Shackles (11 page)

Two hours of calisthenics in the morning, one hour in the afternoon, another hour before I go to sleep at night. If I’d tried to keep up that kind of schedule before my world shrank to this stinking prison, I would have put a killing strain on my heart. But I’ve eased into it gradually, and I pace myself through each session, and with the absence of close to thirty pounds (it must be close to thirty by now), there doesn’t seem to be much strain at all. I’m plenty tired by the time I crawl under the blankets, and I sleep quickly and deeply, but it isn’t the sleep of exhaustion.

The muscles in my arms, shoulders, and legs have become visible; my belly is almost flat. I’m turning into … what’s the expression these days? Hunk? That’s it: I’m turning into a hunk. Wait until Kerry sees me. She won’t recognize me.

I won’t recognize myself, either. Because I still haven’t looked in that cracked mirror in the bathroom. And I won’t—I will not look in a mirror again until I get out of this place. I wouldn’t know the gaunt, bearded stranger in the glass, and I don’t want to know him. He isn’t me; he’s a stand-in, a surrogate, an impostor. The real me is waiting down inside—he hasn’t gone anywhere, he’s just in a temporary state of suspended animation—and once I’m away from here he’ll come out again. And when I finally do look in a mirror I’ll see
him,
not the stranger with the beard and the terrible eyes.

Does that make any sense? I don’t know. I don’t care much right now.

Using soap for grease, I can work the iron the tiniest bit farther over my heel and down along my instep. And that’s all that matters.

Another tiny bit closer to freedom. Almost half the leg iron will slip over my heel now before the lower edge binds hard into the instep.

I have to force myself to eat two full meals a day; have had to for the past week. There is a part of me, a kind of imp of the perverse that lives in all of us, that keeps insisting I eat tiny portions or nothing at all, because that way I’ll lose weight even faster. Yes, I keep telling the imp, and maybe then I’d die of malnutrition before I could get the iron all the way off. Or at least make myself too weak and sick to walk away from this cabin once I get free of the shackles. It’s still winter outside, there are still occasional snow flurries, and there is snow on the ground and it is still damned cold. I can’t travel on foot in freezing weather with only a topcoat for warmth and protection. I’d collapse before I made half a mile; I would probably die of exposure.

No, I must eat regular good-sized meals to keep my strength up. The weight is coming off slowly, naturally; there’s no sense in trying to accelerate the process. Patience. Patience and care.

What I have to concentrate on now is the future, what happens
after
I get out of here and out of these mountains. For the first time since he chained me here, I have to start looking ahead, start making plans.

I need to concentrate on
him,
too. How can I find him unless I have some clue to who he is, where he might be? And the key to that may well be the thirteen weeks’ supply of provisions.

Why thirteen? I’ve got to keep asking myself that question until I come up with the answer.

What is the significance of thirteen?

More old memories crowding up to the surface, unbidden and this time unwanted. Unpleasant memories of my old man, of the way he lived and the way he died.

I hated him, growing up, with as much intensity as I loved my ma. And after his death I forgot him, shut him out of my mind and my life so completely that now, forty years later, I can’t dredge up even the slightest image of him. Just vague impressions—gestures, random actions, shouted words. And all of those distasteful.

I was seventeen when he died. Once he was buried I said good-bye to Ma and I joined the army and went away to fight in the South Pacific, in another of this century’s collection of wars. When I came home again, after four long hard years, no scars on my body but the first of many on my psyche, Ma and I never once talked about him, not to each other and not in each other’s hearing. Neither of us mentioned his name until the day Ma died, five years after my return. Then, on her deathbed, she said with some of her last words, “Try to forgive him,” and I said I would, for her sake, but I couldn’t. And I never have.

He was a drunk, my old man. That was his worst sin because it was the root of all his others. He was all right when he was sober: a little gruff, a little cold and distant, but you could deal with him on a more or less reasonable basis. It was a different story when he had liquor in him. He became abusive, he slapped Ma around and he slapped me around until I got old enough and big enough to put a stop to it. He gambled heavily—low-ball poker, horses, boxing matches. He lost job after job—he worked on the docks, mostly, and was in the middle of the “Bloody Thursday” clash between police and striking longshoremen in 1934—until finally no one would hire him anymore, not even relatives. He still brought home money now and then, sometimes in large amounts, but he wouldn’t say where he’d got it, and when that happened he and Ma would fight and then he would start drinking and storm out of the house and stay away for two or three days. I found out later that he was mixed up in some sort of waterfront black-market operation. But I didn’t tell anyone, least of all Ma; it would have hurt her even more, put even more lines in her round Italian face and even more pounds on her round Italian body. (He drank to excess; she ate to excess for solace and escape. When she died, prematurely, at the age of fifty-seven, she weighed 247 pounds.) I should have confronted the old man about his black-market ties, but I didn’t do that either. I wish I had. Sitting here thinking about him now, after all these years, with the bitterness undiminished by time, I wish to Christ I’d stood right in his face and told him what a son of a bitch he was.

It was the booze that killed him. He was drinking a fifth and more of whiskey a day in the last couple of years of his life, and it ate like acid through his liver and put him in the hospital and killed him within a week of his admission. I went to see him at San Francisco General just once, at Ma’s insistence. The impression I have of him then is of someone small and wasted and old, even though he was only fifty. I didn’t say anything to him—he was partially sedated at the time—and I only stayed a minute or so. Ma stayed a long time. She went every day and stayed a long time and then came home and fixed huge meals and ate most of the food herself. There wasn’t anything I could do for her. I spent most of that week, that deathwatch, in my room reading pulp magazines and army enlistment brochures and vowing to myself that I would not be like my old man, I would not, I would not drink whiskey and I would not steal and cheat and I would not hurt the people who were close to me.

I’ve lived up to those vows the best way I know how. I don’t drink whiskey, I’m reasonably honest, I don’t willingly inflict pain on those I care about or on any decent human being. Whatever else I am, whatever my shortcomings, I am not my old man’s son.

Sudden insight, one I’ve never had before: He made me the way I am today. In his own uncaring, selfish, drunken way, my old man made me exactly the kind of person I grew up to be.

The heater died this morning.

I turned it on to low as I always do, to let it warm up slowly, and right away it started to make a series of loud pinging and thumping noises. I watched it for a few seconds, went to shut it down again—and there was a banging, a flash with sparks in it, and the thing died. I switched it off, let it cool for an hour, and switched it back on. Nothing. Dead as hell.

And outside it’s snowing again and the temperature must be ten below zero. Exercising kept me warm for a while, but once my body cooled down I had to fold myself up in one of the blankets and drink cup after cup of hot coffee until it was time for the next set of exercises. I’ll have to keep wearing the blanket and drinking too much coffee and tea every day from now until I’m free. Eat more and exercise more, too, to maintain my body heat. The threat of pneumonia, of freezing to death, is twice as severe now, with all the life gone out of the heater and its corpse lying over there bent and broken against the fireplace, where I hurled it in a moment of rage and frustration.

But it
can
’
t
be much longer until I’m able to work that leg iron all the way over my heel and off. Another couple of weeks at the outside. I can stay healthy that long … I’ve got to stay healthy that long. I won’t let that frigging heater finish me when I’m this close to freedom.

Five straight days of snow and chill moaning winds. Drifts piling up outside, deep enough to cover the lower third of the shed. Meat-locker cold in here—so intense three nights ago that I had to flatten out one of the cardboard cartons and wrap it around my body under my clothing. The instant coffee is almost gone, and there is only half a package of tea bags left. At least I don’t have to worry about the pipes freezing and cutting off my water supply: If that were possible it would have happened by now. Whoever plumbed this place must have used copper piping.

Sniffles in the morning, chronic runny nose, but no major symptoms of illness. So far.

I can get the leg iron, now, to within half an inch of coming off. Frustrating, that last agonizing half inch, but I just don’t dare try to force it any farther. I must have lost nearly thirty-five pounds but I still need to shed another five or so. God, how long to do that? Another ten days to two weeks at the most. I don’t think I can stand the waiting any longer than that.