John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“This Goulash character,” says Shoe, casually stepping in to the lull, “did you run him through the usual reception?”

Kelso shifts in the chair. “Nothing usual about it. The Buffalo dicks drag the boy up the stairs like a rag doll and unlock the bracelets and throw him down onto the floor in the Warden’s office, where he begins to froth at the mouth and cry out like a banshee. ‘You’re going to kill me!’ says he. ‘I know you’re going to kill me!’ ”

“And where would he get that idea?”

Kelso opens one eye to search Shoe’s face for irony.

“If you had shot the President,” he says, “you might expect a bit of rough treatment.”

DiNucci gasps. “The President of the United States?”

“No — the President of the Skaneatles Culinary and Debating Society. You think if he’d shot any simple fecking rubberneck at the fair he’d rate a hemp brigade the like of what we saw here last night?”

“So he’s foaming at the mouth,” Shoe prompts, “this Goulash—”

“Doctor Gerin is there and he slaps the lad and yells, straight into his face, ‘Drop the theatricals,’ says he, ‘we know yer faking it!’ ” Kelso shakes his head. “Can you imagine that, making a show that he’s insane when he’s only a fecking little anarchist.”

Shoe rubs elbows with murderers on a daily basis, men who have killed for money or passion or survival, and most of them seem pretty well organized upstairs. To kill somebody for a hinky-dink idea of how the world ought to work, and to do it in broad daylight in front of ten thousand witnesses — this, he thinks, would qualify you as a serious candidate for the bughouse.

“That what he copped to?” he asks. “Being an anarchist?”

“Words to that effect,” the screw answers nasally as DiNucci pinches and lifts his honker to get at his upper lip. “Anarchist, anti-Christ, something along those lines. He knew what he was about and said as much between all his blubbering. So we just pulled his clothes off and yanked a cooler suit onto him and chucked the murdering little bastard into isolation.”

“They had me down there in the nut-hatch for a couple years,” says DiNucci, a troubled look on his face. “Right after the trial.”

“Matteawan.”

“I had to beg them to send me here. That place’ll drive you crazy.”

Crazy. Unless, thinks Shoe, Goulash was only following orders, was the worst kind of sap, buying into some load of malarkey he heard in a speech. Like these ginks who can’t wait to climb into Uncle’s uniform, think they’re fighting for Old Glory and instead get sent to some monkey patch in the Pacific to snatch the goods for the ones who got the whole game rigged, the ones who’d sic the bulls on a sorefoot private soldier if he dared to call at their back door for a drop of water.

“So they’ll burn this character for sure,” says Shoe.

Kelso shakes his head. “The President has only been wounded, and he is a solid, fleshy man. Girth is Nature’s strategy for protecting the vital organs. No, Mac will come through like a champion. And our little friend in the punishment corridor,” he nods toward the south wing, “will be with us indefinitely.”

Shoe tries to wrap his mind around it. “Shooting the President.”

“Some are born to greatness,” declaims the Sergeant as DiNucci gently pats astringent on his face, “and some seek notoriety through its de struc tion. Now go get me the paper, and be quick about it.”

Shoe leaves the noisy woodshop and full-steps down the center path, crows solemn above him, filling the birches, as he heads for the administration building. There are bulls strolling the tops of the walls, bulls on the parapets, peeping him all the way across the yard. He sees Lester Gorcey on all fours with the rest of the grounds detail, frowning at the grass as if daring it to grow. Shoe slows, then stops a few yards away and kneels to pretend to deal with his laces. At least one of the bulls up top, probably that wildass Thompson, must have him in the sights by now.

“New guest on the Row,” he says softly, keeping his eyes fixed on his gunboats. “Shot the President in Buffalo.”

Gorcey reaches out to clip a single blade that has dared to rise above its neighbors. Stick your head up in Auburn and they’ll cut it off. “Cleveland is dead?”

Not so easy at all, thinks Shoe, to keep track of the game in here.

“McKinley,” he hisses. “Hanging by a thread.”

He stands and continues down the path. Gorcey will share it with the grounds detail and they’ll clue in the whole south wing. Shoe slows as he passes the punishment cells and the shock shop, and though there is nothing to see but brick, can’t help running his eyes over it.

He’d been young when they transferred him up from Blackwell’s on his first jolt, young and stupid. Pilsbury wasn’t running the Island then and it had been a free-for-all, hard to tell the cons from the poverty cases from the derelicts they passed off as prison guards. You could buy a tumble with a whore for a half-dozen cigarettes. Pick up a nail too, since it was the diseased ones they sent to die there. He’d been out and about there, running with a gang, and then all of a sudden transferred to Auburn and forced to walk in lockstep like a fucking caterpillar’s ass and not a word past your gizzard from lights on to lights out and he kicked, told a keeper where he could put his stick but instead the screw put it hard over his head, more than once, and he woke up in the dark in a metal box on the Row.

First there was the sound, the steady deep thrumming of the prison dynamo through the wall, and then the sting of the rivets sticking up from the metal floor into his flesh. He was wearing a filthy uniform a size too large and shoes made of felt. He crawled to the nearest wall, rivets digging into his knees, and used it to pull himself shakily to his feet. His head was throbbing and there was dried blood on his face. The walls were all sheet metal, a little farther apart than in the cells upstairs. He felt his way around to a narrow, barred slit, head-high in a solid iron door, dizzy, grabbing the bars to steady himself, his mouth like dusty carpet as he began to shout.

“What happened? Where the fuck am I?”

“Where the fuck you think you are?” called a voice from over to the left. “And you don’t have to shout.”

It was true, everything they said echoing in whatever space lay beyond the iron door.

“What time is it?”

The laughter came from both sides, echoing. “You gotta be kiddin me.”

“How many of you down here?”

“Eight cells, half of em full now that you come. The fella in Number Three don’t talk.”

“Then how you know he’s there?”

“How you know I’m here?”

“I can hear you.”

“I might just be your imagination. You could be buried in a coffin somewhere, havin a dream.”

“Stiffs don’t dream.”

“How do you know?”

Whoever it was in the cell to the left, he didn’t like him.

“Relax, kid,” said a different voice from the right. “Whatever they got in mind for you, aint nothin you can do about it.”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Number Eight.”

“He don’t have a name?”

“My name is Kemmler,” said the voice from the right.

Shoe knew that Kemmler was the gink they were going to hook up to their new electrical contraption at the end of the week.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It don’t matter now.”

“Number Eight,” says the first voice, “is three steps from the door to the chamber. So’s the Long Walk won’t be so long.”

Shoe gripped the bars harder, little sense of what was up or down in the total blackness. “I need to see a doctor.”