But the real problem is my body odor and my clothing and the two blankets. Washing out my shirt and underwear and socks once a week, using nothing but a bar of hand soap, doesn’t do much to get rid of the soaked-in sweat smell. Sponge baths don’t do much to cleanse my body, either. I’m afraid to wash my hair, matted and greasy as it is, because of the threat of another bad cold, of pneumonia. And there’s nothing I can do about the blankets or the cot or my coats or my trousers.
All of this is as much an indignity as the rest of it. I’ve been turned into a filthy, rank-smelling bum-I have been made unclean.
I hate him for that, too. As if I needed any more fuel to keep the hate burning high and hot, like a fire on the edge of my soul.
The Thirty-Ninth Day
I’ve given up scraping at the wall around the ringbolt with flattened cans and the edges of can lids. It’s wasted effort, pointless and frustrating and psychologically debilitating. I am not going to escape that way. In all this time I’ve managed to scrape a circular furrow around the bolt no more than an eighth of an inch deep. At this rate it would take me a year, maybe two, to work through the log to the outside. And I’m more convinced than ever that I would need to work all the way through in order to free the bolt. He didn’t just imbed it in the log; no, he drilled a hole straight through to the outside, fitted the bolt into the hole, and then fastened it in place with a locking plate of some kind. I’ve never doubted his intelligence, his cunning, his thoroughness. It would be a mistake to doubt them now.
What I can and still do doubt is his ability to foresee and effectively block every conceivable method of escape. There is something he overlooked, something I’m overlooking. There has to be. I’ve believed that all along and I’ll keep believing it until I find the weak link in the chain… metaphorically if not literally.
The Forty-Third Day
Funny, but old memories seem to come bobbing up to the surface lately. Things I haven’t thought about in years, that were lodged and forgotten in the depths of my mind, most of them from my youth-and I don’t understand why, here and now, after all the days in this place.
The house where I grew up, for instance. It was in the Outer Mission, in a little Italian working-class enclave near the Daly City line. Big rambling thing, built in the twenties, part wood frame and part stucco, with a fenced-in rear yard that had a walnut tree in its exact center. I used to climb the tree when I was a kid, sometimes to pick walnuts when they were in season, sometimes just to sit and think or read. Drove my ma crazy until she decided I was old enough not to break a leg climbing in or out; then she quit yelling at me to put my feet on the ground and keep them there.
That memory of my ma, and others too. She was a big, sweet-faced woman, hiding a load of pain and sadness under a jovial exterior. My old man was one reason for the pain and sadness. My sister Nina was another: Nina died of rheumatic fever at the age of five. I don’t remember much about her, except that she had black hair and black eyes and she was very thin; I was only eight when she died. Ma couldn’t have any other children and so she lavished all her maternal love on me. I was lucky in that respect. If she’d been anything like my old man, the whole shape of my life might have been different.
She loved to cook, as did most Italian women of her generation. She would spend hours in the kitchen, making Ligurian dishes from her native Genoa. Focaccia alla salvia, torta pasqualina, trenette col pesto, trippa con il sugo di tocco, burrida, tomaxelle, cima alla Genovese, dozens more. Lord, the aromas that would fill the house from her kitchen! Garlic, spices, simmering sauces, frying meats, baking breads and cakes and gnocchi e canditti. I can close my eyes now, even here in this place, and it’s as if I’m back in that big house surrounded by all those succulent smells.
There was one Sunday when I was twelve or thirteen-a feast to celebrate the wedding of one of my cousins. It was a warm day and we ate in the backyard, on tables covered with white linen cloths, and there was accordion music-Ma’s brother was a professional accordion player-and dancing, and homemade dago red and grappa from another brother’s ranch in Novato. It was a special occasion so I was allowed to drink a glass of strong red wine with the meal, and combined with the sun’s heat it made me woozy. Some of the guests and relatives laughed, my old man loudest of all, but Ma wasn’t one of them. She never laughed at me. She never laughed at anyone.
She never laughed much at all.
Big woman from Genoa. Big sad loving woman who traded the old world for a new one, and made the best of a life she didn’t deserve. She was exactly as I remember her-not a saint, no, but good. Down deep where it counts, as good as anyone God ever made.
The Forty-Fifth Day
He was here last night!
He came back, he was here, he was right here in this room watching me while I slept!
When I woke up and saw one of the doors across the room standing partway open, saw in front of it the straight-backed chair he’d sat in that first night, I thought I was hallucinating. I came up off the cot with chills racking me, scrubbing at my eyes, staring. But the chair stayed where it was, the door stayed open, the son of a bitch was here.
Rage boiled up, a black savage rage, and I lost control for a time… I don’t know how long. I shouted curses, I ripped at the chain until my hands started to bleed. I hurled empty cans from the garbage carton at the chair and the open door. Then, all at once, the wildness was gone and I was down on all fours, spent, my breath rasping out in little puffs of vapor like smoke from the fire inside.
When I could stand again I went to the window, looked out. But it was an act of reflex: I knew there would be nothing to see, nothing to alter the same old view. And there wasn’t: He was long gone.
He must have come in the small hours, when he could be reasonably sure that I would be asleep. Left his car some distance down the road so the sound of the engine wouldn’t carry and wake me up. Picked last night because the weather was clear and there was a full moon, bright and silvery-it was the last thing I saw through the window before I slept. Made his way around on the other side of the cabin, all stealth and cunning, and let himself in through a window or another outside door. Eased that inner door open, eased the chair through, stood or sat there watching me sleep, the moonlight spilling in and making every detail clear to him. Enjoying what he saw… oh, he enjoyed every fucking minute of it, you can bet on that.
I knew he couldn’t stay away. Knew he’d come back at least once to check up on his handiwork. And I should have known it would be this way, skulking around in the night, watching me in the night and then making sure I’d realize it when I woke up and he was already gone. Far more satisfaction for him that way than facing me, talking to me, giving me even a few minutes of human contact. And far more torment for me.
How long was he here? Five minutes, ten, twenty, thirty? Over there in the dark, watching, something evil in the dark watching and smiling and feeding on what he saw like some kind of vampire… Jesus, every time I think of it it makes my skin crawl, it adds fresh fuel to my hatred and my longing to destroy him. I’ve never felt this kind of bloodlust before, nothing even remotely like it. It’s an ugly and frightening thing, like an alien substance alive and growing in my body. And yet it’s also sustaining somehow-a force I can use to help shore up my faith and my resolve.
Setting all this down on paper has calmed me, put me back in control. But I don’t think I can write much longer. The palm of my right hand is cut and abraded from the chain, and holding the pen, pressing down with the point, is painful. There’s pain in my left heel, too, where the goddamn leg iron slipped down during my frenzy and dug into the flesh.