They put me in a whitewashed eight-man cell on the second floor with the usual collection of county prisoners: habitual drunks, petty check writers, drifters, barroom brawlers, and hapless souls in for nonsupport. There was no window in the cell, the white walls were an insult on the eyes, and we got out only one hour a day for showers. It was going to be a long fifteen days.
I was angry with myself for getting busted on a punk charge like driving with an open container, but I realized that the particular charge didn’t make any difference. That fat cop was going to nail me one way or another; it was just a choice of time and place.
Buddy came to see me during the visiting hours that afternoon. I didn’t want to talk with him after the scene in the bar, and in fact I wasn’t in a mood to talk with anyone. The men in that crowded cell were generally a luckless and pathetic lot, but nevertheless each of their movements (their knee bends and push-ups) and attempts at conversation to relieve their boredom were irritating, eye-crossing reminders of all the wasted nights and days and the impaired, lost people I had known in Angola.
The hack unlocked the cell door and took me downstairs to the visitors’ room by the arm.
“You want some cigarettes from the machine while we’re down?” he said.
I gave him some change from my pocket and sat on one side of the long board table across from Buddy. There were still grains of ice on his mackinaw, which hung on the back of his chair. His face was white with hangover, and his hand with the cigarette shook slightly on top of his folded arm.
“You have thunder in your eyes, Zeno,” he said.
“Room service was bad today.”
“I’m sorry, man. That’s a bad deal. I thought they’d just lighten your wallet a little bit.”
“It could have been worse. They might have tried for drunk driving.”
He paused and looked away.
“You want a butt?” he said.
“The screw’s bringing me a pack.”
“Hey, man, I didn’t mean to go over the edge last night.” His eyes came back into mine.
“Everybody was drunk. That stuff’s always comedy, anyway.”
“You want the guitar? The jailer said you can have it up there.”
“I better not. A couple of those characters would probably try to screw it,” I said.
“Look, I feel like a piece of shit about it.”
“Forget it. I’m going to take up yoga.”
“No, I mean getting it on about Beth.”
The guard put the package of Lucky Strikes in front of me, and I peeled away the cellophane from the top.
“I wouldn’t have brought it out like that unless my head was soaking in acid and booze. Shit, I know I can’t make up back time with her. What you do is between you and her, Zeno.”
I felt my face flush, and I didn’t want to look at his self-abasement.
“I haven’t been thinking about any of that,” I said.
“Man, I can read you. I know what you’re going to think before a spark even flashes across that guilt-ridden spot in the center of your brain. You’re going to tango out of here after your fifteen days, move out of the cabin, and start being a family man in Missoula with some bullshit guilt about old friends hung on your shirt like a Purple Heart.”
“You’ve got it figured a lot better than I do, then,” I said.
“Because I know you.”
“You don’t know diddly-squat, Buddy. The only thing I’ve got in mind is living two weeks upstairs with some question about what my parole officer is going to do with this. After that scene at the pulp mill, this could be the nut that violates me back to Angola.”
“Yeah,” he said, quietly mumbling, with the backs of his fingers against his mouth. “I hadn’t thought about that. That geek would probably do it, too. I didn’t tell you I went to high school with him. He has the IQ of a moth, a real pocket-pool artist. He would probably put you in the toilet just to close the file on you.”
Buddy had a fine way of making you feel better about the future.
“Maybe we can bring a little pressure to bear,” he said, his eyes still introspective. “My sister says he hangs around with a bunch of faggots in East Missoula.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t do these things for me.” I could see the color coming back into Buddy’s face as his fantasy became more intense and the memory of last night and his discomfort in front of me started to fade into an ordinary day that he could live with.
“We always have alternatives, Zeno,” he said. “You can’t sit on a bunk all that time and worry about Louisiana and moving your baggage around and all this marital crap.”
I heard the hack light a cigar behind me and scrape his chair. Buddy looked past my shoulder, then put his pack of cigarettes on the table with four books of matches.
“I better roll, babe,” he said. “I’ll bring some candy bars and magazines tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Become popular with your bunkies. But look, man, the cabin’s yours when you get out. None of this moving into town because you think you got to do something. Besides, the old man wants you to stay there.”
“When did he say this?”
“This morning.” He answered me in a matter-of-fact way, then looked at me with a new attention. “Why?”
“I just wondered. I thought I might have burned my welcome.” But it didn’t work.
His eyes studied mine for even the hint of some private relationship between his father and me, and I was probably not good in concealing it.
“Keep the butts and the matches,” he said. “You never did learn how to split them, did you?”
He put on his mackinaw and walked down the hall toward the front door of the courthouse, that square of brilliant natural light with the snow blowing behind it, and the trees along the street hung with ice, rattling and clicking in the wind, and the people in overcoats and scarfs, their shoes squeaking on the sidewalks while they walked toward homes and fireplaces and families. I put Buddy’s cigarettes, along with my own and the books of matches, into my denim shirt pocket and waited for the hack to put his hand around my arm for the walk upstairs.
The days passed slowly in the cell, with the endless card games and meaningless conversation and the constant hiss of the radiator. Beth visited me every afternoon, and I almost asked her to stop coming, because I wanted her so badly each time after she left. At night I lay on the bunk and tried not to think of being in bed with her, but when I drifted into sleep, my sexual heat embraced wild erotic dreams that made my loins ache for release. Then I would awake, my mattress damp with sweat, draw up my knees before me like an adolescent child suddenly beset with puberty, and debate the morality of masturbation.
I didn’t think it was going to be so hard to pull fifteen days. But after nine days I would have volunteered to pull thirty on a road gang to get away from my seven cell mates, their explosions into the toilet, their latent homosexuality (which they disguised as grab-assing), and finally a definite hum that was beginning in the center of my brain.
I noticed it at the end of the first week when I was sitting on my bunk, with my back against the wall, and staring at nothing in particular. Then I saw a plastic Benzedrex inhaler on the concrete floor, and the hum started like a tuning fork beginning to vibrate. It was like that dream you have as a child when you pick up something small and inconsequential off the ground, and suddenly it grows in your hand until it covers the whole earth, and you know you are into a nightmare that seems to have no origin.
Somebody in the cell had gotten hold of some inhalers and was chewing the cotton rings from inside, which was good for a high that would knock the head off King Kong. But for some reason my glance on that split-open plastic tube brought back all the listless hours in my cell at Angola and all the visions I had there about madness in myself and madness all over the world. My mother had killed herself and my sister Fran in the house fire, even though my father always pretended that it was an accident, and as I grew up, I always wondered if she had left some terrible seed in me. But in Korea I believed truly for the first time that I was all right, because I realized that insanity was not a matter of individual illness; it was abroad in all men, and its definition was a very relative matter. I even took a perverse pride in the fact that I knew the lieutenant was lying when he said we couldn’t take six gook prisoners back to the rear and we had to blow them all over a ditch. Four members of the patrol did it and enjoyed it, but they never admitted later that it was anything but necessary.