Report from the Interior (17 page)

So begins the final chapter of the Fugitive’s Tale. The detectives arrive at Allen’s office just as he is meeting with a delegation from the chamber of commerce, which wants to invite him to be the principal speaker at its next banquet because of his
marvelous work on the new bridge.
All the way to the top—and now the long fall to the bottom again as Marie makes good on her heartless promise. It is not a simple matter of sending Allen back into the clutches of the Dixieland penal system, however, there are established protocols for arranging such a transfer, laws of extradition that must be adhered to, and the Illinois governor and Chicago district attorney refuse to let him go. Newspaper headlines fill the screen.
CHICAGO FIGHTS TO KEEP ALLEN FROM CHAIN GANG
, followed by the Southern response—
LOCAL CHAIN GANG OFFICIALS IRATE AS CHICAGO REFUSES TO AID THEM
—which elicits an editorial in Allen’s defense, “Is This Civilization?”—“Shall we stand by while a man who has become a respected citizen of the community has the shadow of medieval torture creeping over him? Must James Allen be sent back to a living hell?”—which, in turn, provokes yet another response,
WHAT HAS BECOME OF STATE RIGHTS?
: “It is, indeed, a sad state of affairs when the governor of one state refuses to recognize the rights of another.” If only Allen would stand firm, the controversy would eventually die down and be forgotten, he could remain in Illinois as a free man, marry Helen, build more bridges, but the Fugitive is too honorable, too good for his own good, and when the Southern officials offer him a compromise deal, he accepts it in order to clear his name once and for all. They pretend to want him back for just ninety days, supposedly the minimum amount of time he must serve in order to be granted a pardon, and no, of course he won’t have to return to the chain gang, they assure him, he will be given a clerical job in some prison instead. You are just a fourteen-year-old boy, but even you can see through these lies, you can sense the doom that is settling upon him, but Allen is determined to go ahead with it, and so you glumly watch as the Fugitive says good-bye to Helen and boards a train heading south. Once there, he meets with the local lawyer handling his case, a certain Mr. Ramsay, who is first of all concerned that Allen pay an immediate advance on his large fee, and it is only after Allen has written a check that Ramsay informs him that
this is a funny state, and the governor is a little peculiar,
meaning that the clerical job isn’t so definite and they might want him to work for about sixty days. The hapless Allen smiles one of his small, ironic smiles, the smile of a man who has been backed into a corner, who has no choice but to accept another defeat. Sixty days. He can do that if he has to. As long as it puts an end to this gruesome business, sixty days will be worth it.

Bit by bit, by slowly mounting increments over the next days and weeks and months, every one of the promises made to Allen in the North is broken in the South. Step one: he is put in the Tuttle County Prison Camp, the harshest camp in the state—violently pushed into the bunkhouse by one of the guards as the warden tells him he’ll be shot if he tries to escape again. The only solace is that his old friend Bomber Wells is one of his fellow prisoners, but when he tries to explain the pardon deal he has worked out with the prison commission, Bomber tells him flatly: These boys here ain’t ever heard that word. Allen: They just want to make it tough on me, I guess. I’ll get the pardon, all right. Bomber: Listen, kid. They ain’t thinking about handing out pardons when you land in here. This is the last word. You might say—it’s
it.

A wide shot of the hills. Scores of men are working in an immense landscape of stone and sky, swinging their hammers as a spiritual is sung by a chorus of black male voices, and for the first time since the film began, the story is no longer just about Allen and his sufferings, it is about an entire system of barbaric punishment and brutality, and with the words of the black spiritual rising up from the hills, it is impossible not to recall the fact that the Civil War ended just sixty-seven years earlier, that for more than two and a half centuries men and women worked as slaves in the New World, and now that twenty-nine more years have passed and it is 1961, you think about the fact that Hitler came to power just months after the film was released, and therefore it is impossible for you to look at this prison camp from 1932 America and not think of it as a precursor of the death camps of World War II—for this is what the world looks like when it is run by monsters.

Step two: the prison board hearing. Lawyer Ramsay and brother Clint present Allen’s side of the case. As Allen’s virtues are extolled, there is a brief cutaway to the chain gang, where Allen is shown working with his sledgehammer as the chorus of black male voices starts again. Then, some seconds later, back to the hearing, where the judge vigorously defends the institution of the chain gang, arguing (with nightmare logic) that the discipline it imposes on the prisoners can be a builder of character—as, for example, in the case of one James Allen. Step three: the pardon is refused. When Clint comes to report the decision to his brother, Allen, standing on the other side of a barred cell, explodes in a burst of uncontrollable anger, raging against the liars and hypocrites who have stolen his life from him. Clint, ever calm and reasonable, ever the man of the cloth, tells his brother that the commission voted to let him go if he conducts himself as a model prisoner for one year. One year, minus the three months he has already served, which would come to
only
nine more months. Allen: Nine months! This torture—I won’t do it! I won’t do it, I tell you! I’ll get out of here—even if they kill me for it! Step four: he does it. Having no other choice, he agrees to hang on for nine more months. Once again, pages fall from the calendar as the months pass, and behind those pages are the hills, the wide shot of two hundred men breaking stones with their hammers, and the chorus of black male voices continues. Step five: another prison board hearing. Ramsay (to the judge): And finally, not only has James Allen been a model prisoner for a whole year, but I have presented letters from countless organizations and prominent individuals beseeching you to recommend his pardon. Cut to the bunkhouse. The warden enters and says to Allen: Just had a final report on your new hearing. Allen sits up in bed, looking devastated, half dead, half insane, no more than two heartbeats from oblivion: Well? Warden: Suspended decision. Indefinitely.

Allen’s face. What happens to Allen’s face at that moment. A close shot of the face as it crumples up and disintegrates, as tears begin to gather in his eyes. His mouth twitches. His body shakes. He lowers himself onto the bed with clenched fists, no longer seeing anything, no longer a part of this world. Jabs his fists into the air. Feeble, spasmodic jabs—aimed at nothing, hitting nothing. The screen goes black.

This time, he and Bomber escape in tandem. Bomber will be shot and killed, but not before he helps Allen steal a dump truck, not before he drops dynamite on the road to impede the advance of pursuing cars, not before he has one last laugh, and after the old man dies, Allen frees himself by cutting through his chains with the gears that control the back of the truck. Then, with another bundle of dynamite, he blows up a bridge and ends the chase. You are so caught up in the action that you do not stop to consider that Allen, the builder of bridges, has blown up a bridge in order to save his life.

A sequence of newspaper headlines and articles, with more calendar pages falling in the background. The last headline reads:
WHAT HAS BECOME OF JAMES ALLEN? IS HE, TOO, JUST ANOTHER FORGOTTEN MAN?
“A little more than a year ago, James Allen made his second spectacular escape from the chain gang. Since that time, nothing has been heard of him…”

You imagine he is living in comfort somewhere on the East Coast or West Coast, perhaps in some South American country or Europe, reestablished under a new, more deceptive false name, a survivor of the injustices that have been committed against him, for however cruelly he has been knocked around, he has shown himself to be brave and inventive, an exceptional man who has done the impossible by escaping twice from the lowest circle of hell. If not an out-and-out hero, he is nevertheless heroic, and in your limited experience so far the heroic men in movies always triumph in the end. But now it is black again, the last newspaper article has faded from the screen, and when the action resumes it is night, a dark night somewhere in America, and a car is pulling into a garage. A woman gets out, and as she walks forward in the dimly lit driveway, you see that it is Helen. She hears a sound and stops. Someone is hiding in the shadows, a man has been waiting for her, and now he is softly calling out her name—Helen, Helen, Helen—and then the camera turns on him, and it is Allen, ragged and unshaven, no longer close to oblivion but obliterated, another man from the one last seen escaping from prison a year ago. Helen rushes over to him, touches him, speaks his name. Why haven’t you come before? she asks. Because he was afraid to, Allen answers. But you could have written, she says. The camera moves in on Allen’s face, which is no longer the despairing, shattered face of a prisoner but the face of a hunted man, a fugitive, all nerves and jitters now, his eyes showing nothing but fear. It isn’t safe, he says. They’re still after me. I’ve had jobs, but I can’t keep them. Something happens, someone turns up. I hide in rooms all day and travel by night. No friends, no rest, no peace. Forgive me, Helen. I had to take a chance to see you again—to say good-bye. He falls silent. She throws herself into his arms, sobbing. It was all going to be so different, she says. Yes, Allen says, different—and then, with savage bitterness in his voice:
They’ve made it different.

Suddenly, a noise is heard in the dark. A car door slamming? One of the neighbors walking toward them? Allen disentangles himself from Helen’s arms, looks up, looks around, his eyes ablaze with panic. He whispers to her: I’ve got to go. Helen: Can’t you tell me where you’re going? Allen shakes his head. He is backing away from her now, disappearing into the shadows. Helen: Will you write? Again, Allen shakes his head, continuing to back away. Helen: How do you live? By now, he has been swallowed up by the darkness—still there, but no longer visible. His voice says:
I steal.

Nothing now except darkness, and the sound of his steps as he runs into the night.

Hard to forget those last two words—

Hard to forget, and because you were so young when you first saw the film, it has been many years now since you haven’t forgotten.

TIME CAPSULE

You thought you had left no traces. All the stories and poems you wrote in your boyhood and adolescence have vanished, no more than a few photographs exist of you from your early childhood to your mid-thirties, nearly everything you did and said and thought when you were young has been forgotten, and even if there are many things that you remember, there are more, a thousand times more, that you do not. The letter written to you by Otto Graham when you were turning eight has disappeared. The postcard sent to you by Stan Musial has disappeared. The baseball trophy given to you when you were ten has disappeared. No drawings, no examples of your early handwriting, no class pictures from grade school, no report cards, no summer-camp pictures, no home movies, no team pictures, no letters from friends, parents, or relatives. For a person born in the mid-twentieth century, the era of the inexpensive camera, the postwar boom days when every middle-class American family was gripped by shutterbug fever, your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known. How could so much have been lost? From the age of five to seventeen, you lived in just two houses with your family, and most of this childhood material was still intact, but after your parents divorced, there were no more fixed addresses. From the age of eighteen until you were in your early thirties, you moved often and traveled light, parking yourself in twelve different places for six months or longer, not to mention innumerable other places for shorter periods of two weeks to four months, and because you were unsettled and often cramped in those places, you left all relics from your past with your mother, your chronically restless mother, who lived with her second husband in half a dozen New Jersey apartments and houses from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, and then, after relocating to southern California, moved every eighteen months in a perpetual buy-sell frenzy for the next decade and a half, purchasing condominiums in order to fix them up and sell at a robust profit (her interior decorating skills were impressive), and with all those comings and goings, all those cartons packed and unpacked over the years, things were inevitably ignored or forgotten, and bit by bit nearly every trace of your early existence was wiped out. You wish now that you had kept a diary, a continuous record of your thoughts, your movements through the world, your conversations with others, your response to books, films, and paintings, your comments on people met and places seen, but you never developed the habit of writing about yourself. You tried to start a journal when you were eighteen, but you stopped after just two days, feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious, confused about the purpose of the undertaking. Until then, you had always considered the act of writing to be a gesture that moved from the inside to the outside, a reaching out toward an other. The words you wrote were destined to be read by someone who was not yourself, a letter to be read by a friend, for example, or a school paper to be read by the teacher who had given you the assignment, or, in the case of your poems and stories, to be read by some unknown person, an imaginary anyone. The problem with the journal was that you didn’t know what person you were supposed to be addressing, whether you were talking to yourself or to someone else, and if it was yourself, how strange and perplexing that seemed, for why bother to tell yourself things you already knew, why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal? You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.