“Very smart,” Clete said, slamming the metal door.
It was dark inside. Henry felt the metal of the door in front of him. There was no handle, no way of opening it from the inside. If only one person got out, he could open all the other lockers!
He listened to the departing footsteps, Clete’s and those of the two others, then the outer door slamming.
He heard a terrible scream from one of the other lockers.
There was no one to hear except the other prisoners.
In a loud voice he said, “Can you hear me? Is there anyone in the next locker?”
No response, but Henry thought he heard the sound of movement from the locker on his right
“Can you hear me?” he repeated.
In a whisper he could hear, a man’s voice said, “Shut up or they’ll double your time in here.”
“Is it true you don’t get liquid the second week?”
Silence.
“Is it true you get no food the third week?”
“Shut up!” came the voice.
“Not until you tell me.”
After a moment Henry heard a barely audible rasp. “It’s all true. Please don’t talk.”
Henry didn’t want to get his anonymous neighbor in trouble, so he kept quiet, thinking for the first time that the task before him was not only to get himself and Margaret out, but to close this place down by making sure the world knew what was going on in here.
In the meantime, he thought, how long would four hours seem?
9
Phyllis Minter had long ago learned that in this world if you wanted an edge on the next fellow you had to use your eyes, not just to see but to notice. And in her first two days at Cliffhaven, she observed that between the hours of two and five in the afternoon, when the dining room was clear of guests, the outside trucks would come up the road and park near the back of the dining hall. One that she saw from her window was clearly a produce van. Another might have been delivering bottled gas, she wasn’t sure. That driver was a tall fellow, wearing boots that looked like twins of hers. Could he be talked into giving an attractive girl a ride back down with him? To the drivers this place must seem perfectly normal, a fancy resort with a terrific restaurant. Wait’ll she blew the whistle on it! That chief of detectives in Pasadena, he’d believe her. But first she had to get her ass out of here while it was still in one piece.
The staff member who sat with Phyllis Minter at meals was Carol, who didn’t talk much. All Phyllis had been able to pump out of her was that Carol had been an airline stewardess briefly, her plane had skidded on landing, the passengers had all got out the emergency exits okay, but Carol had panicked—something stews weren’t supposed to do—and she ended up at Cliffhaven, grateful for the job. Phyllis took as much time over lunch as she could, to get as close as possible to truck-arrival time, and then, when Carol was about to lock her in her room for the afternoon, said she’d left something in the dining room and could she go get it real quick. Carol said okay, and Phyllis went strolling down to the restaurant on the deserted grounds.
The dining room was empty, except for someone with a trusty armband who was sweeping
up
way in the back. Everything was laid out for the evening meal. She went to her designated table and pretended to be looking for something she had left, just in case anyone was watching. She then looked under and around the next table, and, at a propitious moment, took a dinner knife from one of the place settings, holding it against her forearm and then bending, as if still looking, slipped the knife into her right boot. One of the men she knew before she moved to California, a macho type who talked army a lot of the time, told her, among other things, that bayonets were not really sharp; they did their damage by puncturing, not cutting. If that was the case, a dinner knife, even if it wasn’t as sharp as a steak knife, might help persuade someone of something.
As Phyllis went around to the back of the restaurant on the outside, she gave herself a point for taking the knife from someone else’s table.
There was only one truck at the dock, painted the same blue-and-orange as the Cliffhaven uniforms. It must be one of their own, she thought. Shit! She’d have to have another go at it tomorrow and dream up some other excuse for Carol.
Just then she heard the blessed noise of a large engine, and up the road labored a refrigerator truck. As the driver swung around to back up to the dock, she noticed that he was a stoutish Chicano. Too bad it wasn’t the lanky one with the boots, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
*
She stepped as close to the cab as possible so she wouldn’t have to shout. When he shut the engine down, Phyllis asked him how long he’d be.
The Chicano shook his head. “Not allowed talk to guests. Only staff.”
“Oh come on, a handsome fellow like you can talk to anybody he wants to.”
He seemed scared that they would be overheard.
“Can you give me a ride back down?” she said, hoping her voice was promising to make it interesting for him if he complied.
The Chicano stared dead ahead.
Phyllis turned and saw Carol, watching them from twenty feet away.
“Oh hi,” she said to Carol.
“Find what you were looking for?” Carol asked.
Phyllis decided that getting out of Cliffhaven wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought.
*
In the locker Henry Brown’s worst problem was the severe muscular pain, the deep acid ache in his lower back and between his shoulders. He had tried squatting. You just couldn’t get down far enough before your knees had no room to go forward. An itching sensation just below the pain between his shoulders cried out for scratching. His bladder, full from his early morning juice and water and coffee, pressed for a choice. He could urinate right where he stood, wetting his undershorts, letting it run down his trouser leg—that was probably what they wanted him to do. Or he could be a stoic; the pain was no worse than the muscular aches. It must be much longer than four hours now, he thought. What do the people do who are in here for a day or two? They foul themselves.
How long had he been in here? Time crawled. If every adult on earth spent this amount of time standing up in a cramped steel locker, would it accomplish anything? Nothing. Brothers in pain? Shared pleasure is memorable. Shared pain is forgotten. Henry thought he’d try counting again—101, 102, 103—to take the measure of actual time instead of the incredibly slow moments he felt now.
Suddenly he again heard a scream from one of the other lockers. It was a word. What was the man yelling?
Mercy,
was it? What if he started to yell
Let me out,
and urged everyone else to do the same? A thought occurred to him.
Maybe there’s no one else in this place. Maybe all I’m hearing is a recording.
It can’t be. There’s at least the freckle-faced man. And the man in the next locker who’d told him to shut up. If I knew the freckle-faced man’s name, thought Henry, I’d call it out. To keep contact. He’s got guts.
It was no use. The counting, the thoughts, the plans were all diversions from the physical need, the demand of his bladder. He was about to give in when he heard clear steps, then the rattling of his door, and it was swung open.
“Hi,” Clete said.
Henry looked at the face of the young man, the boy, whatever he was.
Hi,
as if nothing had tran
spired!
“Exactly four hours,” said Clete, glancing at his watch. “Seemed longer, didn’t it?”
Henry stepped down carefully from the locker, afraid that stretching the extra inch or two he needed to stand upright would cause him to collapse suddenly. He straightened out. The pain between his shoulders and in his lower back seemed worse. Margaret would rub his shoulders.
“Where’s my wife?”
“At lunch.”
Clete led the way out of the building.
“Who’s watching her if you’re here?”
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Brown. Think she’d run away with her ducky still here? Besides she likes her food, I’ve noticed.”
“Those sounds in there,” Henry said. “Is that a tape?”
Clete burst out laughing. “You’ve got some imagination! A tape? Terrific. How the hell do you think we tape the stink in there?”
“I’ve got to pee.”
“We’re going back to your room. If you can’t hold out, do it here.” He gestured at the side of the building.
Henry looked bewildered.
“Nobody’s looking,” Clete said jovially. “Except me.”
Henry opened his pants, turned a bit away from Clete, and took his penis out. Immediate, incredible relief. It seemed to take forever to finish.
“Hey,” Clete said. “Want to see something?” He took out his penis. “See,” he said, “you Yids didn’t get everyone in this country to go in for circumcision. My father wasn’t and I’m not.”
Henry didn’t want to get into a discussion with Clete about circumcision. “Can I go see my wife?”
“After your bath. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
In his room Clete showed Henry the portable whirlpool device on the side of the bathtub. “Run the hot water,” he said, “and you’ll see.”
When the tub was three-quarters full, Henry slipped out of his clothes. Clete watched him carefully as he got into the tub, afraid of slipping. In four hours he had gotten discouraged about his body. He had trained it for sports, for standing up to emergencies. In four hours it had been made to feel helpless.
As Clete was about to plug in the device in the socket just under the mirror, Henry yelled, “Wait a minute!”
“What’s the matter, love?”
“You’ll electrocute me.”
“You are silly,” Clete said, plugging the cord in. “Why would I do that?”
The device created a gentle whirl of water. Henry let himself slip farther into the tub until only his head was above the waterline. He could feel the heat in the muscles in his back, way up near the neck where it hurt the most.
“A few minutes in this and you’ll be a new man,” Clete said. “It really works except for the old-timers who’re just too decrepit for the locker gig. Practically everyone you see in the dining room’s been there for an hour or more at one time or other, and they’re not moaning about muscle pain. All they do is behave and they don’t have to worry about going back. Catch?”
*
Henry put on fresh underwear and a clean shirt, for the sake of feeling clean. Why was Clete watching him so carefully when he dressed? Was Clete gay? He didn’t seem to be. Was it just a way of making me feel like a thing?
“Can I rejoin my wife now?”
“On one condition.”
“Yes?”
“Well, don’t sound so sorrowful. It’s not a dreadful thing. I just don’t want you telling your wife about the lockers. If she misbehaves, I want it to come as a surprise to her.”
I must warn her, Henry thought. No, Clete wants me to warn her. It’d be another infraction. She’d be able to stand up straighter, but not turn around, not be able to stretch. She wasn’t in the kind of physical condition he was in.
“Agreed?” Clete asked.
Henry nodded. Tonight. They’d have to make a break for it tonight.
*
When Margaret, sitting alone at the table, saw him coming into the dining room she rose to go to him, but the waitress quickly whispered something to her and Margaret sat down until Henry could join her at the table.
“How are you?” she said. Her eyes said more:
What did they do to you?
Henry glanced at Clete, who sat down on Margaret’s side of the table.
“Okay,” Henry said. He hoped his tone of voice would discourage Margaret from further questioning until they were alone.
Margaret, it turned out, had already eaten. Henry was served a bowl of chowder. He poked around in it, ate some. “I’m not very hungry,” he said.
“Well, stick around till I finish, okay?” Clete said.
After a while, Henry said, “Do you think I could take a nap after lunch?”
“Oh sure,” Clete said. “No problem. Why don’t the two of you take a nap together?”
Was he implying that Henry, after his ordeal, would not want to make love to his wife? Or was he hoping they would and watch them on the closed circuit?
Clete finished using a toothpick on his front teeth, then said, “Just to keep things straight. We have no objections to any of the Jewish couples here doing anything to each other they want to in the privacy of their room, such as it is—I mean the privacy—but you two really shouldn’t. You understand, right?”
“No,” Margaret said.
“You’re a Gentile, aren’t you?” Clete said.
Margaret’s expression froze.
“Nothing personal,” Clete continued. “It’s just Mr. Clifford, he’s got very strong feelings about mismatching. It’s a genetic theory of his.”
“We are not,” Margaret said, “any longer of childbearing age.”
“Yeah,” Clete said. “Your kids are what, half Jewish?”
Margaret did not reply.
“Which half?” Clete said, smiling. They weren’t paying attention to him. He didn’t like that.
Margaret saw the strange
expression in Henry’s eyes. What had they done to him? She reached across the table, taking his hand.