Part Two 15 страница

“You’re hurting me,” she said, with a small cry. She reached behind and dug her fingernails into my hand.

I let go of her. I was shaking uncontrollably. I pulled my suitcase from the back of the car. Our car was stopped in the middle of Stony Island Boulevard and the cars behind us were sounding their horns. This is how I get caught, I thought to myself, but even fear seemed remote and distorted. Rose was rubbing her neck and staring at me—with fear, or hatred, I don’t know, it could even have been pity.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said. “Please, if you could just take me—”

A couple of cars managed to swing around us. The rest—I don’t know how many—were still sounding their horns.

“I’m not moving,” said Rose. She rotated her head, testing the soreness of her neck muscles.

I closed my eyes, covered my face, and saw myself grabbing her shoulders, shaking her back and forth, back and forth, smashing her…I threw the door open and set off down the street, my suitcase banging against me like a separate self.

The bus route from Chicago to Stoughton was a complex one, and the bus that would bring me there left the Randolph Street terminal at four that afternoon, a three-and-a-half-hour wait. It seemed unsafe. Rose would know I was there; it would not be beyond her to convince herself that I was in the pain of psychosis and to take me out of my misery by turning me in. I could not stand to look at the people who filed around the station. Even the derelicts looked menacing—if they did not look like disguised cops, they seemed like omens. The devastating green watery light of the place; the shrieking odors of cheap food, disinfectant, old newspaper. I had enough money for a ticket to New York City. I wasn’t sure what I would do from there but a bus was leaving in fifteen minutes.

I called Jade. She answered the phone herself and accepted the charges.

“I’m coming home right now,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you? Tell me what’s happened!”

“I’m all right. I’m just in a rush. The bus for New York leaves in a couple of minutes, and I want to make sure I’m on it.”

“Are you—” she stopped herself. She knew I was in trouble. “Well, get on it, then. I’m glad you’re coming back. One night without you is all I can take. I miss you.”

“I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

“I called your job and said you wouldn’t be back for a week. All the puppies leave tonight. We’ll have nothing to do except lock ourselves in our room and force ourselves to eat from time to time.”

“I’m coming right away. I better hurry.”

“Then hurry.”

“Are you doing OK?”

“I miss you.”

“How was Bellows Falls?”

“Intense. Horrible. I’ll tell you all about it.”

“God.”

“I know. Also, Hugh’s old girl, Ingrid Ochester, called. She says she has to talk to me. She’s driving through in that van of hers. I’m having breakfast with her tomorrow.”

“What does she want?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. She sounded very determined, though. She’s been very messed up since Hugh. Therapy three times a week and all that. I think she’s worked something out and now she wants to share it with me. If she only knew how much I didn’t want to get into it. I really don’t.”

I held the phone, unable to speak.

“David?”

“I better go,” I said. “I don’t want to…” My voice evaporated.

“OK. Don’t miss your bus. I’m waiting for you. We’ll cry on each other’s shoulder. It’ll be wonderful.”

I said nothing.

“David?”

“I better go.”

“I’ll see if I can borrow Colleen’s car and maybe I can drive down to New York and pick you up. What time do you get in?”

“I don’t know. Don’t do that. I’ll just take another bus. I have to go.” I almost hung up but I held the phone very tightly and close to my mouth. “I love you,” I said. “I’ll always love you.”

“Don’t miss your bus, David.”

“I won’t.” I waited a moment and then, finally, I hung up.

Time after time, during the long rumbling ride east, I went rigid in my seat, certain that this was the moment when Ingrid was telling Jade that it was me Hugh chased after just before his death. I had a dollar seventy-five to my name and I somehow turned all my anxiety and grief into a hunger I was too poor to satisfy. I had nothing to read, I could not sleep, and it wasn’t until we were past Cleveland and it was long dark that I finally got a place next to a window.

I could have changed it all. I could have asked Jade to meet me in New York and then she would not have been able to meet Ingrid Ochester for breakfast. It would have only been a delay, but it would have been better. It would have engendered hope. Nothing is inevitable. Sometimes by stalling an event you contribute to its nonoccurrence. Ingrid could have left, gone somewhere far away, drifted back into the forgetfulness that had protected me for the past months, or perhaps dropped dead of a bee sting. It’s crazy not to throw yourself into the path of a coming event, crazy to convince yourself that if it doesn’t happen now it will happen quite soon, so what’s the use. We can sabotage the future, with a glance, a phonecall, a misplaced message.

I arrived in New York around ten in the morning. I felt foul, exhausted, and what thoughts I had seemed bunched up in one small corner of my mind, like a throw rug that a dog’s been pawing. I used the bathroom at Port Authority to change clothes and once I was naked in the middle of that vast tiled room I learned from the way people looked at me that changing your clothes like that isn’t acceptable behavior.

I realized I didn’t know where to begin hitchhiking to Stoughton. New York encircles you in a dense druidical mass and I couldn’t imagine how to get out of it. I asked a few people at random in the bus station, but the only person who seemed to know anything about it was in a hurry and he only called to me over his shoulder, something about “getting on Henry Hudson.” There were plenty of policemen around but I couldn’t ask them for anything. It was against the law to hitchhike and for all I knew they’d been informed by the Chicago cops to keep an eye out for me—I knew my self-important fears were absurd, but knowing was no cure. I went to a ticket window and asked how much a ride to Stoughton cost—it was five or six dollars more than I had but…I don’t know: perhaps I was expecting a clearance sale.

I had nothing worth selling and lacked the courage to beg, and so I did the only thing I could to get the money for a bus ticket: I called Ann.

“I’m broke,” I said, as soon as she said hello. “I need to borrow six dollars to get on a bus.”

“Where’s six dollars going to take you?” she said.

“To Stoughton.”

“Did she kick you out?”

“No. Why? Why do you ask that?”

“I’m wondering, that’s all. You sound like you’re close by.”

“I’m at Port Authority.”

“I’m wondering what you’re doing here without any money. But I recognize there are many things beneath heaven that are none of my damn business. Come by. I’ll give you some money. But you can’t stay. I’ve got a date for lunch and I’m nervous as a cat.”

Taking two wrong subways and a long walk, I made my way to Ann’s. She met me at the door and put a ten-dollar bill in my hand.

“You’re late,” she said, “and making me late, too. I wish you were staying around because you’re just the person I’d like to tell whatever happens today.” She touched her forehead. “I feel pregnant with anecdote.”

I looked at the money in my hand. I felt my eyes filling with tears.

“That’s a loan, remember,” Ann said. “My finances are in shambles.”

“I’ll pay you back. I’ve got money in…Stoughton.”

“Don’t be shy about saying it,” Ann said. “I’m glad. I know it’s not my place to be…to be anything about it. But I’m glad. You two belong together.”

I nodded.

“And besides, I don’t want to lose you.”

“Then don’t,” I blurted out. “Stay loyal to me. Try to understand. No matter what happens.”

Ann nodded but she didn’t know what I was talking about; she felt a soft wave of embarrassment over how ardent my plea had been, but she was letting it pass right by. It was just as well.

“OK,” said Ann. “Off you go. I’m going to be late and for all I know my Mystery Man is as punctual as death.” She smiled, but a little uncertainly, as if she suspected she’d said exactly the wrong thing.

I put the money in my pants and shifted my suitcase from my right hand to my left.

“How come you’re in New York?” Ann asked.

“I had to go to Chicago and I only had enough money to get this far. Didn’t Jade…?”

“No. Of course not. That’s the condition of our truce. Jade wants an old-fashioned relationship, based on kinship and ignorance—what she calls respect. And I think she’s absolutely right; it’s the only way it can ever work between us. Did you ever tell her about the night you and I spent here?”

“No. There was never a reason to. It wouldn’t matter. It would only—”

“I agree. It’ll go away on its own.”

Coming in through the open windows at the front of Ann’s apartment was the sound of church bells, ringing in the quarter hour.

“OK,” she said. “Out. Away.”

“Let me in,” I said. “I have to tell you something. I wasn’t going to but I have to. I want to now. You’ll know soon enough anyhow but I want you to hear it from me.”

“No. I’m late. And I’m not sure I really want to know. I hate confessions. They always make me think I’m supposed to match them with a bit of breast-beating of my own. I don’t want to get into it.”

“No. You have to. You want to know.”

“You are so wrong. I don’t. At least not today.” She put her hand on my face and rubbed her palm against the grain of my whiskers. “You look strange unshaved. I don’t think it suits you. You’re not growing a beard, are you?”

“No. I just haven’t shaved.”

“Good. I think you should get on the bus, get up to Stoughton, and hope to God that Jade’s not home when you arrive and you’ll have time to shave—and bathe.”

“Ann, I want to—”

“No,” she said, stepping back and preparing to close the door. “Not now. If you want to tell me something, write a letter. I hope that the mere fact that you’ve found my daughter won’t forever discontinue our correspondence. I like you in letters and I love writing to you. Confess to me in a letter. Now go.”

She closed the door and I heard her footsteps going back into her apartment. “I killed Hugh,” I whispered to the door. I thought of shouting it out, but it would be stupid, it would be cruel. And—this thought presented itself in a tone distinct from the others—what did I really know? Maybe Ingrid wanted to talk to Jade about something else. Wouldn’t it have been a waste to try to expose myself before Ingrid exposed me, only to find that I’d really been in no danger at all?

It was eight in the evening when I reached Stoughton. The sky was a low inkwash and behind the swollen clouds lightning flashed, throwing a skittery bleak light that looked as false as a stage effect. It was a simple hitchhike from the bus to our house in North Stoughton, but I walked—past the Main Street Clothiers, past the church on whose lawn Jade and I took our lunch, past the art supplies store where I’d recently put ten dollars down toward a set of drawing pens for Jade, and finally into a Dunkin’ Donuts where I tortured my growling stomach with five donuts and three cups of coffee. Powdered sugar was on my lap and my hands shook. I looked down and my suitcase was gone—no, it was on the other side of the stool. I took it in hand and went to a phonebooth. I didn’t think I should appear home without first speaking to Jade.

The phone rang at least a dozen times before I hung up. I felt a peculiar relief but it was blown aside by a rush of panic. A thought had been murmuring all day behind my will not to think it: Ingrid telling Jade the truth of Hugh’s death might ignite a terror and grief in Jade that would make it so she wouldn’t want to live. I put my last two dollars on the counter and left, already starting to run. It was at least three miles to home and within a minute I was breathing with effort and in pain. Carrying my suitcase was impossible and I tossed it aside, with the idea I’d come back some other time to retrieve it. The world before my eyes bounced up and down and I held onto my senses as if they would otherwise take flight and leave me forever. I was running as fast as I could. I had to rescue Jade, but I must have known that was not the case because already I was lying, telling myself that there was a way I could somehow explain myself to her: the real danger I wanted to rescue her from was the danger of holding Ingrid’s information without me there to counter it.

The house was dark when I finally arrived and the door and windows were locked. I pounded on the front door and punched my finger against the bell a hundred times. Then I went to the back and started again. I went to the back of the yard where I could see the small darkened attic window and I called Jade’s name. I threw pebbles against the window, ran out of pebbles, looked for a stone and couldn’t find one, and finally tossed my shoes. The first shoe sailed past and landed somewhere at the side of the house; the second hit direct with a thud, but didn’t break the glass. I waited and then the light went on. I don’t know how much time passed but finally a shadow moved across the window and then I saw her standing, naked, looking down at me. I called out to her, lifting my hands—they felt so heavy. She struggled to open the window and then realized she’d locked it. She turned the latch and the window slid open.

“Go away. You have to go away.” She stared down at me. The light was behind her but I could see her eyes in the darkness. Her chest was heaving. “I know everything,” she said. The window slammed down.

I raced to the back door and beat against it with open hands. My world, the only world I knew, the only one I wanted, was broken into pieces. I had no world. I could do anything. I beat against the door, I called her name, I threw my shoulder into the door hoping to break it down. It did not budge, and as I bounced off of it I brought my arm around, reaching over the railing of the soft wooden porch, and without a moment’s hesitation pushed my fist through the kitchen window, through the old glass and the saggy wire screen as well. I withdrew, picked a piece of glass out of my knuckle, and tried to see through the darkness if I was bloody. I couldn’t see but I felt the wetness, oily through the cracks of my fingers.

I climbed onto the porch railing and somehow got myself onto the window sill, an inch ledge of tender wood and peeling paint. My fingers gripped the frame and my stockinged feet did their best to hold on to the ledge; to keep myself from falling back, I leaned my weight against the glass and tried to knee a hole large enough for me to crawl in. I neglected to simply reach in to the hole I’d already made and unlock the window. On the third try the window fell away in two huge jagged sheets. I kicked through the screen and as I did, the light in the kitchen shuddered on. I lowered myself in and was hit in the shins—a terrible crack that knocked the wind out of me. The pain spread in every direction and then I was hit again and again. I held on to the window frame with its miniature Alps of splintered glass, three-quarters of my body in the house and my head sending cries into the night air. I was hit again—this time in the knees—and I let go, falling into the kitchen.

Jade was facing me, holding a broom, her hands baseball style near the straw, wagging the red handle at me. I took a stumbling step toward her and she swung again, missing me completely but causing me to stop.

“Don’t,” I said. I closed my hand and my fingertips ground a shard of glass into my palm.

She was naked except for her underwear. She was panting and shaking at the same time, as if running through a freezing rain. There were lines on one side of her face and her hair was flat—she’d been trying to sleep. She continued to wag the broom handle at me but her eyes didn’t seem to be looking at me. She moved her head from side to side, swallowing hard. She stepped forward and threw the broom onto the floor, moved closer until she was near enough to touch, and there she stood, still and immobile. I reached for her, put my arms around her, pressed her unyielding body close to mine.

“We have to talk,” I said. “I know what Ingrid told you and it’s true. But it’s not all. Jade. Jade?”

Slowly, her hands came up and pressed against my chest, pushing me back. “If you stay here, if you stay in this house, no, you have to go, I don’t want to be near you, because if you stay in this house I’ll kill myself, David. OK?” She breathed deeply and burst into tears. She covered her eyes and her fingers were ice white against her scarlet face. “Go away,” she shouted through her tears. “Go away.”

I turned, unlocked the back door, and left. And in my loss, which was absolute, I think I truly did believe Jade would reach out and stop me, or call out, but as soon as I closed the door behind me she rushed to it and turned the lock. I stood on the porch and looked at the wide open window but I had no heart left to climb through. I waited until the light went out and I listened for her footsteps as they went away, but she glided without a sound. A ghost.

A little time is missing. I was wondering where I would stay. I went to our neighbors, the Goldmans, but their lights were on and I shied away. I didn’t know what I looked like that night: a shoeless man with a bloody fist, unshaved, unslept, panicked. I wandered, trying to collect my thoughts. My shirt was wet; it was raining. I wanted to think of somewhere to stay. When I’m particularly exhausted it feels like a low-voltage electrical charge snakes slowly across the top of my skull. In Rockville I tried to have it diagnosed but it apparently is nothing, what we call nothing. And then I was back home, in the yard, staring at the lightless house. There was no line of demarcation between the black roof and the rainy sky. It was all a mass looming before me. There was no longer any question of breaking back into the house but I needed a place to sleep.

I ended up in the kennels Jade had built for the dogs and their pups. I suppose she’d been waiting for me to help her tear them down. There was hay on the ground and two-by-fours and tarpaper to keep the rain off of me. The pen smelled reassuringly of the dogs, fur and shit and breath and milk and reality. I crawled in feeling very fortunate to have found a place so perfect and so near. I placed my head where I could see the house and tried to prepare myself for the morning when Jade would see me and we could begin the long process of making sense of what we knew. I thought about making love with her in the Hotel McAlpin and decided it would help if I remembered that night in every detail, but as soon as Jade asked me into bed I fell asleep.

I slept through the dawn. The light was on me and Jade woke up, looked through the window, and saw me asleep in the kennel. It must have terrified her, made her feel there was no dealing with me any longer. I don’t know what the sequence of events was. She got dressed—but before or after she made the call? She put on a pair of khaki pants and a blue broadcloth shirt, rolling the cuffs midway to the elbow. Blue espadrilles. Then the call. I don’t think, somehow, she’d call the police naked. She was probably hoping that in the time it took her to dress I would have miraculously awakened, that she would look out and the pen would be empty, the straw mashed down in my form. But I was still there, asleep—no, beginning to stir. I remember opening my eyes before the police came, remember seeing the fresh pale sky, the smell of the straw, touching the cuts on my hand and falling asleep, deeper this time, submerging myself as if I knew I would not sleep in my miserable freedom again for a long, long while. “There’s someone here who—” Jade said to the police. But who is what? Threatening me? Who has killed my father? Who has broken into my house? Who has gone mad? I don’t know how she described me to the Stoughton police. She didn’t tell them I was wanted in Chicago because I’d been at the station for hours before they learned that. She probably just told them to come and remove me and didn’t bother with explanations. And when they arrived, she came with them to the back of the house so I could see her as well as them. One of the cops kicked me in the shoulder and when I woke I knew exactly what had happened. “Get up,” one of them said, in a fierce voice, as if expecting the worst from me. I hesitated for a moment, trying to think if there was anything else I could do, if I could alter the rush of events. The cop kicked at me again and Jade cried out. “You don’t have to do that,” she said, and one of the cops said something to her and I stood up. They grabbed me by both arms as if I were a truly dangerous man and they dug their fingers into me and yanked me this way and that, committing those small meannesses that break your heart. It was just a routine morning arrest and it should have been simple and calm; I don’t know what secret revulsion I touched in them by letting myself be discovered in a dog pen. Oh, I’m sure I looked like a creep, but I was hardly awake and I doubt if I looked dangerous. I think it was because I looked so unprotected and so obviously uninterested in defending myself. They walked me away and I moved my feet to keep from being dragged. I tried to look behind me, to see Jade, but they grabbed me harder and I had that morning’s first surge of terror: These guys really hate me, I thought. They pushed me into the back of their squad car. I could look back at the house then but Jade wasn’t in sight. She was still in the back, looking down at the kennels, remembering the dogs and how we had raised them and how they’d almost gotten us to start a family of our own. And she was probably shaking quite a bit and feeling the beginnings of doubt over whether she’d done the right thing. The car sped along. I was in handcuffs but there was no wire fence separating me from the cops in the front seat, like police cars have in cities. I always had heard how much handcuffs hurt so it was no surprise, but I wasn’t prepared for how violently the pain would turn my insides. I was sweating; I thought I might vomit into my lap and I had a huge icy fear of disgracing myself.

 

 

 

Whenever I had thought of the consequences of my leaving Chicago, I rooted my dread to the image of a return to Rockville, of pacing the grassy stretches, of the powder blue Wyon, Illinois, sky, and the blond children with their fingers wrapped around the black Victorian fence peering in at us. It was an image of exile, of fury, and, of course, of unacceptable loss because it meant that once again I would be forcibly separated from Jade. There were times during my life as a fugitive when the fear of capture was so great that it was nearly impossible not to torture myself further by imagining in detail what it would be like to be in Rockville again. But I was generally successful in keeping my mind off it, successful in keeping all the little ghoulish actors gagged and tied in their mental chairs, and it was just as well because what actually happened after I was returned to the authority of the Illinois State Police was far worse than anything I would have imagined—all of that dread would have prepared me for nothing, nothing at all. I was treated worse for violating the conditions of parole than I was for setting fire to a house and nearly burning a family to death. The first time I had broken the law of the world; but now I had broken the police’s law, and they treated that sort of transgression with more severity.

After a series of delays, continuances, appeals, and what I suppose is normal bureaucratic foot-dragging, after questionings, tests, after transfers from one lock-up to another prison, and then to yet another prison, the court decided to send me to a medium-sized penal facility in Volkshill, Illinois, a small town about midway between Chicago and Wyon. I was placed in a cell with a man named Tommy Rita, a guy in his forties who was somewhere near the end of an eight- to ten-year sentence for black marketing cigarettes. Tommy looked vibrant, practically suntanned, and did two hours’ calisthenics in our cell each afternoon to keep his small, stocky body in reasonable shape. At night, in whispers, he liked to tell me how getting popped for avoiding the state cigarette tax only proved how stupid the law was. He had, he said, beaten people to a pulp, firebombed a restaurant, committed innumerable burglaries, married a woman in Hegwisch and another in Michigan City, and all they could get him on was a “little shitass cigarette rap.” I never believed Tommy’s list of felonies.

There’s nothing I really need to say about life in Volkshill. The fear was constant: even the depths of boredom and the mock heights of cynicism were laced with fear. The anonymity was crushing: you could be beaten to death, you could choke on a piece of pork, your brain could explode and no one would care—and perhaps no one would know.

It was my understanding that in less than six months I’d be out of prison, at which time I would not, of course, be free, but would be subject to some alternate, more lenient punishment. This should have made my situation infinitely more tolerable. Nevertheless, I wasn’t equal to it. Though I believed that each day was bringing me nearer to the time when my case would be handled with more mercy, the days themselves, even as they passed, were intolerable: I felt like someone who has been swept out to sea by an undertow; each wave that rolls toward the shore only draws you further away.

I began to see everything through a haze, as real and disorienting as a thick morning fog. There was an accompanying loss of body awareness so that as the world outside of me became less real my own reality decreased as well. My dreams were so vivid and lifelike that I hardly thought of them, and in the midst of my slow, careful prison day there wouldn’t have registered the slightest surprise in me if someone had grabbed my shoulder and shaken me awake. My appetite disappeared; sometimes the aroma of food—not to mention the sight of it—would cause a violent revulsion in me. I developed a limp; my hearing deteriorated. I talked to myself—at first, just to keep things organized, to remind myself of this or that, but then it became a habit and when someone would lean into my blurry line of vision and say, “Why don’t you shut your fucking face?” I’d be surprised that I’d been at it again, or else I’d have no idea what they were complaining about. This led to an enormous sense of persecution—really, everything started to go. The world an inch out of orbit can end all life. I could not adapt; I couldn’t recoup any losses; I only got worse. Every now and then in a moment of woozy lucidity I’d tell myself that all the madness, all the physical symptoms, all the unreality were somehow a product of my will, that I could still, if I truly wanted to, take the reins of my life in hand again. But it was empty comfort. I told myself I wanted to spiral down into madness, but even at the fullest pitch of self-accusation (which was somehow linked to self-congratulation) I couldn’t see or even imagine an alternate mode of behavior.

Rose and Arthur came to visit me in the humanely informal visitors’ room—shiny geometric wallpaper, orange plastic bucket seats, Formica-covered tables around which families could huddle, a portable Panasonic tuned to the local pop music station supplying the background noise. I don’t know what I said or how I carried myself but I made it clear that I was eroding and soon they increased their efforts to have me transferred out of jail and into a hospital. They spent money they couldn’t afford to keep the pressure on the state, and three months into my stay at Volkshill I was suddenly placed in the infirmary for psychiatric observation. I took the familiar tests and was interviewed by a pair of prison psychiatrists—first a Dr. Hillman, who looked like a big pink friendly animal in a children’s book, and then by Dr. Morris, a young black doctor with an Afro and some kind of enormous fang hanging near his throat. I said whatever popped into my mind, with the objectivity of someone calling numbers at a bingo game. I felt under no obligation to answer their questions or follow instructions and in the end they both agreed that my psychological state was in critical disarray. They recommended I be placed in a state institution, and that’s exactly where I would have been sent if I hadn’t had parents who were willing to struggle for a better alternative and were willing to pay for it. And so on January 15, 1974, I was transferred back to Wyon, Illinois, and readmitted to Rockville Hospital. I was delivered in a police car, sitting in back with a middle-aged prison official who didn’t say one word to me for the entire journey. We ran into a snow squall and had to stop for new windshield-wiper blades. I was freezing cold, shivering; I kept my fingers tucked under my arms. The stubble in the cornfields looked like a world in ruins.