John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

So he lay in the water with his eyes half-closed, listening to the faucet drip, transfixed by the silence, mesmerized by the steam. Slowly, the days and nights in prison began to fall away, like blocks of ice calving from a glacier.

One of these days, he thought, I’ll go to a hot spring. Like the ones they have in Wyoming. Just me and the rocks and the water, the trees and the stream. Pine needles. They say it’s a whole other world. A world like… Then.

The day replayed itself at its own speed. First, the fingerprinting at the prison in Pennsylvania, then the paperwork, then the dressing out. This last, a joke. Because nothing fit. Just his shoes and his watch. And the watch was dead.

Not that it mattered. Everything that happened in Allenwood, or in any prison for that matter, happened early, and went downhill. There was nothing to do except time, and the badges got you up at dawn to make sure you did every second of it. So you didn’t need a watch – you needed a timer. Something that counted backward in years, months, and days.

That morning, when the last gate rolled back, it was about an hour after daybreak. A federal Bureau of Prisons van waited outside the fence, fuming under an iron sky. The driver took him and another guy to a bus stop outside a country store on the outskirts of White Deer. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees out, and all Wilson had for a coat was the suit jacket he’d gone to prison in.

He’d hurried inside, but he didn’t stay long. There was a “No Loitering” sign on the register, and the cashier had a look on his face that said “This means you.”

So he and the other guy stood in the cold like a couple of temple dogs, wary of one another, stamping their feet at the entrance to Buddy’s Pik ’n Pak. The locals, cannon fodder to a man, wouldn’t even look at them.

Was it – were they – so obvious?

Well, yeah. There was the van, for one thing, with “B.O.P.” stenciled on the side. ( That was a clue.) And the running shoes. No one on the outside wore running shoes in winter – not when there was snow on the ground. And then there was the “luggage” each of them carried: a cardboard box with duct tape along the seams. No wonder people looked the other way. (Not that looking away would save them. Nothing would save them. Nothing could.)

Eventually, the bus showed up. In a blast of wit, the other guy said something like, “Well, if it ain’t the Long Dog!” ( Get it? Like the bus is a Greyhound? ) They each bought tickets to the Port Authority in New York, which turned out to be as hivelike as any federal prison he’d been in. But it was exciting, too, because it was the first time in years that Wilson could spend money – real money – in a store. So there was a hot dog at Nathan’s, and a newspaper at Smith’s. After that, he got on a second bus, heading down to Washington.

He rolled in a little after four o’clock, and took a cab to the Monarch Hotel, where there was a room waiting for him, courtesy of Bo. (And a good thing, too. He had less than fifty dollars on him.)

“Everything’s taken care of. Room service, minibar, Nintendo…” The clerk smiled at his little joke, then slid a registration card across the desk. “If you’ll just fill this out…”

Wilson printed his name, then hesitated when he came to the space for an address. There was a chance, if not a likelihood, that the desk clerk would recognize a phony zip code. But the only zip code he could think of was the P.O. Box at Allenwood, which wouldn’t do at all. So he changed the last number to six and made up the rest. 12 Pine St., Loogan, PA 17886. The clerk didn’t blink an eye, which probably meant that he’d never been in prison. If he had, he’d have smiled, because a “loogan” was slang for an inmate who’d gone nuts.

“Will you need any help with your luggage?”

Wilson looked up. Was this guy dissing him? The cardboard box that held his belongings rested on the floor beside him. “That’s okay,” Wilson said. “I can carry it myself.”

The clerk cocked his head deferentially, then slipped a Ving Card into the registration folder. Jotting down a room number on the outside, he pushed the folder across the counter, and paused. Looked thoughtful. Frowned. “I think we may be holding something for you,” he said. Turning away from the counter, he disappeared through a doorway, then reemerged a few seconds later, offering a FedEx Pak as if it were a coronation pillow. “Welcome to the Monarch…”

Wilson lay in the tub for half an hour, topping off the hot water with little twists of his left foot. At some point, the temperature of the bath was almost the same as his own so that, with his eyes closed, he couldn’t be sure where the water began and he ended. It was as if he’d dissolved.

Asleep, awake, he floated between two worlds and multiple identities. Copworld and Washington. Inmate and guest. Light danced on the back of his eyelids.

A voice in the back of his head whispered, You can’t let go like this. You float, you dream – you end up like Marat.

He was thinking of the painting, the one by Jacques-Louis David with the revolutionary dead in the tub. Supine. Bled out. At Stanford, Wilson’s art history professor had joked about the picture, saying it gave new meaning to the word “bloodbath.” (Which reminded him: He had work to do.)

A wall of water surged to the end of the tub as Wilson got to his feet, climbed out, and went to the sink. Standing in front of the mirror, sleek and flushed and glistening, he felt like a snake that had just crawled out of its skin.

But the tats on his chest gave the lie to that. With a broken needle and a ballpoint pen, his cellmate had scratched a ghost shirt into his flesh. A crescent moon on one shoulder, stars on the other. Birds and a bear, a dragonfly and a rough sketch of the man whose name he shared, copied from a daguerreotype in a book. And just below all that, a dipsy-doodle of dots and slashes that, translated from the Paiute, read:

He was the Ghost Dancer.

Drawing a razor across his cheek, it occurred to him – not for the first time – that the ink might have been a mistake. It was the kind of macho bullshit that was everywhere in prison, as unavoidable as the smell of Lysol.

If anything, he was inconveniently memorable, even without the ink. For one thing, he was six-four – and he’d been working out for years, living clean in the cage they’d built for him. His face was the color of copper, flat and broad. His nose was a hook between his eyes, which were, like his hair, Jim Jones black.

He had the light beard of his people, so he didn’t need to lather. Just a few scrapes and he was done. Tossing the razor into the wastebasket, Wilson reached for the white robe on the back of the door. Putting it on was like stepping into a cloud.

The FedEx Pak lay on the bed, just past the bathroom door. Stripping the package open, he found a videocassette box inside and, with it, the winter issue of Documenta Mathematica. With a faint smile, he opened the journal, and turned to the title page:

J. WILSON:

ISOTROPY AND FACTORIZATION IN PHASE-CONJUGATE SCALAR PAIRS

A soft snort of satisfaction propelled him over to the minibar, where he found a chilled split of Veuve Clicquot. Working out the cork with a soft pop, he took a long pull from the bottle. How many federal prisoners, he asked himself, had published articles in mathematics journals over the past year? Had there been another? Almost certainly not. And it wasn’t a fluke, either. This was his third publication in the last four years, which would have been good enough for tenure at a lot of universities. And his degree wasn’t even in mathematics!