Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  I saw Aragon alone while the rest of them waited at the front desk for me. He was looking out the window at the cold day below and his gray hair and gray beard were almost lost in the heavier than usual pipe smoke. “Sit down, Ram,” he said, gesturing at the chair. He took off his reading glasses and flipped on the tiny smoke sucker and it made a slight humming noise while we talked. “Ram,” he started, “you’re due for a change, a big change.” And then he told me how it would be.

  Aragon asked me did I remember how it was when I first came to Six East, and how I couldn’t remember and how I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk too much—in private with him or in group—and how when finally the lights started coming back on again, I did and how I began opening up until we had our breakthrough. And me, I’m nodding all the while he’s saying this, saying, “Yes, I remember, I remember.” Then Aragon finally stops and swivels his chair to face me and says, “Ram, where you’re going, you’ll be doing a lot of talking, a lot of group work—very intense group work, in fact.” Then Aragon paused and relit his pipe and blew out the match with a kind of spitting action as though some of the tobacco had gotten on his tongue. “Now the purpose of all this group work,” says Aragon, “is to find out how you interact with other people and to make you more personally responsible for your actions that will likely affect the other people you’ll be living with—and believe me, they will. Were you ever…?” he began asking before checking my file for a moment. “No, of course not,” he says. “You were never in the military. Well, what I was going to say, Ram, is that it’s a lot like boot camp where you’re going—a very long boot camp, a year give or take. You’ll be given a job and be put on a strenuous program, and you’ll have to do volunteer work sometime,” says Aragon, laughing, though I didn’t get why. “Then of course,” he goes on, “there are the outside meetings, and the outside groups, but those won’t come for a while, not until you’ve been there for two months or so.” And me, I’m sitting there listening to Aragon’s soft and even voice and trying to visualize them—the outside meetings, I mean. But all I could come up with was a nature study where you turned over rocks to see the bugs that lived under them or maybe those religious gatherings for baptism—let us now cross the river and gather under the shade of the trees kind of stuff—and I didn’t figure it was either of those and plus there was something in Aragon’s tone—like he was biting off the words with his teeth—that told me the things I was thinking about weren’t close to the truth.

  Aragon got up from behind his desk and walked over by the door and leaned against it. When he began to speak again his teeth had gone normal and his voice was a little softer. “This is do or die for you, Ram,” he said. “You’ll do exactly as they say and when they say, no matter how strange it might seem to you. And they can send you back to Misericordia for the rest of your term if they think you’re not fully cooperating—if you don’t, as they say, get with the program and do what they do there (he said this last part bitten off with the teeth again).” He puffed at his pipe but it had gone cold now, and he muttered something into his beard that I didn’t catch. Then he turned back to me and leaned against the door frame and looked me dead in the eye as if to forever catch and hold me there. His expression had softened again and his voice was at the end of the world. “I disagreed with this move,” Aragon said. “I thought you’d do better here. But on the upside, it’ll only be a year before you’re free again.” He tapped the ash out on his palm and dusted his hands. “Well,” he said, “that’s just how it is, Ram. You’ll probably make out okay,” he said.

  I was finally getting what he was saying—or at least glimpsing it. He really didn’t think much of my chances and this was amounting to goodbye to all we’d been through so far. It was all going to come undone was what he was feeling and I was going to be worse than before I’d come to Six East. And as I was thinking that this was what he was thinking, Aragon was looking down and when he looked up again and saw my expression that this was probably the end of the line he motioned me over toward him and hugged me. The pipe smell that was always Aragon was there but there was another smell—bitter and sea-like and strong as ether. And what had dropped out of me had made my arms limp till then but then sensing what Aragon was feeling and not wanting to show it I returned his hug and clapped him a couple of times on the shoulder—like they do in real movies and like Tor and I used to do—to say it was alright and not to worry, to be strong and buck up and all that. And I told Aragon that I was sure to be alright not knowing whether or not I would. And he told me that he knew that. Figuring I might but probably wouldn’t be. But I was thinking that sometimes you just have to lie about these things, either that or you’ll go even crazier. Then Aragon said, “Here, take this,” and he gave me a shot glass of linctus—“one for the road and old time’s sake,” he said, saying it’s strong and long-lasting and was the last I’d get. Then Aragon looked at the forms once more before signing off on them and led me out of the office with his hand on my shoulder. “Ram,” he said, shaking my hand but not looking me in the eye.

  The cop put me in an orange jumpsuit and cuffed and shackled me and led me away down the hall. Then we packed into the elevator—me, Stella, Bardens, the cop, and the driver—then the door hissed shut and that was that.

  We passed through the security station and then through the sliding doors to the outside world. And the whole thing from the sliding doors to the car took maybe fifteen seconds, twenty seconds max, before the back doors of the station wagon opened and I was shoved inside head down by the guard climbing in next to me. But in that spell I saw and smelled and tasted and felt and heard, spoke all there was there in that short, but somehow stretched out moment that was the outside world and specifically the world of Sagrada, the city where I was raised and later worked and lived a long, living death and little remembered and didn’t even know where I was until recently when Aragon and I began snapping on the lights in the hallway of my memory.

  It was just fifteen clinking seconds in plain air and in it now I saw the trees from where they rooted into the ground instead of from the air above to where they wandered. And I found myself remembering their names too—oak and sycamore, and willow and redwood, and cedar and cottonwood, walnut and elm—and could see on their gnarly trunks, black from the wet tulé that clung near the ground, the dark gray bodies and lighter gray twitching tails of squirrels chasing one another around the trunks and chuckling like I remembered they did. And higher up in the skinny naked branches, a bunch of crows—a murder, I remembered—were sitting and cawing to one another while above them, small flocks of sparrows flew about chasing a red-tailed hawk crying Kee-yah, Kee-yah—a sound like firewood split by a rusty maul, I thought. And off in the distance down the wet street—F Street, I remembered—was the double-rowed avenue of Washington palms in McGuinness Park and above them on the levee to the right were thickets of live oak and cottonwoods and brush lining the banks of the Nacionalé. And I could smell the river too—boggy like peat, but with algae and moss and lily pad all mixed in, an overripe smell like pond smell mixed with human sweat. And there in the foreground was the smell of burning leaves and wood smoke and something citrony. And above all in mixture of it all was the smell of the street, wet and rotting with leaves with oil and rubber mixed in it. It put me in mind of the taste that you got on your tongue when you were a kid and licked the monkey bars on a cold day.

  And there was the smell of fresh wood shingles and asphalt roofs and even the brick from the houses seemed to have a smell and a taste of their own too. And then it was sound again and I was hearing the squirrels bickering and the murder of crows cawing and the keening hawks kee-yawing and trying to shoo the sparrows. And underneath that was the somewhere not-too-distant sound of hammers and electric saws and the whine of a high-speed drill and echoing in the fog below it were the voices of the carpenters I could just make out—“No, give me endo, valley’s too short,” one said. And in the backwash of it all was the sound of cars on the freewa
y dead ahead and an occasional sloosh as one passed by on the street in front of us. And somewhere I picked up the high-pitched voices of schoolchildren shouting while below everything was the bass hum of the slow-waking city, shuffling and heavy. And then it all began jumbling and mixing and I was feeling color and smelling sound and hearing shapes and patterns and everything was swirling and melting into the other and yawing out in a smear—like I was on a merry-go-round that was spinning faster than light itself, I found myself thinking not knowing why I thought it. And when the guard finally said, “get in, Ram,” it was a relief because I was dizzy to nausea from that fifteen-second eternity. But still as he was pushing my head down to clear the door, just like they always do and like you’re dumb enough not to duck, I couldn’t resist one last look up and saw a yolky-looking sun cracking open and spilling through its shell of tulé fog and thought to myself, without knowing how I made the connection that it was in Amsterdam, on just such a day and purely by chance that I ran into Fran many years before which in some ways was how this whole story got started.

  In the car, they had doughnuts and coffee for me, and I ate and drank as much as I could and as best as I could on my short chain leashes so I’d be able to stay awake past the next load of spansule and the first nod of linctus before they both kicked in full bore. And I could see from the freeway the wooded streets of Sagrada with their weepy elms and sad palms and the houses and bigger buildings hiding behind the capitol, with its new dome and the red brick Elks and 926 and the Emerald Tower. And there were new buildings too I hadn’t seen before, that had gone up since I’d gone inside, and then we were banking on the cloverleaf and crossing the bridge above the Sagrada which was fat and wide from the winter rains and lined by live oak and cottonwood and, every now and then a grain silo with a red blinking light. And up the river, Tower Bridge was being raised to let a boat pass under and upstream a train was crossing the river on Jibboom Street. I held on through the Royo causeway filled with the overflow of the Sagrada and Nacionalé and saw the bypass below was filled to capacity. It was like a shallow inland sea and the windbreaks of eucalyptus in the distance were patches of dark gray against the lighter gray horizon. Closer in, white specks—egrets, their name immediately came to me—pecked on the mud-colored water, and the fewer blue-grayish shapes among them were great blue herons. And beyond all that in the far distance was something that gave me a shiver. It was an old barn, rootless and half-sunken in the Royo bypass. But somewhere around the Dixon cutoff I couldn’t register any longer and struggle as I might my eyes started dropping until they finally closed and all that was left of my senses was the car’s motion as we headed west, rocking easy and climbing toward the Coast range.

  When I woke up again we were somewhere on a small bald hill near an old farm. I was sick to my stomach and my head was throbbing. The cop unshackled my legs so I could get out with him in the fresh air and try to walk it off. The sun was out now and the sky was blue and clear with just a bit of moisture left in it. There was a stone fence by the side of the road and beyond that were a few cows munching their way up the hill. The guard and the Dave guy walked me along the stone fence for a while until I said I was okay to travel again. Then we turned back along the wall of stones rising and falling with the land—not like the usual walls you see that run at the same height no matter. And then I remembered what it was—a coolie wall—and I also remembered how it was I remembered that—Shaughn. It all came at once and this is what came—Neely Road, Shaughn and Toomey and me, wheat straw doobies and a quart of Busch Bavarian, the beach on the river just above Johnson’s with bats overhead, The Platters’ I Love You 1,000 Times, and something called the Voo Caray. I didn’t have a clue what any of it meant.

  After the stop I fell asleep. The car climbed and rocked and pitched up and down the hills like a slow-going speedboat. Once when I woke we were in a eucalyptus grove, the next time, it was open farmland, after that, it was suburbs. Then we turned off the highway and onto a dirt road pitted with chuckholes, the car bottom scraping now and again. A couple miles later we were turning again. “Welcome to Acacia,” somebody said.

  It looked like one of those motels built in the fifties—a low-slung suburban job built in an L with a swimming pool in the middle of the angle. The pool was green as a river and there were leaves all over the surface some guy was fishing out with a net. There was also a basketball hoop hanging off a roof beam and two guys and a fat woman were shooting at it and as we passed them on the driveway running around the outside of the pool. I thought: ‘—Corvo, half-court hook shot, swish, two.’

  We stopped at the end of the last building, the short leg of the L, and Dave and Judy went inside a door marked private. The guard got me out and unshackled me and told me to wait with him. I rubbed my stomach and back to take away the chain bite and walked over to a patio where a few tattooed guys were standing around. They nodded to the guard and asked me who I was, and I said Ram, and they said nothing, except for one big muscly guy who made small talk with me about my transfer and asked did I play hoops because he had seen me looking at them shooting. And I told him this and that and said yeah, sometimes, and then asked him how he’d got so muscly and he said driving iron, so I asked him when did he work on the railroad and all of them—the guard too—just cracked up. And when he stopped laughing, the muscle guy—Clark, he said his name was—jerked his thumb over his shoulder at a picnic bench and said, “No, just weights, man. I lift weights.” Then one of the tattoo guys, the one with the blue bandana and mustache, brushed by me and called me a fucking geek but I didn’t care because I was still laughing along with the rest of them even if I was the joke. Then the private door opened and Dave stuck his head out and motioned me and the guard inside.

  It was an office but it was nothing like the formal one Katz had at Fremont or the more library type of Aragon’s. This one didn’t have diplomas or books or plaques on the wall just a bunch of crazy pictures and sayings and beat-up old file boxes made of cardboard. There was hardly any furniture and what there was beat-up too—a couple of old chairs and a schoolteacher’s desk and sitting behind it was Indica Muniz.

  He was leaned back in his chair with his feet on the desk and his hands were folded behind his head and he was smiling at me. He was wearing motorcycle boots and blue jeans and a faded t-shirt and he had a police emblem windbreaker. He had curly black hair that ran down past his shoulders and one of those little beards—a cheater I remembered they were called—that you grow just below the lip. And even though he was sitting you could see how big he was—so big that the room seemed like it was shrunk around him. “So, you’re the famous Ram Le Doir,” he said, leaning forward just enough to stretch out his hand for me to shake. And it was huge with little tattoos between the knuckles and I could see that the other one had them too—not letters that added up to a word but symbols of some kind. He told me his name and said, “You know what Indica is, right?” I couldn’t think of anything but the snake and asked him was it that. The guard laughed hard but Indica didn’t—just kind of smiled. “You some kind of comedian?” he asked. I looked down and said nothing. “Indica,” he finally said, pointing at one of the pictures. “Black marijuana. La mota, pendéjo. The best, The Kind, sabe?” I didn’t know what to say, but I nodded like I understood. Then Indica pushed back from the desk and came over and stood in front of me. “Man, you’re fucked up,” he said. “This guy’s wasted,” he said to no one in particular smiling right in my face and keeping my eyes. “Okay, Homes,” he said finally, “drop ’em and spread ’em.”

  After they body searched me and shook out my clothes they marched me to a gang shower where they disinfected me and then gave me a t-shirt and sweatpants to put on. Then Indica called in two guys—Clark and another I forget—and told them one for cold storage, 120 hours, call Doc Medlin and put him on standby. Then he handed Clark my journal and said, “Give him two hours for this bullshit, shrink’s orders, then take it back and seal it and put it in the safe.” Then
Indica looked over at me sizing me up and nodding. “We do things a little different here, hey, Homes? How you like us so far?”

  They took me to the end of a wing and unlocked a room with a skull-and-crossbones decal on the door and gave me my journal and a pencil. The one guy named Indica left and Clark was sitting by the door to wait with me while I wrote. There is nothing here but a bed on a padded frame with restraints, and the light I’m using to finish this is coming through a little frosted window. Clark sits watching me like I used to watch the birds or passing cars from the Six East dayroom window. Just curious is all. Outside, I hear a conversation and the sound of wood splitting. Somewhere in the building someone with a high-pitched voice is singing along to a song about a Double Dutch Bus—nice ring to that, whatever it might be. Now another load is kicking in. Someone just screamed house meeting, house meeting. I can hear the sound of people running.

  Outside my window the dusk is failing now and the lights around the stadium inside the trees of the park are on for the game that’s about to begin. It’s midsummer now, seventeen months since my last entry, and I’m in a new house, Redwood House, where I was phased four months after Walnut, where they phased me after nine months at Acacia.

  It’s a pretty good place where I am now, an old three-story house alongside Prospector Park and overlooking the diamond where I can see the games from my own room on the top floor. The room has a queen-sized bed, an oak desk and built-in bookshelves and a dormer window covered in colored paper at the top so it looks like stained glass. Unlike Acacia and Walnut, where there were always at least twenty other residents and staffs of six or so, here there are only four of us, myself and three other third phasers, and staff, usually just O’Neill who only drops in from time to time to see if we need groceries or anything from the bank, but mostly just to chat not supervise. We’re our own support here, as we like to say, and it’s as close to freedom or normal life or whatever you want to call it as I’ve been in three and a half years and the only thing that’s keeping me from the total real thing is an Outside Job and six months of probation. After that I go to Fremont for final parole reevaluation. After that I walk.