Shackles

by Bill Pronzini

  Work on the wall for a while. I started doing that four days ago, during the rainstorm—bent and flattened one of the soup cans at the top and in the middle to fit my hand, so that it resembles a kind of scraping tool, and then gouged and rubbed and scraped at the wood around the ringbolt. I’ve been doing that every day since, for an hour or so at a time, even though it hasn’t done much damage to the log and I really don’t expect to get out of here that way. This is a kind of therapy, too, a way of reinforcing my resolve not to give up.

  Pace some more, back and forth, forth and back, dragging that goddamn chain (I don’t listen any more to the slithering, clanking sound it makes—I’ve found I can shut my ears to it if I try hard enough). Do that until I feel tired enough to sleep for an hour or two. Afternoon naps are good for you, particularly when you get up around my age. Ask any doctor, ask Dear Abby, that’s what they all say.

  After the nap, read another chapter or two in the current paperback. I might also read a chapter or two before I fall asleep, if that’s what it takes to clear my mind and make me drowsy.

  Get up, put fresh water on the hot plate, make a cup of tea. No afternoon meal; just two meals a day, morning and evening, to conserve provisions.

  Drink the tea while thumbing through one of the magazines, spot-reading when something catches my eye—the ads, mostly. Modern magazine advertisements can be interesting sometimes, though not as interesting as the ones in the pulps. You can find ads for the damnedest things in thirties and forties issues of Popular Detective, Flynn’s, Complete Detective, Strange Detective Mysteries, a host of others. Ads for trusses, false teeth, lonely hearts clubs, sex manuals, anatomical charts, nose adjusters to alter the shape of your schnozz, home study courses in taxidermy and how to be a detective or a secret service operative. Cures for tobacco addiction, alcohol addiction, epilepsy, rheumatism, piles, pimples, warts, stomach gas, and kidney problems. Booklets on how to patent your invention, how to stop stammering, how to analyze handwriting, how to make love potions, how to “become dangerous” and lick bullies twice your size, how to raise giant frogs for fun and profit. Hundreds more just as improbable. Somebody ought to do a book of pulp-magazine ads, reproduce the screwiest ones in their entirety. For my generation it would be more than a collection of high-camp hucksterism; it would provide instant nostalgia with each and every page.

  Wash out the tea cup, put it back on the shelf. Maybe try to bring KHOT in again, maybe pace a while longer or do a few more exercises, maybe look out the window if the weather is decent, maybe work a little more on these misery pages, these burnt offerings, this indictment. Improv time. Don’t want to establish too rigid a routine here. Got to leave a little room for spontaneity, right?

  By this time it should be late afternoon, getting on toward dusk. Switch on the lamp, if it isn’t on already. Switch on the heater, if it isn’t on already, because once darkness settles, no matter what the weather is like, it gets chilly in here.

  Almost time for supper. Make preparations—and take time doing it, there’s no hurry, let the belly do a little begging for its evening meal. What’ll it be tonight? Corned beef hash? Very good choice, sir, very nourishing. Corned beef hash, crackers, tea, and—let’s see—how about some nice Fig Newtons for dessert? I haven’t had Fig Newtons since I was a kid, and when I was a kid I hated them. If I told my ma once I told her fifty times how much I hated Fig Newtons, and still she bought them, still she put them in my school lunch pail or on my dessert plate at home. I gave up eventually and ate them, every last one, instead of ignoring them or throwing them away. Mothers are good at making you give up, making you eat or do things they think are good for you. It’s a subtle form of mind control that, if practiced properly—and my ma was an expert at it—retains its hold on you no matter how long you live. I still hate Fig Newtons, so tonight I’m going to eat Fig Newtons, and not just because I can’t afford to waste food. If I were confronted with a package of Fig Newtons somewhere else, at any time, I would probably eat the damned things then too. The only reason I haven’t eaten them in thirty-five years is that I’ve somehow managed to avoid being confronted with them.

  Eat supper while paging through another magazine. Wash the plate and cup and saucepan, put them away on the top shelf.

  Read another chapter or two, sitting or lying on the cot.

  Do another twenty minutes or so of exercises.

  Wash my hands and face in the bathroom sink. Strip down to my underwear (if it’s not too cold to sleep in just underwear). Turn off the heater and the lamp. Wrap myself in the two blankets and lie down and will myself to sleep immediately so that I won’t lie there in the dark and think and maybe brood. I remember seeing a movie once, one of those old Topper comedies with Roland Young, and one of the players asked Eddie “Rochester” Anderson if he was afraid of the dark. He said no, he wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of what was in the dark. I laughed at the time; I’m not laughing now. I’m afraid of what’s in the dark, too—the dark recesses of my mind.

  And that’s my day. This day, and with minor variations, all my yesterdays and all my tomorrows until I find a way out of here. On the one hand, the regular routine creates the sense of normalcy I need and acts as a kind of mind-numbing drug for most of my waking hours. On the other hand, the monotony and the crushing loneliness can’t help but have negative long-range effects.

  Now I know exactly how hard-core convicts feel, men in solitary confinement, prisoners on death row. And yet most of them can look forward to their release; even the ones on death row have a mathematically better chance of survival than I do—lawyers working for new trials, commutations, stays. And those prisoners aren’t forced to wear leg irons and chains, not anymore. And they have other prisoners to talk to, friends and relatives who come to visit them. I have no one. No friend or loved one who has any idea of where I am, no way anyone can work effectively for my release. There is only me. My world has shrunk to this corner, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and I am its only inhabitant. For all I know, what I hear on the radio may be nothing more than a tape playing in an empty studio, and the entire human race has been eradicated and I am the last man in the world, trapped here in my little world.

  But that makes no difference in how I get through my days. I haven’t lost my will to survive, nor will I lose it, and so I go on. Minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. Living on three things other than the meager rations of food.

  Hope.

  And my love for Kerry.

  And my hatred of the mad dog who put me here.

  * * *

  The Twelfth Day

  * * *

  Christmas songs on the radio. The one playing right now is an oldie called “Silver Bells.”

  Soon it will be Christmas Day …

  Hazy sky and pale sunlight this morning, as though the sun were shining through milk, and KHOT’s signal is stronger than it has been on any day since my imprisonment. The song that was playing when I first switched on was “Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer.” There have been half a dozen others since: carols and old favorites by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette, novelty items like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

  This isn’t the first day the station has put on Christmas songs, but it’s the first day I’ve paid any real heed to them. First day I’ve let myself think about Christmas, how close it is. And now that the thought is in my head, I can’t seem to get it out again.

  Today is December 16—Wednesday, December 16.

  Friday of next week is Christmas.

  Only nine more shopping days left.

  Usually I put Christmas shopping off to the last minute, but this year I vowed to buy my presents at least one week and preferably two weeks early. I hate crowds. And no matter where you go in the Bay Area one or two days before Christmas, the crowds are unbelievable—holiday commercialism at its most demented. So I wasn’t going to put myself through any more of that last-minute lunacy,
not this year. I even had what I was going to buy people pretty much worked out. That way I wouldn’t have to wander around looking for something suitable. I could just walk into this or that store and buy the gift and walk right out again.

  For Kerry I was going to get a videotape of Gone With the Wind, one of her favorite old movies. And a pair of white jade earrings she’d admired in a jewelry store window last month. And a Norwegian ski sweater, blue and white with a reindeer design, that I saw in a Saks ad and figured would look good on her. The only things I hadn’t chosen yet were her joke gift and her card. We’ve exchanged joke gifts at Christmas every year we’ve been together. Once she gave me a huge plastic jar full of popcorn; last year I gave her a gorilla mask, because she’d once confessed to a secret desire to own a gorilla suit so she could scare hell out of people who came knocking at her door. That kind of nonsense thing. As for her card, I have to be careful in what I select because she doesn’t care for the fancy or traditional or sentimental variety. She prefers something simple, or better yet, something humorous.

  For Eberhardt, the only other person I regularly buy presents for, I had a new briar pipe and some decent tobacco in mind. His old pipes stink and so does the tobacco he uses, a foul black mixture he gets somewhere that looks and smells like burning horseshit.

  This week Kerry and I would have gone to one of the neighborhood lots and picked out a tree. We’ve done that the last couple of years and it’s always been a special occasion. Then we’d take it back to her apartment and trim it and sit around afterward watching the tree lights and feeling Christmassy. Last year we got to feeling more than that and ended up making love on the carpet, so exuberantly that one or both of us knocked off a couple of ornaments and broke one. First time I’ve ever had that under my tree, she said.

  Next week there’s her office party. I don’t like parties much but she insisted that I go last year, so I gave in reluctantly and went expecting to have a lousy time—and had as good a time as anybody else who was reasonably sober and didn’t try to grope one of the agency secretaries behind the water cooler.

  And a couple of days before Christmas, we’d drive around the city and look at the decorations people put up—the flocked and tinseled trees, the manger scenes and cardboard sleighs and Santas and strings of colored lights around windows and doors and in shrubs. You can still see that kind of traditional Christmas spirit in San Francisco’s neighborhoods. It always puts the spirit in me, too, makes me think of when I was a kid and Christmas had a special aura and a special meaning … one that goes away when you grow up and that you can never recapture. Innocence is part of it; so is wonder. As an adult you can remember what it was like, you can feel nostalgia for it, but you can’t really feel it anymore. It’s like trying to touch a ghost: all vague outline and no substance.

  And on Christmas Eve Kerry would cook a special dinner—she’s a very good chef—and then we’d open some of our presents. Not all of them, we always save a couple for Christmas morning. And then we’d go to bed and make love, we always make love on Christmas Eve, and when we woke up it would be Christmas and we’d open the other presents and then have breakfast and later on we’d go over to Eberhardt’s and share a holiday drink with him, exchange presents, and then we then we I don’t want to go on with this it isn’t doing me any good I can’t go on with this.

  It hurts to remember, it hurts to think about Christmas and Kerry and the way things used to be and won’t be this year. No more of it. No more Christmas music, either, shut the radio off and keep it off.

  It hurts too much.

  * * *

  The Sixteenth Day

  * * *

  I’m losing weight.

  I came in here at about 245, belt stretched all the way out to the last hole, gut starting to bulge over all around. A couple of years ago I dropped 25 pounds eating salads and eggs and yogurt, healthy stuff like that. Got down to about 215, felt good, looked pretty good, managed to keep the weight off for almost a year. But I like beer—correction, I used to like beer—and I used to like to eat and I’ve always had sloppy habits, my food intake being no exception. So I put the 25 pounds back on over the past year, plus another 5 for bad measure. Porky Pig, that was me when I got taken out of the real world and transplanted into this one.

  Now, though, the weight is coming off again. My pants are loose at the waist and I’ve taken the belt in one notch already, with another not far off. Short rations, the enforced two-meager-meals-a-day diet—that’s one reason. Exercise is another. I work out an hour and a half each morning now, another half hour each evening. If I keep up that kind of escalating program, I’ll be in tip-top shape at the end of three months. Down to about 210, muscles where all the flab used to be … maybe I’ll be strong enough to rip that goddamn ringbolt right out of the wall.

  Sure. And maybe I can also huff and puff and blow the wall down.

  Yessir, tip-top shape at the end of three months. Best I’ve looked in more than thirty years, since my tour in the military. Of course, I won’t look so good once the food starts running out. It won’t be muscles bulging then; it’ll be ribs and bones. And the gut won’t be flat, it’ll be concave. By the time I die of starvation, I might even be all the way down to 195 or so … first time in my adult life I’ve weighed less than 200 pounds.

  The whisperer won’t even know me when he comes to bury my corpse.

  * * *

  The Seventeenth Day

  * * *

  What was it he said that last afternoon, after he made his grisly little joke about cutting off my leg with one of the can lids? Something about it being the equivalent of an animal chewing off a limb caught in a trap?

  Well, here’s an interesting little problem in self-analysis: Suppose I had an axe or a hatchet. And suppose there isn’t any other way out of this prison. Would I be able to chop off my own leg in order to escape?

  Never mind the fact that this cabin is isolated—more than a mile from its nearest neighbor, he said—and that I don’t know anything about tying off severed arteries. Never mind that I would surely bleed to death before I could crawl more than a couple of hundred yards. Let’s say help is close by. Let’s say that if I were able to chop my leg off, it would guarantee my survival. Would I be able to do it then? Would I have the guts and will of a fox or a wolf in the same situation?

  I wonder.

  I wonder just how many people would have an animal’s courage if they were confronted with that decision.

  * * *

  The Twentieth Day

  * * *

  ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the cabin, not a creature was stirring except the poor miserable bastard trapped here in chains.

  * * *

  The Twenty-First Day

  * * *

  Christmas Day.

  And it’s snowing outside, it has been snowing most of the night. What we have here is a white Christmas. Outside the window it’s all picture-postcard stuff, snow falling, snow mantling the trees, the overcast high so that you can see everything in sharp relief. Any minute now, Bing Crosby will come strolling out of the woods singing “White Christmas.” Or he would if he wasn’t dead.

  Now, now, let’s be cheerful here. It’s Christmas Day, it’s a white Christmas, let’s have a little good cheer.

  Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, la la la la. ’Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la.

  All right, that’s enough for now. A man can only take so much good cheer at one time. Too big a jolt and I might OD. Spread it out, make it last, there’s a long long day of celebration ahead.

  Long day ahead for Kerry, too. How will she spend it? Sitting home alone, wondering, remembering how it was with us on Christmases past? Over at Eberhardt’s—he’d have invited her, the circumstances being what they are—or with one of her lady friends?

  With Jim Carpenter?

  Good-looking guy, Carpenter, suave, sophisticated, very successful in the ad business,
eight or nine years closer to her age than I am, wears $800 suits and still has the trim body of an athlete. Besides which, he’s one of her bosses—Bates and Carpenter, San Francisco’s fastest rising ad agency. Maybe he’s been consoling her during the past three weeks, out of the office as well as in. Providing the strong male shoulder, the reassuring words in her time of need. How soon before she goes to bed with him, if she hasn’t already? Tonight, tomorrow night, some night next week—

  Hey, hey, hold it right there.

  Suppose she does go to bed with Jim Carpenter? So what? You stupid jealous schmuck, why shouldn’t she crawl into the sack with him or anybody else if she needs it badly enough? You expect her to keep the home fires burning forever, on blind faith? Stay celibate until she’s a crone? For all she knows you’re dead, pal, dead and buried somewhere—she doesn’t know anything about what happened to you, for Christ’s sake. She’s hurting too, you think you’re the only one? Don’t start condemning her, blaming her for anything.

  Don’t doubt her, not even for one second.

  Don’t stop loving her.

  Heigh-ho, better lighten the mood again. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride a one-horse open sleigh. There, that’s better. That’s the old spirit.