From the Chrysalis: a novel

by Karen E. Black

  Ah Gran, she thought, close to tears yet again. Sometimes she felt even more upset by the grief she’d caused the older woman than what had happened. Even if in the end she’d done what she was told, the only thing she could do. Now she must never tell anybody what had happened. Especially not Dace. The fact that she had conceived a child with an irresponsible man. Tell me you love me, he used to say. What was wrong with her? Why had it taken her so long to walk away?

  Empty as the residence was, she looked over both her shoulders before picking up the legal sized envelope and trying to guess its disturbing and perhaps salacious contents. She felt an unexpected flurry of hope in her chest. Baby, I’ll stay with you, she remembered wishing he would say. Could she have made another choice? No. She’d had nothing to offer an infant. A faint but impossible whiff of scent issued from the thin, airmail paper. That Brut stuff he used to wear, unless she’d imagined it. Suddenly it was too late to retreat to a safe place in her mind. Too late. She had been late. Another word she hated.

  Standing in the hallway with her arms full of fresh new books, she abandoned all caution, tore open the dirty envelope with her teeth and almost ate his note. Not his letter, but his note. Because that’s all it was.

  Your grandmother said you didn’t have the baby. Those old ladies usually know what to do. When were you planning to tell me? A pity. Our baby would have been lovely, especially with my blue eyes and maybe your hair. Of course it was your mistake and your choice, but I hope the experience didn’t turn you bitter against all men. Especially me. You never did tell me you loved me, but it seemed like you did in the end. But you understood that I had to go to New York. ‘Hair!’ was a hoot and lots of other good parts have come my way since then. It was by far the best decision for me. It’s safer for me here, too. New York girls know how to take care of themselves, if you know what I mean.

  Good-bye, Love. Good-bye for now.

  She stared at the letter, disbelieving, then read it over again. If you know what I mean. Thank God no one else was around, or she just might have spilled her guts like stupid Irma had. Tossing her bag and the letter onto the nearest bed inside her room, reality hit her like a slap. Her cousin wasn’t safe in an ancient prison. She wasn’t safe in a brand new student residence. But Tony was safe. Safe from entrapment and safe enough to send her a self-serving missive. Why had he even bothered to write? A few days between auditions and a stamp to spare?

  She went over the note in her mind, searching in vain for some illumination between the lines, some way she could rewrite what had happened. I just hope you haven’t turned bitter against all men. Especially me. Ah, Tony. Handsome, handsome Tony with his laughing blue eyes and endearing Manchester accent. As if being disillusioned by him was the worst thing. Who did he think he was? Did he have any idea what it was like for her to feel so ashamed of her own acquiescence in her predicament and so betrayed by her own body? Those feelings implied choices she’d never had, for she had been doomed from the moment he’d found her at sixteen. Any fool could have predicted what would happen to an isolated young girl primed to fall in love.

  How powerful he must have felt. Well, he’d always had an inflated opinion of himself, blessed as he was with the conventional good looks of an American soap opera star, but then again, actors need a lot of confidence. And she’d loved that self-confidence, the knowing little twinkle in his eyes and his sardonic smile. Everyone was drawn to him: a beautiful blond man with blue eyes, although he had helped the blond along a bit. The only mystery was why he’d wanted her. She was just a dark little thing, far from beautiful.

  Eventually she laid down and tried to sleep, to forget this unwelcome intrusion from the past, but she couldn’t. Rising from the bed, she glanced around the room, her face shrouded by her heavy hair. She went over to her window but there was nobody outside, not even a stray dog by the stream. She imagined her hair floating on the water, a flower in her hand. Call me mad Ophelia, she thought.

  Forget, everybody had said. Everybody who had known, that is. Forget. It’s for the best.

  But how? She resolutely pulled a metal wastepaper basket out from under her built-in desk, lit a match and deposited Tony’s flaming missive inside. Not that he would write again if she failed to reply. Proud. He’d been so proud. But what if her own resolve crumbled and she wrote to him? Loneliness did strange things to people. Look at what it had done to her. By now she was so furious with herself she couldn’t even cry. The onion skin paper crackled into flames and settled into a gratifying ash, but Tony was still there, still laughing, a little ruefully perhaps. Christ, it made her mad.

  Suddenly she remembered the black and white studio portrait she had pressed flat under her new student mattress. Tony had given it to her just before he’d left. Why in God’s name had she held onto his headshot for so long? She rescued it from oblivion and stared at it for a second, then tossed it into her impromptu fire.

  The orange and blue flames licked his smug face as she watched, and she wondered if he were performing on Broadway yet. Probably not. He would have said. He’d wanted to be an actor since he was a kid, but his family had been too poor to pave the way. They’d had that much in common: their families never could have wasted money on dreams. I’m going to be somebody, she heard him say as his blue eyes played to an invisible audience. But he was almost too old even then, especially for film.

  Why am I always be drawn to the exciting and the unusual? she mused. She tugged back a thin beige spread on her bed and slipped, fully dressed, between the sheets. Because if Tony, or somebody like him, walked into the residence right now, she would be powerless to resist him, give or take an hour or two. Maybe even less. Sure, she was older and wiser now, but somewhere inside her the dreamy girl she’d always been still lurked.

  Damn. The waste paper basket was still smoking. Getting up again, she poured stale water from her toothbrush glass onto the stinking remnants before curling into a ball with both hands tucked under her pillow. The room was tight, crowded already, and was bound to feel even smaller when her roommate arrived—a farm girl, she’d heard. An orange padded desk chair was so close to her face she could touch it.

  Liza sunk into the mattress, feeling utterly drained. Thoughts of the prison, of Dace, then of Tony and his goddamn letter mingled in her mind. Exhausted, she gave in and cried for the man who had left her and the one she had left today.

  So good-looking. Why did they both have to be so good-looking? It made everything so much harder. Her mother used to say looks were wasted on men. Liza had to agree. This when her twin brothers were still rather cute and she, well … It wasn’t fair. And both the men haunting her were so goddamn hungry for their misspent youths: Tony because he feared growing old, Dace because he’d never been young.

  Dace. He must be crashing. Worse than she was. What was he thinking about right now? Liza felt almost guilty, knowing she was the lucky one. She had everything to look forward to, but his life was awful. He’d looked so sad. Prisoners were supposed to feel sad, though. If they didn’t, they’d just keep going back to prison, to what they already knew. Maybe he was thinking about what had happened to land him there.

  Yes, prisoners had to suffer, but not just because they had committed unspeakable crimes. They had to suffer because they were stupid enough to get caught in the first place.

  Tony had said the same thing to her. I don’t care what I told you. You were stupid to get caught.

  Chapter 8

  A Rock Feels No Pain

  More and more teenagers, especially males, are committing violent acts. Various studies indicate that being a victim of violence is the strongest predictor of violent behaviour in male teenagers. The question surrounding these findings is whether the correlation between victimization and violence stems from lifestyles or whether exposure to violence makes teenagers respond to certain situations in a violent manner.

  *[ J. McCall, F.S. Turner & T.D. Smits, “Early Risk Factors for Violent Behaviour in Adolescent Males
,” p.83. Journal of Adolescent Behaviour]

  Maitland Penitentiary, August 26, 1971:

  A rock feels no pain.

  Liza had gotten to him. What a jackass he was to have let her come. She didn’t belong in a place like this. And now that he’d seen her it was too late. She was like him. And he could see she was trying to forget something too. He had to see her again.

  Memories are useless, he’d felt like telling her. Especially in here.

  He’d seen it before, people who went crazy because they couldn’t move on. So why had he gotten trapped at seventeen? A rock feels no pain. What kind of garbage was that? Folk music was all right, but not Simon and Garfunkel. Give him the Rolling Stones or even that skinny little guitarist, Bob Dylan. Somebody with more bite.

  Diving facedown onto his cot, he tried thinking about something else, but it didn’t work. It never did, not on the Sundays they spent in their cells. Everybody else on his tier would be napping except for the old bastard in Cell Block C, who cleared phlegm in his throat all day, every day. Dace turned his head to the side and stared at an ant picking its way across the wall. Just one. Where were his busy little friends?

  Sure, Dace knew he’d killed somebody. He understood that was how he’d ended up here. But what he didn’t understand was how everything else: the fear and self-loathing, the horror he felt about the dead, the look on his father’s face, all of it had been lost to him for years. Then Liza had appeared. She made him think about these things again. She thought she knew everything—she’d read the newspaper, she said. But she didn’t. No one did. And as long he could help it, no one would.

  He’d heard worse stories in here, but on days like this, on days when he saw nothing but ants and heard nothing but a pig clearing his throat, his own story came back to him. His and Rick’s.

  * * *

  They were sixteen and seventeen then, old enough to drink, they thought, but underage by anybody else’s standards, so they had gone to the bootlegger’s to buy beer. As if I didn’t give you enough, his old man yelled at him later. His father, who had always wanted to make up for having a dead wife.

  The boys had a couple of Harley Sportsters earned from working in his father’s shop. They liked to dress up in crisp shirts and chinos and party down by the lake. That’s what all the townies did in Maitland in the spring, the moment the university kids left and they could call the place their own. People said Rick and Dace were lucky, lucky to be young and good-looking, and for Dace to have the hardworking Daddy he did. As if they had never been young and lucky themselves.

  Alan Turbot, the bootlegger, was a man in his late thirties with a thatch of prematurely greying hair growing around the bald spot on head. He had a one bedroom apartment, a place with high, ornate plaster ceilings and water-stained walls. The front room, where he conducted his business, was outfitted with a badly cracked, brown vinyl couch, an assortment of mysterious boxes serving as end tables, battered doors leading to a galley kitchen, a bathroom, a boxy bedroom and not much else. The apartment was located in a three storey building in a commercial area on the port side of town.

  Turbot had only lived in Maitland a year or two. One day he’d just been there. He’d come out of nowhere, a man with no legitimate employment who was willing to supply kids with beer for their parties. Sometimes he had other goodies, too: cheap cigarettes from the Akwesasne Indian reservation east of Maitland, homegrown marijuana, and stuff on little squares of blotter paper he swore was really good LSD. What a trip, he’d say, twirling his necklace until one day the string broke and wooden beads the size of marbles rolled on the floor.

  Alan also had a young boy, Paul, who he treated like a wife. Paul did all the cooking and housekeeping in the apartment, if opening up canned food and picking up stray beer bottle caps counted as housekeeping. To be fair, it was probably hard for him to cook and clean much when he was always strumming his guitar, singing the same mournful lyric over and over … a rock feels no pain. Sometimes the bootlegger threw something at him, like a piece of paper or a shoe, anything that was handy.

  Or sometimes he went nose to nose with him when he was feeling mean. “Don’t you know any Stompin’ Tom Connors, kid?” Paul would get busy with the bootlegger’s merchandise then, sorting and bagging, presumably for his room and board and all the beer he could drink.

  It was hard to imagine Alan and Paul having sex. Dace didn’t want to envision that. What did a couple of guys do anyway? Turbot was ugly with a pock-marked face and a beer belly peeking out from under a dirty white Nehru shirt. Paul was a slim, rather good-looking kid of nineteen or twenty, who did what he was told. Maybe drinking helped. God, he hoped so.

  Judging by the unfocused looks in both Alan’s and Paul’s eyes, they were both out of it by 10:00 a.m. on May 10. Or maybe they were just hung over from the night before.

  May 10. That date was burned forever in Dace’s head.

  Alan held out his hand, palm up. “Try some,” he coaxed, letting bits of the drug-soaked blotter paper join the beads on the floor.

  “Hey,” Paul protested, fetching a splayed broom from the corner. “You’re wasting good stuff and you’re making a mess.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you lazy little bitch.”

  Aw, Jeez. The boys shuffled their feet, uncomfortable at witnessing the domestic scene. It was worse than watching somebody’s parents fight. Rick blushed to the roots of his rust red hair. “Look, Ozzie and Harriet, we don’t want any,” he said. “Just give us the fucking beer.”

  Alan Turbot pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows like he was thinking. “Don’t want to,” he slurred, then collapsed onto his couch. Paul tried to help him up, but he slipped on the beads.

  For a moment, Dace and Rick just stared, confused. “Why? What’s wrong with our money? Ain’t it good enough for you?” Rick asked. A wiry, ex-hockey player in the junior league, Rick had no trouble sidestepping the beads.

  Alan waved them both away with the back of his hand. “Listen, you little pissers,” he said, “I heard what you did to my friend the other night at the bar. Yeah, that’s right. Stan’s a good friend of mine. One of you busted him good in the chopper. He lost a couple of teeth.”

  “That old guy?” Rick asked, his hands tightening into fists. “He was bothering a sixteen-year-old girl who was just walking down the street, minding her own business. So Dace and me—”

  “Yeah, Jennie from high school. She couldn’t talk for crying,” Dace added.

  Alan laughed and started to heave himself onto his feet again. “Well, the way I hear it, she was asking for it, the cheap little tramp, all dressed up in a mini skirt with her tits hanging out to here.”

  Dace was pretty sure Jennie had been Rick’s first kiss. His stomach heaved, imagining her with such an old geezer, so Rick was probably feeling a helluva lot worse.“That’s a fucking lie!” Dace shouted, the full weight of his shoulder knocking Alan back onto the couch. “She wasn’t doing nothing.”

  “Look,” Paul said, fiddling with the buttons on his shirt, “why don’t you guys just leave? I never should have opened the door.”

  What the hell, Dace thought. Nobody told him what to do. For one thing, he’d spent too much time with the priests as a boy. For another, he was almost eighteen. Plus, stupid Alan had a job to do and he wasn’t doing it. It bugged him when people didn’t do what they were supposed to. Pissed him off, actually.

  “We want some beer first,” he said, sotto voiced.

  “Well, you ain’t getting any!” Alan roared, rearing up from the couch. His eyes narrowed and he gave Rick a carnal grin. “But maybe if Ricky boy here is real nice to me … I’ve always fancied a redhead, you know. Oh, sure, you’ve got reddish hair too, D’Arcy Devereux, but it’s a little dark for me. Besides, you’re a bit too old. And you’re a real big boy. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?” He pulled a face. “Oh, shit, Paulie, I was just fooling. Don’t be such a silly little Sheila. Put your toy gun away.”

  “It’s not
a toy,” Paul said, pouting. He removed the safety on what looked like a little black cap gun. A bb gun maybe. He had probably dressed up as a cowboy last Hallowe’en. Tears quivered on his long lashes. “Look, I t-t-told you guys to g-g-get out,” he stammered, unable to steady the gun he waved in the air.

  Everybody looked at the gun. Everybody except Alan that is, who kneed Rick in the groin and laughed his head off when Rick doubled over. Oh, he’d got him a good one all right.

  “C’mon, Paulie,” he grunted. “Don’t you want to see if this boy is red all over?”

  Dace flew forward, trying to kick Alan in the face, but Rick was in the way, clutching his genitals and making a hideous noise: a cross between a stuck pig and a muzzled woman.

  “C’mon. Lemme see,” Alan persisted, reaching behind Rick’s back and fondling him between his bent legs. “Let go of my arm, Paul. Ah look, stupid. You’ve gone and dropped the gun. Cool Ass Luke’s got it now.”

  “It’s not loaded,” Paul bawled, tears streaming down his cheeks, his face in his hands, crying the way only a drunken man can do. “For Christ’s sake, Alan, why can’t I be enough for you?”

  Dace raised the gun and pointed it at the wall behind Alan’s head. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d played cowboys and Indians and he didn’t want to now. He didn’t put the gun down, though. He stuck his forefinger through the trigger instead. For a toy, it was a nice fit.

  “Are you sure it’s not loaded?” he asked, playing for time. With his free hand, he grabbed the back of Rick’s shirt, trying to pull him towards the apartment door. One thing for sure, he was passing on the beer.

  Rick couldn’t move. Or maybe he just wouldn’t. His throat pulsed and there was a dangerous gleam in his pale green eyes. If looks could kill, Dace thought.

  “C’mon, Rick, let’s go,” he insisted, but Alan made a second drunken lunge and something popped.