The Fortress of Solitude (64 page)

“See, Arthur,” he said, taking just a glance from the television, which was tuned to
Judge Judy
. The television was new, and I sensed it got more use these days than the stereo. “I always told you Little Dee would do us proud.”

“Sure,” said Arthur. “Here, Barry, I brought you something too.” He slapped at his pockets until he found it: a fresh pack of Kools, which he tossed to Barry’s lap. “You know that warning about how smoking is bad for your health? Very few people realize I actually
wrote
those words.”

“Y’all a couple of gifted children, I’ll give you that.”

“Of course, they changed them all around, took out most of my best stuff.”

“That’s their prerogative, though, isn’t it, Arthur?”

“Yeah.”

“You got to
grant
them their pre
rog
ative.”

“I guess so.”

“I heard
that
.” Barry reached to graze fingertips with Arthur, still not neglecting the television show. He’d pushed the cigarettes off with the box set.

“You want to hear the CDs?” I said stupidly. “They sound really great.” Barry’s publishing stake meant he’d see some money from the box, eventually. It should add to the trickle of royalties which presumably kept him in the house. Maybe I was wrong to think he should be proud of the monument too. Maybe the Barry I wanted to be able to give the box to was the Barry of 1975. That man, like the one in the photograph, was as inaccessible to Barry now as he was to me.

“I know what all them old records sound like.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I’ll check them out some other time, man.” He spoke slowly and carefully, and I knew I should drop it. “I don’t have no CD player, anyhow.”

I just nodded.

“You know that Fran, that girl your old man took with?” Changing the subject, his voice grew gentle again. “She’s all right. She’s been looking out for me, you know.”

“I heard.”

“He’s lucky, find a girl like that.”

“I know.” Everyone agreed, from A to Zelmo. I only hoped Abraham did too. It was then that I remembered what I’d wanted to ask my father about the new paintings. Were the portraits of Francesca an excuse to stare, to try to see through the skin of his new situation, this woman who’d taken Rachel’s long-abandoned place? Was he trying to fathom Francesca? Or had she asked him to paint her, requested he look with that intensity? Who’d sought the confrontation the portraits recorded?

There was a long silence, filled by the television’s yammer. I began to think of the rental car again, and the road I meant to cover this day. My heart was bogging on Dean Street, but it was Mingus I had to see.

Barrett Rude Junior focused his eyes on mine for the first time in nearly twenty years, perhaps reading my mind. His gaze at last pierced the caul that had covered it even when he’d found us at his door, and through his short inspection of the photograph and words on the box set’s cover.

“What brings you round to see this old washed-up singer, Little Dylan?” he said. He gave
washed-up singer
some of his old melodic juice, and I felt a twinge in my saliva glands, as though I’d dipped my tongue to cocaine.

“I just wanted to give you the records,” I said. I couldn’t call them
CDs
now.

“You done that,” he said, a little coldly.

“And we’re going up to visit Mingus. I mean, I am.”

“Huh.” Barry clouded. He grimaced in concentration at something in Judge Judy’s realm, perhaps a ruling going the wrong way. Someone had to keep a watch on such stuff.

“Maybe if you’ve got any message for him—”

Barry chopped with a clawed hand. Mingus in Watertown was too distant, that was what the gesture seemed to say. Dean Street was real, Francesca and Arthur were real and worth acknowledging. One brought soup, the other cigarettes. Judge Judy was real enough: she was in front of his eyes. I’d come and proposed that Barry consider California and 1967 and Watertown and those were all too remote, too tiresome.

“You know I’m watching my morning shows,” he said, addressing Arthur. “I’m not awake yet, man. Come around tonight and we’ll party.”

“Okay, but Dylan’s gotta head,” said Arthur. “He just wanted to say hello.”

“Tell the boy I’m watching my morning shows.”

Arthur walked me to my car, and apologized. “I should have told you not to mention Mingus,” he said. “It sort of shuts him down.”

“What did Mingus do to him?”

“It’s not that simple.”

I’d stashed my bag in the rental’s trunk already, and said my goodbyes, promising Abraham and Francesca I’d spend a day with them on the other end of my jaunt upstate, before I returned to California. I was ready to go.

“Here,” said Arthur. He frisked himself again and produced an unsealed envelope full of cash, evidently counted in advance. He slapped it into my hand. “You can’t give it to them directly, they can’t have money inside. You have to contribute it to their commissary accounts, then they, you know, take it out in cigarettes, or whatever. Hundred apiece.”

“Who’s
they
?”

“You know how I was saying to Marilla it seems like everybody’s in jail?”

“Sure.”

“Robert Woolfolk’s inside too. Watertown, same joint as Mingus.”

chapter  
11

I
was an amateur here, as much a neophyte crossing these thresholds as I’d been in L.A., penetrating Jared Orthman’s sanctum. Only now I was an amateur among professionals. All the black and Hispanic moms and grandmoms, all the stolid grown-up homeboys visiting homeboys, all but me knew how to visit a prison. Their expertise began to be shown just past the parking area, still well outside the outermost ring of wire, where taxicabs from the Watertown train station and the Greyhound terminal turned in a circle, where the chartered bus from New York, full of prisoners’ families, off-loaded and waited, the driver smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and picking tobacco from his teeth. There the visitors fell into a line, to trudge through a long shack, a small aluminum trailer on concrete blocks. It had been raining the afternoon before, as I drove out of the city, raining when I took my motel room just outside downtown, raining just a bit more this morning, as I breakfasted on sausage patties at a Denny’s. Now gray-green clouds wheeled above the prison and were mirrored in the puddled gravel at our feet. No one but me glanced up at the sky or down at the ground as I hurried in to take a place. Inside the trailer three guards—
correctional officers
, they were called—ran a bureaucratic outpost, one where we displayed ID, signed this form, then that one, giving address, stating relationship to prisoner, avowing comprehension of rules, etcetera. All but me knew the prisoner’s number they’d come to visit. I knew only Mingus’s name, causing a bored captain to have to flip open a fat binder to locate the corresponding digits. The bathroom in the trailer was our last chance to pee. Everyone took it, knowing the drill. I took my cue, fell in line. The trailer’s single pay phone was the last we’d see, and it too was in continuous use. I thought of calling home, trying for Abby. But the line of callers was too long.

The drill the visitors knew was above all that of waiting, in total deference. Complaint had been worn out of them some time ago. We waited in one secured zone after another, as we progressed by degrees inside the Watertown facility. First, approved by some unseen hand, we were taken from the trailer, along concrete paths marked with fluorescent orange-and-yellow paint. I found it impossible not to fear being rifle-shot from a high tower for crossing the painted stripes, for we were now under the gaze of the concrete towers, having put the trailer and parking lot, the whole of Watertown out of sight behind us. Then we passed through what was called an “A/B door”—a metal cage, wired so door A and door B couldn’t be unlocked at the same time. After we were inspected from within a windowed office there came a joltingly loud buzz to switch the circuit. Bolts slammed through the door behind us, and the door ahead opened to permit us to pass from the box.

With that we were inside, sort of. The prison wasn’t, as I’d pictured, a single edifice, a stone Gormenghast or iron Deathstar, but a sprawled compound of structures and fences and gates, a bleak ranch for human livestock. Between everything, safe zones, moats of speckless concrete, protected by razor wire. And, through doors unlocked for us by gray-clad, dronelike officers, the interiors were dully institutional, like 1960s-era school buildings or hospital emergency rooms, full of mint-green tile and wooden paneling worn to matte. Each place we encountered in this visitor’s gauntlet felt provisional, refitted for this temporary use, though they’d likely been used this way for years.

I later understood each prisoner had to be located, cleared, brought to the visiting room hidden deep inside the walls—there was no motive for the guards to finish processing us until the prisoner had been escorted to wait for us in that room. This was a place of canceled time: it had no value. We weren’t customers, to be pleased or reassured. Yet for all the waiting, I was always guiltily startled when my name was finally called, was always gazing in the wrong direction, distracted by the stuff pinned to the walls, yellowed notices, ten-year-old memos requiring
block sergeants to remain at posts until the arrival of replacement block sergeants
or forbidding
visitors skirts higher than 2 inches above the knees
or “
bear midriff
,” advertisements for shuttle services and child care, twelve-step and pregnancy clinic solicitations, and a long, hypnotic list, photocopied into a runic blur, of commissary items: toothpaste $1.39, comb 19¢, ketchup packet 19¢, jar chicken $1.79, jar lima beans 89¢, jar instant coffee $1.59, peanut butter $1.39, conditioner $1.29, hairnet 29¢, bun 25¢, chocolate bun 30¢, and on and on from there—the list was schemeless, incantatory, horrible.

“Ebdus.”

“Yes.”

“Belt and shoes off, contents of pockets in the wooden box.”

I waddled up, the only one who needed to be told.

“All in the box.”

I scooped out my pockets, offered them my shoes and belt.

“No pens.”

I shrugged helplessly.

“You can throw it out here.”

“Sure.” I put my ballpoint in the green steel garbage pail. Other visitors streamed through the metal detector while I fidgeted with my crap.

“What’s this ring?”

“Wedding ring.”

“Why ain’t you wearing it?”

“Uh, it’s my mother’s wedding ring. I just carry it around, it doesn’t fit.” Don’t make me put it on, I prayed. The officer squinted, frowned, let it pass. Something else was more interesting.

“What’s that?”

“What?”

She pointed to a single pale-orange conical earplug which had sprung to the top of the change and rental-car keys I’d heaped into the wooden tray along with the ring. The plug had unsquished, breathed open as foam shapes will do.

“Earplug,” I said.

“What for?”

I considered the appearance of the earplug, the vaguely sexual fitted form, through the officer’s eyes. “For the airplane,” I said.

She looked at it closely. Now I wondered if it more resembled drug paraphernalia.

“That’s for an
airplane
?”

“For blocking out the sound of the engines. So I can sleep.”

“Just one?”

“I guess I lost the other one.”

“Huh.”

I’d never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug. The officer scowled, but placed my tray full of stuff on the far side of the barrier. “Give me your right hand, sir.” From a stamp pad she marked my knuckles with some invisible stuff. “Take your box, sir.”

Once through, I began slipping into my shoes, repocketing my stuff.

“Sir, not here.”

“What?”

“You can’t stay in this area. Take your box to the bench in there.”

Five of us were called, to have our hands examined with a black-light wand that exposed a purplish emblem. The keys on the fistlike ring at the escort officer’s belt varied in size and shape, some as modern as my rental car’s ignition key, others as medieval as those wielded by the
Wizard of Id
’s bailiff. As our group strode the corridor I learned another subtle art, of slowing so that the officer, who’d lingered to relock the door behind us, had time to overtake us and open the door ahead.

I tried to absorb the others’ expert docility, as a balm. We were being transformed into inmates, I began to understand, as our reward for asking to go inside. We’d crossed seven or eight levels of lock-in before I was led to meet Mingus Rude in the visitor’s room, a bleach-redolent chamber of pale blue tile. There, we were sealed from one another by a Plexiglas window covered with minute scratchiti, and allowed to converse on telephones.

He had to speak for both of us, at first. I couldn’t find a word.

“D-Man. I can’t believe it’s you, shit.”

I nodded.

“Check you out. Boy done growed up. Hah!”

I’d journeyed back, from that distance at which Mingus had sometimes seemed an implausibility, a myth. Now he was before me, in the all-too-human flesh. His skin was skull-tight, the whites of his eyes sickly yellow, he wore his father’s ridiculous Fu Manchu mustache and a filthy red sweatshirt, his wide grin revealed a chipped incisor, his raised eyebrows a thin scar seaming his eyelid. Still, I persuaded myself he didn’t look bad, or so different from the man I remembered. In Junior’s photograph on the
Bothered Blue
cover I’d seen a resemblance to Mingus, but now, despite the mustache, I didn’t see Mingus in terms of his father. Mingus was only Mingus, the rejected idol of my entire youth, my best friend, my lover. Seated across from him, I knew he’d already grown into a man at some point before the last time I’d seen him, the day of the shooting. I hated to recall the boy I’d encountered in the mirror when I first arrived at my Camden dorm—the frightened boy, desperate to impress with his fresh punk haircut, who’d go on spend his life pretending not to have seen and known so much.