The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (46 page)

*

“Sometimes you can only teach by example. That’s why the state gives us the death penalty. Sometimes the example itself is more powerful than the threat of death
.”

*

Bullfinch Warden actually said, “Look on my works, ye mighty.”

And we saw. Incised around Quiven’s naked waist by the constant jackhammering of a million tiny needles was the warning:
LOVE IS DEATH … FREEDOM IS SUICIDE … FREEDOM IS SUICIDE … LOVE IS DEATH
, words chasing each other around and around dead Quiven’s waist, a warning to us all etched in pain, and if the needles penetrated Quiven’s vitals, it’s a testimony to physical strength and to the power of his love that he had his moment with Joanna before his heart faltered and he died.

In case you’re interested, Warden Bullfinch wasn’t about to leave it at that.

He stood up on the catwalk while we filed past what was left of Quiven and he made a speech. I’ll spare you the details. It was worse than the anklets and the belts, and the punch line? Instead of sending Joanna to Quincy for retrial, Bullfinch Warden was conducting a witchcraft trial, special event for the Labor Day Weekend visitors to Old Arkham Village, us on time-and-a-half rations since prisoners are never paid, and the state makes overtime provisions when they need you around the clock. The trial was slated to take place in front of high-ticket audiences at special evening showings so we could continue with business as usual during the day.

*

“The lessons we teach here are for the ages. They are lessons for us all.”

*

But what do you care? You loved the trial. It went live on
CNN
.
Hard Copy
came in on it, along with
Inside Edition
, and Ted Koppel interviewed William F. Buckley Junior on the witch hunts of the 1950s in a special
Nightline
telecast direct from here.

Because you thought it was contrived just for your entertainment, you even loved the
auto-da-fé
. It’s a good thing Joanna was already catatonic; she didn’t feel a thing. At least we don’t think she did, although
Entertainment Tonight
reported agents from William Morris and
CAA
were trying to sign her up on the basis of her performance, up to and including her dying screams.

And because you were excited and distracted by how real the flames looked and how eloquently Joanna writhed, and because the screws were busy keeping you from mobbing the stake, Gemma’s body and mine touched in the crush:
“Arch.” “Gemma!” We fused, bonded by instant love. And as reflected flames licked our faces and we moaned in the heat, my friend Laramie Beckam, who knows every duct and pipe in the bowels of our underground cellblock because he is a trusty, Laramie fell in with us and we hatched the plan.

*

“The only effective facility is the maximum security facility. It has to look civil from the outside, but it must shut off all possibilities of escape
.”

*

Now our plan is complete. We’ve assembled civilian wardrobes and kited them over the electronic barrier. After I plant this note I give the signal. Laramie starts the fire in the paint locker. By the time it’s extinguished he’s shorted out the E-barrier and we’re out of here. And if we don’t make it; if they see us escaping in spite of the fire and confusion; if they shoot us dead, no matter. It’s better than one more day in the smithy, with Gemma suffering behind the Visitors’ Center desk or giving her monologue on Colonial spinning in the repaired and refurbished Cotton Mather house.

*

“Effective prevention is predicated on the impossibility of escape
.”

*

Quiet. You don’t hear me. If our plan works, you will never read this. Instead you’ll see me on all 1,000 Primestar channels, telling our story to the world. All that remains is to slip this account into my jerkin and, when the shift changes and the screws march us, the early detail, to the holding pen to draw breath before they put us back into the Colonial petting zoo, I’m going to slip away. I’ll stick this notebook into the cornhusk doll barrel in the Bayberry Candle corner of the General Store. Although Hester is afraid to come with us, she’s volunteered to risk her life if necessary to preserve this testament. At my signal that we’re home free, she’ll destroy it for our own protection as well as hers.

Live free or die.

We go tonight.

—
F&SF
, 1998

The Food Farm

So here I am, warden-in-charge, fattening them up for our leader, Tommy Fango; here I am laying on the banana pudding and the milkshakes and the cream-and-brandy cocktails, going about like a technician, gauging their effect on haunch and thigh when all the time it is I who love him, I who could have pleased him eternally if only life had broken differently. But I am scrawny now, I am swept like a leaf around corners, battered by the slightest wind. My elbows rattle against my ribs and I have to spend half the day in bed so a gram or two of what I eat will stay with me for if I do not, the fats and creams will vanish, burned up in my own insatiable furnace, and what little flesh I have left will melt away.

Cruel as it may sound, I know where to place the blame.

It was vanity, all vanity, and I hate them most for that. It was not my vanity, for I have always been a simple soul; I reconciled myself early to reinforced chairs and loose garments, to the spattering of remarks. Instead of heeding them as I plugged in, and I would have been happy to let it go at that, going through life with my radio in my bodice, for while I never drew cries of admiration, no one ever blanched and turned away. But they were vain and in their vanity my frail father, my pale, scrawny mother saw me not as an entity but a reflection on themselves. I flush with shame to remember the excuses they made for me. “She takes after May’s side of the family,” my father would say, denying any responsibility. “It’s only baby fat,” my mother would say, jabbing her elbow into my soft flank. “Nelly is big for her age.” Then she would jerk furiously, pulling my voluminous smock down to cover my knees. That was when they still consented to be seen with me. In that period they would stuff me with pies and roasts before we went anywhere, filling me up so I would not gorge myself in public. Even so I had to take thirds, fourths, fifths and so I was a humiliation to them.

In time I was too much for them and they stopped taking me out; they made no more attempts to explain. Instead they tried to think of ways to make me look better; the doctors tried the fool’s poor battery of pills, they tried to make me join a club. For a while my mother and I did exercises; we would sit on the floor, she in a black leotard, I in my smock. Then she would do the brisk
one-two, one-two and I would make a few passes at my toes. But I had to listen, I had to plug in, and after I was plugged in naturally I had to find something to eat; Tommy might sing and I always ate when Tommy sang, and so I would leave her there on the floor, still going one-two, one-two. For a while after that they tried locking up the food. Then they began to cut into my meals.

That was the cruelest time. They would refuse me bread, they would plead and cry, plying me with lettuce and telling me it was all for my own good. My own good. Couldn’t they hear my vitals crying out? I fought. I screamed, and when that failed I suffered in silent obedience until finally hunger drove me into the streets. I would lie in bed, made brave by the Monets and Barry Arkin and the Philadons coming in over the radio, and Tommy (there was never enough; I heard him a hundred times a day and it was never enough; how bitter that seems now!). I would open the first pie or the first half-gallon of ice cream and then, as I began, I would plug in.

Tommy, beautiful Tommy Fango, the others paled to nothing next to him. Everybody heard him in those days; they played him two or three times an hour but you never knew when it would be so you were plugged in and listening hard every living minute; you ate, you slept, you drew breath for the moment when they would put on one of Tommy’s records, you waited for his voice to fill the room. Cold cuts and cupcakes and game hens came and went during that period in my life but one thing was constant: I always had a cream pie thawing and when they played the first bars of “When a Widow” and Tommy’s voice first flexed and uncurled, I was ready, I would eat the cream pie during Tommy’s midnight show. The whole world waited in those days; we waited through endless sunlight, through nights of drumbeats and monotony, we all waited for Tommy Fango’s records, and we waited for that whole unbroken hour of Tommy, his midnight show. He came on live at midnight in those days; he sang, broadcasting from the Hotel Riverside, and that was beautiful, but more important, he talked, and while he was talking he made everything all right. Nobody was lonely when Tommy talked; he brought us all together on that midnight show, he talked and made us powerful, he talked and finally he sang. You have to imagine what it was like, me in the night, Tommy, the pie. In a while I would go to a place where I had to live on Tommy and only Tommy, to a time when hearing Tommy would bring back the pie, all the poor lost pies …

Tommy’s records, his show, the pie … that was perhaps the happiest period of my life. I would sit and listen and I would eat and eat and eat. So great was my bliss that it became torture to put away the food at daybreak; it grew harder and harder for me to hide the cartons and the cans and the bottles, all
the residue of my happiness. Perhaps a bit of bacon fell into the register; perhaps an egg rolled under the bed and began to smell. All right, perhaps I did become careless, continuing my revels into the morning, or I may have been thoughtless enough to leave a jelly roll unfinished on the rug. I became aware that they were watching, lurking just outside my door, plotting as I ate. In time they broke in on me, weeping and pleading, lamenting over every ice cream carton and crumb of pie; then they threatened. Finally they restored the food they had taken from me in the daytime, thinking to curtail my eating at night. Folly. By that time I needed it all. I shut myself in with it and would not listen. I ignored their cries of hurt pride, their outpouring of wounded vanity, their puny little threats. Even if I had listened, I could not have forestalled what happened next.

I was so happy that last day. There was a Smithfield ham, mine, and I remember a jar of cherry preserves, mine, and I remember bacon, pale and white on Italian bread. I remember sounds downstairs and before I could take warning, an assault, a company of uniformed attendants, the sting of a hypodermic gun. Then the ten of them closed in and grappled me into a sling, or net, and heaving and straining, they bore me down the stairs. I’ll never forgive you, I cried as they bundled me into the ambulance. I’ll never forgive you, I bellowed as my mother in a last betrayal took away my radio, and I cried out one last time, as my father removed a ham bone from my bra: I’ll never forgive you. And I never have.

It is painful to describe what happened next. I remember three days of horror and agony, of being too weak, finally, to cry out or claw the walls. Then at last I was quiet and they moved me into a sunny, pastel, chintz-bedizened room. I remember that there were flowers on the dresser and someone was watching me.

“What are you in for?” she said.

I could barely speak for weakness. “Despair.”

“Hell with that,” she said, chewing. “You’re in for food.”

“What are you eating?” I tried to raise my head.

“Chewing. Inside of the mouth. It helps.”

“I’m going to die.”

“Everybody thinks that at first. I did.” She tilted her head in an attitude of grace. “You know, this is a very exclusive school.”

Her name was Ramona and as I wept silently, she filled me in. This was a last resort for the few who could afford to send their children here. They prettied it up with a schedule of therapy, exercise, massage; we would wear dainty pink
smocks and talk of art and theater; from time to time we would attend classes in elocution and hygiene. Our parents would say with pride that we were away at Faircrest, an elegant finishing school; we knew better—it was a prison and we were being starved.

“It’s a world I never made,” said Ramona, and I knew that her parents were to blame, even as mine were. Her mother liked to take the children into hotels and casinos, wearing her thin daughters like a garland of jewels. Her father followed the sun on his private yacht, with the pennants flying and his children on the fantail, lithe and tanned. He would pat his flat, tanned belly and look at Ramona in disgust. When it was no longer possible to hide her, he gave in to blind pride. One night they came in a launch and took her away. She had been here six months now, and had lost almost a hundred pounds. She must have been monumental in her prime; she was still huge.