The Keep (8 page)

I write down
shitbag.

Hey, Holly warns Hamsam in a sharp voice, our crimes stay out, remember that? But she’s looking at Tom-Tom and you can tell she’s thinking,
Clown suit?

Alleged crimes, says Allan Beard, our resident brain.

Our crimes? Tom-Tom’s smiling up at Holly and his smile is like a lizard’s smile. Is that what you said?
Our
crimes?

Only to be nice, Holly says. I have to admit she’s learning fast.

I’ve tried everything to get her to look at me: clamming up, asking questions, laughing, stretching, knuckle cracking. Every week I bring in something to read, and after I read it out she glances my way because she has to, but her eyes don’t connect—they’re looking next to me or behind me or even through me. I guess the stuff I wrote about the guy fucking his writing teacher made her nervous. And I feel like telling her, Babe, it wasn’t you, okay?
That
writing teacher was an actual blonde, not to mention she was under thirty, no wrinkles around her eyes, and had curves on her like you wouldn’t have if you ate Snickers bars around the clock, plus she wore
dresses
—ever heard of those? And she smelled like strawberries. Or mangoes. Or licorice. Hell, I don’t know. But being inside changes everything. Stuff you’d call common or even flat-out invisible in the outside world turns precious in here, with magical uses you never thought of. A broken pen is a tattoo gun. A plastic comb is a shank, meaning a knife. A couple of plums and a piece of bread are next week’s hooch. A packet of Kool-Aid is dye, an airshaft is a telephone. Two paper clips in a light socket plus a piece of pencil lead will light up your cigarette. And a gal like Holly, who maybe you wouldn’t raise your head to look at out in the world—in here she’s a princess.

I don’t think you’re nice, Tom-Tom tells her. I think you’re guilty just like the rest of us.

Speak for yourself, Hamsam says, and a few guys bang their desks in agreement.

Holly smiles at Tom-Tom. She has pale eyebrows, bloodshot eyes. Her nose is long and kind of pointy. She has nice lips, I’ll give her that; they’re pink and have a clear soft shape even without lipstick, which she never wears. No makeup of any kind. I’m watching her carefully, which is something you can do with a person who never looks back, and when Tom-Tom tells her she’s guilty a kind of ripple happens in Holly’s face, and through the ripple I catch something I haven’t noticed before but I realize now that it’s been there all the time, right from day one. Pain.

Tell us about your crimes, Holly T. Farrell, Tom-Tom says.

She’s still smiling. None of your fucking business, Tom, she says.

That’s one day. They run together. All you want is for the weeks and months and years to pass so your time inside can be over like a bad dream and you can get back to your real life, but the longer you’re inside the more your old life is what starts to feel like the dream. And of course I want it back, but the problem is, when do you have the same dream twice?

Nothing changes in here: 425 steps to my maintenance job (always walking on the right side of the yellow line that runs down the middle of every corridor), 320 from there to chow, 132 to chow from D-block. Lights out at eleven, on again at five for the first count. Four more counts, with a standing count at 4 p.m. in our cells. Three stints a week in the weight cage. Four packages a year, but for me it’s usually less because the only family I’ve got is distant, so my packages are always things I order for myself.

My cell: six feet by ten, two metal trays nailed to the wall with mattresses on top that look like old taped-up cushions from patio chairs. No one ever wants the top bunk—people cut each other over bottom bunks—but I like the top because it gives me the best view of our window: five inches wide, twenty-four high. It has some kind of special glass that smears up what’s outside into murky gray shapes, maybe to keep us from masterminding our grand escape, or maybe because a window you can actually see through would just be too nice. But get this: after that second class with Holly when the door in my head opened up, I sat down on my bunk and looked at the window and all of a sudden I could see through it straight to the yard: concrete, fences, guys sucking in fresh air. I practically yelled. But I stopped myself because sudden movements or noises are not a good idea around my cellie, Davis.

Nowadays I can stay on my tray for hours looking down at those figures moving around in the gray. I watch them like I never could if they knew I was there, and I notice stuff: how Allan Beard pulls out the hair in his beard, how Hamsam walks like a chimp. How Cherry turns to the fence and cries when no one’s watching. How Tom-Tom lets the geckos sit behind his ears and climb up his ponytail. It’s better than television.

The hell are you looking at all the time? Davis asks me.

Nothing.

Then why are you looking?

Why do you care what I do?

I don’t give one blessed goddam what you do.

Good. And I go on looking, and Davis goes on hovering, which in a space this size means taking a step toward the window and then a step away from the window and staring at me. Davis is a porter, so he’s always around. He sweeps, he mops the tier halls, and in return the COs never flip our cell and Davis can stockpile shit underneath his bunk, a space that’s officially one half mine. God knows what he’s got under there—shanks, contraband, a bomb for all I know. He tucks a red-and-white checked tablecloth under his mattress so it hangs down to the floor and covers up whatever’s under there. I’ve never lifted up the tablecloth (Davis gets rabid if I go near it) but I’m curious.

I have certain reasons for asking, he says.

Asking what?

What you’re looking at.

And what reasons are those?

You answer my question, I’ll answer yours.

My answer is nothing. I’m looking at nothing.

Bullshit. No one looks at nothing.

No,
you
don’t look at nothing, Davis. But I
do
look at nothing.

Well, that’s a poor use of your time.

As far as Davis is concerned, all I do in here is waste valuable time. His whole day is organized down to the minute—hell, for all I know he budgeted an extra five to hassle me about the window. When they first put us together he gave me lectures on self-improvement, on building and achieving and dragging myself out of the muck, that kind of thing, and then at some point he decided it was hopeless. But here’s the funny part: I signed up for Holly’s class to get away from Davis one night a week. And since I started that class, everything feels different—brighter, sharper, a little strange, like I’m starting to get sick.

Davis has a project of his own that drives me pretty nuts, although I try not to give him the satisfaction: he does a daily minimum of seven hundred push-ups in our cell. I have nothing against personal fitness, but come on—
seven hundred
? We’re talking a level of grunting and sweating and groaning and (by the last hundred) screaming out for mercy that would be hard to take even in a giant space such as a gym. In this little trap it’s a horror show. And I don’t even mean the catcalls from everyone else on the tier about what I’m doing to Davis to make him howl like that. I mean the sheer racket of it.

But around the same time that our window glass got straightened out, Davis’s workouts started hitting me a different way. It happened when I listened to his words. The more shaky and worn out Davis gets from his push-ups, the more the normal words we all say every day start getting mixed up with old words he must’ve used at some earlier point in his life:
goon
and
dildo
and
asswipe
and
your mama
—words left over from a life that’s long gone. And once I noticed the old words Davis uses I started hearing them everywhere, because this place is a word pit—words get stuck in here, caught from when the clock stopped on our old lives. So now when a fight starts up I don’t walk away like I used to, I crowd in and wait for those ghost words to start coming up. I’ve heard
chump
and
howler
and
groovy,
I’ve heard
fuzz
and
kike
and
kraut
and
coon
and
square
and
roughhouse
and
lightweight
and
freak show
and
mama’s boy
and
cancer stick
and
fairy
and
party hearty
and
flyboy
and
knuckle sandwich
(don’t forget we’ve got lifers in here with false hips and false teeth who can tell you tales about rolling bums on the Bowery if you get them going), and I grab up these expressions, I trap them in my head and I save them. Because every one has the DNA of a whole life in it, a life where those words fit in and made sense because everyone else was saying them, too. I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I’m keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank.

In the next class I read again and Mel speaks up first, which is surprising because Mel hardly ever talks. Hamsam isn’t there.

I’ve got a reaction, Mel says. Actually, it’s a problem, Miss Holly.

Shoot, Holly says.

Mel clears out his throat and says, kind of formally, I would like to know what’s going to happen next.

Holly waits, she’s expecting more, and when nothing else comes out of Mel and she realizes
this
is the problem he’s talking about, she smiles. Mel, she says, that’s a good thing; it means the story has engaged you.

No, Mel says, it’s not a good thing. He has a soft panting voice, a high-blood-pressure voice that goes along with his body, which looks fatter every week. How he does it on the shit they serve in here I don’t know. He says, It’s not a good thing because it makes me uncomfortable.

You don’t want to make Mel uncomfortable. He’s big and dumb and dangerous. The word is he tried to kill his wife by grinding up three hundred vitamin C tablets and sprinkling the powder on her clothes and her pillow because someone told him vitamin C was toxic if you inhaled it.

Define
uncomfortable,
Mel, Holly says.

I mean like I get an uncomfortable feeling inside me that’s like an empty feeling, it’s a disappointed feeling like I want to know what’s going to happen and I feel bad not knowing, like Ray’s holding out on me. And then I start to have a pissed-off feeling, pardon my French, Miss Holly.

It sounds like you’re describing
anticipation,
Holly says. And that’s not a problem, Mel. That’s what a writer lives and hopes for.

It’s a problem because being uncomfortable is not what I like, Mel says. The quieter he gets, the more he means it. Tell me what happens, Ray.

Mel, Holly says, and she laughs like she doesn’t believe it. You can’t make that demand. It’s not fair.

I say it’s not fair of Ray to make me wait.

Tom-Tom’s sitting next to me. He picks that desk every week, who the hell knows why. Now he’s twisting and flicking around and finally he turns to me and says, C’mon, Ray. Tell us what happens. You were
there,
right?

I look at him and smile. I don’t know why I like pissing Tom-Tom off. Maybe because it’s so easy.

See, Ray won’t tell, Tom-Tom says. He’d rather sit there with a shit-eating grin all over his face.

Pardon his French, Cherry says, and he and Allan Beard start to laugh.

I write in my notebook
shit-eating grin.

Mel waves away the laughs. You’ve got no reason not to tell me what happens, Ray, he says, and his voice is butter melting in a pan. The way I feel right now, he says, I’ll be personally offended if you don’t.

I have no interest in personally offending Mel. He was in the hole for three months after he stabbed a guy named Julian Sanchez with a toothbrush he’d made into a shank by scraping it over the pavement. Luckily for Sanchez, in the heat of the moment Mel accidentally used the brush end.

But when I start talking, it’s not to make Mel happy. I do it for Holly, to get her to look at me. Being inside turns us back into infants: guys kill each other over a volleyball call, they throw their food and piss and shit because what else is there? What else have we got? And I need Holly’s attention, that’s all. I need it.

Well, I say, the next thing is that Danny’s going to set up that satellite dish he’s brought and call his ex, Martha Mueller.

Okay, Mel says. And say what?

You don’t have to do this, Ray, Holly says, eyes to my left.

The main thing is, I tell Mel, Danny wants to get back together with Martha. But she won’t.

I need the
words,
Mel says. Right now you’re just making noise in my ear.

Holly’s waiting, but she’s not happy.

Okay, I say to Mel. Here are some words: “Hey, Martha, it’s Danny…. Yeah, I made it okay and I’m here in this old castlewith my cousin and some other people, and I’m thinking about you.” I get a heat reaction in my face, but I keep on going. “I was wishing we could…I was hoping we could—” Now I’m stumbling, hardly getting the words out, and the guys are laughing like mad. Holly, too, she can’t help it. “I was hoping we could start things over again—” Oh, fuck, I groan because I’m having a stroke, I’m dying of shame. I can’t do this, Mel.