meaning in silence. Eddie realized that everything was all right. It was just that Dr. Messer didn’t know who he was, didn’t remember.
How many years had passed since he had last been in this office? Eddie wasn’t sure, but he recalled the occasion clearly. It was during the period of Dr. Messer’s enthusiasm for soliciting inmate volunteers for drug- company tests. Eddie had agreed to take one little red pill a day for six weeks. At the beginning, someone from the drug company had given him a local anesthetic and taken one gram of muscle from inside his forearm. At the end, another gram was required, for comparison. By that time, Dr. Messer had been trained in the procedure. He took the gram himself, but something went wrong with the anesthetic, although Dr. Messer hadn’t believed Eddie about that, and then, with the big square-ended instrument dug deep in his flesh, it was too late for Eddie to do anything without making things worse. The arm had been useless for months. The drug company paid Eddie ninety dollars- forty for each procedure and ten for taking the pills. He’d spent it at the canteen, mostly on Pepsi, ripple potato chips, and cigarettes.
Dr. Messer said: “Ah.” He nodded to himself, removed his glasses and turned to Eddie. Christmas-tree smell wafted across the desk. “Well, son. Got any plans? Thirty-four’s not old, not in this day and age.”
Eddie said: “What were the results of the experiment?”
Dr. Messer blinked. “Experiment?” His forehead creased in a way Santa’s never would. “I asked you about your plans.”
“Plans?” said Eddie.
“Like what you’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next year,” Dr. Messer explained impatiently.
“Steam bath,” Eddie said.
The forehead creases deepened. “You want to work in a steam bath?”
Eddie was silent.
Dr. Messer took a deep breath and said: “What did you do before?”
“Before?”
“Before here.” The impatient tone was back, beyond the control of deep-breathing techniques.
Eddie considered his answer. What had he done? There’d been swimming, of course. And Jack, Galleon Beach, Mandy, the Packers, the whole fuckup. “Not much,” Eddie said. The names, their syllables strange and familiar as returning to the house you were born in, stayed in his mind. “But as a friend of mine says,” he added, “you can’t expect to take up where you left off.”
“Your friend sounds wise.”
“For an ax murderer,” Eddie said, stretching the truth a little.
Dr. Messer, long accustomed to conversation with those less bright than himself, took another deep breath. “The point is it’s expensive outside these walls. In here we give you your three squares per and a place to sleep. Out there you got to earn it. You’re gonna need a job. Unless you’re in line for a fat inheritance or something.” Dr. Messer turned up the corners of his mouth to show he was being funny. Eddie said nothing. Dr. Messer’s lips turned down. He tapped the screen with his glasses. “Says here you’re an ‘inadequate personality.’ Know what that means?”
“Sounds like bullshit to me.”
Dr. Messer’s fat fingers tightened slightly around the frames of his glasses. “That just proves the point, son.” He tapped the screen again, harder now. Maybe it was a symbolic way of knocking sense into Eddie. Or just knocking him. “Five to fifteen, but everybody knows you’re out in three and a half, four. Any half-assed adequate personality would’ve been. Any half-assed adequate personality wouldn’t have fucked up his parole. But you did the whole nickel and dime, like the dumbest con in the joint.”
All at once, Eddie thought: Why do I have to listen to this anymore? I’m gone. He looked into the untwinkling eyes and said: “In your opinion.”
“In my opinion?” Dr. Messer’s voice rose, but not much, a few decibels. The door opened and the C.O. stuck his head in.
“Everything okay, Dr. Messer?” He wasn’t gone yet.
“Couldn’t be better.”
The door closed. “Tell you something,” Dr. Messer said, starting to smile. “I’ve been in corrections for twenty-three years. It’s the shittiest work in the world. The pay is shitty, the benefits are shitty, the hours are shitty. But the shittiest part is, you got to deal with the likes of you. One look and I know your whole story, past, present, and future. And you know something, son? Summing up, so to speak? I’ll be seeing you again. Soon.” He was smiling broadly now, but resembling Santa less and less. He tossed a brown envelope at Eddie. Eddie caught it and started to rise.
“Count it,” Dr. Messer said. “Just so’s there’s no misunderstandings.”
Eddie opened the envelope and counted his gate money. Three hundred and thirty-eight dollars and twenty- five cents. It wasn’t a gift. That’s what he’d earned, minus what he’d spent in the canteen.
“Sign here.”
Eddie wrote “Edward N. Nye” on a form Messer slid across the desk. Then he stuck the money in the pocket of his new pants and went out. There were no good-byes.
The C.O. led him along a corridor and down a damp stairway. They entered a dark space. The only light came from a dusty ceiling bulb. It shone on a white station wagon with government plates. “Get in,” said the C.O.
Eddie stepped forward, fumbled for a moment with the door-it had a recessed handle he was unfamiliar with-and climbed in the backseat. From the front came a voice: “Hokay?”
“Okay what?” said Eddie.
The driver turned to him and shrugged. He was a dark-skinned man with a thin mustache and a Tampa Bay baseball cap. Did Tampa Bay have a team?
He switched on the engine. A big door opened in front of them, exposing a rectangle of dazzling light. They drove out into it.
Out, along a couple hundred feet of pavement that led to the perimeter fence, where guards checked under the hood, under the seats, under the chassis, and waved them through. The guards, their shotguns, the fence, the gate, all blurred in Eddie’s vision. The light was so bright it hurt his eyes, made them water uncontrollably. Was one of the guards staring at him? Don’t think I’m crying, motherfucker, Eddie thought. It’s nothing like that-just this light.
Out, past a woman in black holding a sign that read “Free Willie Boggs,” and onto a highway with other cars, a highway lined with other signs, signs Eddie tried to read through the dazzlement: Motel 6, Mufflers 4U, Lanny’s Used Tires, Bud Lite, Pink Lady Lounge, All the Shrimp You Cn Eat $6.95, XXX Video, Happy Hour. The driver turned on the radio. “… skies overcast, temperature in the mid sixties,” it said; then the driver switched to a Spanish station where an announcer was saying the same thing. Overcast? Eddie looked out. He saw no clouds, but the sky wasn’t blue. It was gold-thick, dense, rich; all the way down to the ground.
And then his gaze fell on the side mirror. He saw a medieval vision in it: a fortress of stone, shimmering in the glare. Eddie had never seen his prison before, not from the outside. They had brought him in at night. Now he watched in the mirror as the gray walls shrank, their lines lost distinction, wavering in the golden light. It might have been a mirage.
Louie. Louie hadn’t been so easy. Louie knew what had happened to the Ozark brothers, even if no one else did. Had the boy made plans or simply seized an opportunity? Louie didn’t know, and what difference did it make? He could never be alone, that was all.
It took two years. The boy-although there wasn’t much boy left by that time-found a half-inch-wide elastic band one day, wrapped around a discarded envelope in the yard. If he’d had a coat hanger or a cleft stick the rest would have been easy, but coat hangers were forbidden and there were no trees in the yard. He tried to stretch the band between his thumb and index finger, but it was too thick. The only way was to take one end of the band in his teeth and pull with his left hand. That left the right hand free.
He stole a four-inch nail from the shop, carried it through the strip search glued to his palate, hanging down his throat. Back in his cell he took it out, along with part of the lining of the roof of his mouth. Late at night he would practice, holding the band taut between his teeth and his left hand, setting the head of the nail in the band, pulling it back, firing into his pillow for silence. A technique that took a long time to perfect, but that was the one thing he had.
