The Shrine at Altamira

by John L'Heureux

  Nails held the flashlight to the side so that Russell could see who he was, and then he smashed it hard against the side of Russell’s face. Russell’s fist went out, and he crouched for the attack, but he was too late. A knee crunched into his chest, and fists caught him suddenly in the belly, the ribs, the kidneys. There were fists everywhere. He couldn’t get his breath. Somebody had him by the hair and was banging his head against the concrete wall, and banging it, and banging it, and then he went unconscious.

  They argued about who would be the one to turn him out. They figured he was a virgin, and so each of them wanted to go first, but Nails said, Let’s be reasonable; it was my plan and I’m the one that knocked him out. So they let him go first. The others lined up and waited. They wanted Boyle to suck on them while Nails finished up with Russell, but Boyle seemed to have escaped during the fight. Typical woman, somebody said.

  All four of them had Russell, and then Nails was ready to go again, and this time he was slower, deliberately taking his time, and while he fucked him he burned little holes in his back with a cigarette. The others had him a second time, and then they got a couple buddies, and they got a couple buddies too, and it went on—running a train on him—pretty much all night. By that time, Russell was bleeding from the rectum, and there was everybody’s jism coming out of him, and shit, so they decided to leave him for the niggers or the spics. But it was too late, really, so they took off for their cells. By this time Russell had cigarette burns on his back in the shape of a heart, a little joke, and a burn on the sole of each foot.

  After breakfast, Boyle called the guard, and a couple hours later some hospital guys came with a stretcher and took Russell away. On his body was a note that Boyle hadn’t dared remove. It said: “Get well soon.”

  Maria could not bring herself to step inside the hospital again. She sent John lots of Golden Books, and she wrote him notes about how much she loved him and how she wished she could see him, but she did not go to the hospital. Ana Luisa went every week.

  “He misses you,” Ana Luisa said.

  “Don’t start, Mother. Just don’t start.”

  “He wants to see you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re his mother.”

  “I’m his mother, and he misses me and wants to see me, but I can’t bear the sight of him. It makes me physically sick to look at him, do you understand that? I can’t bear to look at him! Now will you stop?”

  “He loves you.”

  “I’ll go mad. I swear to God I’ll lose my mind.” She began to cry.

  “Querida. Maria. It doesn’t matter what he looks like. He’s your son. He’s your child.” She put her arms around Maria. “I know how you feel. Don’t you think I know? It hurts you to see him suffer like that. I know, Maria.”

  Maria shook herself free and reached for a tissue.

  “He’s been there more than a year, Maria. A whole year without his mother.”

  “I’ll go see him, all right? I’ll go. Not today, though. I need a little time. I need a little more time.”

  “Querida” Ana Luisa said, and stroked her daughter’s hair. “It’s hard for you, I know. It’s hard.”

  Dr. Clark sat in the living room with the lights out. He had a scotch in his hand, and the television was turned on to some detective story with lots of hollering and shooting and car chases—harmless stuff, the usual. He wasn’t looking at the screen; he just liked the background noise. It made him feel he was in the real world, without any of the trouble of being there. More and more, he felt he couldn’t cope with reality. It overwhelmed him. It crippled him.

  Only this afternoon his shrink had asked him, What is it you really fear, secretly, in your innermost heart? Dr. Clark had laughed. He wanted to say, I fear getting up in the morning. Hell, I fear waking up in the morning. I fear getting out of bed. I fear that on the way to work I’ll see a teenage girl who’s fat and angry and has no life ahead of her except rejection. I fear John’s pain, because I can’t do anything about it. I fear being alive. He wanted to say all this, but at the same time he wanted to say, What kind of crap have you been reading that you ask questions about my innermost secret heart? And in the end that’s what he’d said. There was a pause, and the shrink said, But I mean really.

  Really, he wanted not to talk to people, not to see them, not to be responsible. Who was he to be responsible for the world’s pain? Really, he wanted to be left alone. He wanted out.

  He shook his glass a little, making the ice clink. He didn’t drink scotch. He didn’t even drink wine. He had no vices. And he was tired to death of it all.

  Really, what he wanted was to find John’s father and kill him. He had never said that before. He had never thought it before. But that’s what he wanted. That’s what he feared.

  All this time he’d been blaming God, for his cruelty, his heartlessness. But it wasn’t God who had done this to John. It was a man, with a man’s face that somehow concealed the face of naked evil.

  He got up and went into the bedroom and opened the bureau drawer. The picture of Russell Whitaker was scrunched up, but Dr. Clark smoothed it out and studied it under the lamp. This was not the face of a monster. Certainly it was not the face of the man who kept him awake at night and made his days almost unendurable. Whitaker had light brown hair, blond perhaps, a squarish face with a good jaw, and a nose that was a few millimeters too long. It should have given him a hawklike expression, but it didn’t because the eyes caught your attention and held it. They were pale blue, or gray, and they appeared innocent of all experience, as if the person behind them had nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. This was the face of a priest or a social worker, full of dumb goodness. It was not the face of a man who had set his own son on fire.

  Dr. Clark knew people. He had connections. Nonetheless he made many, many phone calls before he learned that nobody would be allowed to see Russell Whitaker for at least two weeks. Whitaker was being detained, in privacy. It was a disciplinary matter, that’s all they could say.

  Dr. Clark waited two weeks and called again. He had to look at this man, this monster, with his own eyes.

  Russell spent a day in the prison hospital until the internal bleeding stopped, and then, to keep him from causing more trouble, he was transferred to solitary confinement.

  The cells in solitary were called strip cells, for two reasons. The cell was stripped bare and so was the prisoner, although—for humanitarian reasons—Russell was allowed to keep the bandage on his back where the cigarette burns had got infected. Except for the bandage, he would remain naked for the next two weeks. The sheets were taken away, and the mattress. That left either the bedspring or the cement floor for sleeping. There was no light, but there was an old paint can he could use for a toilet. The cell was four feet by five feet. In the morning a trustee brought him two slices of bread and a cup of coffee. In midafternoon, a thin soup. That was it: life-raft rations.

  At first Russell was aware only of the pain. It was like a fire that spread from his rectum throughout his insides, making him shake uncontrollably. He was icy cold and yet the sweat sprang from his body. Inside, he was on fire.

  Later, when the fever passed, he was aware only of John. “For you, for you,” he muttered, even though he knew he could never make up for what he had done.

  As the days went by—he measured them by the slices of bread—he became aware that he had lost a front tooth and there were cuts on his face and chest. He had earned it all. He deserved this and more. The next time, maybe they would kill him. “For you,” he said.

  He did not cry. He gave no sign that he felt anything—not pain, not guilt, and not repentance.

  Toward the end he found he was most comfortable on his knees.

  Maria parked her car on the bluff facing out toward the Pacific. From here she could see only the waves, stretching to the horizon. There was no land, no beach, only water and sky.

  She tried to forget herself in work, but John was home from the ho
spital again, and how could she forget? There he was, everywhere, with that ruined face. He was nearly eight years old now, and very smart, and he knew she couldn’t bear to look at him. The pain was too much. She could not pretend.

  It began to rain, and in a short while she could see nothing at all. She sat there, looking at nothing.

  Ana Luisa picked John up at his new school—a special school for blind and burned and handicapped children. It was his first day.

  “How was it, poquito?” she asked. “Did you learn a lot today?”

  “Freak City,” John said. “Retards and freaks.”

  “Don’t mock God’s handiwork,” she said, and made the sign of the cross.

  “Not very handy, if you ask me,” John said.

  Ana Luisa said nothing. She loved him. She would forgive him anything. What had happened was the will of God.

  “It’s cool, Gram,” he said, seeing she was upset. “It’s muy bueno. I like the other kids.”

  “Bueno,” she said, and laid a hand on the side of his ruined face. “Bueno” she said.

  Dr. Clark sat at the table, waiting for Russell Whitaker to be brought in. He had never visited a prison before and he didn’t know what to expect. In movies the prisoners sat behind little barred windows like tellers in a bank, and their families crowded around trying to slip them a gun or drugs or—in the comedies—a cake with a file in it. But this was just an ordinary room, empty except for the table and four chairs.

  If this were his shrink’s office and he was waiting for his ride on the couch, he would get up, walk around the room, look out the windows. But there were no windows here, and the room did not invite walking around; it was too much like a cell.

  How deep inside the prison were they? he wondered. And what went on in there—in here—where nobody could see what was happening and stop it? He had trained at Harvard and he knew what power-hungry men were like, so he could guess what went on in a place like this, where the only power they had was power over each other.

  He refused to think of that now, however. He had come to confirm something for himself: that the man who set fire to John was no ordinary man; he was an aberration of nature, somebody outside the scope of human feeling. God’s terrible mistake. Otherwise what hope was there for any of us? He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair.

  Was there any hope?

  In his breast pocket he carried the picture of Whitaker that he’d cut from the newspaper. And in his wallet, the picture of John.

  He was about to reach for the picture of Whitaker, to search the eyes one more time, when he heard footsteps coming, the loud click of a lock, and then the door opened and Russell Whitaker came in, followed by the guard.

  “Twenty minutes,” the guard said as he closed the door. He slouched against the wall with his hand resting lightly on his revolver, prepared to watch them.

  Russell sat down opposite Dr. Clark. He had been out of the hole for three days now, but his eyes were still attuned to darkness, and he blinked against the light. He wore handcuffs and kept his hands in his lap. He stared down at the table.

  Dr. Clark looked at him and then looked at the guard. “Are you going to stay?” he asked. The guard nodded his head. “I see,” Dr. Clark said, and moved his chair so that his back was to the guard.

  He leaned forward to say something, but he couldn’t find the words. Whitaker was exhausted, he could see that. And in the recent past, perhaps in the last couple weeks, he had been beaten badly about the head; there were contusions, lacerations, dark swellings. He had very likely suffered a concussion. The eyes looked pained, with deep black smudges beneath them. A front tooth was missing. He needed something for the pain, and he needed rest.

  This was the monster who had set his own son on fire?

  Clinical, detached, Dr. Clark leaned back in his chair and studied him: the shape of the forehead, the cheekbones, the thrust and angle of the nose, the soft flesh of the lips, the square jaw. With such strong, clear features, it would be an easy face to reconstruct. It was a well-made face, nothing special, no evident sign of evil.

  Five minutes had gone by and they had not spoken. Dr. Clark turned in his chair and glanced at the guard. The guard stared back at him, but he stood up straight and began to shift from foot to foot.

  “Listen,” Dr. Clark said and, surprised by the sound of his voice in this strange room, he said no more. After a while Russell looked up at him, and Dr. Clark was astonished at the softness of those pale eyes, the look of innocence. Dr. Clark found himself blushing. “I’m your son’s doctor,” he said. “I’m a plastic surgeon.”

  Russell continued to look at him.

  Dr. Clark turned to the guard once again. “Do you have to be here?” he asked. “Couldn’t you get lost for just a couple minutes?”

  The guard looked up at a corner of the ceiling.

  They were silent again. Five more minutes passed. And another five. Finally the guard couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “I’ll be outside,” he said, and left.

  Again Dr. Clark leaned forward, searching Whitaker’s face for some mark that set him apart from the rest of us. “Listen,” he said. “I have to ask you something. I have to know.”

  Russell looked up at him.

  “How could you do it?”

  Russell said nothing.

  “Why?” His voice echoed in the room.

  “I don’t know,” Russell said.

  “Did you hate him? Did you hate yourself? Was it insanity? Some eclipse of the brain? How could you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your own son.” He was whispering now.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Clark studied Whitaker’s face as if, by an act of the will, he could see behind the eyes and find the secret there, the bad seed. But he saw only pain. He reached for his wallet and took out John’s photograph that he’d clipped from the newspaper. A handsome little boy, smiling.

  “Your son,” he said. “Before you set him on fire.”

  Russell looked at the picture and said nothing. And as Dr. Clark continued to study him, a tear began in the corner of Russell’s eye. It ran down his cheek, clung for a moment to his chin, and then fell to the table. He had not cried once since the terrible thing he had done. He had not cried in the mental ward, he had not cried during the trial, he had not cried when they beat him and cut him and raped him over and over in his cell. But he cried now, freely, at the photograph of his smiling son.

  Dr. Clark got up and left the room. He had come to look upon the face of evil but had seen only an ordinary face, a man’s face, and the man was shedding tears.

  This Whitaker was not a monster after all. He was just another man.

  And there was no hope for any of us.

  They had begun reconstruction of the nose. Dr. Clark had chosen to raise a tube pedicle from the inner side of the good arm. That was quicker and easier, he felt, than using the chest or the abdomen, because the flap of skin could be applied directly to the face at the second stage. The challenge was to raise sufficient tissue to supply a lining for the nose, since cartilage and bone had been destroyed. Later he would use a bone graft to support the bridge, but that was months in the future. Right now he had to get the pedicle going, and it looked as if it would work just fine. The healing would take months, but at least they’d made a start.

  John lay in bed, recovering from the operation. He’d become resigned to them. They were his life now, and besides, the worst part was over, Dr. Clark said.

  Dr. Clark came to see him every day. John liked Dr. Clark. Peggy was John’s favorite but Dr. Clark was next. And then the nice lady who read him his books.

  He was very happy.

  Bad news. There was not sufficient tissue on the arm pedicle to allow for a successful nose graft. They had to start over, this time working with the abdomen. It would take three weeks, maybe more, before the pedicle could be attached at one end of the wrist. Another three weeks before it could be separated from t
he abdomen and transferred to the nose, then two weeks more before the removal of sutures, and this schedule presupposed that each stage would be completely successful. Later they could worry about contractures of the nose and the cheek. Right now they had to start again to build a nose.

  Dr. Clark gave no sign of his disappointment. He remained cheerful and positive in his attitude. If you weren’t going to kill yourself, there was nothing else to do but get on with the business of living. Attitude, he had discovered, was everything.

  The nose flap had taken sufficiently well, and now Dr. Clark was able to perform an iliac bone graft. It was a simple matter of taking a bit of bone from the right side of John’s pelvis and grafting it to the glabella to form a support that would serve as the bridge of his nose. It was not a difficult operation, but it was tricky.

  Afterward Dr. Clark went for a long walk.

  Peggy—since it was Friday night—had a big dinner and then she hit the dance clubs with a cop she’d just met. He was the only cop in California who could dance, so he claimed, and he added, nervously, that he was fantastic in bed. “Fine, fine,” Peggy said. “Just so long as you can dance.”

  John held the mirror to his face and examined his new nose. “It’s nice,” he said. “It’s cool.” He wiggled the mirror around to get a look at the nose in profile.

  Dr. Clark had warned him not to expect too much, and John had tried not to, but he had expected more than this blob of muck where his face used to be. He looked like some horror movie. He looked like shit.

  John knew that he would have lots of time to cry later, so right now he faked an eager look and a happy voice, and he smiled up at Dr. Clark. “Thank you,” he said, and he shook the doctor’s hand.

  Dr. Clark looked pleased.

  Ana Luisa had knocked three times, but still Emory did not come to the door. Maybe he was late getting home. She shifted the bag of groceries from one arm to the other and waited for a minute, then she knocked again. There wasn’t a sound from inside. Either he was not home or he was not conscious.