The Four Stages of Cruelty (2 page)

Josh was my property now, so I checked his bracelets and gave his chain a couple of quick jerks to make sure they were fastened, even though the Keeper had done the snapping himself. Then I directed Josh to the door with a little more force and spite than necessary. He almost tripped at the first few steps; then he remembered how to do it. You cup your hands near your groin, crouch so that your back is hunched and the vertical chain is slackened, and take high-speed baby steps to keep the ankle chain from striking taut. They call it the shackle shuffle, and it makes you move like a bitch.

A brown sedan was waiting at the curb edge. Wallace had lent me his car so I wouldn’t have to pay for the miles. Josh sat in back on the right so I could keep an eye on him, like a child in a car seat, but he was so meek and glum I had to remind myself to keep a steady awareness. He turned rather suddenly as we pulled onto the old post road, and I realized he was looking back at Ditmarsh. The high walls were spotlighted but otherwise dim and hard to make out, but the dome was glowing like an orb. I bet he was thinking it should have been a lot longer before he saw the outside of that house, and I bet he was hoping without hope it would be a lot longer before he saw it again. Then it was all silence along the highway, my directions spread out beside me.

I typically tried not to converse at any length with inmates—it made the job easier when you saw through every attempt at banter or connection like it was one more grift or lie—but the holdout got harder as the day went on and on.

We hit the Super 8 motel first, and I parked next to the room door and walked Josh out. His mother opened the door and met us, hugged him, and thanked me. She was older than I expected.

“Please come in,” she offered—as if there were any other way this was going to play out.

I showed appreciation for her kind hospitality, and we occupied the room like members of the same family, barely enough space in and around the twin beds to avoid one another’s limbs. I unshackled Josh more gently than I had handled him before, and he looked at me for instructions.

Mrs. Riff took over. “Your suit’s hanging on the bathroom door hook. I turned the shower on to steam the wrinkles out.”

“Is that okay?” he asked me, and only moved after I gave my assent. I’m sure it was strange for his mother to see that.

Josh went into the bathroom. I wished the TV was on, a blast of Fox News to smother the uncomfortable hush. I could smell Mrs. Riff’s perfume over the staleness of industrial carpet and bedspread fabric. Distracted by other thoughts, she put on a watch and some rings, and touched her hair awkwardly, like someone newly blind. There was a pinkness to her cheeks that did not look healthy. When she noticed me again, she seemed almost startled by my presence in the room, so I told her I was very sorry for her loss, but in such a stiff and
trite way I probably came across more uniform than human. She nodded in acknowledgment and looked down at her lap, her mouth tight with irritation. The vibe I got was that at some level, below the politeness and the prim dignity, she nurtured a little spark of hate, and held me, and those like me, responsible for everything bad that had happened to her precious boy. While this pissed me off, it also settled my own anxiety and gave me a nice sense of distance from her concerns. I did not want to get personal, and the wretched scene was already too social worker by far.

When Josh came out wearing an off-the-rack black suit, his mother fussed with it until she was satisfied, and then they forgot about me and sat on the edge of the bed and talked. I removed myself to the deepest corner of the room and did a good job of keeping my ears shut, even though it was impossible not to absorb the long pauses and sniffs, the unspeakably hesitant touches of sleeves and shoulders, as though real contact was as forbidden as it would have been in the VnC room. Josh was hunched over and twisted away like someone hiding from a physical blow. Mrs. Riff looked at the tissue in her palm. Tough haul, I thought, but then again, those are the dividends you earn serving a major bit in a maximum security penitentiary. Lost birthdays, missed weddings, whole lives. Any sympathy I felt always curdled a little when I thought about the reasons they were inside in the first place. I did not know what Josh had done, but it had to be something nasty, horrific, or repeated to end up at Ditmarsh.

When it was time to go, I didn’t put the shackles back on, but used the plastic zip cuffs instead, practically invisible if
Josh kept his hands clasped and those overly long sleeves extended. Of course it was ridiculous to feel as though he were less an escape threat in his civilian suit than he had been in his orange smocks, but it seemed obscene to send him to the funeral in chains. Mrs. Riff took her own car, and we followed close behind. They walked into the funeral home together, me hovering in the near background. Casket open. A waxy, sharp-nosed face fixed in stern bewilderment. That cloistered, stuffy room. All kinds of memories for me, my own father’s death so recent. I counted seven mourners total, and one of them might have been an employee of the funeral home. Part of me was relieved; the fewer who knew about this craziness, the better. I wondered if it had been arranged that way, in which case the paltry attendance seemed another sacrifice that might have made a prodigal son’s shame even harder.

Once the service ended, mother and son hugged long and hard; then we parted so she could follow her husband’s body to the cemetery and we could go back to the house on the hill. Spell broken, I became all business and made Josh change back into his orange jumpsuit right there in the reception room, then shackled him up again, walked him out, and slid him into the back of the sedan. He rested his head against the cold glass and barely looked up until we were on the highway and he announced that he needed to hurl.

I didn’t understand the urgency at first, but then I saw him bucking, and I said, “Oh, no you’re not,” even as I took a shoulder check, launched the car across three lanes of traffic, slapped the hazards on with my palm, and watched the side
mirror for oncoming. Before I could get out and open his door, he vomited on the vinyl seats.

His coughing and crying barked so violently it sounded as though he were being rent from within. I didn’t care, or rather, I took all the caring I normally would have felt and zipped it up, knowing too well that inmates lie and fake and induce illness right before they ruin your career or take your life. So I dragged him across the vomit and out of the car and pressed him up against the door with a baton—what we in the business affectionately call a fuckstick—until I could get some zips free to secure his shackles to the doorframe.

“He hated me!” Josh said. “He hated everything about me!”

And he moaned and coughed, thick strands of spittle hanging over his mouth like tendrils of skin. Then softer, losing energy, shaking hard, so that I knew he was in physical shock, “I didn’t know … I didn’t even know. Oh, God, he hated me so much.”

I’d jammed the fuckstick into his back so hard I’d probably bruised his kidney. Did I really think he’d try to escape—out there on the side of a highway, chained ankles to wrists, covered in puke and snot, wearing orange pants? And yet it’s the astonishing unlikelihoods that generate the most hilarious ridicule in the CO room—those legendary fuckups dreaded by all.

He repeated “I didn’t know” like it was a childish prayer, so often, so weakly that it became necessary, in that shriveled, suspicious part of me, to process what he was talking about.

“Didn’t know what?” I asked, standing back, watching him carefully.

He hung his head and muttered that he hadn’t known his father was going to die, hadn’t known about the cancer, hadn’t even known he was sick. His father had never forgiven him. And in dying without reaching out, his father had punished him in the cruelest possible way.

I’ve witnessed some Jerry Springer moments in my career, but this was a new twist in the ever-varied fucked-upedness of family.

“You didn’t know your father was sick until Keeper Wallace told you he’d died?” At the funeral home I’d heard whisperings about brain cancer and the doctor visits, and out of that blur of detail I’d gathered that the progression from symptom to treatment to hospitalization and deathbed had been a quick seven-month tumble. But the boy hadn’t been told?

He kept mentioning his mother’s visits, and how she hadn’t said anything, how she’d acted as though everything was all right, had excused his father’s absence by claiming he was too busy, overwhelmed with work, unable to join them.

“He hated the goddamn sight of me. He always did,” Josh said, and then he started throwing up again, this time on the outside of the car door. It was tough to watch, even for a softy like me. He hung on the zip wires as though his parachute had gotten tangled in a tree, and tried to wipe his face with his shoulder.

“I’m real sorry,” he said for the fifteenth time, meaning the puke and the standing on the side of the road.

“Not as sorry as me.” The pissed-off, hard-ass CO in me talking, the one who waded thigh high through the shit flow
of lousy lives. I needed to reassemble some order. I popped the trunk, stared inside for a few seconds, came up with a gray flannel blanket and a bottle of blue windshield wiper fluid, cracked open the bottle, and proceeded to splash the fluid judiciously inside the car. The mess ran along the vinyl like an overflowed toilet, and I sopped it up as best I could with the blanket.

“You are not sitting in the front seat with me, you are not sitting in the front seat with me,” I said to him, myself, and whoever else might have been listening in the cars streaming by.

But the backseat was soaked, so I ended up making him my wingman with three zip lines linking his chained right wrist to the handle above the passenger window. I even wiped his face with a tissue from my pocket.

We drove for another half hour, windows wide to clear any remnants of the smell, aching with the cold air, before I turned off suddenly at a highway McDonald’s. Why did I do it? The weakest of weak moments. He was still crying, and there was revolt in my heart, and I decided suddenly and almost violently that if I didn’t give that kid a moment to collect himself before going back inside, he might not make it, figuring if a few chicken nuggets cost me my job, they might just save my soul.

“Can your stomach handle some food?”

Meek and surprised, he just nodded, and then he told me he had twenty bucks that his mother had slipped him. It was a stupid thing to say, verboten to bring currency inside, but instead of punishing him or confiscating the bill, I told him the Happy Meal was on me.

I ordered food and a pop for him, coffee for me. At the service window the uniformed attendant looked shocked at the sight of us together in the front seat. I noticed the camera. Watch that show up on fucking YouTube, I thought. When the food got passed in, I pulled away and lodged the car in the empty lot close to the exit. I rearranged the zip cuffs so one of his hands was free enough to eat, then handed him the bag.

Though I was used to unpleasant messes, the faint smell of the vomit and the greedy way he slurped his food made me squeamish. They all did that, as though even the bite in their mouths could get taken away. I asked him if he felt any better. He told me it had settled his stomach and that it tasted really really good. Then he went to work on the extra-large fries.

I took a sip of coffee and watched the highway.

“Have you worked at Ditmarsh a long time?” he asked. Like he was new on the job and we were colleagues.

“About three years.” I said nothing more. Watching him eat, I wondered if I should have gotten him two meals.

“I saw you once, in the infirmary,” he said.

Great, I thought, my very own stalker, and added my own inanity to our conversation.

“Ditmarsh must be a big adjustment for a person like you.”

I meant privileged, middle-class, so much better off than the average hard-timer as to seem like a different species.

“I’m starting to get used to it,” he said. And then he began talking about his father again, and the shock of not knowing he’d been sick, and how he’d always thought they’d have the time to work something out between them.

I know what he wanted: unconditional love. He wanted to be told that it didn’t matter what he’d done or how bad he’d been, that the love itself was limitless. But he didn’t get any of it, and lacking the smallest proof, he wondered if there’d been any love at all. At some level, conscious or cancer-addled, dear old dad had chosen not to make peace with his son. Some fathers are like that, incapable of getting over shock, incapable of dealing with the jagged complexities of an imperfect relationship. I thought of my own father.

“In my experience,” I said, “people die exactly as they live. You don’t get that deathbed reconciliation.”

He nodded, as though what I said actually resonated. Part of me wished I’d sugared it up a little. But maybe Josh appreciated the hard truths for what they were—those rocks you get to stand on. Anyway, that was our moment of connection, the link that led to everything else.

We drove the last stretch of highway, then took the old post road, and when he saw it, I could almost feel the tightness come over him again. Ditmarsh loomed on the hill above the river like a fortress, the dome radiating a gentle light above the walls. There could have been a city below it. A planetarium. It was difficult to picture the inmates warehoused in the dark ranges.

The parking lot was mostly empty. We were ahead of schedule. I stopped the car, turned off the lights, and remained in the driver’s seat. When I spoke next, the sternness was back. “You realize, of course, that none of this happened.” I wanted to make it intensely clear for his sake as well as my own. “You mention it to anyone, and your life will be shit.” Both of our lives might be shit. “I’m not warning
you. I’m stating a fact. Because there are people in there, people you may even trust, who will hold this against you with a level of resentment you may not be able to imagine.” He said that he understood, though it looked to me as though his comprehension was all murky and confused.