Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  Daniel always felt bad about Sills. He was stand-up and treated him and the others with consistent respect. They should’ve named the new prison out in western Mass. after him only, not him and Polaski. Now, all these years later, it’s the Sills/Polaski Correctional Center, and Polaski has gone down in history as some kind of hero who gave the ultimate sacrifice in corrections when he was a bully and a sadist.

  Daniel grabs the pot handle and stirs the beans and turns down the heat. The rain is coming down so hard his trailer is like the inside of a can being beaten on by sticks. He glances down at his letter to Susan. He can write to her all he wants, but she’ll never get her mother back. Why not just write his daughter a short note instead?

  Susan,

  I’d like to see you before I go.

  The rain begins to let up. His trailer smells like beans. He picks up Susan’s letter and reads where he last left off. He had never trusted the strip rats but it never came to him not to trust her. She had chosen him. She and Danny and how from day one they could never hold back from each other.

  There were so many places where they’d done it: under the Himalaya, on the beach on a blanket in the dunes at night, once under a pinball machine in the arcade at three in the morning when he ached for her and scratched on the window screen of her bedroom. It was low and faced the parking lot, and it was a hot night and they’d already made love earlier in the backseat of Liam’s Impala, paint cans and rollers on the floor, Linda’s bottom on a tarp Danny had pulled there for her while jerking down his shorts. It was only four or five hours later and he couldn’t sleep and then Linda’s beautiful small face was a shadow against the screen, but it had a rusted aluminum track and would make too much noise to open, Paul’s bed just across the tiny room, so Linda whispered, “Out front.” And then her hand was in his hand and she was spreading a T-shirt out under the pinball game because it was dark and hidden there and Daniel can still smell the dusty concrete and her hair and skin—salt from the ocean and soap and her faint pine taste as she let him push himself all the way into her. This gift from her. What else could he call it? No one else had ever been so good to him like this. No one had ever made him feel like a one and only like this. But the burning worm had come to life now. Even before Liam came to bail him out for the twenty-five dollars Danny paid him back that night. (And why hadn’t she bailed him out? “I was with Susan! I didn’t want to bring her there, Danny!” ) The real story, Daniel knows now and has known for too long, is that, sitting in that concrete cell on a steel bench waiting to get bailed out, the worm began to make him see things he hadn’t seen before. How fast that first long kiss under the Frolics led to her giving all of herself to him under the Himalaya. How they never even talked about it before or after. How it was his first time, but it couldn’t be hers. No pain. No blood. Only this slick rising and falling hunger he now had to have the way he used to need water and sleep and air. It never even occurred to him to wear a rubber. Because in those early months with Linda Dubie he was so damn high and happy, nothing occurred to him. He wasn’t thinking at all. Neither of them were. To stop and talk and to think about things like pregnancy were as far away as a man being hurled down a white river pausing to ask the time.

  The concrete walls of the cell were painted yellow and someone must’ve smuggled in a pen because a few inches from the barred door was the drawing of a vagina with something dripping out of it. Beneath that was one word: slut. It was a word the worm loved. It seemed to be its only food. How could Danny have been so slow? That smile she gave Bill in the arcade, that look on his face when he’d glanced at her sitting beside her husband in the sun. He’d been with her, too. He had.

  That was bad enough. The thought that Linda had given Jimmy Squeeze’s brother what she’d also given to Danny. But then the worm squirmed deeper and began to burn. Had she done it with Bill while she was with Danny? While she was Danny’s wife? Danny stared at that jailhouse drawing and he thought of all the times she could have done it. When Susan was napping. Or maybe when Lois was taking care of Susan, and Linda was working the arcade. She smoked a lot of Camels, and she was always taking a cigarette break. One afternoon Danny and Liam were up on the roof of the Frolics patching the flat roof with tar, and Danny had looked over the edge and seen his very own Linda Ahearn standing in the shade of the entrance to the arcade smoking a cigarette, one arm crossed under her breasts like when they first met, her coin apron around her hips. She looked so beautiful and so alone and she was his, the mother of their baby, and then she got a long look from a big man walking by with his kids. But what if it was Bill passing by right then? Who’s to say he couldn’t flash that smile and lead her to some dark corner real fast? Who’s to say he didn’t? That she didn’t? Then Danny had pictured his wife’s legs spread as she let in Bill and stared into his eyes the way she stared into his, like he was the only one for her, and that’s when the cell tilted and he threw up on the concrete floor, the worm burrowing from his head and heart into his guts, where it would stay until it was too late.

  Daniel stands and walks over to the stove and turns the flames off under the beans. He sits back down and writes: Susan. Danny lost his way. That’s not the right way to put it really because it looks like I’m making excuses for him. I’m not. He deserved everything he got and more. But he went crazy for a while. That’s what I’m trying to say. And when people are crazy it’s like being around a drunk or somebody so high on something your conversation with them is from another planet. You can’t talk to them. Linda couldn’t—

  You should know that I went crazier behind the walls. You may know they put me in Walpole first and I was on Suicide Watch from things I kept saying I guess though I don’t remember any of that. What I remember is wanting some con to kill me. I kept seeing

  Daniel squeezes his eyes shut. Linda’s face, her hair, her eyes, the way she stared right into his after, the surprise and the fear fading to a knowing he would do this. And there was the fading that did not look unlike love, an echo of it, though it was a love for who she’d been, a love she was trying to hold on to but couldn’t.

  I wasn’t strong enough to take my own life.

  I was a fish. That’s what they call a first timer. And the sharks don’t even circle a fish. They just go right for him but Danny went after the first shark that looked at him wrong. His name was Chucky Finn and he was from Charlestown. I had my tray of baloney and mashed potatoes made from water and powder from a box and

  Why is he writing this? How can any of this be something she needs to read? He hasn’t earned the right to tell her this. But she needs to know, doesn’t she? She needs to know that even in max lockup he was so out of his mind by what he did that he feared no one, starting with two-hundred-sixty-pound Chucky Finn, who glanced up at Danny across the table just long enough to say, “No fucking’fish,” and Danny was on him faster than he’d ever been on anybody. He’d always had big hands and now they carried only blackness, and after he put Finn there with punches he still doesn’t remember throwing, Danny straddled Finn’s chest and his hands were squeezing Finn’s bald head and he kept slamming it onto the concrete floor, three screws on him, cons staring at him like he was either an annoyance or a welcome distraction from the endlessly narrow days they’d been living for so long.

  Can’t he just tell her he was crazy and leave it at that? No, because if he leaves it there, that one word will just sound like an excuse. If he leaves it there, Susan won’t really know any more than she may know now. And she needs to know that for the past twenty years, Daniel has abstained from women. He would like to say that Danny became Daniel behind the walls, but that isn’t true. Danny was a young man, and that hunger Linda lit inside him didn’t go away, though it did for months right after because the only picture in his head of Linda was the bad one, a slow nightmare of what he’d done playing over and over. He’d squeeze his eyes shut and press his face into his bunk, but that only made it worse. He saw what he saw and he felt it, too, and how could
he have done it? How could that have been him?

  It was that sound she’d made. Like she’d just burned her finger on the stove then yanked it back. The way she stared into his face, that black knowing about him, a curse on him.

  He was twenty-four or twenty-five, but each morning he woke as soft as an old man. Even in solitary, his first trip to Block Nine for Chucky Finn, then his second for stomping the head of Chico Perez who’d pulled a shiv on him in the laundry room just because Danny’s shoulder had brushed his. But the Reactor’s core spewed its reckless heat, and Perez’s shiv was in Danny’s sliced palm and he stomped and stomped. But even all those days and nights in solitary, if his mind went anywhere good, it was only to little Susan, to holding her and playing with her, and, when she was a baby, feeding her in her high chair and patting her tiny back till she burped near his ear.

  It wasn’t until Norfolk, maybe six or eight months in the Threes, that Danny woke hard. It was a sign of life he hadn’t seen coming because he’d stopped thinking of ever feeling alive again. But now this. A sign of good health in a healthy young man, and it wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that he was healthy, but at the same time he felt grateful for it. And there came a memory of him and Linda. They’d only been married a week or two and Linda was a few months pregnant, her belly just beginning to swell. It was late September but warm, and they’d slept with the bedroom windows open. Linda had hung white curtains, and when he woke on his side up against her back, his arm around her, a breeze blew in, billowing the curtains out before they fell to the side and their room smelled like the ocean. Linda said, as if they’d both been awake a long time: “That’s so pretty.”

  Then they were making love and Danny, lying in his bunk back on the second floor of the Threes, began to jerk on himself and it didn’t take long at all and no one on this earth was worse than he was.

  Some of the guys went gay in there, though they never called it that. A mouth was a mouth, a hole was a hole, and you did what you had to do. What Danny did was go back to when it was just him and Linda. He’d picture them doing it in the sand and in Liam’s Impala and on their couch with just the light of the TV on them. He’d picture it and start to smell her smell and hear her breaths and then it would all drop to his center and out into his hand and the TP he used, and there was the feeling he was trying to make dried flowers bloom again.

  The rain has stopped. Daniel dumps some beans onto his plate and sits at the table. He moves aside his letter to Susan. She won’t be hearing any of that. He spoons some beans into his mouth, but they may as well be a clump of melted wax he makes himself swallow. He pushes aside his plate and thinks again of that summer of 1988, outside for the first time since ’73. Danny was thirty-eight years old but felt like a young kid who didn’t know enough about the world to be in it.

  His father was dead by then. Because of Danny’s accrued good time, he was offered a furlough to Liam’s funeral, but Danny didn’t go. At visiting, he told his mother he was denied. His father had lived a small life, and Danny knew it would be a small funeral and he would stand out. There might be his mother’s sister and her husband from New Jersey, some grown cousins, a few tradesmen from over the years, maybe Will Price and another owner or manager from one of the amusement parks Danny’s old man had helped to look magic, but that’s it. And Danny would not be the one in the cheap suit his mother would have to go out and buy for him, greeting people at the casket of this man who hadn’t visited him even once.

  Danny’s mother wanted him to live with her, but after only a few months Danny’s parole officer let him move to Boston. That first full summer out was hot, and he lived in a one-room a block from the barbershop where he worked in the shadow of the highway overpass across from North Station. At Norfolk he’d learned caning and he’d learned how to cut hair, and the owner of the shop knew Danny’s PO and that was that. All day long, five days a week, it was men’s heads and hair and talking faces in the mirror, a cotton clothes protector over their shoulders and chests, the rise and fall of their voices and laughter and jokes and talk of whatever was in the news. That August it was Bush and Dukakis. When Danny went down, Nixon was still president and we were in Vietnam.

  At sundown he’d go walking. He was still smoking then, Winstons he kept in the front pocket of his T-shirt or rolled up into his sleeve. He’d gained some weight too. He’d never been one of those guys to lift barbells or play basketball in the shadows of the walls, and sometimes he’d see his reflection in the window of a package store or clothes shop, this guy with a gut and long sideburns nobody seemed to have anymore, his hair combed back, his hooked nose and big hands. The thing is, he looked like an ex-con, and he didn’t like it. He also looked like he came from another time, and he felt that way too. He didn’t expect the outside to be so bright and loud and full of motion, either. All the college kids were moving back into the city, and he’d pass a couple of girls on the sidewalk with their clean hair and bare legs, their slapping flip-flops and naked toes. He’d smile at them as if he were still the age he’d been when he went down, but they’d pass by him as if he weren’t there; and why wouldn’t they? He was the age of their fathers and so he was invisible to them, which is how it should be, he thought. He should be invisible to women. And he thought of his Susan being the exact same age these college kids were, eighteen years old or so.

  Walking along the brownstones of Back Bay, he’d see a father in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts and running shoes unloading a U-Haul or station wagon, carrying a table lamp or rolled rug or a taped box up the steps and out of sight. Once down near Fenway Park, one of these men glanced over at him and winked at Danny as if he were one of them, just another middle-aged tuition payer doing his happy fatherly duty, helping move a kid who was going to college or getting a first apartment.

  It was too much.

  Danny began to take routes away from neighborhoods with colleges in them. In Boston this was hard to do, but he’d leave his one-room near the tracks of North Station and head east along Commercial Street to the wharfs jutting out into Boston Harbor. On the other side was Charlestown, and he could see the Bunker Hill Monument and thought of guys he met in Norfolk from that neighborhood, men who robbed banks like it was just another trade like plumbing or carpentry other guys might learn from their fathers and uncles. Out on the water were big gray freighter ships and much smaller pleasure boats and a few white motor yachts cruising along. When he got to Hanover Street, he’d walk up to Prince and the narrow cobbled streets of the North End. It’d be crowded with short-sleeved tourists and little kids, and sometimes he’d sit at a table in one of the open-air restaurants and order an espresso and sip it and watch cars drive slowly by, people stepping in front of them like they weren’t there, horns honking, uniformed cops on horseback, a thin Italian man smoking a cigar in the doorway of his gelato shop, the stringed lights hanging over the street from one brick walk-up to another, the smells of fried squid and lemon and smoke and bubble gum and the perfume of the women walking by with their men. He couldn’t stop staring at them, their faces and hair and bare shoulders, their small wrists and painted nails, their soft-looking rears behind shorts or skirts he wanted to touch and kiss but also run away from as fast as he possibly could.

  That first stretch in the Hole, the voice that came into Danny’s head was: You did this, Linda.

  He knew he was wrong to even begin to think this, but he’d never been crazy before her. He had a temper, and he never took any shit from anyone for more than a heartbeat or two, but after the Reactor’s heat had cooled he never thought any more about the boy he’d punched or kicked or both just to make him stop. That was the thing. Danny had never started anything with anybody. He never looked for trouble anywhere, so why was he here in this cell with the light that never went off and a steel bunk bolted into the wall and a Bible with its cover torn off?

  Because of you, Linda. But those words in his head made his face burn and he knew it wasn’t her but it was her, or at least
it was what she’d done to him; she’d made him feel he was one of God’s chosen kings when all along she was doing the same to beach shit like Squeeze’s brother Bill, though after over a year of this, he began to consider, like slivers of ice pushed into his veins, that he’d been as “sick in the head” as Linda had said he was, that she’d never done any of the things he said she had, and so what he’d done he’d done to a completely innocent woman. And even if she did do it, what he’d done was so wrong, so very wrong, and those fifteen years passed as slowly as an entire ocean drying up under the sun.

  One late sundown that first fall outside, he saw a big woman across the street talking to a cop. She looked to be in her sixties, and she wore a pants suit and too much eye makeup, her graying hair done up with a lot of hair spray. When she lit a cigarette, it was like Danny’s heart just tapped up against an electric fence because she looked so much like his mother-in-law he threw a five onto his table and walked down Prince and out of that neighborhood for good.

  Why didn’t he think of this? Lois came from a big Italian family only a few miles north of Boston. Why wouldn’t she or one of her brothers show up in the North End? It hadn’t been her, but that didn’t matter. Of all the people he’d known on the outside, she was the very last he hoped to ever see again.

  Ever.

  Daniel feels a bit queasy now. There’s an ache in his hips and groin, and a Coke might help, but he doesn’t have any. He scrapes his plate and rinses it off in the sink and leaves his trailer. Sometimes he locks it, and sometimes he does not. But now, standing in the smells of pine pitch and wet sheet metal and damp dirt, he thinks of his letter to Susan on the kitchen table, and he lifts his front door till it clicks into place and he locks it. He steps around the pooled water in the middle of his yard and starts up his truck. For the past forty years he has lived his life alone. It’s a condition you get used to, the way a one-legged man gets used to his cane and hopping from one resting place to the next. But this wanting to see his daughter once more seems to have opened up more wanting inside him. All this time he has kept those wants small: a warm bed, three meals a day, clean clothes, and just enough money to live. His only indulgences have been an occasional beer or ice-cream cone or movie, his trips to the library for books on tape. But as he backs out onto Beach Road on this wet night just to go looking for a Coke, he can feel that bigger wanting, his shame for this rising to his face as he steps on the gas and moves swiftly down through the dark pines and lighted trailers and cottages, families living inside them, each and every one.