Today he was at his job because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to be. He was a little drunk and he had no more money for movies.
He wore a teeshirt and cut-offs, that the authorities might see he was unarmed.
Lunch in thirty minutes, and he felt the power and grace of a man working well under the influence of amphetamines bartered for in the men’s room at shift-change. He turned, lifted, spilled shapes; turned, lifted, spilled shapes. The incredible noise owned everything, but he was in it, a part of it, turning, lifting, spilling, a denizen of this turbulent mechanical flood. The larger box was full. He turned, grasped, hoisted, and raised it, spilling shapes into the hopper. The double doors to the building were open, and in the square of white light they admitted he could see squad cars coming to a halt. “Like a Rolling Stone” was playing on the cigar lady’s radio, and Burris was a part of that, too, and it was all a gigantic maelstrom from which escaped tiny bottle-shapes into the waters of American daily life. Something in his inner ear—more known than heard—was saying Burris, Burris as he turned, lifted, spilled: an officer, leveling a riot gun at Burris’s chest. The officer’s mouth was erupting in his flushed face, and Burris, Burris Houston was known within Burris. As you stare into the vackyoom, of his eyes was also known, and as he walked away from it all dressed in terror the radio was letting him know, How does it feel. Tell me how does it feel.
5
On the first day Bill Houston stayed on his back in the lower bunk and failed to know whether he was awake or sleeping. He became involved in his mind with red squares and triangles
On the second day he woke to a curious sensation and found that his left hand, trailing over the edge of his bunk, was adrift in water. Christ Jesus save me. They’re doing it to us. We’ll all be drowned.
The bars, tinted a pale institutional green, might not have been there at all. The spaces between them might have been colorless panels affixed to green air.
He gripped the upper bunk’s edge and hoisted upright. The queries and exclamations from neighboring cells gave him to understand there was trouble with the building’s pipes. He removed his socks—his shoes had been taken from him, and his shirt—and waded two steps through a three-inch tide to the combination toilet-and-sink. As he approached the wall there, and the mirror—a circle of polished metal welded above the sink at the end of his cell—he knew he travelled the last small distance of a journey he’d undertaken to complete a very long time ago. And now it was finished. And now another was beginning.
He was alone here, one of the special captives isolated because they were believed capable of great violence. His head ached from the back of the neck through the cranium and down the bridge of his nose: in the mirror he saw that both his eyes had been blackened. Bruises circled his belly below the ribs. More than anything at this juncture, more than innocence, liberty, or another chance, he wished for a drink of Seagram’s Seven and Seven-Up. Then he thought of drinking it with friendly strangers amid a place of calm: a barroom of polished oaken tables and imitation leather stools. The chest-fever of his need broke in his throat; before he could tell if he was crying tears, he turned on the faucet and splashed his face.
Crouching over the water, he looked before him at rivets studding the metal wall, their green heads flaking to bare primer the color of cherries. The sink was spilling over. Dizziness circled his vision, and he leaned on the basin and rested his knee on the metal toilet that jutted left from the same clogged pipe that served the sink.
The noise of heavy shoes and the cries of prisoners, the screech of buckets on the catwalk, the whanging of steel gates, the slosh of water against bulkheads—men swearing and ruining mops against iron bars—all of this was so like the atmosphere of a large seagoing vessel that the two experiences, penal and naval, blended for a moment in Bill Houston’s perception and he tried to cling to the idea that he might only be assigned temporarily below decks.
In Pearl Harbor he’d wandered once through a destroyer in drydock—the choked and baking Somerville, out of San Diego—and loose inside it, he’d been deeply alienated from its haunted stationary silence, its failure to live by moving. That afternoon he’d been a trespasser in a forbidden sepulchre, a sailor on a ship on dry land, helpless to travel or float or do anything but walk away on two legs, leaving whatever errand had brought him to that place unaccomplished. And now he felt the same, but he couldn’t depart. They had him this time. After this time there would be no other
When the guards came to make him presentable and bring him out temporarily among free people, he refused the razor they offered. “It’s your face,” the fat guard said, and handed him a shirt, and the other fat guard gave him back his boots. They were both fat. They flanked him enormously as the three of them proceeded along the gauntlet of cages to the control unit of A-wing of the Maricopa County Jail’s main building. The prisoners they passed were silent, casting their gazes to the right or left of Bill Houston, but all attended his passage with a frozen zeal that they could hardly disguise and that he had never witnessed in any men anywhere. “I stepped in some shit this time, didn’t I?” he told the guards. He was perspiring in the mechanically refrigerated air, and he wanted them to fool around a little, the way guards always fooled around. But they were alarmed, too, by the uniform ice-quiet of men who normally reacted with vocal interest and derision to their comings and goings, and so they kept quiet themselves.
They took him handcuffed through doors and corridors into a pre-war section of the building which smelled of fresh paint, and then down a hallway strewn with dropcloths and stepladders. The painters working there said hello and chatted with the guards as they passed. It eased Bill Houston’s mind to know that in some circles he remained anonymous. When they ushered him into a spacious conference room still in the midst of its remodeling, where two overhead fans revolved wearily in the ceiling and a workman’s radio played softly, he looked at his lawyer for the first time. It was the same lawyer Bill Houston had always been saddled with—about five-six, round glasses and mustache, western string tie, a public defender looking twelve or thirteen and clutching a plastic briefcase with probably nothing inside of it. Bill Houston sat down across the table from him and said, “I can’t get up no confidence in you.”
“If you could afford fancy counsel, you wouldn’t be here,” the lawyer said. “I’m assuming that. I’m assuming you’re a person who doesn’t like to kill people. I’m assuming you wanted money and that you didn’t want blood. I’m assuming you’re not homicidal.”
“I’m not,” Bill Houston said. “We didn’t mean it.”
“That’s what we’re going to convince the jury of. We’re going to convince them you’re stupid and tragic, but basically a nice guy.”
“How’s my brother?”
“Which one?”
“There ain’t but one involved here. James.”
“James is alive. He may need more surgery later. Burris is now involved. He’s in custody, too, over in the Annex, and so is a man named Dwight David Snow. Nobody wanted to talk to me, but my guess is probably James gave them up.”
“No way.” Bill Houston shut his jaw tightly against a sudden feeling he might cry in front of his lawyer.
“He was hurt pretty badly, William.”
“Can we cop a plea or something? What’s your name?”
The lawyer looked tired. “I’m Samuel Fredericks, known to everyone as Fred. Or, actually,” he admitted, “as Freddy.” He looked tired even of his name. “The prosecution is offering you this deal: You agree to plead guilty to first-degree murder, and they’ll agree to do everything they can to execute you The Assistant DA says it’s almost like going free.”
“Shit,” Bill Houston said. “Does it hurt?”
“What?”
“Does it hurt. The gas.” Bill Houston laid his head down on his arms and felt a misery descending that made him want to puke. “If it don’t hurt, I’ll do it.” With a tentative tongue he tasted the metal of the c
onference table. To hear himself say “the gas” was wrenching. He was living somebody else’s life, some murderer’s. “Does it hurt?”
“You can’t imagine,” Fred said.
Across the run was some fellow who stayed in his cell’s top bunk—though nobody occupied the lower one—with his right arm flung across his eyes and the fingers of the left examining, one by one and continually until he slept, the rivets in the ceiling above his face. Bill Houston spent a great amount of his own time leaning against the bars of his cell, his own arms hanging out into the catwalk area as though he breathed through them the air of relative freedom; and he watched this man. He didn’t want to lie down because on his back he was defenseless against his thoughts—the fear that he would confront a door opening onto a gallery of faces, the loved ones of the man he had killed. That he would walk amid a crowd of officials, normal people who knew how to live their lives. He would be made to look on the dead face of his victim. He had a feeling he was going to find out something terrible about himself, something even worse than that he was a murderer, something so essentially true as to be completely unbelievable. He dreamed of witnesses. The twisted relatives behind the glass—the more they tormented him, the more vividly they themselves were agonized, and he could never pay anybody the price. It wasn’t the punishment that hurt—it was the punishment’s failure to be enough. These visions and comprehensions were no less present when he stood embracing the vertical bars of his cell, but they seemed less actual then, less likely to happen, as if by butting up against what kept him from walking freely in the world, he came to know what kept him safe from the future.
The motionlessness of his defeated neighbor across the run drove Bill Houston to activity. He walked the cell and sometimes exploded into grunting bouts of calisthenics that left him exhausted and temporarily serene. He petitioned for a pen and pad, and when his thoughts turned to Jamie he let them burn a message—three or four words a day, he was no scholar—into the page:
Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me—Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks—they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen—Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die.
I have feelings for you you know its hard to say—Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.
Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.
Love
Wm Houston Jr
Tell Burris hell still be my brother
“I’ve been informed that, contrary to your request, you cannot be moved any closer to the television on A-wing,” Fredericks told him. “The TV is for men serving sentences. You haven’t been classified, you’re violent, etcetera etcetera. No TV.”
“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “Don’t make no never-mind to me. In the joint I’ll get enough TV to where it makes me sick.”
Fredericks held Bill Houston’s communication in the palm of his hand. “I’ll try and get this delivered. But I think you should know Jamie’s in the hospital.”
“What happened? She all right, or what?” Fredericks had brought him Camels, and he lit one casually. He didn’t want his true concerns identified by these people.
“She’s in the hospital,” Fredericks said. “I don’t know the details. She had a nervous breakdown of some kind.”
“Got a little frazzled, hey?”
Fredericks looked at him curiously until Houston said, “What about the kids?”
“I don’t know about the kids. I didn’t know there were any kids. I presume any kids would be taken care of.”
“Okay. Anyway,” he said, shoving the ashtray across the table toward Fredericks. “How’s James?” But Fredericks didn’t smoke.
“James is recuperating nicely. He’s doing just fine. And I think we’re going to get your trials separated after all, because Dwight Snow’s got some slick counsel with pull. He’s off on his own.”
“Off on his own?”
“He’s getting a change of venue. Separate trial in another county. He’s in a good position—no record, and he was in possession of an unfired weapon.”
“Bastard held off till I had to go in,” Bill Houston said.
“I did not hear you say that.”
“I got nothing to hide.” One he’d learned from Jamie.
“Anyway, James’s gun had been fired, but he claims he just hadn’t cleaned it and just hadn’t loaded it fully.”
“That’s true. I don’t remember him firing no rounds.”
“They may try you together, but they’re beginning to see how it could get messy. And Burris I can definitely separate—his position is already more clearly defined than Dwight Snow’s.”
Bill Houston said, “I don’t understand any of this. Just bring me comic books and cigarets. I give up.”
“Well, I’m talking strategy. And that strategy is designed to keep you alive. I wanted you all tried separately, but I don’t know now. We may want you and James to go in together. I really can’t pretend to have anything figured out till I get the prosecution to loosen up a little. The thing is,” he said, and stopped Bill Houston’s hand from fidgeting, covering it with his own, “everybody’s being very weird over at the DA’s. I’m just starting to suspect that whatever they want, our policy should be to want the opposite. No cooperation.”
Bill Houston stripped the paper from his cigaret butt. Both men observed the small movements of his thick fingers raptly, until he’d added its tobacco to the contents of his county-issued plastic bag of makings and dusted the last few grains from his fingertips. “Couldn’t you try again? I mean, you know, to get them to move me down closer to where the TV is at?”
Fredericks swept the ashtray and his briefcase from the table with a deft violent movement of his arm; the two guards—the same two who went everywhere with Houston outside his cell—came to attention, but did not draw near.
The expression on the lawyer’s face said nothing about how he might be feeling. His tone of voice was identical to the tone he always took with the defendant. “You’re miserable, William. You’re the complete twenty-five cent desert crook. You’re without any sense of personal responsibility, even for your own life. But I’m going to save your ass.”
“Hey, this intimidation shit—you don’t scare me.”
“That’s good,” the lawyer said, “because when your lungs turn red, I wouldn’t want you to be scared. I wouldn’t want you to be scared when your soul goes up the pipe.”
Bill Houston sat with his feet out and crossed, staring at his boots, and said it one more time out of a thousand. In his cell he said it silently to the walls, and in his sleep he cried it out loud and woke the others in neighboring chambers: “I killed him.”
She was greatly aware of the wide thirsty grounds of the place surrounding these slow interiors, but nothing of that outer world was available to the sight of inmates because the windows were so high. Their ties cast crisscross shadows along the floor this morning, so that as Jamie entered carrying newly issued toilet articles, her feet, in disposable paper slippers, passed through quadrangles of light.
Along opposite sides of the ward ran two rows of eight beds each, most wearing comfortable green or red plaid bedspreads. Lamp fixtures encased in wire mesh disrupted the walls of pale yellow, which were bare except for a small sign near the door that said:
TODAY IS
tues june 4
YOUR DAY
A couple of elderly women sat on a bed playing with cards and a board full of pegs, and another old woman with a leathery face walked up and down between the rows. These and the few others present wore wrinkled cotton gowns identical to Jamie’s. On the bare mattress of the bed the nurse pointed her to, there were two women seated side by side like passengers. They looked all right to Jamie, but they were smaller than your regular women, and on
e of them had a face caked white with make-up and made horrible by a thick smear of crimson lipstick—she looked like a voodoo doll—and as Jamie approached, the other one began making sounds no human should have been capable of. The doll-lady nodded and said, “She means the President.” The other kept making awful noises and the doll-lady said, “Too fast, Allie—slow down!” To Jamie she said, “The Department of Money, she means.”
Now Jamie saw that the woman held to the folds of skin around her throat one of those mechanical buzz-boxes for people without a voice. The matter being discussed excited her tremendously, and she gestured even with the hand that held the box, waving it around unawares so that it spewed noise inconsequentially. Her friend said, “That’s The Times We Live In. The Times We Live In, she’s saying.”
“Excuse me,” Jamie offered, “you got your fat ass on my bed.”
The nurse came out of the bath-and-shower room at the end of the row of beds, carrying a stack of bedding for Jamie. “Alice, is this your bed? Is this Bridget’s bed? Bridget—is this your bed?”
Alice placed the voice-box against her throat and said, “Fungyoo.”
“Alice,” the nurse said. She seemed about to smile.
“Zlud.”
“She means Slut,” her companion said to Jamie.
“Off the bed, please.” Throwing the bedding down beside them on the mattress, the nurse made shooing motions with her two hands.