Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 page)
Aside from that and the extensive vocational guidance and rehabilitory aid the prison offered in the person of Mr. Smelter, there were also two courses being given that summer for high school or university credit. “Body Movement: Grace” was the title of one, “Poetry Workshop” the other. I decided to take “Body Movement: Grace” because it had to be good for me and anyway teaching body movement in a prison is the kind of paradox that attracts me. Unfortunately, the instructor Roland Pound emphasized the Grace more than the Body Movement. His thesis was that a fundamental requirement of grace is never to look at your hands. Never. He showed us how to walk and sit down, and in a way it did good things to our convicted postures. But I only stayed in the course two days. It wasn’t because of the cuts I got shaving while I stared directly into my own worried eyes. It wasn’t due to those moments in class when I’d sit down on a hand and not be sure if it was my own. I quit because of the third time I lit the filter on one of my cigarettes and took a death-defying drag on all that nylon-fiberglass et cetera. In that third hacking moment as cough moved to retch, I decided to once again start peeking at what my hands were doing. Besides, the whole concept played hell with my infielding.
To compensate for dropping grace, I enrolled late in the poetry workshop which Salvatore had already told me Wesson himself was teaching. I considered wearing a disguise for a while, but then dropped it and just went in to take my medicine. Wesson was as incredible, or is it credible, as everyone else. He delivered his knowing glance in my direction for a moment and then started the class, not knowing he’d soon be drawn across the keen edge of our imprisoned imaginations. He read a poem by some character I’d never heard of, some “friend” of his, during which Wilkes, a grand larcenist from Grand Rapids, kept saying “Hey, teach, if this is a workshop, where are the tools?” The first two times he said it everybody laughed, but Wesson continued reading using his inspired baritone voice. The only part of the poem we could hear was about this guy leaving Reno for San Diego and the promise of the West, a new life, or some such geographical lie.
“Hey! Hold on!” Lefty yelled out.
“Good. Do you have a comment, Mr. Croisure?”
“Yeah, I got a comment.” He addressed the class: “Look, the guy says he’s leaving Reno, right?”
“Right.” Wesson put in. “For the site of new promise …”
“No way! I worked in Reno for six months once as a backup dealer. God, there was this girl worked in front of me. Some piece! Rode her bike to work …”
“Yes, yes, and …” The class ignored Wesson’s prompting.
Lefty went on: “Wendy was her name. Rode her bike …” Here Lefty lapsed into a blank-eyed reverie, and the class, we sat in respectful quiet in our circle. “Yeah,” Lefty came to, “this cross-eyed poet needs a roadmap. You don’t wait to get to Reno to go to San Diego. Why you can’t get there from Reno. He’d have turned left in Elko!” The class exploded in hoorays and applause.
“Lefty should know,” our coach, Oliver Panghurst, added, “he’s been there.”
“And so I conclude,” Lefty concluded, “that this here poem is full of shit.” More wild applause.
“Ahem, yes, well … the idea of promise, of moving west,” Wesson was faltering, “of starting a new life, certainly is not lost on you, you …” Oh Wesson, you are hanging over the abyss, “… you confined-type men.” Wesson collapsed on the lectern.
“Us confined-type men,” Lefty spoke for everyone, “find this kind, like any kind of shit, offensive. It’s the goddamned poet who’s lost. He
ought
to start a new life as a …”
“As a prison guard!” Panghurst shouted.
“Yes!” Lefty came back. “
Yes
, as a prison guard—that don’t take no brains!” The room, like so many I’d been in of late, disintegrated into descending debris, rising smoke and splinters of light as paper clips streamed silver toward Wesson’s shock-white eyeballs.
So I stopped going to the workshop, though Salvatore reported to me from time to time and it was clear that Wesson was being dealt the kind of cards he deserved. I know this moralistic stance here seems inappropriate, but Wesson had openly rubbed me what is known as the wrong way too long, and revenge, regardless what nonsense is uttered by rehabilitation officials and other coxcombs, is nectar, and who—given the choice—won’t sample a smidgen?
At night still, I’d lie in my bed, but I couldn’t believe I’d made it. In the period before sleep when people do their best thinking and from which no thought is recoverable, my mind slipped through the successive holes of thought faster and faster, like a car’s motor racing after it has stopped, the whirling centrifugal whine, metal against metal, all oil gone up in spires of tinged steam, and the clutch, wouldn’t you know it, in. That is to say, among the other fifty billion thoughts that flew by like bats in the cave of my indignant rage, I thought about my own responsibility and guilt. I had felt guilty before about different things, so I knew what it should feel like if it came. I had had black-hearted moods, entire atmospheres of guilt, in which conscience like a drunken lumberman fed the long planks of my raw remorse to the sawblade; but I didn’t feel that way now. At all. Perhaps it was the deep sense of embarrassment I felt for all the hundreds of paper readers and civil employees who thought I was guilty that led me onto that trackless train of thought, onto that rapid-fire midnight docket. The sentences flew out like the years in
20,000 Years in Sing Sing:
For ever knowing and associating with Dorothy “Dotty” Everest—five years and a thousand-dollar fine, fine suspended because of Mexican penalties paid …
For various croquet felonies—two years …
For not marrying the perfect Lenore and buying a small orchard farm in Logan, Utah, and, don’t you know, settling down—five big years … with this sentence came the conflicting maxims, “It’s never too late” and “Don’t close the barn door after the horse has fled.” It might not be too late …
For not punching Mrs. Ellis’s son-in-law—six months …
For ever gaining (what a word) employment at the Flying W and existing within the same square mile as the Waynes and Teeth—five years at least …
For coveting the vanished Lila—a clear five years …
For not taking more drastic measures with Lila—six months …
I ransacked the rest of the potentially guilty clutter in the desk drawer of my mind, but really couldn’t come up with any regrettable details that I hadn’t already paid for, except an incident at the Pumpkin Hop which took place with my close associate at the time, Joylene North. That was way back in junior high, and I assigned myself ninety days for it.
As my thought processes closed down for the night and sleep approached like the wolves around a diminishing campfire, I added all the debts. Twenty-four years and ninety days. Subtracting my age, I had only sixty-six days left to serve. I was determined to serve only sixty-six days more. I rolled onto my back and looked up at Bette Davis who knelt concernedly over my imprisoned self, and I said, “Sixty-six more days in Sing-Sing, baby, and I’ll be coming home.” I fell deeply asleep twenty minutes before the dark night of the soul.
Summer passed. I worked hard on the fitzer beds, and took firm pride along with Randy Spike in the job we were doing. Days are such small items. They merged and streamed by. It was like those scenes in the movies where they show the superimposed calendar being torn away, page by page, and blowing off into the wind. June. July. August. They also have the newspaper come spinning out at you and then it slows and stops and one headline says
JOE ELECTED MAYOR;
then another paper spins out at you, stops and says
JOE ELECTED GOVERNOR;
then a third comes spiraling out:
JOE ELECTED PRESIDENT.
And you know that suddenly Joe has made the big time, as they begin a shot in the oval office, and that he has forgotten all his old, dear friends. It doesn’t take long, movies tell us, for good people, the kind you and I know, to become crooks. Well, in the prison it was the same. Time whirled away and by late August the “Dangerous Convicts” were tied for the league lead with the “Escapees.” We’d have had the title clinched except our best hurler, Armstrong, got paroled; the best hitter in the league, our centerfielder Manny Bloomfield had been somewhat eviscerated in a knife fight; and our first baseman Enos Harper had escaped by walking away from the farm detail.
Despite these handicaps our coach, the red-faced Oliver Panghurst, along with the rest of us, still felt confident that we could win the league. The announcement was made that Sniffy Laughton was making a solid brass trophy three-feet tall and weighing nearly ninety pounds for the winning squad. Sniffy ran the machine shop. That was when our team started eating lunch together, quietly talking, breaking our cups apart slowly like bread; that was when things started getting more realistic, or unrealistic, as the case may be, and things had a chance of making the movies, of going beyond this confined mediocrity, well, that is to say, we planned the escape.
It was mildly unfortunate that we didn’t use phrases like, “Yeah, we’re really going to blow this joint!”, when talking about the escape, and the general conversational tone was disappointing also. No one growled in a hysterical rasp. Perhaps it was because the plan was simple. Simple and easy. Just having the escape was enough for me. I didn’t really care how they talked about it. Deeds, that ran around breaking down doors, were in order, not Words that twisted into nothingness like smoke.
The plan. The new wing would not be completed until early October, and until that time all of our air vents were open ended in the new unfinished system. From there through one set of corridor bars, through the basement passageway, out the side doors, across the budding fitzer bed, onto centerfield of Dexter, and over the wall. I got all the information about the new wing out of Spike as we’d talk during the day.
It became obvious from the first that he would never go for escaping until the landscaping was done. I felt bad about prying stuff out: “Where does that door go, Randy?” But it was escape wasn’t it? And he liked leaning on his shovel and talking about the way things were going to be, the master plans for the yard, and his role in it. Besides, our route took us right through the fresh fitzer beds, as I’ve said, and that would have killed old Spike. So I didn’t tell him anything.
“Going over that wall is going to be one hairy mother.” Wilkes, the pitcher, would say three times every lunch. “You got the beam. You got the guardhouse. The guards have got machine guns.” The guardhouse beam we measured, and it swung around the yard, just like in the movies, every nineteen seconds. “It’s gonna take two-three minutes to get the eleven of us over that mother wall. It’s gonna be hairy.”
“Okay, you Dangerous Convicts,” Coach Panghurst said over his plastic tray, “Somebody has got to go down there tonight and clear that set of bars out, and check those East Yard doors.” He smiled, tapping his spoon on his cube of green jello. “I’ve escaped four times and been shot five, and if we get hung up between here and centerfield, we are gonna get our Dangerous Convict asses shot off, and I’d personally rather be in prison than,” he stopped tapping and stabbed the spoon into the green quivering mass, “be dead.”
There was a thoughtful jello silence.
“I’ll do it.”
I said that.
That afternoon I received a letter from Eldon. He had been looking for Lila in my behalf, but she hadn’t turned up.
Dear Larry,
They closed the Flying W, and Nicky and the gang have moved over to Roosevelt for other felonies. Don’t worry, I am on the case. … I’ve kept what stakeout I could at Lila’s place for the last week: nothing. If she shows, I’ll get the necessary evidence, confession, or flesh. Will a pound do? Lenore came over about three weeks ago, and your dreams will be happy to hear she cried. Heavily. But Gary is very in the picture: marriage.
I am now contributing editor to
The Guide to Fishing in Eastern Utah
. I’ve met some wonderful Indians while fishing, including an incredible guide: name of Nighthorse. Many fish leap from little streams calling your name. Don’t worry, I don’t write about the good places. The tomatoes are thick, but green. How about coming to help with the harvest? Many more events to report, including Indian lore, but later ……
Your pal, Eldon
P.S. I have a new roommate and it is hilarious.