The Four Stages of Cruelty (10 page)

I could sense Josh in the next cell, and I moved in front of his door. In that moment, all my anger toward him surged, my rage like a knife that ripped in a ragged line through the air, swinging out to hit something soft and vulnerable. His drawings of me pissed me off. What he’d done to his girlfriend ate at my stomach. And yet, in the lottery of life and death, he was protected from harm. I didn’t know how to justify such random outcomes, that some men could be dragged down into the earth and torn apart while others got watched over by guardian keepers. I shone the light into his room and caught his face where he lay on the bunk, his eyes open, as if knowing with a preternatural instinct that someone outside the door was thinking about him, the expression pathetic, anxious, wary. He had said that he and Crowley were close. Well, let him hear the truth now.

“Your friend’s a wind chime,” I hissed through the grate, and stumbled on, seeking out a doc.

Josh lay on the bed and wondered if he’d heard right. He knew it was news about Crowley. He heard it as a tender kind of caring, a bit of human compassion, even an overture of mutual need. He missed his friend terribly. He’d been worried and anxious since the fight in the yard, frightened that he
hadn’t done enough to help. Now he had some news. Crowley was a wind chime, he thought, and let the words tap lightly through his brain, contemplating their poetic mystery, wondering what they meant. The answer, when it came, was simple. All rumors of escape or relocation had to be true. Crowley was gone, free somewhere. The wind blowing him about. He was a poem. A note hanging in the air. There was nothing more peaceful than sitting outside on a porch in the warm summer evening listening to the quiet tones of a wind chime.

When he woke up an hour or so later, heart knocking, he understood the real meaning of the dream. Not free. Not released. But dangling in a breeze. A hanging man.

When he woke, Josh was so flattened by the endless depths of unconsciousness that he was bewildered to find himself in Ditmarsh.

Then he remembered the news about Crowley and felt sick to his stomach, wondering what it had been like for him when it happened. Had he been very afraid? Had he known what was coming? Josh had hours to think about it.

During that long morning, despite the fact that it was Christmas, no one was allowed out of his cage. Nothing got delivered. At one point the hallway pounded with panic, army boots stomping by at a hard run, a door slamming against the wall, and a voice shouting for a doctor. In between there were long, empty oceans of indifferent silence. He wished the entire Christmas season to be over. He thought
about his mom and ached with emptiness. He considered the peace that might have been possible if he’d never been born.

That afternoon, he was told to distribute meal trays in the ward. It was the first time the COs had asked him to do anything. The doors got unlocked. Able-bodied and compliant, Josh moved awkwardly and hesitantly down the hallway, unaccustomed to staring into so many homes. Most of the regular long-termers were docile on bug juice. They sat on the edge of their bunks, rocking back and forth, or paced their drums waving away unseen flies. A few were eager for chatter or news, though he had nothing to offer. The one with no face needed to be fed, so Josh set up a tray on the edge of the bunk and filled a spoon. When the spoon nudged the man’s mouth, he ate mechanically. Josh fed him until the mouth stopped opening, and then he wiped the warped rivulets of healed flesh clean, afraid the nubbed hands might reach up and touch him.

By the time he got to the intensive care wing, he was tired of being free of his own cage and wanted to leave the trays on the chrome table outside, but a male nurse, overworked and weary, told him to finish the job. The room was a cavern with a dingy, antiseptic chill. The walls had been plastered until the edges were smooth and then painted a dull battleship gray. The ceiling shot twenty feet above to where the hanging fluorescent lights gave off a weak glow. The beds were in alcoves, the entrances arched. In the first alcove he saw a patient with some kind of vacuum machine parked beside the bed, rolling with a bad motor. Next over was an old bag of bones attached to an IV. Neither of them needed food, as far as he
could tell, so he moved on, rattling the cart along the stone floor. He placed a tray on one man’s stomach and put a spoon in his hand. He laid trays on med tables at the next two beds, where the men were sleeping. Then he came to a bed enclosed by a cage. Inside, he saw Elgin.

Even unconscious and strapped to the hospital bed railings, Elgin scared the shit out of him. In Brother Mike’s studio he’d worn only an undershirt when working, showing off his tattoo colors, birds of prey on his broad shoulders, tangled spiderwebs spiraling from each elbow, naked angels with big tits peeking out from his own pectorals. According to Crowley, Elgin’s artistic work was done in service of keeping his inking skills up, in the unlikely event he was ever released and could open his own parlor. Now half of Elgin’s face was covered in a kind of cheesecloth, mottled with Chiclet squares of blood. There were uncovered stitches on his neck, a slashed line like a row of black flies drawn to the puckered gore. The sheet was tucked snugly below his armpits and then raised up in a tent around his waist, as if gently lifted from whatever horrifying injuries settled underneath. He was utterly helpless yet still fearsome. The cage door was closed, but there was no lock on the clasp. He could pull out of the straps, rise up, and swing the door out, and Josh would be too frightened to move.

Standing there, Josh heard a loud, reprimanding voice and looked to see who was so angry.

“What’s your goddamn hurry? Some of us in here could actually eat that food.”

He saw that it was Roy, sitting on a bed in the last alcove at the end of the room. The cot sagged below him. His peg leg
stood against the wall, the halter at the top of the stick yellowed and stained. As Josh wheeled the cart over obediently, Roy grabbed a crutch from the floor and hauled himself off the cot.

“Just joshing you, Josh,” he said. “I’m glad to see a pal at a time like this.”

A pal. He’d never talked at any length with Roy before, only suffered his jokes and his relentless teasing, like the new kid in school. Roy limped toward him on the crutch. He seemed diminished now without his peg leg, breathing hard.

“You thinking about Crowley?” Roy asked.

Josh said he still couldn’t believe it.

“I know, I know,” Roy said, and then limped forward some more. “Help me get over to the big window. I need to warm my bones in some daylight, or I’m going to die in the dark like an old house cat.”

He slid underneath Roy’s wing and helped him maneuver his girth across the room. Passing Elgin’s cage, Roy sneered. “You staring at that sack of beat-up shit made me miss Crowley more than I could stand. If God’s got any spare time on his hands, he could send a nice chunky aneurysm up this fucker’s leg.”

Josh agreed. Together they moved on toward the caged window and stared out. The glass was greasy with decades of exhaled breath.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” Roy said.

They gave me three days off after finding Crowley, and I was grateful for the break, even as I wished I had something other than the rattle and shock of the previous week to occupy my every waking thought. MacKay was still in intensive care and not seeing visitors yet, but at least his prognosis was good. I got the information by lying, telling the nurse I was his daughter calling from out of state. No one checked on me, no one called to congratulate me or tease me or hear the Crowley story firsthand, no one even called to wish me Merry Christmas, and my brain went to work on that silence, parsing it for meaning. I began to wonder if they blamed me, if they saw my industriousness as a betrayal, a finger pointing toward some other CO’s guilt. When the phone finally rang on my third and final free evening, I reached for it with a high school nervousness. It took me a moment to recognize that the quiet voice on the other end belonged to Brother Mike.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” he said.

It was no bother, I told him, though I was surprised and confused by the call.

“I wanted to see if you were all right,” he said.

“What do you mean?” For a moment I didn’t understand.

“Aren’t you the one who found Jon Crowley?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “It must have been awful.”

It was, and I realized then that I felt morally stained by the experience, that I feared it might never wash off.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I wonder what happened,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to go there with a weak sister. If I ever mused on the reasons, it would be with a fellow CO, and only then with caution and the worst possibilities left unspoken.

“Have you looked at the book I lent you, the one that Jon was inspired by?”

He meant
The Four Stages of Cruelty
, the drawings by Hogarth.

“To be honest,” I said, “it wasn’t my cup of tea.”

Lying on the couch, with the phone up against my ear, I pulled the book over to my lap and turned the heavy pages again, though I had no stomach for it. Hogarth had drawn four distinct panels, and the rest of the book was commentary. At first glance the images seemed ordinary, street scenes of London in a vaguely Victorian era, but on closer inspection everything normal turned to murder. Boys who seemed to be playing with animals were actually torturing them. Men with maces and sticks beat horses. A child was crushed under a wagon wheel while four powder-wigged judges watched. A woman in an alley lay in an awkward pose, and then you noticed that her angled head was almost severed from her body, the slit throat gaping wide, and that she had been bound before death, her wrists notched by deep cuts. In a large room inside a brick-laden dome, a host of learned men in scholarly hats
crowded around a slab on which the corpse of a hanged man was undergoing autopsy, the rope still around his neck. A dog chewed on the tossed-aside heart, and bones were being boiled in a cauldron. It was bestial cruelty, a mosaic of casual perversion, and I wanted none of it.

Brother Mike didn’t seem to sense the vibe of my dismay.

“Hogarth followed the passage of a young man from his violent upbringing along his murderous path to his final end, hanged and gutted. He wanted to show that violence is contagious and has social origins, and that it follows a progression of cruelty. It’s a crude theory, but have you ever doubted that upbringing and social environment contribute to the lives the men in Ditmarsh have led? Sometimes, learning about the juvenile records and the foster homes and the alcoholic fathers and prostitute mothers, I allow myself to wonder if we have the right people locked up.”

“Was that what Crowley was trying to do? Make some kind of point about life in Ditmarsh?” I did not truck with the sentiments Brother Mike was describing, but I wanted to know more.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “I’m not sure we can ever grasp the full complexity of what violence does and where it comes from. I have this feeling that to truly understand the motives and the causes and the circular nature of it all, we need to hold some contradictory theories in place at the same time, and believe them to be equally valid. I don’t think Hogarth ever gave enough credit to evil, for example. I don’t think any social reformer knows how to comfortably tackle the problem of evil.”

He didn’t call it the mystery of evil, as I might have, but the problem, as though the existence of evil were a concrete issue with practical consequences, like a math question or a difficult repair job.

“And what is the problem of evil?” I asked, picking up the thread he’d placed before me, wondering what labyrinth I was being led into.

“Here, from my admittedly underschooled brain, are some of the essential questions: Is Satan responsible for evil? If so, why does the all-powerful God let Satan hold so much sway over the affairs of men? Is God responsible? Then what does that say about God as a loving being, or about man, created in God’s image? Are God and Satan both irrelevant superstitions, and evil a material by-product of chemical, social, or psychological influences? Depending on your point of view, there are ramifications. What should we do with evil? Cut it out like a disease? Kill it like a monster? Put it away in a place where it cannot harm others? Hate the sin, forgive the sinner, and work on rehabilitation?”

“You’re talking about matters beyond my job description,” I said.

“And mine, too,” he said.

A pause in our conversation. I stretched back and wondered what to say.

“So what’s the answer?” I asked.

“Love,” he replied, but the word was so curt, and the moment so awkward, I didn’t know whether I’d heard him right, and I was too embarrassed to ask him to say it again.

I thanked him for calling, and we said our good-nights.
Despite our differences, I was glad for the connection, the moment of human comfort.

I’d seen the faces of men who’d done what anyone would consider evil things, but their brains were usually so bewildered and pathetic, you wrote off their behavior as some sort of autism of violence. The spiritual counselors explained it with religion. The social counselors talked about case histories and abuse records. All of it was so much shit to those of us actually working the blocks, negotiating the moods, trying to keep the lies straight. People think we’re thugs, a little thick and hard, none too smart or caring, but I honestly believe you need the disconnect—the brute confidence or the comfortable blitheness or even that little smirk of cruelty—to do the job well.

I fell asleep on the couch, my comfort spot when comfort won’t come, and didn’t wake up until the phone rang again. For a moment I expected Brother Mike, a continuance of our conversation, but the voice was different.

“So you’ve done it,” the voice said, and then asked, “How does it feel?”

I knew the voice or thought I did.

“How does what feel? Who is this?”

“Do they know what kind of a cunt you are?”

That’s when I understood the true nature of the call. I sat up and asked again who the hell was calling. The voice on the other end breathed steadily, without fear, for a dozen seconds, then hung up.

I checked the call record and saw the number listed as unknown. I checked the street through a gap in the curtain and saw nothing but darkened cars and trees heavy with snow. I lay on the bed and tried to close my eyes, but I kept seeing Crowley. Would I ever get his hanging shadow out of my mind? I had some pills in the bathroom cabinet for bad nights, but I didn’t want to put myself under when there was a stalker out there, some drunk and bitter turnkey, some ex-inmate who’d finally made a house call. I tucked my prized armament of personal choice, a stainless steel .357 handgun, under a book on the night table because that’s what you do when you’re hearing footsteps on the stairs.

A few hours later, in the grimy light of morning, the phone rang a third time. I was eating raisin bran and staring at the counter TV, feeling unsteady and hungover from the lack of sleep. I checked the call display and saw the number of the local newspaper. They’d been hassling me to renew my subscription, but I hated having that waste of paper piling up unread, so I’d resisted their never-wavering siege for months. This time I was thankful to see a familiar irritation, and I almost answered. Then I stopped myself when I realized what was happening. Someone at the paper wanted to talk to me about Ditmarsh.

It had to be about Crowley. About finding him. The missing inmate. The one everyone thought had escaped. The one who showed up ugly dead inside the City. I did not want to talk to anyone in the media. I let the phone go to voice mail and checked the message fifty seconds later. Nothing.

I did the dishes and put in a load of laundry. I kept glancing
at the local news station as I worked, and I stopped everything when a report came on about an inmate at Ditmarsh Penitentiary who’d gone missing during a recent disturbance and had since been found dead. The blood in my veins thickened as a reporter on scene described the events and then cued a recorded interview with the warden.

“If he’d escaped, as these erroneous rumors insist, we would have notified other law enforcement authorities, and I can assure you no such notification was made. Contrary to your misinformation, the inmate had been held in protective custody the entire time.”

It shook me hard to hear the lie so blatantly spooled. Then came the kicker. While in protective custody, Crowley hanged himself, the warden said, and the matter would be investigated thoroughly, as was routine in all such cases, by the Pen Squad, an independent police unit inside Ditmarsh. “But I caution you,” he said, the sternness of his voice utterly convincing, “this suicide was not an avoidable tragedy, but an act of violent defiance designed to inflame an already tense situation. Jonathan Crowley was that kind of inmate. This is difficult for the general public to understand. But that man went to his grave spitting in the face of authority.”

It’s not often you get to witness the truth shit-kicked so thoroughly. My phone rang again, a number I didn’t recognize, so I picked up the receiver and thumbed end with enough firmness to choke a throat.

That’s when I first started feeling paranoid.