The Cage Keeper (4 page)

“We will both go to the latrine, Al. You will walk in front of me. That trucker is fast asleep in his rig, so you can stop thinking of him coming to your rescue. Also, I am quite adept at throwing this knife and making it stick. Get the picture?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Get out of the car after me.”

After we finish urinating and splashing water on our faces Elroy has me open my trunk to see I don’t know what. He lifts my spare tire and looks at the empty space beneath it. Then he opens my toolbox and rummages through that. There’s a slow wind coming from the ice fields behind the rest room. It’s going right through my jacket. It’s freezing the water left over on my face. I look at Elroy bending over into my trunk then think of myself taking one step forward and slamming the lid down on his head. My blood’s rushing through my temples as I see it happening, but again, my body doesn’t make a move. Then he finds what I forgot I had there: a short coil of heavy tow rope Mark lent me this past August after my car stalled for the second time in downtown Denver. Elroy straightens then closes the trunk, his knife handle sticking out of his heavy jeans jacket pocket, my brother’s rope in his hand.

“Get in the front seat, Al. It’s bedtime.”

IN THE LAST SIX or seven hours I have probably slept two. My leather jacket is bunched up between my shoulder blades. My toes are frozen solid. And I see my breath shoot in front of me every time I exhale. Right now I’m looking straight up past my steering wheel and out of my windshield at the branches of the spruce tree we parked under. I can see the sky through them. It must be around two or three o’clock, though the way my hands are tied to the steering wheel I don’t feel like straining my neck muscles to check my watch and see. The rope runs down my body, joins my feet and legs together, and is tied to the armrest of the passenger door. My legs are bent up in a right angle and my butt is resting on the hump between the seats. Elroy’s got the remaining rope tied to his wrist in the back, or so he told me just before he went to sleep. He is the most quiet sleeper I have ever not heard. You can hardly hear him breathe even. More than once I shined my light in his sleeping face back at the center just to make sure he hadn’t died. And more than once he would wake up cussing about his civil rights and invasion of privacy and every other piece of legal horse-shit that came to his immediately alert brain. But no such luck now; he is definitely alive and breathing in the backseat of my car. I can feel it through the rope.

A little while after he nodded off I heard the eighteen wheeler start up. I prayed that the driver would pull close enough to my car to look down and catch a glimpse of a guy tied up in the front seat. But he just meshed his gears and was gone. Now, hours later, the insides of all the windows are fogged up with my and Elroy’s breathing. So nobody’s going to see us by accident unless they open a door, which is what I am hoping now, that a passing state trooper will pull in to check on the lone parked car with the misted-over windows. But I can’t even concentrate on that. My mind is just bouncing around from one wired thought to another. I still can’t forgive myself for not clocking Elroy with the trunk lid. One hard whack; that’s all it would’ve taken. Or I could have at least pulled the knife out of his jacket pocket and thrown it onto the highway, then made a run for it. I hear the cars passing by and I think of all those Jews who just climbed into those trains knowing they were being sent to their deaths. I remember seeing film footage of that in a sociology course back at Syracuse. There must have been one hundred people to each Nazi with a machine gun, but nobody even gave the guy eye contact. They just helped each other into the cattle cars without a word. I couldn’t understand that then. I’ve always kind of agreed with the old adage that right makes might. I’m not sure about all of that tied up in the cold of my own car though. I know I’m right but I can’t seem to make a move around this animal who, with his bare hands, beat to death some innocent guy on an army base a few years ago. And I don’t even know if it’s just fear that keeps paralyzing me. But I do know this: I’ve got to let myself sleep. I’ve got to rest and clear my head. The cold’s not bothering me much anymore. Except for my fingers and nose, I feel sufficiently numb all over. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. The caffeine has worn off and my heart has slowed back down to normal. With each breath I’m telling every frozen muscle in my body to let go. At least my wool cap is still on my head. I think of my eighth-grade teacher, Ms. Farnes, telling us how forty percent of a person’s body heat can leave an uncovered head. I see and hear other people in my life. The voices of some are in the mouths of others. Then I am no longer tied up in the front seat of my Monte Carlo; I see my father getting out of our station wagon. I have been playing one-on-one with Mark and am all sweaty and dirty and feel good. My father’s tie is loosened and his collar is unbuttoned. His glasses are in his left shirt pocket, but not in his case. He looks sick, like he is about to throw up, and I can see that his eyes are red. I say: “Hey Dad, what’re you, sloshed?” He turns towards me, then walks as steadily as any human being ever walked in his life. He hugs me harder than he ever hugged me before. He looks over my head at Mark coming out of the house, the screen door slamming behind him, then, in words that don’t have enough air behind them, he says, “Oh sweet Jesus. Somebody has killed your mother.”

HUNGER IS WHAT woke me. Hunger and cold. My eyes feel like two desert pools dried up in my head, so I know I haven’t slept enough. The car smells like Elroy’s booze breath and I can’t see through the frost of the windshield, but night has definitely fallen. I stretch my neck and turn my wrist through the rope. It’s six-seventeen on my digital watch. I let my head fall back and my cap comes off. I can’t remember ever being this hungry before. I think the circulation has been cut off in my hands and feet. And my butt has frozen itself to the hump between the seats. I want to clear my bowels and brush my teeth. I can’t hear Elroy’s breathing but, again, that’s nothing new. I rest my head back on my cap and think of sticking that huge Bowie into his gut when I hear somebody whistling outside. It’s a cheerful dopey tune; something Roy Rogers would whistle to Trigger. Christ, maybe it’s a cop. The back door opens, the ceiling light goes on, and Douglas Agnes McElroy sticks his head inside.

“Rise and shine, Alley Oop. You got some driving to do.” He leans in between the bucket seats, puts the Bowie handle between his teeth, then unties my feet. He gets the knot loosened on my hands and as soon as he pulls the rope away from my wrists, he takes the knife from his mouth and rests the point of it on my chin. “I’m figuring it feels like the real thing to you now, son. Do not forget what I told you about playing hero with me. I propose to get through this all right. I suggest you do the same.”

“I’m hungry.”

“We will go take care of our toiletries. Food will be our first priority after that.”

THERE IS SOMETHING about ordering food from a plastic clown when you’ve got a convicted murderer at your side with his Bowie pressed against your jacket that makes you feel you might have died and gone to another planet. I got over this feeling and ordered four super-large tacos and two large Cokes from what sounded like a high school girl. When I pulled around to the pickup window she looked down and smiled at me and told me the price again: six fifty-seven. Her eyes were dark brown and so was her hair, but she had thin pale arms that seemed out of place when you saw how large her breasts were. She reminded me of Angela Nickerson, Maggie’s daughter, and when I handed her my money I didn’t even give her a signal that things weren’t so cool in my car. I just looked into her eyes, dark as a deer’s, and thought about that little homemade Christmas tree in Maggie’s room back at the center. I thought of that, and Angela, and pieces of her father’s skull lying on the floor at her feet, and how I hadn’t shaved or brushed my teeth and would like to. And when she gave me my change, handed me my food, and smiled her business smile, I couldn’t smile back. I was looking at her thin arms holding that bag of food out in the winter air for me to take, and I thought how weak they looked, how they seemed to be straining with just the weight of a few tacos and a couple Cokes. I was staring at a little brown mole on her white forearm and went into a gaze, one of those times when your mind and eyes just decide to lock in on something then space out on you until you can almost feel the drool on your chin. “Here’s your food, sir.”

McElroy nudged me with the knife and I took the bag, put the car in gear, and got back on the highway. But I was still in some other focus. Elroy handed me a taco but as starved as I was I didn’t eat it right away. I sipped my Coke through a straw, looked straight ahead at the taillights of cars full of people who had homes to go to, and thought of my mother. I saw her getting into the little red Opel Sport my dad had given her as a present for their sixteenth wedding anniversary. I saw her getting into that in front of our house, driving up the street, stopping, waiting for a car to pass, then taking a right. This I saw walking up from where the high school bus had just dropped me off. It’s the last action I ever saw my mother make. It’s what I see instead of memories— warm greeting card memories you are supposed to have of dead people you love. Laughter and tears. Home-cooked meals. All that shit. I don’t see any of that. I just see my mother drive a hundred yards, stop, then take a right to her destiny, to some punk who snatches her purse then shoves her through a plate-glass window before he runs and gets away, that’s right, never gets caught. And my mother’s sweet head is just about severed on the floor of Adler’s pharmacy in downtown Syracuse.

My brother Mark was a junior at Syracuse University then. For about a month he and Frank Walters and another friend of theirs, John McLaughlin, they drove the streets looking, just looking. Twice they beat the shit out of kids because they wore leather jackets and carried big radios that they had probably stolen anyway. But then Mark almost got busted for drunk driving, stopped cruising for revenge, and became a hermit student. He changed his major from business to criminal justice. He said he wanted to be a cop but then he met Anne and married her a month before they both graduated. She told him she would not be one of those women who wait up nights to find out whether her husband has been shot down in the streets or not. So now Mark runs the tightest community corrections center in the mountain region. All of the inmates hate him there. They call him King Screw. But he’s got respect. He tells me community corrections is just a stepping-stone for him to penitentiary work. He wants to be a kick-ass warden. Then, who knows? Maybe even run for office. Get capital punishment legislation passed in every state in the country.

That’s how he’s handling things. And I guess I’ve taken a similar road. I have always wanted to be like Mark, not in every way, but in most. For me a criminal justice career became inevitable, was kind of an organic reaction to the new family I found myself living in all through the rest of high school and into college. My father, who never fired a weapon after his time in the army back in the early fifties, he’s got a complete arsenal now: shotguns, rifles, and ten kinds of handguns. Soon after my mother’s funeral he joined a rod and gun club, and after he became proficient with his first purchase, a .357-magnum revolver, he started taking us down to the range to learn too. Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon for almost a year my father, Mark, and I would go down to the club, put earphones over our heads, then for close to an hour we would blow away the shadowed silhouettes of men hanging from the north wall of the place. My father started drinking less, even socially, and stepped up his tennis playing from just once or twice a week to five or six times. That’s where he met Julie, down at the Maple Leaf Health Club. She’s ten years older than I am and six years older than Mark. She’s been with my dad for five years now. Whenever they go out on the town for the night my dad carries his .380 semiautomatic in his pants pocket. It’s small enough and flat enough it’s not conspicuous, and he can get it out of his pocket pretty fast. One night he drew it on a kid who stepped around the corner of Luigi’s restaurant to ask for a light.

I reach between the bucket seats for my second taco and napkin when my headlights light up a green sign that says: CASPER 49 MILES. Elroy hasn’t said a word since before the Jack in the Box, but he just burped without covering his mouth; it’s the Elroy I know and hate. The anarchist essayist. The silent killer troll. Fuck you, Elroy. Just see how much farther I drive you, you sonuvabitch. I wipe my face, look straight ahead, and sip from my Coke. Then Elroy opens the glove compartment and pulls out my Rand-McNally map. He stares at it, kind of weighs it in his hand, then looks straight ahead and says: “Pull the car over, Al.” His voice is low and steady. I get into the breakdown lane and stop. I wait a second then turn to face him when his fist slams into my left eye, snapping my head back against the window. Then he is holding me by my jacket collar, touching his knife to my throat.

“I have lived without insurance all my life, kiddie cop. I can finish it now. I can cut your fucking throat right this second. It is up to you.”

“I forgot it was there. I swear.” I am looking into his steely eyes. They look hurt. I feel nothing.

He lets go of my jacket. “Get out at the same time I do.”

We get out of my car together. Cars light us up as they pass us. A freezing wind hits me in the face. My eye aches. It’s closing up.

“Come over here.”

I walk around the front of the car to the passenger door and Elroy. The wind is blowing his gray hair back from his face, and his eyes are red and watery. I get inside, and as he ties my hands and feet and leaves the rest of the coil in front of me, I think how crazed he looks. He still smells like that French booze, but it’s gotten worse after sitting inside his guts. He smells like sweet formaldehyde and sweat.

We’re back on the highway and Elroy’s driving, hunched up behind the wheel. “I guess I’m just about the lowliest creature you’ve ever come across, Al.”