Bill Pronzini - Shackles

When I’ve finished the coffee, return to the hot plate and make another half cup. Then pour my breakfast into the saucepan and heat that. Eat breakfast on the cot, washed down with my second cup of coffee. Wash out the saucepan and the plate afterward, put them back on the top shelf next to the hotplate.

Pace for a while, twenty minutes to half an hour, as long as I can stand it.

Sit or lie on the cot and read a chapter or two or three of one of the paperbacks. I’m partway through an unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra now, as a change of pace from the fiction. Lurid stuff, plenty of sex, lots of glitter and glamour and big money, all sorts of innuendo on a variety of fronts. All I knew about Sinatra before I started this book was that he was a crooner and a decent actor and a paisan who may or may not have a few underworld connections. Now I know enough to make me care even less about him than I did before.

Write a little, as I’m doing now. If I happen to feel like writing, that is. I haven’t the past two days, so I didn’t bother; there was just nothing I cared to set down on paper. Today I felt like picking up a pen again and I seem to be going on at some length. Not for any therapeutic reason… or maybe it is therapy, in a way, the kind that helps you keep things in perspective by confronting your thoughts, writing them out. But I don’t want to force it. Does it matter if I keep a record of every single day I’m here? I don’t see how it can.

Work on the wall for a while. I started doing that four days ago, during the rainstorm-bent and flattened one of the soup cans at the top and in the middle to fit my hand, so that it resembles a kind of scraping tool, and then gouged and rubbed and scraped at the wood around the ringbolt. I’ve been doing that every day since, for an hour or so at a time, even though it hasn’t done much damage to the log and I really don’t expect to get out of here that way. This is a kind of therapy, too, a way of reinforcing my resolve not to give up.

Pace some more, back and forth, forth and back, dragging that goddamn chain (I don’t listen any more to the slithering, clanking sound it makes-I’ve found I can shut my ears to it if I try hard enough). Do that until I feel tired enough to sleep for an hour or two. Afternoon naps are good for you, particularly when you get up around my age. Ask any doctor, ask Dear Abby, that’s what they all say.

After the nap, read another chapter or two in the current paperback. I might also read a chapter or two before I fall asleep, if that’s what it takes to clear my mind and make me drowsy.

Get up, put fresh water on the hot plate, make a cup of tea. No afternoon meal; just two meals a day, morning and evening, to conserve provisions.

Drink the tea while thumbing through one of the magazines, spot-reading when something catches my eye-the ads, mostly. Modern magazine advertisements can be interesting sometimes, though not as interesting as the ones in the pulps. You can find ads for the damnedest things in thirties and forties issues of Popular Detective, Flynn’s, Complete Detective, Strange Detective Mysteries , a host of others. Ads for trusses, false teeth, lonely hearts clubs, sex manuals, anatomical charts, nose adjusters to alter the shape of your schnozz, home study courses in taxidermy and how to be a detective or a secret service operative. Cures for tobacco addiction, alcohol addiction, epilepsy, rheumatism, piles, pimples, warts, stomach gas, and kidney problems. Booklets on how to patent your invention, how to stop stammering, how to analyze handwriting, how to make love potions, how to “become dangerous” and lick bullies twice your size, how to raise giant frogs for fun and profit. Hundreds more just as improbable. Somebody ought to do a book of pulp-magazine ads, reproduce the screwiest ones in their entirety. For my generation it would be more than a collection of high-camp hucksterism; it would provide instant nostalgia with each and every page.

Wash out the tea cup, put it back on the shelf. Maybe try to bring KHOT in again, maybe pace a while longer or do a few more exercises, maybe look out the window if the weather is decent, maybe work a little more on these misery pages, these burnt offerings, this indictment. Improv time. Don’t want to establish too rigid a routine here. Got to leave a little room for spontaneity, right?

By this time it should be late afternoon, getting on toward dusk. Switch on the lamp, if it isn’t on already. Switch on the heater, if it isn’t on already, because once darkness settles, no matter what the weather is like, it gets chilly in here.

Almost time for supper. Make preparations-and take time doing it, there’s no hurry, let the belly do a little begging for its evening meal. What’ll it be tonight? Corned beef hash? Very good choice, sir, very nourishing. Corned beef hash, crackers, tea, and-let’s see-how about some nice Fig Newtons for dessert? I haven’t had Fig Newtons since I was a kid, and when I was a kid I hated them. If I told my ma once I told her fifty times how much I hated Fig Newtons, and still she bought them, still she put them in my school lunch pail or on my dessert plate at home. I gave up eventually and ate them, every last one, instead of ignoring them or throwing them away. Mothers are good at making you give up, making you eat or do things they think are good for you. It’s a subtle form of mind control that, if practiced properly-and my ma was an expert at it-retains its hold on you no matter how long you live. I still hate Fig Newtons, so tonight I’m going to eat Fig Newtons, and not just because I can’t afford to waste food. If I were confronted with a package of Fig Newtons somewhere else, at any time, I would probably eat the damned things then too. The only reason I haven’t eaten them in thirty-five years is that I’ve somehow managed to avoid being confronted with them.

Eat supper while paging through another magazine. Wash the plate and cup and saucepan, put them away on the top shelf.

Read another chapter or two, sitting or lying on the cot.

Do another twenty minutes or so of exercises.

Wash my hands and face in the bathroom sink. Strip down to my underwear (if it’s not too cold to sleep in just underwear). Turn off the heater and the lamp. Wrap myself in the two blankets and lie down and will myself to sleep immediately so that I won’t lie there in the dark and think and maybe brood. I remember seeing a movie once, one of those old Topper comedies with Roland Young, and one of the players asked Eddie “Rochester” Anderson if he was afraid of the dark. He said no, he wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of what was in the dark. I laughed at the time; I’m not laughing now. I’m afraid of what’s in the dark, too-the dark recesses of my mind.

And that’s my day. This day, and with minor variations, all my yesterdays and all my tomorrows until I find a way out of here. On the one hand, the regular routine creates the sense of normalcy I need and acts as a kind of mind-numbing drug for most of my waking hours. On the other hand, the monotony and the crushing loneliness can’t help but have negative long-range effects.

Now I know exactly how hard-core convicts feel, men in solitary confinement, prisoners on death row. And yet most of them can look forward to their release; even the ones on death row have a mathematically better chance of survival than I do-lawyers working for new trials, commutations, stays. And those prisoners aren’t forced to wear leg irons and chains, not anymore. And they have other prisoners to talk to, friends and relatives who come to visit them. I have no one. No friend or loved one who has any idea of where I am, no way anyone can work effectively for my release. There is only me. My world has shrunk to this corner, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and I am its only inhabitant. For all I know, what I hear on the radio may be nothing more than a tape playing in an empty studio, and the entire human race has been eradicated and I am the last man in the world, trapped here in my little world.