From the Chrysalis (29 page)

At least the gauntlet wasn’t personal. It was just mass punishment for the fright and loss of control the guards had experienced, and for the implicit criticism they would face when their jobs and routines were reviewed.
How did Sandy McAllister get hostages?
In their place, Dace might have done worse. Then they got a little too personal when they came to his cell.

Three weeks later he got out of Segregation just long enough for the croaker to tape his ribs and ply him with painkillers. He hadn’t spoken to anybody except the little joint man for so long he was amazed when words came out of his mouth.
 

“A little late, but better late than never,” he quipped as he got on the scales. He’d lost twenty pounds. He caught sight of himself in a little mirror over the examining table then. His long hair was falling out in clumps, but his beard was still thick and bushy.
 

The bespectacled little doctor with the black Brylcreemed hair tried to hold his breath as he taped his patient’s ribs. He liked to talk, and for the most part Dace was the perfect listener: he didn’t talk back. Dace kept quiet as the man opened up, sharing his thoughts.

He went home to a house on the lake where he was completely restored every evening. He’d never been married, but a silent woman came in to clean his house and cook his meals. She served no other purpose. He was past all that. He needed women even less than he needed men, although the latter provided entertainment in a job that left no time to read or reflect.

He’d taken this job in the penitentiary to avoid the pain habitually inflicted on innocents in everyday life. Everything here was black and white; people got what they deserved. There were no innocents, no children dying of leukaemia, no wild-eyed women screaming in labour, no old vets dying of regret. He’d worked in prisons for twenty years now, stitching self-inflicted wounds and dealing with manipulative maligners too stupid to bother researching the diseases they feigned. He supervised paddlings designed to inflict physical scarring and maximum pain. He had even attended the last hanging in Canada at the Don Jail in 1962.
 

He enjoyed it all and could still sleep at night, his stomach full of the fresh, non-penal meat and potatoes his Polish housekeeper cooked.

Adhesive caught in Dace’s chest hair and the doctor’s hand got caught in the tape, making him an inadvertent prisoner of his patient. He gave the tape a vicious tug before resorting to a pair of stainless steel Cross scissors he kept locked in a small desk drawer, just out of his patients’ reach. Most of his patients were four time losers with a cunning born of desperation. Darcy “Dace” James Devereux was no exception. Dace never even blinked through the ordeal, but the doctor saw him looking at the scissors. Perhaps he also saw him smile. He didn’t seem to like that.

“So why haven’t you taken the coward’s way out and slit your wrists?”

“Nothing to slit them with, Doc,” Dace replied. The little painkillers he’d downed without water were already creating a lovely sense of euphoria. “My teeth aren’t sharp enough.”

“A smart mouth, eh? Exactly what it says in your file—sorry,
files.
Some good, some bad. The last Warden described you as a real Jekyll and Hyde. He wasn’t far off, was he? A murderer at seventeen, but a stand-up guy for all your friends.”

“For the record, it was manslaughter.”

“Killing’s killing. Makes no difference to God what the courts call it. Makes no difference to me, either. And you’re smart, too. Smart enough to weasel out of a jam with your high I.Q. I.Q—you know what that means, don’t you? Luckily we’ve got people here smarter than you. All the riot instigators and hostage-takers are in solitary. Three have bled out.”

“Who?” Dace asked too quickly. If he stayed quiet, the good doc might volunteer more. But Dace couldn’t stop himself. The painkillers had loosened his tongue and he was craving human contact. “Just for the record, I didn’t take those guards hostage.”

“No, you were
taking care
of them,” the doctor said. “So their friends came and beat the living crap out of you for no reason. No reason at all. So why don’t you charge them? Set the record straight?”

“You want a little more drama around here, Doc?”

“Oh, you’ll have drama, boy. They might not bother with the hostage-takers, but there’s an ongoing investigation. Somewhere down the line they’ll start looking for guys to charge with two counts of murder. Let’s just say you fit the bill.”

“Me murder … who?” Dace stuttered. “I never touched a hair on their heads. Nobody did.”

“Not the hostages, stupid. Those two cons who died. Remember? They were human beings too, you know.”
 

Afloat on his bed that night, Dace almost forgot about wanting to get out, kill all the bad guards and run off with Liza. Free of pain for the first time in weeks, he worried about what the doctor had said, the possibility that he might be charged. That he might never get out long enough to do anything. To take Liza …
Jesus fucking Christ, Jesus, Jesus,
he thought.
If I have to, I’ll kill everybody here
.

Yeah, it made sense. Nothing had happened to the hostages, but the bulls had stomped him, so the warped bastards must have something up their sleeves.

Charge the guards with assault.
His assault and maybe somebody else’s. The goon squad was working overtime these days. There had been so much screaming at first he’d thought he was near the psych wing, but he knew better now. The guards were still collecting debts.
Charge the guards with assault
. The idea was a little pipe dream that kept him going for a while, occupying all that dead time when he had nothing else to do or read, when his pen ran out of ink, when nobody came, unless the disembodied hand shoving grub through the slot in his door counted.

He probably wasn’t the only person thinking this way. Who knew how many men the good Doc had inspired to share their dreams with their friends? Maybe that’s why
the authorities had suddenly started talking about releasing him and quite a few other prisoners slightly ahead of schedule. The prisoners would never win, but there was no way the guards wanted to end up in court.

He slept better then. His dreams changed, too. He was no longer in prison. He lived with Liza, and his father and his sister lived nearby. Liza always wore a yellow dress. He didn’t know if they … well, none of that mattered. Because whatever she wanted, he wanted. In his dreams there were two motorcycles in his garage and always a party going on.
 

And the world was full of suckers. Dace was his own boss. He worked hard at something—he wasn’t sure what—so they had lots of money. They lived on a mountain with only one way up, and D’Arcy Devereux was at the top, a young man still.
 

Months passed as he dreamed this way, in the Hole, on bullshit institutional charges.

Chapter 20

The Truth is Plain to See

People will talk. Even if a man has been acquitted by a jury, people will talk, and nod and wink—as far as the world goes, a man might often as well be guilty as not.

[Eliot,
Middlemarch,
Book VIII, LXXIV]

Maitland University, January 4, 1972:

Liza had just returned from Christmas vacation with her mother in Toronto. Her mother was a happy woman now, with no time left for grief—especially the grief young girls were apt to bring. Liza had spent almost every moment with her, catching up. Mostly they drank tea in the kitchen of her mother’s miniature flat. Night after night she had lived through past lives, bringing the Magills up to date, her mother up to middle age and herself up to age fourteen.
 

In the end she almost started seeing herself as her mother saw her: a clever, moody young girl with a head full of dreams. A girl who would do great things … without a man. She didn’t need a man. And Liza would go farther than the twins for the simple reason that she had lucked out and inherited the family brains.
 

Thank God she didn’t know about Dublin or Dace, Liza thought glumly, though how her mother could have missed hearing her ex-nephew was a key player in a recent penitentiary riot, she didn’t know. Maeve Magill rarely read the newspaper, though. She got most of her information through a network of family and friends. In some ways, the Magills had a lot in common with the Devereux. They didn’t want to know terrible things. Even if they did, they really didn’t like to say.

If only Liza could have been more like her mother, but she wasn’t. Something told her it was better to face life head on, though that was difficult when it came to Dace. What had happened to him? Although only a couple of letters had arrived, he was probably writing every day. He must be! Good Lord, what else did he have to do?
 

By now she had figured out he was in Segregation. All the “ringleaders” were. Although there was no reason now to hope he’d make his parole, she still did. Prior to the riot, he had been just a couple of breaths away. The prison authorities, well, they moved in mysterious ways.

Once she was back in residence, Liza unlocked her room and almost stumbled over the pile of newspapers her roommate had stacked inside the door. Janice always meant to read the news but never found the time. Right now she was probably playing Bridge in the upstairs lounge. Several receptacles of butts and ashes testified she’d been there recently, if a jumble of clothes and loose-leaf notepaper wasn’t enough. Liza sighed and waded into the room.

Janice had also been using her bed, presumably because she hadn’t been able to locate her own under the mounds of dirty clothes. Although Lily of the Valley had been sprayed around in a touching, if ill-advised effort to mask the odour, the underlying stink was enough to make even a man retch.
 

Already upset because there hadn’t been any mail on the hall table from Dace, Liza kick-boxed a pile of laundry out of her way. Dace’s last letter, a note really, had been postmarked November 27. How long could they keep a man in Segregation, anyway? Then again, even if he’d been out in Gen Pop, the Pen was locked down so tightly nothing was going to get in or out except regular staff and supplies, and maybe some crystal meth run by a dirty guard.
 

Somebody was giggling in the hall. It sounded like her neighbour, a little doll-like girl they called Chatty Cathy. Liza quietly closed the door.
 

The papers caught her eye again, fresh and unread. Who knew? There might be something in them, a vital clue as to what was really going on. There had been nothing new in the Toronto papers. Stooping, she picked up a couple before she’d even taken off her coat. The headlines would probably be enough.

Too bad The
Maitland Spectator
didn’t have a regular column called Pen News. She yanked off her knee-high leather boots and sat on the floor with her coat on. It was always cold in her residence room.

As the pile of half-read papers beside her mounted—in direct proportion to the innuendo and outright lies—she realized how blessed she had been to have grown up in Toronto instead of Maitland. Toronto was a big city, more anonymous than here. Even here, she had no family to keep her except Dace and Uncle Norm, and they were both fed up with Maitlanders glaring at Dace as if he was the de facto leader of an outlaw motorcycle pack, the devil incarnate, or worse.
 

She needed a Coke, but once she started reading the paper, she couldn’t stop. On the other side of the wall Chatty Cathy maxed the volume of Procol Harum.
And although my eyes were wide open, they might just as well have been closed
. Liza loved the song, but it was nerve-wracking living in residence with so much extraneous noise. Especially when she had something else on her mind.
 

The song ended, but Chatty Cathy started it up again. Lord love her, was that the only single she had? Fortunately, catching up on Maitland news was relatively simple because the headlines were nearly all the same: Sit-downs … dissent … more calls to send in the army.
She said there is no reason and the truth is plain to see.
The prematurely opened Supermax was going to cause more problems than it solved, Liza thought, staring at a black and white photograph of the penitentiary and trying to figure out where Dace slept.