1973
F
rom the pool the blue fairways fell down to a shaggy carpet of treetops that ran across the flats to the green ridges of the Appalachians reaching into a clear sky where the summer sun cast long afternoon shadows from the high dive and tall poles with speakers playing “Sha Na Na Na, Hey, Hey, Goodbye.” On one side of the pool, under a canopy where the greasy odor of frying hamburgers mixed with the acrid chlorine off the water, kids pushed french fries through little puddles of ketchup on paper plates. On the other side, at the edge of a slope that angled down to the parking lot, a line of lounge chairs in the grass was occupied by sunbathing women.
Just below the top of the slope Nick walked slowly behind the chairs, darting between them occasionally to steal a half-smoked cigarette from an unguarded ashtray. With a handful of butts he circled the hill beyond the deep end and sat down with two boys on the concrete slab over the big humming filters. He cracked the bottom of his fist and let the butts spill out one by one like gold dust.
“No one saw you?” Billy Kimball asked.
“I think Mrs. Thomas saw me but didn’t say anything.”
“Mrs. Thomas is cool,” Norman Blevins said. “But Mr. Thomas is scary.”
“We don’t have any matches,” Billy said.
Nick dug a white pack with the country club logo from his cutoff shorts and flicked it with his thumb onto the little pile.
Billy lit three-quarters of a Virginia Slim and coughed.
“Greedy creep,” Nick said. “That was the best one.”
“Here, take this.” Norman handed Nick half a Camel, then selected a slightly shorter Pall Mall with lipstick marks. “Who was smoking this?”
“Mrs. Reynolds.” Nick coughed.
“The one with the big bazooms?” Billy asked.
Nick nodded, inhaling. He felt dizzy.
“Nick’s mother has the biggest boobs of all,” Norman said with a tone of awe.
“I fingered a pussy yesterday,” Billy said.
“Really?” Norman said.
Nick pumped his jaw to blow a ring and the smoke only curled out of his mouth.
“What’s it like?” Norman asked.
“Warm and slimy, like . . .” Billy tapped the ash, sighed. “Like Play-Doh with warm baby oil.”
“Jenny Wright?” Nick tried another ring, failed.
“Yeah.”
“Never kiss and tell,” Norman said. “That’s what my brother told me.”
“Jenny Wright lets anyone finger her.” Nick ground his cigarette into the concrete.
“Try to be gentlemen.” Norman waved his pudgy arms back and forth like a referee.
“You never fingered her,” Billy said.
“I’ve never tried.” Nick looked hard at Billy. “I don’t want to.”
“You’re scared. Scared of girls.”
“I’m scared of girls.” Norman laughed. “Especially my sisters. Hey, did you hear that next year we won’t be able to wear cutoffs in the pool anymore. The threads clog up the drains or something.”
“I won’t be here next year,” Nick said. “We’re leaving next month for Virginia.”
“Really?” Norman didn’t inhale. He blew out a mouthful of smoke that hung motionless in the humidity. “That sucks. When did you find out?”
“My parents have known for a month. They just told Cage and me last night.”
“Is Cage mad?” Billy lay down flat on the slab and blew smoke up at the sky.
“He’s really mad. He doesn’t want to lose his friends. He wants to stay here, live with the Campbells.”
“Will your parents let him?”
“No way.”
“Your dad got transferred?” Norman asked.
“The church is not like a company.” Nick let his legs dangle over the edge. “They don’t transfer you. When a church needs a new minister, they go out looking until they find one that they like.”
“Oh,” Norman said. “So why did he take it?”
“It’s a bigger church. More salary.”
“Norman’s always changing the subject,” Billy said. “Let’s go.”
The men’s changing room was damp and smelled of disinfectant. Norman, peering around a wall at the outside door, gave them a thumbs-up sign behind his back. Billy and Nick scrambled from a bench to the top of the lockers, slid aside a board of thin plywood, from which Cage and some of his friends had removed the nails the year before, and crawled into the darkness on the top of a cinder-block wall. Nick slid the board back almost in place and moved slowly behind Billy, who scraped his knee and cried out. Nick whispered, “Shsh!” Billy rose up and looked through a hole in the plywood.
“Shazaam,” Billy whispered.
Nick clenched his fists. He remembered seven years before, in kindergarten, where the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms were adjoining stalls, and he and Norman had climbed over the top to watch a cute dark-haired girl sitting on the toilet. Where is it? What happened to it? he’d asked Norman after the girl left. Girls don’t have wee-wees, Norman had said with the authority of having sisters. Wow, Nick had mumbled, dumbstruck by the great revelation, which was his first lesson in the differences between the sexes.
“Golly, they’re huge.” Billy’s voice was shallow. “Like cantaloupes.”
“Lemme see.” Nick pinched Billy’s butt until he moved farther along the top of the wall. Through the hole he could see Mrs. Miller, a woman about his mother’s age, stooping over to put her legs through a bathing suit. She stood up, revealing round white breasts with pink nipples the size of saucers, and pulled the suit up her fat legs to the mysterious dark triangle, then stretched the navy fabric up her white belly and wiggled her arms through the holes, shaking her breasts. A heat rose up from his toes until Nick’s whole body felt feverish, a strange, overpowering sensation to kick through the thin plywood, dive from the locker tops onto Mrs. Miller, rip the suit off her, and bury his face in her breasts.
“They’re big bosoms, huh?” Billy said in the darkness.
Nick opened his mouth but no words came.
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” Cage said, standing on the edge of the pool. Beside him Nick held his breath, watching a sixteen-year-old swim the ninety-foot length of the pool underwater. The boy reached the wall of the deep end, smoothly flipped, and swam back toward them. Nick exhaled and shook his head. The crowd hushed as the boy reached the blue line marking the deep third of the pool. He swam on, breaking last year’s record. Nick looked up at Cage’s sandy hair and fierce blue eyes, then back at the pool, as the crowd applauded.
Midway between the two ends the boy stood and raised his arms over his head. On either side lifeguards moved a rope of floats stretching across the pool to mark the position. The noise ebbed and the crowd looked back at the shallow end to see if there were any more contestants. Cage waved at the chief lifeguard.
“You?” a high school kid said to Cage. “You’re just a freeloader. Preachers get a special deal.”
“Lay on, Macduff,” Cage said coolly, looking the kid calmly in the eyes before turning and walking away from the pool.
“What?” the boy said.
“Ever heard of Shakespeare?” Nick didn’t know the boy, only saw him in the summers at the country club.
“How old’s your brother?” the boy asked.
“Thirteen.” Nick crossed his fingers and glanced at the swimmer, who had just climbed out of the pool. He looked a full foot taller and twenty pounds heavier than Cage.
With one hand behind him touching the wall of the clubhouse, Cage turned his head slowly to the lifeguard, who nodded, raised a thumb, and smiled. Cage breathed in deeply, filling his chest three times, then shot across the concrete, his bare feet slapping the puddles. He reached the edge and dove long, seemed to hang in the air an instant before slicing the water. He swept his arms back and held them to his sides, glided to the middle of the pool, then breaststroked smoothly to the far end, kicked off the wall, and moved toward the blue line on the bottom.
“I hope he doesn’t pass out,” Nick’s mom said, appearing suddenly at his side. “Cage is so stubborn.”
Nick said, “Oh, Mom.”
Crossing the line out of the deep end, Cage seemed to slow down. Nick imagined his lungs bursting, the pain that cried out for air. The floats were impossibly far, another twenty feet. The high school kids on the edges stopped talking. Cage inched along, stroking then gliding, kicking slowly. Nick watched his mom, her lips pressed tight. He put his hand around her back, then quickly dropped it and stepped away. Cage was coming to the surface. The back of his head came out of the water, then he jerked it back down and kicked wildly. His head grazed the bottom of the marker rope and he popped up on the other side. The spectators cheered louder than before. Cage held one hand on the rope and kicked to stay afloat, too short to reach the bottom.
“I wish your father were here to see this,” Margaret said.
“Why does someone at St. John’s always die on the holidays?” Nick’s face was serious.
His mother laughed, examined his small face with marvel and affection.
Out in the middle of the pool Cage raised his right arm above his head and clenched his fist in the Black Power salute. Suddenly everyone by the pool was quiet.
“That boy,” Margaret said. “One day he’s going to go too far.”
“Nick, do you hear me?” I whisper.
Under a cloudless autumn sky a guard cradling a shotgun with a German shepherd at his knee walks past on the gravel road between fences. A bunch of the inmates are playing baseball but I never feel comfortable with them. The grass is soft and warm. A hawk climbs an updraft in widening circles, his eyes scanning the ground as he rises. The buildings of Bridgewater, the thousands of wretched inmates, the millions of dark insane thoughts, getting smaller and smaller, until all that is left is a blur of color from a great altitude.
The guards don’t want to let me go. Every day they fuck with me for no reason. Before I came out here one of them told me that I was wanted on a phone over in Max 1. They were going to beat the hell out of me as they walked me over, so I refused to go and tagged along with the baseball detail. Last night after lockdown, Pringle was watching his little black-and-white TV and I asked him to turn it down. He turned it off. Then he starting jacking, going, Yeah, baby, oh yeah, suck me, bitch, suck hard, yeah suck on this, suck away, mmm, mmm, mmm. I put the pillow over my head but I could still hear him, Yeah, baby, that’s right, lick my balls, lick my asshole, put your tongue up my ass, yeah, just like that. I yelled down, Pringle, turn your damn TV back on. He screamed, Fuck you, faggot, or I’ll jump up there and come in your face. I yelled back, You try it and you’ll never jack off again. Later on while I was asleep, two guards grabbed me and told me they wanted me in solitary until the next morning. I hadn’t done anything. Outside the buildings, they took turns throwing me up against the wall with no explanation, never said a word. Weird stuff. I don’t know what’s going on. I think they want me to get in a fight so that my holding order is extended. I’m trying just to be cool. Right, brother? What else can I do? But how can months of this not leave you with a heavy case of shell shock—post-traumatic stress disorder? These months are scarring me for life. Invisible scars. Grooves in the brain. I have seen so much that is squalid, depraved, evil. It’s part of me now. I am, after all, the sum total of my experiences. That’s all anybody is. A compilation of experience. And now I am stuck with this. I am Cage Malone Rutledge, the max-security-nuthouse inmate. I will carry that with me to the end of my days. My time here has wrought itself into a cage to hold me back from living a normal life. How can it not?
W
ell, praise the Lord, this is the last time I will enter these gates, I think, driving into the hospital. What a misnomer. More a cruel warehouse of insanity.
“I won’t miss it,” Harper says, parking the car, though he has only been here once before. “But it’s kind of exciting. I mean, the armed guards. The dogs. The electric gates.”
“You can bet Cage won’t miss it.” I hand Harper a breath mint, put one in my mouth. “Oh, how I have been praying for this day. You may believe yourself to be a humanist, Harper. But look at the miracle of today. So many people have told us that it is nigh impossible to get someone out of Bridgewater and it is happening today. So many churches are praying for Cage in Baton Rouge and Memphis and Bristol. You should pray, Harper. Even if you don’t believe. Belief can come through practice.”
“I’d rather practice Buddhism.”
Harper gets out of the car and puts on the navy linen blazer that he reluctantly agreed to wear over his polo shirt. I pick some lint off one sleeve. He has grown so tall. The top of my head doesn’t reach his shoulder. He is our only boy who is larger than Franklin. So proud of them all. Such handsome boys. Suddenly I remember Nick is dead. More than two years later, when I picture the boys collectively, I still take Nick as among the quick for a few seconds before the bottom falls out of my heart. Oh, Nick, I pray that you are feasting with the saints for eternity.
Harper opens the door and follows me into the dreary reception area.