“Oh, nobody locks them,” Dr. Storch said. “Of course, you do as you think best. But the locks are so flimsy. There’s really no point.” My grandfather detected a note of bitterness, as though Dr. Storch had fallen prey to pilfering more than once. “You can pick them with a playing card.” My grandfather locked his door and Dr. Storch shrugged graciously. “There’s no harm in it, certainly,” he said.
They went past the door of Dr. Storch’s cell and he pushed open the door. “Same as yours, in every drab particular.”
Again there was the note of sham complaint, as if the uniformity of prisoners’ cells obeyed some principle that Dr. Storch endorsed. Anyway, it was true: same cot, lamp, chair, table, same small chest of drawers. Same boxed ration of blue sky. No photographs. A few pocket books piled on the table with typed library labels taped to their spines. The topmost book was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. My grandfather had adored this classic of “hard” science fiction when it was first serialized in Astounding, enough to drop three dollars when Doubleday brought out a hardcover edition a year later. In 1974, when he pressed a fresh copy on me, it remained one of his all-time favorite books.
My grandfather did not acknowledge to Dr. Storch this evidence of a shared interest that might form the basis of a friendship. It was like when you dropped by the neighbors’ at suppertime with a piece of misdelivered mail, and their house had a warm smell of carrots and bay leaf, and before they had a chance to ask you to sit down, have a glass of water, try a little of the soup, at least take off your coat, you shook your head and said, Don’t worry, I’m not staying.
“Very nice,” he said.
They went along the gallery toward the bathroom. Most of the other prisoners had already gone down to the mess hall, leaving their cell doors unlocked or ajar. Calendar girls, some photographs of children. Prisoner watercolors of fruit, Ava Gardner, the green Shawangunks. A porcelain Virgin with a halo of gold wire.
“I think you’ll find the food quite palatable,” Dr. Storch said.
“Dinner was all right. Beef and macaroni. Hard to ruin.”
“We do get a lot of macaroni.”
“It’s filling.”
“And cheap. I’m a dentist, by the way,” Dr. Storch said. “Not an MD. If you were wondering. And I would like to tell you the truth about why I’m here before you encounter the remarkable mythology my accent has engendered—every day a fresh outrage seems to have been added to the catalog of my mythical crimes! I feel it’s imperative I tell you the truth, you see, because I think . . . Do I perceive that you are a Jew? Yes. Well, here it is: Rest assured, I am not a Nazi. I am a German, yes, of course. But I detested Hitler, and I was never a member of the Nazi Party. I left Germany just before the invasion of Poland, and lived through the Blitz in London, where I was nearly killed on three occasions by German ordnance, including a V-2 rocket. It was never my job to extract the gold teeth from mouths of deportees when they arrived at Auschwitz or Belsen. I lived my whole life in Hamburg and was never near any of those places. I never conducted hideous dental experiments or operated on patients without anesthesia. I never gave anyone a forked tongue or implanted a whore’s jaw with shark’s teeth. After the war I emigrated to Buffalo, where in 1953 I was arrested for practicing dentistry without a license, a felony in the state of New York, alas. And that’s why you find me living in the cell next to yours.”
It all came out in a burst, as though Wallkill regulations required that confession be done promptly, before one reached the bathroom door. There was a lot to digest in Dr. Storch’s confession. It was hard to know what to say in reply.
“I’m a salesman,” my grandfather said.
As they walked into the bathroom, Dr. Storch stiffened. He sidled around my grandfather and ducked into one of the stalls. At the trough-style sink a prisoner with a cauliflower ear and a barrel chest stood washing his hands. His forearms were blotched with dull tattoos. He closed the tap and went over to one of the continuous loops of linen towel that were mounted in white boxes on the wall. Patiently, he dried the blocks of pink marble that served him for hands. He smiled at my grandfather and said, “Hiya.” Preceded by a half-second of cool appraisal, it was a friendly smile. Ex-marine, my grandfather guessed. Middleweight to light heavyweight. Good reach. Bad knees.
“Morning,” my grandfather said.
“Name’s Hub. Hub Gorman.” He winked at my grandfather and called out, “See ya at breakfast, Al.” He had a lazy midwestern drawl that reminded my grandfather of Dean Martin’s.
If Dr. Storch had a reply, my grandfather didn’t catch it. Hub angled his head at the stalls and rolled his eyes in that direction. “Want to watch yourself around that shitbird,” he said cheerfully.
My grandfather didn’t reply. He had an aversion to people who winked at him. The jury was out on Dr. Storch, but he was reasonably sure he would still hate Hub Gorman a week from now. There was nothing to be done or said about it. Bad blood, pissing contests, ongoing feuds, that would all constitute a surrender to Wallkill, every bit as much as would making a friend. Even if he had to serve the full twenty months, my grandfather’s plan was to be always just dropping by.
Gorman stepped toward my grandfather, using the lurch imparted by bad knees as a pretext to push his face in much too close. His breath smelled like a cast-iron skillet.
“Word of advice,” he said, arranging his ugly and genial features into a solemn mask. A pregnant pause followed. My grandfather endured it. “Never let a dentist put you under.”
He shambled out, whistling a few aimless notes. My grandfather went to one of the urinals. The relief of urination helped to mitigate a feeling of foreboding brought on by the interaction of Dr. Storch and Hub Gorman. Dr. Storch came bustling out of the stall.
“There you are!” he said, as if he and my grandfather had become separated while hiking through the woods. “Ready for breakfast?”
They got to the mess hall one minute past seven. Since it was my grandfather’s first breakfast at Wallkill, the guard at the door cut him a break. “Go on, then, you, and get your pancakes,” he said, shoving with his shoulder against one of the swinging doors to let my grandfather in. “Don’t let it happen again, all right?”
After my grandfather went through, the guard stepped into the doorway. The warmth went out of his voice. “You can just go hungry this morning, Doc,” he said.
* * *
“That’s why you always say that?”
“Say what?”
“‘Never let a dentist put you under,’” I quoted. “That’s what you always say.”
“I do?”
“It’s one of your major pieces of advice.”
“It’s just common sense,” my grandfather said. “I don’t give advice.”
I searched my memory to see if I could contradict him. I found statements on the order of Get the hair dryer away from the bathtub and It will heal faster without a Band-Aid and, of an approaching Doberman, He can smell that you’re afraid.
“So you’re anti-advice,” I said.
“I’m not anti-advice, just there’s no point to it.”
“Okay.”
“They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.”
I was not entirely certain, and thought of asking him, who this they were, pointlessly wasting his time. I decided he was in all likelihood talking about the human race.
“So next time a dentist wants to give me gas, I should just say, ‘Go for it.’”
“Feel free. People die every day in dentist’s chairs.”
“Poor Dr. Storch,” I said. “Did you get a little nicer to him later on?”
“I wasn’t unkind to him. I just didn’t talk to him. I didn’t talk to anybody, and I didn’t want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.”
This did not strike me as necessarily marking a radical cha
nge in approach.
“Yeah, but, I mean, that guy Hub was tormenting him for months . . .”
“A year.”
“And then you move in right next door. And you haven’t been there for the whole history of Dr. Storch getting picked on and called a Nazi and treated like shit, even by the guards, who it sounds like were basically decent to the other prisoners.”
“They were more than decent.”
“And you’re, you know, all muscley and tough-looking and whatever. He couldn’t’ve known what a total, like, badass you were. But I bet he was maybe hoping you might want to stick up for him.”
“‘Badass.’” My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.
“I bet he was hoping you’d be his friend. It sounds like he needed one.”
“He was,” my grandfather said. “He did.”
He closed his eyes and appeared to drift for a little while, and I thought the afternoon’s conversation might have come to an end. It was nearing four. The palliative care nurse was due at four-thirty. But then his color deepened and he opened his eyes. They had the clarity of pain. The meds were wearing off.
“Every infraction at Wallkill, you got time added to your sentence. Fighting, getting into a dustup with another inmate, they would add a lot of time. Months. Months for one fight. The only thing worse was if you tried to escape, ‘going over the hill,’ they called it. And then? If you got into another fight after that? The way you probably would, if you started something serious with a hard-on like Hub Gorman? They shipped you off to Green Haven. Or Auburn. Maximum security. Where they put the bad guys, prison prison. Your mother was fourteen when I went in, Mike. Stuck in Baltimore, where she didn’t know a soul. Living with a pool hustler and a grumpy old lady. Stuck there till the day I come get her. And your grandmother . . .”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not reproaching you. Hey, I’m sorry, Grandpa.” He was looking out the window. The momzer sat on the top of the fence, facing the ivy-tangled slope, its back to the birdfeeder. Making a show of indifference or surrender. “It’s time for your pill.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Come on. I’m really sorry, okay? Come on, you need it. Grandpa.” I said Grandpa again, but in an Eeyore voice. Then I said it in the voice of Darth Vader. He kept looking out the window at the squirrel, who was so much less trying company than his grandson. “What do you want to take it with?” I said.
He rolled his head in my direction. “Cold beer.”
“Seriously? Is that okay?”
He lifted an eyebrow no more than a quarter of an inch. Just high enough to say, What the fuck difference could it possibly make?
I went to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and poured some into a plastic cup. I was fairly new to California at the time, and Mexican beer still held considerable allure. On further reflection, I transferred the beer from the plastic cup into a tall glass and topped it off from the bottle, tilting it so he could swallow his pill without getting a mouthful of foam. I carried the glass of beer into the guest bedroom with a certain ceremoniousness. For some reason I was really looking forward to seeing him drink a little beer.
He put the Dilaudid onto his sueded tongue and washed it down with a healthy swallow of Dos Equis.
“Rock and roll,” I said.
He closed his eyes. In his contentment he looked handsome and severe. “Mmm,” he said.
“Good, right?”
“Good.”
“Have a little more.”
I passed the glass to him again and he took another long pull. He handed me back the glass. “Enough,” he said. “Thank you. Go ahead, honey, you finish it.”
I sat down in the chair and had a sip of beer and watched him smack his lips. The complicated bitterness seemed to linger and resonate on his tongue.
“Storch, what a nudnik,” he said. “I must have been nuts.”
26
At Wallkill in the evenings your time, for the most part, was your own. The recreation room had table tennis, board games, and a monstrous console with a record player and a radio. Partway through my grandfather’s stretch, Dr. Wallack, the warden, had a new Philco television brought in at his own expense and installed beside the radio, so the men could watch the fights on Friday night. The casualty rate for Ping-Pong balls exceeded the rate of resupply, and the records for some reason were devoted primarily to polka music or instruction in Portuguese. Many of the board games were on their fourth or fifth set of tokens, counters, and dice, improvised or crafted by inmates from spools, bottle caps, corks, modeling clay. In the case of Monopoly, the entire board had been redrafted onto a sheet of pine by some wistful or ironic cartographer who substituted the streets of Albany, New York, for those of Atlantic City, discounting all the properties by fifty percent. Reception on the television was dreadful, but many of the men would watch anything that passed across the screen of the Philco, furious blizzards of static, prizefighting ghosts.
Some of the prisoners, having exhausted the recreation room’s store of wonders, simply retired to their cells every night. Many joined a prayer circle or weekly Bible study. Most of them took up a hobby sooner or later. They painted in watercolors and oils. They carved duck decoys, built birdhouses, bent sheets of metal into napkin holders. They turned table legs on lathes and then affixed them to tabletops they had coped and mortised. They put in extra time caring for the livestock, in particular the horses. My grandfather naturally found his way to the so-called Hut, where in addition to a Hallicrafters shortwave radio and a darkroom there was a radio repair workbench.
People from the towns and villages around Wallkill would bring their radios to the prison to be repaired for the price of parts. Radios went on the fritz in interesting ways and could be repaired in ways that were satisfying. It was a matter of having the right parts and the proper tools and then ruling out the possibilities one by one. To my grandfather that was more or less a recipe for solace. When he lay awake in his bunk at night, his own problems felt so amorphous; in his dreams they were as infinite as mirrors reflecting one another. But in the radio repair shop, in the innards of a Magnavox, problems could be picked off, hunted down, cornered. They could be eliminated with a cotton swab, a piece of copper braid, or a drop of solder. And he had always loved the sugary tang of solder smoke, hot off the tip of the iron.
Even on those nights when Dr. Storch showed up in the Hut, he was easier for my grandfather to handle or to ignore. Storch would put on a headset and sit for hours in front of the Hallicrafters in the corner. He took in the news from Rádio Nacional in Brazil, from Radio Moscow, from Deutsche Welle. He monitored the chatter and technical rundowns broadcast by stargazers and weather watchers around the world who had been recruited to record and transmit their observations during this International Geophysical Year. He lost himself amid the interlacing transmissions of a million solitary amateurs reaching out to one another in the night.
On the first Friday evening of my grandfather’s first October at Wallkill, Hub Gorman wandered into the Hut. It was not a customary haunt of Gorman’s, and my grandfather saw at once that he was looking to make trouble. Gorman stood for a moment just inside the doorway. He nodded to my grandfather. His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions. He had spotted Dr. Storch in the corner, his back to the door and the trouble that had just shambled through it.
Gorman started across the lab with practiced slowness. The man took his time to do almost anything: roll a cigarette, get out of a chair, finish a bowl of chile con carne, lick the spoon. When a guard gave him an order, he pondered it. His languor was partly a kind of insubordination through indifference. It was also a manner of predation. He was an alligator sunning himself on a rock.
“Gorman,” my grandfather said. “C’mere, look
at this.”
Gorman stopped. He was only two or three feet from Dr. Storch. He cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a string of squibs going off. He turned with the usual show of hastelessness.
My grandfather held up a gaudy gold and red box that once held two dozen Romeo y Julietas.
“Don’t smoke,” Gorman said. He pointed at his mouth with a knobby finger. “Chew gum.”
“Not cigars.”
The cleft between Gorman’s cheeks and brows diminished. He made his way over to the electronics workbench.
“Don’t bring him over here, dumbass,” said another prisoner, who had served as a radioman on the Abraham Lincoln during the war. “What do you care if he wants to fuck with the Nazi?”
“What is it?” Gorman said. Across the hemisphere of his left arm, some jarhead tattooist had mapped, island by greenish-black island, month by month, year by year, the bloody advance of the 10th Marines on the empire of Japan. The shoulder featured a mushroom cloud labeled nagasaki, where the 10th had patrolled the cinders postwar.
“It’s a radio. Made out of a cigar box.”
It was the work of a night, completed just five minutes or so before Gorman’s appearance in the Hut. My grandfather had intended to present it as a gift for the warden’s grandson, Theodore, the next time the boy visited; Theodore took an interest in science. He was bright and forthright and not in awe of the prison, its inmates, or his grandfather. Among inmates who pined for their own children, Theodore was a great favorite. They showered him with matchstick Eiffel Towers and tin can roadsters.
My grandfather handed the cigar box to Gorman, who hefted it. “Heavy.”
“It runs on a flashlight battery.”
My grandfather opened the lid to show Gorman the battery amid the capacitors and wires. He took out the little gray earphone on its braided gray wire, and Gorman poked it into the pleats and convolutions of his deformed right ear. My grandfather showed Gorman how to turn on and tune the radio. Gorman asked him to find the “church station” and my grandfather did. Gorman grinned. “Hey,” he said. “A radio in a cigar box. That’s pretty neat.”