Salem Falls (6 page)

Jack was brought there by a security guard, who assured him that this visit was on the house. One of the twins who ran the farm had found Jack buried up to his neck in a heap of feed, blood spreading over his blue denim shirt in the shape of a valentine heart. Jack hadn’t been asked any questions, nor had he volunteered information.

The nurse gathered her materials on a metal tray. “Want to tell me what happened?”

Jack could barely speak past the blinding pain that came every time he moved his head. “Nosebleed,” he choked out.

“First nosebleed I’ve ever seen that involved broken nasal cartilage. How about that contusion on your spine, and your ribs? Or should I guess . . . you were kicked by a cow?”

“Sounds good,” Jack said.

Shaking her head, she packed his nostrils with cotton and sent him back to the pod. There, in the common room, men sat playing board games. Jack made his way to an unoccupied table and began to play solitaire.

Suddenly, two tables away, Aldo lunged across a Scrabble board and grabbed another inmate by the lapels. “You callin’ me a liar?”

The man looked him in the eye. “Yeah, LeGrande. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Jack averted his gaze and turned over the queen of spades. Put it there, on the column with the five of diamonds . . .

“I’m telling you, it’s a word,” Aldo insisted.

Hearing the commotion, the correctional officer on duty appeared. “What’s the matter, Aldo? Someone not want to share his toys with you?”

Aldo jammed his finger at the game board. “Isn’t this a word?”

The guard leaned closer. “O-C-H-E-R. I’ve never heard it.”

“It’s a word,” Jack said quietly.

Aldo turned with a smug grin. “You tell ’em, Teach. I read it in one of your books.”

“Ocher,” Jack said. “It’s a color. Kind of orange.”

“Twenty-seven points,” Aldo added.

His opponent narrowed his eyes at Jack. “Why the hell should I listen to you?”

“Because he studies all kinds of stuff,” Aldo said. “He knows the answers to all kinds of questions.”

Jack wished Aldo would just shut up. “Not the ones that matter,” he muttered.

Jack scraped the shovel along the concrete, holding his breath against the pungent stink of manure as he tossed another load into the wheelbarrow. The cows twisted their muscular necks to blink at him with great brown eyes, their udders already swollen with milk again and distending their legs like a bellows.

One of the cows lowed at him, batting eyelashes as long as his pinky. Gently, he moved his shovel to one hand and traced the marbled black-and-white pattern of her hips and side. The heat and softness of it made his throat close.

Without warning, his shovel was knocked away and he found himself sprawled facedown. He felt the scratch of hay against his temple, the fetid puddle of manure beneath his cheek, and the cold bare air on his backside as his jeans were wrenched down. The deep voice of Mountain Felcher curled at the nape of his neck. “How much you know, Einstein? You know that I was gonna do this to you?”

Jack felt the meat of Mountain’s fingers close over his neck. He heard every tooth of a zipper coming undone.

“Aw, Christ, Mountain,” came a voice, “couldn’t you pick someone else?”

Mountain ground himself against Jack. “Shut up, LeGrande. This ain’t your business.”

“Sure it is. St. Bride’s got a bet going with a bunch of us. He says he can get every answer right on Jeopardy! before the brains who are playing do. There’s a can of coffee in it for each of us if he screws up.”

Jack took small, shallow breaths through his mouth. He had made no bet with Aldo or anyone else in the pod. But he’d spend his life’s savings on coffee, if that was what it took to get this monster off his back.

“We get to place our commissary order tomorrow-if he’s stuck in the infirmary tonight, thanks to you, we won’t get our coffee for another week.”

Jack’s arms were released. He scrambled upright to find Mountain buttoning his jeans and looking at him speculatively. “I seen that show. Ain’t no one smart enough to get them questions all right.” He crossed his arms. “I don’t want coffee if you lose.”

“Fine. I’ll buy you a chocolate bar instead.”

Mountain’s hands were on his shoulders in an instant, drawing him to his feet. “You get those answers right tonight, then tomorrow I’ll leave you be. But you play again next night, and the next. And the minute you fuck up, you’re mine.” He touched Jack’s jaw, the pads of his fingers soft. “You lose that game, and you come to me like you want it.”

Jack froze. He watched Mountain leave the barn, then his legs gave out beneath him. Pants still down around his knees, he sat in the straw, trying to draw in air.

“You okay?”

Until he’d spoken, Jack had completely forgotten that Aldo was standing there. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and nodded. “Thank you.”

“The only thing Mountain likes more than a piece of ass is new entertainment.” A bright flush worked its way up Jack’s neck and face as he righted his clothes. “It’s no big deal,” Aldo said, shrugging. “We’ve all been there.”

Jack felt himself begin to shake uncontrollably, a delayed reaction from what had nearly happened. In jail, you gave up everything-your possessions, your job, your home. The thought that any man might take even more from an inmate-something as irreplaceable as dignity-made Jack so angry his blood ran faster.

He could not let Mountain Felcher win.

Jack won. And like Scheherezade, he gained a reprieve for several nights. His days took on a frenetic quality: he’d work eight hours, then grab as many books as he could from the prison library and carry them to his bunk. He read before dinner, during dinner, after dinner . . . until the familiar strains of the television game show filled the common room. He went to sleep thinking of the ingredients in a Tom Collins; he woke imagining the history of the Sino-Russian War. But soon, he wasn’t doing it alone. Prisoners who at first were angry that they hadn’t gotten the coffee they’d expected had come to root for Jack, having realized that self-esteem packed just as much of a high as caffeine. Eager to help, they took books out from the library, too, and fashioned questions for him. They’d quiz Jack as he brushed his teeth, bused his cafeteria tray, made his bunk.

After a week, all of Grafton County Correctional Facility knew about Jack’s bet with Mountain Felcher. The guards wagered with each other, a pool for the day that Jack would eventually stumble. The maximum- and medium-security pods followed his wins through the jail grapevine. And at 7 P.M., every TV in the prison would be tuned to Jeopardy!

One night, as had become the custom, Jack sat to Mountain Felcher’s left, his eyes riveted on the television screen overhead. The leading contestant was a woman named Isabelle with wild curly hair. “Quotable Quotes for six hundred,” she said.

The historian Cornelius Tacitus said these beings are “on the side of the stronger.” The other inmates stared at Jack, waiting. Even the correctional officer on duty had given up on his crossword puzzle, and he stood nearby with his arms crossed. Jack felt the response bubbling up from his throat, easily, carelessly. “The angels.”

In the next breath, he realized he’d given the wrong answer. “I meant-”

“The gods,” said the contestant.

A bell rang and $600 showed up in Isabelle’s account. The common room grew so quiet that Jack could hear his pulse. He’d grown so sure of his skill that he hadn’t even stopped to think before he spoke. “The gods,” Jack repeated, licking his dry lips. “I meant the gods.”

Mountain turned to him, eyes flat and black as obsidian. “You lose,” he said.

Out of sympathy, the others left Jack alone. When he threw up in the bathroom, when he stalked in silence to the cafeteria, they pretended not to see. They thought he was terrified past the point of speech, and it was something they could understand-by now, everyone knew that the forfeit of the bet was Jack’s free will. It was one thing to be raped; it was another thing entirely to offer yourself as a sacrifice.

But Jack wasn’t frightened. He was so angry that he could not utter a word, in case his fury spilled out. And he wanted to keep it inside him, glowing like a coal, hoping to burn Mountain Felcher and scar him as deeply as Jack himself was sure to be scarred.

The night that Jack lost the bet, Aldo’s voice drifted to him as he lay on his bunk. “You just do it, and then you put it behind you and never let yourself think about it,” Aldo said quietly. “Kind of like jail.”

Jack stood in the shadows of the barn, watching Mountain’s arms bunch and tighten as he lifted another bale of hay onto the stack he was making in an alcove. “Cat got your tongue?” Mountain asked, his back still to Jack. “Oh, no. That’s right. I got your tongue. And the whole rest of you, too.”

Mountain stripped off his work gloves. Sweat gleamed on his forehead and traced a line down the middle of his T-shirt. “I had my doubts about you paying your debt.” He sat on a bale of hay. “Go on, drop those pants.”

“No.”

Mountain’s eyes narrowed. “You’re supposed to show up wanting it.”

“I showed up,” Jack said, keeping his voice even. “That’s all you get.”

Mountain jumped him and set him in a headlock. “For someone who thinks he’s so smart, you don’t know when to shut your mouth.”

It took all the courage in the world, but Jack did the one thing he knew Mountain wouldn’t expect: He went still in the man’s hold, unresisting, accepting. “I am smart, you asshole,” Jack said softly. “I’m smart enough to know that you’re not going to break me, not even if you screw me three times a day for the next seven months. Because I’m not going to be thinking what a tough guy you are. I’m going to be thinking you’re pathetic.”

Mountain’s grip eased, a loose noose around Jack’s neck. “You don’t know nothing about me!” In punishment and proof, he ground his hips against Jack from behind. Denim scraped against denim, but there was no ridge of arousal. “You don’t know nothing!”

Jack blocked out the feel of Mountain’s body behind his, of what might happen if he pushed too hard and sent the man over the edge. “Looks like you can’t fuck me,” he said, then swallowed hard. “Why don’t you just fuck yourself instead?”

With a roar that set three sparrows in the rafters to flight, Mountain wrenched away. He had never tried to force someone who had given in yet refused to give up. And that one small distinction made Jack every bit as mighty as the bigger man.

“St. Bride.”

Jack turned, his arms folded across his chest-partly to make him look relaxed and partly because he needed to keep himself from falling apart.

“I don’t need you when there’s a hundred others I can have,” Mountain blustered. “I’m letting you go.”

But Jack didn’t move. “I’m leaving,” he said slowly. “There’s a difference.”

The black man’s head inclined just the slightest bit, and Jack nodded in response. They walked out of the barn into the blinding sunlight, the foot of space between them as inviolable as a stone wall.

Mountain Felcher’s sentence for burglary ended three months later. That night, in the common room, there was a buzz of interest. Now that Mountain was gone, the program lineup was up for grabs. “There’s hockey on, you moron,” an inmate cried out.

“Yeah, and your mother’s the goalie.”

The footsteps of the guard on duty echoed as he hurried down the hall toward the raised voices. Jack closed the book he was reading and walked to the table where the two men threw insults like javelins. He reached down and plucked the remote from one’s hand, settled himself in the seat just beneath the TV, and turned on Jeopardy!

This Hindi word for prince is derived from Rex, latin for King.

From the back of the room, an inmate called out: “What is Raja?”

The two countries with the highest percentage of Shiite Muslims.

“What are Iran and Saudi Arabia!” Aldo said, taking the chair beside Jack.

The man who had wanted to watch hockey sank down behind them. “What are Iran and Iraq,” he corrected. “What are you, stupid?”

The guard returned to his booth. And Jack, who held the remote control on his thigh like a scepter, knew every answer by heart.

Late March 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

E very day for the past three weeks, Jack had awakened in Roy Peabody’s guest room and looked out the window to see Stuart Hollings-a diner regular-walking his Holstein around the town green for a morning constitutional. The old man came without fail at 5:30 A.M., a collar fitted around the placid animal, who plodded along like a faithful puppy.

This morning, when Jack’s alarm clock went off, he looked out to see a lone car down Main Street, and puddles of mud that lay like lakes. Scanning the green, he realized Stuart and his animal were nowhere to be seen.

Shrugging, he grabbed a fresh T-shirt and boxers-the result of a Wal-Mart shopping spree he’d gone on with his first paycheck-and stepped into the hall.