang his tin against the bars. Five rings meant Range Five, and you could tell by listening if it was North or South. You would tell the lieutenant or the captain. To open a cell you had to unbolt them all, and you turned a crank in the wheelroom at the end of the block. In summer the upper tiers were hottest, the bottom ones coldest in winter. A service passage ran the length of each tier between ranges: pipe chases and conduits, no light, a narrow catwalk Fred Sr. walked every night, looking for signs of a digout. He could hear them through the vents in the backs of their cells: “Goodnight, Peaches, I love you.” “I love you too, Georgia, good night.” He heard the Settle brothers call to each other, and young men and old crying in their sleep.

  Twelve days on, three days off. Then thirteen on and two off. Fred Sr. was a relief officer and worked every job but death row. He worked every Christmas.

  Archie worked West Block. Archie was not his name but he was called that because he had flat feet and hadn’t been allowed to enlist. He was often late because he lived in the city and would visit the girls downtown on his way out. When he caught something they changed his nickname, but not to his face. He and Fred Sr. checked the Hole every hour. The cells in the Hole were under the bullpen and the temperature was always ninety degrees. No light, no bed, just an opening in the middle of the floor. You wore white coveralls and a pair of cloth slippers in the Hole. They kept track with cards: white for white inmates, blue cards for coloreds. Your sissy’s card was red.

  The cells in the Hole were made for one man at a time but sometimes they doubled them up. Once two men went in and one came out. The other was never found—so the story goes. If the Hole didn’t straighten you out you’d wish it had because beneath that was the Box, in which you couldn’t stand erect, and there goes another story of another confinement in which conditions were so unspeakable it was not even given a name, but this is where the expression “under the jail” comes from.

  When they put Fred Sr. on days they gave him another fifteen dollars a month and a uniform that fit. The shifts were longer but not as boring as nights. Sometimes he had to use his shitstick. When an inmate spoke to you he was to stand no less than three feet away with his arms folded. Any closer you gave him a whitecap, and this was the most action Fred Sr. had seen since the war, since Cactus Ridge.

  Fourteen thousand troops withdrawn from the front line with nervous breakdowns. He hadn’t told a soul back home.

  On days they blew reveille at seven in the morning, and the inmates washed and shaved with cold water. West Block fed first. Fives out and down! Fours out and down! and they marched in lockstep to the dining room, right hand on the right shoulder of the man in front. Blue shirts, blue pants, red stripes down the side. No talking or smoking, in line or in the dining room. If anyone spoke you could whitecap him. In the dining room hundreds of mouths shredding food, teeth clicking on metal, clattering utensils. The guard in the center aisle controlled the flow, and when they were done he cleared them out two rows at a time.

  Across the yard, Zone Two. Inmates could smoke and talk on their way to work; everybody worked, and everybody made eight cents an hour. Half went into your commissary fund, and half you could take with you if you ever left. You worked in the laundry or the kitchen or in the shops; print shop, tailor shop, furniture factory, powerhouse. Setting type with hot lead. There was a garage in Zone Three and officers could bring their cars in for repairs—ten dollars not including parts. If you had a blue slip from the Parole Board, you went to the tailor shop for a fitting thirty days before getting out. Clack and drone of fifty electric sewing machines. They would cut the pattern from whole cloth and sew it right there on the floor. They made your shoes from plain hides, dyed, cut, and sewed them on a last. If no one came for you on the day of your release you sat in the bus station in your new suit and shoes, waiting, perhaps trembling, my God where is home now?

  But for a while after Okinawa, after the caves and kamikazes, Fred Sr. was shop officer in the furniture factory. Boards from the sawmill were seasoned, cut, assembled with glue, sanded, stained, hand-rubbed with wax. A table for the warden’s quarters, a chest of drawers for the governor’s mansion. Fred Sr. sat on a pedestal and signed passes and filled out discipline sheets. A brass bell at the back of the shop he could ring if there was a fight or some other disturbance.

  Fighting was sixty days lost time, sixty days grace. You rang the bell three times for a riot.

  Inmates would sniff the paint thinner in the finishing area. 57635, who’d robbed a milkman and ran the belt sander, sniffed so much the lining of his skull was eaten away and he was paroled home to his family, legally blind, stumbling over furniture in childhood rooms. 55901 poured it all over himself then went out into the yard and lit a match. He’d gotten a letter. When he charged another inmate, either for aid or accompaniment, the east tower guard cut him down with a single .30 caliber round. Because his family could not be contacted, or because he had none, his blackened husk was shoved into a dark suit of unfinished seams (hastily made in the tailor shop) and buried with a few words in the inmate cemetery at the north wall. Only a number was inscribed in the stone, as if even after death you remained property of the state.

  On the grounds beyond the north wall where the institution quartered its dead, it raised its own crops and livestock. The inmates who worked the farm stayed in the honor dorms. There were apple and peach orchards along Route 13, a cannery, a hog and poultry farm, a horse barn, a dairy farm and pasture with a herd of Holstein cows. A slaughterhouse. There was a dirt road to the greenhouse and the warden’s dog liked to sleep in the middle of it, covered in dust, so that you would have to drive around him. A small lake between the hog lot and J-Dorm and in the summer boys would swim in the lake and fish for blue-gill, and feed apples to the big Belgian horses in the barn. Girls could only swim on certain days. In the fall when corn was being canned, Archie would drive a truckload of husks to the dump off Route 13. Once, when he got out of the truck to drop the tailgate, 61342 rose from beneath the pile of husks like some Halloween specter and stabbed him in the chest with a brass flush rod. (He’d honed it on the floor of his cell.) Archie drew his service revolver and shot 61342 in the neck, pulled the rod from his breastbone, and drove them both to the infirmary, the inmate squeezing his throat with both hands as if to strangle himself for ineptitude. Both were treated and recovered, and 61342 was tried and sentenced in the prison court in West Diagonal.

  Five years grace, five years lost time.

  Supper was at four. At three forty-five Fred Sr. would ring the bell in the back of the shop and the inmates lined up for count. They marched back to the dining hall for another noisy speechless meal. The music bell rang at eight and they could plug headphones into the walls of their cells (the institution had its own radio station), or they could play their guitars for the hour. Singing was forbidden. Guitars were the only instrument permitted at OSP, and though some players were more proficient than others, and rarely did they play in accompaniment, occasionally the stray sounds of scales and chords, crude attempts at a blues, even a fragment of the classical repertoire, would meet by some harmonic accident in the dead air of the tier and bring it to life. For that moment the range would grow quiet with listening, and perhaps those without hope of parole or pardon listened hardest, hearing a song that sang itself and belonged to no one, and whose last refrain could only be silence. Then the bell sounded to warn them that the lights would go out in five minute
s, and five minutes later the lights went out.

  They took showers on Saturday. The Car Wash was located at the end of West Block and the guards ran them through fifty at a time. They went to commissary on Saturday after showering, and after lunch they went to the yard or the gym where they played baseball, basketball, or boxed. Sunday morning you could go to chapel, Catholic or Protestant, and before dinner there was a movie in the high school. Not everyone attended church but almost everyone went to the movies, to Forbidden Planet or The Ten Commandments, and in addition to these entertainments the institution could provide its own: once a year the inmates would mount a stage production in the high school—Shakespeare, O’Neill, Gilbert and Sullivan—filling every role and capacity themselves—director, conductor, lighting technician; Titus, Ophelia, Peter Pan. Or they would perform a work of their own creation, presented under the title The Little Show in the Big House and open to the public for a modest admission.

  After the riots in the dining hall Fred Sr. made lieutenant. He received the largest increase of his tenure and bought a new blue Mercury station wagon with Hardtop Styling and a Super Marauder V8. He drove his family once a year to OSP to see The Little Show in the new blue Voyager, and drove Fred Jr. there once a month to get his hair cut. (Inmates learned to shave and cut hair at the Barber Shop and School. They practiced on a grinning skull, and two of the inmates awarded licenses would be pulled to work in the officer barber shop.)

  Fred Sr. would show his son around. Archie, a Mason and gun enthusiast like Fred Sr., shook the boy’s hand. Fred Jr. petted the warden’s dog. They visited the death house and Fred Jr. sat in the chair. His father made him get out, said it was bad luck.

  The ride to OSP in the blue Mercury took most of an hour. Farms, rush of country green and brown. Amish family in a market wagon. The radio played but Fred Sr. wouldn’t allow the new music. They talked but he no longer talked about the war. He talked about the Soviet space dog, the new conveyor system in the powerhouse—inmates didn’t have to shovel coal anymore. He mentioned the new social worker and Fred Jr. said they’d been taught to say Negro or colored. Fred Sr. mentioned the girl who lived two houses down and his son said nothing and listened to his father’s car. Four hundred horses with in-block combustion chambers, a water flow intake manifold and three two-barrel carburetors. Fred Jr. knew all of its component parts and what they did and should sound like because he was what they called mechanically inclined, and at home in the workshop he’d made of his room he would stop time fixing clocks, watches, his mother’s toaster, her blender, electric fans, typewriters, a discarded adding machine he’d found and restored to use; anything with moving parts, anything but the radio that sat playing on his desk, and what didn’t need repair he would dismantle anyway, solve its mystery with his mind in his hands, the new music in his ears.

  He’d built an amateur crystal radio set and not only conversed with other ham operators and monitored international broadcasts, but he listened to signals from space, from the satellites, Sputnik and Vanguard and Explorer, beeping and humming to him about cosmic rays, magnetic fields, the shape of the Earth. He was also a fair carpenter, had made birdhouses, simple furniture, a wagon for his paper route, executed projects from school and others of his own design. In shop class he excelled; in math, English, history, science, his performance was average. He was small and slight and poor-sighted, and as an athlete a father’s disappointment—made barely passing marks in the gymnasium.

  But he had inherited a predilection for firearms and, as if to fill a gap in paternal affection, been given one of his own, a Colt Woodsman .22 pistol with a long barrel and walnut grips. Fred Sr. had taught his son how to zero the sights and adjust the pull, that the way you squeeze the trigger is the most critical component of accuracy, and Fred Jr. was already an accomplished amateur marksman. He dismounted and cleaned his own arm using a concoction of kerosene, sperm whale oil, acetone, and turpentine. He used flannel patches and a knobbed wooden bore brush, and when he was done he would, against the onset of rust, fill the frame of the piece with gun grease, cover it in flannel, then wrap it in two thicknesses of manila drawing paper.

  The radio singing Zing! Went the Strings of His Heart, singing Who Knew Where or When?

  But during the ride to his last haircut at OSP they barely talked at all, for they had reached that stage in the relationship between father and son which is composed largely of silence. Fred Jr. brought his yo-yo. He sat in the metallic vinyl of the front seat, almost as big as their living room sofa, and listened again to the engine. He wasn’t sure when he would be listening to his own, but he knew it wouldn’t be a station wagon; it would be a Plymouth Fury or a Chevy 210, and he would wax it with Zip Wax and tune it himself, and he would tune it so well it wouldn’t make a sound, she wouldn’t even hear it as it slowed up alongside her like a big fish in clear water, and when she turned and looked at last she would see the black chrome shining at her, the sun burning in it as if the one in the sky were secondhand, and she would shine back then and he wouldn’t have to say a word, wouldn’t have to ask where she was going because her destination was his, always had been, they’d only lacked the means of getting there, and then she would be sitting no more than a foot of green vinyl away, not two doors down, in the passenger seat but not a passenger, looking through the windshield, through the glass at whatever they passed, and it wouldn’t really matter where she looked because it would always come back to him on a curve of light.

  Only the radio, doing his talking for him.

  They parked in the lot under the hard winter sun and went in through the administrative office. They went through the bullpen because you had to go through the bullpen to go anywhere at OSP. Two turnkeys in a bulletproof cage with gun ports and mirrors, controlling everything. There were four barred steel doors in the corners of the room, and only one could be opened at a time. Sometimes the turnkey outside the cage would pat Fred Jr. down as a kind of joke. He didn’t pat down Fred Sr.

  He opened the door and they went to the barber shop.

  Marble floor, high ceiling. Only one inmate worked the barber shop on weekends and 59631 stood there sharpening his straight razor on the stone. Fred Jr. liked the sound it made: ssk, ssk. The stone had a corner missing. Fred Jr. was first. 59631 used scissors and a comb and Fred Jr. liked the sound the scissors made, but not as much as he liked the sound of the stone. Except for that the haircut was silent because inmates were not permitted to talk to family members. When he was done, 59631 took off the bib, bunched it up and dusted off Fred Jr.’s neck, then helped him out of the chair. It was Fred Sr.’s turn.

  He sat in the chair and 59631 tied the bib on, then reclined the chair with a foot pedal so that Fred Sr. sat tilted back not quite staring up at the ceiling. 59631 stropped the blade on the leather strop hanging from its nail behind the chair. The straight razor had a wooden handle and was made of Sheffield steel, not stainless, which rusts and won’t hold an edge. He used a badger hair brush. He twirled it rapidly in the soap cup and Fred Jr., standing in front of the chair with his yo-yo, Rocking the Baby, Splitting the Atom, liked this sound as well. When he was done brushing the soap on Fred Sr.’s face, 59631 asked, as he always did, “What’ll it be today, sir?” and Fred Sr. replied, “Same as always,” same as he always did, and 59631 nodded and put his left hand on Fred Sr.’s forehead, something he didn’t always do, brought the blade under Fred Sr.’s jaw and cut his carotid artery. Blood sprayed onto Fred Jr.’s glasses, the red veil through which he would from that moment on see this new unfathered world, through which he saw the inmate draw the blade across his father’s throat, slicing the Adam’s apple and larynx and cutting through the jugular vein on the other side of Fred Sr.’s neck, the yo-yo sleeping at the end of its string, Fred Sr.’s arm burrowing like an animal under the red-soaked bib, then rising, and though Fred Jr. never saw the gun he saw the shape of its barrel through the cloth as his father shoved it under the barber’s chin without looking, damage done. The s
hot boomed and, tall as the room was, a hairy, bloody clot of scalp and skull appeared almost instantly on the vaulted ceiling, along with whatever motive 59631 may have had, slowly unpeeled itself and landed on the floor next to the inmate’s body with a sound like someone dropping a wet rag. The next sound came from far away, the clank of the wheel lock turning in the bullpen.

  The yo-yo swung like a pendulum, slowing.

  Fred Sr. tried to stand with his hand looking for his throat, the red spreading in a great wet fan below his neck but the foam on his face still completely white. He looked at Fred Jr., at his flesh and his blood, moved his lips but his windpipe was cut and whatever those words might have been bubbled soundlessly from that ragged new mouth and were lost. He sat down then like a man who has said his piece.

  The funeral was on Valentine’s Day. It was very cold and snow drifted. The casket was draped with a flag and rode a caisson drawn by four caparisoned horses. Two of the horses were saddled but had no riders. The ground was covered. The mourners kept stumbling over headstones on their way to the grave site, but only the living complained. The sun came and went, came and went, the sky opening and closing as if to admit some souls and deny others. The flag was folded thirteen times and presented to the widow. The retching of grief interrupted by gunfire, a three-volley salute.