Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (631 page)

“Robbery,” I said. I still responded automatically with the minimum. My crime didn’t get more impressive with the addition of details.

“You’re in a rush?” said Floyd.

“What?”

“You haven’t got all day? You’re going somewhere? Tell your story, kid.”

We talked. He drew the tale of my crime and arrest out of me. He and Billy Lancing laughed when I got to the collision, and Floyd said, “Fucking cop was probably jerking off with the other hand.”

“He’ll be telling it that way from now on,” said Billy. “Won’t you, Nick?”

“What?”

“Too good not to tell it like that,” agreed Floyd.

And then he began to talk about his own crimes, and his punishments, before he was hardened. “—hadn’t been sent upstairs to get the money he forgot I woulda been killed in that crossfire like he was. ’Course, my reward for living was the judge gave me all the years they wanted to give him—”

“Shit, you weren’t more than a boy,” said Billy.

“That’s right,” said Floyd. “Like this one.”

“They all look like boys to me. Tell him how you used to work for the prison godfather, man.”

“Jesus, that’s a long time ago,” said Floyd, like he didn’t want to get into it. But he was just warming up.

The stories carried me out of myself, though I felt that I’d been warned that embellishments were not only possible, but likely. Floyd and Billy showed me that prison stories were myths, told in individual voices. What mattered were the univer-sals, the telling.

I’d been using my story to show a connection between myself and Floyd, but the bricks were no longer interested in connections. Billy and Floyd might have been accomplices in the job that got them sent up or they might never have met; either way they were now lodged catty-corner to one another forever, and the stories they told wouldn’t change it, wouldn’t change anything. The stories could only entertain, and get them attention from the living prisoners. Or fail to.

So I let go of trying to make Floyd admit that he was my father, for the moment. It was enough to try to understand it myself, anyway.

* * * *

On the way back from dinner Lonely Boy and two others followed me back to my cell. The hall was eerily empty, every adjoining cell abandoned. I learned later that such moments were no accident, but well orchestrated. The three men twisted my arms back, pushed me into the toilet stall, out of sight of the wall, and stripped down my pants.

I will not describe them or give them names.

What they did to me took a long time.

Lonely Boy stroked the nape of my neck all through the ordeal. What they did was seldom tender, but he never stopped stroking the small hairs of my neck and talking to me. His words were all contradictions, and I soon stopped listening to them. The sound was the point anyway, a kind of cooing interspersed with jagged accusations. Rhythm and counterpoint; Lonely Boy was teaching me about my loss, my helplessness, and the music of his words was a hook to help me remember. “Little special boy, special one. Why are you the special one? What did they choose you for? They pick you out for me? They send me a lonely one? You supposed to be a spy here, you want to in-fil-trate? How are you gonna spend your lonely days? You gonna think of me? I know I been thinking of you. This whole place is thinking of you. They’ll kill you if I don’t watch out for you. I’m your pro-tec-tor now—”

When I finally was alone I crawled into the lower bed and turned away from the wall. But I heard Ivan Detbar’s voice from above. He was making sure to be heard.

“You don’t have to go looking to find the top dog on the floor. The top dog finds you, that’s what makes him what he is. He finds you and he’s not afraid.”

“Shit,” said Billy Lancing.

“That’s who you’ve got to take,” said Detbar. “You’ve got to get on him like
thunder.
There is no other way.”

“Shit,” said Billy again. “First thing I learned in the joint is a virgin asshole’s nothing to die for. It doesn’t make the list.”

Floyd wasn’t talking.

* * * *

Graham and another guard took me into an office the next day, an airless room on the interior.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“Are you doing what we told you?”

“Talking? You didn’t tell me anything more than that.”

“Don’t be smart. Your father trusts you?”

“Everything’s great,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” I didn’t bother to tell him that Floyd didn’t agree that he was my father, that we hadn’t even established that after almost three days of talk.

I was feeling oddly jaunty, having grasped the depths of my situation. And I wasn’t all that impressed with Graham on his own. There wasn’t anything he could take away from me.

I wanted more information, and I suspected I could get it.

“There’s time for that,” said Graham.

“I don’t think so. All this weird attention is going to get me killed. They think I’m a spy for you, or they don’t know what to think. I’m not going to be alive long enough for you to use me.”

I wasn’t interested in telling him about the previous night. I knew enough to know that it wouldn’t improve anything for me. The problem was mine alone. I didn’t know whether I was ever going to confront Lonely Boy, but if I did it would be on prison terms. My priority now was to understand what they wanted from me and my father.

“You’re exaggerating the situation,” said Graham.

“I’m not. Tell me what this is about or I’ll ask Floyd.”

Graham considered me. I imagine I looked different than when they first dragged me out of the hole. I felt different.

He made a decision. “You’ll be brought back here. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

The other guard took me back to my cell.

It was a few hours later that I was standing in front of the man who didn’t introduce himself the first time. He didn’t again. He just told me to sit down. Graham stood to one side.

“Do you know the name Carl Allen Hemphill?” asked the man.

“Carl,” I said, surprised.

“Very good. Have you been speaking with your father about him?”

“What? No.”

“Did you know he was a prisoner here?”

“No.” I’d heard he’d been a prisoner. But I didn’t know he’d been a prisoner in the prison built of human bricks. “He’s here now?” Somehow I was stupid enough to yearn for an old friend inside the prison, to imagine they were offering a reunion.

“He’s dead.”

I received it as a small, blunt impact somewhere in my stomach. It was muffled by the distance of years since I’d seen him, and by my situation, my despair. Sure he was dead, I thought. Around here everything is dead. But why tell me?

“So?” I said.

“Listen carefully, Nick. Do you remember the unsuccessful attempt on the President’s life?”

“Sure.”

“The assassin, the man that was killed—that was your friend.”

“Bottmore,” I said, confused. “Wasn’t his name Richard Bottmore, or Bottomore, something like that—”

“That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Carl Allen Hemphill.”

“That’s crazy.” I’d barely begun to struggle with the notion of Carl’s having been here, his death. The assassination was too much, like being suddenly asked to consider the plight of the inhabitants of the moon. The point of this conversation, the answers I was seeking, seemed to whirl further and further out of my reach. “Why would he want to do that?”

“We’d very much like the answer to that question, Nick.” He smiled at me as though he’d said enough, and thought I could take it from there. For a blind, hot second I wanted to kill him. Then he spoke again.

“He did his time quietly. Library type, loner. Nothing that was any indication. He was released five months before the attempt.”

“And?”

“He had your cell.”

“That’s what this is about?” It seemed upside down. Was he saying that my real connection with Floyd didn’t interest them, wasn’t the point?

“Floyd hasn’t said anything?”

“I told you no.”

This time it was the man at the desk who lit a cigarette, and he didn’t offer me one. I waited while he finished lighting it and arranging it in his mouth.

When he spoke again his expression was oddly distanced. It was the first time I felt I might not have his full attention. “Hemphill left some papers behind. Very little of any value to the investigation so far. But he mentioned your father. It’s one of the only interesting leads we have.…

“The people I work with believe Hemphill didn’t act alone. The more we dig up on his background, the more we glimpse the outlines of a conspiracy. You understand, I can’t tell you any more than that or I’ll be putting you in danger.”

His self-congratulatory reluctance to “put me in danger” put a bad taste in my mouth. “You’re crazy,” I said. “Floyd doesn’t know anything about that.”

“Don’t try to tell me my job,” said the man behind the desk. “Hemphill left a list of targets. This is not a small matter. It was your father’s name in his book. Not some other name. Floyd Marra.”

I felt an odd stirring of jealousy. Carl and my father, my father who wouldn’t admit he was. “Why don’t you talk to Floyd yourself?”

“We tried. He played dumb.”

What if he is dumb?
I wanted to say. I was trying to square these bizarre revelations with the face in the wall, the brick I’d conversed with for the past three days. Trying to picture them questioning Floyd and coming away with the impression that he was holding something vital back.

“Can’t bug the wall, either,” said Graham. “Fuckers warn each other. Whisper messages.”

“The wall doesn’t like us, Nick. It doesn’t cooperate. Floyd isn’t stupid. He knows who he’s talking to. That’s why we need you.”

He doesn’t know who he’s talking to when he’s talking to me,
I wanted to say.

“I’ll ask him about Carl for you,” I said. I knew I would, for my own reasons.

* * * *

“Crabshit fish,” interrupted Jones. “That’s a hell of a thing.”

It nearly expressed the way I felt. “He almost started a war,” I said to Floyd, trying harder to make my point.

“He was a good kid,” said Floyd. “Like you.”

“Scared like you, too,” said Ivan Detbar.

I had to remind myself that the bricks didn’t see television or read newspapers, that Floyd hadn’t lived in the world for over thirteen years. The President didn’t mean anything to him. Not that he did to me.

“How’d you know him?” said Floyd. “Cellmates?”

It was an uncharacteristic question. It acknowledged human connections, or at least it seemed that way to me. Something knotted in my stomach. “We were in school together, junior high,” I said. “He was my best friend.”

“Best friend,” Floyd echoed.

“After you were put here,” I said, as though the framework were understood. “Otherwise you would have known him. He was around the house all the time. Mom—Doris—used to—”

“Get this cell rat,” said Floyd. “Talking about the past. His mom.”

“Hey,” said Billy Lancing.

“That’s a lot like that other one,” said Ivan Detbar. “What’s his name, Hemphill. He was a little soft.”

“No wonder they were best friends,” said Floyd. “Mom. Hey Billy, how’s your
mom
?”

“Don’t know,” said Billy. “Been a while.”

Now I hated him, though in fact he’d finally restored me to some family feeling. He’d caused me to miss Doris. She knew who I was, would remember me, and remember Carl as I wanted him remembered, as a boy. And besides, I knew her. I didn’t remember my father and I was sick of pretending.

What’s more, in hating him I recalled trying to share in Doris’ hatred of him, because I’d envied her the strength of the emotion. She’d known Floyd, she had a person to love or hate. I had nothing, I had no father. There was the void of my memories and there was this scarred brick, and between them somewhere a real man had existed, but that real man was forever inaccessible to me. I wanted to go back to Doris, I wanted the chance to tell her that I hated him now, too. I felt that somehow I’d failed her in that.

I was crying, and the bricks ignored me, I thought.

“Hemphill sure got screwed, didn’t he?” said Billy.

“The kid couldn’t take this place,” said Ivan Detbar.

“But he was a good kid,” said Floyd.

“Wasn’t his fault, something tripped him up bad,” said Billy. “Something went down.”

Through my haze of emotions—jealousy, bitterness, desolation—I realized they were offering me warnings, and perhaps some sort of apology.

And the talk of Carl made me remember my assignment.

“You guys talked a lot?” I said.

“I guess,” said Floyd.

“Nothing else to do,” said Billy. “ ’Less I’m missing something. Floyd, you been holding out on me?”

“Heh,” said Floyd.

“There wasn’t any talk about what he was going to do when he got out?” I asked. My task might only be an absurd joke, but at the moment it was all I had.

“I don’t hear you talking about what you’re going to do when you get out, and you’re only doing a three-year stretch,” said my father.

“What?”

“That’s the last thing you want to think about now, isn’t it? Maybe when you get a little closer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That poor kid was here at the start of ten years,” said Floyd. “Hey, Billy. You ever meet a guy at the start of a long stretch wants to talk about what he’s gonna do when he
finishes!”

“Not unless he’s planning a break, like Detbar here. Hah.”