by John Straley
Bloom was standing at the security gate. I went into the bathroom.
My unhappiness was becoming more and more mysterious as I walked up to Bloom at the gate. Before my bag even went through the scanner he took it and pawed through it. He took out my hunting knife.
“This is a weapon, Younger. You can’t have this in the cabin with you.”
“So?”
“So you’ll have to check it as luggage.”
I watched the attendant tag my knife, then I watched it move past the rubber curtain on the conveyor belt. It was small and vulnerable, and I hoped it would be all right, but in fact I never saw it again. A Gouker skinning knife is the finest knife a man can own, and someone else recognized that, too.
Bloom needed to frisk me and he backed me up against the glass partition of the security area and ran his hands under my coat and down my pants. I was thinking of Miles Davis and trying to remember one of the riffs in “Funny Valentine.” Bloom’s hands felt damp and soft as they kneaded the muscles down to the small of my back.
“How’s someone like you stay in shape, Younger?”
“Hard work, clean living, and a nice smile.”
He stood up suddenly and I thanked him. He patted me once on the back as I went out through the doors of the terminal. I looked around and told him to have a nice day.
The plane was late in taking off and they served champagne. The stewardess had an appropriate perky smile but dark eyes that looked like holes in a painting. Our fingertips brushed slightly as I took the plastic cup of champagne from her hands.
Just after we took off, the jet banked steeply to the east and we flew back over the airport. I looked down on my little toy town. Toy post office and windup trucks. I thought about the book from the woman who used to love me sitting on the bench of the Pioneer Home. I could see my house with the blue flower boxes hanging over the water on the second floor. I thought I saw someone pedaling a bike with thick tires and a large basket past my front door.
I didn’t notice I was crying until a stewardess came by and gave me a tissue to blow my nose in. Her arm and wrist were slender and they formed a pretty arch, like the limb of a fruit tree, as she poked the tissue into my clenched fist. She didn’t look at my eyes. It was a perfect gesture, an expression of indifference and concern, which is the most a drunk can ask for.
SIX
THE STATE SPARED no expense on razor ribbon wire when they decided to beef up security around the Lemon Creek Correctional Institution. Rounding the last curve, it looks like you’re driving up on the Maginot Line. The prison is tucked back up a newly glaciated valley on the banks of Lemon Creek. There are scrubby spruce and alder trees on both sides of the creek, and I always have the feeling the glacier is just over my shoulder. The water of the creek is silty, almost opaque. The current is slow as the creek begins to meander at sea level toward the salt water of Gastineau Channel. It flows past the prison and down past several trailer parks. There used to be wrecked cars on the shores to hold the banks in place. In a few of the ragged alders kids from the trailer parks had tried to hang rope swings from the skinny limbs until the creek sucked the trees, root systems and all, into the slow current. One rope fluttered in the dirty water. The children had given up trying to swing over the creek and were inside their trailers watching TV.
From the exercise yard a prisoner could see eagles circling the garbage on the creek bank. Once when I was there I saw a raven hopping outside the fence line with a waxed-paper bag of french fries dripping from his beak. Raven who stole light from the darkness.
I was prepared for the strip search inside the visitors’ decompression lockup. They knew me by my first name, and they took the time to look into “my third eye,” as the grinning security guard referred to it. It’s an easy procedure, kind of like walk-in surgery. There are no pen lights or tongue depressors. They just ask you to take your clothes off and squat and cough as hard as you can and then they see if anything falls out. The guard was nice about it. Maybe it was because he knew me.
I put my clothes back on and clipped a visitor s tag onto my shirt. All I had was my 3-by-5 spiral notebook and a pencil; everything else was in a locker. I stood in the sealed passageway to the visitors’ interview rooms. One wall was covered with bulletproof one-way reflective glass. I checked my hair and smiled. The buzzer sounded and then I heard the clunk of a heavy lock giving way. A voice from a speaker informed me, “We’ll bring Hawkes up to room four, Cecil.”
The door swung open. Down a hall were several locked doors with bulletproof windows. A young guard with an empty holster stood beside an open door. “Hawkes will be right up.”
I walked past the interview rooms. In one, a woman had her head down on the table, resting her forehead on her hands, and an Eskimo man was banging his palms on the tabletop.
I walked into room four. It was about six feet by ten feet and at the far end was another door with a window that looked out on to the main prison hallway, which led from the dorm rooms to the stairwell that goes to the shop. Men walked past slowly as if ambling down to the corner for a pack of smokes. Some were wearing prison blues; others, white T-shirts. All of them looked in at me and several of them waved. One held up a slip of paper on which he had written, “APPEAL?” I shrugged, holding my hands out in a gesture of helplessness.
After a few minutes a guard stood at the window holding a young man by the arm. He unlocked the door and led the man in. Then he pointed to the phone on my left and said, “Dial zero when you’re done, Cecil.” I thanked him and he left, locking the door behind him.
The door snapped shut with a sudden authority, making me wince. I thought of the eagle circling above the sky blue ice of the glacier, I thought of the raven hopping on the curb with the red thread on his leg, far away from here, very far.
Alvin Hawkes came into the room and sat across the table. His hands were crossed in front of him. He was only a wiry five foot six or seven. He wore wire-rimmed reading glasses. He had the stubble of a recently shaved head and the purple bruises of homemade tattoos on the backs of his hands. His left hand had a symbol for infinity on it and the word “GODS” was written across the knuckles of the right.
He looked at me, squinting and wrinkling his nose. Either he was curious or he thought something I was wearing would be good to eat. Hawkes had small blue eyes that were deeply set. His jaw muscles flexed as I began to talk.
“My name is Cecil Younger. I’m a private detective. I’ve been hired by Louis Victor’s mother to find out why you killed her son.”
Now his smile became broad as if it were clear that everything was funny, including me. He began to chuckle and then laugh. It was a laugh you heard a lot in jail. It sounded like rocks clattering far back in a cave.
“It was nice of you to come see me.” He stood up and extended his hand. “Why don’t you dial zero, I’ve got to go to the library.”
“You won’t talk to me?”
“It doesn’t show much respect, Mr. Younger, to come here and start talking to me about a killing. A killing I have been suspected of committing, arrested for, convicted for, and am now serving a sentence for. Have you talked to my lawyer?”
“No—would that make a difference?”
“Well. There it is.” And he held his hands palms up with his elbows pressed tightly to his sides. He was smiling. “There it is.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t follow you.”
“Would it make a difference? That’s a good question … to talk to my lawyer, I mean. I don’t think it would. Talking to lawyers has never made a difference as far as I can tell.” He sat back down. “What does she want to know?”
“Why did you kill her son?”
“She doesn’t know? She really doesn’t know?” He leaned back and put one elbow up on the back of his chair.
“There was a time when my lawyers wanted to pursue… I don’t know what you’d call it—a gambit—I don’t know—a strategy, to make the cops believe that I was … unstable�
�emotionally. They believed that I could gain some advantage. Sentencing consideration. You can see that backfired.” He smiled broadly and gestured around the cell like a character actor in a drawing-room comedy. He paused briefly, then he leaned forward and lowered his voice.
“I played along with them because I got advice, scientific advice, that I should exercise restraint and I should be patient with what the lawyers had to say.” For the first time he looked at me directly and his stare didn’t waver. “I knew you were coming,” he said deliberately.
“How did you know?”
He smiled sweetly again, as if he were worried about me.
“I was informed. I understand now that I should tell you the whole truth.”
I was a little uncomfortable with his choice of words.
“What is the whole truth?”
“Do you know much about science? Have you ever heard of alpha wave ionizers?”
“No.” I opened my notebook and held my pencil attentively: the scribe.
“Well, you can read about them. I’ve read about them a lot. You know, the earth generates energy. Well, most of it comes from the sun, but that’s different, that is solar energy, but the earth generates its own from the dense atmosphere that gathers in the north. You are familiar with the aurora borealis? The energy that I’m speaking of is similar, yet it takes the form of alpha wave particles.” He took my notebook and drew a squiggle on my pad. “Where do you think radio waves go? TV? All of the taxi cabs have radios. We are surrounded by wave particles; it’s like we’re swimming in them, but you can’t hear them or see them. If you said you could you’d be crazy. That’s because they aren’t organic, that’s because they don’t come from the earth itself.”
He leaned forward and spoke slowly so I would have time to understand this next: “Now this is true. Everybody is born with the ability to receive the earth’s transmissions, but most people can’t. The further north you go, the better your ability to receive. The earth concentrates the waves near the pole.”
I hadn’t started writing and he was looking at my pad. I quickly wrote the date and then the words, “True … concentrated transmissions.”
“This is the truth. I know it may be hard for you to accept but something extraordinary has happened to me. There is a thin flap of membrane that anyone can open up by concentration. You have it. Everybody has it.” He pointed to my ear. “But to open it you must have intense powers of concentration. I have opened that flap. I am free to receive.”
“Who is speaking to you?”
“Now, put yourself in my place. I mean, you start hearing voices. That’s crazy, right? So you have to start sorting it out. That confused me for a long time. I was getting a lot of signals; there are so many signals, many voices, if you will. Think about it: tree voices, cloud voices, fish voices. I was getting them all.” He leaned back. “It was weird.” Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “It takes concentration to be able to tune them out, but that is the Devil for you. That’s the Devil for you, because the key to remember is… don’t tune them out. Tune them in.”
His voice was quavering. He leaned forward. “You can actually tune them in all together and get one strong signal, one incredibly strong signal.”
He stopped and in an instant became aware of himself and sat back, a little embarrassed. Where at first he was coy he was now taut, staring like a bear assessing a photographer. At the same time he couldn’t shed that film of self-awareness. There was something ironic about him, in his gestures, the fake professorial diction, as if he were absorbed by his own act, unable to break out of character.
“I knew the voices were the truth. But as weird as it was, I had to prove it to other people.”
He reached into his pockets and took out two small pieces of tinfoil. He formed them with his thumbs until they were shaped like cups. Then he put the cups over his ears. He paused and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, listened for a moment, nodded as if confirming something he had every confidence in and then smiled.
“I’ve now blocked the transmissions; I can’t hear a thing. I can do this a hundred times and a hundred times the voices stop. These are verifiable and reproducible results. This is scientific. It’s not just my word for it. There has to be a physical basis for the voices or how else could the foil stop them?”
A white man with a braided beard walked by on the prison side of the glass and made a face by pulling out his cheeks with his forefingers and waggling his tongue around. I waved and he walked on.
“Funny? I know.” Hawkes smiled confidently. “Everyone thinks it’s funny but it won’t be so funny when I harness the full potential of these waves.”
“Are you seeing a doctor in here, Alvin? Someone you can tell about these voices?”
He fished into his shirt pocket for a can of snoose, tapped the lid twice with his fingertips, twisted the lid off, and took a two-finger dip of tobacco. “Don’t need a doctor. The reason I’m the way I am is I have terrific control. This is true. I know I’m different from everybody else here and they know it, too.” As he said the word “they,” he pointed his thumb toward the ceiling, leaving a question in my mind as to who “they” referred to.
“Listen, Alvin, I know you’ve been asked this already, but are you sorry for killing Louis Victor? Thinking about it, does it make you sad?”
He leaned forward again. He had the shadow of a scar above his left cheek. His chest was shiny and showed a dark stubble and one razor nick above the top button of his shirt. He squinted at me as if he were trying to read something written on the tip of my nose.
“I didn’t kill Louis Victor,” he wheezed. “God killed him. God reached up through the earth and killed him.”
“Are you an agent of God, Alvin?”
“We’re all agents of God, some of us are just more attentive.”
“Did God tell you to kill Louis Victor?”
“No, God told everything on earth to kill him, and I just happened to be listening.”
He leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses with a professorial gesture. “Do you remember in the story of Jonah when God directs the worm to eat the roots of the fig tree that was shading Jonah out in front of the temple? That was just a fable, he was really directing the whole earth to teach Jonah a lesson. You can’t really blame it all on the worm. I am a worm, you are a worm, and all of the guards and lawyers are, too. It’s true, you see. When I was younger I was confused by that, but not now. Worms. I used to be dirty and I was lazy. I couldn’t pay attention to what was being said. I was covered with bacteria. Bacteria breeds in body hair. I used to have lots of hair and my stepfather used to whip me for having my hair too long. He was being like the worm, moving and sort of swimming in the earth surrounded by God.”
“Who killed Louis Victor, Alvin?”
“You mean who actually stopped the electrical workings of his brain?”
“Yes.”
Hawkes looked down. I could hear him flicking his thumbnail under the table. He closed his eyes.
“You know, before I gained so much control I was very sinful. I did terrible things.”
“What did you do, Alvin?”
He was forcing his eyes shut now, squeezing them shut, painfully tight, as if trying to keep out any trace of light. Then he covered his eyes with his fists. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving.
“I used bad language. I had sex with dirty girls whose whole bodies stank with sin. I even had the clap. I was mean to my mother and to my grandmother. I was mean to children in school. God doesn’t like that. God doesn’t like that. But when I first started to hear the voices they told me that I was forgiven.”
“Did God forgive you for killing Louis?”
His body appeared to be rigid, and I could see sweat soaking through the armpits of his prison blues.
“Louis was going to kill me. He was going to turn into a bear and eat me. Bears and humans eat the same kinds of food. Louis was going to eat me, and I had to feed h
im to the bear first. I was very, very confused. I was hearing crazy things. I thought I was God. That couldn’t be true, could it? That’s just crazy, after all of the… sinful things I had done. That couldn’t be true, could it?”
He looked at me with a frantic questioning expression, eyes darting back and forth.
“Finally, I couldn’t keep it in, and I had to tell Louis about the voices and about what kinds of things they were saying. He started yelling at me. He said he had to get rid of me. That’s what he said—get rid of me. Not fire me or let me go, but get rid of me. His son and daughter were on the boat and he said that he was going to sleep with them. I remember him with a gun in his hand. I knew he was going to kill me.”
Hawkes stood up. His voice was urgent and his eyes were focused on the blank space next to the door.
“I walked toward him as he was bending down by the bed. He stood up and hit me.” Hawkes crouched in a wrestler’s stance, still staring at the space in front of the door. “I remember charging him and we tumbled out the door. I was thrown back inside, and I remember him coming at me with a splitting maul.”
He covered his ears, and shook his head slowly and intently as if he were easing into a trance. “I don’t remember any more, the voices won’t let me remember any more. All they say is crazy stuff. They say I’m a thunder storm. I’m a hurricane. That I could flatten this prison. The voices say that I’m stronger than God. That’s crazy. How could God create something stronger than himself?”
He sat down, one hand flat on the table. He flicked his thumbnail. He focused on it.
“The only thing I know is the membrane receiver popped open and then shut and then opened again when I talked to the cops. I remember it clearly, the pop in my inner ear. I remember flying on a helicopter. I remember sitting in a room like this with the troopers. I remember talking to the lawyers. But something won’t let me remember anything about killing Louis.”
“Do you remember anything at all about that day?”
“Only that it was windy. That night there were two boats in the harbor, Louis’s and a troller. Louis’s boat had to reset its anchor because of the wind. Louis was angry because his son had anchored so close to the beach.”
