Cage's Bend

by Carter Coleman

  “I think I’ll see how Margaret’s holding up,” Mrs. Eppers said, dashing Nick’s hopes that she would drop him off and drive away. She quickly stepped out of the car and walked in the house through the sitting room door without knocking, calling out, “Mars!”

  “You’re going to get licked,” Jimbo said.

  Nick jumped out of the car and ran through the garage and opened the kitchen door. He looked both ways quickly. The kitchen was empty. He was up on the counter, on his knees, placing the little wallet back on the sill when the women walked in. For a moment, glancing over his shoulder, it was hard to tell them apart. Their short dark hair was held back by bands, and they wore tapered slacks that came to their ankles and sleeveless cotton shirts. Mrs. Eppers was trying not to smile and his mother’s face was red with anger. Nick lowered himself down to the linoleum floor.

  “Nicholas Rutledge, where have you been?”

  Nick muttered, “Around.”

  “Did you go to Pucket’s?”

  Nick was silent.

  “Nick, tell me the truth.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Nick squeezed his lips into a curvy line.

  “I’ve got to get home and make dinner,” Mrs. Eppers said, backing out of the room.

  “Thanks, Nancy.” His mother crossed the floor and knelt by him.

  “Nick, what were you thinking?” Her voice was gentle. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  Nick was silent. He looked at his feet, shrugged.

  “Nick, you know you’re not supposed to walk to Pucket’s on your own, a little boy like you. Some bad people might get you.”

  “Who?”

  “Strangers. There are bad people in the world.”

  Nick glanced up at her face, back at his feet.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He looked in her eyes and saw that she wasn’t angry but worried. “I won’t go again by myself.”

  “You took your milk money, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Oh, Nick, how could you?” She shook her head, put her hand to her brow, and squinted. “We’re not like the Eppers. We don’t have much money. You can’t buy candy whenever you want. You won’t be able to buy milk at school. Do you see?”

  “Taffy tastes better.”

  She shook him by the shoulders. “Nick. There’s not enough money. We don’t have enough money.” She raised her voice. “I don’t know how we’re going to pay our bills. We might run out of money. God, there’s never enough money. There’s simply not enough. Never enough. Your father doesn’t make enough money. They don’t pay ministers enough.”

  Nick had turned his head. His mother was sobbing. She stopped shaking him and held him close. “Oh, Nickfish, I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault. Okay?” She looked at him brightly, smiled through tears, her cheeks wet. “You’re too young to realize the value of money.”

  Margaret

  Nantucket is like a newly born place. Part of it is the wind from the ocean, and I’m sure the flowers are so beautiful because of all the moisture, but every flower—most of them are flowers I’m familiar with and many of them are flowers we grow in the South—is more lush. Just fresher. The yellow Scotch broom is in bloom. It’s a shrub up here. I’d only seen it in flower arrangements and to see it growing is thrilling. Annuals like nasturtiums are wonderful and the perennials, like hollyhocks, are just spectacular. And then those beach roses, the Rosa rugosa, a pink rose that almost grows wild up here. But the best thing of all is the roses growing up on the rooftops. I’ve never seen anything like that. I borrow Harper’s bicycle and ride and ride, looking around for the roses covering the rooftops. I do believe Nantucket is one of the most exquisite places in terms of its climate and visual beauty.

  The first morning, exploring Siasconset on the bicycle, I saw the town tennis court and I peered through the shrubs. It was like being in a dream. The ladies had on big straw hats and long white linen skirts and their blouses had big leg-o’-mutton sleeves. The men were wearing long white linen pants and elegant white linen shirts. Just enchanted, I watched them playing and thought, Oh my goodness, this is the world of a hundred years ago, and I felt really weepy, thinking, Oh, I don’t want Cage to be in trouble. I want him to make a place for himself up here so I can become a part of this world. Later Beth Slade tells me they were filming the tennis players in period costume for an ad but I didn’t see any people with cameras. Nobody else was watching.

  There’s a tragic irony in Cage going to jail in Nantucket two years to the day after Nick died in San Francisco. I was bracing myself for the anniversary of his death, and Cage’s news caught me off guard and brought a double sadness rushing into my heart like a winter wind. The three weeks in England were the first time since his death that I was able to laugh aloud. Nick was the son closest to my heart. Where Cage and Harper resemble their father physically with their blue eyes, Nick had my dark hair and eyes and the shape of my face and my quiet temperament. When he was tiny, I would take him to the Junior League and church committee meetings and give him a little toy and he would entertain himself quietly for an hour, never a nuisance. He was the most loving one, the one I could always count on. A mother may love all her children equally but there is one to whom she feels a special bond. This was the one God took from me and I suppose there is a lesson in that.

  Nothing is sadder than parents burying their own child. Nick was cremated and we spread his ashes off the top of Roan Mountain in North Carolina where Franklin had taken the boys hiking from the time they could walk. Like any brothers born so close, Cage and Nick fought often in their adolescence but they loved each other fiercely. Cage wept the whole way walking up the mountain and after Franklin read the committal service and we scattered the ashes, Cage stood on the edge of the cliff for a long time as if he might follow Nick into the abyss.

  Now it seems as if he has.

  A few minutes after Franklin and I walked in the door back home in Memphis, jet-lagged from the long flights, the phone rang and the operator said it was a collect call from the Bridgewater State Mental Institution. At first I thought it was one of Cage’s jokes. But when they put Cage through, I knew it was real from the desperation in his voice. He tried to sound upbeat, asked about our journey, and when I asked him why on earth he was in a mental hospital, he said, “I don’t know, Mom. I haven’t done anything wrong,” and he started crying. He sounded like a little boy, just pitiful. I asked him what the hospital was like and he replied, “You don’t want to know. You wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

  Perhaps I should have waited for Franklin to get over the terrible flu that he picked up crossing the ocean—he started vomiting on the leg from Atlanta to Memphis—but trying to be brave and spare him, I decided to come up here by myself. The afternoon I arrived Harper took me to the house, where the yard was full of funny old boats and paint cans. We worked and worked for days to clean up before the owners arrived. Oh, those people, when they got there, they were so cool to me. This is cruel, I thought. Mrs. Taylor thinks that I’m responsible, that I haven’t been a good mother or he wouldn’t have turned out like this. There’s a lesson there somewhere. Never transfer your anger from one person to another.

  I spoke to the lawyer that Harper had hired, a boy just out of law school who was apologetic about the terrible outcome, and I spoke to the psychiatrist who had sent Cage off to Bridgewater, a curt man who had trouble looking me in the eye. He said that he suspected that Cage was manic-depressive. That was shocking news to me and Harper, for we had been certain that Cage dropping out of Vanderbilt so close to finishing and all his wild behavior on Nantucket were a result of his depression over Nick’s death. I asked if a traumatic event could trigger a manic episode and he said quite possibly.

  On visiting day I fly to Hyannis and rent a car. You can get a good deal on a day rental. Bridgewater is a big, fearful-looking place. I park and go inside the waiting room. I’m sure I have everything but First Time written on my
chest. The waiting room is unpleasant and the staff who ask if they can help you are these hardened people. They tell me I’m early and can’t see Cage until midafternoon. A matronly woman who has visited someone inside and is on her way out sees that I’m flustered and comes up and says, “Would you like to go and have lunch somewhere and I will tell you what I know?”

  We go to a pizza place in a little shopping center not too far away and she tells me that she’s a schoolteacher and comes every week to see the man who was her fiancé, a high school principal and very upstanding citizen, an absolute straight arrow. Every day he visited his parents, who were elderly and didn’t have much money. He was very concerned what would happen to them if something should happen to him and he decided the best thing to do was not let that happen. He went to their apartment and shot both of them. So he’s in the facility for life. The story fills me with a hopeless feeling. I ask his diagnosis and she tells me that he’s bipolar, manic-depressive, which is shocking, for I had no idea that manic-depressives could be so violent. She tells me that once you get in Bridgewater, it’s very hard for the family to get you out. I think, Well, I have to start working on that right away.

  I adhere to the hints of the schoolteacher, who told me to get to the waiting room early so I can be at the front of the line and to get in as quickly as possible because the time passes so fast. She told me to tell my son to be polite to the guards, not to talk back, and to keep a low profile, which has always been hard for Cage to do. They lead us into a big room with all these tables and chairs. It’s a shock to see Cage come out dressed like a criminal in blue denim. His hair hasn’t been so long since he was a teenager. When he sees me, his face lights up like a tiny child thrilled to see a parent.

  “Hey, Mama.” Hugging me, he smells like he could use a shower. “Welcome to the nuthouse.”

  “Oh, son.” I manage to smile and hold back the tears. “Is it as awful as it looks?”

  “Wretched beyond words.” He laughs and sits down across a small table. “I stole a butter knife and for six days they had me in Maximum 1, sharing a cell with a double murderer.”

  Cage must see the horror on my face because he touches my hand and says, “Don’t worry, Mom, after I met with the shrink in charge, they moved me back to the med wing, Max 2. Where’s Pop?”

  “He’ll come next week. He has a terrible flu, can’t keep anything down. The break was so good for him. He’s been stressed-out. The diocese might be torn asunder by extremists on both sides.”

  “Fags and bigots,” Cage says.

  “That’s not polite.”

  “Okay, homos and homophobes.” Cage shakes his head at the absurdity. “Yeah, well, Pop doesn’t need to see his firstborn locked up like an animal. How’s Grandmother?”

  “She’s fine. She told me to tell you that she loves you and is praying for you.”

  “I’m sorry to do this to y’all. But there’s been a mistake. I don’t belong here.”

  I put my hand on his. “I know. We’ll get you out. Just hang on.”

  “I’m not sure how long I can hang on.” He looks around the room, lowers his voice. “The guards are worse than the inmates. They scream and spit and kick you. They don’t like me. They don’t like southerners. Once a day we go out on the ball field. There’s a tree near a fence. I think I could climb it. Make a run for it.”

  “Cage, I know one bit of advice I’m going to give you. Don’t try that or you’re going to be here for a long time.” I squeeze his hand. “Remember what your great-grandmother would say: ‘You’ve got to take hold.’”

  “Mama, I wasn’t crazy when I got here. I don’t know why they had to send me here.” He looks so much like a frightened little boy that it just breaks my heart. He starts to cry. “But I’m going to be crazy if they keep me in here. These crazy inmates start fights with me. When I’m out on the ball field, I see them huddling together, pointing at me. They know I’m different. They know I don’t belong here.”

  “We know you don’t belong here, too, Cage. We’re doing all we can to get you out. You’ll be out soon. Just pray for deliverance.” I want to cry but I know I must appear strong to help him stay strong. I reach across the table and cup his face with my hands, and thinking about what the teacher told me, I say, “We’re going to get you out.”

  Cage

  Leaving the visiting room, I wipe the tears on my sleeve and set my face. I pretend I’m tough, pull my shoulders back, set my lips together tight, try to emit a don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. Sometimes I try to be invisible. We walk in a line with screws at the front and the rear down the long white corridor. The whole place is white, every hallway, cellblock, meeting room. White. The absence of color. After ten days I’m going snow-blind. Seeing Mom in her green summer dress brings home how far away I am, how deep I’ve descended into white hell. The shame of a mother coming to visit you in a lockup—imagine your mother catching you jerking off and multiply times a thousand. But praise Jesus for parents. Home is the one place you can count on. Mom and Dad are my only hope. Sylvia has not replied to my last letter and has stopped accepting my phone calls. The last time we talked, she said her parents had told her not to get involved. So much for love.

  The line halts at an electric door. A man behind thick, scratched glass nods at the screws and buzzes it open, then we walk through. The sound of it sliding shut nearly triggers another round of tears. Thirty days, I repeat silently. Just thirty days. The screw stops at a T-junction, the corridors that run to Max 1 and Max 2, and divides us into two lines. I’m at the front of Max 2.

  “Move it out.”

  Barney the Giant is sweeping the linoleum with a big push broom. I try to look past him. He stands up straight and runs his hand up and down the broom. “Yo, pretty boy, you watching the moon? Gonna be full next week. Not long now.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Barney,” a screw says.

  The reek of madness and misery seeps through the heavy doors and fills the white hallway for a hundred feet, growing stronger with each step. Max 2 is a warehouse for the mindless nuts. The ones who sleep in their shit and have to be bathed with a fire hose. I almost gag when the doors open and the cellblock exhales a stench like the wind off a dump, carrying the noise of a thousand maniacs. Moaning. Howling. Singing. Conversations with God. Dialogues with Satan. Soliloquies to the quick and the dead. It’s only quiet in the evening after they’ve tranqued everybody. The screws stand aside to let us pass.

  An old man floats by, catching invisible butterflies with an invisible net, who, if you believe the screws, was a Harvard lepidopterist who mounted one of his students under glass. I walk slowly down the white hall, looking for Mike, the single other semi-sane inmate on the floor, to see if he got the new Newsweek and kill some time discussing current events. I glance in the TV room, where a crowd is watching Atlantic Professional Wrestling, Horrible Hogan and the Exterminator, by far the most popular show in Max 2. The violent crims of Max 1 prefer Cops.

  “I have to see my doctor,” a wizened little man tells me. “I have to see my doctor.”

  “It’s Saturday,” I say. “I don’t think they’re on duty.”

  “I haven’t seen my doctor for twelve years.”

  I look at a screw standing nearby. He smiles at me and nods.

  “That’s true?” I ask.

  “Hell, yeah, cracker boy. You think you in the fucking Mayo Clinic? You in the Land of the Lost here, boy.” He laughs and moves down the hall, singing “Whistle While You Work.”

  “You seen Mike?” I ask a tall crew-cut guy standing by the door.

  He turns his head slowly toward me from the TV. “Hulk Hogan is breaking us out tonight. Just before dawn. He’s coming through the TV.”

  “I’ll be here,” I say, backing up.

  “Make sure it’s on channel thirteen,” he whispers, putting a forefinger to his lips.

  Down the hall a large man with a noble face and a mane of black hair is gesticulating forcefully, punching holes in the air
, his voice booming. “The greatest weapons to fight communism are not missiles but Big Macs. A McDonald’s in every city will make the world safe for democracy.”

  “Mr. Speaker.” I wave.

  “I recognize our distinguished colleague from south of the Mason-Dixon.” He smiles beneficently.

  “Haven’t you seen the news? We’re going to win! Communism is crumbling. It’s the dawn of People Power.” Passing by, I pat him on the back. “Poland, East Germany, China, the workers are rising again.”

  His eyes fill with fury and his hand shakes as he points at me. “An agitator!” he screams. “An agitator in our midst. Don’t let him escape.”

  Farther down the white hall, a man sits on the floor, his head between his knees, weeping. Behind him, in a cell, a man is filling a tin cup with excrement, scooping it off the floor. In the next cell a Jack is going at it fast and furious to a photograph of a beagle. I close my eyes and keep walking. We are not responsible for what others do, I think. But are we somehow responsible for what we make ourselves see?

  At the end of the corridor Mike’s cell is empty. I sit on a bench and look down to the other end, the nuts gradually diminishing in size until the ones at the far end are denim stick figures. Speaker is raising a clenched fist. The lepidopterist’s arms are akimbo, beating his wings. The long white corridor becomes the red cinder straight of an oval track. The noise and the stench fade into silence, the nuts blur and disappear. Papa was walking hand in hand with Nick and me, about eight and nine, leading us to the soft foam mattress in the pole vault pit, where we jumped like it was a trampoline while he ran his laps, waving each time he passed.

  “Straightaway, straightaway, straightaway to heaven.” I open my eyes and see a guy from Schizo Anonymous a few inches from my face, pointing to the white ceiling. He laughs and laughs, hugging his sides like he’s freezing.

  “You’re just a lunatic,” I say softly. “Just a fucking lunatic.”