Doing Time (42 page)

Mel turns and leaves the bedroom but stops just outside the door. She is suddenly lightheaded, dizzy. She is fine, she tells herself—she has come this far; she can go on. She takes a breath and steadies herself with a hand against the wall, walks to her brother's room and looks in, then continues around the stairwell toward her father's room. This is why she has returned — she has forced herself to this room because she believes in the dream; she has rehearsed this a hundred times in her mind; she is convinced she can walk in and walk out and in that fleeting turn bring it all back — everything: the senselessness of it, the horror, the fear that would never come. And then walk out and forget it, forget this room altogether … or perhaps remember it as it had always been so perfectly ordinary — his robe hanging on the back of the closet door, the collection of antique paperweights on the roll-top desk, the wisteria lamp in the corner with the tilted shade, the humid oversweet odor of pipe tobacco and cologne permeating everything — the Oriental rug faded where the afternoon sun burns through the tall windows … but there on the rug is another faded area, a large oval where someone has scrubbed, where a stain has been lifted by hard work and whatever chemicals …

… He walked out. He tucked the gun in his pocket and looked around the room as though deciding what to do or what to take, glared at them as if to say, You think I came for your wallet, old man? You think I came for the fucking TV?

And walked out. She heard him in her brother's room, knocking pictures off the wall, toppling the dresser. Then in her room, hangers springing from the closet, drawers yanked open and clattering to the floor. He ran downstairs, and she heard him in the parlor, furniture crashing, glass breaking. She tried twisting her arms to loosen the tape, tried slipping a hand out but couldn't. Her father lay next to her — if she could inch down, get to his wrists, she could chew the tape and free his hands. She rolled to her side, told her father what she was doing, expecting, hoping he would say Yes, hurry … but all he could say was Why? — Why was this happening to them?

Melody in her bathrobe, tugging her father through the snow in the backyard, over the fence and into the darkness of the neighbor's yard — she saw this in her mind: tiptoeing to her room for her bathrobe, the two of them hurrying down the service stairs to the rear door and out into the night. .. but the man returned before she could finish with the tape at her father's wrists; he walked in as she was lifting her head, a long strand in her mouth.

He did not hit her. He simply pulled her by the hair, back to where she'd been. And then leaned over them, his breath quick and labored now, nearly a wheeze, and held the note where they both could read it, held it with a young and shaky hand, tapping it with the barrel of the gun. And her father said, “Dammit, there is no safe. Can't you hear? There is no safe.” And the man shot him. In a clap of thunder she saw her father bounce once and then leak his life onto the rug through a ragged opening in his head. And the last thing she felt was the gun in her hair, and a roar, not a sound but a pressure, a rushing as of wind in a tunnel, going away …

*  *  *

It is too much for hen With no warning she begins to retch. She hurries out the door and down the hall to the bathroom, reaches the toilet but can't throw up. She waits but nothing happens. She considers pushing a finger down her throat but can't do that either. This is how it has been since the hospital, this sense of choking, of something there but not there, something not in her throat but hidden in the damage at the base of her skull, poised as if to ambush her. And it will not come, it will not leave her.

She moves to the sink, and realizes — standing now at the mirror, seeing a face that is not her present face but a face from the future — that the dream was a sham, a hoax, that she was a fool to think she could walk in and walk out and rid herself of the past. She could almost laugh. She ts both the joke and the joker, the dreamer and the dream itself. Oh, but the fear will come — she knows this now, she can see it in her eyes ~~ it will leak from her slowly, drop by drop, year after year, as tears, blood from a wound that will never heal.

She splashes water on her face, hoping to shrink the endlessness of it all. She must grow her hair back, she thinks, her wild hair that saved her — so that he thought he'd shot her in the center of the head when in fact the bullet had only grazed her; she had turned to her father at that instant, turned her crown of curls out past her shoulders and halfway down her back — and he'd shot her hair instead.

Hair chat is gone now, barely long enough 10 cover the crease in her skull. She had been a month in the hospital, and then the long, slow recovery at her brother's in Omaha. The police had arrested the man that same night, in another house a block away ~~ a drug addict, or a mental patient, she never did get it straight. She had come to in a haze ot pain, the left side of her face sinking in a pool of blood ~— hers and her father's, the sickening, fruity smell of it in her throat ~— and had pushed herself across the floor, then back with the telephone cord in her mouth until the old metal phone toppled from the desk. And later, out of the hospital and at her brother's house, the nightmares began: a man in a ski mask stalking her, catching her, the gun tangled in her hair™ every night she'd wake up screaming, and her brother at first croubled, even frightened, and then later impatient, condescending, would tell her it was okay, everything was okay now, the man was in prison. As if that were enough,

Mel leaves the bathroom, She feels heavy; the gray light in the upstairs hall seems to press against her; the air settles in her lungs like ash. She forces herself past the bedrooms and down the stairs, and when she enters the living room Beth gets off the couch. The front door is still open, and now a chill is added to the gloomy silence of the house.

“There's nothing I want here,” Mel says, and Beth blinks, looks around at the furniture and then touches the arm of the couch.

“This is very old.”

“Yes, it's stuffed with horsehair,” Mel says, impatient now. “And that's marble on the tables, and the chairs are antiques. So is the rug.”

“Worth a fortune,” Beth says, almost dreamily.

“Then maybe you should sell it for a fortune —”

Mel is about to add: And buy yourself a new hat … and can think of a dozen other phrases too cruel to be witty … but she is aware of an almost visible warmth from Beth, a concern that has nothing to do with the house.

Beth hesitates, and clears her throat. “Honey, all your books, all your clothes in your room. You don't want any of it?”

Suddenly Mel wants out. Out of the house, out of the city. She's had this idea about hitchhiking to Alaska, working construction or crewing a fishing boat, something hard and out of doors. Something far away.

“Are there papers to sign?”

Beth smiles. “Your brother took care of that. We're set to close in a month.”

Mel lifts her knapsack by the strap, slings it over her shoulder. “Then can you give me a ride? To the freeway downtown?”

“Honey, of course.” Beth stares toward her but stops abruptly when Mel turns. From behind Mel she says, “But why don't we have lunch at Andre's first? Or there's this cute little place on the downtown mall.”

Mel can't answer. The idea of lunch is so absurd she feels like crying. She steps outside onto the porch. The sun winks through the upper branches of the sycamore in a way that is familiar. When she was small, five or six, she carried a serving dish from the dining room and filled it with dirt from around the rhododendrons in the front yard. Her father spanked her, struck her for the first time. And then on the porch he picked her up, and in a rare show of affection, and with the sun over his shoulder winking rainbows through her tears, he kissed her cheek and told her he was sorry.

Mel hands Beth the key and Beth locks the front door. The fragmented light has a hypnotic effect, and as they walk to the car Mel sees too clearly what will happen to the old sycamore — she sees them cutting it, limb by limb, grinding the branches in one of those infernal machines, the sawdust swirling high into the summer sky.

Beth opens the car door for Mel and says, “Can't I take you to a friend's place? Or a hotel? Listen, hon, I don't have to return to the office. You could come out to Cherry Hills. The last of my daughters is in college and my husband and I are all alone with too many empty rooms. It's such a lovely house, with a magnificent yard, with dogwood and cherry trees, and, oh, the flower garden, it's the perfect time of year .,. you can stay, you know, we'd love to have you. It would be a nice place to relax.”

“No thanks,” Mel says, dropping herself on the front seat of Beth's car and shifting her knapsack to her lap, hugging it to her chest as a girl would hug a doll. Because she doesn't feel like relaxing. What she feels like is running. Running and running until she runs out of herself. What she feels like is disappearing, though she knows it wouldn't help. What she really feels like is killing someone.

1992, Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility
Canon City, Colorado

It is late winter … sun high in a pale blue sky, the air sharp with the scent of pine from the foothills to the west. Mel has been driving for three hours, from her home on the western slope to this city on the edge of the plains where the mountains have become wrinkled fingers stretching eastward, dry escarpments hugging the river, and where the highway no longer meanders with the lay of the valley but abruptly widens to become a busy thoroughfare into town — immediately to the left is the prison: high stone walls and tin-roofed guard towers, chain-link fences topped with concertina wire, a parking lot out front.

She locks the car door. It is Saturday, visiting day, nearly noon, and there are plenty of vehicles in the lot. She is here to meet a man she does not know, a prisoner now for thirteen years. She does not know this man and yet she has carried the memory of his hooded face, his youthful and powerful hands, since the night he shot her father, shot her also, left her for dead. And she has carried the memory all these years, like the still tender scar at the base of her skull.

Mel fancies herself a vagabond, and rightfully so. She is also a writer, but of this she must frequently remind herself, even though she has had numerous articles and even a book published, with another on the way. It is that travel has been her release and writing her anchor, and with her fears, somehow she has equated entrapment with success, freedom with travel. Although now, for the first time in thirteen years, she has settled into one place in one town for more than a month, and for the first time ever she is living with a man, someone she met while hitchhiking in Mexico — his name is Hank and he is as carefree as she is not; he is a wanderer also but not out of need; he is currently a ski instructor and a bartender at a resort near where they live, and he is in love with her. And this is why she is here — now that she has a home she is aware of a connection to this prison, to the man who possesses in his crime the greater part of her.

There is a solitary tower out front, a gate through a high fence and a walkway leading to a sixties-modern building fronting the stone wall. Mel enters the building via glass doors and stops at a desk where a uniformed officer hands her a form to read — visiting rules — and another to fill out: Name, Address, Driver's license number, Name and number of inmate, Relation to inmate. She does this quickly and hands it along with her driver's license to the officer. She knows the inmate's name — Alex Pitts — but because she does not know his penitentiary number the officer must find it on a list. As to “Relation,” she has written: Friend.

Mel did not plan this visit. She is not sure what will happen. She knows that Alex Pitts is here — her brother in Omaha has checked every year for thirteen years to make certain — but she does not know if he has a family now, a wife or a girlfriend who visits him. She knows only that he was young when he arrived — eighteen, a year younger than she — and that he was a drug addict, a homeless boy with a record for burglary since he was ten,

She signs a waiver to be strip-searched, which a female officer tells her is a formality and to which she will probably not have to submit. Mel wears no jewelry and has never carried a purse, so there is nothing but her wallet to place in a nearby locker. She is dressed according to the rules — no short skirt or dress (Mel has not worn a dress in twenty years, since she was twelve and her father had to beg her to attend an Easter party with him}, no tight or see-through blouses, no revealing sweaters —she wears what she usually wears: sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers, a jacket with pockets for her notebooks and pens, empty now. The guard pats her down and assists her through a metal detector, and suddenly she is on the other side of a steel door and into a barred sally port — inside the prison now — through another door and into a wide, rectangular room with cinder-block walls and a linoleum floor, square pillars supporting a cement ceiling, thirty or forty metal tables surrounded by folding chairs, a row of vending machines along one wall and an old wooden desk in the corner, another uniformed guard behind it.

There are other people in the room — families, women alone — but no inmates, although Mel is not sure what an inmate looks like, what sort of outfit he wears. She finds an empty table against the wall, eases herself onto the chair, and scans the room. It is curious — she has never seen the races so thoroughly mixed — whites and blacks and His panics not in groups but scattered here and there in the room and even mingling at a row of tables that have been pushed together — even the waiting areas of bus and train stations, all the airports she has been in, are not like this.

A woman with yellow, strawlike hair and dreadfully thin arms, sitting alone at the next table, smiles tentatively at Mel and lifts a hand, wiggles her fingers in a halfhearted wave. “I haven't seen you before,” she says, her face the face of a sad clown, pouty red lips and chalky skin, dark circles like sinkholes around her languid brown eyes. “Did you bring quarters? You know, you can have quarters in here, for the machines.” She opens her other hand and reveals a roll of coins. “I couldn't stand it here without a pop or a candy bar or something.”