In another time, Cathedral and Caesar would have had enough of everything — from muscle to influence — to demand that someone give up the killers, but the prison was filling up with younger men who did not care what those two had been once upon a time. Also, Cathedral had already had two visits from the man he had killed in Northwest. Each time, the man had first stood before the bars of Cathedral’s cell. Then he held one of the bars and opened the door inward, like some wooden door on a person’s house. The dead man standing there would have been sufficient to unwrap anyone, but matters were compounded when Cathedral saw a door that for years had slid sideways now open in an impossible fashion. The man stood silent before Cathedral, and when he left he shut the door gently, as if there were sleeping children in the cell. So Cathedral didn’t have a full mind, and Multrey was never avenged.
There was an armed-robbery man in the place, a tattooer with homemade inks and needles. He made a good living painting on both muscled and frail bodies the names of children; the Devil in full regalia with a pitchfork dripping with blood; the words “Mother” or “Mother Forever” surrounded by red roses and angels who looked sad, because when it came to drawing happy angels the tattoo man had no skills. One pickpocket had had a picture of his father tattooed in the middle of his chest; above the father’s head, in medieval lettering, were the words “Rotting in Hell,” with the letter “H” done in fiery yellow and red. The tattoo guy had told Caesar that he had skin worthy of “a painter’s best canvas,” that he could give Caesar a tattoo “God would envy.” Caesar had always told him no, but then he awoke one snowy night in March of his sixth year and realized that it was his mother’s birthday. He did not know what day of the week it was, but the voice that talked to him had the authority of a million loving mothers. He had long ago forgotten his own birthday, had not even bothered to ask someone in prison records to look it up.
There had never been anyone or anything he wanted commemorated on his body. Maybe it would have been Carol, his first girlfriend twenty years ago, before the retarded girl entered their lives. He had played with the notion of having the name of the boy he thought was his put over his heart, but the lie had come to light before that could happen. And before the boy there had been Yvonne, with whom he had lived for an extraordinary time in Northeast. He would have put Yvonne’s name over his heart, but she went off to work one day and never came back. He looked for her for three months, and then just assumed that she had been killed somewhere and dumped in a place only animals knew about. Yvonne was indeed dead, and she would be waiting for him at the end of the line, though she did not know that was what she was doing. “You can always trust unhappiness,” Yvonne had once said, sitting in the dark on the couch, her cigarette burned down to the filter. “His face never changes. But happiness is slick, can’t be trusted. It has a thousand faces, Caes, all of them just ready to re-form into unhappiness once it has you in its clutches.”
So Caesar had the words “Mother Forever” tattooed on his left biceps. Knowing that more letters meant a higher payment of cigarettes or money or candy, the tattoo fellow had dissuaded him from having just plain “Mother.” “How many hours you think she spent in labor?” he asked Caesar. “Just to give you life.” The job took five hours over two days, during a snowstorm. Caesar said no to angels, knowing the man’s ability with happy ones, and had the words done in blue letters encased in red roses. The man worked from the words printed on a piece of paper that Caesar had given him, because he was also a bad speller.
The snow stopped on the third day and, strangely, it took only another three days for the two feet of mess to melt, for with the end of the storm came a heat wave. The tattoo man, a good friend of the Righteous Desulter, would tell Caesar in late April that what happened to him was his own fault, that he had not taken care of himself as he had been instructed to do. “And the heat ain’t helped you neither.” On the night of March 31st, five days after the tattoo had been put on, Caesar woke in the night with a pounding in his left arm. He couldn’t return to sleep so he sat on the edge of his bunk until morning, when he saw that the “e”s in “Mother Forever” had blistered, as if someone had taken a match to them.
He went to the tattoo man, who first told him not to worry, then patted the “e”s with peroxide that he warmed in a spoon with a match. Within two days, the “e”s seemed to just melt away, each dissolving into an ugly pile at the base of the tattoo. After a week, the diseased “e”s began spreading their work to the other letters, and Caesar couldn’t move his arm without pain. He went to the infirmary. They gave him aspirin and Band-Aided the tattoo. He was back the next day, the day the doctor was there.
He spent four days in D.C. General Hospital, his first trip back to Washington since a court appearance more than three years before. His entire body was paralyzed for two days, and one nurse confided to him the day he left that he had been near death. In the end, after the infection had done its work, there was not much left of the tattoo except an “o” and an “r,” which were so deformed they could never pass for English, and a few roses that looked more like red mud. When he returned to prison, the tattoo man offered to give back the cigarettes and the money, but Caesar never gave him an answer, leading the man to think that he should watch his back. What happened to Caesar’s tattoo and to Caesar was bad advertising, and soon the fellow had no customers at all.
Something had died in the arm and the shoulder, and Caesar was never again able to raise the arm more than thirty-five degrees. He had no enemies, but still he told no one about his debilitation. For the next few months he tried to stay out of everyone’s way, knowing that he was far more vulnerable than he had been before the tattoo. Alone in the cell, with no one watching across the way, he exercised the arm, but by November he knew at last he would not be the same again. He tried to bully Watson Rainey as much as he could to continue the façade that he was still who he had been. And he tried to spend more time with Cathedral.
But the man Cathedral had killed had become a far more constant visitor. The dead man, a young bachelor who had been Cathedral’s next-door neighbor, never spoke. He just opened Cathedral’s cell door inward and went about doing things as if the cell were a family home — straightening wall pictures that only Cathedral could see, turning down the gas on the stove, testing the shower water to make sure that it was not too hot, tucking children into bed. Cathedral watched silently.
Caesar went to Cathedral’s cell one day in mid-December, six months before they freed him. He found his friend sitting on the bottom bunk, his hands clamped over his knees. He was still outside the cell when Cathedral said, “Caes, you tell me why God would be so stupid to create mosquitoes. I mean, what good are the damn things? What’s their function?” Caesar laughed, thinking it was a joke, and he had started to offer something when Cathedral looked over at him with a devastatingly serious gaze and said, “What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.” Cathedral was not smiling. He returned to staring at the wall across from him. “What’s with creatin bats? I mean, yes, they eat insects, but why create those insects to begin with? You see what I mean? Creatin a problem and then havin to create somethin to take care of the problem. And then comin up with somethin for that second problem. Man oh man!” Caesar slowly began moving away from Cathedral’s cell. He had seen this many times before. It could not be cured even by great love. It sometimes pulled down a loved one. “And roaches. Every human bein in the world would have the sense not to create roaches. What’s their function, Caes? I tell you, we need a new God, and I’m ready to cast my vote right now. Roaches and rats and chinches. God was out of his fuckin mind that week. Six wasted days, cept for the human part and some of the animals. And then partyin on the seventh day like he done us a big favor. The nerve of that motherfucker. And all your pigeons and squirrels. Don’t forget them. I mean really.”