Eureka Man: A Novel (13 page)

A spokesman for the prison said that Virgil
Cain had been moved to another prison upstate and that Riverview
would remain locked down until investigators could determine how
and where Virgil Cain had planned on entering the tunnels inside
the prison.

The hype was enough to hold everyone's
attention for the next two days. Virgil Cain was both hated and
revered by his peers. Hated for being a low-life pedophile who, for
reasons that baffled everyone, had been allowed to bounce his
thirteen-year old stepdaughters on his lap during weekly visits;
and revered for having whatever it was he had that made women
worship him. This polygamist had a word game that Billy Graham
would envy, or else he had a very long tongue.

But the novelty wore off with the passing of
each meal-a bag lunch consisting of a bologna and cheese sandwich,
an orange and a half-pint of milk. By Monday evening those who
didn't have food in their cells that they purchased from the
commissary were feeling the hunger pains and letting the guards
know it. “Take it easy, men,” the sergeant told them when he was
making his rounds. Chewing a wad of tobacco, he stood in front of
Oliver's cell and spit a stream of the liquid shit over the tier
and down the side of the wall. “You'll all be out in the
morning.”

Two hours later the same sergeant placed the
prisoners' mail on the bars of their doors. Oliver received two
letters. A message from his mother June telling him they would be
up to see him soon, and a notice from the communications office
informing him that he would be moving to the big St. Regis, cell
L-14, when the institution resumed normal movement in the
morning.

Oliver sighed long and deep, grappled with
his obstinacy, then smiled as wide as a farmer who had prayed for
rain and been rewarded with a downpour. Before he changed his mind
and Winfield Petaway's fate, he quickly packed everything he owned
into his footlocker, thinking with absolute certainty that the big
St. Regis was far enough away from the vilest thing he knew.

AFTER LUNCH the next day, Champ the boxer was
standing in front of his cell on M tier when Oliver showed up to
see him. “Come on in, Priddy.” Champ stepped into his cell, sat
down and started rearranging piles of folded laundry. He was
dressed for his morning roadwork. Purple sweatpants, two dingy gray
sweatshirts, and black brogans. Champ stared at Oliver's swollen
eye and grinned. “I thought you quit boxing a long time ago.”

“I did,” Oliver said, eyeing the six
grapefruits on Champ's desk.

“Looks like you just had a sparring session
with someone.”

Oliver had momentarily forgotten about the
mouse under his left eye and the fresh scab over it. “Just a little
misunderstanding, that's all.”

“Everything all right?”

“It is now.”

“That's good. I want to ask you a serious
question, Priddy. You feel safe in this joint?”

Before Oliver could answer, someone tapped
him on the shoulder and said, “Are you coming or going? Let me get
by, please.”

Oliver stepped out of the way to let the
prisoner enter Champ's cell. He was carrying a jug of steaming hot
coffee wrapped in a yellow dishtowel. He wore blood-red Japanese
slippers with gold thread and a white terry cloth bathrobe. His
long black hair hung loose halfway down his back and over his
shoulders, black curtains billowed around a strikingly feminine
face. He had black almond-shaped eyes, flawless skin and thick
lips, a delicate frame, but his hands were strong and marked by
work.

“This is my boy, Little,” Champ said.
“Little, this is Oliver.”

“How's it going?” said Oliver.

“Nice to meet you,” the boy said. “Excuse me
again.”

After he was gone Champ said, “You want some
coffee?”

“No thanks.” Oliver stood at the threshold of
the cell eyeing the posters on Champ's wall. Mohammad Ali, Dr. J,
and the Honorable Elijah Mohammad. He looked around the room and
two things impressed him: the racks of clothes hanging from several
hooks on the walls-sweat suits, silk robes, jeans, shirts, jackets,
and sweaters; and two waist-high stacks of books inside the door.
The room had a strange smell to it, though. Oliver wasn't sure, but
he thought it was a combination of dried sweat and cocoa
butter.

“Well, do you, Priddy?”

“What?”

“Feel safe in here.”

“Anybody would be a fool to feel safe in a
penitentiary, Champ. I watch my back everywhere I go, but I'm not
afraid. Just smart. I'll tell you one thing, though.”

“What?”

“I feel a lot better now that I'm over here
in the big St. Regis.”

“Why's that?”

“Well, let's just say I was real close to
fucking a dude up over there and now I don't have to.”

“Lemme guess. Was it a niggah named Fat
Daddy?”

“Yeah. That's the dude.”

Champ smiled and dropped a pile of clothes
into a cardboard box. “How do you think I knew that?”

“I don't know, man.”

“Cuz I know everything that goes on in this
joint. You think you're safer over here?”

“All I know is I'm glad to be away from that
guy. He was stalking me everywhere I went. I didn't have any peace
of mind except when I was at work or locked in my cell at night. It
was nerve racking.”

“Well, this is why I wanted to talk to you,
Priddy. See this block's no different, man. There's guys over here
tougher and crazier than Fat Daddy and they're everywhere. In the
stairwells, the showers, around every corner, ducking behind the
trash cans. All they're looking to do is pounce on something young,
white and fresh. No disrespect intended, but you're a good looking
dude, Priddy, and you're gonna have trouble over here too.”

“Yeah, but there's something those guys don't
know about me, Champ. I had to kill a guy already for that shit,
and I'll do it again it if I have to.” Suddenly, Oliver was feeling
queasy, his adrenalin was pumping fast and the butterflies were
fluttering in his stomach. He was relieved when he heard the
work-line bell ring. “I've got to be getting to work now,
Champ.”

“Hold up, Jack. You still got ten minutes. I
called you up here to ask you a question. How'd you like to be my
partner?”

Oliver couldn't hide his disappointment or
his fear. His jaw dropped and his eyes were wide. A red scald rose
up his neck and into his cheeks. “What kind of question is that,
Champ? I thought you and I were cool, man. I ain't no punk.”

Champ grinned and shook his head. “Calm down,
Priddy. We cool. I like you. You're all right for a white guy.
Look. You get visits, right?”

“Yeah, every week.”

“All right. Get your girl to start bringing
you reefer. You smoke?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Keep a little for yourself each time
and give me the rest. Let's say a couple ounces a month. I'll sell
enough to pay your girl back for the stuff and keep the rest for
myself. We can be business partners. You won't ever have to worry
about another niggah in this joint even looking funny at you.”

Oliver sighed slowly, relieved to learn that
Champ wasn't interested in trying to demoralize him. He knew what
his answer would be. He admired Champ and enjoyed hanging out with
his squad in the Young Guns Boxing Gym. They had never ridiculed or
teased him after he quit the team to go to school and when he came
in to work out on the heavy bag and jump rope once or twice a week,
they welcomed him with open arms, treating him like a brother. Big
Jake. Brother Melvin. Disco Bob. Blue Light. Cheese. Soul Train.
And Champ. These North Philly boys, notorious not just for their
gang-warring prowess, superior boxing skills and unflinching
courage, also had a gift for talking jive and ribbing one another.
Oliver loved hearing them play the dozens. He felt a real kinship
when he was around these fellows. There was no reason why he
couldn't help Champ make a few dollars for himself while at the
same time gain the one thing in the world he needed to prosper.
Albert was going home in a few months and he had already arranged
for Oliver to continue receiving packages once he got home.
Oliver's part of the deal would be a cinch.

“Yeah. We can do that, Champ. But what
happens if my girl leaves me? What do we do then?”

“As slick as you are, I know you'll find
another chick sooner or later.”

“Okay. It's a deal,” Oliver said.

“Wait. There's one more thing, Priddy. I've
come a long way in math and I appreciate all the help you've been
giving me up in that school. I'm going to try one more time to pass
that GED exam but if I fail it again, you're going to have to find
a way to take the math test for me the next time. I've got to get
my diploma, man. That's all there is to it.”

“You'll pass it, Champ.”

“Yeah, but if I don't, you've got to find a
way to take the exam into the bathroom or somewhere and complete it
for me.”

“Okay. If it comes down to that, I will.”

“Solid. So it's a deal?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Let's shake on it.”

AFTER MAKING HIS quid pro quo deal, Oliver
immediately stopped reading and sleeping with one eye peeled to the
door. No longer did he squeeze his anus tighter than a vise or walk
around checking over his shoulder every time he turned a corner.
Now he threw himself into his studies. Now he could concentrate
with the precision of a microscope. During his childhood it had
been easy for him to become enthusiastic about a new hobby or
adventure only to grow bored and lose interest when the novelty
wore off. Baseball cards had lost their importance the minute the
bubble gum lost its flavor. Winning every cat's eye and steely in
the circle wasn't as much fun as giving the whole sack of marbles
away in the end. Bringing home pockets full of Mary Janes from
Woolworth's was a strong second to the excitement he experienced
when he had first shoplifted them. But that didn't happen when it
came to pursuing his education. His hunger for knowledge was
relentless.

Every night after the dead bolt dropped on
his door, he withdrew like a hermit crab into his inner world. For
the next four years he studied subjects ranging from religions of
the world to personality disorders, multicultural poetry, criminal
justice, calculus, satire, public speaking and many others. Though
he was more interested in literature and philosophy than he was in
mathematics and history, he still earned straight As in calculus
and the history of Western civilization. So in awe of the academic
world and so concerned about his status within that world was he
that he was compelled to master every subject he took up. His
greatest passion of all was literature, though, for it was through
the vicarious experience of reading that he had come to recognize a
truth and internalize it. The Count of Monte Cristo may have been a
condemned man, but hope still ran through his prison. If the
protagonist in The Red Badge of Courage was a coward, Oliver wanted
to be one too. After reading the novels of a Russian writer named
Dostoyevsky, he found a book of letters the author had written
while he had been in a Siberian prison. One particular letter
Dostoyevsky sent to his brother gave Oliver permanent assurance
that it didn't matter whether he was in prison or out in society
because, as Dostoevsky had so eloquently put it, “... life is life
everywhere. Life is in ourselves, not in the world that surrounds
us.” Oliver read these words and the epiphany moved him to
tears.

Discovering life inside himself eventually
led Oliver to grapple with his Catholic upbringing and reject
original sin as the source of his suffering. It was original
ignorance, he believed, that was the root of all suffering. He
rejected, too, the father, son and holy ghost, and the rest of the
supernatural kingdom. Pascal's wager was fascinating, but it went
against the grain of his own thinking. If we live our lives as
believers and find in the end that there is no God, we have lost
nothing, Pascal proposed. But if we live as non-believers and find
ourselves face to face with a supernatural God at the end, then our
proverbial goose is cooked for all of eternity. Cela vous fera
croire et vous abetira. (“This will make you believe and you will
be stupefied.”) Oliver disagreed that there was nothing to lose by
believing blindly, for to do so, as the Church demanded, was to
stop searching for the truth.

With every book he opened he found a reason
to turn the page. When he studied Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the
goddess of memory, became his heroine and led him to other books
where he learned advanced mnemonic tricks for remembering formulas,
dates and important names and geographic regions. In philosophy,
Husserl's idea of intentionality became his grail: “If our 'gaze'
toward a thought or idea is a stone thrown toward its object, then
meaning depends on how hard we throw the stone.” Eureka!

During these years his increasing sense of
inner freedom led him to write in his journal about the aesthetic
side of his daily life:

October 9, 1982. Today while I was sitting
in the bleachers reading Emerson's “Self Reliance,” I saw a blind
man standing near the wall. He was a gaunt and gristly looking man
with blotches of pink and brown skin covering his face and hands.
For a while I watched him standing there tapping his
red-stick-of-a-cane to the rhythm of the blue handball the
prisoners were hitting against the wall. What disease, I wondered,
had caused his black skin to turn pink like that and his hair to
fall out in patches, leaving the bald spots a hue of sickly
pinkish-brown? I thought to myself this man would curse God's ass
up one side and down the other if he knew how horrible and pathetic
he looked. Dostoyevsky said that denial of self-expression is death
to the soul, so when I came in from the yard this evening I wrote
this poem about discovering a blind man among us: