Chapter 5 There were rumors of an escape. Trevor was nowhere to be found. One day, Cider was called from the cage and saw a man in a suit from whom he could barely hide his disgust and was discharged. He stood disgruntled before judge Sheldon then proceeded out of the courtroom. They took him to the locker room in the penitentiary and told him to wait. They brought out his old clothes and had him confirm each item that he had worn when they’d arrested him. He dressed in his civilian clothes save for the socks. He looked like someone just released from prison. His clothes had been held for quite a long time. He wore black and white sneakers, faded blue jeans, a black T-shirt. The guards had him walk with his hands behind his back down the hallway. They led him outside, down the sidewalk, and as he was being taken away from the penitentiary in his normal attire he looked to the side to see two guards bringing in a new prisoner. The smallest prisoner shuffled by awkwardly, clanging and clamorous, his ankles shackled together, his hands chained to his waist as if he were a mad bomber. It was Trevor. Cider and Trevor passed, and each stared for a moment at the other, and it was indescribable, wordless, what passed between them in that instant. Then they took Cider away to loose him in the world. He sat motionless in the backseat of the police cruiser. The clear plastic box sterile and divided in two parts. The driver’s space sealed by another sheet of plastic, and mounted between the plastic and the driver’s space was a .12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun. Four red, uranium tipped shells beside. He leaned forward and pointed to a bus-stop by the side of the road. “Needs to be an address.” “What about that church over there?” “You’ve been driving me crazy, junkhead, it needs to be a Goddamn address.” “You don’t hold with church?” The officer cursed. He pulled the cruiser over to the curb and opened the door and stepped out. He unlocked and pulled open the back door. “Don’t jerk me around. You got a place to go or you really want to be left here?” “Here’s fine,” said Isaac, and got out and walked into the tiny concrete lot of the church. The officer stood there looking at him. “Better pray you’re not trespassing.” Cider rubbed the back of his neck with a cupped palm as he watched the cruiser wink away over the horizon. He went to the back of the yellow brick building. There was a cement stairwell, pulled up by the earth, split open all over by weeds. Beside the steps sat a small tire tube where dirty flowers grew. He stepped over to the cellar window, completely black in there. He pushed over the weeds and worked his way to the cellardoor. He tried but it had been locked. He went back to the window and worked at it and finally it squeezed open. He climbed his way into the shadow. He found a sleeping quarters compiled of old yellowed newsprint. He lay down and felt something against his ankle. He sat up, picked up the whiskey bottle, held it in the air. A quarter full. No cap. He wiped the top of the bottle with his sleeve then took a swig. He took another to wash it down. He rolled over with the obituaries, moaned and turned away, as if he already knew their order. He breathed out a dream in the darkness. Of children who had died going along the dream road in the dark carrying lanterns and crying on their way from the world. By nightfall he went out the way he came in and left it open. In a ditch a ways down he slept on his side with both arms propped under his head and his knees bent. Steady breaths. Blood on its course, the nerves tittering. He woke at the dawn but the winds had picked up. He walked down the road with an out held thumb. Against the rising of the sun a black object appeared, wavy at first, then in solid form, a semi truck barreling down the left lane. It whirred past and did a like vanishing show toward Salinas, Kansas. Karma never killed like the way I say hello, he thought. Soon it began to snow. Past the old brick pawnshop, through an alleyway and over a fence. A police cruiser stopped to ask his destination. The kid, talking proper, stood quiet, restraining the bitter hatred that he felt. Move along. Down the street and around a corner. Where an obese hooker sneered and puckered her lips, face dolled with makeup like a clown’s. Come on over this way, if you’d like. He never. Maybe once. Across the avenue toward the sparser quarries of town. Where a known rapist loitered beside the filling station. The kid went on. The ground strewn with rocks and bottlecaps and cans. He climbed up a ladder. On the warehouse roof he peered out to the winter skyline, a solitary figure framed against the city’s industrial drear. There were smokestacks in the distance. And the factory whistles sounded sadder than his heart could bear. One night he saw a home in flames and hid in a ditch to see it burn. People already filed out, carrying their loot. All the portables. A man struggled out of the house with a television-set but the fire burned too intense and he dropped it and fled. The resident stood watching the entire disaster with a look of utter bewilderment. The kid eased up out of the ditch and slunk back into the night. Anybody seeing him those winter months amid the city’s greyer edges might have wondered who he was, this criminal deprived of his habitat and its provisions. Frequenting the alleys in a cotton jacket. Among old fugitives in poolrooms. Those who walked the streets nodded to themselves and agreed that joy had gone from this season and could you tell them where? He passed these locals by, his face a silent mask, a stone insanity. The rapist beside the gas station hunched on the curb, mumbling words of beggary. The kid went by, past a vacated auto-repair shop, along a sidewalk sloshed with black snow. Down the cold morning street where no streetlamp lit the way. He kept on. At the curbside he picked up pace and tramped through a gravel lot. Toward the bar on the corner. There a man lolled beside the ashbucket, smoking a chewed butt. The kid came out of the bar stupid and muttersome and walked on down the street. He walked by wooden apartments where in the upper window a hand wipes the glass and a face appears to watch the lonesome outlaw go away. He passed a church, morguelike and burned, a chain padlocked at the entrance. The gutters of the place were flooded and froze into a kind of sewage, and he stood there a while, recollecting his baptism. He shuttered and left that place. He arrived back at the cubbyhole, coughing and wet, staggered inside, collapsed on the cot, fell into a slumber, and dreamed. Of his great grandfather, hung before his time. Left to dangle neath a cedar tree. Below him wheat sways and the fields are grim. Beyond the evening horizon is a shadowworld of form. The man hangs dead by his skull and tolls right to left north to south. But imagine beforehand, taken from the shade of confinement and brought out into the agony of sunlight, rope wrapped round his neck. Being pulled along in a mulecart, down the dirtroad past cemeteries filled with names none yet his own. But still he’s strung dead. And seasons passed, and the travelers who went by that place never happened to glance to this public spectacle left unattended, the bones suspended there among the treelimbs, his deathgrin yellowed with age. And in the spring a new growth drilled through his chest and blossomed, his torso naked of flesh, a lonesome birdcage. Where the ragged sparrows nest. There was a robbery that afternoon and shots were fired. A man had been fatally stabbed. The kid stumbled out of his hole still drunk to see the dying rapist amid the shadowshapes of night. Someone had stabbed him over and again and he sat shrieking. Blood everywhere. Drained from his heart, a frantic pump. Blood made from the milk of his mother who surly did love him. Nobody phoned for help and that night the clothes were stripped from the body and two young delinquents fought over who got the shoes. It seemed to rain all that winter. The few snowfalls turned soon too slush but the brief white quiet amid the shop windows seemed a dream and the snow sifting down brought in the old city a time almost close to silence. Those cold nights on the mattress high in the derelict building in the West Bottoms he’d lie awake and hear the sirens, a lonely noise. Sad sound in the city. He said that nature is speculative and must be scrutinized so as to unearth the traits that give rise to the understanding and that laws of catastrophe cannot be divided away so are distributed to all and even the dead have the commune of their loss and he surmised as much for the living on a pay plan of complete and total cataclysm as subtly it becomes everybody for themselves and God against them all.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 08:19:18 +0000