by Lee Durkee
“Resisting!” O’Cochran bellowed. “Attempted escape! Jesus, you almost made it too.”
“I gotta use the bathroom,” Noel tried to say.
“Feel that? Feel that cold blue steel, son? It’s the last thing many a better man than you ever felt.”
If he could have, Noel might have begged not to be shot, but as it was, he had no breath left for begging. Very slowly O’Cochran maneuvered his weight off of Noel until only the pressure against Noel’s neck still pinned him to the desk. O’Cochran said, “Now I want you to turn around—but slow, real slow. And then I want you to give the barrel of this revolver a big wet kiss, son. It’ll be good practice for prison, trust me.”
Noel had to roll over on the desk. After he had accomplished that, he saw that it was not a gun, it was O’Cochran’s index finger.
“Fooled you.”
“Yes sir.”
“Pull on it.”
“Sir?”
“Pull my finger!”
Noel quit removing paper clips from his cheek and reached up and gripped O’Cochran’s chubby index finger and gave it a soft tug. O’Cochran closed an eye, hiked a leg, farted.
“That’s better,” he said.
Still hyperventilating, Noel said he needed to use the bathroom real bad, and he needed that inhaler back, please.
“Number one or number two?”
It took a moment for the question to make sense.
“Number two, sir.”
O’Cochran nodded sympathetically then sat Noel back down in the desk facing the corkboard and left him there.
Some twenty minutes later Taylor found Noel doubled over on the floor and helped him to the bathroom and stood guard in front of the doorless stall.
“Go ahead, get started. Might as well get used to it. You’re in custody now.”
As his stomach began to uncramp, Noel cringed and then covered his eyes to hide the tears welling up there. When Noel’s stomach had finally quieted down, Taylor said, “Look. Noel, right? Noel, maybe this ain’t as bad as you think it is. See, those two old-timers back there, they like talking tough, but the truth is we checked you out and you got a clean record. There’s no way you’ll sit more’n two, three years tops. I know, I know—you’re gonna keep harping away on how it wasn’t yours—”
“It wasn’t. Mine.”
“See, you just dug yourself deeper is all. It’s your word against theirs. Plus they’re gonna haul in all these high school kids who’ll swear on the Bible that you sold them drugs. Which we both know is the truth. Now, look. Hell, I used to run a little wild myself. So I can relate. Kinda. But those two buzzards, they’re old school, Noel. They see you, all they see’s a drug pusher, one who sells dope to children. They want your hide. And they got it too. Still, they been around long enough to know it ain’t that simple. It never is,” he added, as if he were an old man and not someone three years older than Noel. “So tell me this. Simple yes or no. Are you someone amendable to a deal?”
Noel asked what kind of deal.
“Only kind in town. You gotta give up your source. Soon as you do that, you walk outa here. Pretty day outside, Noel.”
“Turn narc, you mean?”
“It’s like pulling off a Band-Aid. Faster you do it, the better.”
“I think I want a lawyer.”
“Maybe that’s a good idea. Get everything real official. But I gotta warn you, the second you call in a lawyer, won’t be no more deals struck. Once that blue suit walks in the door, everything goes by the book.”
Taylor reached into his pocket and found a dime and held it up, tail side showing. “You sure you want this?” When Noel did not reply, Taylor asked, “Or are you someone who’s amendable?”
Scratched into the stall just above the toilet paper dispenser was the advice: Need help? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT!
Staring at that, Noel replied, “I don’t even know what I am.”
By dark everyone had left the police station except O’Cochran, who was crooning along to a Willie Nelson tape. Noel, both his legs asleep under the desk, continued staring into the phantasmagoria of the corkboard. More than once he had reached up and touched the cork to see what would happen. But even the act of raising one hand panicked his lungs that much more. The dog was gone now, but the smell was as strong as ever. Around midnight O’Cochran called over and asked if Noel had had enough for one day.
“I can’t even feel my legs.”
“Pretend you’re handcuffed,” O’Cochran instructed. He guided the limping Noel down the hallway into the last room. This room was layered thickly with robin’s-egg-blue paint and halved by a cell. The cement floor looked to have been freshly scrubbed. A wire bunk held a thin but clean mattress. A trickle of water bled out of a contraption on the wall that looked more like a sink than a toilet, and beneath it was a roll of unopened toilet paper.
“My wife,” O’Cochran apologized. “She did everything but leave one of them paper bands across the shitter.”
He handed Noel the inhaler and said, “My son’s got one of them too. His is green, though.”
Noel used the inhaler. His shoulders slumped then he took a deep breath and looked up and explained that the green ones weren’t nearly as good. Plus the green ones made your hands shake and kept you up all night. “You oughta change over to the blue ones, even though they cost a lot more.”
“Now, why don’t that surprise me?” O’Cochran replied, but he took out a pen and copied down the name of the drug on a notepad. While he wrote he said, “My youngest boy—I got six, six kids, not all boys—he goes to that school you like to sell drugs to.”
“I never even seen that school in my life, sir, I swear.”
“Uh-huh. Take your clothes off, please.”
When Noel hesitated, O’Cochran removed Noel’s belt and pointed with the buckle up at the water pipe running along the ceiling. He clenched both fists like doing a chin-up. “Black fella hung himself up there one night. Using his own underwear.” He dangled the belt over his head, stuck his tongue out sideways, and then crossed his eyes. “Next morning, guess who waltzes in. Hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee yet. Hell, I didn’t even know we had anybody in lockup. I threw open the door, and good morning—there he was. Still spinning.” O’Cochran measured his palms about a foot apart. “Son, let me yell ya, you ain’t seen much in this world until you’ve seen, first thing in the morning, the enormous cold-blooded hard-on of a hanged man.” He regarded the space between his hands and said, “I don’t take chances anymore. Now strip down.”
After Noel was naked, O’Cochran backed him into the cell and gently pulled the door shut and tested it.
“We never even found out his name. That black fella’s. No ID, no nothing. Picked him up drunk-disorderly. All we found out, he had these two little teardrops tattooed under his left eye. You know what that means?”
Noel shook his head
“Means he killed two men in prison. A teardrop for each man you kill.” O’Cochran touched himself twice under the eye. “Prison ain’t no place for you, child’a immortality. I want you to be thinking long and hard about that tonight. Because, come tomorrow morning, I’m gonna ask you one question and I’m only gonna ask it once.” He flicked off the overhead bulb. When he pushed open the door to the hallway, a two-by-four of yellow light fell across the cement floor and halfway into the cell.
“By the way, you ain’t handcuffed anymore.”
Noel looked from the shaft of light to his wrists, which he had fused back together as soon as he’d finished undressing. Now he separated them slowly, as if released from a spell.
“You want me to leave the hall light on? I can wedge a shoe or something in the door here, work it like a night-light.”
“I ain’t afraid of the dark.”
That made O’
Cochran chuckle.
“Well, you’re one up on me, then. Good night, child’a immortality. Heater’s running. Guess you don’t hold with ghosts either. Good for you.”
•••
The door shut and the darkness around Noel began to expand. Sitting on the cot and pressing his back to the wall and rocking with his knees near his chest, he kept thinking about Tim and Miss Weiss. Prison life . . . that took up its share of his imaginings too, as well as the ghostly presence of the hanged black man spinning above him. And Lily. And the look on Cecilia’s face when she had stepped out of the classroom. Every half an hour or so his lungs tightened up again. He tried to ration the inhaler. The ache in his buttocks from sitting down all day swam into his thighs and calves. Hours passed this way before he finally fell asleep. He must have fallen asleep. How else to explain coming bolt awake, his right arm, which had been pillowed under his head, deadened past the pin-and-needle stage? It felt like a dead man’s arm had been pinned to his shoulder. Noel tried to rouse the arm by cursing it and by flopping it around and by kneading blood into it. In his panic he stood, but his right leg proved equally bloodless and instantly he collapsed backward onto the cot.
It was not until he saw the soldier sitting on the far end of the mattress that he understood himself to be dreaming. This realization did little to calm him. It was strange, knowing that you were dreaming but still not waking up. After a few seconds of studying the soldier, Noel went back to curse-kneading his dream arm. The soldier, whose severe thinness made his cheekbones stand out effeminately, was grinning, perhaps maliciously, down at a large black and white photograph set on his lap. His teeth were blackened and a few of the front ones were missing. His bare feet were scarred and mangled and infected-looking along the bottoms of the toenails. He inserted a trembling cigarette into his mouth and began pulling the fire toward his lips in long sips, rearing his head back as he inhaled, and every once in a while glancing up to watch with some amusement Noel’s attempts to flag blood into his right arm.
Eventually he broadened his grin and coughed and said, “Boo.”
“I ain’t scared of you and it don’t even matter if I am, you’re just a ghost or some kinda bad dream.”
“Just a ghost?”
“Yeah.”
“If I’m just a ghost then go ahead and say my name.”
“Goose is your name.”
“Not Goose, my real name. Say my real name.”
“I don’t have to do nothing just ’cause you tell me to. Anyway, where’d you get that picture at? That’s my little brother.”
The black and white glossy was of Ben. In it, Ben stood naked, his feet spread wide apart, his arms straight out from the sides, but there were dozens of arms, all extending straight out, forming a near-circle around him, as if he had been flapping his arms like wings with the shutter left open except that each arm was depicted clearly without the least blur of motion.
Not looking up from the photograph, the soldier asked, “Hey, I know it’s none of my business, but you’re not going to rat on that little jewboy friend of yours, are you? Because, if you ask me, these fucking damn cops, they just mind-gaming you.”
“I ain’t ratting on nobody.”
“Well, you’re sure as hell thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“I think about lots of things, that don’t mean I do them.” Then Noel asked, “Hey, how’d you die anyway?”
“What makes you so sure I’m dead?”
“What—you ain’t one of those ghosts don’t even know he’s dead, are you?”
The soldier’s laughter got all mixed up with cigarette smoke. Finally he replied, “How’d I die? Let’s see . . .”
“You got shot, didn’t you? In the damn heart.”
He did not reply at first, just shrugged and went on smoking his cigarette, which he was holding between his thumb and index finger. His fingernails were gnarled and yellow and very long. His hand kept shaking, and the line of smoke coming off the cigarette shimmied upward, forming little staircases of smoke.
“Yeah, I got it in the heart, alright,” he admitted finally. “But from the back, while trying to escape. I’d of made it too, maybe, if they hadn’ta already broke both my damn feet after the first time I tried escaping. You wanna see the exit wound?” After saying this, he unbuttoned his torn khaki shirt. A strong gravitational field started to draw Noel across the cot. It wasn’t really an exit wound, it looked more like a perfect black hole, more an entrance than an exit. Noel was sucked forward, inching along the cot, but then the soldier closed the shirt again and smiled. As if a proper threat had been administered.
“I ain’t narcing on nobody,” Noel told him.
They waited together in the large darkness of the small cell.
“I got about three, four things worth telling you.”
“Maybe I got a few things worth telling you too,” Noel replied.
“The first thing is this. Beware what you learn to do well in this world. Because you just might end up doing it the rest of your life.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means what it says it means. The second thing I want to tell you is something my grandfather once told me. He said to me, Goose, drunk women’ll do funny things.”
“I already know that one.”
“Well, here’s one you sure don’t know. Only break one law at a time, Noel. One law at a time.”
“Sounds like you didn’t know that one either.”
“I didn’t know any of them except the one about drunk women. That’s why I’m telling you them, so you don’t make the same mistakes I did. And this last one’s the most important one.” Again he opened his shirt, and this time Noel began a long journey, swept forward and entering into the black wound headfirst with his arms soldiered at his sides. The last thing he heard his father say to him was, “Go to the light, Noel. Go to the light.”
•••
He emerged as if squeezed out of a tube into a vast black womb and began a descent into a region of stars that, as he drew closer, divided into clusters and spirals and animal-shaped nebulae flashing pink and orange, and these he passed through or missed by millions of miles and then after a long time he approached a galaxy centrifugal in shape, its tail studded with a system of planets tethered around a small dim sun and slung out from it haphazardly at such diabolical speeds that he could scarcely imagine it binding together another moment and into the midst of this unraveling dreamscape he plunged headlong and as he did so the rotation of the planets slowed or seemed to slow as the bright orbs grew larger and more formidable and he began to pass them one by one, their moons rearing and winking then lost in the approach of a new planet, then another and another, this last one sparkling blue on a collision course and as he feathered into its bright atmosphere he saw ahead of him a blue sea, which he followed at gull level into the mouth of night and then up and over an ocean liner, its passengers on deck pointing at him and wasting flash cubes, then daylight swallowing him up and a beach bone-white and constellated with umbrellas staggered blue red yellow blue red yellow for miles with women sunbathing between these bright asters the eye is a womb every one of them naked or at least topless the beach is full of naked women and onward through the strobe of night-day-night-day with a quick flight through jungle, through abandoned heathen temples, through bamboo villages giving way to flooded fields, to women with hats shaped like smaller umbrellas a dozen different colors bending into rice paddies, then a monsoon, another ocean, a giant polluted river, then veering low along a smaller polluted tributary, skimming a water tower where someone had spraypainted john 3:16, and lastly him swooping down to enter the courthouse window as if it were a cave and he a bat fluttering down the hallway through the last door and between the bars into the small cell, where he found himself alone on the cot propped against the wall and
as he honed in and hung himself upside down inside his own body he awoke, except there was no sensation of awakening, rather the mute understanding that he was now awake where as before he had been other than awake and all the while the voice inside his head was chanting the eye is a womb, chanting the beach is full of naked women, and again his right arm deadened and again he tried to rouse the arm by thrashing it around the cell as a phone rang thinly in a distant room.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AT FIRST LIGHT O’Cochran entered the cell and handed Noel his clothes, all neatly folded. Noel got dressed, followed O’Cochran back into the office, and sat at the same school desk. The phones were ringing and O’Cochran snapped one up, listened petulantly, then barked, “Lady, you ain’t alone, the whole town thinks the world’s coming to an end. But I ain’t got time to go check your barn. You gotta go check your own barn and then call me back if it landed in there.”
The phone rang again as soon as he hung it up. The same thing was happening to Taylor, who was manning the second desk. Finally O’Cochran put someone on hold and came over and set a carton of doughnuts and a mug of coffee in front of Noel. Noel ate quickly then asked to use the bathroom.
“You know where it is,” O’Cochran replied, his hand over the phone.
Noel rose cagily and moved through the two rooms and down the hallway. He was too exhausted to ponder escape. When he returned from the bathroom, he hesitated before sitting down. The radio had been turned low, the Mr. Coffee was gurgling, both Taylor and O’Cochran were still answering the phones. Clyde had entered the office and was watching despondently as the coffeepot trickled full.