Under Radar (8 page)

The Spanish Town Prison was hell, of course, a universe of pain and insult, six thousand men behind stone walls whose foundations were older than Boston. Someone was always screaming somewhere. Gang wars from outside continued inside, and the guards bet among themselves on fights that ended in death. Tom, hating himself, stifled his impulse to indignation, the voice of the American who might say, “I have my rights.” He wanted no rights beyond those he could earn.

But he did want something, he wanted the approval of the brutal men around him. They ignored him. Scarred, vicious men passed him without notice. He had killed a man to protect his daughter's honor, everyone understood this. He wasn't in prison because in a drunken coma he had run his car into three Jamaican children, or been caught transporting drugs. His crime was human.

As they avoided him, he decided that his intimidating aura of tragedy demanded from others a cautious and distant veneration.

Or so he thought at first.

After a time, he saw their opinion of him as nothing more than cold indifference.

And then he knew that he was wrong, they were offering friendship all the time, in their own way, and that they were all strangers to one another.

Now he embarrassed himself for wanting validation from such poor men. He knew he was confused, that he had wanted respect, yet he pushed these men away and created their disdain.

Looking back on his life, Tom saw a pattern, of first imagining that his worst feelings were the general opinion, the worst feelings about himself or others, and then sharing those opinions with people more generous to the world who pushed him away, not wanting to be stained.

Tom wanted to dig through the junk heap of his life until he found the layer where he had lost attachment to those scraps of his character that could summon worthy regard. He knew that if he could only pull the conflicts together, he would rescue himself from the whole flotilla of misjudgments that ended with a dead fat man at the bottom of a waterfall. He wanted this, he wanted to fix himself, but to what end? He was here for the rest of his life. What good if this enlightened vision of himself finally arrived?

Slowly, Tom made friends. If someone needed help moving a bed, Tom was there to give a hand. If someone needed help reading a brief from his lawyer, Tom was there. The thanks he received made him grieve more deeply for the time he had wasted.

He understood this: If I could have recognized true friendship when offered, throughout my life, I would not
be the person I am, and therefore I would not be here. Much earlier in life I would have joined in friendship with strong good people, men and women, not my gang of sleazy scammers, and we would have helped one another.

He imagined the contours of such help. It would have the energetic zest of his conspiracy without the cynicism, that suspicion of everyone else. He would make more money, but it might take longer, and his friends would always be there to point out new opportunities.

He lay on the floor of his cell, his arms crossed over his chest, their weight the two soft heads of his little girls stretched out on the floor beside him, in the living room of a condominium they rented at a ski resort in Vermont, watching the logs spark in the fireplace.

Skiing, yes, they would go skiing all winter long. His good friends and their families would rent condominiums in the same place, and they would all gather together at the end of the day and make dinner, big pots of spaghetti and huge salads made of nothing but iceberg lettuce. Rosalie never bought iceberg lettuce because it lacked the vitamin content of romaine, but children love iceberg's noisy crunch, especially with sweet creamy dressing from a bottle. They eat large bags of potato chips, forbidden at home, but what the hell, right? It's a vacation. Let's relax. One of his friends is sure to know something about wine, and he brings a dozen different bottles, and all of them are good.

After dinner they play Scrabble together and let the children win, not that the children aren't all bright and
capable, and so intellectually elastic that they make wonderful words on their own.

They rent videos that everyone can watch. One of the fathers rents Jimmy Cliff in
The Harder They Come
, a film about a poor Jamaican singer who turns to crime and is shot to death in a mangrove swamp. With the first reggae song, the little girls are moved to stand in front of the television and dance, shaken by the music out of their bodies and their modesty, but they don't want to dance, the music captures them, invisible strings reach out and jerk them like marionettes, and they cry out for help, and then Tom reaches for his machine gun and shoots the television, and then every television in the ski resort, and then he shoots everyone who threatens his children, all the children, and he goes on shooting.

...

His father died after Tom's ninth month in prison, and his mother died soon after.

Rosalie visited without the children to bring him the news. She came with a white Jamaican lawyer. She wore a pretty yellow sundress and white sandals.

“Yesterday, after I left, your sister told the girls that you were dead. She told the girls that I had gone to Jamaica to identify your body. She told them that Jamaican law calls for your cremation. I know it's horrible, but we want to make a hard boundary between the day you killed Barry Seckler and their future. I couldn't
tell them the story and look them in the eyes. When I come back, I'll give them the comfort that I can.”

“What did I die of?”

“We said you had a heart attack. We didn't want you to be murdered. A heart attack was easy. We'll have a memorial service when I go home.”

“What will you say at the funeral?”

“We'll talk about the man we remember, the man we loved. It will be wonderful for the girls and wonderful for me. We'll laugh about you. We'll remember your many kindnesses. The official story now is that you went crazy on your vacation and started to fight someone, and something terrible happened. Perhaps you had a fever. We all agree not to dwell on what you did or why. You were found guilty of murder in Jamaica, while in America you might have been convicted of manslaughter. The prison conditions were hard, you were delicate, and you died. Each of the girls has a therapist who is helping her to remember you with love. Sign here.”

Tom signed. “Have you had any contact with Debra Seckler?”

“Yes. When you were sentenced.”

“Will you tell her I'm dead?”

“Yes.”

“I could write to the girls. I could send them mail. I can tell them I'm alive.”

“You won't.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you don't want to hurt them any more than you have.”

“I may get out someday.”

“No. You're here forever, which won't be long. You'll get old in here fast, and you'll get sick in here, and you will die in here. I'm sorry, I hope you believe that I'm sorry.”

They shook hands. Then she kissed him on the cheek. “We were having such a lovely day. They were lovely people.”

One morning, Tom looked in the mirror and saw a man with a white beard that fell to his chest, and white hair below his shoulders. The man had eyes set deep in hollow sockets. The beard was thick, but what he could see of the man's cheeks was furrowed. The white-haired man's nose had a high bridge that twisted to the right and then flattened.

Tom touched the nose.

This is me, he thought.

He knew this, years had gone by. The last thing I remember was a visit from my wife. I have been in a fight, or I have fallen, or been pushed. My memory dissolved, but I'm back into myself, and I remember who I was before I grew this beard. I am Tom Levy, and I killed a man.

There were four iron cots in the cell. A black man, perhaps thirty, smoked a cigarette and looked up at him with little curiosity. Tom, careful not to make eye contact in the mirror, wanted to stay suspended in the peace of his recovered self without announcing his return to consciousness. He needed time to make sense of things.

What if I've been a zombie for twenty years? What if this man and others feed me, dress me, wash me? Have I been silent for twenty years? Do I talk, but without consciousness of my speech? And if I speak, what do I speak? Have I learned the Jamaican patois?

What if I have been a savage man, fighting and stabbing? What if I am cruel and a leader? What if this man protects me? What if this man is my prison lover?

Tom lifted his shirt. He was well muscled, and his chest was covered in old scars. And were these hands his, so burned and calloused? How did this happen?

Tom cleared his throat. The man on the cot said nothing. Well, a man clears his throat, no matter who he is or what.

The smells of the prison rushed at Tom like a sound, like music. The heavy tropical air carried the rich brew of a harbor, and the close relish of cooking oil, wood smoke, and a sewer, like a bass, supporting all the vibrations of stink, and as each scent tickled Tom's attention, it came with an emotion: the smoke was distant lust, the aroma of cooking was disgust, the feeling from the sewer was a paradox of repulsion and love.

He studied the mirror. I would not know this was me except that I know my name.

Those dark steady eyes are my eyes, which used to be even and dull, practiced in their steady focus. My face records the triumph of repentance over still visible and unmistakable traces of the depravity of that dullness. I am beautiful! My panic is gone!

He touched his nose. Someone hit me.

I was in a fight. I will not assume that the punch that might have knocked me into years of insensibility is proof of defeat. I may have won. And I have been, for years, so completely within the routines of my penance that time dissolved and, with time, my crime.

How many years?

Something in me stands corrected. I look like a saint.

Beneath the mirror was a washbasin. Tom ran the water and splashed it on his face. This must be why I was standing here. I was here to wash my face. Behind him, in the mirror, Tom watched the smoker on the bed. It was time to learn more.

“Where do I get a shave?” Tom asked.

The man on the cot smiled at him, like a father in love with a baby. “What?”

“Where do I get a shave around here?”

“I'll be right back.” The man ran from the room, shouting down the corridor, “He spoke! He spoke! He wants a shave! Levy wants a shave! Levy wants a shave! He spoke!”

A hundred prisoners gathered outside the cell. Tom watched them, remembering some of their faces from his first year in the prison. There were two white men among them.

“Can someone tell me my story?” Tom asked, keeping his eyes averted from the white men, who Tom supposed were drug dealers, so the blacks would not feel divided from his respect. “Can someone tell me how I
broke my nose and why my hair is white?” Tom's voice was as unfamiliar to him as his face, lower, softer, not so aggressively placed in the middle register, not so tight. He liked this new voice. “Can someone tell me how long I have been here? Have I been well? Have I been a burden or of service? Please, how long have I been here?”

The first man to answer was the man from his cell. “Seven years.”

“And my hair turned white in seven years?”

“Yes.”

“And how did I break my nose?”

An old man in the crowd started to answer, excitedly, but he spoke an impossibly difficult argot, and Tom could understand none of it. One of the white men, an American, saw Tom's distress. “I'll help you,” he said. “I know what he's saying.” So the old man explained, and the American translated.

“When you came into the jail, you knew nobody. For the first year, everyone asked about you, what you had done. You were the man who killed a tourist who had offended your daughter. Everyone knew the story. No one blamed you.”

“But I shouldn't have done it.”

“No one blamed you. Still, this is prison, and men challenged your honor. A thief from Negril asked you to fight. You had no choice. He hit you, and you hit him. He hit you in the face, with a rock he kept hidden, and you fell. You were taken to the infirmary. There was a condemned man in the bed next to yours who took you
for an angel. He had been tortured for days by the guards. His hanging was due in a week, and the warden wanted the man presentable because the execution would be observed by the press.

“The condemned man told you a story. He was seen talking to you every day, all day and all night, for his final seven days. You asked him questions at first, and he answered, but then you stopped asking questions and you listened. The condemned man whispered to you.

“And all the time that he talked, your hair lost its color. On the day he finished, they came for him and walked him to the gallows. And on that day, your hair finished turning the color it is today, that terrifying white. And since that day, silence has been your companion. You have walked among us, eating, dressing, bathing, never saying a word, minding yourself. We spoke to you, but you never answered.”

“What did the hanged man tell me?”

“Only you know the story. We have been waiting for it.”

“I don't remember it. I don't even remember the hanged man.”

“You must remember!” The old man jumped at him and grabbed his shoulders. “You were told a story that cannot fit inside you without coming out. Someone else's memory resides inside of you, it was placed there by a man who was hanged, perhaps because of the story, and he was desperate to keep the story alive. Why? His mystery is crawling inside of you, looking for a way over the wall.
The story the hanged man told you is inside you like all of us are inside of this prison. And if you tell us that story, you will free yourself, and those who hear the story will also be free.”

Tom asked, “How?”

“What do you remember?”

“About what?”

“Everything. Tell us your life story. Tell us everything you know.”