The Summer I Died

With a prayer, I placed the buckle arm against the concrete wall. . and rubbed.

It scraped over the concrete, flaking off bits of cement like dandruff. I did it a few times and then touched the tip. It was hot. It hadn’t gotten any skinnier, but I felt certain it would.

With black all around me, and silence filling my ears, I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. I don’t know how much time passed. I don’t know how loud it actually was, though to me it sounded like a car engine. I just scraped that little piece of metal against the concrete until my biceps flared up, until I was gnashing my teeth like a child waiting for a tetanus shot. Little cold specks of cement tickled the backs of my legs as they flew up then drifted to the floor. After a long time, I stopped to check my progress and felt an incredible heat radiating off the metal. It had thinned ever so slightly, not enough, but it was enough to know this plan might work.

So I went back to work, and I rubbed and rubbed some more. My eyelids grew heavy; I had probably been up over forty hours by now. But sleep meant nothing to me; I had to keep rubbing.

Time was kept in relation to sounds from above. The television, a laugh track, Skinny Man talking, someone walking around, a voice I recognized, David Letterman, Skinny Man again. After awhile the television went silent. Maybe he was retiring for the night; maybe he was listening to them. Movies claimed the night was witching hour, and if so, shouldn’t he be on his way down? Maybe he thought the night was too quiet for screams, maybe he worked, maybe he was just tired. Who knew?

I didn’t stop again until my shoulder felt swollen, until the passing hours became a blur. Then I touched the small piece of metal and smiled. As I'd hoped, it had thinned into a pin. I couldn’t believe it, it had worked! Now all I had to do was pick the lock using the exact hand that was bound. Why, I thought vexingly, was every jumped hurdle met with an even larger one beyond it?

It was an issue of Chaos Legion, number twenty-one or twenty-two, if I remember correctly, where Stanley Horner-aka Greymatter, so named because he could steal your mind and leave you babbling like a retard-had to get out of handcuffs before a bomb turned him into what would be considered a delicacy in my present whereabouts. As a mental mutant with no elevated physical strength, he’d saved himself by pulling a nail out of a floorboard and using it as a key.

I sifted through the debris in my mind trying to remember the context of the comic. Bits and pieces started to come back to me like roaches to an open trash can, and soon I could visualize the page, the words, and the illustrations. Inside a handcuff was a sloped lever that allowed the cuff teeth to slide forward but not backward, so that the cuff tightened and wouldn’t slide open. Additionally, a tiny pin on the outside of the cuff, when pushed in, slid in over the sloped lever and blocked the cuff from sliding forward anymore, preventing the cuff from tightening itself further. But this pin could very easily be pushed out from the other side with something thin.

I decided to attack that challenge first. It took a few attempts, what with my hands all gimped up by the cuff, but by using my leg and the wall, I pushed the pin on the right cuff back out with the sharpened buckle. After I had done that, I swung the collar to my other hand and did the same thing over there. Now I had to be very careful; I could easily tighten the cuffs and snap my wrists.

Back inside my head, I reread Chaos Legion. What was Stanley telling me? Handcuff keys end in a small flag, like a P, which is turned to flatten the sloped lever and allow the cuff to slide back without the teeth hitting it. The flag is essential. Stanley had used the leg of his chair to bend the nail.

Using the wall and the cuff itself, I began bending the tip of the buckle arm at a ninety-degree angle. Despite still being hot and thin, the metal was as strong as the Hulk’s erection and I had to strain to get it shaped into a small hook. It wasn’t a flag but it was probably close enough, or so I hoped.

I put the buckle in my belt loop, the collar strap hanging down near my leg, leaving the buckle arm sticking straight out. Slowly, with grandma speed, I slid the cuff’s keyhole onto the “key” and pushed it in as a far as it could go. Then, using my wrist, I rotated the cuff.

The buckle arm fell out of the keyhole.

Shit, I mumbled, welcome to Dexterity 101. This wasn’t going to be easy.

CHAPTER 22

I repeated the process ad nauseam. Sticking the “key” out, pushing the cuff on it, turning my wrist. Hour after hour I kept at it, until I could faintly hear birds singing the ain’t-it-great-to-be-alive song in the trees outside. And then, as my eyes were sliding shut. . the key flattened the lever, and the cuff opened just enough for me to slide my hand out.

And that was that. No fireworks, no dancing bears, no parade. Just me holding my hand in front of my face, straining to see it in the dark, and feeling my lips spread wide in an involuntary smile. I stood like that for who knows how long, motionless, sweat dripping down the nape of my neck, not believing what I’d just done. How long before I was able to get my head straight? It felt like it had been in a blender, shot into space and time-warped back.

I went to work on the other cuff, which was much easier to manipulate with my one hand free. Working furiously, I picked it the same as the last one, but for some reason it wouldn’t come open, the “key” felt wrong, like maybe I had bent it out of shape somehow. I tried to pull it out to check on it, but it was stuck inside the lock. FUCK! I nearly screamed. Instead, I jimmied it and prayed it would find the lever. My desperation to escape was now beyond need, like a drug, an impulse I couldn’t fight.

The whole while the voice in my head kept saying, Calm down, you can do it, don’t give up. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that voice sounded as if it came from somewhere else in the room as well. But I didn’t think on that too long. Besides, I was tired like a man forced to listen to a congressman’s speech, so I couldn’t be quite sure of what I was seeing or hearing. I just hoped it wasn’t a dream, because if I woke up and found myself still bound, well, I didn’t want to think on that either.

Maybe a half-hour passed, the faintest glow of light now seeping in under the door, when the cuff snapped back and the “key” dislodged.

I was free.

Soon as I rubbed my wrist to ease the pain I heard the voice again. Don’t stop, get free now.

Wasting no time, I went straight for the neck iron. Skinny Man was smarter than he let on, because the clamps around my neck prevented me from just leaning forward and stretching out for one of the tools against the far wall. Skinny Man was also a sly man.

I felt for the keyhole and plunged the sharpened buckle inside and rooted around. The lock was a different type than the cuffs, bigger and older. It probably used a skeleton key with several teeth. Of course, I couldn’t be sure in the dark, but I had seen the one used on Tooth so I figured it was the same.

Out of nowhere a cool breeze ran across my face. It smelled like the trees in the mountains outside. It smelled like freedom. Where it came from I didn’t care, under the door, a crack in the foundation, it didn’t matter; it spurred me on despite my heavy fatigue. A fatigue that had me feeling like I was walking in a dream.

The makeshift lock pick was having about as much effect on this lock as a finger would have on a woman with ten kids. It was just too small for the hole. I ran the dog collar through my belt loops so it wouldn’t fall to the ground, and with both hands, grabbed the chain that connected the collar to the metal plate in the wall. It was stuck fast. Yanking only hurt my arms and back, and the metal plate had obviously been built into the wall somehow and wasn’t budging.

Spinning myself around, my legs in a painful X, I faced the wall and got my first real look at what was holding me. The chain from the collar was welded into a link in the wall plate. No way it was going to come loose no matter how hard I pulled. The back of the collar had a hinge, and unlike the front which was locked with a padlock, it was held tight by a long screw. The screw allowed the collar to open and close, but true to Skinny Man’s precautions, it had no crevice for a screwdriver; it was smooth and solid and held tight by a nut on the bottom. Years of rust had fused the nut to the screw and the top of the screw to the collar, and no matter how hard I twisted it wouldn’t come undone.

With a wrench I could make a go at it, but with nothing but a dog collar I was back to square one. At this point I was a firm believer in making do with what I had. If a wrench was what I needed, a wrench I would have to make. So taking my new wonder tool from my belt loop, I turned it over in the wan sunlight, thought about how to