Shackles (7 page)

No more sun. Heavy clouds instead, gunmetal gray and veined with a kind of gangrenous black. Ugly clouds. Fat, bloated clouds full of rain. Break open pretty soon, dump rain like gray piss on the rest of the day.

I can’t keep still. Cold in here, the air smells of rain even in here, I need to move around. I’m not going to write any more, pointless to keep writing crap like this.

Gray piss all over the rest of the day.

Yesterday was bad, the worst since I’ve been here, and today doesn’t look much better. More dark clouds, more rain—it hasn’t stopped raining since yesterday noon.

I’m still edgy, depressed. It’s getting to me, all of it, the weather, the chain and the leg iron, the short rations, the staticky radio,
all
of it, and I can’t seem to break the mood. Dangerous frame of mind, I
know
it is, I know I’ve got to snap out of it, but how? How? I did an hour’s worth of nonstop exercises this morning, then paced and paced and paced until I was fatigued, but the workout didn’t seem to have any effect on me mentally. I don’t even want to eat. My belly is screaming for food but the thought of food makes my throat close up. I’ve
got
to eat, though. Got to keep my strength up.

Frigging weather. Why doesn’t it stop raining?

I keep wondering if he’ll be back.

Nearly a week now since he left. And he said he wouldn’t come again until he was sure I was dead. But will he be able to stay away that long? The whole purpose of this prison is to make me suffer, right? A man who hates that deeply, who craves revenge that much—wouldn’t he want to keep tabs on his victim, get a firsthand look at some of the suffering? Seems likely he would. He’d have to have tremendous will power not to. And wouldn’t he want to make sure I hadn’t found some way to get free, no matter how escape-proof he thinks this place is? If I were him I wouldn’t be able to sleep night after night for as long as four months if there was even the remotest chance of my prisoner getting loose, coming after me.

But I could never be a man like him, so how can I know what goes on in a mind like his? Maybe he’s completely satisfied that there’s no way for me to escape. And maybe just the
thought
of my suffering is enough for him.

Still. Still, there’s a chance he’ll come back. I
want
him to, because then I might be able to gull him into believing I’m sick, catch him off guard that way. He wasn’t careless before, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be maneuvered into making a mistake. Oh yes, I want him to come back, I want him to make a mistake, I want to get my hands on him.

I want to kill him.

Only one other person I’ve felt that way about. Man named Emerson who hired a gunman to take out Eberhardt a few years ago. I happened to be with Eb at his house when the gunman showed up and both of us got shot, Eberhardt so seriously that he almost died. I tracked Emerson down with every intention of canceling his ticket—only he was dead when I caught up with him, dead of a freak accident, and it came as a relief because I didn’t have to put myself to the test after all, find out if I really was capable of cold-blooded murder when the moment of truth arrived. Now, looking back on that time, I
know
I would not have been able to kill Emerson. All my life I’ve lived and worked within the law. And I’ve seen too much torn and bleeding flesh, too much death and dying, to want to inflict that kind of indecency on another human being.

But this is different. What the whisperer has done to me isn’t human;
he
isn’t human. He’s a dangerous animal, a mad dog. And I
can
kill a mad dog—I know that just as surely as I know I wouldn’t have been able to destroy Emerson.

Every man has his price in murder, just as he has his price in wealth or power or love. When the mad dog locked me in these chains we both found mine.

My daily routine is well established now, some of it by choice and some of it dictated by the contents and confines of my cell.

Wake up around seven, get up immediately. To the window first, for a look at the new day. Passable weather this morning: high, broken overcast, streaks and wedges of blue here and there. The sun hasn’t appeared yet; I keep hoping it will before the day ends. But at least there haven’t been any more rainstorms. The one over the weekend lasted two full days, broke at last on Sunday afternoon—and the worst of my depression broke with it. Odd how the weather can affect your mood so profoundly. I can tolerate overcast and snow flurries, I’ve discovered, but I dread long periods of rain. And I yearn for the sun. In a way I’ve become a sun-worshiper: I need it to help me survive.

Back near the cot for my morning exercises. Sit-ups first; I can do a set of fifty now, where I could do only twenty-five when I started. Then leg pulls and stretches, easy enough with my right leg, damned difficult with my left because of the leg iron and the chain. Then push-ups, twenty or so, then on my feet for knee bends, toe touches, several other twists and stretches and jerks that I can’t name because I’ve more or less made them up myself. I can do an hour’s worth of exercises now without fatigue. Tomorrow I’ll increase the time by fifteen minutes. And keep increasing it in fifteen-minute increments whenever I feel I’m ready. Eventually, I should be able to use up most of the morning in exercising, and that will be good because your mind shuts down when you’re making physical demands on your body. Sweat and strain equal a period of relative peace.

Drag the chain into the bathroom, use the toilet, then strip to the waist, brush my teeth and wash my face, and take a quick sponge bath with the dampened cloth. Avoid looking into the cracked mirror over the sink; I’ve only glanced at my reflection once, two days ago, and that was plenty. The face itself is unpleasant enough, with its coating of straggly gray whiskers and its haggard aspect. But the eyes … I’m afraid to look into my own eyes, for fear of what I might see reflected there.

Put on shirt and coats, go get the coffeepot and fill it with water and then take it back out and put it on the hot plate. Plug in the hot plate. Spoon coffee into the mug (coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, tea at night). Draw an X through the day’s date on the calendar. Switch on the heater, just for a few minutes, to take some of the chill out of the room: I’ll be feeling cold again because my body has cooled after the morning workout. Find something on the shelves to eat for breakfast; open the can and set it aside. By this time the water should be boiling. Make the coffee, take the cup to the cot and sit down with it. Turn on the radio, try to bring in KHOT—the only station I seem to get on the radio. The last few days it hasn’t come in for more than thirty seconds at a time, but this morning I got one twenty-minute stretch of golden oldies like “Orange Blossom Special” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” songs I’m beginning to like in spite of myself, and several other stretches of five to ten minutes each. Plus part of a news broadcast that told me a bunch of things, none of which I particularly wanted to hear (and nothing about me, of course). I’ve always been an ostrich when it comes to the daily news. For too long my life has been overrun with pain and suffering and ugliness; I don’t need any more of it in black and white, or in bright colors with some newscaster speaking solemnly in a voice-over—the same newscaster who will be joking it up with a weatherman or a sportscaster two minutes later. So I didn’t listen to much of the radio newscast, paid the most attention to a sports update that told me the Forty-niners won last Sunday. Let’s hear it for the Forty-niners.

When I’ve finished the coffee, return to the hot plate and make another half cup. Then pour my breakfast into the saucepan and heat that. Eat breakfast on the cot, washed down with my second cup of coffee. Wash out the saucepan and the plate afterward, put them back on the top shelf next to the hotplate.

Pace for a while, twenty minutes to half an hour, as long as I can stand it.

Sit or lie on the cot and read a chapter or two or three of one of the paperbacks. I’m partway through an unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra now, as a change of pace from the fiction. Lurid stuff, plenty of sex, lots of glitter and glamour and big money, all sorts of innuendo on a variety of fronts. All I knew about Sinatra before I started this book was that he was a crooner and a decent actor and a paisan who may or may not have a few underworld connections. Now I know enough to make me care even less about him than I did before.

Write a little, as I’m doing now. If I happen to feel like writing, that is. I haven’t the past two days, so I didn’t bother; there was just nothing I cared to set down on paper. Today I felt like picking up a pen again and I seem to be going on at some length. Not for any therapeutic reason … or maybe it
is
therapy, in a way, the kind that helps you keep things in perspective by confronting your thoughts, writing them out. But I don’t want to force it. Does it matter if I keep a record of every single day I’m here? I don’t see how it can.

Work on the wall for a while. I started doing that four days ago, during the rainstorm—bent and flattened one of the soup cans at the top and in the middle to fit my hand, so that it resembles a kind of scraping tool, and then gouged and rubbed and scraped at the wood around the ringbolt. I’ve been doing that every day since, for an hour or so at a time, even though it hasn’t done much damage to the log and I really don’t expect to get out of here that way. This is a kind of therapy, too, a way of reinforcing my resolve not to give up.

Pace some more, back and forth, forth and back, dragging that goddamn chain (I don’t listen any more to the slithering, clanking sound it makes—I’ve found I can shut my ears to it if I try hard enough). Do that until I feel tired enough to sleep for an hour or two. Afternoon naps are good for you, particularly when you get up around my age. Ask any doctor, ask Dear Abby, that’s what they all say.

After the nap, read another chapter or two in the current paperback. I might also read a chapter or two
before
I fall asleep, if that’s what it takes to clear my mind and make me drowsy.

Get up, put fresh water on the hot plate, make a cup of tea. No afternoon meal; just two meals a day, morning and evening, to conserve provisions.

Drink the tea while thumbing through one of the magazines, spot-reading when something catches my eye—the ads, mostly. Modern magazine advertisements can be interesting sometimes, though not as interesting as the ones in the pulps. You can find ads for the damnedest things in thirties and forties issues of
Popular Detective, Flynn’s, Complete Detective, Strange Detective Mysteries,
a host of others. Ads for trusses, false teeth, lonely hearts clubs, sex manuals, anatomical charts, nose adjusters to alter the shape of your schnozz, home study courses in taxidermy and how to be a detective or a secret service operative. Cures for tobacco addiction, alcohol addiction, epilepsy, rheumatism, piles, pimples, warts, stomach gas, and kidney problems. Booklets on how to patent your invention, how to stop stammering, how to analyze handwriting, how to make love potions, how to “become dangerous” and lick bullies twice your size, how to raise giant frogs for fun and profit. Hundreds more just as improbable. Somebody ought to do a book of pulp-magazine ads, reproduce the screwiest ones in their entirety. For my generation it would be more than a collection of high-camp hucksterism; it would provide instant nostalgia with each and every page.

Wash out the tea cup, put it back on the shelf. Maybe try to bring KHOT in again, maybe pace a while longer or do a few more exercises, maybe look out the window if the weather is decent, maybe work a little more on these misery pages, these burnt offerings, this indictment. Improv time. Don’t want to establish
too
rigid a routine here. Got to leave a little room for spontaneity, right?

By this time it should be late afternoon, getting on toward dusk. Switch on the lamp, if it isn’t on already. Switch on the heater, if
it
isn’t on already, because once darkness settles, no matter what the weather is like, it gets chilly in here.

Almost time for supper. Make preparations—and take time doing it, there’s no hurry, let the belly do a little begging for its evening meal. What’ll it be tonight? Corned beef hash? Very good choice, sir, very nourishing. Corned beef hash, crackers, tea, and—let’s see—how about some nice Fig Newtons for dessert? I haven’t had Fig Newtons since I was a kid, and when I was a kid I hated them. If I told my ma once I told her fifty times how much I hated Fig Newtons, and still she bought them, still she put them in my school lunch pail or on my dessert plate at home. I gave up eventually and ate them, every last one, instead of ignoring them or throwing them away. Mothers are good at making you give up, making you eat or do things they think are good for you. It’s a subtle form of mind control that, if practiced properly—and my ma was an expert at it—retains its hold on you no matter how long you live. I still hate Fig Newtons, so tonight I’m going to eat Fig Newtons, and not just because I can’t afford to waste food. If I were confronted with a package of Fig Newtons somewhere else, at any time, I would probably eat the damned things then too. The only reason I haven’t eaten them in thirty-five years is that I’ve somehow managed to avoid being confronted with them.

Eat supper while paging through another magazine. Wash the plate and cup and saucepan, put them away on the top shelf.

Read another chapter or two, sitting or lying on the cot.

Do another twenty minutes or so of exercises.

Wash my hands and face in the bathroom sink. Strip down to my underwear (if it’s not too cold to sleep in just underwear). Turn off the heater and the lamp. Wrap myself in the two blankets and lie down and will myself to sleep immediately so that I won’t lie there in the dark and think and maybe brood. I remember seeing a movie once, one of those old Topper comedies with Roland Young, and one of the players asked Eddie “Rochester” Anderson if he was afraid of the dark. He said no, he wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of what was
in
the dark. I laughed at the time; I’m not laughing now. I’m afraid of what’s in the dark, too—the dark recesses of my mind.

And that’s my day. This day, and with minor variations, all my yesterdays and all my tomorrows until I find a way out of here. On the one hand, the regular routine creates the sense of normalcy I need and acts as a kind of mind-numbing drug for most of my waking hours. On the other hand, the monotony and the crushing loneliness can’t help but have negative long-range effects.

Now I know exactly how hard-core convicts feel, men in solitary confinement, prisoners on death row. And yet most of them can look forward to their release; even the ones on death row have a mathematically better chance of survival than I do—lawyers working for new trials, commutations, stays. And those prisoners aren’t forced to wear leg irons and chains, not anymore. And they have other prisoners to talk to, friends and relatives who come to visit them. I have no one. No friend or loved one who has any idea of where I am, no way anyone can work effectively for my release. There is only me. My world has shrunk to this corner, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and I am its only inhabitant. For all I know, what I hear on the radio may be nothing more than a tape playing in an empty studio, and the entire human race has been eradicated and I am the last man in the world, trapped here in
my
little world.

But that makes no difference in how I get through my days. I haven’t lost my will to survive, nor will I lose it, and so I go on. Minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. Living on three things other than the meager rations of food.

Hope.

And my love for Kerry.

And my hatred of the mad dog who put me here.