From the Chrysalis (18 page)

Weekends were different, of course. No work. Was that good or bad? Dace had the option of visiting one of three chapels—all-purpose Protestant, Roman Catholic or Jewish—if he didn’t want to spend all day in his cell, with the remote chance of receiving a visitor on his approved list. Books and magazines were scarce and restricted unless illegally obtained, and inmate mail was censored as well. (The fact that he agreed to a skin search, including a rectal probe before and after every visitor, was something she would learn long after.)
 

Slipping off her sandals to walk barefoot on the grass, she wondered what he did all day if he couldn’t even work now. In the past he had played on several in-house teams and worked in the prison library, but the Pen was almost shut down now, incubating some kind of botulism like badly canned food.
 

Well, he could still read. He had been reading
East of Eden
the last time he’d written. The middle-aged prison librarian, an inveterate reader and counterfeiter, had recommended Steinbeck. And of course he wrote wonderful letters—to her alone, she hoped. He had done a correspondence course. And he lifted weights when they let him. Like the rest of them. Except he was better, much better. He had muscles. Too many, she amended, suddenly afraid. Why did he need so many? She looked at Mel’s arms, supple, lean and brown in one of the simple, solid-coloured T-shirts he favoured and a wave of tenderness washed over her. She wanted to look after him, too. He was just a boy, a tall, thin boy, and much better off that way. As she watched him, he brought his timetable up to the John Lennon glasses perched on his nose, pondering where to go next.
 

“Let’s go to the student lounge,” she suggested. “It might be cooler.”
 

“Where’s that?” he asked. “In the Student Hall?”
 

She looked around with her unaided eyes. “Over there.” She pointed at a sign and Mel followed her gaze.
 

Dace has 20/20 vision like I do, she thought. Yes, he was smart and strong with perfect vision, but he would never fit in here on campus. She knew that. He was much too old, in so many ways.
Where was his place?
And what about hers? The question was there because she belonged with him. But where? One look from him and his eyes would ignite the hot green grass as her fellow students fled. One look from her, well, nobody would notice.

People here were baby-faced. Just look at Mel’s cute little upturned nose. Nothing had ever gone wrong in Mel’s life. Last night he had confided the details of his small town childhood to her. He was the local G.P.‘s son with a childhood so idyllic she figured he must be repressing. She’d fought the urge to say something sharp and spoil his evening. Now as she studied his unlined face with its full, youthful cheeks, she touched her own. Did she look as old and used up as she often felt?

So good to be walking with this new boy through old limestone buildings. The air was heady with the smell of wood, books and decay, like Ireland, where she had left a part of herself behind. Lovely, old lady Ireland. She remembered the wind tearing through her hair at Dunluce Castle, a place she had begged Tony to take her. She thought again about the coast on his motorbike, as they sped from Dublin and talked their way across the border.

But goddamn the puking past. If she didn’t focus on the present, she would end up grieving this place, too. A fragment of a poem drifted into her mind:
Grieving over Goldengrove unleaving … it is the blight man was born for …

Someday she would leave here, too. Except she would leave with Dace. The moment he got out. Well, maybe not too soon. In her mind, she heard her grandmother say:
And what about your education?
She had wanted to go to university for so long. She would have to finish school first.
 

Her reverie was interrupted when Mel stopped. They were passing a newspaper box in the entrance to the Student Hall. “Oh, shit,” he said.
 

What now?
She followed his gaze and saw the headline of the
Maitland Spectator
, displayed in the yellow metal newspaper box outside the Great Hall. PRISONERS IN REVOLT
,
she read. Her white timetable fluttered unnoticed onto the grass by her feet.

Mel glanced at her, startled by her expression. “You look like you’re going to faint,” he said and laughed into her pale face, though not unkindly. Mel was kind and good and wanted to be a doctor, like his Dad. He steadied her shoulders with his smooth, brown hands until the life flowing from him almost revived her. “Don’t worry. The army will surround the bad guys and all you little campus girls will be safe.”

“But my cousin’s in Maitland Penitentiary.”

“A guard?”

“No. He’s an inmate, for God’s sake!”

“Why?” Mel looked nonplussed at first, then aghast. “What … what did he do?”

“I don’t know,” Liza lied. “But what if they go in shooting? Where will he go?
T
hey’ll mow them down like grass!”

“Hey now, relax. That’s a bit dramatic,” he said, shooting an appalled glance at the curious students swirling by them. “Better not make a scene. Look, your cousin will be okay. Christ, do you really have a relative in the Joint? C’mon, what did he do, pass some bad cheques?” He seized her shoulders and tried to look into her eyes. “Sell grass? Where you from, girl? I thought you were from across the pond, with the lilt in your voice and your black Irish eyes.” He paused, perhaps remembering, if not regretting that she’d asked all the questions and he’d done all the talking last night.

“I don’t know what he did.”
And I don’t care.
 

“Oh, c’mon. What did you read in the newspapers?”

“I was in Toronto when it happened. I was fourteen.”

“Something bad then, if it’s been five years. How old is he? When’s he’s getting out?”

“Soon. He’s supposed to get out soon. He’s twenty-three now. And it wasn’t his fault.”

“Uh sure, if you say so.” Mel’s lips kept moving, so he’d said something else, but she didn’t hear. Mutely she pushed her clipboard at him and fled in the direction of their student residence, leaving him looking a little stunned.

Although she was panting and her upper legs were burning, she kept running. She had to think. She had to get Dace out. He wasn’t involved, he
wasn’t
. Even if the stupid
Maitland Spectator
was screaming: LAST CHANCE.
What did that mean? It was their last chance to
what?
Jesus Christ. What if somebody had already died? She knew what their bargaining chip was. An accompanying headline had read:
Six prison guards
missing and feared dead.

Chapter 13

Anteroom to Hell

Psychiatrist Predicts Inmate Behaviour.
 

A prominent local psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Johnson, was responding to Maitland Penitentiary’s Warden assertion that only half of 723 inmates are believed to be actively involved in the now two-day-old riot. Because they “run in packs” to survive, few will be able to resist the pull of the inmate subculture. Tension is building and there will be a power struggle, Dr. Johnson added. Also, lack of sleep, lack of food and easier access to contraband drugs is likely to contribute to aberrant behaviour. There is an increased risk of sexual assaults, beatings and even death
.
*[
Maitland Spectator
, September 3, 1971, p.5.]

Maitland Penitentiary, September 4, 1971:

Hours passed before he had enough juice in his body to send distress signals to the great beyond. Whatever the hell was going on, they couldn’t be in the middle of a riot. They
couldn’t
. Not with Sandy, that clown, in charge. When Dace wasn’t pacing, he jammed his face between the bars. He could just make out a narrow slice of catwalk encircling the domed amphitheatre and some empty cells on the other side. He didn’t hear any voices, any banging, nothing.

For years he’d had a black and white snapshot of his father and sister taped to the wall of his cell. “So what do you think, guys?” he asked them now. “Are they all dead?”

Something startled him—a rustle that might have been Sandy’s robe—but it was just a rat, streaking from one tier to the next.
 

How the hell had he ended up in this cesspool?
Bang, bang.
A Saturday afternoon, a madman, a toy gun and now this.
Christ, nothing was supposed to go wrong! He had been nothing more than a boy who loved riding his bike—the wind in his hair, a girl he picked up along the way, the action, the excitement and the thrill of a chase. He looked down at his rough knuckles. The biggest thrill he got these days was smashing somebody’s face.
 

Enough of this bullshit. He had to concentrate. If this were just a minor insurrection, a protest, a sit-down or a slowdown, it made sense to wait it out. He’d gotten involved in one sit-down, the first year he was Inside. What a fuck-up that had been. Everybody had lost their “privileges”, their good time, and most of their personal possessions. Now here they went again.
 

If he could just get out! His eyes swept from the floor to the ceiling, as if he had a hope of finding a chink in the wall.
At least he had his body, he thought, getting down to do more push-ups. He never talked about sparring—for him it was almost like breathing—but he was a prison house boxer of some repute, often approached by other convicts desperate for protection.

“Somebody’s trying to kill me,” they’d whisper. Poor, colourless schmucks, aging and flaccid. He hoped he never got that way. He felt sorry for some of them, he really did. Some guys just shook, and he knew. “I have a wife and children and I know I can make good,” they swore in the little prison library, whispering behind the stacks.
 

“Lucky you. B-b-blessed with a body well-nourished in infancy and early childhood,” the skinny little library con stuttered, observing these interactions. “My mother always fed me c-c–crap.”

“You should have seen the slop the priests fed me.”

“Still, you have more than your share of inherent muscle mass. Perhaps from some farmer ancestor.”

The prison librarian talked like Liza. He used big words. Dace missed some of his speech, but he could catch his drift, courtesy of the books he’d read. He liked listening to him. They all did.
 

“What, not a warrior?” he’d asked. Sure, the idea of a flaxen haired little farm wife to warm his bed and cook his meals held some appeal. He just couldn’t see himself mucking about in dirt or driving a tractor all day.

The librarian was wrong about his ancestry, though, if he meant blind luck was all men had. A man worked for what he got. Take him. He had strong shoulders, a thick neck and bulging forearms, but he worked out every day. Anybody could have had the same body with a little self-discipline and the right motivation. He had started weightlifting the first time he’d been incarcerated. Anything to keep from smashing his head into the nearest wall when he was a blind, scared, stupid, eighteen.
 

When the racket started up again, it was almost a relief. Somebody cursed God, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and a lot of other people. They were probably looting the chapels in the West Block. God only knew what they hoped to find. To each his own, but Dace drew the line at throwing hymn books—or any books—in the air.
 

By now he almost wished that the resident goon squad would round up all the loose felons and toss them back where they belonged: in the slammer, in the clink, in the Hole.
Where he belonged.
In his darkest moments, he knew he belonged there, too.
 

If the gutless fucking bulls didn’t get control of his goddamn cell block soon, the army would come in. In his mind soldiers burst in and cut down every single upright cocksucker while Dace dove headfirst under his bed, his thin mattress exploding into a mess of chicken feathers, bonemeal, and plasma.