The Four Stages Of Cruelty Part 13

I called MacKay early the next morning, amazed at how quickly they'd s.h.i.+pped him out of the hospital. It showed you how little our insurance covered.

"They got you off the oxygen yet?"

"Doesn't matter," he answered. He sounded p.i.s.sed off, a feistiness that was rea.s.suring. "I'm moving to Arizona. You can wheel your oxygen tanks right onto the f.u.c.king plane. I hear they sell extra canisters at the airport in Phoenix. Think of me getting a tan while I soak Medicaid f.u.c.king dry."

"Can I see you?" I asked. He hesitated. As the silence went on, I figured he was closed for business. No more good times with his favorite subst.i.tute daughter.

When he told me yes, I thanked him in relief and said goodbye. Then I had to call him back and ask where he lived. He called me a sweet little idiot.

I drove to the east side of town. Once Irish, now heavy on Somali and Hmong. The clapboard house reminded me of the one my parents raised me in. I knew there were cubbyholes under the stairs where bowling b.a.l.l.s and vacuum cleaners were stored and where kids could hide. I knew there was a dirt-floor bas.e.m.e.nt loaded with old furniture and rolls of moldy carpet that couldn't be parted with. MacKay and his wife lived like typical working-cla.s.s families with exactly no residual income. It made me ashamed of all my various suspicions over the years.

Shuffling in slippers like a grandfather, he showed me in. The living room had a matching plaid couch and recliner, and a rickety coffee table in between. Ray haunched down slowly into the recliner, so I took the couch. His color was bad, his hands prominently veined. Mrs. MacKay was out, and I wondered if he'd arranged it so. The TV was on, volume muted. I was surprised to see a church service on the screen. It wasn't even Sunday.

Ray killed the TV by pressing his big thumb on the power b.u.t.ton.

"In the kitchen, in the cupboard over the stove, there's a bottle of Kentucky. Get us a couple gla.s.ses."

"Jesus, Ray," I protested.

"p.i.s.s on it," he said. "I gave up cigarettes. If you won't get it for me, I'll get it myself."

He started to haul himself forward, so of course I summoned the dependable enabler of my childhood and walked into the kitchen on orders.

The tile floor was torn neat the fridge. A collection of miniature porcelain cats lined the windowsill over the sink. A pair of binoculars hung from a tea towel k.n.o.b next to a calendar of different birds. I found the bourbon and the gla.s.ses and poured. I did not dare to water it down.

"Do you miss it?" I asked when I sat across from him again. I felt guilty showing up in uniform.

A grin, a shake of the head, a whoosh of breath. "Yes. I miss the G.o.dd.a.m.n place. I should have been a tour guide. All day yesterday I sat here looking at a photo alb.u.m. How are things in there?"

I did not know how to answer him. "Kind of f.u.c.king weird, Ray, actually," I said. "I'm not sure what's what anymore."

His eyes squinted. "Like what? You in trouble?"

And with the question, a barrier fell and I could not help but think of my father. Sitting before MacKay, the room devoid of life like an airless museum, I wondered why it had been so hard for my father and me to connect. I remembered the year my mother left him-left us, I suppose, to live with her sister-and how little we had to say to each other while she was gone. Had it been depression that kept him from really connecting with me, even when it was just the two of us together? That possibility seemed obvious suddenly, and something else became clear: the urgency I felt inside to remain busy at all times, under pressure, involved, vigorous, p.i.s.sed off, resistant, and ambitious in futile and self-defeating ways-and the vacuum in my life when I had none of that-was a kind of shadow illness. Was depression my problem, too, dealt with in different ways?

"Maybe I'm about to get in trouble," I acknowledged. I was more nervous than I wanted to admit.

"What kind of s.h.i.+t are they throwing at you?" he asked.

The fatherly concern I never got.

"I have a sentencing hearing this afternoon," I said. "They're saying I whacked Shawn Hadley a little too hard."

MacKay shook his head. "Sorry about that. Ask him if he wants his b.a.l.l.s back."

"It's not really that," I said. "I'm trying to find something else out."

"Like what?" And when I hesitated, he said, "Jesus, Kali, you interrupt my busy f.u.c.king morning and can't spit it out? What's on your mind?" I took his impatience as a good sign.

"I want you to tell me what you know about the Ditmarsh Social Club."

He didn't look at me, but there was a thin smile on his face, and he sat back in the recliner and stared at the dead TV screen for a full minute.

"I'm not even going to ask you why you're asking," he finally said.

"Okay," I said, and didn't move.

"I'm wondering if there's a way we can not have this conversation."

"That's up to you," I said. "But I'd like to know what you know."

"You think it will help you somehow? You think it will alleviate whatever s.h.i.+t storm you're facing?"

"I do," I said, though I didn't believe it. I believed I was walking into the s.h.i.+t storm face-first.

"You're a big girl. You can make your own choices."

I waited. He shrugged, started rolling the bottom edge of his gla.s.s on the armrest fabric.

"The Ditmarsh Social Club was a choir," he said. "About a hundred years ago. Turn of the century."

"A choir?" It was the last thing in the world I expected.

"Like one of those barbershop quartets. You know. A bunch of well-groomed men singing in harmony, deep voices and high voices all mixed together. They showed up at the state fair. They did some ball games. Sang at the Governor's Mansion, that kind of thing. Swell bunch of choirboys."

"COs?" I asked. "Men who worked at Ditmarsh, not inmates?"

He glared at me. "Of course they weren't f.u.c.king inmates. Yes. Hacks. Turnkeys. Us. The choir was a noted feature of Ditmarsh Penitentiary until World War One. Then I guess people stopped enjoying that kind of singing. Probably because of the f.u.c.king radio."

He stopped talking. I realized he was trying to catch up on his breathing, get it steady. Too many words coming out in a single flow. I felt like s.h.i.+t for pus.h.i.+ng him.

"So then it went away?"

"Went away. No more social club until the 1950s, except when it came back. When it got revived, let's say, it was different. Kind of an inner circle. A club for the COs who were trusted, who were on the inside of things. There was the Ditmarsh Social Club, and there was everyone else, all the working stiffs."

"How come I never heard of it?"

"Because it went away again. For good reason."

"What reason?"

"I started working at Ditmarsh in 1977. Never knew anything about the social club until the early eighties. I got pledged, you could say, in 1985. Seemed like a good thing to me. You got extra duty. You got your back covered if you f.u.c.ked up. Kind of what the union was supposed to do but never actually f.u.c.king did. Then I saw it wasn't all gravy."

The gla.s.s empty now, in his lap. He scratched at the Band-Aid on the back of his hand and recrossed his varicosed ankles.

"I think we were watching too many Charles Bronson and Dirty Harry movies. You have to understand, the courts were ridiculous. They loved bad guys, hated cops. They gave us a hard time if an inmate fell down. Consequently, the inmates had a lot of sway, and officially we couldn't do s.h.i.+t about it. They had all kinds of mandated luxuries. They worked the system to their extreme advantage. So the social club took it on itself to restore a little justice to the place. I probably don't know half the s.h.i.+t that went on. But sometimes, when some correction was needed, we made it happen. We made sure the inmates got the message. Unofficially we ran the City. No one went down in the hole without pa.s.sing through us. Everything that happened down there happened because of us. You remember when we were talking a few weeks back about that c.o.c.ksucker Earl Hammond?"

I nodded, a little dry-mouthed. Of course I remembered.

"Well, everything with the social club turned to s.h.i.+t after that f.u.c.ker iced Bucker."

"Why?" I asked. "How?"

"Jesus, that's hard to explain." He let out a heavy breath. "Not exactly pleasant memories. Hammond was f.u.c.king evil, and he deserved everything we could lay on him, so we decided to make him the supreme example, demonstrate what justice really meant. We cleared out the whole City for him, and he was the one and only living soul down there for three years."

"Three years," I said.

"Long time," MacKay agreed. "I stopped thinking that was a good thing around year two." He grunted, a shortened laugh, and gave me a strange look, as if still puzzled. "I started feeling sorry for the f.u.c.king guy. Me. Of course, you couldn't admit that to anyone else. In fact, you're the first living soul I've ever told. But I've never seen anything more cruel than keeping a man down in an isolation pit day and night for year after year. It just got to me."

"What happened?" I did and didn't want to know.

"Hammond started going nuts. But in an ugly way. You could see his mind kind of folding in on itself. He'd been mentally healthy before. Down there, he started changing, turning into something not really human. Some of it could really set you off. You showed up, and he was covered in s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t everywhere, and he'd been left that way for a week, and you just hated him for it. Or you'd pa.s.s him his food and he'd throw it at you as soon as he could, so we started shackling him up for meals, and then in general pretty much all the time, to minimize the ha.s.sle and the danger. That's why we called him the Beggar. He had sores all over his body. He had these long nails. And the worst part, I swear, was that when he talked to you, you realized he had no f.u.c.king clue where he really was. I mean, seriously, he thought he was in another world. Sometimes it was a world full of demons and he was a hero sent to save everyone who was good. I remember as though it was yesterday him telling me that the G.o.d we all called G.o.d was actually evil, and the real G.o.d was trapped in another universe behind a barrier, and it was his job, the Beggar's job, to overthrow the evil G.o.d's rule over this world and free us all and right the wrongs. And incidentally, he might have to kill every one of us to make it happen.

"It was crazy as s.h.i.+t, but he believed it. Sometimes he told me the walls had turned to liquid fire, and other times he said the demons had been with him for hours, mocking and torturing him, and once he told me the chief f.u.c.king demon was sitting with us in the corner of his cell that very moment, waiting for me to leave."

And then, to my astonishment and eternal guilt, Ray MacKay started to cry.

"It was heavy, Kali, I have to tell you. I started sitting down there with him my whole s.h.i.+ft, just to help him keep it together. I'd tell him to hang on. Get through another eight hours. That the next eight would be better. And with the human company he came around a little bit. He was a smart son of a b.i.t.c.h. He'd crack a joke when you weren't expecting it, and then I'd wonder for a week if he wasn't playing me, but I'd see the look in his eyes the next time down there, and I'd stay again and just sit with him, and sometimes point my flashlight at the part of the wall he said the demons used as a gate to come get him."

Ray put his face in his hands and disappeared for a while. I felt less than human for not easing over and putting my arms around him. I was shocked, I suppose. I didn't have any room in my brain to imagine Ray MacKay talking in that way.

"I quit the club," he said, looking up, wiping everything off, the tears and the soft grief. "I didn't want to be part of it anymore. And the club didn't last much longer after Hammond was gone. I wasn't the only one keeping Hammond company. Half of us felt like s.h.i.+t about it. Other half went harder the other way. Push and pull. They s.h.i.+pped Hammond out, sent him to California for some technical reason related to his original charges. About a year after he was gone, a few of the top guys in the social club got in trouble for a little criminal activity. No big surprise. During the investigation one of them erased himself with a revolver. Another drove his pickup truck onto the ice on Long Lake to get to his fis.h.i.+ng hut, even though it was late March and sixty degrees. A third guy did go to prison, and that, of course, was probably worse than death for a jack who'd been a hard-a.s.s when he lived on the other side of the bars."

He drank from the gla.s.s and noticed it was empty, then gave me a funny look.

"So there you have it. That's the f.u.c.king story. Whatever reason you wanted to know, keep it to yourself. I'm paying for my sins twenty years later."

I thanked him, and he told me to go, and then he told me to bring over the bottle of Kentucky before I left. So I did.

24.

I tried Ruddik from the car as I drove to Ditmarsh for my hearing. Ruddik didn't answer, and that left me lost. I was at the stage with him when I wanted more talk. I wanted some answers, too. I tried to focus on driving, but the information I'd picked up churned inside me, wreaking havoc on my poor stomach.

Then the cell phone rang, a number I didn't recognize. I was still leery of unexpected calls, given the press interest in Hadley, but I couldn't stand not answering and got relief and release when I heard Ruddik's voice on the other end.

"I found out about the Ditmarsh Social Club," I told him. It sounded ridiculous when I started explaining the history-that it had been a kind of glee club a century ago, that it reformed in the '50s, not to sing, but as a kind of vigilante group. And when I mentioned Earl Hammond and the City, he interrupted and asked me who I was talking about.

"Hammond was an inmate here about twenty years ago. The social club kept him in the hole for three years after he killed a CO. Then he got transferred, and the social club broke up after that."

He told me he didn't understand. "Slow down. Get me into your head. What does this inmate have to do with Crowley? Am I missing something?"

My chickens had come home to roost. I could come up with no quick and reasonable way to divert the need to explain why I'd failed to mention the comic book and the Beggar before. So I told him about Josh and Keeper Wallace and the special trip, and I told him about the Beggar and that the fallout shelter mark I'd seen had been in the comic book, and I told him I thought the fight in the yard between Elgin and Crowley had something to do with the comic book, too.

"Like you said, the art therapy group could be your gym. Maybe Hammond fits into it somehow."

I stopped myself from talking. I wanted to let him catch up, think it through, ask me something. Maybe I expected more praise, an instant promotion, but I was surprised at Ruddik's reluctance to grab hold of my vague theories.

"All right. Where's the comic book now?"

I told him I didn't know, feeling stupid for once having had it in my possession and letting it go.

"Then we probably ought to approach the man who runs the art therapy group," he said. "Find out if he knows."

"Brother Mike," I said. "I can do that. I've met him."

And so I had my next step. When I hung up, I realized how fast I was going and eased my foot off the accelerator. I saw a brown trooper's car only a few seconds later and felt lucky. The smokies didn't always dish out tickets to us law enforcement cousins, but they were a little arbitrary about our exact degree of kins.h.i.+p. They didn't take us quite as seriously as we would have liked.

When I got to Ditmarsh, the delayed anxiety of the trial hit me again. It seemed so ridiculous and small compared with the monstrosity of the place and the things that had happened inside. It felt as though another me, in another life, were rus.h.i.+ng through the halls to make it to the hearing on time. Wallace met me outside the small courtroom in Keeper's Hall and asked me where my union lawyer was. I realized then, with a sudden numbness, that I'd never actually taken him seriously when he'd suggested it before. It still stunned me that my conduct was under scrutiny, that a corrections officer could be called into question for forcibly restraining an inmate. It was like arresting a surgeon for making a patient bleed, or court-martialing a soldier for shooting at an enemy combatant.

"Do you really think it's necessary?" I asked Wallace.

"I wouldn't mention it twice now if I didn't," he said.

He walked away, p.i.s.sed at me, and I felt my own bile rising. A million-dollar house, and this a.s.shole was giving me a hard time.

My presence was pro forma only. I sat in the back row and watched Hadley's lawyer berate, cajole, and f.e.l.l.a.t.e his way into a continuance. Of the five or ten reasons he gave, one crawled under my skin. The inst.i.tution had failed to produce requested evidence, namely the videotapes of the event in question, required in law (though rarely in practice) to be recorded whenever the Urgent Response Force was engaged.

"The terrible things that happened in that cell are being hidden from us, Your Honor," his lawyer intoned. "Officer Kali Williams and Lieutenant Raymond MacKay engaged in s.a.d.i.s.tic practices knowing full well this administration would cover up their misdeeds. I demand that the evidence be produced."

Keeper Wallace promised to deliver the tapes as soon as possible. The judge asked Wallace not to waste the court's time. The delay p.i.s.sed me off, too. If Wallace pa.s.sed over the tapes, everyone would see I had done nothing wrong, or nothing overtly brutal. They might watch a little scuffle in the cell, catch a glimpse of Hadley flopping and twisting for a second or two, but that was in MacKay's presence, not just mine. Release them, I thought, and get this over with. The reluctance to give anything over to the lawyers and the courts was counterproductive. It made everyone think there was something we were hiding, that the cliches were true.

Walking out, Hadley gave me a smirk. My only satisfaction was seeing him limp. Wallace and the Ditmarsh lawyer rose out of their chairs and gathered around the judge for a good laugh and a "how ya been" conversation. The judge, evidently, had been a parole hearing superintendent many years previously. I watched Wallace nodding and smiling, displaying a casual ease you didn't see on his face when he was working. I waited half a minute for some over-the-shoulder glance of sympathy and finally left the room ignored or unnoticed.

25.

I called Brother Mike that night, using the number he'd reached me from on Christmas Day. He sounded unsure of himself at first, as though preoccupied and hazy. It seemed impossible at that moment to bring up Hammond or the comic book, so I asked to see him in person, away from Ditmarsh. He hesitated before saying yes and invited me to visit him at his home. I didn't quite know what to make of the reluctance. I just knew I had a few hours that Sat.u.r.day before my afternoon s.h.i.+ft.

I drove out early, well beyond the city, to what had once been farmland edging up on the river and now was being gobbled up by suburban developments. The turnoff to Brother Mike's property was a narrow, unplowed road into the forest, just two gutters of dirt funneling through the hard snow. The Land Rover had the clearance and b.u.mped along fine, though it would be h.e.l.l to back out if I couldn't turn around. Then I came to an old house, a chimney puffing smoke, a wedge of front yard, and a deer fence surrounding the back.

He met me at the front door, and his smile was so broad and effusive I knew I must have misinterpreted him on the phone. He ushered me in, took my parka, and hung it up, and after I took my boots off he beckoned me down the hallway into the kitchen. He'd just made tea and cookies, the dear aunt I'd never had.

We sat on high stools next to a kitchen counter. A large window overlooked the expansive backyard, and there was some kind of structure back there, a sagging house covered in old sacks, too big to be a sweat lodge. I wondered what it was for. A plate before me. The cookie looked like a pile of horse manure, hairy with fiber, something a hippie might sell in a coffee shop. The tea was strong, the way Irish grandparents like it, mixed with much milk.