The Pledge (45 page)

“We all are, Bruce. With this stupid Korean War going on, we all feel that we'll never be released. But let's talk about India for a few minutes. That's my homily. You wouldn't want me to waste it?”

“Heaven forbid. It's getting dark already. The summer dies so quickly.”

“I asked you what you might guess that this diplomat said.”

“You tell me.”

“He gave me four reasons for their silence. First reason: they're still dependent on England for a good many things. They don't want to upset that apple cart. Second reason: their problems as a new government. Third reason: they don't want to feed a piece of fuel that big to the Communist Party. Fourth reason: people die in India, people die in Bengal. There are floods and famines, and in the case of this particular famine — who died? A part of the dead, a large part, were Untouchables, and their lives are not very much worth bothering about, and another part of the dead were Muslims, and since the Muslim rice dealers were involved, let them worry about their dead, and the rest of the dead were very poor peasants, of which there are all too many in India, and nobody, India or elsewhere, makes much fuss when the very poor die. So there is my homily, and the reason I'm boring the shit out of you with this is because at this moment you have a very poor picture of yourself.”

“If that's your moral discourse, I can live without it.”

“I suppose so. I can understand that. But the point I'm making is about you and your future. I may argue with Duprey, but he and Oscar Hill and you and myself — we're caught in the same noose. We feel the agony of poor people who die. We don't laugh about it or brush it off. Maybe there were ten thousand correspondents working that war for a buck and a big reputation, maybe only a few hundred, I never looked at any statistics, but you're different.”

“Yeah, that's why I'm here,” Bruce agreed sourly.

“I'm trying to reach you with something, and maybe I'm not putting it right. Do you know what Jesus said to the Jews?”

Bruce turned and looked at Legerman for a long moment. “You really beat the hell out of me,” Bruce said.

“I try. Now I'll tell you what Jesus said to the Jews. Quote: Ye be the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?”

“He said that?”

“Your religion. Did you ever read the New Testament?”

Bruce smiled. “No, they never sent me to Sunday school.”

“Enough of goddamn unappreciated homilies,” Legerman said. “I'm going to bed and read. I'm reading John O'Hara's
Appointment in Samarra.
I found it in the library. The man writes like an angel.”

“Thanks,” Bruce said.

“Work easy,” Legerman said.

Bruce sat on the steps of the bunkhouse while darkness filled the bowl where the prison camp lay. Ink poured into a vast receptacle, ink rising to the tops of the mountains that surrounded the place, a black cup with a rim of white light. Too much beauty is painful and fills one with nameless longing; it always speaks of things beyond our reach, and it shrinks the flimsy substance of the ego. The moral discourse on the part of Legerman had left him cold. Decency and compassion are better dealt with by someone not consigned to hell. There were men in prison who took it in their stride. They built time without giving it much of a second thought, and some of them were far more content in prison than they would have been outside. No one went hungry in prison — not in an American prison. They had clean clothes, decent food, and they lived in the company of their peers.

Of course, Leavenworth and Lewisburg were not Mill Bog, but they were what the convicts called good prisons. The point was to commit a Federal crime, and so keep oneself out of state prisons.

Bruce was coming to the conclusion that he would kill himself before he accepted a life sentence, and this, romantic and improbable, nevertheless brought him a sense of peace. It also decided him. He told himself that he would do as Molly desired, meet her on the road and make the break for Chicago. He would do anything for her, go anywhere for her, live anywhere, so long as they could be together.

It was a decision he had to come to, and once he had made the decision, he slept better. He was no longer confused from hour to hour, torn and anguished, and those feelings were replaced by excitement and anticipation. He had done something of the sort once before, when Legerman hustled him out of Calcutta before the British could catch up with him, and that had been successful, and there was no reason why this should not be equally successful. And with this came the expectation of seeing Molly without a time limit, without the misery of saying goodby a few hours after greeting her. It spelled freedom, and regardless of the danger that came with it, the taste of freedom was sweet and delicious.

The few days passed, and it was suddenly the eleventh of October. Professor Duprey shook his hand and said, “I shall miss you, Bruce. You are like a rock, and in prison one needs that.” He didn't say he would see Bruce in New York. Word gets around in a prison; even a blurred sense of something impending gets around. Legerman said, “That pig, Scharnoff, had a meeting with an FBI man up in the Administration Building yesterday. Be careful what you say to him.” Suddenly, he threw his arms around Bruce and crushed him in a bearlike grip. Bruce's eyes were wet as Legerman let go of him.

“All right,” Legerman mumbled. “Second meeting. We have a few more to go.”

Oscar Hill was more restrained. He still felt guilt for denying Bruce the privacy of the hospital toilet, the more so since no one had been injured sufficiently since he took over to warrant a bed in the hospital. He thanked Bruce for giving him the cigarette idea, and informed him that he had already smuggled eighteen pages out of the prison. Bruce felt miserable about that, but without the courage to tell Hill that it was a vengeful invention.

Scharnoff sought him out, slapped him on the back, and said, “Lucky bastard, you and that redheaded beauty of yours.” The director, short and heavily muscled, grasped Bruce's hand, and in what is at times a gesture of hostility, attempted to crush it in his. Bruce crushed back, and Scharnoff winced in pain. Months in the machine shop had done things for Bruce's grip.

Lemuel Ward gave him a wallet done in his cellophane craft work, and Jackson gave him the name of a hamlet in Kentucky where there'd always be a glass of corn whiskey, one hundred and eighty proof, waiting for him. The convicts who worked with him at the motor pool had come to like him more than a little. Clem Alsta and Harry O'Brien turned his leaving into anger. He was leaving them. They reacted as if it were a blow struck against them. Sam Jones, the boss convict at the garage, held his hand for a long moment, and then shook his head, his eyes full of pain. “You made me a damned good mechanic,” Bruce said. “I'm going to leave my book with you. I hope you find time to read it.”

Tears in his eyes, Jones said, “You dumb white son of a bitch, I can't read.”

For more than ten months, Bruce had spent every day except Sunday in the big garage and the sheds that adjoined it. He had forged parts in their big furnace. He had taken apart tractors and ten-ton half-tracks, and he had put them together again. He had worked on lawn mowers, bread-mixing machines, logging windlasses, commercial cars, pleasure cars, and trucks. Every problem he met had been solved by the intercession of Sam Jones, who had never learned to read.

Back at his barracks, he saw Demming, who was waiting to say goodby. Dressed in gray flannels, shirt and tie, and tweed herringbone jacket, Bruce presented a different figure of a man from what Demming had seen before.

“I hate to lose you,” Demming said. “You and Jones run the best work force down in the garage that we have ever had.”

“I'm not being released,” Bruce said bitterly.

“You're being released,” Demming countered. “You're being released from here. We'll have a check for you in the morning. Twenty cents an hour isn't much, but over a year it mounts up. I try to run a decent place here, Bacon. It's a prison, but it's probably the most intelligent prison in America. Mr. Bennett would be pleased if you were to write about it.”

“How? With joy at being imprisoned decently without committing a crime? Do I praise the prison and at the same time damn the lunatics in our Congress who have put that filthy committee together? I've been what you call a good prisoner. I have not complained and I've worked hard. That pays whatever debt I have to the clowns who put me here.”

“Come on, Bacon,” Demming said impatiently. “Neither I nor the Federal commissioner put you in prison.”

“That's true and I'm sorry for blowing my stack. On the other hand, you hold me here tomorrow until the next set of lunatics pick me up. You know, I don't think it's legal. I don't think you have any right to hold me tomorrow.”

“It's legal. I got the subpoena today.” He reached inside his jacket and handed Bruce a subpoena. “A Federal marshal will be here tomorrow to drive you to Washington. A letter has already gone out to your wife, informing her of the fact.” He paused, staring at Bruce. “It stinks!” he exclaimed harshly. “It stinks to hell!” He put out his hand and Bruce took it.

He had given his extra tobacco to Lemuel Ward, cot to his left. His small store of four Milky Way candy bars went to the Kentucky moonshiner, cot to his right. The moonshiners, all of them heavy drinkers who dried out during their jail term, had a sort of frenzied desire for sweets. The gift was appreciated. Now, as daylight faded, Bruce sat on the wooden steps in front of the barracks, smoking the last of his last pack of Granger Rough Cut in a corncob pipe that he had made, and contemplating the sunset, his past, and his future. His year had not been entirely wasted. He had learned enough to get a job anywhere as an automobile mechanic. He could make a corncob pipe, and he could forge and hammer a piece of iron into something it was not originally intended to be. He could fix things, not all things, but a good many things. He had lost twenty pounds; he was in good health; and he had acquired a taste for tobacco, and now he was facing the rest of his life in another Federal prison.

If Mexico was to be their final destination, then how does one make a life there? He had never been to Mexico. He had studied German and French in college and reinforced them during his war years, but he knew not a word of Spanish. His vision of Mexico was confused and uncertain, pieced together out of bad films and books not much better than the films. Perhaps they could lose themselves in Canada? Perhaps the Canadian government would refuse to extradite them? His thoughts were becoming childish, and he shook his head to clear them away.

Darkness came, with the faint promise of a moon that would be over the horizon in another hour, and while they gave little light, the stars made a wonderful appearance, a host of dancing players indifferent to their earthly audience. A guard came by for his nightly check.

“Can't sleep, Bacon?”

“Later, perhaps. I want to get used to civilian clothes before I take them off.” For Bruce the guards were nameless and faceless. Demming had once reminded him, “We need prisons, and as long as we have them, we need prison guards.” Bruce had complained to Demming that the guards were brutal toward the black prisoners and almost fawning toward the whites. When Demming was away in Washington, they'd drive into the garage, begging favors — a new screen in the transmission, plugs, a carburetor, shocks. Demming answered Bruce's complaint, asking, “Did you ever know a kid wanted to grow up and be a prison guard?”

This guard on this night wanted to be friendly. In his eyes, a man like Bruce represented power denied to him, and that could or might be useful someday. How was not important; Bruce was not an ordinary prisoner. “You can't imagine how many of them do it. They get their clothes the day before release, and they got to put them on immediately.”

Bruce nodded.

“Good to get out.”

“You're right,” Bruce said.

The guard went inside, did his check, and came out again. “Going to sit here all night?”

“For a while,” Bruce said.

“You're lucky we got a touch of Indian summer. It'll be cold as a witch's tit a week from now.”

“I imagine so,” Bruce agreed.

The guard went on. The ripple of sound coming out of the barracks behind him muted. The day began early in the prison. It was lights out at nine o'clock. At ten, the prisoners were mostly asleep. Bruce tapped out his pipe and put it in his jacket pocket. Molly didn't smoke, but she rather liked the scent of his tobacco. Now, as the prison slept, time stood still. It was eleven o'clock, and then, in what felt like an hour, it was eleven-fifteen. Bruce's heart was beating faster as he rose and slowly walked up the rise of land toward the Administration Building. The half moon had appeared, and it cast its cold silvery light over the prison. If he feared the possibility of being observed, he was also grateful that he would not be stumbling around in the dark.

The silence was thick, heavy, not the opposite of sound but a part of sound. He had once heard the expression “to listen to silence,” and now, for the first time, he understood it. He could hear the silence.

He walked slowly, without haste. He made a circle through the grassy lawn around the Administration Building, and that way he reached the access road at the beginning of the driveway. He began to walk down the access road toward Route 39, and then, suddenly, it was there, Route 39. As he turned left on 39, he offered a pleading prayer, to what god or gods might be, that no car would come along. He told himself that if he were to see the glow of approaching headlights, he'd fling himself in the brush or the ditch or whatever was alongside him, since a man on the road at this hour of the night could only be a convict.

The half mile after he had turned left would stay with him. For one thing, he had no way to measure distance. He remembered that a mile was 1760 yards, but for the life of him couldn't seem to work out the distance of his stride. He reasoned that there had to be two feet between the toe of one foot and the heel of the other, and then it became fuzzy. Finally, he accepted it as a stride a yard. Over eight hundred steps at least.