The Fortress of Solitude (65 page)

“I can’t believe it. Where you
been
, son?”

He spoke as though resuming where we’d left it, my year before graduation from Stuyvesant. As though I’d been at high school in Manhattan these decades, and now we only hadn’t run into one another, to exchange a quick handclasp on Dean Street, for a few long months.

So where
had
I been? I answered, “California.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard from your pops you was out that way. Someday I got to get out there myself—
the Golden State
, damn.” Like Marilla, Mingus merely hadn’t gotten around to it. “Dillinger’s gone way out west, checkin’ out the Golden State. Yet despite how the boy’s livin’ large, he don’t diminishize his roots, he comes back to
represent
.”

Mingus was authoring a romance, wrapping my awkwardness in his old raconteur’s warmth. It was nonsense and a gift I took gladly. No mention of the special nature of the setting for our reunion, though his jive happened to be piped over an intercom. The setting didn’t bear mentioning. His smile’s warmth, the way he beamed himself across that thickness of Plexiglas, suggested a capacity for a binocular vision which excluded surroundings. Recalling how the city had reeled from us as we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway gazing at spray-painted stone, I thought now that that had always been one of Mingus’s talents.

“Arthur couldn’t come,” I said, as if Arthur were the unfaithful one. “He sent up some money for the commissary, though.”

“Arthur’s always lookin’ out for a brother,” said Mingus. He didn’t mean to sting me, only to bathe Arthur, too, in beatific gratitude. “I know I let Arturo down a bunch of times, but my man always picks up the phone.”

“I count on him for news of you,” I lied. I hadn’t been any more in touch with Arthur than I had with Mingus. And I hadn’t heard news of Mingus until Abraham and Francesca raised the subject in Anaheim, at dinner with Zelmo Swift.

“Little brother’s doing fine for himself, too,” said Mingus, freeing me from this line of talk. “Done got fat and happy.”

“Well, fat.”

Mingus wheezed, too much laughter for the joke. “Ho
snap
,” he said, putting on a show. “I
heard
that. I been tellin’ the boy he got to shed some poundage he wants to snag himself a
wife
.”

The word was peculiarly silencing: heading to forty, we’d fallen laps behind life’s course. We had no wives. Mingus, at least, had an excuse for why he hadn’t been dating lately. About Abby there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound self-pitying or fatuous. I felt the distance between Dean Street and my Berkeley life as an unbridgeable gulf.

At the lapse I tuned in the murmur around us: one-sided talk into the visitors’ telephones, the unself-conscious yakking of two corrections officers at the door, and, from one of the booths, a voice gummy with weeping.

“I saw Junior,” I said.

“At the house?”

“Yesterday. With Arthur.”

“My old man,” said Mingus. He spoke simply now, his gaze shy. “He’s hanging in there.”

“It was good to see him,” I said.

“He must have been glad to see you.”

I couldn’t fathom a reply, so we fell to silence a second time. Mingus had abandoned his patois, and the trumped-up garrulity that had gone with it. I was ashamed to want it back.

Mingus smoothed his long contrails of mustache, stroked his chin. There were flecks of spittle on his side of the glass between us, evidence of his actor’s enthusiasm, now gone. I met his rheumy eyes and saw a stranger. I could no more ask Mingus who he’d become—whether incarceration had broken him the first time, at eighteen, or what had led him back inside after his first release, or what his life had meant to him in the time between his two sentences—than I could imagine how to confess myself to him. I was helpless to say who I’d become in California, or to let him know I remembered everything between us despite it all.

“Arthur says Robert’s inside too,” I said, despising myself for the false casualness, for my use of
inside
. My heart was thudding now.

“Plenty of brothers you’d recall from the old days inside now,” said Mingus. There might have been rebuke in his words, I wasn’t certain. “Donald, Herbert, whole bunch of them.”

I didn’t remember Donald or Herbert. Perhaps Mingus knew this.

“You and Robert see a whole lot of each other?” Dopey questions poured from me, helplessly.

“I put myself out for Robert until I couldn’t
afford
to no more.” Now there came a steely note of institutional savvy in Mingus’s voice, and his gaze blinked from mine. “Our boy Robert put himself in the way of some trouble. They had to shift him into protective custody.”

“Oh.”

“I told him but the poor-ass snake can’t listen.”

To divert the anger that seemed to be unstoppering, I said, “Actually, Arthur sent cash for both of you.”

“Put mine to Robert’s name. Boy could use it.”

“Really?”

“It’s not too late for him to pay his debt down. Anyway, I’m in a protest with these motherfuckers, they took my stamps.”

“Stamps?”

“For letters. Postage stamps, man.”

“What happened?”

“I had thirty dollars of stamps in my bunk down at Auburn. When they moved me up here they were supposed to be transferred—” Here Mingus launched into a torturous account of a paperwork error. The Watertown facility prohibited stamps because they resembled paper money, could be used as scrip. The postage had been meant to be dissolved into Mingus’s commissary account, had been placed instead with belongings to be returned to him after release. Mingus filed protest forms, but the seized stamps were stranded in a limbo between the two prisons, the two sets of rules. Mingus retailed this story with a joy-in-persecution that could only be called Kafkaesque. In a world of deprivations, I suppose the smallest might become a fetish. It made my head hurt. I wanted to scream
Forget the stamps, for God’s sake I’ll buy you thirty dollars’ worth of stamps if you want!
But the stamps were Mingus’s cause, and so he railed on. What was thirty dollars compared to a cause? Too, in this place a talker’s gifts were only encouraged in one direction, to stanch the wound which bled hours, days, years. I tried not to lose patience with the monologue.

“I brought you something else,” I said, when Mingus paused for breath.

He scowled confusion.

I dug in my pocket as discreetly as I could. “I’ve been keeping it for you,” I said, and pushed the ring to the edge of the Plexiglas, like a checker I wanted Mingus to king.

“Put that away,” he said. He waved, a low flat gesture which seemed to say
Keep it under the table
. “They’ll confiscate it.”

I covered the ring with my palm. Still, I couldn’t keep from avowing my mission of rescue. “This is why I came—I mean, I wanted to see you. But the ring belongs to you.”

“It never did.”

“It does now, then.”

“Shit.”

Mingus had grown cold and wary, as though I’d asked him to recall things he couldn’t afford to.

“How can I get it in to you?” I said, thinking moronically,
If I’d known about the hermetic seal, I’d have baked a cake
.

“Put it away.”

“You could use it to break out of this place,” I said quietly.

His laugh now was bitter, and authentic.

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t even use that thing to break
into
this place.”

The rest, until my time was up, was small talk. Mingus wanted news of my father, so I described the honor he’d received in Anaheim. I mentioned Abby, omitted her color. We even talked over the stamps again. Mingus asked questions and didn’t listen to my answers. A wall had fallen between us. Afterward, I was led out, my knuckles inspected again for the phosphorescent stamp of a free man. On my way out I deposited two hundred dollars into Robert Woolfolk’s commissary account, keeping my promise.

chapter  
12

I
nvisible in twilight, my eyes picked out stuff I’d missed the first time crossing the yard.

On concrete clean of the slightest scrap of litter or leaf, a single latex glove, flipped inside out in the haste of its removal.

Pinned to the fence, a hand-pained sign:
DON
’
T FEED THE CATS
!

Past the fence, shadow-blobbed trees. Sensuous unreachable hills. The moon a pale disk snuck into sky before sunset.

It wasn’t either day or night when I crept back inside the gates of Watertown Correctional, but something in between: daynight, the hour of the changing of the guards.

I’d only had to lay on my motel bedspread flipping cable channels for half an hour—Mets game;
Emeril
;
Sunburn
, with Farrah Fawcett and Charles Grodin; and
Teddy Pendergrass: Behind the Music
—before Mingus’s words penetrated my brain in their full profundity:
You couldn’t even break
into
this place
. I’d heard them as merely scoffing, when in fact they spoke of my whole life’s flinching from what mattered most—not California, dummy, but Brooklyn. Not Camden College, but Intermediate School 293. Not Talking Heads, but Al Green. “No way out but in” (cf. Timothy Leary, 1967). “The old way out is now the new way in” (cf. Go-Betweens,
Spring Hill Fair
, 1984). Behind the Music, sure. But I needed to go behind the walls. My first pass at the prison had been too cursory, a tourist’s, as ever. I had to earn Mingus’s escape with my own willingness to go inside, to show it could be done. I’d known Aeroman had one last mission: now I saw it couldn’t be conducted by surrogate. I’d wear the ring myself, once more.

This certainty came like a fever. The motel room seemed to pitch, the walls to crawl, like Ray Milland’s in
The Lost Weekend
. I broke a sweat, felt my bowels loosen dangerously. Lying still, apart from the twitching of my thumb on the remote, I sought a channel to distract me from my intent, uselessly. So I sprang from the bed, rinsed the clammy perspiration from my throat, and spent five minutes or so under the motel sink’s fluorescent, trying to stare myself out of what I was about to do. Then I repacked my small bag and checked out.

I hid my rental car in the stadium-sized lot of a shopping mall at the edge of town, camouflaging it in a sea of like models. Recalling the metal detectors, I slid off my belt and watch and left them under my seat, then locked my wallet in the glove compartment, not wanting to carry it inside, either. I also removed the car’s key from its bulky ring and tucked it into my shoe, like sixth-grade mugging money. Finally I slid on Aaron Doily’s ring and walked invisible out of the mall lot, then made my way to the prison along two miles of well-groomed highway shoulder, past signs reading
DO NOT STOP FOR HITCHHIKERS
.

CO parking was down the hill, behind the trailer where I’d begun my first voyage inside, earlier that day. There, the evening shift trickled in, one or two at a time, in ten-year-old compacts and pickup trucks, to receive perfunctory badge checks at a manned booth, and a glance into bag lunches for signs of contraband. I had no trouble slipping past the cyclone-fence gate behind a Datsun—it felt as though a visible man could have done it, cloaked in haze and exhaust. My guide-Datsun took its place in a scattering of cars. Its driver was a pearishly short man with Elvis sideburns, wearing a Bills jersey. He paused in his open door for long-sighing finish of a smoke before crushing the butt into the gravel lot, then headed for the entrance. I fell in close behind him, matching my invisible footfalls to his own crunching steps. I staggered slightly, and recalled the special nature of invisible clumsiness, the inner-ear panic that seemed to go with appearancelessness. Aping Mr. Pear’s low-center-of-gravity lope helped me find my rudder, though.

The officers had their own A/B door, where they scrutinized one another through a glass partition. This required a hairbreadth maneuver: ducking through, I was almost clipped by the B door, and in hustling to avoid it grazed the heel of Pear’s shoe with my Converse high-top’s toe, nearly giving him what in grade school we would have called
a flat tire
. Pear whirled. I backed to the gate, clammed my mouth. Pear squinted, saw nothing, believed his eyes, carried on. I let out breath. The prison groaned and hummed, deep in the floors, and the air was full of a distant cascade of clanking—enough to cover an invisible man’s inopportune gasps for air.

So I trailed my unknowing escort across the moon-pale yard. We passed into a low bunker showing lit offices behind unbarred windows, a building I hadn’t glimpsed in my official visit, one with no cell blocks that I could see. Pear turned through an unlocked doorway, headed for a door marked
MEN
’
S LOCKERS
. It was there I realized he’d played his full part, that I had no reason to follow him farther. I’d need to find other bodies to trail—it would have been impossible dumb luck if Pear had happened to lead me to the exact block where Mingus was celled.

I parted from him there, and wandered through into the offices. The air here was free of the tang of authoritarian fear I’d smelled in the visitor’s hall. Instead the place was as innocuous as a small-town Department of Motor Vehicles. Two CO’s flirted at a coffee machine, the woman with a black crew cut, but zaftig in her uniform. Two more sat with clipboards, yawning at paperwork. Another pair, one slurping a Coke, the other tapping down a pack of cigarettes, watched a clock-radio-sized television, showing late innings of the same Mets game I’d glimpsed in my motel. Lime-green walls were disguised with school photos, newspaper cartoons, garage calendars. Ten years ago they might have featured pinups, but the presence of female guards prevented that. I supposed there were still pinups in the men’s lockers, though.

While I stood flattened just through the doorway, Pear, now in his well-ironed grays, and belt loaded with baton and keys, waddled into the room.