Robert Coover - Public Burning

Inside, the troopers were sucking milk shakes and horsing around with a young high-school girl behind the soda fountain, elbowing each other slyly, looking bored and horny at the same time. I recognized them. The first team. All suited up. A little kidding around, a little grab-assing, ball-tugging, just loosening up for the big game, no harm meant, no rapes intended. One of them was playing a pinball machine that said HOT STUFF along the top, and on the jukebox somebody was singing “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night.” Maybe I should risk it, I thought. They won’t even notice me come and go. A caramel milk shake might be just the thing I needed, better even than antacids. Or maybe pineapple. I adjusted my moustache and started forward, feeling uneasy, on the wrong side of things somehow — like that day long ago when I entered a strange drugstore to purchase my first packet of prophylactics and found myself face to face with a man who looked like my grandmother. That time, in panic, I’d bought a lotion for athlete’s foot instead. Today it was an old woman who looked like Herb Brownell. She met me in the doorway and said: “What’ll it be, mister?”

“Uh…this one!” I croaked, reaching blindly behind me and grabbing a card. I fished for a nickel. “And…uh…could you tell me, please, the best way up to the, uh, prison?”

“Sure, bud,” she said eyeing me suspiciously. She pointed: “Right over, uh, there: uh, Hunter Street.” Was she mocking me? Behind her, the cops had stopped joshing the little soda jerk and were staring dully out at me. I pocketed the postcard, thrust a coin at the old lady, and fled, nearly crashing into the side of a passing taxi. Behind me, I heard hard belly laughter, and it made my stomach knot up and my knees quake. But I was on the way at last.

At the entrance to Hunter Street, however, I was stopped cold: “Sorry, mac, visiting hours are over.” He was a big potbellied gray-haired cop in a short-sleeved blue shirt, wet in the armpits.

“The Warden’s expecting me,” I said as gruffly and matter-of-factly as I could. “Greenleaf…uh, Thomas—”

“Sure he is, sure he is,” said the cop sourly, staring vaguely over the top of my head, as though I were too insignificant to be seen. He had a thick hairy nose and small pale eyes: a German, I supposed.

“Listen,” I said, “believe me—”

But the cop was busy with two guys who had come up behind me, wearing straw hats down over their noses, unknotted ties, and carrying big Speed Graphics. They flashed some kind of pass, press cards probably, and the cop let them through. I didn’t have one. The next guy did have one, though, and he still didn’t get through. “I’m sorry, bud, but we’re just too crowded.” The man shrugged, we exchanged commiserating smiles.

“Hey, you know that guy?” snapped the fat cop, squinting darkly at me, one hand on his pistol butt.

“Wha—? N-no!” I gasped. I felt like I used to feel around Ola’s old man: shabby, obsequious, guilty.

“Who was it?” asked another cop, wandering by with a walkie-talkie.

“Fuckin’ Daily Worker reporter. He had a lotta fuckin’ nerve.”

“Judas, I’ll be glad when this thing is over,” sighed the cop with the walkie-talkie.

The fat cop shrugged heavily and mopped his brow. “A job’s a job.”

“Yeah, so long as the damned you-know-who don’t show up,” said the other one.

“The Phantom? Shit, I wish he fuckin’ would,” snarled the fat cop, hiking his gunbelt. “I’d love to tangle asses with that greasy cocksucker. I bet he ain’t half what he’s fuckin’ cracked up to be!”

“Half’s enough,” the other one said, giving me a long inquisitive stare. “Who’s the dude in the handlebars and funny bags?”

“A crasher. Says his name is Nature Boy.”

“Greenleaf,” I corrected, but I knew it was hopeless. I could see the prison up the hill at the top of the street, so close and yet so far.

“Thomas Greenleaf?” asked the cop with the walkie-talkie. “It’s all right, Frank. The Chief said to let him through. The Warden’s waiting for him.”

Frank shrugged and waved me by, moving to stop some other guy coming up behind me. Made it after all! I braced my shoulders and strode by them — but then the cop with the walkie-talkie grabbed me as I passed: “Hold on there a minute, pal!”

“Eh? What—?! You said I—”

“It’s your moustache,” he said, leaning down to whisper in my ear: “You got it on upside down!”

“Oh! Uh, right…!” Just as well. It was beginning to itch, and changing it around gave me a chance to scratch. The cops’ laughter, though, I could have done without.

It got more congested the further up the hill I went. There were other checkpoints, but they were easier to get through than the first: the weakness of all security systems. Once you cracked the periphery, the rest got easier. But not all that easy. At the prison parking lot, I found at least a hundred and fifty reporters and cameramen, some of whom I recognized, and nearly that many more police, among them the Sheriff of Westchester County, apparently a guest of honor in the cavalcade that would soon transport the Rosenbergs to Times Square. “Anything stirring below, Sheriff?” a state trooper asked him.

“Nope, all quiet,” he said. “Nothing but Republicans down there.” Everybody laughed. Even I was laughing, it was like someone was pulling my face and shaking it.

“They say there’s trouble brewing up in the city,” a reporter said.

Somehow I had to find a way past all these guys without being recognized. Access was through a gate in a wire fence behind all these people. There were more guards there, then another heavier gate in a thick wall, the prison beyond that. I’d expected gray blocks of marble — stone upon stone — like an old castle, but most of the walls and buildings in fact were made of brick. Brick and concrete. It was large, but it had seemed larger from below. Impregnable, just the same. And archetypal: probably those familiar hexagonal watchtowers with the peaked roofs gave you this feeling. Just like in the Raft and Cagney movies. You could get nostalgic about this place if you hung around long enough. The guards in the towers were armed and wore dark sunglasses. They seemed very relaxed. They reminded me of the captains of some ships I’d been on. There was some kind of walk up through the chopped granite hillside by the north wall: maybe there was a way in through the back. But one of those towers hovered over the place where the walk began, with a lot of smiling cops gazing down. Not a chance.

I stood for a few uncertain moments in the sun at the edge of the parking lot, near a bank of telephones hanging exposed on a fence there. I reasoned: if somebody comes up to me suddenly, I could duck my head over a phone and give someone a call. I realized I’d probably call Pat. I was sweating heavily and my moustache kept slipping. The sun was dropping over the river: time running out. It was now or never. A couple of reporters turned my way, apparently coming to use the phones. I stepped brusquely out into the parking lot as though heading for my car, then turned on my heel and walked straight toward the gate. My moustache fell off: I grabbed it, clutched it in my fist. My heart was pounding away a mile a minute, but I remained outwardly cool. Courage — or, putting it more accurately, lack of fear — is a result of discipline. Any man who claims never to have known fear is either lying or else he is stupid. I was afraid, all right, I knew a lot was at stake, but I’d made up my mind to do this, and now I had to carry through. I was famous for this, this stubborn carry-through, everyone from my mother to Uncle Sam had noticed it, I probably couldn’t do otherwise. But I felt like I’d felt getting into that cage with Sheba. There was a sign at the gate: