The Fortress of Solitude (72 page)

I stared at him, for what must have been a long moment.

“Yo, Dylan?”

“What?”

“
Fuck
you, motherfucker.”

Prisons slept. I had transit of the Watertown facility by now—three, four in the morning, whichever it was. The familiar music of clanking deadbolts and jangling keys alerted no one. I was only certain the A/B doors were my limit, a test I couldn’t pass visible. In my previous plan—just hours old, though it felt like another world—I’d intended to ask Mingus to wait a few days before using the ring, to give me a head start in getting clear. I doubted I’d get the same consideration from Robert. Anyway, I hadn’t asked for it.

I held to that previous plan nevertheless, which consisted of getting as near to the visitors’ room as I could. If I had to be found inside the compound, I figured innocence by association was my best hope—a civilian, I’d go to where civilians could be found, from time to time. There I’d wait out the last few hours of the night, then try to blend in with the morning’s first wave of visitors, maybe claim to have accidentally blundered through the wrong door. I still hadn’t scrubbed my ultraviolet-inked knuckles, and could reasonably hope the mark would still register in the COs’ scanners. I’d offer that up, with my whiteness, as sign I wasn’t part of the population. And, after all, I wasn’t. They’d have to let me go.

I reentered the green-tile pavilion which led to the visitors’ room, found my way to a corridor I’d passed through, one in sight, through wide Plexiglas windows, of the chamber where I’d removed my belt and shoes and had my earplug puzzled over. There I found a doorless room, really only a vestibule leading nowhere, with a pair of bright-lit Pepsi machines, another vending machine offering cellophane-wrapped Oreos and Cheez-Its at the end of corkscrew spirals, and a high-mounted television set, angled as though for a bedridden patient.

I slid the ring of keys into the dust deep between the feet of the Cheez-Its machine. They’d be retrievable if I needed them, but should I be caught, they’d hardly aid my case. Then I slumped inside the doorway, tucked my feet close, drew myself out of sight of the corridor from every angle I could calculate. Exhaustion was toxic, and my head began to nod. Not nodding in time—I wasn’t composing and committing to memory a lost masterpiece of a rap album, only nodding off. Anyone could sneak up on me who liked to. The black eye of the television glared down, but it wasn’t intelligible, wasn’t Vader or Big Brother. There was no authority here, malign or otherwise. The Pepsi machine glowed, but no one was home.

I woke, to bright sunlight and an aching urge to pee, to find the Plexiglas window across the corridor full not of sluggish morning visitors but an agitated glut of COs, Watertown city policemen, and a handful of other middle-aged white men in dark suits, a few of them jotting on stenographer’s pads. Then I was startled by someone nearer: a young CO in the vestibule with me, back turned as he fed dollars into the machine, one after another, and gathered an armload of Pepsi. The rolling clunk of a can into the machine’s gullet was what had jerked me awake. The CO hadn’t spotted me, but turned now, abruptly.

“I, uh, dropped some change,” I said, blinking awake, and pawing with my hands on the floor.

“How the hell’d you even get in here?”

“Through that door,” I bluffed. “It was open.”

“Holy Hell, if Talbot saw you!”

“It was Talbot who told me I could come in here,” I tried. “I think I’m a little confused. Where’s the bathroom, anyway?”

Now the CO squinted down at me, sensing something irregular. He had to straighten his shoulders, and reorganize the freight of soda cans in his crooked elbow. He was the youngest I’d seen, evidently a gofer, though his belt was laden with keys, plastic baton, and, I was pleased to see, ultraviolet scanner.

“You’re a newspaperman, right?” he asked.

“Surely you remember me, young man.” I stood, brushed myself off, and affected a transatlantic tone of befuddled impatience, casting myself as Cary Grant, him as Ralph Bellamy.

“What’s your name again, though?”

I searched and came out with: “Vance Christmas.” He was the only newspaperman I could think of in my condition, besides Jimmy Olsen. I supposed Christmas deserved any belated trouble Aeroman could bring him.

“Right, yeah, but from where?”

“Albany,” I said. “I’m with the, uh,
Albany Herald-Ledger
. You know, we’re doing a special feature on the state of the prisons.”

“But you came in with those other guys, right?” The fog of uncertainty between us was an irritation to this man, my diffident captor—he wanted me to supply a right answer as badly as I wanted to supply one, so he could resume his uncontroversial errand.

“Sure, Talbot invited me to tag along,” I said. I supposed
those other guys
were the ones just on the other side of the window. If I was made to join them perhaps I would be allowed to tag along and, eventually, shuffle out. “Because of the special feature thingee, the supplement.” This fiction was becoming distractingly real to me—I imagined a shattering exposé, Pulitzers for the underdog
Herald-Ledger
—so I neglected to wonder why reporters, real reporters, were here in the first place.

I’d made a mistake, though, in trying a second time to claim the unseen Talbot’s blessings. Gofer squinted harder, and arranged the cans of soda along the top of the machine to free his hands. He rubbed the crook of his arm to restore feeling to the chilled flesh, and cleared his throat, reassembling dignity and command.

“Can I see some I.D.?”

“Look, listen,” I said, lowering my voice. “I didn’t really come in with those other guys.”

“How’d you get here, then?”

“I spent the night. I came in as a visitor, yesterday—here, check my hand stamp, you’ll see.”

“Well, I don’t know about that . . .” He seemed about to panic and seek help. We were still unnoticed by the congregation in the search room. This was my margin, my breath, and it was rapidly vanishing.

“Listen, wait,” I said. “I really am a reporter for the
Albany Tribune
.” Had I bollixed my credential? No matter: “I persuaded a couple of guards to smuggle me in here—you know Stamos and Sweeney?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t want to get them in trouble, that’s why I was stalling. They let me stow away, for my investigation.”

“
Stamos
did that?”

“Yup.”

“Christ, they’re idiots!”

“I know, I know.”

“Talbot’s going to
murder
them.”

“Maybe not, if you can get me out of here. Just slip me back through to the lot. I’ll never involve any of your names, I promise you that.”

“Jeez Louise!”

“Check my hand.”

Shaking his head, Gofer unclipped his scanner and shone it on my knuckles. The purple emblem seemed to hover, a tiny hologram.

I tried to hustle him past deliberation, by acting as if he’d already agreed. “Let’s make a move now, they’re not looking.”

“Jeez—”

“Only I really need to stop in the bathroom, I was stuck there all night.”

“Oh, brother.”

When I emerged from the men’s toilet Gofer regarded me pityingly, my threat all dissipated now. “Guess it was unlucky for you this whole thing went down today,” he said.

“
Crazy
unlucky,” I agreed.

“Teach you to try that again.”

“Indeed. Never.”

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

At the A/B doors I whispered, “Probably you should just say I left something in my car.” Gofer made a face, then leaned through a sliding window.

“This guy’s got to go back to the lot,” he said, his tone morose, like a bullied boy. “I’m taking him out.”

“Okay,” came the bleary reply. The cage’s bolts slammed open and shut, each in turn, and we moved through.

“Hey, so what exactly
did
go down in there?” I asked Gofer at the entrance to the lot. The dawn’s early light, still combing through the treeline, shocked my crummy orbs. I caught a whiff of myself, an ordinary all-night stink. Three disgruntled crows jogged across the gravel as we approached, then flapped aloft to barely clear the razor curls atop the Cyclone fence, and winged for the highway and the strip mall beyond it. The birds made shabby harbingers of my freedom: the prospect of my rental car’s AC, some McDonald’s coffee.

“Holy Moses,” said Gofer, incredulous I’d been so near yet missed the breaking story. “Nothing apart from a fellow up in the SHU fooled an officer into opening his door, made a run for it. I guess he had some stolen keys, so we’ve got a whole headache about it now. Talbot’s having a cow.”

“Guy escaped?” I was blessed, I understood now, in being one headache too many this morning. Hence my easy ticket out. No one, least of all Gofer, wished to see Talbot further inflamed. I couldn’t have scripted Robert Woolfolk’s role better if I’d tried.

“Killed himself.”

“What?” I blurted.

Gofer shut his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

“They killed
him
, you mean.”

“Nope.” He staged-whispered for effect. “Suicide. Got loose, then did away with himself, poor crazy son of a gun.”

“Why would he kill himself if he got free?”

Gofer shrugged. “This fellow leaped off a gun tower, highest point on the yard. Gunnery officer said he was hooting like an eagle. He hit a sloped concrete embankment, landed sideways, I guess. It was pretty sickening. They were taking pictures out there but nobody’s going to use them. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen—his arms got tangled under his body, so he sort of crumpled up and broke in half as he slid down that bank. Didn’t even look human by the time he came to a stop.”

chapter  
16

T
he Hoagy Carmichael Room, a mock Midwestern parlor with carpet and furniture and vitrines full of Carmichael’s own scrapbook memorabilia, was open only by appointment, but I was able to make one on the spot. I didn’t sense the room’s keepers had too much demand. The formalities were only to be certain no intruder seated themselves at Hoagy’s upright piano and started playing, or swiped hand-scrawled notes from Bix Beiderbecke or Governor Ronald Reagan. The key-bearer was a middle-aged secretary down the corridor, in the Archives of Traditional Music, there in Morrison Hall. She hovered nervously beside me in the room, until I persuaded her I was a good bet. Then I was left alone, to balm my soul in contemplation of the original sheet music for “Ole Buttermilk Sky” and “My Resistance Is Low” and a ribbon-bound screenplay of
To Have and Have Not
autographed by Bogart, Faulkner, and Hawks. Afterward I went to the listening room and spent some time on headphones, exploring lost acetates, rare masters of Carmichael’s music. The Collegians, Carmichael’s Indiana University fraternity band, had recorded a stomp called “March of the Hooligans”—careening hot jazz with a fiddle solo to peg it as Hoosier. I played that tinny, miraculous bit of schoolboy art five or six times, then returned to dwell some more in the Zen garden of the room.

I’d driven all day and far into Sunday night from the mall lot in Watertown, committing topological penance across western New York and into Pennsylvania, on a flat, three-lane interstate which judged or forgave nothing, only left me wholly to my own judgment. Now I understood: I’d wakened Aeroman to kill Robert Woolfolk. It was a collaboration that had taken Mingus and the ring and my half-conscious hatred years to devise, though the seed of inspiration had been unmistakable, in Aaron X. Doily’s plunge into the Pacific Street vest-pocket park, twenty-three years ago—what goes up comes down. Aeroman was nothing if not a black body on the ground. I hadn’t even played fair and told Robert of the ring’s switch to invisibility. I wondered if he’d discovered it. I wondered if the guards on the tower had only told themselves they’d seen the man who screamed like a raptor on his way down, if there’d been anything to see until he’d smashed to pieces on the embankment.

For so long I’d thought Abraham’s legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life’s real actors, in my Fortress of Solitude. To see the world in a liner note: I am the DJ, I am what I play. But here I’d catapulted across the country in an airplane seat, a deranged arrow-man of pure intention, to uncover Mingus and Robert at Watertown—they hadn’t asked me to come. Maybe I’d underrated the Rachel in me, the Running Crab ready to destroy and bolt, to overturn lives and go on the lam.

So now I had to move on the ground, touch the earth. I needed to follow her crab footprints exactly, make no mistake in whom I was tracking this time. I drove just over the limit, anonymous in the flow, but inside the space of the car I was a vigilante, a low rider. I drove without music, my CD wallet on the backseat, untouched—no soundtrack to prettify the ugly scene of me. I stopped only to stretch my legs, gas up, and piss, and to make a handful of calls, letting Abraham and Francesca know I wouldn’t be returning to Brooklyn, contacting the airline to cancel a ticket and the rental office to say I’d be returning the car to Berkeley in a few days, not La Guardia tomorrow. No one was pleased, but I didn’t give anyone a choice in the matter. I didn’t call Abby, because I didn’t have anything to tell her, not yet.

I lost my wits on the road at around three. The sporadic lights coming the other way seemed always about to veer into mine, despite the wide grassy divider between us. I found a Howard Johnson’s then, at the entrance to Ohio, and slept for a few queasy hours, showered, hit the road again. I made Indiana by midmorning—a left turn at Indianapolis, past Larry Bird’s auto dealership, south to Bloomington. Campus parking was a bitch, so I settled for a faculty spot. I’d killed a man last night—I could stand a campus parking ticket.

At a terminal in the library I made my discovery: my quarry not only still lived in Bloomington, he worked on campus. I wouldn’t even have to repark my car. The researcher at Zelmo Swift’s law firm had traced Running Crab’s last known address to Bloomington, 1975, before she’d dropped off the map after bail flight in Lexington, Kentucky. But Abraham had refused even to look inside Zelmo’s manila folder of “This Is Your Life!” data, and neither Zelmo Swift nor Francesca Cassini could have known, as I did, another name to use to pick up the Bloomington trail.