“Just don’t turn me in,” she says. “It would be awful for your family.” She bounces up and returns to the bathroom while I dress again. There is a razor running and periodic splashes of water. Whether it is because my wife has to sit through the whole thing or that I can’t bring her back, I don’t know, but the whole thing makes me a different guy. In short, I’ve been raped.
She tows me outside, clattering on the steps in wooden clogs, sending forth a bright woman’s cologne to savage my nerves. I see there is only one way my confused hands can regain their grasp: I burst into tears. She pops open a small flowered umbrella and uses it to conceal me from the outside world. It seems very cozy in there. She coos appropriately.
“Are you going to be okay now?” she asks. “Are you?” I see Deke’s car coming up the street. The Impact Man, the one who never does anything nice for her. I dry my tears posthaste. We head down the street. We are walking together in the bright evening sky under our umbrella. This foolishness implies an intimacy that must have gone hard with Impact Man, because he arcs into his driveway and has to brake hard to keep from going through his own garage with its barbecue, hammocks, and gap-seamed neglected canoe, things whose hopes of a future seem presently to ride on the tall shapely legs of my companion.
I can’t think of something really right for us. The only decent restaurant would seem as though we were on a date, put us face to face. We need to keep moving. I feel pretty certain we could pop up and see Al Costello, my Catholic friend in the tower. He always has the coffeepot going. So we get into my flivver and head for the prison. It makes a nice drive in a Tahiti-type sunset, and by the time I graze Staff Parking to the vast space of Visitors, the wonderful blue-white of the glass tower has ignited like the pilot light on a gas stove.
“I want you to meet a friend of mine,” I tell the lady. “Works here. Big Catholic family. He’s a grandfather in his late thirties. It looks like a lonely job and it’s not.”
The tower has an elevator. The gate guards know me and we sail in. The door opens in the tower.
“Hey,” I say.
“What’s cooking?” Al grins vacantly.
“Thought we’d pop up. Say, this is a friend of mine.”
“Mighty pleased,” Al says. He has the lovely manners of someone battered beyond recognition. She now glues herself to the window and stares at the cons. I think she has made some friendly movements to the guys down in the yard. I glance at Al and evidently he thinks so too. We avert our glances and Al says, “Can I make a spot of coffee?” I feel like a fool.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Fine.” She is darn well glued to the glass. “Can a person get down there?”
“Oh, a person could,” says Al. I notice he is always in slow movement around the tower, always looking, in case some geek goes haywire. “Important thing I guess is that no one can come here unless I let them in. They screen this job. The bad apples are soon gone. It takes a family man.”
“Are those desperate characters?” She asks, gazing around. I move into the window and look down at the minnowlike movement of the prisoners. This would have held zero interest for my wife.
“A few, I guess. This is your regular backyard prison. No celebrities. We’ve got the screwballs is about all we’ve got.”
“How’s the family, Al.” I dart in.
“Fine, just fine.”
Everybody healthy?”
“Oh, yeah. Andrea Elizabeth had strep but it didn’t pass to nobody in the house. Antibiotics knocked it for a loop.”
“And the missus?”
“Same as ever.”
“For Christ’s sake,” says my companion. We turn. He and I think it’s us. But it’s something in the yard. “Two fairies,” she says through her teeth. “Can you beat that?”
After which she just stares out the windows while Al and I drink some pretty bouncy coffee with a nondairy creamer that makes shapes in it without ever really mixing. It is more or less to be polite that I drink it at all. I look over, and she has her wide-spread hands up against the glass like a tree frog. She is grinning very hard and I know she has made eye contact with someone down in the exercise yard. Suddenly, she turns.
“I want to get out of here.”
“Okay,” I say brightly.
“You go downstairs,” she says. “I need to talk to Al.”
“Okay, okay.”
My heart is coated with ice. Plus, I’m mortified. But I go downstairs and wait in a green-carpeted room at the bottom of the stairs. There is a door out and a door to the yard. I think I’ll wait here. I don’t want to sit in the car trying to look like I’m not abetting a jail break. I’m going downhill fast.
I must be there twenty minutes when I hear the electronics of the elevator coming at me. The stainless doors open and a very disheveled Al appears with my friend. There is nothing funny or bawdy in her demeanor. Al swings by me without catching a glance and begins to open the door to the yard with a key. He has a service revolver in one hand as he does so. “Be cool now, Al,” says my friend intimately. “Or I talk.”
The steel door winks and she is gone into the prison yard. “We better go back,” says Al in a doomed voice. “I’m on duty. God almighty.”
“Did I do this?” I say in the elevator.
“You better stay with me. I can’t have you leaving alone.” He unplugs the coffee mechanically. When I get to the bulletproof glass, I can see the prisoners migrating. There is a little of everything: old guys, stumblebums, Indians, Italians, Irishmen, all heading into the shadow of the tower. “We’re just going to have to go with this one. There’s no other way.” He looks crummy and depleted but he is going to draw the line. We have to go with it. She will signal the tower, he tells me. So we wait by the glass like a pair of sea captain’s wives in their widow’s walks. It goes on so long, we forget why we’re waiting. We are just doing our job.
Then there is a small reverse migration of prisoners and she, bobby pins in her teeth, checking her hair for bounce, waves up to us in the tower. We wave back in this syncopated motion which is almost the main thing I remember, me and Al flapping away like a couple of widows.
As we ride down in the elevator again, Al says, “You take over from here.” And we commence to laugh. We laugh so hard I think one of us will upchuck. Then we have to stop to get out of the elevator. We cover our mouths and laugh through our noses, tears streaming down our cheeks, while Al tries to get the door open. Our lady friend comes in real sternlike, though, and we stop. It is as if we’d been caught at something and she is awful sore. She heads out the door and Al gives me the gun.
In the car, she says with real contempt, “I guess it’s your turn.” Buddy, was that the wrong thing to say.
“I guess it is.” I am the quiet one now.
There is a great pool on the river about a mile below the railroad bridge. It’s moving but not enough to erase the stars from its surface, or the trout sailing like birds over its deep pebbly bottom. The little homewrecker kneels at the end of the sandbar and washes herself over and over. When I am certain she feels absolutely clean, I let her have it. I roll her into the pool, where she becomes a ghost of the river trailing beautiful smoky cotton from a hole in her silly head.
It’s such a relief. We never did need the social whirl. Tomorrow we’ll shop for something nice, something you can count on to stand up.
There for a while it looked like the end.