“Golly, they’re huge.” Billy’s voice was shallow. “Like cantaloupes.”
“Lemme see.” Nick pinched Billy’s butt until he moved farther along the top of the wall. Through the hole he could see Mrs. Miller, a woman about his mother’s age, stooping over to put her legs through a bathing suit. She stood up, revealing round white breasts with pink nipples the size of saucers, and pulled the suit up her fat legs to the mysterious dark triangle, then stretched the navy fabric up her white belly and wiggled her arms through the holes, shaking her breasts. A heat rose up from his toes until Nick’s whole body felt feverish, a strange, overpowering sensation to kick through the thin plywood, dive from the locker tops onto Mrs. Miller, rip the suit off her, and bury his face in her breasts.
“They’re big bosoms, huh?” Billy said in the darkness.
Nick opened his mouth but no words came.
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” Cage said, standing on the edge of the pool. Beside him Nick held his breath, watching a sixteen-year-old swim the ninety-foot length of the pool underwater. The boy reached the wall of the deep end, smoothly flipped, and swam back toward them. Nick exhaled and shook his head. The crowd hushed as the boy reached the blue line marking the deep third of the pool. He swam on, breaking last year’s record. Nick looked up at Cage’s sandy hair and fierce blue eyes, then back at the pool, as the crowd applauded.
Midway between the two ends the boy stood and raised his arms over his head. On either side lifeguards moved a rope of floats stretching across the pool to mark the position. The noise ebbed and the crowd looked back at the shallow end to see if there were any more contestants. Cage waved at the chief lifeguard.
“You?” a high school kid said to Cage. “You’re just a freeloader. Preachers get a special deal.”
“Lay on, Macduff,” Cage said coolly, looking the kid calmly in the eyes before turning and walking away from the pool.
“What?” the boy said.
“Ever heard of Shakespeare?” Nick didn’t know the boy, only saw him in the summers at the country club.
“How old’s your brother?” the boy asked.
“Thirteen.” Nick crossed his fingers and glanced at the swimmer, who had just climbed out of the pool. He looked a full foot taller and twenty pounds heavier than Cage.
With one hand behind him touching the wall of the clubhouse, Cage turned his head slowly to the lifeguard, who nodded, raised a thumb, and smiled. Cage breathed in deeply, filling his chest three times, then shot across the concrete, his bare feet slapping the puddles. He reached the edge and dove long, seemed to hang in the air an instant before slicing the water. He swept his arms back and held them to his sides, glided to the middle of the pool, then breaststroked smoothly to the far end, kicked off the wall, and moved toward the blue line on the bottom.
“I hope he doesn’t pass out,” Nick’s mom said, appearing suddenly at his side. “Cage is so stubborn.”
Nick said, “Oh, Mom.”
Crossing the line out of the deep end, Cage seemed to slow down. Nick imagined his lungs bursting, the pain that cried out for air. The floats were impossibly far, another twenty feet. The high school kids on the edges stopped talking. Cage inched along, stroking then gliding, kicking slowly. Nick watched his mom, her lips pressed tight. He put his hand around her back, then quickly dropped it and stepped away. Cage was coming to the surface. The back of his head came out of the water, then he jerked it back down and kicked wildly. His head grazed the bottom of the marker rope and he popped up on the other side. The spectators cheered louder than before. Cage held one hand on the rope and kicked to stay afloat, too short to reach the bottom.
“I wish your father were here to see this,” Margaret said.
“Why does someone at St. John’s always die on the holidays?” Nick’s face was serious.
His mother laughed, examined his small face with marvel and affection.
Out in the middle of the pool Cage raised his right arm above his head and clenched his fist in the Black Power salute. Suddenly everyone by the pool was quiet.
“That boy,” Margaret said. “One day he’s going to go too far.”
Cage
“Nick, do you hear me?” I whisper.
Under a cloudless autumn sky a guard cradling a shotgun with a German shepherd at his knee walks past on the gravel road between fences. A bunch of the inmates are playing baseball but I never feel comfortable with them. The grass is soft and warm. A hawk climbs an updraft in widening circles, his eyes scanning the ground as he rises. The buildings of Bridgewater, the thousands of wretched inmates, the millions of dark insane thoughts, getting smaller and smaller, until all that is left is a blur of color from a great altitude.
The guards don’t want to let me go. Every day they fuck with me for no reason. Before I came out here one of them told me that I was wanted on a phone over in Max 1. They were going to beat the hell out of me as they walked me over, so I refused to go and tagged along with the baseball detail. Last night after lockdown, Pringle was watching his little black-and-white TV and I asked him to turn it down. He turned it off. Then he starting jacking, going, Yeah, baby, oh yeah, suck me, bitch, suck hard, yeah suck on this, suck away, mmm, mmm, mmm. I put the pillow over my head but I could still hear him, Yeah, baby, that’s right, lick my balls, lick my asshole, put your tongue up my ass, yeah, just like that. I yelled down, Pringle, turn your damn TV back on. He screamed, Fuck you, faggot, or I’ll jump up there and come in your face. I yelled back, You try it and you’ll never jack off again. Later on while I was asleep, two guards grabbed me and told me they wanted me in solitary until the next morning. I hadn’t done anything. Outside the buildings, they took turns throwing me up against the wall with no explanation, never said a word. Weird stuff. I don’t know what’s going on. I think they want me to get in a fight so that my holding order is extended. I’m trying just to be cool. Right, brother? What else can I do? But how can months of this not leave you with a heavy case of shell shock—post-traumatic stress disorder? These months are scarring me for life. Invisible scars. Grooves in the brain. I have seen so much that is squalid, depraved, evil. It’s part of me now. I am, after all, the sum total of my experiences. That’s all anybody is. A compilation of experience. And now I am stuck with this. I am Cage Malone Rutledge, the max-security-nuthouse inmate. I will carry that with me to the end of my days. My time here has wrought itself into a cage to hold me back from living a normal life. How can it not?
Margaret
Well, praise the Lord, this is the last time I will enter these gates, I think, driving into the hospital. What a misnomer. More a cruel warehouse of insanity.
“I won’t miss it,” Harper says, parking the car, though he has only been here once before. “But it’s kind of exciting. I mean, the armed guards. The dogs. The electric gates.”
“You can bet Cage won’t miss it.” I hand Harper a breath mint, put one in my mouth. “Oh, how I have been praying for this day. You may believe yourself to be a humanist, Harper. But look at the miracle of today. So many people have told us that it is nigh impossible to get someone out of Bridgewater and it is happening today. So many churches are praying for Cage in Baton Rouge and Memphis and Bristol. You should pray, Harper. Even if you don’t believe. Belief can come through practice.”
“I’d rather practice Buddhism.”
Harper gets out of the car and puts on the navy linen blazer that he reluctantly agreed to wear over his polo shirt. I pick some lint off one sleeve. He has grown so tall. The top of my head doesn’t reach his shoulder. He is our only boy who is larger than Franklin. So proud of them all. Such handsome boys. Suddenly I remember Nick is dead. More than two years later, when I picture the boys collectively, I still take Nick as among the quick for a few seconds before the bottom falls out of my heart. Oh, Nick, I pray that you are feasting with the saints for eternity.
Harper opens the door and follows me into the dreary reception area.
> “Good morning, Mrs. Beasely.” I smile at the hard woman with a bird face and thinning hair who has not so much as grinned in the last quarter of a year.
“Good morning.” She doesn’t smile.
“We’ve come to collect my son.” I smile. She looks rather surprised. “Cage Malone Rutledge.”
“What’s his number?”
I have it memorized. “R. O. O. O. Three. Five. B.”
“Take a seat.”
“Thank you.” I smile.
Mrs. Beasely leaves the desk.
Harper says, “That woman is a real bitch.”
“She must have a very hard life, son,” I say. “Imagine the legion of angry, desperate relatives passing through her office every day.”
After half an hour Harper glances at me and goes up to the desk.
“Beg your pardon,” he calls out. My boys are all—both— polite.
Mrs. Beasely comes to the desk.
“Do you have any idea how long this will take?”
“No.” She spins on her heel and walks off.
Harper tries to read an old, tattered Islands. I only read waiting room magazines with gloves and it’s too warm for gloves. I fret about Franklin in Memphis, the pressures on him from so many people, then I see a picture of a beach in the magazine that looks like Pawley’s Island, where Harper fell through a rotten screen on a front porch headfirst ten feet down into sand when he was four. That was the summer when Nick insisted on spending most of his time in the shade of water oaks with a young Cherokee wood-carver, learning to sculpt tiny owls and dogs. Cage spent all day in his little metal fishing boat on the ocean, a boat built for a lake that had no business out on the open sea. Instead of motoring around the island to the calm water of the inlet, he started coming in through the breakers to the beach in front of the house. I can still see him in the stern as a wave spins the boat broadside to the shore and rolls it, see his dark, skinny body diving through the spray. How many times did Cage nearly give me a heart attack? And Nick. Once I was reading the evening paper on the porch of the house in Bristol. It was my favorite of all the rectories. Nick was pedaling fast down the steep road at the foot of our yard, the day he put on high-rise handlebars and a banana seat, the new fashion amongst the kids at the time. I had told him to wait until Franklin got home but he didn’t. I watched the handlebars swing forward and Nick catapult over the front wheel and hit the road with his face, his mouth open. I thought he’d cracked his head but he only chipped his teeth. Then Harper. Harper was an angry child. Once, driving him home from school on the freeway going seventy miles an hour, Harper just opened the door wide open and threatened to jump out. For a moment I thought he was going to do it. That was only five or six years ago. Boys. My Lord. How often have I wished that I’d had girls?
“It’s been two hours, Mom,” Harper says. “What can be taking so long?”
“I don’t know, honey.” I pat his leg. “They told me to come here today when they opened. The wheels of this bureaucracy obviously need oiling.”
The reception room has filled up with a whole spectrum of people from various socioeconomic brackets, from couples dressed up as if they are going to church to an unshaven man in coveralls to a filthy man who may very well be homeless. Mental illness is very democratic.
“Maybe Cage doesn’t want to leave.” Harper’s smile is strained.
“Maybe your father will be consecrated the archbishop of Canterbury.” I think of how my grandmother always made light of grave situations, which was never easy for me. I have a tendency to obsess.
“Everyone who has registered please proceed to your numbered table,” Mrs. Beasely announces from behind the desk, and the crowd files into the visiting room, leaving us alone again. I try to make eye contact with Mrs. Beasely and she looks right through me, then disappears into her office. “Thank goodness for Dr. Plauche. Without his intervention I think Cage would have languished here for years.”
“I thought you said it was prayer.” Harper yawns.
“How do you think I happened to bump into the good doctor as Frank and I were leaving last month? What made me decide to talk to him?”
“Happenstance.” Harper smiles.
“Providence.” I pat his leg again.
“I wish Providence would speed up the bureaucrats.”
“Patience.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Harper says, “but I don’t have the time.”
“Humor and grace. Those are Cage’s favorite virtues.”
“That’s what he says.”
“He was quoting your father’s favorite saint, Francis of Assisi.”
“The nature boy. Talked to animals. Birds landed in his hands. I remember the statues. Mythology, Mama. That’s all that is.”
“Doubt is the companion to faith.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Harper goes back to his magazine. The waiting room starts filling up with visitors for the next session. Harper keeps glancing at a very pretty brunet who looks like a young Audrey Hepburn. I don’t think he noticed her wedding ring. He asks, “Who do you think she’s visiting?”
“Whom,” I correct. “A friend, I hope, and not a sibling or her husband.”
Harper nods silently. The adjacent room exhales the first round of visitors, who look more defeated now than they did going in, then it inhales the newcomers. After a few minutes Harper gets up and peers in the small glass window in the door. Sitting back down, he says, “She’s visiting her husband, I think. Wonder what he did.”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t think I can bear any more despair. Where on earth is your brother?”
Harper squeezes my shoulder and walks up to the counter. “Mrs. Beasely? Please excuse me. We’ve been waiting for over three hours. We were told to pick up my brother first thing this morning.”
I can’t hear or see her from my seat.
“What?” Harper glances over his shoulder at me with an expression of horror and incredulity. “You’re kidding, right?”
My God, I think. They’re not going to release him after all. He got into a fight. Every day on the phone he said how the guards were provoking him so that they wouldn’t have to release him. Or he’s injured. The guards beat him up and his body is so bruised that they can’t show him to us. Oh my Lord, maybe he’s dead. Some murderer could have killed him, jealous that he was going to be transferred. The air leaves my body like a punctured balloon and I can’t catch my breath. The room is suddenly fuzzy, my head light as a feather, the air feels a hundred degrees.
“They can’t find him.” Harper is at my side, his voice sounding far away. “Mom, are you all right?”
I nod and breathe in through my nose, slowly pouring air down deep to my abdomen, recalling Mrs. Swinivasha, my yoga teacher for a year in Baton Rouge. I wish that I had kept up my yoga, found a teacher in Memphis. It certainly would help me deal with the stress. Through my nostrils I breathe out calmly. Harper is saying, “It’s okay, Mom.”
“They can’t find him?”
“That’s what she says.” Harper shakes his head. “They’re looking for him.”
Somewhere in there, those massive wings, the place as big as the Pentagon. “They lost him?” I stand up, smooth my skirt, and cross the room with Harper at my elbow. I raise my voice and keep it calm. “Mrs. Beasely!”
She turns from a filing cabinet ten feet behind the counter and looks at me.
I do not smile. “Do you mean to say that we have been waiting half of the day while you looked for my son?”
“We’re a big institution. We’re understaffed. Takes time to process people. If you would—”
“Where is my son?” I cut her off.
“They’re looking for him. His unit thought he was in protective custody but he wasn’t. He may be in one of the recreational areas. We’ll find him.”
Behind us a number of people have arrived to register for the next visiting session. I turn to them, smile. “Pardon me for one more minute. They’ve kept me waiting f
or hours and now they say that they’ve lost my son.” Looking back at Mrs. Beasely, who has come to the counter now, I say, “Mrs. Beasely, I wish to see the director.” I pull an envelope from my handbag. “This is the judicial order for the transfer of my son from this negligent disorganization. I want my son.”
“We’re looking for him, lady.” Mrs. Beasely is looking through me again. “Just take a seat and we’ll find him.”
“When?” Harper looks as if he is enjoying my performance. “Tomorrow?”
“Very soon.” Mrs. Beasely looks at Harper, then the growing crowd behind us.
I turn around and smile. “I’m very, very sorry. What would you say if they lost your son?”
“Lady—”
“Mrs. Rutledge.” I cut her off again.
“Why don’t you come back after lunch?”
“Why don’t you put out an all-points bulletin? Why don’t you call the director for me? Why don’t you do something to find my son? I want my son!” I no longer give a damn about politeness, scream as loud as I can, “I want my son! I want my son!”
“Okay, okay, Mrs. Rutledge.” Mrs. Beasely crosses to her desk and speaks into a phone, then comes back to the counter. “I’m sorry for the delay. A supervisor is going back to his unit.”
I step aside for the visitors to register, stay by the counter. Harper looks at me with a proud smile. Mrs. Beasely gives cards to a young couple and an elderly woman, who smiles at me and says, “I know just how you feel.” Mrs. Beasely answers the phone, then looks at me and says, “They’re bringing your son up now.”
The young couple starts to clap and in a few seconds all of the visitors, about a dozen of them, are applauding, strangers, bound together in despair, cheering each other on.
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