Regiment of Women (10 page)

With this complaint it seemed to Cornell that Harry had passed from the personal to the social, but his cellmate's rage now took on a special tone.

“Menstruation makes no sense at all. It should be abolished! But chemically: a pill or powder. Lots of women are afraid of the knife. Why should you—they—have to undergo a hysterectomy? Fucking scientists! You can be sure they take care of themselves, but they won't let the secret out.”

Cornell cleared his throat. “Well, that's one advantage we have over women.” Harry stared at him briefly in what he could have sworn was hatred. Cornell did not understand him at all.

“Gee,” Cornell said. “I wouldn't think their troubles would worry you.”

Harry's eyes cleared. “Yeah,” he said roughly. “They can all bleed to death.” He went to the water bucket and drank from the dipper.

Cornell was reminded that he had not peed in ever so long. Part of the pain in his lower belly, for which he had blamed anxiety and dread exclusively, was no doubt due to this.

“Uh, Harry,” he said, “I guess we must do our business in this other bucket?”

“That or in the ventilating duct,” Harry said coarsely, pointing to the grille high on the wall. He stood there grinning while Cornell pulled up his skirts.

“Could you turn your head, please?” Cornell requested. Someone had undressed him thoroughly: his blue bikini underpants and his pantyhose were gone, and in their stead he wore ugly bloomers in white cotton, and no stockings.

“You'll have to get over that false modesty,” said Harry, but he reluctantly turned away.

The rim of the bucket, especially at the two points where the metal came up in arches to secure each end of the wire handle, was painful to the biscuit—the old childhood name for the bottom, which came back to Cornell, who had not pulled down panties of this sort since he had been in the primary grades.

He really did not feel all that better when he finished.

“What happens here if you get sick?” he asked.

“You die,” said Harry, turning back to watch the bloomers rise again.

“You know,” Cornell said, letting the shapeless skirt fall into position, “I don't know if it is right to treat people this way, even criminals. I mean, take me. I make one mistake, and here I am. Now, it seems to me that some people who were inclined to crime would think, well, I'm going to be horribly punished for the most minor of things, so I might as well do something really bad. If I'm caught, what difference would it make?”

“You're thinking like a man,” said Harry. “What do women care about such distinctions? They've got the power, and they're going to use it as they see fit. Besides, they wouldn't agree that it is a minor crime for a man to pose as a woman. That's theft, isn't it? You're stealing what belongs to them, and what is worth more than sexual identity?”

“Personal
identity,” Cornell said with some vigor. “I like to believe that I'm Georgie Cornell first, and second a man—or second, an American, and third, a man. I think sometimes this sexual matter is carried too far. You have to eat and sleep whether you are man or woman, and if you are cut, you will bleed—”

Harry was shaking his head and slowly waving his hand.

“That's just playing with words, Georgie, and you know it. You've always been a cipher, only now you've been moved into another column. You're a zero in the statistic on how many perverts have been arrested this week, month, year.” He was sitting on his cot, and he slapped his knee. “Look, men are bigger on the average than women. Women dominate them by moral, intellectual, and psychological means. That couldn't be done if it were a matter of sheer physical strength. You were a head taller than either of those detectives.”

“But one had a blackjack and struck me from behind!” Cornell protested in an impulse of pride, which he regretted an instant later: he was boasting about his effeminate streak of brutality. “I was foolish to resist at all, though,” he added. “But I just saw red when I was slapped. I've always been like that I remember in school when another boy slapped me I'd scratch his face and pull his hair.” Something was wrong with this memory. He found it and blushed: actually, he would punch his tormentor, balling his fist like a girl.

“Women,” said Harry, perhaps fortunately paying no attention to Cornell's embarrassment, “are more intelligent than men, but less emotional. They have to run the world; they do not have the time to squander on personality. They must deal with things, with issues, and with people as things and issues. How could the President, for example, cope with international problems if she were personally vulnerable to every little slight, real or imagined? You must admit, if you are honest, that the fundamental concern of a man is his own vanity.” Harry smiled. “Now, of course, that, or rather what comes from it, can be charming, so charming, in fact, that it can even lure certain women from the stern path of duty—”

Cornell frowned. “I've never managed that,” he said. “I've read about it in novels or seen it in pictures, but in life I can't recall distracting a woman for more than fifteen minutes. Or maybe I've always met the wrong ones. Raving egomaniacs, most of them. You listen to them talk about their work and politics and sports and their bank accounts and their fascinating friends—whom, by the way, you never meet, any more than you get access to their bank accounts—and then you try to talk about what interests you or even about your troubles, I mean, you can be in the most distress, and what do they do? Listen? No, they begin to paw you.”

He restrained himself. He was getting too bitter.

“Women, Harry,” he said, “are by nature very selfish people.”

For some reason Harry's genial smile broadened into almost a laugh. Then he quickly straightened his mouth to say: “Well, I'm just acting as devil's advocate here. We should know our enemy—that's my motto.”

“Enemy?” asked Cornell. “That's a bit strong, isn't it? They certainly can be painful, but then so can one's fellow men. One thing can't be said of most women: they're not spiteful or backbiting. And then if you think of it, what's the alternative? What kind of world would it be if men ran it? Mary!”

Harry squinted at him. “You're talking treason to the cause, now, aren't you? Isn't that what your bunch wants? ‘Power to the men!'” He balled and raised his little fist.

Cornell said quietly: “There you go again, Harry. You're doing it again. I'm just not going to argue any more. If you insist on calling me a male-liberation revolutionary, in spite of my protestations to the contrary, what can I do? It's impossible to prove you're
not
something. I just hope the court is not as stubborn as you.”

Harry smiled again. “Sorry,” he said. “It's just that you don't seem all that upset by the accusation.”

“I try to control my emotions,” said Cornell. “I used to get hysterical a lot when I was younger, but that sort of thing ages you rapidly. I'm going to be thirty soon. I have to get some dignity to replace my lost youth.”

He stared at Harry. “One of those detectives you mentioned said I was a cool customer…. How did you know I was a head taller than either of them?”

“Huh?”

“You mentioned the detectives.”

“Oh. Well, they brought you in here last night, didn't they?”

“I was unconscious.”

“Yeah, and they took off your clothes and put you in the uniform. They looked like rough customers. I pretended to be asleep.”

“Did you see them give me the truth-serum shot?”

“I imagine you got that at the precinct station.”

“Was I talking when they brought me in here?”

Harry shrugged. “Well, yeah. I heard the name ‘Charlie,' to be honest.”

“Oh, Mary.”

“You couldn't help it,” Harry said sympathetically. “You probably named the others, too.”

“Poor Charlie,” Cornell groaned. “I wish I could be sure, though. There are lots of Charlies.”

“Charlie Harrison. He works at your company,” Harry said.

“I just told you that.”

“You said it last night, too,” Harry replied quickly. “I was just confirming it when I asked you before. I was hoping you gave them the wrong name. My heart really fell when I heard you confirm it now.”

“You think he's been picked up?”

“It's simple to find out,” said Harry and went to the steam-pipe and tapped at some length. Then he listened to the brief reply. He shook his head in admiration.

“Those fellows know more about this jail than the superintendent, I'll bet.”

“Well?”

“Oh, sure,” said Harry. “Charlie's in a cell near them.”

Cornell lowered his head to his knees. He had not wanted certainty. He had asked for it in that hypocrisy by which one hopes to delude fate.

“Life has been pretty rotten to him,” he said to his lap. “He was once a streetwalker.”

“That's only a misdemeanor,” Harry said in an automatic, official kind of voice.

R
OBERT
A
RDREY
, 1972

C
ORNELL
COULD
NOT
get to sleep. The narrow cot, the thin mattress, the sour odor of the blanket, the memory of the greasy mess of the third feeding, were scarcely conducive to rest, nor was his recurrent guilt about Charlie. But he was kept awake by thoughts of Harry.

As Cornell had prepared for bed—a splash of cold water on the face, a wetted finger for a toothbrush—Harry as usual did nothing about himself. Harry did not visibly wash and yet looked clean; had not eaten all day and yet seemed healthy; had been generous, warm, tender—and aggressive, cold, hostile. He was a mercurial type. You never knew where you stood with him.

The cell had got chilly and damp, or perhaps it had always been like that and Cornell took notice only when he was faced with the period of compulsory repose. After the trays from the final serving had been handed out through the slot, Harry informed him that the light would shortly be extinguished and the cell kept dark for seven hours.

Cornell shivered, went to the steampipe and felt it: dead-cold iron.

Harry spoke sharply: “What are you doing?”

“It's cold in here.”

“Let that pipe alone,” said Harry. “Gillie and Randy will think it's a message.”

“I just felt it,” Cornell said. “I didn't tap.”

“Just get away from there.”

Cornell's hand went to his hip. “Listen here—” He did not intend to take orders from a rapist. But then his basic reason overcame his pride. It made no sense for them to be at each other's throats within this narrow enclosure. He dropped his hand and smiled.

But Harry leaped across the cell and seized the bosom of Cornell's dress.

“Don't you ever talk to me in that tone,” Harry cried. “You little punk!” Though he was considerably shorter than Cornell, he pulled Cornell in close, then thrust him away.

Amazingly enough, this attack did not threaten Cornell's control. He astonished himself by going limp. He was operating on some sort of instinct.

“When I tell you something I don't want any lip,” Harry said furiously. He pulled Cornell in again, nose below his cellmate's chin. “Get that and get it good, buster.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Having blurted this unthinkingly, Cornell remembered the source of his instinct: years before, he had had a teacher who handled him similarly.

Harry roared: “You fresh punk.” He brought up his knee and drove it at Cornell's groin, but owing to the difference in their heights, he struck too low—a miscalculation the teacher had never made, nor for that matter Dr. Prine, who often employed this technique in her therapy.

Still being politic, however, Cornell pretended he had been damaged, howled, clutched his midsection, fell onto the cot, and wept. The light went out shortly thereafter.

Eventually Cornell straightened out, pulled up the blanket, pulled it down again slightly after he smelled the leading edge, and lay there looking into blackness. Harry remained silent. Cornell considered apologizing. He had had no ulterior purpose in addressing Harry as a woman. Pure accident.
Violent
and
female
were complimentary adjectives, as even Harry would admit. In blunt-instrument and knife murders,
cherchez la femme
was the investigatory principle. Yet as Harry had pointed out,
they
were smaller than we—though not than Harry himself, who was only five-four or five. He must have raped a tiny woman. He was undoubtedly helped by surprise. Perhaps he had been armed. He did not seem terribly strong, could never have pushed Cornell around that way without cooperation. Which was another reason for Cornell's failure to fight back: he had not felt seriously threatened.

Cornell frowned, and was conscious of the lump on his head: diminished, less sore now, but still tender. Corelli had been strong enough to give him that, but a blackjack would be effective in the fist of a child.

Harry was still quiet. You couldn't even hear his breathing. Should Cornell apologize? It would be awfully uncomfortable if they stayed on the outs, with only nine feet square between them. But then it really wasn't fair if Harry considered himself the injured party. He didn't own that steampipe. Pervert! Cornell stuck out his tongue in the dark. The blanket had ridden up again and he got a very unpleasant sensation as he tasted the wool.

Poor Charlie was now in jail too. What must he think of Cornell? Perhaps Harry could send a message through the steampipe explaining the seeming betrayal. Else Charlie might think it the issue of spite. No man could be blamed for what he said under truth serum. However, Cornell was relieved that he had not been tortured into making the revelation. That would have led to the same end, and he would have suffered considerable pain on the way. He abhorred pain. That's what he so hated about sexual intercourse: it hurt.