Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  Laurel smiled. Mabel had misinterpreted lovesickness.

  Hal came down the steps of the administration building. The most natural thing in the world would have been to rush into his arms; if only she could take his hand. “Hey,” she said, smiling to herself. He did not know she made half a joke.

  “Hey,” he said. “Baby, Buddy’s got another con for you to interview in the library. We don’t have long. And he’s not going to be on the farm long, either. I’m so tired of being at his mercy.”

  Baby, she thought. She had always longed for a man to call her that.

  “Let’s go to the rabbit hutches,” Hal said. “We can have some privacy. That day at the fair was nice, but having Buddy at our shoulders, I don’t feel we said anything.”

  “I know,” she said. “But without him, we’d have had nothing. Whose rabbits are they?”

  “They belong to Purvis. He says raising them is all that keeps him sane. I don’t know how he got started.”

  “With two rabbits,” she said.

  “I wanted to buy you something at the fair. But I’d have had to ask Daddy for the money, and I didn’t want to answer questions. I’m going to tell my family something about us soon.”

  “Don’t worry them.” She felt such sympathy for his parents. His poor mother, Laurel thought. He said she still cried over her first sight of him, when he was allowed visitors for the first time, after six weeks. His head had been shaved when he came to prison. Laurel went with him toward the rabbits, thinking how demeaning prison was and that at his age he had to ask his father for pocket money.

  “I got this for you, though.” Hal handed her a spoon shaped into a bracelet. “I give the boy who makes these my state-issued sack of tobacco each month. I’m never going to learn to roll my own cigarettes.”

  “You didn’t have to give me a present.”

  “What I wanted you to take home is a replica of a Conestoga wagon one of the guys makes out of match-sticks.”

  “That’s just what I’ve always wanted,” Laurel said.

  Hal turned and, seeing his face, she quickly apologized.

  “Eastern humor,” she said. “Sorry.” It was out of place.

  He said, “Things these guys think up to keep busy and to make money, I find touching.”

  “I do too, Hal,” she said, keeping step. She was thinking how, before him, she had never been the sort of woman who prompted presents; she’d always wanted a man to give her a teddy bear. William brought home unexpected flowers from vendors in Grand Central, and she was touched; they were often a little the worse for wear, but she told him truthfully it was the thought that counted, and she put the flowers in a vase in the kitchen. That was where she would see them the most. Her father never in his life gave either her or her mother any present but cash. She had grown up with a lot fewer expectations than many women.

  “We can’t stay out here long. I just heard some of the guys complained about me having a woman visitor out of visiting hours last week, even a journalist.”

  “I didn’t know anybody paid attention to us.”

  “These guys know everything. The closest to a big-time criminal we’ve got here is a boy named Gus, from Illinois. He told me today I seemed to have had a hard time saying goodbye to that writer. I told him I had, and I hoped something was going to come out of our meeting. These guys all know about my situation with Sallie. That she’s waiting to hold me up for everything I’ve got and wants full child custody. Gus said, ‘The best thing that could happen for you, Hal, would be for your wife to die’; then he said, Laurel, ‘I know a Mexican boy who’ll come up from Monterrey and wipe anybody’s ass for five hundred bucks, in case you’re interested.’”

  “What in the name of God did you say?”

  “I said I thought I’d pass.”

  Laurel went on thinking how little a life could be worth, thinking of Sallie so innocently at home not even knowing her life was being bargained over. And wasn’t it incredible she and Hal were involved in this kind of existence?

  Hal said, “It was as natural to Gus as arranging a golf game.” He nervously lit a cigarette. “I was planning on another visit, but Buddy’s started worrying these guys will jackpot me. Get revenge. They’ve done it to him. Guys who resent AA told others in the program Buddy was establishing a relationship with them to get into their wives’ pants. Buddy said when I started in the program, ‘I don’t care if you like these guys. I just want you to learn to love the sons of bitches.’”

  “He won’t help us?”

  “He thinks what’s happening between us is fantasy. He’s seen so many boys hurt he doesn’t want it to happen to me. He says you’ll leave and that will be the end of it.”

  “Hal, I’m not like that.”

  “I told him that. That I never trusted a woman the way I do you. I can put you on my list of visitors and tell Mama and Daddy and Pris not to come next visiting Sunday.”

  There were so many reasons she could give for not arriving at home when she was expected. Loyalty overtook her. “I have to be home on Labor Day,” Laurel said. “To get Rick ready for school.”

  “I understand.” They entered the shed.

  The old trusty rose up, holding a watering can. “I’ve got guard duty, Hal. This is the only time I’ve got to feed and water them.”

  “It’s all right,” Hal said.

  Laurel moved along with him and stuck her fingers to a wire cage. “Aren’t they cute,” she said, touching a rabbit’s wiggling nose. She knew what it must be like for a man to walk around with a hard-on. Hal had gone to the far end of the shed and stared out back. Something bothered him today, maybe that this was their last meeting. She stood looking out too. “What’s all that?” she said, seeing an old Delton City transit bus, an abandoned school bus with the name of a town half painted out, a dilapidated trailer, and shacks of nailed-together boards.

  “The red houses I told you about,” he said. “For conjugal visiting. It’s touching the way these guys take care of those places, painting and cleaning and planting flower gardens around them. One old boy nearly worked himself to death, and when he took his wife up to one on her first visit and explained what it was for, she said, ‘You certainly don’t expect me to go in one of those.’ He said, ‘Of course not, honey.’ I’ve never seen a man so crestfallen in my life.” Purvis stood chuckling in the background.

  “I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t go in one,” Laurel said. Right then, she knew what visiting Sunday could have meant; Hal had a lenient sergeant who looked the other way about “wives” who visited. But no, she had to be home on time.

  And she knew who Purvis was; he did look older than his years, as Hal had said. He, too, had killed his stepson but was serving a life sentence. For murder? she wondered. He had befriended Hal in the beginning. Then one day he had received his divorce notice in the mail, the way most men learned the news. “It’s pitiful to watch,” Hal had said. Purvis pretended not to care, but Hal followed him to a guard shack and found him crying. He talked a long time to Purvis, who suddenly said, “Hal, you’re going to make it in here.”

  “How do you know that?” Hal said. “I don’t know it myself.”

  “By your eyes. When you came in here, I never had seen such suffering in the eyes of another human being.”

  “Laurel, I was amazed,” Hal had said. “That old man’s semiliterate. How remarkably wonderful people can be.” They had agreed it was strange he could learn to appreciate people in a place like prison. Hal had written: I used to think Negroes had no feelings except in rare instances. And poor whites affected me the same way. I was so surprised when I came here to learn they did. Also how interesting they can be. I always thought they were niggers with two thoughts, sundown and payday.

  She wrote him back then. You’ve been to hell and back and are a better man for it.

  “Buddy’ll be waiting.” When Hal dropped his cigarette without grinding it out, she stepped on it hard because of the wooden structure. She
walked on thinking they would not want their first kiss with someone else present. Hal would make no move toward her in the shed because, as much as he trusted Purvis, in prison you did not totally trust anyone. She tried to comfort herself that in another kind of prison they’d have talked through glass and on an intercom. Then she realized Hal was not behind her, and looked back to see him talking to Purvis. She was surprised by his angry manner. Purvis gave him a gentle shove in her direction. “What’s the matter?” she asked. He came up with a tic in one cheek; she remembered noticing it other times.

  “I just asked him how he could stand keeping those animals in those goddamned cages.”

  She needed to be more like Sallie, lighthearted, gay, and capable of chatter. Though possibly Sallie wasn’t as much that way anymore. Her mother had always said men did not like serious women. Needing to change his mood, she began to talk off the top of her head. “Rick had a pet rabbit once. We bought it out of a ten-cent-store window the day after Easter because we were worried its feelings were hurt. It was the only rabbit left. We kept it on a screened porch. I found it all stretched out dead one day. I’d kept feeding it lettuce, and apparently it died of diarrhea. I didn’t know rabbits couldn’t eat as much lettuce as they wanted, did you?

  “It was an old ten-cent store like the kind in the South. Soundport has nothing like that anymore. Now it’s filled with what my mother calls boutique shops. One time William asked a salesgirl what kind of fur a skirt was made out of. She told him ‘Lapin.’ He nearly died laughing. ‘You mean rabbit?’ But the salesgirl didn’t know what was funny. In Soundport now I wouldn’t know where to go to buy a spool of thread, it’s so posh and chic. The kind of cutesy town where at the drive-in bank, they shoot out dog biscuits with your money in that little tray.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I mean when you have a dog in the car with you.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  She had hated that rabbit’s dying. She had felt responsible for its death. A more horrible feeling overtook her walking through this prison. She hurried on. “Well, anyway, pet rabbits have such a boring life. Just locked up in—” and she glanced at him. He did not seem to be paying much attention. What man would?

  “Got a match, Hal?” A trusty rose from hunkering on the ground. He was overseeing prisoners under guard, legmen, digging a ditch. They wore blue with yellow stripes down their pants legs. He spoke close, lighting his cigarette. “Grady’s right. We ought to have free-world guards. There’s too many scores to be settled among prisoners guarding each other.” He squinted at Laurel through smoke and went away.

  “Do you agree with that?” she said, in interest.

  “I don’t have to guard prisoners being in my office all day.”

  “I know, but what do you think about—”

  He interrupted gruffly. “I had a wet dream last night, Laurel. Do you know what that’s like for a man at my age? This is the first time I’ve had the desire to fuck a woman since I’ve been here. I was afraid I’d lost all that feeling. Buddy’s offered to take me to a whore in Greenwood, and I’ve refused. I was afraid he’d begin to think I was one of the gal-boys we’ve got here.”

  “I doubt that,” she said, smiling.

  “I don’t want a whore. I never have.” He looked at her in the sunlight, his eyes laughing beneath those handsome, dark eyebrows. “I’m saving myself for you, baby.”

  “You’re damaged goods. But I’ll take you.”

  “All night I lie in that cage imagining all kinds of things.”

  “I do too.”

  “I’ve thought about it and told myself I couldn’t ask that of a woman like you. To drive alone and meet me somewhere in a motel room for a few hours.”

  “Why not? If Buddy will take you out to a whore, why not me?”

  “If you’ll come, Laurel, I’ll ask him.”

  “Haven’t you had at least the desire to masturbate?”

  “In a cage with twenty other men? I hear some of those guys beating their meat at night. No thanks.”

  “How about in the old bus where you practice your bagpipes? I think it’s mean the guys won’t let you learn to play them in the cage.”

  “What do those hicks know about music? All right, if the impulse comes over me, I’ll tell myself Laurel told me to.”

  Why do I have to tell you? she wondered, sorry again for the glimpses of passivity prison had brought on. Outside the library door, she stopped and said, “Did you have affairs when you were married, other than with Sallie?”

  “Once with Carla. Not once with Sallie. Why, hell, if you meet me in Greenwood, you’ll be getting practically a virgin. That’s more than I’ve ever gotten.”

  Laurel laughed, and Buddy opened the door. He introduced her to a hefty middle-aged prisoner. All during her interview with Joe, she thought of Hal. “I got busted the first time when I was seventeen,” Joe said. “For robbing a filling station. When I come out, I couldn’t get a job because I been in stir. Nobody would hire you back then. So I had to rob again. After that, my family wouldn’t have nothing to do with me. I left St. Louis and started roaming.”

  “That’s the usual vicious circle, isn’t it?” she said. She thought about Hal being the gentleman he was, yet saying he wanted to fuck her; no man had talked to her that way before.

  “Yes’m, it is,” he said. “I been busted in more states than I could name you.”

  “How does this prison stack up?”

  “Missus, when I got busted in Mississippi, I told myself I had come to the end of the road. I thought I’d never get out alive. But it’s the best place I been. The most humane.”

  “How is that?”

  “In Leavenworth I didn’t see the sun for ten years except as a slant of light on a wall at a certain time of day. In wintertime I didn’t see it at all. Didn’t see a dog all that time. I been paroled here once. First thing I done I bought some whiskey before I got on a bus for St. Louis.”

  “You were going home again?”

  “Missus, I’m forty-five years old and I done run out of places to go. I don’t know if my family would have anything to do with me. I didn’t find out. I got drunk on the bus. The driver had me arrested for disorderly conduct time I hit Delton. Done broke parole. Hadn’t been gone from prison but three hours. They come got me. Nine hours later I was right back where I’d started.”

  “But why would you do that?”

  “Used to the custodial.” Joe looked sheepish. “It’s been my life. It’s what I want and I’ve faced it. Ever’ time I’ve gone out I’ve come right back in.”

  “You ought to just stop getting paroled.”

  “It’d save the taxpayers some money, now, wouldn’t it?”

  Buddy returned with Hal. Impatiently, she and Hal waited, like polite children, for the others to stop talking.

  “She wants to write about this place, she ought to be here for the rodeo,” Joe said. “They tie money to the horns of steers. Turn loose all them old boys to get it how they can.”

  “That colored boy that got gored up so bad last year is doing better,” Buddy said.

  Joe laughed. “He’ll be out yonder again come fall. I got a new man in my cage. He’s talking about winning. Shoot. He ain’t got the sense. That boy got busted for robbing a chain store he managed. It was opened with a key. And he had the only one.” Laurel could not help enjoying the moments they stood in camaraderie. Part of her lifetime, now, seemed to have been spent in this room. Hal hung back so meekly at the door; she wished he would step forward and join the other men. “Come on back here and cover the rodeo,” Joe said. “It’s open one day to free-world folks.”

  “Young lady, I won’t be more than an hour or so.” Buddy opened the door and shut them at last into privacy.

  “Baby, he says it’s go.” Hal held her by the elbows for a moment, their lips barely met; this place was too heavy with fear for both of them. They ran enough risks.

  Sitting in their accustomed chai
rs, they let their knees touch. He held her hand to one knee. “You’ve got to realize, Laurel, this trip out could be a carrot dangled before our noses. Something can always happen. If a boy escapes, the prison closes up like a nutshell. All leaves are canceled.”

  “I understand.” They made plans; she would meet Buddy at the prison, to make certain they were going; then she would park down the highway and go the rest of the way with them. He worried about her driving back to her cabin at night alone. Laurel laughed and explained she went about a lot at night, to tent revivals, black churches.… He was perturbed by her being with black people, though she said she went with a black woman friend.

  “Come on back here in the fall, baby. You can combine the rodeo with a visiting Sunday and maybe one day out with Buddy. It would make your long trip worthwhile.”

  Any time would be worthwhile. She let her hand rub the inside of his thigh. “I don’t know what to say to get away from home,” she said.

  “If you’re getting a divorce, you won’t have to say anything. What are your thoughts about that?”

  “The same. That I want a divorce and don’t want to have to go through what you have to to get one,” Laurel said. She could not imagine telling William or Rick.

  “Start your divorce as soon as possible. And come on back here. We need something to go on, piece by piece, till I’m out of this place for good.”

  “Till I’ve crossed those tracks,” the prison expression went. She nodded; but there was so much she didn’t want to let go of with William.

  “Fall’s a sad time for me,” Hal said. “A year ago, I was waiting for my trophies to come from Africa; then my world fell apart.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been to Africa.” She hated thinking about that night.

  “I planned on it for years. Read everything by Robert Ruark. Went to the Delton zoo constantly by myself to study the animals. And do you know, Laurel, I was forty-one years old and afraid to tell my parents I was going. Sallie had to tell them.”