I am writing to you from the bowels of the earth,
Where phantoms on glistening stallions
Charge hi-yo silver away into mists forever forgotten.
The only sound is the memory of the sound
Of their hooves clanking against the cobblestone.
I am in the jungle of mankind, lost without a face,
Near death of self, my soul a lingering grimace
Hanging untethered in space.
I stay up all night reading it over, feeling like Judas Iscariot, and thinking about calling Mom and Dad, who are due to arrive in Memphis the next day. What a homecoming.
B
eyond the barred windows, beneath a leaden sky, three rows of tall fences topped by razor wire encircle the grounds. The alley of grass between the outer fences is patrolled by rottweilers and German shepherds and a blue K9 patrol car. Inside the white room, twelve men in blue denim sit on plastic chairs in a semicircle while another inmate leads what’s supposed to be a discussion but is usually a long silence punctuated by deranged musings apropos of nothing. A couple of Thorazine tadpoles squirm and list in slow motion around the room. An old grizzled guy named Ozanne keeps repeating softly, “Straightaway, straightaway, straightaway to heaven,” then he laughs uproariously and points to the ceiling.
Welcome to Schizo Anonymous.
Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Bipolar Anonymous, I go anywhere to get off the block and away from my cellmate, who murdered a state senator and a hooker and kept them in the trunk of his car for a week. They’ve yet to diagnose me, so I’m free to attend any group. I started the week on Max 2, the medical wing, but the first day, a giant named Barney told me he was going to rape me on the full moon, so at my first lunch I pocketed a butter knife, not knowing that they were counting. They searched us on the way out and by the end of the day I was moved into Max 1, in with the serious criminals.
“Cage, would you like to share anything with us?” the group leader asks. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well, Bill. Let’s see.” I take a deep drag off a Camel. I started smoking in the week I’ve been in here and dream of walking into a restaurant and when asked, Smoking or nonsmoking? I’ll reply, Chain-smoking, please. Little vice I picked up in the nuthouse. I blow a smoke ring. I discovered a natural knack for smoke rings. “I keep wondering what the fuck I’m doing in this cage with a bunch of criminal lunatics—ax murderers, grandma-rapers, dog torturers, cat buggerers, sadists, masochists. One moment I’m a carpenter on Nantucket getting more pussy than Jim Morrison and the next I’m in this dungeon which would make the pit of Dante’s hell look like a tailgate party at the Super Bowl.”
Some of the nuts cackle.
“Do you have anything constructive to say?” Bill is very patient. He speaks in a caressive, womanly cadence.
“Well, I keep telling myself it’s a bad dream, worst fucking nightmare of my life, and I’m going to wake up soon.” I blow a ring within a ring, figure if I make it out alive, I’ll be able to blow a third through the second.
Bill’s opening his mouth to say something
constructive
when Ozanne comes out of his private nightmare and asks, “Do you think Jesus was a schizophrenic?”
“Whah?” someone says, while the others laugh. Half the group stops drooling to denigrate the question. Schizo Anonymous is most animated in group criticism.
“What kind of question was that?”
“Ozanne, you’re in the ozone.”
“Of all the retarded remarks.”
“Now, hold on, fellows.” Bill tries uselessly to guide the group back to a therapeutic exchange.
“Straightaway, straightaway, straightaway,” Rey Rosa, a Latino from Boston, mocks him.
“Straight to hell, straight to hell, straight to hell,” an arsonist who looks like an accountant chants in a high, abrasive voice.
I reach over and offer Ozanne a cigarette.
Ozanne smiles and sticks the cigarette between his lips. Within seconds it’s covered in spittle.
“Silence!” Bill yells, a little red in the face. “This is not
constructive
.”
Rey Rosa is up on his feet dancing around Ozanne. “If Jesus was a schizophrenic, maybe we should invite him to the group.”
“Then it would be a revival.” The arsonist titters.
“Straightaway, straightaway.” Reynolds, who’d thrown his mother from a balcony, joins in the chorus.
Ozanne sticks out his chin and yells, “Well, Jesus said he was God
and
man!”
That silences them. Even the most deranged, street-born schizos can utter truth. I start clapping.
I call ’em Jacks. You can’t go a half hour without seeing one. In the shower, in the bathroom, in the cells, in the doorways, inside, outside, on the ball field, furtively or in full view. At any given minute there must be three hundred guys jacking off to fantasies too horrific to ponder. No telling what’s going on in the women’s wing. At any given minute three hundred Jacks putting their drool to good use, lubricating their lunatic cocks like randy chimpanzees, enough for thirty self-help sex addicts groups. Unified, the Jacks could take over the joint. If I wasn’t crazy when I arrived, I will be by the end of the evaluation.
I’m in the library typing a letter to Sylvia, who wrote she would sell her Saab to pay for a good lawyer, when Rey Rosa walks up with another Latino and starts reading over my shoulder. Turning my head, I ask him, “May I help you?”
“You like to write, don’t you?” His eyes are black holes that suck in the light from the room.
“Look, amigo, I’m just minding my own business.”
I turn around and start typing. He is breathing in my ear, his breath rancid as dead fish. “Dearest Sylvia,” he reads in a faggy voice. “How in God’s name did I end up in this hell?”
I lean away. “This is a private letter.”
He pops me right in the eye. I elbow him in the gut but it glances off and he smashes my face into the keys. I come onto my feet, screaming and turning over the table, and manage to lift the chair and swing it at him but he jumps clear.
The other Latino stands a few feet away, shouting, “Hit him, Vincente. Kill the cracker!” The inmates at the other tables turn their backs.
I keep swinging the chair around, screaming, “Security!”
Rey Rosa manages to kick one of my legs out from under me and I fall, then scramble under a table, come up on the other side, and flip it over, still shouting. Rey Rosa and his buddy come toward me. The other inmates are quietly picking up their books and walking away. Finally four screws in tan uniforms come running in and tackle all three of us. They put Rey Rosa and me in solitary. It’s a dark cell with a sheetless mattress and a toilet without a seat. I feel safe for the first time in days, then the next morning I start doubting they will ever let me out. They do in the afternoon. Walking past Rey Rosa’s cell, I see him strapped down, wrenching against restraints and howling.
When I finally make it into the evaluating psych’s office, some sort of trusty is sitting behind his desk, a shrimp dressed in lumberjack flannel despite the summer heat. He wipes his mouth with a filthy handkerchief. “Sit down, Mr. Rutledge.”
I sit down and take out my packet of Camels.
“No smoking,” the man grunts.
“Where’s Dr. Willcox?” I ask.
The man looks around the room, sticks his head under the desk, then pops up, smiling. “That’s me.”
I sit there, stunned. Lunatics are running the asylum.
“Do you know why you’re here?” He dabs the brown hankie against his lips.
“Forty days’ evaluation to see if I’m competent to stand trial for resisting arrest, assaulting a cop, destruction of public property, and passing bad checks.”
“That’s correct. Do you think you’re competent to stand trial?”
“No doubt about it, Doc.”
“Dr. Willcox.” His grin reveals particles of food stuck between his yellow teeth. “Why did you assault the policeman?”
“Dr. Willcox, I was stressed-out. I have a lot of debts. I’ve bounced a lot of checks.” My hand trembles, putting the pack of Camels back in my shirt pocket. “But I hadn’t done anything to merit being hauled into jail and then this cop shoved me from behind and I exploded.”
Willcox stares at a folder on his desk. “You consulted the Nantucket mental health service prior to your arrest. Why?”
I tilt my head back and take a deep breath. “I was having problems sleeping and concentrating. My thoughts raced along at the speed of light but I’ve calmed down a lot since I’ve been here. I think I just needed to catch up on my sleep. Those green pills they give us at night zonk me out. I think I just needed to sleep for a long spell.”
“Hmph.” Willcox scribbles something in the folder. “You seem to have a propensity for violence.”
“No, sir. I told you. I was just stressed-out and snapped. My friends and family will tell you that I’m not in the least violent.”
“Yet you attempted to steal a knife your first day here and yesterday you got in a fight in the library.”
“Doctor, I took the knife because this guy Barney who could play fullback for the Patriots told me he was going to rape me.” I struggle to keep my voice calm. Does this doctor ever walk the halls? “In the library a guy from Schizo Anonymous punched me in the eye for no reason. I was simply trying to make enough noise to get the screws—I mean the correction officers—to rescue me.
I
haven’t started any fights. I just try to mind my own business, get along.”
“Well, you certainly seem to be rational and calm now.” Willcox shuts the folder. “I enjoyed our chat. See you again soon.”
Raven, the double murderer who bunks below me, is out getting electroshock treatment, so I’m in the cell skipping the group meetings, reading Faulkner to remind me of my roots.
The Unvanquished
. Shit. Those two boys never spent any time in a Yankee nuthouse. See how unvanquished they’d be after a week in this place. On the corridor outside, two old inseparable, indistinguishable black guys known as Amos and Andy, trusties who stick together like Siamese twins, are clattering mops and buckets.
“Ever spied how crabs act in a bushel basket?”
“I ’pose I seen some crabs ’fore in a basket.”
“You remark how they act?”
“Reckon they ac’ how they always ac’.”
“How’s that?”
“Crabby.”
“Heh, heh, heh. You ain’t observe ’em too close.”
“Never knowed you was a scientist yo’self. When you making a big study o’ crabs anyhow?”
“Back in Carolina, time I’s knee-high to katydid.”
“Surprise’ you ken ’member that fah back. So, how’s crabs ac’ in a bushel basket?”
“Well, when one of ’em crabs works his way from out de bottom of de basket all way through the rest ’em crabs till he reaches the rim and he’s about to climb on out, other crabs gang up ’gether and pull his spiky ass right back in.”
1968
B
ristol, Tennessee. In the foothills of the Appalachians, Cloudland Drive circled through a neighborhood of colonial two-stories and low-slung Frank Lloyd Wright caricatures situated on wide, shady lawns. The rectory was a large gray-shingled split-level with a maroon front door. On a steep slope flanking it the new rector had built a tree house on stilts like a little fire tower. Nick, seven now, came down a rope ladder hanging from a trapdoor, then climbed up the mossy slope to the driveway that wound around behind the house.
He went inside through the kitchen door, then passed through the dining room, living room, and sitting room, looking for his mother. He followed the sound of the TV up the stairs and found her at the ironing board beside an overflowing laundry basket.
“Hello, Nickfish.” She wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, glancing at the TV, where a casket was being unloaded from a hearse in a sea of black people. “Martin Luther King. He was a minister like your father. Killed by a bad, bad man. Such a shame.”
“Why?” Nick stared at the procession.
“For trying to help the Negro people. It’s a tragedy.”
“Does Daddy try to help the Negro people?” Nick rested his hand lightly on his mother’s leg.
She smoothed his hair. “Yes, your daddy has organized a march to remember Martin Luther King. Someday you’ll understand how brave your daddy is.”
“Will bad men kill him?”
“No,” Margaret said. She set the iron upright and bent down to hug him. “No one will hurt your daddy. Okay?”
“Okay.” He nodded.
“How ’bout an Eskimo kiss?”
He rubbed his nose against hers.
“Lord, I have so much to do.” She stood up. “All this ironing. We have to drive across town to pick up Cage. Then there’s dinner. And we’ve run out of milk.”
Nick said, “I’m going back to the tree house.”
“Okay, honey.” She fit one of Frank’s shirts on the tapered end of the ironing board.
Nick went downstairs into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Nothing caught his eye. He walked slowly to the sink and looked up at the windowsill, where the school milk money stayed in two plastic change wallets, round ovals with splits down the middle that opened when you squeezed them, a red one for Nick and blue one for Cage. He hoisted his knees on the counter and reached over the sink, took two quarters from the red one, put it back on the sill, and dropped to the floor with a thump. Holding his breath, he looked over his shoulder at the sitting room door.
Nick ran outside, circled the house, and streaked across the front lawn, over the soggy low spot above the septic tank, worrying for a moment that his mother might see him from the upstairs window, and down the bank to Cloudland Drive, then up the hill, past Martin Parks’s house to the Ridgeway Road. He ran down Ridgeway, past the McInneys’, where older boys were playing football, to the bottom of the hill. A quarter mile from home he stopped to catch his breath. He knew what he was doing was wrong. He knew that he would be caught. But he also knew that somehow he would get away with it. Subconsciously he wagered that the pleasure would be greater than the punishment. Between hills, Forest Avenue was a busy road that ran in a straight flat line. Out of breath, Nick walked on the shoulder, deliberately keeping three feet from the cars that whizzed past.