Peter Abrahams - Lights Out

The other prisoner was watching them. Eddie had seen him playing cards in the rec room. His name was Louie. He smiled at Eddie. Eddie ignored him.

Eddie and Jack lost the thread of the conversation, fell silent despite the wall clock ticking away the time they had together. After a while Jack licked his lips again and said: “There’s nothing new, Eddie. I’m sorry.”

Eddie had known that the moment Jack came in the room. Nothing new meant that JFK still hadn’t been found. And finding him was only step one. Without a confession from JFK, without some statement that he was responsible and that Eddie had had nothing to do with the dope on Fearless , there was no hope of a retrial.

“Mandy?”

“Disappeared.” Jack stared at the unpainted cement floor. “We still don’t know if she was in on it anyway.”

“Why else would she go overboard?”

“Maybe she just knew the load was there and took off when she saw trouble coming.”

Without warning me, Eddie thought. The implication of that was clear, had been clear from the beginning, although it meant less and less as time went by.

“We’ve had this discussion,” Jack went on, glancing at the toothless old woman and the prisoner named Louie before looking again at Eddie. “Mandy doesn’t matter. What matters is JFK. No one saw him leave the island. Brice hasn’t even been able to find out what his real name is, if he has one.”

“Why did he try to raise us on the radio?”

“Because you were running off with his investment. We’ve been through this too.”

“But he got cut off.”

“Maybe he changed his mind.”

“Why would he do that?”

Jack shrugged.

“The radio was in the bar. Someone must have seen him. The question is who.”

Jack sighed. “The question is where did he go.”

“Maybe he went to France.”

“France?”

“He speaks French.”

Silence. One of the C.O.s removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard. “Brice charges two hundred a day,” Jack said.

“Borrow,” Eddie said, his voice rising over the acceptable limit. “Borrow on your seven and a half percent.”

The C.O. put his glasses back on, gave Eddie a red-eyed glare.

Jack’s voice rose too. “Seven and a half percent of what?”

“Fucking can it,” said the red-eyed C.O.

“Galleon Beach,” Eddie said, more quietly.

Jack shot Eddie a quick and angry glance. “The bank foreclosed last week.” He looked away. “Packer’s finished. Trimble, with his pious little scruples, finished him.”

“He’s a good man.” Trimble had given Jack a thousand dollars to retain Brice.

“He fucked us,” Jack said. “All because…” He went silent.

Eddie leaned forward. Their faces were very close. “Are you blaming me?” he said.

Jack didn’t answer. The prisoner named Louie smiled at Eddie again.

“Are you?”

“Let’s not argue,” Jack said. Eddie smelled alcohol on his brother’s breath.

“Get me out of here,” he said.

“I’m trying, Eddie.” Jack’s voice broke.

They sat together on the bench while the hands on the wall clock circled toward the end of the visiting period. Jack shook his head. “Everything went to shit so fast.”

The C.O.s rose the instant the minute hand touched twelve for the second time. “What’s happening?” Jack asked.

“You have to go.”

“God.”

They got up, embraced again. “Hang on,” Jack said. “At the very worst…”

“Say bye-bye,” said a C.O., coming closer.

“At the very worst what?” Eddie said.

“Please take this the right way, Eddie. Five to fifteen, but at the very worst it means you’ll be out in less than four, with time off for good behavior. It’s bad, I know. But you’ll only be-”

Eddie squeezed his brother’s arm as hard as he could. “Get me out of here.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

Jack hadn’t known the meaning of the very worst. Brice couldn’t find JFK and sent his letter informing Eddie of the closing of the investigation a month or two later. By that time it didn’t matter. Louie and the Ozark brothers got Eddie in the showers a week after Jack’s visit. Less than four swelled to the full fifteen. Jack never returned to the visitor’s room. He sent food packages at Christmas and Eddie’s birthday for a few years, then just at Christmas, then not at all. That was understandable too.

“Where can I drop you?”

Eddie opened his eyes. Ram was looking at him. They were on a bridge, stuck in traffic. Ahead lay Manhattan. Eddie had never been there, but it couldn’t be anything else. The tops of the towers were hidden in the clouds. The snow had turned to rain, steaming the windows of the cars.

“Two-twenty-two Park Avenue,” Eddie said.

“You live on Park Avenue?”

“That’s where you can drop me.”

“I’m not going uptown.”

“Anywhere’s fine.”

“Washington Square?”

“Sure,” Eddie said, although he had no idea where it was.

Ram drove across the bridge, got stuck in more traffic by a river. “It’s funny,” Ram said, “when I saw you shaved your head and all, I got the idea you’d been with us, maybe not too long ago.”

“With you?”

“A convert.”

“It’s ringworm,” Eddie said.

There was no further discussion until Ram stopped by a grassless park and said, “Okay?”

“Thanks.”

Eddie got out. “Take this,” said Ram, handing him another bag of Holesome Trail Mix. He drove away. There were two bumper stickers on the back of his car. One read: “Krishna amp; Co.-Food for the Soul.” The other: “This car climbed Mt. Washington.”

Rain fell, cold and hard. Eddie crossed the street. A woman was sitting on a scrap of cardboard with a baby and a sign: “Homeless and hungry. Please help.” Eddie handed her the trail mix.

He had walked twenty or thirty blocks and was soaked to the skin before he realized that the description on the cardboard sign applied to him too. The thought had an odd effect: it filled him with a sense of well-being, made him smile. Everything was going to be all right-unlike the woman and her baby, he could always win money in swimming pools.

Two-twenty-two Park Avenue might have been one of the towers Eddie had seen from the bridge. It was all steel and glass, joined together at right angles, the top ten or twenty stories disappearing in the clouds. On the sidewalk below lay a man in a soggy blanket. He didn’t have a baby, just a sign: “Please help.” His eyes met Eddie’s. The look in them was as bad as anything Eddie had seen inside. That puzzled him. Out of Holesome Trail Mix, he reached into his pocket and found the $1.55 remaining from his gate money. The man made no move to take it. Eddie laid the money on the blanket, leaving himself with the two hundred-dollar bills, and followed a woman wearing a trench coat and sneakers through a revolving door into the lobby.

The lobby was probably the grandest room he’d ever been in. It had a fountain with water spouting from the mouth of a bearded sea god; a marble floor, marble walls, and a huge chandelier hanging from a ceiling several stories high; and at the far side, gleaming banks of brass elevators. Men and women dressed in suits and carrying briefcases got on and off in a hurry, funneling through a gap between two velvet ropes. Eddie was almost across the lobby when he noticed the two men in chocolate-colored uniforms standing at a desk in the gap between the ropes and realized it was a security check. He stopped dead.

Relax, he told himself. He had passed through thousands of security checks, what was one more? And this one: like a child’s notion of security, with the silly uniforms and velvet ropes. Besides, you’re a free citizen, not an inmate. So: move. But he didn’t want to go through that security check, had to force himself to take those last steps.