I tell Nicky if it’s a question of squaring accounts, I’ll hitchhike east and she can keep all the money. But she claims my hitching days are done. At my age, either people won’t pick me up or they’ll pick me up and kill me. That’s how it is, everybody just roaming around and ready to steal.
The day Nicky drives me to Needles to the Greyhound station, she goes over it again. The schedule. The cities where I change buses. The state lines where the time changes and I lose an hour and have to fix my watch. She hands me a map out of the glove compartment and shows me the roads that go to Maryland. Some are blue, some red, all zigzagging and crooked as the veins on the back of my hands. They have numbers so you can keep them straight, and I store them in a drawer in my head.
Nicky goes on talking it to death. How I need to keep track of my bag. How I have to eat. How I shouldn’t stare at people except when I’m talking to them, and then I should look them in the eye, but not too long and not too hard. How I’d be smart not to stand too near anybody in the bathroom.
The way she talks, the trip sounds like prison. But that’s okay. I know prison. To get along you go along and follow the rules.
She drops me in front of the station, says, “Bye-bye. Bring home the bacon,” and speeds off. I wait there in the sun, holding my bag, my feet in the pool of my shadow that’s like a circle of oil on a slab after a trailer leaves. I have this feeling I might sink in it over my head. So I step into the shade where my shadow doesn’t follow.
A gizmo with a clear plastic window, like the oven in Nicky’s house, has a stack of newspapers inside it. On the front page there’s a prison riot. The inmates are stripped and hooded and have their hands cuffed behind their backs. Dogs on leashes bare their teeth, ready to bite. A dozen naked guys are piled together. Maybe hurt, maybe dead. They’re stacked up like wood and their arms and legs jut out.
The guards, some of them women, laugh and point at the privates on these prisoners. You can’t really see them because the newsprint is smeared between their legs. Still, you know what’s under the eraser marks. I don’t look too long because it gives me that feeling of sinking in an oil pool to see parts of their bodies rubbed out.
A little boy and his mother leave the station. She’s pulling a suitcase on wheels. He’s carrying a toy bus no bigger than a cigarette pack. I don’t stare. I don’t stand too close. But I ask where they bought the toy bus. Without stopping or looking my way, the mother says, “The souvenir shop.” Then they hurry on, and I haul my bag inside.
The shop has maps and cigarettes and gum and cold drinks. There are free color foldouts of towns along the road and I take a few. There are toy buses too and I buy one that’s silver.
I hold it up to my eye. Through the windshield I see the little bus has seats and luggage racks and a button-size steering wheel. It even has a door in back for the bathroom. There’s no driver or passengers, and it’s no trouble to memorize the layout. In case of a fire or a rollover I’d escape through a window. Whenever I go light in the head, then light in my whole body till I’m scared I’ll float away, I usually stretch out and grab the floor until the feeling stops. But now I can grab the toy bus instead.
As I count the coins to the cashier, I repeat the numbers to myself, not out loud, and I don’t stare too hard. When Mom worked at Safeway, she hated people who made her wait. I go fast. But there’s a bad moment when the cashier makes change and tries to put it in my hand. I ask her to put it on the counter and let me pick it up. She shoots me a look. She seems to be a nice girl, so I tell her I don’t like to be touched.
On the ceiling of the station, there’s a speaker calling the names of cities and the numbers of buses. I trace the towns on Nicky’s map, and when the voice calls my bus, it’s not hard to find outside at the curb. The problem starts when the driver says I have to stick my bag into a space behind an aluminum flap underneath the bus. I argue that the bag has to be where I can see it.
“You carry it on board, you’ll block the aisle,” he says.
“No, it’ll fit over my seat.” I show him inside my toy bus where the luggage rack is.
“Whoa, man!” He ducks his head. “Don’t blind me with the damn thing.”
I move it away from his face.
“If the bag fits overhead, fine,” he says. “If it don’t, it’s gotta go here.”
I slip sideways up the aisle, my map, my foldouts, and the toy bus in one hand, my bag in the other. Pressing it flat, I stuff the bag onto the rack. Once I’m in my seat, I can’t see it except by looking up, but that’s better than having it in the hole.
The bus is just another box, but a big one. Not like a cell, more like a holding pen crowded with sweating cons. Some passengers are fat, and the skinny ones wear belts with a sack hanging in front like a stomach. Nicky has one she calls her fanny pack. But with that name shouldn’t it hang down in back?
Everybody settles and the door shuts with a squeak that I could imitate but don’t. Then the bus eases through Needles the way I inched up the aisle, sucking in my belly, careful not to rub against anybody. It rounds corners real slow, like the tall iron gate at Patuxent slamming shut. People have to jump out of the way quick. God help them if they don’t. It’d squash you like a bug.
Outside the city, on the interstate, the land flattens under the beating sun. It reminds me of the Mexican table in Nicky’s house, the one with hammer marks on the copper and crimps at the edges. Light hits it and flashes over my face.
Faster and faster, the exit ramp numbers slide back in the corner of my eye and fall into the same drawer with the road numbers in my head. You can try to remember, Cole always said, but it’s dumb to try and forget. The harder you work at it, the more it sticks in your mind.
I had twelve years with Cole at Patuxent and I go to him now whenever I’m lonely. I remember his smell—he had straw-colored hair and he smelled like straw—and how strong he was and how he held me. His hands were so big, he was like one of those black guys on the basketball court that can palm a ball.
At first I asked him not to touch me. I told him it was like an electric shock. He warned the other guys on our tier, and they didn’t touch me either. At fourteen, small and weak, I’d have been turned out as somebody’s punk if Cole hadn’t spread the word. No one went against him. He was the toughest con at Patuxent. He had killed a cop and there was no way he’d ever get paroled, so he had nothing to lose.
On the tier, there was so much noise I couldn’t sleep. I heard what sounded like rats gnawing my skull, scrambling around in the box, drawer to drawer. I didn’t know whether they were scratching to dig out or dig in. I told Cole, and he said it was just guys sharpening tin and plastic on the cement floor, making shanks. I still couldn’t sleep.
Every day I cleaned my cell and lined things up by size and shape. That’s what I did as a kid when Mom dragged me to Safeway during her shift and let me play in the aisles. I’d start at one end and straighten out the stock. I didn’t bother about labels or prices or products. I fixed on shapes and sizes and sometimes colors. I’d stack the cans and bags, then mix them up and make a new design. Before Mom punched out at the end of the day, I had to switch everything back where it belonged.
Since there wasn’t enough in my cell to keep me busy, I’d scrub the floor, then snap my fingers five times. I’d flush the toilet five times. I’d flick the light switch five times. Then the number changed and I had to snap and flush and flick seven times or four times or nine.
Still, nothing stopped the noise and let me sleep. It wasn’t one sound after another, but lots of different sounds at the same time, like riding on this bus and hearing a radio, hearing music from somebody’s earphones, hearing people talk, the horns of passing cars, and the hum of tires on the highway and the hum in my mouth. Or like when I was little and Dad screamed and Mom screamed and I found myself screaming too. You wouldn’t think a single ear could hold so much. But then my head holds that box that holds the jumble of drawers that hold my whole life.
When it got to where in prison I began to hear chainsaws and burglar alarms and vacuum cleaners nonstop, I dropped to the floor and rocked back and forth. I didn’t quit even after the guards threw me in the hole. The doctors asked me why I did it, and what could I say except that too many noises bring too many ideas, and the heaviness in my head gets like balancing on a cliff, scared I’ll tip over.
When I was a baby, I had a blue blanket with silk edges that I slept with. I’d rub the silk and suck my thumb and doze off in no time. I knew not to expect a blue blanket at Patuxent. They’d never let me have one, and if they did, people would poke fun. So Cole suggested I rub his hair, and it was smooth as silk.
I hadn’t let him touch me yet. But one day when my mind started tipping over and I fell off the cliff, he found me on the floor. Times like that my ideas are loud as words and I figure people hear them and pretend not to. They stare at me, and I know I ought to shut up but I can’t.
I didn’t need to explain to Cole. He understood and cupped his hand on my head. There was no electric shock, just that calmness that came over me when the doctors made me swallow a pill.
Cole lifted me onto my bunk, and his hand went from my head to my neck and he hugged me the way Candy tried to do when we were little. I loved her, but it hurt to have her touch me. I liked to be near her, just not too close. The best was when she was in her wheelchair and I was behind it, pushing. She squealed for me to go fast, and I’d grab the plastic grips like the handlebars on my bike and start running. It was as hard as pumping a bike uphill. Then we’d zoom downhill, with Candy laughing and me careful not to step on cracks in the sidewalk. Mom called us a hell on wheels. But it was heaven to me, with Candy’s hair blowing against my face, soft, real soft, in a touch that tingled and didn’t hurt.
That’s how it was with Cole. It tingled, it didn’t hurt. If I didn’t like what he did, he stopped. He never yelled or got rough. He fought other guys, punched them till they bled, but never me. He taught me how to stay alive in prison. We lifted weights together, spotting each other on the bench press. I needed muscles, he said, to protect me when he wasn’t around. It was like I was the son and he was the father. Not Dad, but how I wish Dad had been.
Cole laughed when I told him this. “Hope to hell your daddy and you never did what we do.”
“Never,” I said. “We didn’t talk. He didn’t teach me things. He chopped the head off a turtle.”
People on the outside don’t believe it, but you get to feel at home in prison, even get to like it. I didn’t tell that to Mom and Candy. They shuffled in every Sunday, and we sat in that box in the visiting room and talked over the telephone. Most times, they talked and I listened. Or didn’t listen and just looked at what inmates had scratched with their fingernails on the glass. It didn’t seem possible that it could stop a bullet if you could make a mark on it, a little picture, with your fingernail.
When Mom had Quinn in her belly, it grew bigger by the week. Candy was excited that she’d have a sister or a brother and said you could feel it somersaulting in Mom’s stomach. She wished I could feel the baby kick. But I was just as glad not to.
At the end of the hour, they pressed their palms on one side of the glass and told me to lay mine on the other, so we were touching, yet not touching. Mom always cried and Candy did too, both of them believing I was sad to be locked up and aching to go home with them. But all I ever wanted was to get back to Cole.
Some nights we stayed awake while the sky in my cell window turned from black to gray. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked, and Cole said, “I’m going to be dead a long, long time. I’ll sleep then.”
He told me he had been in the army and fought a war. I don’t know which one. Not the war they have now. An earlier one. He had traveled the country, worked different jobs, had a wife and kids. “Then I fucked it all away,” he said, “drinking and doing drugs. Wasn’t anything I didn’t smoke, swallow, or shoot up.”
“Is that how you killed the cop? By mistake when you were high?”
He found that funny. “’Less you’re crazy, which I’m not, you don’t shoot a cop by mistake. I caught the son of a bitch in bed with my wife. I told him to climb off her before I killed him. I was carrying a .357 and didn’t want a slug to go through him and hit the wife too. With me doing life, the kids figured to have it hard enough without being orphans in the bargain.”
His wife and kids never visited. What was the point? he said. Smarter for them to start over in a new place with somebody else. He didn’t say if he had other family alive. They didn’t visit either. On Sundays he’d buy a pill from a black guy and nod off.
He didn’t hound me, like the doctors, to describe what I did to Dad. He told me he’d listen if I wanted to talk about it. But there was nothing to say. That drawer in the box in my brain was nailed shut.
“You must’ve blacked out,” Cole said.
“I don’t remember any color except red. There was blood everyplace.”
“Yeah, sounds like you blacked out.”
While Mom kept on pushing for my parole, I was planning to commit an offense that would bury my case at the bottom of the pile. But Cole warned me not to. Years down the road, there’d be younger, tougher cons on the tier, he said, and he’d be too old to chase them off me. Then where would I be? He told me to go while I had the chance.
Afterward, I visited him regular, just like Mom and Candy, and later on Quinn did me. We talked on the fake telephone. We touched hands on the bulletproof glass when we said good-bye. I was ready to keep coming back. I had nothing better to do. Cole’s the one that broke it off. “Look,” he said, “it’s time you found yourself a woman.”
I never did. I had no idea how or where to find one. Not that I had any interest in hunting around. No interest in men either. It’s Cole I miss—his big hands, his straw-smelling hair. Nobody else.
That evening, the bus looks to be on fire. The window is cool, though, when I lean my cheek against it. The sky’s a flag with red and white stripes and a scatter of stars. I feel the hum of the tires on the road, and I hum along with them, but low so nobody hears. Around Phoenix, cactus stands up tall on the scrubland. Some are as high as telephone poles, and have branches, left and right. Some have melted into green candles that have burned down to nothing. That’s how hot it is outside where the AC doesn’t reach.
Once it’s dark, I think about dinner and practice for it. Nicky warned me to slow down and in my mind go over ordering and eating. She offered to pack food in a bag. Maybe I should have let her. Restaurants are risky. I don’t like to eat except in places that have pictures on the menu. I like to see what I’m ordering. And I like to sit in the right spot in case there’s music that might make me dizzy. Nicky said if I practice, I’ll be okay. So eyes closed, I watch myself in Wendy’s, eating at a table between a door and a window.
The bus hiccups, gears downshift as we chug into the mountains, and I shift the sound in my mouth. It’d be so easy for the tires to lose their grip and send us crashing into the ditch. The grinding sound of the gears bites into my chest, and I squeeze my toy bus, imagining myself at the button-size wheel steering us safe along the cliff edge.
We pull into a parking lot that has gas pumps, picnic tables, bathrooms, and fast food. It’s not Wendy’s or any other place I know, but I’m too hungry to care. Passengers cross the pavement, puffing clouds when they breathe. It’s cold in the mountains but warm inside, and after I order my food, I pick a good table in the meat-smelling heat and watch that the bus doesn’t leave without me.
When I look down at what I’m about to eat—I don’t lean my nose too close like that time Mom pushed my face into the soup—I suddenly remember my bag that Nicky warned me to keep an eye on. It’s in the bus, on the luggage rack where I can’t see it. I shovel in a big bite and race across the parking lot. Then I remember the map and the foldouts and the toy bus, and have to run back to get them before hurrying to the big bus. My bag is where I left it, and I’m h
appy, just tired and hungry.
Once everybody’s back on board and we’re on the road, moonlight pours through the windows and sparkles on wrists and fingers where people’s watches and rings are. I hear them sleeping, and I smell their clothes, their breathing, and the food they ate. The rerun air from the bathroom vent smells of every ass that ever sat in there. One minute I’m shivering, the next I’m sweating. I pull the darkness over me, then throw it off. Somehow I dream, but don’t sleep.
I’m still hungry and remember Mom’s hamburgers and how she chopped onions and cooked them inside the meat. I remember when I went to prison she gave me the chain from around her neck, the same one Candy wore to the hospital when she caught polio. A Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Mother. But the guards took it away from me so I wouldn’t choke myself to death. Or do like that inmate who wrapped a wire around his dick, tightening it until it dropped off.
I dream Mom’s face and her eyes, one blue, one brown. That time I fell and cut my forehead, she drove me to the emergency room. The doctor rolled me in a blanket, the way the guards pin your arms and legs before they throw you in the hole for your own good. As the doctor stitched me up, Mom stayed beside me, saying, “Shhh-shhh.” But I couldn’t stop screaming.
Or was that the day Dad died? All of us crammed into the kitchen, the butcher knife in my hand.
By morning we’re out of the mountains and in winter. It’s brown outside, with dead grass, not sandy desert, stretching on and on. Trees along a creek bank have trash instead of leaves on their limbs. The tires hiss on the road, and there’s rain on the roof. That evening when the car lights click on, the highway looks like it’s swimming with snakes. I lean my cheek against the cold glass and watch folks at the end of the workday drive home to dinner. I wonder whether Mom still fries hamburgers with onions inside. I wonder what she has to give me.
Lying with the Dead Page 10