by Sol Stein
*
When the orange juice was served, Henry thought it was pointless to continue the silence game.
“Clete, how about taking us for a drive around the countryside this morning?”
“Very funny,” Clete said.
“Shouldn’t somebody notify Hertz? We were supposed to return the car in Los Angeles tomorrow.”
“Look, Mr. Brown,” Clete said, “you don’t need to worry about Hertz.”
“Don’t they come looking?”
“Sometimes you’re too much, Mr. Brown. Try the French toast, it’s really good. You, too, Dr. Brown, I recommend it. Hertz,” he said, continuing through half a mouthful of French toast, “just collects the insurance. You don’t think they care, do you? It’s a cost of doing business in California.”
As Henry slowly cut the French toast on his plate into bite-size pieces, the first shimmering nuance of an idea lured him into thought.
“You’re not eating,” Clete said. “Anything wrong?”
Henry loooked up. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, his voice trailing off.
“I meant with the food,” Clete said.
“I’m afraid my stomach’s a bit upset,” Henry said, rising.
Margaret was puzzled. Henry always announced every complaint to her.
“Am I allowed?” Henry asked.
Clete pointed, nodding. “It’s just this side of the ladies’.”
“I think I know the way,” Henry said.
The first door, in the modern style, showed a male figure. There was a second door less than ten feet down the hall.
The door felt as if it were controlled by a heavy spring. Inside the men’s room he looked up. The door closer was vacuum-operated. Maybe. The urinals were on the right, the cubicles with their swinging half-doors on the left. So far, so good.
He went over to the double-hung window at the rear. To the right front he could see the white-stoned walkway to the dining room. His view to the left was obstructed by large bushes leading off to the woods. From outside, as they had come toward the dining room, he had noticed the window, and having noticed the approximate location of the bathrooms the night before, he assumed the window to be one of the bathrooms. The window of the second bathroom next to it was invisible from the walkway.
Henry went into one of the cubicles and listened against the wall.
Just then he heard the door open. Someone coming into the men’s room. Clete? Quickly, he flushed the toilet to announce his location. He dropped his pants and sat down.
Whoever it was entered the next cubicle. It was soon apparent that the occupant of the next booth had a purpose more ordinary than Henry’s.
Henry leaned his head back against the cold tile wall, listening. Nothing.
The man in the next booth eventually left. He couldn’t stay here much longer. Suddenly, through the wall he heard the sound he was waiting for, a toilet flushing just on the other side of the wall. Of course, that was the way twin bathrooms were usually arranged, the main facilities back to back, emptying into a single soil pipe between them. Okay.
He checked his appearance in front of the mirror, then went out, his eyes glancing over at the door to the other bathroom. It might work. Anything was worth trying.
He rejoined Clete and Margaret with apologies.
“Feeling all right?” Clete asked.
Henry nodded. They finished the meal in silence.
*
As they were wending their way out of the dining room, Henry saw a new couple being led in by one of the orange-and-blue-uniformed young men with a sardonic expression just like Clete’s. They were young, the woman no more than twenty-six or -seven, the man under thirty. He had red hair. Neither of them looked a bit Jewish, Henry thought. Their eyes looked like those of trapped animals.
As soon as Clete led Henry and Margaret out of the dining room, he said, “Those are the Krinskys. Nice couple. They’ve been here before.”
No wonder the look in their eyes, thought Henry.
“And they came back?” Margaret asked.
Clete chuckled. “Not exactly. Krinsky figured his way out of here. We didn’t catch up with them till near Santa Barbara.”
Maybe, thought Henry. And maybe the Krinskys were a setup for them, to prove the uselessness of escape attempts.
*
Clete led them in a direction they hadn’t been before, an area north of the dining room, on a dirt path leading away from the built-up area.
“Mind a walk?” he asked.
Ten minutes later, circling east, they came to an outcrop of rock. Clete motioned them to come look.
Perhaps thirty feet below them and stretching into the distance, Henry and Margaret could see land under cultivation. Several dozen people were working, stopping, nipping off the tops of the weedy-looking plants, inching forward, repeating the process, watched by orange-and-blue-uniformed staff members.
“See how well behaved they are,” Clete said. “You’d never know none of them’ve been farmers before.”
“Who are they?” Margaret asked, suspecting she knew.
“Guests.”
I’ve got to control my reactions, Henry thought. I don’t want anything to spoil our chances for tonight.
“You’ll learn more about our economy here in due course,” Clete said, glancing at his watch. “In the meantime, I’ve got to get you back for indoctrination. I hope you don’t mind walking a bit faster.”
Halfway back Clete took a side road toward an area north of the dining room where twenty or so redwood lounge chairs were arrayed in two rows facing the sun as on a cruise ship. All but two of the chairs were already occupied, and Clete gestured at the two empty ones.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the young man who stood in front of them, his legs apart like a gym instructor, “Mr. Clifford has been kind enough to donate these pamphlets, which we will all now read. Please don’t speak among yourselves. Address any questions to me.”
Henry glanced down at the pamphlet. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They had to be kidding.
“What is this?” Margaret said.
Henry remembered seeing a copy when he’d been seventeen or eighteen. He’d dipped into it, couldn’t see how anyone could believe such garbage.
Margaret asked again, “What is this?”
A man in front of her, reddish-haired and freckle-faced, turned to Margaret and said, “It’s the menu for the Holocaust.”
Instantly, Clete was headed toward them.
“You were warned not to speak,” Clete said to the red-haired man, who Henry could now see was only a few years older than Clete. “And you, too, Dr. Brown,” Clete said.
The young man stood now, taller than Clete. The woman next to him tugged at his sleeve, trying to get him to sit down. He wrenched his arm away.
“You’ve been here nearly a week,” Clete said to the young man. “You ought to know better.”
“Oh fuck you,” the man said, turning away, just as Clete, with the full force of his arm, slapped the man across the face with the back of his hand.
Henry found himself standing. “Now cut that out!”
Clete turned to Henry. “Mr. Brown, you’re too new to get involved. This man’s been trouble all week.”
“My wife asked a civil question, and he answered.”
The eyes of the other guests darted from their pamphlets to see what was happening. Clete waved a hand, and two of the other staff members came trotting over.
“Okay,” Clete said. “Freckles goes, and Brown goes.”
Henry felt the strong arms grab him from behind. “Take your hands off me,” he said, watching the other staff member Clete had called snapping something on the freckled man’s hands.
Handcuffs?
Henry felt the metal being snapped around his own wrists.
“Cut that out!”
He tried to pull his hands apart. This was ridiculous!
“I told you good behavior was rewarded, Mr. Brown, not
insolence,” Clete said. “Okay,” he said to the others. “The lockers for both of them.”
“It was I who spoke,” Margaret said, suddenly realizing that she and Henry might be separated.
“You sit down,” Clete said. She wasn’t a Jew. He’d need special instructions.
“Move,” Clete said, and on cue the two staff members shoved their charges forward.
The freckle-faced man was trying to look back at his wife, who had tried to keep him seated.
Suddenly, the staff member behind Henry shoved him hard. He stumbled forward. His hands, his balancing agents, were not available to him. He nearly fell. He glanced just once at Margaret’s eyes, a rabbit in a field surrounded by hunters.
Then Henry and the freckle-faced man were led away around the back of the main buildings of Cliffhaven, Clete behind the group, until they came to a gray building in the rear. It looked like the kind of thing that houses electrical equipment. Clete used a key to unlock the door, then motioned Henry and the freckle-faced man in. The staff members behind them shoved them forward into the doorway.
I have to keep my head, Henry thought. The objective is to get away. Useless resistance might kill the prospect of escape. He walked into the building.
Inside it was like a long locker room, with full-length lockers along both walls. Henry could hear sounds of breathing from some of the lockers, and from one he could hear the sound of a woman whimpering. The smell was like the worst kind of public urinal.
“What the hell is this?” Henry asked.
“You’ll see.”
“There’re people in those lockers.”
“You bet.”
At the other end of the room, the freckle-faced man was resisting being shoved into one of the lockers by the two staff members.
Clete swung open the door of an empty locker. There was not quite room for a man of Henry’s height to stand upright.
“I’m going to be nice to you,” Clete said, “since this is your first infraction. Turn around.”
He unlocked Henry’s handcuffs. “That’s so you can scratch yourself,” Clete said. He motioned Henry into the locker with his thumb.
The freckle-faced man was shouting to have his handcuffs removed. The staff members handling him turned to Clete.
“No way,” Clete said. “You heard him say fuck you, didn’t you?”
Henry saw the two staff members shove the man into a locker, then slam the door shut. God, it would be awful with one’s hands cuffed.
“You people are crazy,” Henry said.
“If every Jew in America had a taste of these lockers, we’d have a lot less trouble from you people.”
“What trouble?”
“Get in there.”
“How long have some of these people been in here?”
“The longest anybody’s lasted is a few days. Since yours is a first infraction, I’m giving you exactly four hours. That other fellow’s getting eight.”
Henry wondered whether standing in that confined space would be as bad as whatever Margaret would experience in her head during the four hours of waiting.
I’m not going to do this, he thought.
He looked at Clete.
If I resist, Henry thought, he’ll do something that might kill our chances to escape tonight.
“Come on,” Clete said. “I haven’t got all day.”
He is making me my own jailer, Henry thought, as he stepped in backward so that he would face forward toward the air holes. He wasn’t sure he could really turn around inside.
“Very smart,” Clete said, slamming the metal door.
It was dark inside. Henry felt the metal of the door in front of him. There was no handle, no way of opening it from the inside. If only one person got out, he could open all the other lockers!
He listened to the departing footsteps, Clete’s and those of the two others, then the outer door slamming.
He heard a terrible scream from one of the other lockers.
There was no one to hear except the other prisoners.
In a loud voice he said, “Can you hear me? Is there anyone in the next locker?”
No response, but Henry thought he heard the sound of movement from the locker on his right
“Can you hear me?” he repeated.
In a whisper he could hear, a man’s voice said, “Shut up or they’ll double your time in here.”
“Is it true you don’t get liquid the second week?”
Silence.
“Is it true you get no food the third week?”
“Shut up!” came the voice.
“Not until you tell me.”
After a moment Henry heard a barely audible rasp. “It’s all true. Please don’t talk.”
Henry didn’t want to get his anonymous neighbor in trouble, so he kept quiet, thinking for the first time that the task before him was not only to get himself and Margaret out, but to close this place down by making sure the world knew what was going on in here.
In the meantime, he thought, how long would four hours seem?
9
Phyllis Minter had long ago learned that in this world if you wanted an edge on the next fellow you had to use your eyes, not just to see but to notice. And in her first two days at Cliffhaven, she observed that between the hours of two and five in the afternoon, when the dining room was clear of guests, the outside trucks would come up the road and park near the back of the dining hall. One that she saw from her window was clearly a produce van. Another might have been delivering bottled gas, she wasn’t sure. That driver was a tall fellow, wearing boots that looked like twins of hers. Could he be talked into giving an attractive girl a ride back down with him? To the drivers this place must seem perfectly normal, a fancy resort with a terrific restaurant. Wait’ll she blew the whistle on it! That chief of detectives in Pasadena, he’d believe her. But first she had to get her ass out of here while it was still in one piece.
The staff member who sat with Phyllis Minter at meals was Carol, who didn’t talk much. All Phyllis had been able to pump out of her was that Carol had been an airline stewardess briefly, her plane had skidded on landing, the passengers had all got out the emergency exits okay, but Carol had panicked—something stews weren’t supposed to do—and she ended up at Cliffhaven, grateful for the job. Phyllis took as much time over lunch as she could, to get as close as possible to truck-arrival time, and then, when Carol was about to lock her in her room for the afternoon, said she’d left something in the dining room and could she go get it real quick. Carol said okay, and Phyllis went strolling down to the restaurant on the deserted grounds.
The dining room was empty, except for someone with a trusty armband who was sweeping up way in the back. Everything was laid out for the evening meal. She went to her designated table and pretended to be looking for something she had left, just in case anyone was watching. She then looked under and around the next table, and, at a propitious moment, took a dinner knife from one of the place settings, holding it against her forearm and then bending, as if still looking, slipped the knife into her right boot. One of the men she knew before she moved to California, a macho type who talked army a lot of the time, told her, among other things, that bayonets were not really sharp; they did their damage by puncturing, not cutting. If that was the case, a dinner knife, even if it wasn’t as sharp as a steak knife, might help persuade someone of something.
As Phyllis went around to the back of the restaurant on the outside, she gave herself a point for taking the knife from someone else’s table.
There was only one truck at the dock, painted the same blue-and-orange as the Cliffhaven uniforms. It must be one of their own, she thought. Shit! She’d have to have another go at it tomorrow and dream up some other excuse for Carol.
Just then she heard the blessed noise of a large engine, and up the road labored a refrigerator truck. As the driver swung around to back up to the dock, she noticed that he was a stoutish Chicano. Too bad it wasn’t the lanky one with the boo
ts, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
*
She stepped as close to the cab as possible so she wouldn’t have to shout. When he shut the engine down, Phyllis asked him how long he’d be.
The Chicano shook his head. “Not allowed talk to guests. Only staff.”
“Oh come on, a handsome fellow like you can talk to anybody he wants to.”
He seemed scared that they would be overheard.
“Can you give me a ride back down?” she said, hoping her voice was promising to make it interesting for him if he complied.
The Chicano stared dead ahead.
Phyllis turned and saw Carol, watching them from twenty feet away.
“Oh hi,” she said to Carol.
“Find what you were looking for?” Carol asked.
Phyllis decided that getting out of Cliffhaven wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought.
*
In the locker Henry Brown’s worst problem was the severe muscular pain, the deep acid ache in his lower back and between his shoulders. He had tried squatting. You just couldn’t get down far enough before your knees had no room to go forward. An itching sensation just below the pain between his shoulders cried out for scratching. His bladder, full from his early morning juice and water and coffee, pressed for a choice. He could urinate right where he stood, wetting his undershorts, letting it run down his trouser leg—that was probably what they wanted him to do. Or he could be a stoic; the pain was no worse than the muscular aches. It must be much longer than four hours now, he thought. What do the people do who are in here for a day or two? They foul themselves.
How long had he been in here? Time crawled. If every adult on earth spent this amount of time standing up in a cramped steel locker, would it accomplish anything? Nothing. Brothers in pain? Shared pleasure is memorable. Shared pain is forgotten. Henry thought he’d try counting again—101, 102, 103—to take the measure of actual time instead of the incredibly slow moments he felt now.