Mockingbird (16 page)

The rest of us sat in a circle around the fire. The gray-haired man pulled a joint from his shut pocket and took a twig from the fire and lit it. He seemed to be accustomed to fires—in fact, all of them seemed to have done this many times before.

One man, smiling, said to the man next to nun, “Charlie, how long since the last malfunction?” and Charlie said, “It’s been a while. We were overdue.” And the other laughed and said, “Yeah!”

The gray-haired man came over and sat by me. He offered me the joint but I shook my head, so he shrugged and gave it to the man on the other side of me. Then he said, “We’ve got at least an hour. Repair on robots is slow here.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Everybody gets knocked out in court and they don’t wake him up till he gets here. But one guy told me once he thought it was North Carolina.” He spoke to the man who had taken the joint. The man was passing it to the next man. “Is that right, Foreman? North Carolina?”

Foreman turned around. “I heard South,” he said, “South Carolina.”

“Well, somewhere in there,” the gray-haired man said.

For a while we were all silent around the fire, watching its flames in the afternoon air, listening to the sound of the surf against the beach and hearing the occasional cry of a gull overhead. Then one of the older men spoke to me. “What they put you in for? Kill somebody?”

I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. He would not have understood about reading. “I was living with someone,” I said finally. “A woman . . .”

The man’s face brightened for a moment and then almost immediately went sad. “I lived with a woman once. For over a blue.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Yeah. A blue and a yellow. At least. That isn’t what they put me here for, though. Shit, I’m a thief is why. But I sure do remember . . .” He was wrinkled and thin and bent; there were only a few hairs on his head, and his hands shook as he took the joint and inhaled from it and then passed it to the younger man next to him.

“Women,” the gray-haired man beside me said, breaking the silence.

Something about that one word seemed to open up the older man. “I used to fix coffee for her,” he said, “and we’d drink it in bed. Real coffee with real milk in it, and sometimes when I could find it a piece of fruit. An orange, maybe. She’d drink that coffee out of a gray mug and I’d just sit at the other end of the bed facing her and pretend to be thinking about my own coffee but what I was really doing was watching her. God, I could watch that woman.” He shook his head.

I could feel his sadness. There were goose bumps on my arms and legs from hearing him talk like that. I had never heard another person speak for
me
like that before. He had said what I felt and, sad as I was, there was relief for me in it.

Someone else said softly, “What become of her?”

For a while the old man didn’t answer. Then he said, “Don’t know. One day I come home from the mill and she wasn’t there. Never saw her again.”

There was silence for a moment and then one of the younger prisoners spoke up. He was trying, I suppose, to be helpful. “Well, quick sex is best,” he said philosophically.

The old man turned his head slowly and stared at the man who had just spoken. And then he said to him, strongly and evenly, “Fuck that. You can just fuck that.”

The younger man looked flustered, and turned his face away. “I didn’t mean. . .”

“Fuck it,” the old man said. “Fuck your quick sex. I know what my life’s been like.” Then he turned toward the ocean again and said softly, repeating himself, “I know what my life’s been like.”

Hearing this and seeing the way the old man looked toward the ocean with his thin shoulders squared under his faded blue prison
shirt
and the breeze blowing the few wisps of hair on his old, tight-skinned head, I felt such sadness that it was beyond tears. And I was thinking of Mary Lou and of the way she had looked, in the mornings sometimes, drinking tea. Or of her hand on the back of my neck and the way that, sometimes, she would stare at me and stare, and then smile. . .

I must have sat there thinking these things about Mary Lou and feeling my own grief for a long while, looking out toward the ocean, past the old man. And then
I
heard the gray-haired man next to me say softly, “You wanta swim?” I looked up at him, startled, and said, “No,” perhaps too quickly. But the thought of getting naked with all those strangers had brought me back to the present with a start.

Yet I love to swim.

In the Thinker Dormitories, each child has the pool to himself for ten minutes. Dormitories are very strict about Individualism.

I was thinking about this when the gray-haired man suddenly said, “My name’s Belasco.”

I looked down at the sand at my feet. “Hello,” I said.

And then, a moment later, he said, “What’s your
name
, buddy?”

“Oh,” I said, still looking at the sand. “Bentley.” And I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up, startled, at his face. He was grinning at me. “Good to know you, Bentley,” he said.

After a while I got up and walked down to the water’s edge but away from the swimmers. I know that I have changed much since I left Ohio; but all that intimacy and feeling were more than I could stand at once. And I wanted to be alone with my thoughts of Mary Lou.

At the water’s edge I found a hermit crab, in a small, curled whelk shell. I knew it was a hermit crab from a picture in a book Mary Lou had found:
Seashore Creatures of North America
.

There was a strong, briny, clean smell along the edge of the water, and the waves, gently rolling in along the wet sands, made a sound like I had never heard before. I stood there in the sun watching, and smelling the smell, and listening to the water-sound, until Belasco’s voice called me back. “Time to go, Bentley. They’ll have him fixed before long.”

We all climbed silently up the stairs and went back to our positions in the field and waited.

After a while the robots came back. They did not notice that we had made no progress in their absence. Stupid robots.

I bent to work, in time to music.

When I got to the seaward end of the row, I looked down at the beach. Our fire was still burning.

I realize that I have just written “
our
fire.” How strange, that I should think of it as belonging to all of us—to us as a group!

As we were going back to the fields from the beach I walked beside the white-haired old man. I wanted, for a moment, to say something kind to him, to thank him for making my own sadness more bearable, or, even, to put my arm around his frail-looking old shoulders. But I did none of these. I do not know how to do such things. I wish I knew how; I sincerely wish it. But I do not.

Alone in my cell at night I think a great deal. I think sometimes of the things I have read in books, or about my boyhood, or about my three blues as a professor in Ohio. Sometimes I think about that time when I first learned to read, over two yellows ago, when I found the box with the film and the flash cards and the little books with pictures. The words on the box said: “
Beginning Readers’ Kit
. They were the first printed words I had ever seen, and of course I could not read them. Whatever gave me the patience to persist until I learned to read words from a book?

If I had not learned to read in Ohio and then come to New York to try to become a professor of reading, I would not be in prison now. And I would not have met Mary Lou. I would not be filled with this sadness.

I think of her more than I think of any other thing. I see her, trying not to look frightened, as Spofforth took her out the door of my room at the library. That was the last time I saw her. I do not know where Spofforth took her, or what has become of her. She is probably in a prison for women, but I’m not certain of that.

I tried to get Spofforth to tell me what would become of her, while we were riding in the thought bus to my hearing; but he would not answer me.

I have tried to draw a picture of her face on my sheets of drawing paper, using colored crayons. But it is no good; I was never able to draw.

Yellows and blues ago there was a boy in my dormitory who could draw beautifully. One time he put some of his drawings on my desk in a classroom and I looked at them with awe. There were pictures of birds and of cows and of people and trees and of the robot who monitored the hall outside the classroom. They were remarkable pictures, with clear lines and with amazing accuracy.

I did not know what to do with the pictures. Taking or giving private things to others was a terrible thing to do and could cause high punishment. So I left them on my desk and the next day they were gone. And a few days after that the boy who drew them was also gone. I do not know what became of him. Nobody spoke of him.

Will it be the same with Mary Lou? Is it all over, and will there be no mention of her in the world again?

Tonight I have taken four sopors. I do not want to remember so much.

After supper this evening Belasco came to my cell! And he had a small gray-and-white animal under his arm.

I was sitting in my chair, thinking about Mary Lou and remembering the sound of her voice when she read aloud, when suddenly I saw my door come open. And there Belasco stood, grinning at me, with that animal under his arm.

“How. . . ?” I said.

He held a finger to his lips and then said softly, “None of the doors are locked tonight, Bentley. You might call it another malfunction.” He pushed the door shut and then set the animal on the floor. It sat and looked at me with a kind of bored curiosity; then it began scratching its ear with a hind foot. It was something like a dog, but smaller.

“The doors are locked at night by a computer; but sometimes the computer forgets to lock them.”

“Oh,” I said, still watching the little animal. Then I said, “What is it?”

“What is what?” Belasco said.

“The animal.”

He stared at me with great surprise. “You don’t know what a
cat
is, Bentley?”

“I never saw one before.”

He shook his head. Then he reached down and stroked the animal a few times. “This is a cat. It’s a pet.”

“A pet?” I said.

Belasco shook his head, grinning. “Boy! You don’t know anything they don’t \\each in school, do you? A pet is an amimal you keep for yourself. It’s a Mend.”

Of course
, I thought. Like Roberto and Consuela and their dog Biff, in the book I had learned to read from. Biff was the pet of Roberto and Consuela. And the book had said, “Roberto is Consuela’s friend,” and that was what a friend was. Somebody you were with more than a person should be with anyone else. Apparently an animal could be a friend, too.

I wanted to bend down and touch the cat, but I was afraid to. “Does it have a name?”

 “No,” Belasco said. He walked over and sat on the edge of my bed, still speaking only barely above a whisper. “No. I just call it ‘cat.’” He pulled a joint out of his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. His blue prison jacket sleeves were rolled up and I could see that he had some kind of decorations that looked as if they were printed in blue ink on each of his forearms, just above the bracelets on his wrists. On his right arm was a heart and on his left the outline of a naked woman.

He lit the joint. “You can give the cat a name if you want to, Bentley.”

“You mean I can just decide what to call it?”

“That’s right.” He passed me the joint and I took it quite casually—considering that I knew sharing was illegal—and drew a puff from it and passed it back.

Then, when I let the smoke out, I said, “All right. The cat’s name will be Biff.”

Belasco smiled. “Fine. The beast has been needing a name. Now it’s got one.” He looked down at the cat, who was walking slowly around, exploring the room. “Right, Biff?”

Bentley and Belasco and their cat Biff
, I thought.

DAY ONE HUNDRED FIVE

The prison buildings are, I believe, the most ancient structures I have ever seen. There are five of them, built of large green-painted blocks of stone, with dirty windows with rusted bars on them. I have only been in two of the five buildings—the dormitory with the barred cells where I sleep, and the shoe factory building where I work in the mornings. I do not know what is in the other three buildings. One of them, which sits a bit apart from the others, seems to be even older than the rest, and its windows have been boarded up, like the summer house in 
Angel on a String
, with Gloria Swanson. I have walked over to this building during the after-lunch exercise period and looked at it more closely. Its stones are covered with a smooth, wet moss, and its big metal doors are always locked.

Around all of the buildings is a very high double fence of thick wire mesh, once painted red but now faded to pink. There is a gateway in the fence through which we pass to work in the fields. There are four moron robot guards at this gateway at all times. As we pass through on our way to work they check the metal bands that are permanently fastened to our wrists before we are let through.

I was given a five-minute orientation lecture by the warden—a large, beefy Make Six—when I first was issued my uniforms. Among other things he explained that if a prisoner left without having his wristbands deactivated by the guards the bands would become like white-hot wires and would burn his hands off at the wrists if he did not return to within the gates immediately.

The bands are narrow and tight; they are made of an extremely hard, dull, silvery metal. I do not know how they were put on. They were around my wrists when I awoke in prison.

I think it is near to wintertime, because the air outside is cold. But the field around the plants is heated somehow, and the sun continues to shine. The ground is warm beneath my feet as I fertilize the obscene plants, and yet the air is cold on my body. And the stupid music never stops, never malfunctions, and the robots stare and stare. It is like a dream.