Both challenges demand of the prisoner that he think, that he use his mind, his wit and his imagination. But whereas the one challenge encourages him to think along lines that will drive him yet farther from society, the other challenge encourages him to think along lines that will adjust him to society.
No matter which challenge it is, there will always be men to accept it, as the warden of Walla Walla State Penitentiary — from which the ten convicts escaped with their forged-card-bulging brief cases — inadvertently proved, back in 1952. He gave the prisoners a special dinner one day in that year, in honor of the fact that a full year had gone by without the digging of a single tunnel. Three days later, during a normal shakedown, guards found a tunnel one hundred feet long.
Service Call
by Bruno Fischer
I take Fridays off, but you know how it is with a dentist That morning I had to go downtown to my office to attend to a patient who had spent a bad night. I made the necessary extraction.
When I returned home at noon, I found Margaret on the porch indulging in her favorite hobby, which was minding other people’s business. Time hung heavily on her hands since our daughter had gone off to college.
“Now that hussy is carrying on with the television repairman,” she told me.
I didn’t have to ask her which hussy she meant this time. She was staring at the Hamilton house directly across the street, and in front of it at the curb stood a small truck on which was lettered riverside TV SERVICE.
“He’s been in there for quite a while. And it’s not the first time.”
“So they have trouble with their set,” I said. “Don’t we all?”
“Every few days?” Margaret sounded pretty grim about it, a sure indication that she was enjoying herself. “In recent weeks, practically every time I looked I saw that truck parked there.”
I took off my jacket. Now at noon the day was becoming quite warm. “All it could mean is that the Hamiltons got stuck with a lemon of a set. Some need more fixing than others.”
“How convenient for her — if true.” She uttered that feminine sniff that proclaimed she knew what she knew beyond argument “You men,” she said. “Always trying to find excuses for women like Norma Hamilton.”
“Oh, hell,” I said eloquently.
Leaving Margaret on the porch to her fun, I went upstairs to our bedroom to change my clothes.
Two of the bedroom windows were at the front of the house, and as I pulled on a cool polo shirt, I could look down at the placid, tree-lined street and across it at the Hamiltons’ red-brick house sitting behind a lawn and a rock garden and shrubbery. The truck remained at the curb. We also used Riverside Service, and I remembered the repairman from the time he had been in to change a tube in our set a couple of months ago. I supposed he was the same one — a youngish man who rolled his shirt sleeves up to his shoulders to display his muscles. A virile blond animal, that one was, and it could be that Margaret was right Because Norma Hamilton Was very much a man’s woman.
She was about thirty, the prime age, and rather pretty, but what set her off from other women was an aura of sexuality that enveloped any man in her presence. It affected even me, who had a middle-aged paunch and whose feet always hurt from standing at a dentist chair. Often, of an evening, I would watch Norma Hamilton standing at her rock garden, charmed by her ripe figure in shorts and a snug blouse, and maybe I would dream a little. The scuttle butt in the neighborhood, especially among the women, was that there were men other than her husband who did considerably more than dream. Now including, perhaps, the television repairman.
Suddenly a familiar gray sedan rolled up the street.
I moved closer to the window. The sedan stopped some hundred feet away, in the middle of the street, and I could feel Arnold Hamilton staring at that truck in front of his house. He owned a haberdashery store downtown a block from my office; usually he had lunch in the same restaurant I did, and sometimes, since we were neighbors if not exactly friends, we ate at the same table. Had he come home in the middle of the day because he suspected something or merely because he had decided to have lunch at home for a change?
Margaret burst into the bedroom. “Erwin, Arnold’s come home.”
“So I see,” I said.
She joined me at the window. He was getting out of his car, which he had pulled into his driveway.
“I ought to phone Norma,” she said.
“Why?”
“To warn her.” She was still panting from her run up the stairs. “Something terrible might happen if he catches them together.”
“You’ll only make yourself ridiculous,” I pointed out. “Besides, it’s too late.”
Arnold Hamilton was at the front door of his house. He was a gaunt man with sad eyes and thinning hair. It seemed to me that there was something stealthy in the way he let himself into the house, though probably I was simply being affected by Margaret’s overactive imagination. The door closed behind him.
We waited at our upstairs window. I found myself listening for loud voices; they would surely have carried across the quiet street. No sound came from the house, and after a minute or two, the repairman appeared carrying his kit. He got into his truck and turned around at the end of the street and drove off.
I chuckled. “Disappointed, Margaret?” I said.
She actually seemed to be. It occurred to me that nothing much was happening in her life since Betty had left for college. She wasn’t the club-woman type and made few friends and usually I was too tired to take her places after work. The result was that she lived a lot of her life vicariously through books and television and the more dramatic doings of our neighbors.
I slipped my arm about her waist. “Tell you what, sweetheart. Let’s go swimming after lunch.”
“I’d like that,” she said, leaning against me.
Her waist was remarkably slim for a woman her age. Not that she was old — only partway in her forties. In my arms she didn’t feel much different than she used to. I kissed her on the cheek and we went down to the kitchen.
It must have been an hour later that I heard the siren.
I ran out to the porch. A black-and-white police car stopped with a jerk where the truck had been. We had finished our lunch and Margaret Was upstairs getting our swimming things together. In almost no time, she joined me on the porch. We stood together watching two uniformed policemen hurry into the Hamilton house.
“Something must have happened,” she said.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” I said.
Cars continued to arrive. They contained policemen both in uniform and in plain clothes, and the entire neighborhood was pouring into the street. A word spread among the people gathered in groups, a word we could hear all the way to our porch. The word was murder.
“We ought to tell the police what we saw,” Margaret said to me in a hoarse whisper.
“We didn’t see anything much.”
“Still, it’s our duty to tell them.”
“All right, I’ll do it,” I said. “You stay here.”
I crossed the street. A uniformed cop stopped me on the opposite sidewalk.
“If what I hear is true, I think I have some information,” I said. “Was somebody really killed?”
“It was Mrs. Hamilton. Who are you, sir?”
“I’m Dr. Erwin McKay. I live in that house across the street.”
He led me up the walk to the front door and said to wait there and went inside. Pretty soon he reappeared with a burly man in a slouch hat. “This is Dr. McKay,” the cop said and returned to his post on the sidewalk.