The Four Stages of Cruelty (31 page)

Fenton looked as though he’d been digging for coal, his hands and face black, his eyes buggy. Josh wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know until I was free of them, and Fenton said I’d be free enough, locked in down there. Josh agreed and let them toss me down into the darkness.

It hurt bad. I lay at the bottom of the dark stair, and I couldn’t see a thing, not even a crack of light where the door must have been. It was so black I wondered if I were unconscious or floating through space. I winced when I pushed myself up. Pain is weakness leaving the body, the recruitment poster said, but I knew that pain was gravity attaching you to the here and now. I crawled into the first narrow cell, out of the hallway, out of the line of sight, and sat up against the wall.

A minute later, maybe ten minutes, I heard the door open. I wondered if it was my rescue or my end. The light did not fill the dark passage outside but splashed through like a passing current. I heard a heavy thud, a groan, and a cry. I knew it had to be another body tumbling down.

“Brother Mike?” I called. I listened but heard nothing. Then the scraping sound of someone crawling. I should have gone out and found him, but I waited instead, still paralyzed with my own fear and the failure that smothered any desire to help.

“It’s me,” the voice said, and the creature slithered in to join me.

Josh, my rescuer, leaned up against the other wall. I heard him pant and groan.

“They’re gone now,” he said. “There’s no reason for them to come back.”

I nodded and closed my eyes.

Hours went by, I presume, or only seconds. I woke up in the same absolute darkness and wondered if he was still present or if the arrival had been a dream. I nudged his foot with my own and heard him cry out and start to cough. I wanted to know he was still with me.

A little strength had come over me. I felt a touch of the old me creeping back in. Resilience is the last thing to go. It keeps surging back like a forgotten tide, even when you think it has been banished for good. It was followed by anger. Disdain. Maybe loneliness, the great force beneath everything that keeps mashing us together.

“You told them that Hammond is here?” I asked him. “Why did they believe you?”

“Because it’s true,” he said. “He’s been here all along. Crowley knew. That’s what he was telling us.”

My brain moved slowly, muffled by the darkness, the gears in it cranked and turned.

“Is Hammond Roy?” I asked. All along.

He coughed. The sound didn’t go anywhere, just flapped from his chest and stopped in the air.

“No,” he said. “It was dig.”

I waited.

“The
G
was a six. Ditmarsh infirmary six,” Josh said. “I was in Ditmarsh infirmary three. Crowley was in DI-two. Hammond in DI-six. I figured it out.”

I tried to think it through and understand. DI-6? I counted down the cells in my mind and came to the one where the man with no fingers or toes, no face, sat on the edge of his cot and waited for the world outside to go by.

“That’s Hammond?”

There were prisons within prisons, Ruddik had said. I was stunned by the thought that Hammond had been returned to Ditmarsh. Maybe Hammond shot himself. Maybe someone shot him. And when he was helpless and harmless and they had no other place to put him, they brought him back and abandoned him to a mute and solitary existence, his identity obliterated.

“I didn’t know it was Hammond. I had no idea until now. But Crowley spent a lot of time with him,” Josh said. “I didn’t like to go near. Roy knew I was right. As soon as I told them.”

The darkness around us. We were two voices and no physical bodies. We might have been talking on the telephone.

“What about Brother Mike?” I asked. “What did they do with him?”

I heard Josh shift, and then his voice came from lower than before, closer to the ground.

“They took him,” he said, almost a whisper. “I asked them not to. I should have made a better deal.”

“Why did they put you down here?”

He didn’t answer, and I got used to the silence again.

“I’m cold,” he complained, and the voice came from far away.

I’d like to say that my response was immediate, that I slid over to my rescuer with the little strength I could still summon and lay down beside him, that I put my arms around him and shared my warmth. I’d like to say that the impulse was natural and human and immediate, but it wasn’t. I let him lay there alone for a long, long time.

His breathing became my stumbling metronome. When the metronome faltered, I waited for it to begin again, and I started to cry. I willed myself away from the wall and over to him. I found his form on the ground, lying on his back, and I stretched out beside him on the hard, damp stone. At first I put my hand on his chest; then I touched his forehead and his face, and rested my hand on his forearm, my mouth next to his ear. When he twitched, I slid my hand down further and grasped his hand in mine and imagined a little clench.

“I feel very close to him now,” he said.

The words startled me. Did he mean Crowley, or did he mean his father? Someone on the other side. I had the feeling that there were explanations lingering inside him. You could call them confessions, or you could call them ghosts. Thoughts, hopes, regrets, things he wanted to release by telling me but couldn’t any longer because he had slipped off. So instead of listening to those things, I told him it was going to be okay.

What was it like to die? Were you alone with your infinite thoughts and memories, a sense of greater existence, or did you feel the presence of others close to you? Was it enough to feel that presence, or did the overwhelming desire to reach someone cause you pain? Was that what eternal peace
meant—an untethering, a drifting away from the pain of love, an understanding of its boundless power?

I heard the footsteps and the voice calling out, and I wondered, with a terrified tensing up of my stiff body, who it could be.

“Kali?” the voice called. “Kali, are you in here?”

The footsteps came closer. Keeper Wallace was calling my name. My eyes had become used to the darkness. When the door moved, I saw him standing there, filling its opening. He had a rifle in his hands and he was alone. The rifle clattered to the stones. He bent, his arms came under my back, and I felt myself rising up.

“Put your arms around my neck.”

I hung my arms around his neck.

We climbed the stairs, my body rising up into the blinding light.

“Josh,” I said. “We need to bring Josh.”

“It’s okay,” Wallace said. “We’ll get him later.”

It took me seconds to blink my vision back. I saw Stone lying on the floor, a tangle of pink laundry on his chest. I saw Cutler sitting against the wall. The brightness of morning outside, but more dazzling than that. Flooded by fire hoses, Ditmarsh had become a castle made of ice. The floor of the hub covered in a translucent lava. Some of the beams and bars and railings dripping with the same opaque, stiffened candle wax, and all of it glittered in the first sunlight. I’d never seen it so brilliant.

I saw soldiers moving toward us slowly, spread out in formation, rifles in that familiar angled point, carefully walking the ice.

The same country road, the same rutted turnoff into the woods. Though most of the snow was gone, the trees and bushes were still skeletal. I tried to imagine a verdant burst of spring, the tangle of green choking the path, hiding the way. I wanted to see Brother Mike’s house in the woods turn into something from a fairy tale, a place to dwell forever.

There was nothing but stillness when I pulled into the yard. I got out of the Land Rover and climbed the steps of the porch. I did not like the quiet, and I felt anxious rapping on the door. There was no answer. I turned the knob and pushed. The door stuck on the floor and then pried free. I called out and heard his voice answer weakly from within.

I had hoped for tea, even for one of those cookies, but he was in no condition for hosting. He’d described it on the phone as his “bad state” when I’d called to check on him. I saw the evidence now. The air in the room was slightly sour. He looked sallow, unhealthy. I guessed that he’d eaten very little. I said hello and sat down across from him.

“How are you?” he finally asked.

“Better,” I said. And though it was a lie, I knew by now that the lie was going to become true. Eventually I would be better, maybe even whole. I still felt shame and grief and anger and fear, but the emotions were no longer as corrosive. I
did not wake up every night and stare at the ceiling with my heart thudding in my chest. It stopped happening when I realized that Josh was with me. I felt very close to him now that he was dead. That still bothered me. It wasn’t an easy or a comforting thought, to know I was linked to him forever, but it had become my reality.

“I’m very glad,” he said, and added, “I’m still struggling.”

There were many questions I wanted to ask him, but I did not know how to begin. Would the answers cause him more pain? I knew that whatever was eroding him had something to do with his basic beliefs. My own beliefs were flimsy and flexible. They could be reshaped. I was already molding them to make sense of things I would never have believed months before. But the impact on him was heavier than that, more structural. Some fundamental aspect of his universe had collapsed, and life in the aftermath was a difficult adjustment.

“I have a task,” he said, “that I’ve been putting off for some time. I’m wondering, since you’re here, if you would help me take care of it?”

The way he said it, it could have been a drain that needed snaking or a will that needed a witness’s signature.

“Of course,” I said.

That seemed to liven him slightly. He stood up stiffly, as though bothered by chronic pain, and walked into the kitchen. I followed. At the back porch, he found a large hammer and asked me to carry it.

We put on boots and crossed the backyard to the kiln.

“I’m having some difficulty bending over,” he said. “So I was wondering if you would crawl in there for me and retrieve
the pieces of pottery that are inside. It will be dirty work, I’m afraid.”

“Sure,” I said.

I lifted the tarp that covered the entrance. Still dark in there, but no longer as warm.

“Do you have a flashlight back at the house?” I asked. “I might trip and break something.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he answered.

There was no arguing. I hunched over and made my way inside.

My eyesight adjusted to the darkness. I did not realize until I was standing inside that a closed dark space would bring back the anxieties. I felt a little bite of fear on the back of my neck, and my heart rate became more rapid. But that was then, and this was different. I saw the bowls and vases and cups along the shelves. They were cold to the touch. I took a vase in each hand and headed back down the tunnel. At this rate it would take me a very long time indeed to retrieve each precious item.

I handed the large vase carefully to Brother Mike when I was outside. It was beautiful, I decided. I was not normally one for precious objects, but this warped clay, formed by fire, moved me.

Brother Mike took it from my hands and tossed it away. It landed with a heavy thud on the hard ground.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s ruined,” he said. “I should have retrieved them at most two days after the firing. It’s been six weeks. The humidity got to them.”

He picked up the hammer and swung it down, obliterating the vase with one smash.

I did not pass over the other vase.

“But it’s beautiful,” I said. It was slightly shrunken perhaps, but exquisite. “Didn’t you tell me that the unpredictable results of the firing were all part of the process?”

“Kali,” he said patiently. “I have pieces in collections all over the world. Trust me. I know what needs to be done.”

He took the vase from my grip and tossed it down. “And besides, it’s therapeutic.”

I did not share his view, but despite my reluctance, I went back for more. With each trip I handed him another couple of precious items, and he tossed, swung, and smashed. I gave up on the niceties and began rolling them down the tunnel ahead of me, until I could no longer stand the bad air and needed a break. I felt like a coal miner working a seam.

Outside, sweating from the latent heat and the exertion, I ran my hand across my forehead. Brother Mike started to laugh.

“What is it?” I asked, self-conscious.

“If you could see yourself covered in soot and sweat. You finally look like your namesake. Kali, the destroyer of worlds.”

“I’ve been waiting for the right moment to reveal myself.”

It was good to see his smile.

By the late afternoon we were inside again and drinking that tea I’d wanted.

“I’m sorry you were left down there,” he said.

I did not want to think about that place and those things, and I did not blame him for them. I only wished there were pockets of time that could be utterly forgotten.

“Was it Hammond,” I asked, “in the infirmary?”

He did not answer for a minute. I knew that Fenton and Roy had led Brother Mike back to DI-6 and that Fenton had butchered the man within. But there was no official confirmation about the identity, no trail to anyone named Hammond, only my insistence, and no one had paid my claims any attention.

“I don’t know,” Brother Mike said finally. “Jon Crowley had convinced me that it was Hammond. I’m sorry I lied to you about that, but I couldn’t tell you the truth. I feared what would happen to Hammond if anyone learned he was there. I was only able to visit the infirmary once, and I didn’t recognize anything about him. It was awful what Fenton did to him. Like a cow being slaughtered.”

I wanted to ask if they’d found an answer on the man, a tattoo or some indication of the bank account number they were looking for, but I didn’t have the heart to press for details.

“I suppose it was the comic book Roy wanted all along,” I said. “If they ever catch him, that’s the one thing I’d like to ask.”

He had escaped from the window of the examination room of a city hospital, a place they’d sent the inmates with the worst injuries. I was still struck by the absurdity of a one-legged man climbing a drainpipe from four stories up, catching a taxi, and getting away.

Brother Mike did not seem to hear me.

“I think I feel most betrayed by Jon,” he said. “To know that the comic book wasn’t an artistic retelling of Hammond’s life. To find out there were symbols and messages encoded in the drawings. And to realize that he’d used me to get the details, that he’d gone through my files for those reasons and not the reasons I thought. I was a fool to believe him.”

I stopped him.

“You don’t know what Crowley was thinking, why he did what he did. Maybe it wasn’t clear-cut either way. Some of it might have been about the money. Some of it might have been about Hammond. Crowley may not have been completely free to act or feel as he would have liked. Roy might have forced him. Or maybe you were conned. That’s a very plausible explanation, and the simplest one now. But it’s also possible that Crowley was more complicated. I’m not sure anymore that you can ever know another human being.”

I was speaking from the residue of my own bitterness, and I was thinking about Ruddik and Wallace and the others, and the different prices that had been paid. The inquiry into the riot had begun with great intensity. There were questions about accounting irregularities at the prison, a whiff of corruption among some of the COs, rumors of a secretive group called the Ditmarsh Social Club, and an imperative to turn over every rock no matter what might be found. But with Droune’s suicide and Wallace’s resignation, the mood had changed, and the investigation petered out. Instead, the media attention focused on the ex-con who’d impersonated a local journalist to gain entry to Ditmarsh; on me, the brave ex-soldier who’d held off the rioting inmates until the troops arrived; and on Ruddik—the
man no federal agency claimed. His former employers, a prison in Kentucky and another in Tennessee, both acknowledged that he’d quit before they’d finished enough paperwork to fire him. Another mystery, and more pain for my heart. I was as disoriented by the attention on my so-called heroics as I was of the scornful way they talked about Ruddik.

“There is something I need to tell you, Kali,” Brother Mike said, interrupting my downward spiral. “It’s about Keeper Wallace and Josh.”

I waited. I did not want to talk about Josh. The connection I would never shake.

“About eight months ago I was approached by a lawyer who’d made a donation to my restorative justice fund. The lawyer wanted to know who, inside Ditmarsh, could do the most to help an inmate, named Josh Riff, about to be remanded to the prison.”

It was all very distant to me. I listened and wondered what fork in the path of my life had been decided without my knowledge eight months earlier.

“When I found out the inmate in question was such a young man, sentenced for such a long time, I introduced the lawyer to Keeper Wallace, and that’s where I left it. Last week Keeper Wallace called me and confessed. He told me that he’d agreed to provide special protection for Josh in exchange for money.”

With the words, a tightness formed inside me.

“They knew the Keeper’s daughter was in trouble, that she had no money, a criminal record, and three children. They offered to build her a house if the Keeper looked after Joshua.”

Brother Mike stared into my eyes.

“The Keeper told me it was the first time he’d ever been tempted to take a dime. He’d believed no one would be hurt and his daughter and three grandchildren would be taken care of. He had a lot of guilt around his daughter. The only sacrifice would be to his own integrity, and Keeper Wallace, because of various personal failings in her upbringing, believed he owed her that. In particular, the middle grandson was starting to get into trouble and needed an improved environment.”

I nodded. “So he housed Josh away from gen pop.”

“He thought he could keep everything under control. Obviously he couldn’t. When he found out that Josh’s father was dying of cancer, the Keeper realized he’d made a terrible mistake. Not because he might get caught, but because he’d taken advantage. He asked me to tell you what really happened and why.”

It was difficult for me to hear. I no longer wanted to learn the details of the way Keeper Wallace had compromised himself, even if I could understand the human need behind it. Maybe, when I felt on more solid ground, I would be grateful to know that mere money had not been the basis for it all. But another pain slipped in as I sat there in Brother Mike’s room. The pain that Josh had felt over his own father, and the distance between them.

“He did it out of love,” I said.

Brother Mike nodded. But I don’t think he understood. I meant that Josh’s father loved him, and had known he was going to die, and that was why he’d bribed the Keeper. He wanted
to do what he could to look out for Josh on the long road ahead of him. Out of all the mysteries that still lapped at me, that was the only certain thing I understood. He did it out of love.

“The Keeper is sorry,” Brother Mike said, “that whatever he did to get you involved in this led to everything that happened to you. He wanted you to know that you deserved better.”

It was my turn to stare. “You can tell him I’m going to be okay.”

All the time, however, I was thinking about love. Distorted, complicated, even misguided love. I thought about the thin, tepid love I felt for my father. And the guilt-ridden love Wallace had for his daughter. And the mute and inexplicable way Josh’s father had shown his love for his son. Was there any other force in the universe so strong? The absence of love. The hurt from love. The insecurity of love. The making up for love that had been imperfectly expressed. I had this insight, tickling the edges of my mind, that love caused all the pain in the world, was the source of all the hurt. I was in awe of the mystery of human compassion and the inability of love to make the distance between us any more bearable.

Brother Mike nodded as if I’d said the words aloud, and we sat quietly, drinking our tea.