Bill Pronzini: Shackles

“For Christ’s sake, you only served five years.”

“Five years! You think that’s all there is to it? If you only… all right, then. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t going to but I will.” His eyes glittered and glistened again. “Eleven days after I was admitted to Folsom, I was gang-raped by four other cons. Have you ever been homosexually assaulted? No, of course you haven’t, so you can’t even begin to understand what it was like. You have to experience it to know. And that wasn’t the only time, no. Some of the cons… well, they covet chaps like me. Young, slender, oh yes, we’re prime meat. I was raped three more times before one of them, a lovely fellow named Abbot, turned me out. Do you know what punk means in prison slang?”

I knew but I didn’t say it.

“A homosexual lover,” he said. “Private property, for the exclusive use of one man. I was Abbot’s punk for two years, until he was released. Then I became Frank Tucker’s punk-I was Tucker’s punk until he was released last year, six months before I was. Now do you understand why I despise him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah, but you still don’t understand why I went to him after I got out. Why I would subject myself to more of his abuse. Aren’t you wondering that? I could have got the help I needed elsewhere, couldn’t I? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

His voice had risen shrilly, almost hysterically. The look in his eyes… it was the same kind of look I had seen in mine that day in the Carder A-frame. Only worse, more tormented-the most terrible look I have ever seen in the eyes of another human being. It put a chill on my back, a metallic taste in my mouth.

“Here’s something else for you to think about,” Vining said, “ I thought about it, you know. After I brought you up here and chloroformed you the second time and dragged you in here. I thought about raping you as those cons raped me. I wanted to do it, I truly did, but I… couldn’t. I’m not a faggot, I never participated willingly-I couldn’t do that even to you. Besides, there was no way to be sure you’d catch it and I couldn’t wait long enough to find out, the doctors said I might have to be hospitalized within a few months, I didn’t have enough time to make you die that way.”

Chills up and down my body now, because now I understood, I knew his motive, I knew what he was going to say before he spoke the words-

“That’s right,” he said, “I have AIDS, I’m dying of AIDS, they gave me AIDS in prison but you put me there, damn you, you’re the one who destroyed me!”

He came lunging up off the cot, charged me, struck wildly at my face. But he was no fighter; he hadn’t been able to defend himself in prison against bigger, stronger men, and he had no chance with me either. I fended him off with my left arm, hit him under the right eye with the flattish surface of the.22-not half as hard as I had hit Frank Tucker with the piece of driftwood-and knocked him down.

He got up on his knees, holding his head, moaning a little. There was blood on his lower lip where he’d bitten through it. “Go ahead,” he said, “shoot me, kill me, get it over with. Do it, you bloody bastard. Do it do it do it!”

But I couldn’t.

I could not shoot him.

Something seemed to tear loose inside me. The room went out of focus for an instant, came back into focus with a sudden sharp clarity. Ninety days in this place, a week on the move, all the hate and all the rationalizations and all the shoring up of my resolve… and I couldn’t do it.

He saw that in my face and got off the floor, rushed me again, screaming, “Kill me, damn you, kill me!” I hit him another time, nothing else to do, hit him with a little more force and put him down again and this time he didn’t get up. He groaned, rolled over, lay pulled up into himself gasping for breath, sobbing. Not a diabolical lunatic, not a mad dog-just a weak and broken man, sick and tormented and dying. Just another victim.

My knees had gone shaky; I made it to the cot, sank down on it, and sat there looking at the floor. The hate was still inside me but it was dying too, now-as if it had burned too hot for too long and consumed itself. Glowing embers that in a short while would become ashes… cooling ashes, then dead ashes. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if he had been someone else, if he had had another motive, if he were not dying from the horror of AIDS; maybe then my hate would still be as white-hot as his and I would have been able to go through with it.

And maybe not.

Either way, I would never know for sure.

Sitting there, I became aware of the smell in the room: sour stench of fear, corruption, human misery. And part of it was mine. It came wafting up from the cot, from the canvas that had absorbed it from my body, and it seeped in through my nostrils, seemed to swell my head like a noxious gas. Gagging, I pushed onto my feet and stumbled to the door and pulled it open to let the night in.

But I didn’t go out into it yet. I leaned against the jamb, taking in cold clean air until I could breathe normally. The.22 was still in my hand; I shoved it into my jacket pocket. Then I went over to where Vining lay, hunkered down beside him.

He was quiet now; I turned him enough to tell that he had passed out. There was a ring of keys in his pants pocket. I took that to where the leg iron rested at the end of its chain, over near the bathroom. Only four keys on the ring, and the first one I tried opened the padlock. I brought chain and iron and padlock back to where Vining lay, looped the iron around his left calf, adjusted it to a tight fit, locked it in place. Then I straightened and put my back to him and went out of there, away from him, away from my prison for the last time.

I walked along the access lane, not fast and not slow. Walked with the night wrapped around me, the wind cold in my face, the sky immense and lunar-bright and frosted with stars. And I felt… free. It was a different feeling from the one last week, after I had squeezed out of the leg iron-as if that sense of freedom had been false, illusory, because it was incomplete. As if for the past seven days I had been dragging around another set of shackles, an invisible set whose binding weight had drawn me down inside myself, made me see things the way you see them through distorted glass, made me believe things the way you believe them in a dream or a delirium.

If I had shot him in there I would never have thrown off those shackles. I would have carried them until the day I died, and they would have grown heavier and more restricting until the burden of lugging them around became unbearable. Vining’s revelations and my own internal makeup had weakened the links, and by not killing him, by not being able to kill him, I had burst them. That was what the feeling of something tearing loose inside had been: the last set of shackles coming off, setting me free.

Now it was over, finally over.

Now I could go home.

I returned to San Francisco at eight P.M. on Thursday, March 10-seventeen hours after I had left the Deer Run cabin for the last time.

Not much happened in those seventeen hours; it was all anti-climax. I had driven to the Calaveras county sheriff’s office in San Andreas and told my story to the night deputy in charge, a man named Newell: who I was, what had happened to me, how I had tracked down Neal Vining, and that I had left him chained inside the cabin. The only things I omitted were my original purpose in going after him, and my breaking and entering and thefts from the Carder A-frame. Those were things I would never tell anyone, not even Kerry; they were private crosses for me to bear alone. I had locked the.22 in the trunk of the Toyota, and it would stay there until I could pack it in a box with a couple of hundred dollars in cash and mail it anonymously to Tom and Elsie Carder in Stockton.