The Cage Keeper (3 page)

“You just take another slow and careful right turn when you get to the corner before the bank. Take that right and then get on 119 to Niwot. And Al, do not fuck with me. I am in complete control of my senses.”

2

My mind is one big training manual. I’m seeing white pages flip over and over in my head; I’m trying to remember anything I might have read about being kidnapped by an inmate under your jurisdiction, how to handle a knife. My palm slips slightly as I take the turn in front of Rocky Mountain Bank. There is a red traffic light in front of us. I have to stop. Okay, I’ll speed the car up just a little then jam on the brakes and put Elroy through the windshield. I see it all clearly in my head but my body isn’t going along with it. I pull the car to a gentle stop in front of the red light, look to my left, past the darkened parking lot of the bank, to the outdoor mall, where just yesterday I saw a movie before I came to work:
Star Wars.
McElroy takes another swig off of his bottle, the knife point pushing at my side. I don’t believe this. The light changes and I drive straight ahead.

“We might have some fun tonight, Al. You never can tell.”

“We should talk about this, McElroy.”

“Talk?”

“Yes,
talk.
You are escaping from a correctional facility, Elroy. You are kidnapping a corrections em
ploy
ee. Jesus Christ, they’ll lock you up forever.”

“Wrong.”
He pushes the blade a bit more into my jacket. “You’ve got that wrong, Allen.”

“I know. I’m sorry. You’re right.”

He takes another drink and I keep my mouth shut.

We go through seven more traffic lights before we are out of the city and driving alone in the darkness up two-laned 119 towards Niwot. At the third traffic light, the one right before The Rhino, I almost did it. The blade had pulled far enough away from my side so that I didn’t even feel it, but when I leaned forward a little to prepare myself I felt my seat belt pulling across my chest. I went limp as I tried to imagine getting free of the belt and opening the door before Elroy had time to put it in me. And I couldn’t take the seat belt off before I hit the brakes or I’d go through the windshield with him. So that plan is out. But right now, I’m not thinking about plans. Elroy’s keeping that foot-long, two-and-a-half-inch blade right at my side. I’m almost afraid that if I do think up something, the thought will travel down through my body, be picked up by that Bowie, absorbed into Elroy’s hand then brain and
slice
—that’ll be all she wrote. So I’m just sitting here with both hands on the wheel looking straight ahead at my headlights cutting through the darkness, lighting up this road that passes over the flatlands of Colorado just east of the foothills. On either side, as far as you can see, is white frozen snow about a foot deep and a week old. If it were daytime I could look out of my window to my left and see a blue-gray wall of mountains looming out of the fields on the horizon. I know this because just last Saturday when I was working I had to drive up here to monitor a furlough, Maggie Nickerson’s.

“You’re doing just fine, Allen. I want you to know that.”

“Do you think you could pull the knife away then?”

“Yes, Al, I can do that, and will, but when we get into Niwot you can count on it being pretty close.”

“What are we going to do there?”

“That’s my concern, kid. Not yours.”

His voice just went down a notch, but he keeps his knife in his lap. I can see a ball of light up ahead in the distance: Niwot. It looks to be three or so miles more. I sit tight and drive and keep my mouth shut, but I’m watching him as best I can out of the corner of my eye. He looks a lot smaller sitting in a car seat. With his sloping shoulders and his short torso, he almost looks like a monkey, but old, dangerous, too. He’s wearing his thick winter-lined dungaree jacket, and he has on a blue workshirt with a T-shirt underneath. We’re driving under the streetlights on the far outskirts of Niwot and I can see his face better. His chin is jutted out forward a little like when he takes out his teeth, and his eyes are narrowed so that there are real deep furrows in the skin of his forehead; he looks like he might be pondering some kind of deep philosophical question, but I know he’s just trying to keep his booze in line. I look down at the brown bottle in his lap: Grand Marnier. It sounds like something a sailor would drink. Drink up then, Elroy. Guzzle yourself to death.

“You know that I used to teach literature, don’t you, Al?”

He snaps that question at me so fast I jerk a little bit in my seat.

“What’s the matter, boy?”

“Nothing, I just—”

“You just don’t expect me to be cognitively in charge, isn’t that it, Al?”

“Whatever you say.” I look at him for a second and he is looking back at me, smiling.

“Yes. I taught literature at Greeley. Now I’m no writer, but I do know literature. The Elizabethan period is my specialty, Al. And Al. Do not think for a second that one little bottle of French liqueur is goin’ to rob me of my senses and render me stupid.”

“We’re in Niwot.”

“That is correct.” He puts that huge knife point to my jacket side. “There’s a Sunoco station up here to your right. It’s full service.” He lowers the liquor bottle down between his legs onto the floor, and I pull in alongside the pumps. Dirty snow is plowed up against the side of the building. A young guy is inside reading a magazine. He’s leaning back in a chair and has his feet up on his desk. I honk the horn and the kid looks up then stands to get his coat that’s hanging behind him. I think about Wilson, about how maybe he should have noticed my fogged-up windows in the back alley when he pulled up on his motorcycle. Maybe he could have looked and thought about it for just one second. Elroy slips the knife between the car seat and where my kidneys are as the kid comes out of the building. He’s rubbing his hands together and his breath is shooting out in front of him in short foggy blasts.

“Mornin’,” he says.

I’m about to speak but then Elroy leans in front of me. “Fill it up, son.”

“Yessir.”

A frigid breeze is coming in steady through the window. I start to reach for the handle. “Mind if I roll the window up?”

“Yes, I do, Al. That air is good for you. Keep you awake. Get out your money.”

I reach around and get my wallet. He takes it from me then opens it and takes out all I got, a twenty and two ones.

“I didn’t think you were making millions over at Fascist House.”

I sit there in the cold, smelling gasoline. The attendant hangs up the nozzle, then comes around to the window.

“Eight-seventy.”

Elroy presses that Bowie flat against my lower back as he leans in front of me and hands the kid my twenty. “Hey partner, I wonder if you’d be willing to bring us four black coffees from your machine I see in there. I’d be happy to give you a couple extra dollars for your trouble.”

I’m looking straight into this kid’s face. He’s got a few pink pimples on his chin and forehead, and I’m looking right into his watery brown eyes, moving mine all around then shooting them in the direction of Elroy beside me. The kid just smiles at me like he understands how it is to be with senile grandfathers or something. Then he says, “Sure. No problem.”

IT WAS JUST AFTER Elroy had me get off 119 past Longmont, heading north on Highway 25, when I realized nobody would be missing me for at least two whole days. I’m not due back at the center until Friday, so unless someone saw a gray-haired man pop my car door lock then climb into my Monte Carlo with a huge knife in his hand, nobody would connect us. When this hit me, my heart started beating fast and my hands got slick on the wheel. I leaned forward a little in my seat to take a breath but then spilled coffee between my legs onto my crotch. A hot wave passed through me and for a second I felt like I was going to throw up. All of this Elroy didn’t seem to notice; he just kept sitting there in the dark holding his Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand, his Bowie knife in the other, leaning his head back against the seat and watching the white lines of route 25 come into my headlight space then pass under us like they were medicine for his old bones, water for a man in the desert. But then he turned to me and said: “No one will be looking for a sky blue Monte Carlo for two days anyway, will they, Al?” And I couldn’t say anything. Not a word came from my lips. And in the back of my head somewhere I realized I had been hoping that this hadn’t been planned at all, that he had just jumped off the wagon after work and flipped out, that after he sobered up he was bound to calm down, realize how rash he had been, and have me drive him back to face the music. But then what about the knife? I hadn’t been letting myself think about that. Now that is all I am thinking about. If he’s smart enough to rip off a car and a driver nobody’s going to miss for forty-eight hours, if that’s part one, then what’s part two? And as we pass through the tiny sleeping town of Rimnath heading towards Bellington, my throat dry from coffee, my palms slippery with sweat, I just turn to him and ask him straight out, “Are you going to kill me, Elroy?”

He looks at me and I can barely make out his expression in the early morning darkness, but I know that it has changed. That look isn’t on his face anymore, and his eyes have softened somehow, like all of a sudden nothing is funny to them or ever will be again.

“I do not enjoy killing, Al. It is not a hobby for me.”

I look back at the road and hear him sip from his bottle.

“Though I have done it, haven’t I? As a soldier and a civilian I have done it. Just make sure you do it wearing their colors is all I can say. ’Cause mister, if you don’t—”

I look at him for a second. He is looking straight at me. I look back at the road.

“You are a cage keeper, Al. I can see you take your job seriously, too. You want to be a good cage keeper. Maybe someday run one like your brother, Mark, back at Fascist House. You are a good cop, Al. That is what you want to be. Just don’t try being one now, kid. I do not fancy the idea of snuffing you out, but I will if you start to play hero with me. I will slit you open like a fish.”

I look at him then look back at the road, then look at him again. “You won’t get any trouble from me, Mr. McElroy.”

He nods without a word and I go back to my driving. I want to check my watch but he still has his eyes on me; I don’t want him to wonder anything crazy. The sky is still very dark, no beginning signs of daybreak, but it can’t be more than a couple hours away. We pass through Bellington, just a short stretch of one-room stores with faded lettering in their windows, some framed with Christmas lights that cast orange and red and blue onto the empty sidewalk. We come to an intersection with a blinking yellow light and I keep going but up ahead on the left is a brightly lit Winchell’s Donuts. The only customer in it is a very fat police officer sitting at the counter with his back to the glass.

“Don’t even think of speeding up or doing anything else to attract that pig’s attention.”

That huge horse castrater is at my side. I look away from the doughnut shop as we leave Bellington and enter again the darkness of route 25 heading north.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN Wyoming before, I am there now. We passed through Cheyenne shortly before five o’clock this morning and were out of there in no time. The highway runs to the west of it and as we passed this flat frontier metropolis, I looked past Elroy’s caveman profile to the still-lighted streetlamps at the base of the buildings; I saw the red taillights of a Trailways bus that was heading down one of the streets towards the center of the city and I thought then how I would like to be on that bus, how I have always liked buses, how I slept on one almost the whole day-and-a-half trip down to Fort Lauderdale with Gus and Lopes spring break our sophomore year. While I slept they drank beer that we had smuggled in after a stop in Georgia. But I just couldn’t stay awake in the soft jolts and vibrations of that moving bus. That’s what I thought of as this cutthroat bastard and I passed Cheyenne and hit the snow prairies of Wyoming just in time for sunrise. At first there was a pale lip of pink on the horizon. Then the sun was totally exposed, looking as orange and round as an egg yolk. Now it is daylight and I find myself driving alongside men and women in cars and trucks and vans on their way to work. I look over at McElroy and he is looking at me. I wonder how long he has been doing that. Then I see him stick his thumb and forefinger into his mouth and pull out his teeth. He wipes them on his pant leg but keeps his bloodshot eyes on me. The center of his face just caved into the gaping hole under his nose. He looks like a lamprey eel. I look back at the road as he clicks his teeth into his mouth, then sits up and spits something onto the floor of my car.

“There is a plan here, Al. There
is
a plan.” He looks at me, waiting for my reaction like we’re two chums on a vacation together or something. “We’re going straight up into Canada, kid. You are goin’ to drive. But we will travel only by night. We will sleep by day. The border can’t be more than seven hundred miles north of us if I am not mistaken, course we will have to get a map. Do you have a map?”

I shake my head, though I think my Rand-McNally is still folded up in my glove compartment.

“No matter.” He puts the knife between his legs and rubs his hands together. He looks out the windshield then reaches over and turns off the heat. “With luck and proper precautions I see no reason why you can’t have me safely in the province of Saskatchewan by midmorning tomorrow.” He picks up the knife again and then points it straight ahead at the highway. “I want you to pull into the next rest area. That is all you need to know for now.” He lowers the Bowie to his lap and I look to my right hoping somebody might have seen this ugly man with the bushy gray eyebrows waving a knife around. I see a guy in an orange Datsun 240 Z. He is looking straight at us but not with the expression of someone concerned. He’s got on glasses and is going bald. His shirt collar is too tight for his neck. He looks like my dad.

We are halfway to Casper before I see a rest area sign and get into the right lane to exit. I glance at my watch. It’s seven twenty-two. We are driving through some of the flattest country I have ever seen, and it’s all covered with snow. A sign says: WHEATLAND 8 MILES. I pull into the rest area, a plowed parking lot lined with a few trees. There’s a concrete rest-room building in the middle and Elroy has me go way off in the corner away from a parked eighteen wheeler. I pull in under the snow-weighted branch of a tall spruce and I think of the Christmas tree standing in the corner of the mess hall back at the center. I’m tired. My bladder’s full. I don’t even feel very scared right now.