The Pledge (39 page)

Meanwhile, Olsen had arrived with his black bag and two clean towels stuffed into his shirt. Any accident at the garage, as he well knew, called for clean towels. “I need hot water,” he shouted. “One of you assholes run to the kitchen and get me a kettle of hot water. On the double.” Meanwhile, he was wiping the blood and filth from Baxter's face. He wrapped a towel around Baxter's head to stop the scalp bleeding, and then he took a stethoscope out of his bag and listened to Baxter's heart. Then he snapped at Bruce, “Bacon, get your ass over here and stop feeling sorry for yourself!”

Bruce rose painfully and went to the cot where Baxter lay.

“What did you hit him with?” Olsen asked.

“An oil can. Is he dead? He's dead, isn't he?”

“He's not dead. You can't kill a bastard like Baxter. He has a bad concussion and maybe a fractured skull. There's a phone in the garage office. Dial three hundred — that's the main office — and tell them that we want an ambulance and a doctor. Meanwhile” — turning to one of the mechanics — “get your ass up to the hospital and bring back the stretcher.”

Bruce went to the garage office, still not out of his nightmare but not a murderer at this moment, and told the guard who answered the telephone that they wanted an ambulance and a doctor at the hospital. When he returned to Olsen, now the center of interest for every convict working in the area, the water from the kitchen had arrived, and Olsen was bandaging Baxter's head.

“He's alive?” Bruce asked.

“He's alive. Did he hit you again?”

“Kicked me.”

“Where?”

“The hell with it,” Bruce said.

“Get a hose and clean off your shoes and pants. Then come up to the hospital. I want to see where he kicked you.”

The convicts parted their circle to let Bruce through to the water hose. No one spoke, but a few grinned and nodded. There were no guards near the garage, and Bruce would come to realize that this was the deliberate policy of the prison. All arguments and fights were handled by the prisoners. The guards not only did not interfere, they made themselves scarce — even though by now everyone on the prison grounds knew that Bacon had taken care of Baxter.

The stretcher arrived, and Baxter was placed on the stretcher and carried up the rise to the hospital. Bruce followed along. He wanted to help Olsen undress Baxter, but it hurt too much to bend over. Baxter was still unconscious.

“He could be like that for a day or two,” Olsen explained. “He's had a bad concussion. I couldn't feel any fracture in the skull, but from the cuts it says he's been hit hard, and there are probably some hairline fractures. That won't kill him, and as long as he's not dead, it won't go on your record or take away any good boy time. Up at headquarters, they know the whole story about yesterday and it's valid self-defense. He'll lose good time, you won't. Now drop your pants and show me where he kicked you.”

“It's becoming a habit,” Bruce said.

“Red, turning blue and ugly as sin,” Olsen told him. “That son of a bitch kicks like a mule. There's some skin off, but not like your cheek. I'll clean it off with peroxide and put a Band-Aid on it. I'll give you six aspirins, three and three. You're a big guy and you want three. It'll deal with the pain now, three of them, and then if you wake up with pain at night, take the other three. Go back to your barracks and go to bed.”

He slept through lunch, woke up at dinnertime, went to the mess hall, where every convict who caught his eye gave him the sign of approval, thumb and forefinger in a loop, and then went to bed again. He refused to think about his attack on Baxter. It horrified him to discover what violence he was capable of. It made no difference that he was provoked; provocation was no excuse for his behavior. The thoughts were short-lived; he was asleep almost instantly.

The following day, he learned that Baxter had been taken to Alderson for x rays and after a few days would be shipped to the prison hospital at Lewisburg. He would not be returning to Mill Bog, a fate that no one in Mill Bog appeared to regret, nor was there any indication that he would not recover completely. The diagnosis, as Olsen was informed, spoke of severe concussion and two hairline skull fractures. No one spoke about the incident once a day or two had passed, and neither the warden nor any of the guards ever referred to it. However, Bruce learned about Baxter's vicious treatment of the black prisoners who worked at the auto pool, and one of them went out of his way to thank Bruce and shake his hand. Bruce's reputation went up several notches and the attendance at the evening literacy classes almost doubled.

All of which gave him no comfort, since the situation in his mind remained very clouded. He had tried to kill another human being, and only his inexperience in the business of killing had saved his as well as his victim's life. He left the incident out of his letters to Molly, and he kept postponing Molly's visit — at least until his face healed. A man who had learned the trade at Leavenworth, where he had served many years of time for the theft of over a hundred cars, was put in charge of the garage, and Bruce began an introduction into the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. He began to face the fact that he liked working on the big woods trucks and the tractors. It was the first time in his life that he devoted day after day to working with his hands, hard physical work, and he discovered that his body and his mental outlook were both changing.

Too tired to conduct his classes at night, he switched them to Sunday; and then, a month after he had come there, he was called up to Warden Demming's office, where the warden said to him, “Bacon, you and I both live in a world that confuses us, or am I mistaken?”

“I certainly share your confusion.”

“I don't for a minute believe you're a communist, and I'm not going to ask you; but Washington has issued an order that no communists work in education. I think it's stupid and uncalled for, but there it is. I don't make the rules.”

“You mean you want me to stop working with the Kentucky people?”

“That's what it is.”

“It's a shame,” Bruce said unhappily. “It's just the worst damn shame. They were beginning to read and write. I don't know how to tell them this — so help me, I don't.”

“I'll come to your next class and take the heat off you.”

There was some measure of relief in this, along with Bruce's disappointment. He had taken to the teaching, inventing his own methods, excited as a kid when they worked, playing with all sorts of theories on the subject of education; but on the other hand, he now had his Sundays back, to do as he wished with them. And his face was healed. It was time for Molly to visit.

He wrote to her, “We still have sixteen days before Christmas, and while you can't bring gifts, you yourself will be the most wonderful gift of all. Talk to my mother and father. I wrote to them asking them to come. They're not young, and I hesitate to ask them to drive down alone. On the other hand, from all I've been told, the train trip is miserable, and if you want my innermost feeling, it's that they shouldn't come. Not only is getting to this place an ordeal, but I am afraid of the effect on my mother, even though I have written to them in more glowing terms than this place deserves. Little things. I have lost weight — all to the good. I weighed one hundred and ninety when I came here. I'm twenty pounds lighter now, my nails are broken and beyond cleaning, and my hands are the hands of a mechanic — none of which bothers me, but Mother sees such things and she'll be worried sick. Also — let me be frank — for the few hours you'll be here, I want you to myself. I don't want to divide my love. I think of you constantly, trying to make an image of how you look, having internal conversations with you, having dreams about you.

“It's very cold here, and as I write, it's beginning to snow, just the first powdery sprinkling. At night, when the sky is clear, one is overwhelmed by the mantle of stars. We're almost three thousand feet high here, and the air is like wine. I am allowed two hours of visiting time per month, and while I've not yet done two months here, the warden will allow me four hours, since I don't want you coming again next month. The trip is just too hard. I must tell you that most of our time together will be in the visiting room, although perhaps we will be able to walk outside for a while. They do occasionally bend the rules here.

“So please write when you receive this, and tell me exactly when you plan to come. I'll count the hours.”

She came alone, driving down in a rental car, putting the chains on herself, a competent woman who would not be stopped by a snowstorm. She was no one to play games with, and she knew him too well not to see the scars on his face and demand an explanation. “I didn't want to write to you,” he said. “Now that you're here, I can tell you.” Her eyes filled with tears as he told her what had happened. “Don't tell me you're proud of me. I'm sick over the whole thing, and it's a damned undeserved dispensation that I didn't kill him.”

“I'm proud of you,” she said. “I love you. You're a strange, crazy man, but I knew that when I took up with you. If I could be with you here, I'd just as soon have it that way. The world's gone crazy outside. They're playing with their new atom bomb toys and stoking up for a war with Russia.”

“I have a subscription to the
New York Times.
Some days I don't even open it, it's a world so vague and far away. I'm reading
War and Peace
again. I read it years ago, when I was seventeen. A book like that should be read twice, three times. God, if I could write such a book, I'd say that my life had some meaning.”

“Your life has plenty of meaning, and speaking of books, I have the proofs of a book called
Invitation to the Theater
, by a writer named Bruce Nathaniel Bacon.”

“You're kidding.”

“Cross my heart.”

“Where? Did you bring them?”

“They're locked in the trunk of my car. Shall I get them? I wasn't sure of the rules.”

“I could have them. I'm sure I could work that through Demming, although the rule is that all printed material must come directly from the publisher. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to expose the stuff at this point.”

“And you may not be wrong about that,” Molly said. “Sylvia has some evidence that the vendetta against you is being sparked by that lovely British outfit called M-One and the Limeys are totally pissed off about accusations that they conspired in the killing of six million Indians in Bengal. We both think it's just as well that no one should see the proofs until the book is published.”

“Why did you bring them then?”

“I can't do these things without consulting you. Sometimes I feel that they're weaving a damned web around us. I met a couple of Indians, embassy people and both of them Bengalis, and they said you're absolutely right about the famine and there's a pile of evidence put together at Calcutta University, and a squabble going on between the top brass there as to whether it should be released. The Indian government isn't looking for trouble with England, and they're trying to sit on the stuff. Anyway, your publisher feels the same way, and he doesn't want anyone to see the book until it's in print and until printed books go out for review. The way I hear it from friends out on the Coast, Peter Johnson is going all out on the book and with his own money. He's quite a character out there. But I have to have your agreement, and if you feel I can give you the proofs here and that no one else will see them —”

“No. Oh, no. You see, anything I have here in prison is subject to confiscation. It might be that technically they have no right to confiscate a set of printer's proofs, but you'd have to go to court to prove it.”

“Johnson called to ask whether there are any copies floating around. I have four copies of the manuscript.”

“That's it.”

“If you want me to, I'll proofread it. I won't change a word.”

“I'd like that. If you have the time?”

“Time? Darling Bruce, I'm in prison for a year. I got a damn good job at Fred's Steak House on Fifty-sixth Street, and I work the dinner hour only. The tips are good. I haven't gone under a hundred a week since I'm there.”

The conversation was done in whispers, since the visiting room was filled with people, men, women, children. Bruce knew that this happened every Sunday, but he had never been here before on Sunday. The mountain women came with their children, lots of children with cornsilk hair and wide, staring eyes, dressed very properly and neatly. Appalachia, Bruce knew, was the most poverty-stricken area of the nation, but the moonshiners were a little better off than the unemployed miners and the farmers who tried to scratch a living out of the rocky soil. They used shoes as a mark of distinction and they paid as much as forty dollars a pair. They were allowed to keep their Sunday shoes in prison, and they would put them on each Sunday, rubbing them to a high polish. They were uneasy with words, and for the most part they sat in silence with wife and child during the visiting hour. There was another room for black prisoners, separated by a thin partition from the white visiting room, and in contrast to the whispers in the white area, a great bubble of voice and laughter and weeping came out of the black section.

“We work together,” Bruce explained to Molly, “but we don't eat together or live together — a beautiful expression of the looniness of society carried into its prisons.”

But then, like the others, Bruce and Molly sat in silence. They had talked and talked, and then their talk ran out. Bruce had hoped that they might at least take a short walk outside, but an icy rain was falling and he never put the matter to a test. Four hours spent in a room with ten or eleven families began to choke them — and they sat in silence. But then the others departed, family by family, and the last hour of the visit was theirs alone. They were able to embrace, to hug each other, pressing their bodies together, to stand clutched in each other's arms, each filled with overwhelming anxiety for the other.