Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (14 page)

Nicky had left the Waynes and Teeth off in Gunnison where they had the Saab waiting. Nicky had continued north in my truck full of copper wire. When the highway patrol pulled him over in American Fork and charged him with grand larceny and attempted homicide, he quietly listed me as his accomplice. The man he shot, Hatcher Kinnel, was in the hospital in fair condition with a bullet hole entirely through his shoulder. “Why, they tried to assassinate me!”, the papers reported him repeatedly saying.

Nicky, being used to this lifestyle of shabby illegality, acquired Darrel Teeth’s lawyer, bail, and a suspended sentence in that order and in a hurry. They’d been through this six times before for various felonious endeavors and they knew the cops, the judge, the ropes.

Then it was me.

It wasn’t at all like the movies, and I, myself, it turns out, was nothing like James Cagney, except I did learn, waiting through all the black boredom of my trial, to smoke cigarettes like food, like a deep blood need. It seemed that Lila was in Elko, Nevada, indefinitely and Nicky’s “Sure it’s his truck,” didn’t aid matters. After I’d told what there was of my tale to what there was of a judge, my incredulity slowly congealed into an unmagnificent indifference. I mean how could I understand dozens of human beings pointing things at me as I came and went from the courthouse? Fists, fingers, cameras, microphones, and I suspect somewhere, a sharp pointed stick or two.

Mrs. Kinnel, the injured man’s wife was there evidently; I think she was the spleening woman who screamed, “Assassin! Assassin!” as I entered the room. Mrs. Ellis for some acrimonious reason was there also. She didn’t yell anything; her presence was barb enough. She had, her face announced, been expecting something like this of me for a long, long time. Riddel was not there. Eldon because of his helmet was barred from the gallery. I sent him a note, finally, that said: “Please water the tomatoes. Cordially, Larry and Vanzetti.” I won’t go on. That all things are possible became gradually apparent to me as all the papers were shuffled and filed so thoroughly against me, and I, myself, amid a pointed crowd, and cries of “Assassin! Assassin!” was conveyed off to the Big House.

I loved calling it that during the trial: the Big House. In the courtroom I’d turn to Nicky, who was perversely benevolent enough to attend, and say secretly, absurdly, “Hey, big boy, don’t you worry, things’ll be different up at the Big House.” Yes, that was before. Let me tell you something: no one in the Big House calls it that anymore.

Giving Vaughn, the bald checking guard my clothes and raging watch in exchange for the “garb” as my new wardrobe was called, I said, “So … this is the Big House, eh?”

“What?”

“So, this is the Big House.” I repeated looking around at the corners of the pale green room as if I were looking clear across Montana.

“Oh,” he said. “You dumb-ass. You sad dumb-ass.” He shook his head. “This is goddamn prison, and you’re in it.” I stopped saying that for a while. The rest was like that too: My dreams of prison fell away, heck, they were ripped away like a shirt in that porn film called
The Secretaries
. There is, in the end nothing romantic about having no toilet seat.

At dinner we filed in cafeteria style and were dished adequate, lukewarm food by Doug, Fred, and Star. The head cook was my old acquaintance Leeland Rose, DeLathaway’s help. We sat in small groups and talked, and again I am not telling lies, about the weather. The cups were styrofoam and no one ever pounded his on the tables which were small, pastel ovals. The whole scene was so stinking, so disappointing. It reeked of the casual.

Back during the theatre of the absurd, the trial, I had thought occasionally, fine if this vicissitude among others is visited on me, fine, another new life of extremes. Wrong was I. We’d actually loiter after the ham casserole lunches, smoking and breaking our styrofoam cups apart slowly, gently, the way a schoolteacher would, and then at the sound of the moderated whistle which did not blare, but sounded, (like Muzak stuck on a xylophone note), we’d break up and go to work. I certainly would have rather had Mrs. Hatcher Kinnel, wife of the “assassinated” man, sneak up on me while I lounged in my swimming pool and drill me full of complete holes from an oversize pistol. Some kind of dramatic ending would have suited me much better, a conclusive and final event, despite the fact that I would have had to borrow someone else’s swimming pool. At Mrs. Ellis’s, we didn’t have one.

Frankly, I also expected everyone to be filing and refiling his case with teams of hip, longhaired lawyers who came and went on motorcycles, because naturally, every prisoner had been wrongly accused, tried, and convicted. I couldn’t wait to get next to any of this injustice, so I could get myself the same lawyers, and commence the real wheels of justice. After all, right is right.

No one said anything about lawyers, cases, anything.

I stood in a long line of men the fourth day waiting to see Mr. Smelter, the Vocational Rehabilitation Officer. No one talked about their lawyers. We stood in a comfortable, accepted silence. I kind of liked the shuffling, when the line moved up one man, shuffle, shuffle, but unfortunately there was no grumbling to accompany it. That we were all guilty or innocent, the same as all the pedestrians strolling freely about the metropolitan walkways, tilling the rural soil, or leaving motel rooms in the baked sunslant of afternoon, was simply a becalmed piece of data, a cold fact. The boredom drove everybody places they might not have gone otherwise, but we were all—innocent (myself, remember?) and guilty—in the same backseat.

I tried to assume the stance of the men around me: one leg at a time shifting, cigarettes dropping from mouths like smouldering caterpillars quietly to the cement floor. And soon I too, was standing as though this was any line, registration, car wash, hamburger, matinee, urinal at the ball park; soon I too was doing the great American one-step, the act in which all people in free countries spend most of their time: loitering.

It got so I kept wanting to clean my wallet, which was locked away somewhere in that complex in a manila envelope, to sort the old restaurant cards from the newspaper clippings, from the phone numbers. I thought back to that woman in Why, Arizona—lady, you were right. There is no better reason. What we were doing in that line, like everybody-everywhere, was serving time. Now there’s a concept.

Then Mr. Smelter’s mahogany door opened and it was my turn. His office was full of metallic knick-knacks, that upon closer examination showed themselves to be parts of broken tools: shards of broken shovels, rake teeth, screwdriver handles. A polished crowbar, bent into an N, weighed down the papers in his “Out” basket. The bookends were the heads of two hoes. Mr. Smelter looked at a stiff white card that must have been about me.

“Wire, eh?”

“Sir?”

“Interested in electronics?” He leaned up on his desk and picked up a smashed hammer head, feeling its weight.

“Lightning only.” He put down the hammer head definitely and leaned back and blew up at a mobile of burnished broken saw blades. It began to turn slowly.

Still looking at it, he asked me: “Well, Boosinger, tell me. Do you prefer to take two things and make them into one thing, or do you prefer to take one thing and make it into two things?”

“I prefer …”

“What?” He blew upward again. There are some questions in this world for which I do not have the answers, and so I looked blankly at Mr. Smelter who really was unfit to give advice to the lovelorn, which I guess I was, really. “Well, what do you say?”

“That’s a great question you’ve asked,” was all I said.

“Okay, then,” he said after a silent saw-twisting minute, “landscape maintenance.” I stood up. “Report to Spike in the East Yard right after lunch.” I left him there as he probed his ear with the single leg of a shattered pliers.

I started going to work in the East Yard. My budding best friend and next-door neighbor, Salvatore, worked in the laundry and he said I had a pretty good deal working out in the sun. I had been assigned to the landscape crew for the new wing which was being constructed as we shoveled. We were scribing out a contoured bed for small fitzers which would serve as an organic transition between the walls and the yard.

The East Yard was mostly centerfield for Dexter Diamond, the prison’s hardball field, where we played Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons. The foreman of our crew was a triple murderer named Spike Spike, a red-headed former strong man at the circus. I’ve never seen a grown man with so many freckles. He kind of liked me and gave me the pleasant chore of turning the sod in the bed mixing in the topsoil with a pretty good Acme Land Company shovel. My soft foot got pretty tough right under the arch where I’d jump on the shovel, driving it into that rare prison soil.

So May passed, and I was assumed by prison life, which as I have said, was just a life. Work in the yard, smoking in the cell, talking evenings with Salvatore, playing the fiercest kind of baseball, no real hassles. Can you believe it has come to this in this country’s prisons?

One thing I should confess that I had expected to happen was my auction: you know, the new greenhorn (they don’t use that term either), the young guy comes into prison, and all the hardened criminals cluster like a boil around him bidding with smuggled dope for the fresh flesh. My first weeks in the block, even at work, everybody ignored me. I tell you it was just like the world. And no one asked me what I was in for, ever. I had “Oh, you know, assassination,” all ready for them, but no one was interested.

Spike turned out to be a good man, very helpful in the field and proud of the work our crew was doing. He came over to me one day and said quietly, “You know, Larry, my name isn’t really
Spike
Spike.”

“No?”

“No. It’s
Randy
Spike.”

“Randy, huh?”

“Yeah, but I don’t like anyone to call me that.” He set his mouth. “It’s a kid’s name.” He looked at me through nine million freckles. It was the most amazing confession I’ve ever heard. “But you can call me Randy if you want—just don’t let anyone hear you, okay?”

“Okay, Randy.”

“After all,” he said kicking a clod into dust, “It is my name.”

What I liked the most was the baseball. Getting off early those three days a week, playing the games, was incredibly pleasant. The teams had been cleverly named, proving the presence of intelligent people on that particular side of bars. My team was the “Dangerous Convicts.” Good, right? There were seven other teams in the league, but the only one that was a real threat to our squad’s taking the title was the “Escapees,” which as you can see is a clever name also.

As a team we Dangerous Convicts had spirit, but the games were quiet. We’d all sit on the bench like tired people at a dentist’s office, not talking much, but on the field everybody ran the bases and fielded the ball at dangerous velocities. No one made jokes about stealing bases, even to Lefty, who had successfully robbed eighty-one banks, all in California. Off the diamond we rarely talked to each other (except for Salvatore who played second and me, the third baseman); and even the most omniscient of observers would have had trouble telling we were a winning and somehow unified team.