The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (45 page)

*

“I don’t know, I turned the other way and the prisoner just …” The guard produces two bloody ears.

“Shut up, they’ll hear you.”

“But Warden, what are we going to do?
”

“Shut up. The state examiners!” Bullfinch Warden snarls, “Get him out of here.”

“He’s so deep in solitary that
…”

“Not the perp. The tourist who got hurt. We can’t have this getting out
.”

*

You think we look charming. If you think about us at all. Hester lays out bayberry candles and you get all mushy: I love America. Delightful. You note the glint in the 12-over-12s that us hard-timers clean every day at dawn and you get all proud. American ingenuity. Quaint.

Well, you don’t have a clue. See, you can watch us cobble or pot until you get bored and then you can buy your barley sugar sticks and take the Ethan Frome or Hester Prynne shuttle back to the Molly Pitcher or the Crispus Attucks Parking Lot and get in your RVs and go. We stay.

I could tell you about charming. I could show you the underside of cute. Old Arkham Village is our nation’s heritage all right, but it’s not what you think. Rehabilitation, sure: let cons do time in pretty-pretty early America. Whittle by the fireplace with the mantel painted in authentic imitation cranberry-and-buttermilk paint, except we can’t have knives. Press criminals through the all-American grid. They come out the other side like potatoes, mashed. Homogenized. You can mold them into anything you want. It’s America all right, America straight out of Lizzie Borden by Simon Legree. We, your model prisoners, live by the numbers. Bullfinch Warden has thumbscrews and a gift for hurting people so the marks don’t show. Then there are the trusties with their Red Devils and their cattle prods. And at night, stalking the catwalks in our dormitory hundreds of feet below Betsy Ross Lot 3, the screws.

*

“Honey, let’s fuck here.”

“Eeek, what would our forefathers think?”

“Our forefathers are off duty. The place is closed.”

The tourists are lying together on the greensward. A noise comes out of the ground like a great, communal groan. She leaps out of her lover’s arms with a shriek. “Ernie, somebody’s listening, let’s get out of here!”

*

I am writing in my own blood, by what light sifts through the bars in the subterranean part of Old Arkham Village that you never see. This is our home nights until dawn, Thanksgiving and Christmas, when even public parks in the State of Massachusetts close.

And if we look all right to you in the daytime, bowing and smiling, answering your questions in eighteenth-century quaint—well. You don’t see the hidden monitors, trusties ready to rat if the smile slips even a half inch. Sonic barriers at the perimeters and electrified razor wire in the woods. The anklets and the belt.

I’ll come to the belt.

Meanwhile, my credentials. To prove that this is no political tract and definitely not a gag. It isn’t even a cry for help.

It’s a record of how things are. What it’s like in this tarted-up, chintzy, early American penal colony, me to you. I, Arch Plummer, am a lifer here in Old Arkham Village; for years I have been your friendly village blacksmith, answering your stupid questions as I hammer horseshoes and craft cheesy rings for your kids out of genuine, authentic replicas of eighteenth-century square-headed nails. You’ve seen me pull glowing metal out of the forge and bong horseshoes into shape to the voice of Jason Robards reading, “Under the spreading chestnut tree …”
The Village Blacksmith
, piped in here on a loop, and you’ve seen me hammer them on to the Percherons’ hooves and finish them off with the hasp while on the same loop some old mid-American broad named Jo Stafford belts out “The Blacksmith Blues.” Well I could tell you a thing or two about blacksmith blues.

Right, I am the village smithy. For my crimes. If you knew how many times I’ve heard that track or what would happen to me if I trashed the speakers or tried to walk away from the racket, you’d understand. Burn scars on my ankles where the anklets zapped me; mossy cracks in my skull from the beatings in solitary and beginning marks around my waist from the belt. I am a lifer.

A life sentence to Old Arkham Village, when all I did was steal a loaf of bread.

OK, OK
, it was a Lexus, but I didn’t know about the toddler in the back until we reached Cuernavaca, by which time the only logical thing to do was send the ransom note. I never laid a finger on him! I bought him the Pancho Villa serape and matching Mexican hat and put him on the bus home before I even mailed the note. And here I am with the hard-timers. Quiven, the decoy duck carver (murder One), and Roland the town printer (arson), Gemma the gingerbread maker (crime of passion, don’t ask; her husband was
shtupping
her mom), sweet Gemma—whom I happen to be in love with—and Laramie the cobbler (armed robbery, which I happen to know was a frame).

*

“It is well known that society’s dregs are recidivists beyond all hope of rehabilitation.” The warden fills the eighteenth-century meeting house, roaring like a frustrated warthog, and thirty visiting penologists flinch. “If we are going to warehouse them, let’s do it creatively. There is no enterprise without its profit
.”

*

If you find this. When you read this. Know this. Everything I’ve done I did for Joanna. And Quiven. Because of what happened to them when the only wrong thing they did was falling in love.

See, when the screws turn us out of the rack and march the work details out four hours before Old Arkham Village opens, nobody cares who walks next to who in the double line. Hard-timers, all of us, groggy from the pills, belching oatmeal and miserable in our pointed shoes and scratchy linsey-woolsey period costumes, shambling like the dead.

The screws are zoned out on these grim mornings; hung over from the orgy and bitter about being stuck on the predawn shift. Nobody notices if you’re marching with guys from your tier or sidling closer to the women in the foggy dawn, and if you do collide with her—Oh, Gemma … if Quiven collides with Joanna!—if you mutter to each other under cover of the guards’ shouting and get to know each other, everybody thinks what you two say to each other leads to zilch. The vise of a maximum security prison is too tight for love.

But Quiven got close to Joanna and fell in love anyway.

*

“Mommy, that lady doesn’t like me.”

“Of course she does, dear. It’s her job.”

“Then why is she crying?”

“Shut up. Shut up and eat your horehound drops.”

*

I didn’t even see it happening; I was conditioned to march on, like Pavlov’s dogs or the chicken that dances on the electrified turntable, like, soft-shoe like crazy to keep from getting shocked. Want to break and run? Want to kill and burn? Light some weed or relieve yourself behind a tree? Forget it. We look free to you, but we are not. Hidden by the costumes, there are the anklets, with
an extra added incentive for us. Under the shirts and leather jerkins, we wear the belts.

Electronic control. Now and ever. Day and night. We prisoners are reined in tight. We eat rotten meat and weevily bread and belch misery and resentment; we crawl out of boxes on these dank mornings and break rocks before we don our costumes for the Early American Card Shoppe or tickety-boo little Scrimshaw Junction, folding our hands underneath leather aprons and putting on prim Colonial smiles. But what do you tourists care?

We look all right to you.

*

“And to keep order we give them the illusion of rehabilitation. That they are learning new careers. Movement is not action, but we make them think it is. A true belief in movement can prevent action,” Bullfinch Warden says.

*

Appearances. Happy colonists. Model prisoners. If you look at all, you don’t see past the costumes and bland faces, but there is rage scorching the sweaty gauze under our wigs and murder in our hearts. Be careful what you do when you come into our shops and houses; be careful what you say! Rebellion etches the insides of our bellies; pry open our jaws and you’ll see fire. We mean to destroy Bullfinch Warden, but you happen to be closer. Beware. We could just rip a hole in your face.

Some days one of us forgets himself and strikes out or makes a break for it, but it never lasts long: the belts. The monitors. The drugs. No sleep. Debilitating food.

By the time you come at ten a.m. we’re so deep into it that we look right at home in the confected past. And if Quiven and Joanna fall in love and begin to plan, I don’t guess it, so how could you? I am in love with Gemma, but it’s only since the
auto-da-fé.

Quiven was in love with Joanna. He couldn’t leave it alone. Notes dropped in with the laundry, sweet Gemma slipped Joanna’s notes into the pockets of his fatigues for her, and in the men’s supply room Laramie Beckam did the same for Quiven. Quiven and Joanna had seconds to cherish and devour each other’s notes; the screws turn out the beds and check the toilets on the hour. Their love fed on messages in the code that desperate prisoners send, endearments
tapped out on prison pipes. They kept in touch! Love grew on the most insubstantial communication—veiled looks, those endearments murmured standing in line; one day I saw Quiven and Joanna lock fingers. I whispered, “Careful. You’ll get hurt!” but a trusty heard me and instead of working at the smithy I logged the twelve hours until the park closed with my head and hands clamped in the village stocks. I tried to warn him!

*

“But let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen. These people are animals. We are a warehouse here. Good penology is optimizing it.”

*

Quiven knew it would kill them both but he was in love. Still, love might have died of starvation if Bullfinch Warden hadn’t caught Joanna dreaming over her spinning wheel: a complaint. Family of Latvians, in the hand-worked shirts and aprons with the lambs embroidered on the front. When lovesick Joanna was too distracted to answer their hundred questions they went to the warden for a refund. Mind you they thought he was the historic curator. Yeah, right. “We come so far. She look asleep!” They claimed the hostess in the Cotton Mather house was not only dumb, but deaf.

The next day Joanna was ashen and drawn. Bullfinch Warden had activated her anklets. Not big-time torture, just enough voltage to keep her on her toes. Safe. But seeing Joanna suffer drove Quiven nuts. It was around then that we had the Indian corn pudding riot, with Quiven standing up on the table in the dining hall and us chanting and banging our cups until they zapped all the anklets and belts and we fell out senseless from the pain. When we came to, Quiven was in solitary and we were under lockdown on short rations, bread and water and fried pork rinds, don’t ask.

It wasn’t bad food that drove Quiven. It was compression. When he cleared solitary he was assigned to the Old Stone Jail. Then he heard Joanna scream. Fury drove him to crack the leg irons and wrench off the cell door. Compression sent him out of the jail and across the Village Green to the Cotton Mather house. He went in spite of the fact that the belt’s secret workings intensified as he got farther from his designated post.

Quiven was in agony by the time he reached Cotton Mather house. Screaming Joanna was bent backward over her spinning wheel by a sex-crazed tourist in a
FUCK ME I’M AMERICAN
T-shirt and an International Harvester cap. In
spite of the teeth of pain Quiven pulled her away from the horrified tourists and took her upstairs. Security programming sent a couple of jolts into her anklets to keep her in place but love overrode the pain.

“Oh, Quiven,” she said, or so Gemma reports.

Quiven looked at her with his own death written in his face. “I love you.” They both knew that this was not only the first time for them, it would be the last time.

It was excruciating, but they didn’t care. The anklets wouldn’t kill her, only scar her, and when push comes to shove in prison, it is the moment you strive for, not the terrible aftermath or punishments to come.

So Quiven and Joanna locked themselves into a bedroom where they murmured and touched for as long as they could manage until the gnawing scorpions in the belt overrode even Quiven’s compressed love and grief and he fell out of himself, never to return.

*

“Because of its nature, a democracy is obligated to pretend to rehabilitate. To work, rehabilitation has to be voluntary. Since it is mandatory it never works. Therefore, the state’s only obligation is to make it look as if we have tried.”

*

By the time Bullfinch’s cadre in their Revolutionary war uniforms broke in on them, pain ruled. Quiven was dead. And Joanna? Joanna had gone so far back inside herself that not all the Thorazine in the world could retrieve her. She was lost to us.

No deed goes unpunished and nothing in prison passes without note. Bullfinch took off the belt and strung Quiven’s body up in the underground cellblock. He made us file by to see the exact cost of rebellion. They hung him upside down, so we walked by the body cranksided with our heads resting on our shoulders so we could see into his face.