I put my hand on his. “I know. We’ll get you out. Just hang on.”
“I’m not sure how long I can hang on.” He looks around the room, lowers his voice. “The guards are worse than the inmates. They scream and spit and kick you. They don’t like me. They don’t like southerners. Once a day we go out on the ball field. There’s a tree near a fence. I think I could climb it. Make a run for it.”
“Cage, I know one bit of advice I’m going to give you. Don’t try that or you’re going to be here for a long time.” I squeeze his hand. “Remember what your great-grandmother would say: ‘You’ve got to take hold.’”
“Mama, I wasn’t crazy when I got here. I don’t know why they had to send me here.” He looks so much like a frightened little boy that it just breaks my heart. He starts to cry. “But I’m going to be crazy if they keep me in here. These crazy inmates start fights with me. When I’m out on the ball field, I see them huddling together, pointing at me. They know I’m different. They know I don’t belong here.”
“We know you don’t belong here, too, Cage. We’re doing all we can to get you out. You’ll be out soon. Just pray for deliverance.” I want to cry but I know I must appear strong to help him stay strong. I reach across the table and cup his face with my hands, and thinking about what the teacher told me, I say, “We’re going to get you out.”
L
eaving the visiting room, I wipe the tears on my sleeve and set my face. I pretend I’m tough, pull my shoulders back, set my lips together tight, try to emit a don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. Sometimes I try to be invisible. We walk in a line with screws at the front and the rear down the long white corridor. The whole place is white, every hallway, cellblock, meeting room. White. The absence of color. After ten days I’m going snow-blind. Seeing Mom in her green summer dress brings home how far away I am, how deep I’ve descended into white hell. The shame of a mother coming to visit you in a lockup—imagine your mother catching you jerking off and multiply times a thousand. But praise Jesus for parents. Home is the one place you can count on. Mom and Dad are my only hope. Sylvia has not replied to my last letter and has stopped accepting my phone calls. The last time we talked, she said her parents had told her not to get involved. So much for love.
The line halts at an electric door. A man behind thick, scratched glass nods at the screws and buzzes it open, then we walk through. The sound of it sliding shut nearly triggers another round of tears. Thirty days, I repeat silently. Just thirty days. The screw stops at a T-junction, the corridors that run to Max 1 and Max 2, and divides us into two lines. I’m at the front of Max 2.
“Move it out.”
Barney the Giant is sweeping the linoleum with a big push broom. I try to look past him. He stands up straight and runs his hand up and down the broom. “Yo, pretty boy, you watching the moon? Gonna be full next week. Not long now.”
“Shut the fuck up, Barney,” a screw says.
The reek of madness and misery seeps through the heavy doors and fills the white hallway for a hundred feet, growing stronger with each step. Max 2 is a warehouse for the mindless nuts. The ones who sleep in their shit and have to be bathed with a fire hose. I almost gag when the doors open and the cellblock exhales a stench like the wind off a dump, carrying the noise of a thousand maniacs. Moaning. Howling. Singing. Conversations with God. Dialogues with Satan. Soliloquies to the quick and the dead. It’s only quiet in the evening after they’ve tranqued everybody. The screws stand aside to let us pass.
An old man floats by, catching invisible butterflies with an invisible net, who, if you believe the screws, was a Harvard lepidopterist who mounted one of his students under glass. I walk slowly down the white hall, looking for Mike, the single other semi-sane inmate on the floor, to see if he got the new
Newsweek
and kill some time discussing current events. I glance in the TV room, where a crowd is watching
Atlantic Professional Wrestling
, Horrible Hogan and the Exterminator, by far the most popular show in Max 2. The violent crims of Max 1 prefer
Cops
.
“I have to see my doctor,” a wizened little man tells me. “I have to see my doctor.”
“It’s Saturday,” I say. “I don’t think they’re on duty.”
“I haven’t seen my doctor for twelve years.”
I look at a screw standing nearby. He smiles at me and nods.
“That’s true?” I ask.
“Hell, yeah, cracker boy. You think you in the fucking Mayo Clinic? You in the Land of the Lost here, boy.” He laughs and moves down the hall, singing “Whistle While You Work.”
“You seen Mike?” I ask a tall crew-cut guy standing by the door.
He turns his head slowly toward me from the TV. “Hulk Hogan is breaking us out tonight. Just before dawn. He’s coming through the TV.”
“I’ll be here,” I say, backing up.
“Make sure it’s on channel thirteen,” he whispers, putting a forefinger to his lips.
Down the hall a large man with a noble face and a mane of black hair is gesticulating forcefully, punching holes in the air, his voice booming. “The greatest weapons to fight communism are not missiles but Big Macs. A McDonald’s in every city will make the world safe for democracy.”
“Mr. Speaker.” I wave.
“I recognize our distinguished colleague from south of the Mason-Dixon.” He smiles beneficently.
“Haven’t you seen the news? We’re going to win! Communism is crumbling. It’s the dawn of People Power.” Passing by, I pat him on the back. “Poland, East Germany, China, the workers are rising again.”
His eyes fill with fury and his hand shakes as he points at me. “An agitator!” he screams. “An agitator in our midst. Don’t let him escape.”
Farther down the white hall, a man sits on the floor, his head between his knees, weeping. Behind him, in a cell, a man is filling a tin cup with excrement, scooping it off the floor. In the next cell a Jack is going at it fast and furious to a photograph of a beagle. I close my eyes and keep walking. We are not responsible for what others do, I think. But are we somehow responsible for what we make ourselves see?
At the end of the corridor Mike’s cell is empty. I sit on a bench and look down to the other end, the nuts gradually diminishing in size until the ones at the far end are denim stick figures. Speaker is raising a clenched fist. The lepidopterist’s arms are akimbo, beating his wings. The long white corridor becomes the red cinder straight of an oval track. The noise and the stench fade into silence, the nuts blur and disappear. Papa was walking hand in hand with Nick and me, about eight and nine, leading us to the soft foam mattress in the pole vault pit, where we jumped like it was a trampoline while he ran his laps, waving each time he passed.
“Straightaway, straightaway, straightaway to heaven.” I open my eyes and see a guy from Schizo Anonymous a few inches from my face, pointing to the white ceiling. He laughs and laughs, hugging his sides like he’s freezing.
“You’re just a lunatic,” I say softly. “Just a fucking lunatic.”
He stops laughing and makes a peace sign. “Thanks for that cigarette.”
“Up shit creek without a paddle, as they used to say,” a voice whispers. I come awake with a start, then keep perfectly still. The room is dark, save a faint glow through the bars. The hallway beyond is quiet. Pringle is snoring on the bunk below. My spine tingles. The voice is familiar, one I haven’t heard in a long time. I wonder if I’m dreaming.
“Events sort of got out of your control, swept you along like a flash flood, and dumped you in this place.” The voice is coming from the end of the bed. I’m too scared to move. I know that voice almost as well as I know my own. “Well, it’s a better place than where I am.”
“Nick?” I whisper. “Is it really you?”
“It ain’t the bogeyman.”
I raise up on my elbows and see a figure sitting on the end of the bunk, dangling its legs over the edge. “Am I dreaming?”
“That’s not the right question. There’s a fine line between waking and dreaming, life and death, sanity and madness. Who’s to say what’s real?”
“I must be dreaming.”
“You must be . . . or maybe not.”
“I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t mean to kill you.”
“Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t
really
your fault. It’s kind of too late in the game but I forgive you. Okay? Feel better?”
“Is that why I’m here?”
“That’s one way of looking at it. Sort of simplistic, though.”
“What’s it like being dead?”
“Beyond the mirror of your imagination.”
“I miss you, Nick. Every damn day. No one knows me like you did.”
“I’m with you, brother. Wherever you go. Following you like a fart.”
“That’s nice to know. Have you seen Poppy?”
“Went fishing with him the other day.”
“Fishing? Where?”
“Where else? Old Hickory Lake. You can only go places that you’ve been.”
“Jugs or poles?”
“Poles. Caught a whole mess of bass. But he likes to throw them back now.”
“Will you tell him that I love him?”
“He knows that, Cage.”
“Can you help me get out of here?” I sit up, lean my back against the cold wall. Nick is transparent, the hallway light filtering through him. I can’t make out his features.
“Like what, help you escape? You shouldn’t try to escape.” His jaw doesn’t move when he talks.
“Maybe you could write an order for my release and put it in the right tray.”
Nick laughs. “I wish I could help you, Cage. I would if I could. But it’s beyond my parameters.”
“Nick, is there life after death?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it life.”
“Are you in purgatory?”
“No such thing.”
“Have you seen the face of God?”
“We’re not allowed to talk about that.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
“No. Listen, I’ve got to go. Take hold, Cage, you’ll be all right. You won’t be here forever. Take my advice and don’t tell anyone I was here. They’ll think you’re crazy.”
Then he’s gone.
“Nick, come back.” I crawl to the end of the bed to see if he had left an imprint on the blanket, and it’s flat. “Nick, come back.” I wipe tears from my eyes. “Nick!”
“Shut up, you crazy cracker,” Pringle says groggily from the bed below. He kicks the mattress. “Don’t make me get out of this bed and bust up your face.”
“I must have had a nightmare,” I say, lying back down.
“Save it for group.” Pringle kicks the bed again. “I don’t care if you dreamed you were locked in a nuthouse.”
“If this is the way God treats his friends, no wonder he has so few.” St. Theresa of Avila’s words resound in my head like the refrain of a hymn, over and over, as I sit down in the kitchen to put on my fortieth, maybe fiftieth, new pair of New Balance, which became my brand in the seventies when Cage swore by them in high school. I wear out a pair every three months, mail-order them quarterly from Runner’s Warehouse. The kettle whistles and I rush across the kitchen in one shoe to take it from the burner before it wakes Margaret, who’s emotionally exhausted from her trip to Massachusetts. The clock on the stove shows five-thirty. I pour the water over a tea bag and pick up the steaming mug with a picture of a grizzled cowboy and a quotation:
There’s a lot of things they didn’t tell me when I signed on with this outfit.
First Nick’s death. Now Cage’s crack-up. After nearly thirty years of consoling grieving families, after countless accidents, sudden heart attacks, long, slow deaths, hundreds of thousands of hours in hospital rooms sitting with families while the doctors trooped in to recommend further futile treatments whose only tangible results would be protracting the pain and bankrupting the families, I don’t know where to look for solace. The trials of Job.
I carry the tea out the back door into the garden. The sky is lightening the palest pink. Warblers, jays, and cardinals are singing as if all is right with the world. I single out my favorite—the ethereal flutelike
ee-o-lay
of the wood thrush. A foreign song, without human meaning, without human feeling, Harper, my youngest, the atheist, would say. After stretching, fifty sit-ups, and twenty-five push-ups, I leave the garden through the gate by the carport and jog up the street toward the country club parking lot. God has blessed me with good knees. Even after thirty-five years of daily running, after most of my peers have given up jogging for swimming or golf, my knobby old fellows are going strong. Hitting the golf course, I commence my morning prayers. “Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against Thy holy laws,” but I break off, remembering Nick as a long-haired, gap-toothed teenager. He came home once from a matinee, a movie set in the future where the world was so polluted all the trees had died, so affected that he spent the rest of the afternoon picking up trash for a mile along the street outside the rectory where we lived in Virginia. Why did You take him so young, so idealistic? Or was it You who took him?
The trees cast long shadows over the fairways beneath the bluing sky as the sun simmers the humidity into a sticky broth. My sweat has soaked through my shirt. I stop trying to pray and follow the high ivy-covered brick wall that encircles the club. Was it something we did, some failure as parents? Through grammar school and junior high, Cage had been the bright one, always one of the top students in his class, a leader, the captain of the football team, while Nick was the shy underperformer. In the first grade Nick had refused to learn to read. He simply didn’t want to. In fourth grade, after refusing to do his homework for a week, his teacher whipped him in front of the whole class. That would never happen nowadays, but it worked. He started turning his homework in on time.
Then a clear reversal occurred in high school when we moved from Virginia to Louisiana. Cage became a B student, while Nick logged straight As, was elected president of his class. Cage grew into a mercurial young man, often storming away from the dinner table or the Christmas tree, dissatisfied with his presents, with his lot in life as the son of a clergyman, while his friends got new cars, stereo players, ski trips. Nick was quiet, the peacemaker. The pattern continued on through college. Nick’s grades never slipped, while Cage’s continued to drop. Cage graduated without a clue as to what he wanted to do, without a sense of purpose. I think the professors at Sewanee these days are as morally confused as Cage is. I suppose Cage was doing drugs.