Hocus Pocus Part 5

HE WAS THE first convict I heard use the expression "the PB." He told me that sometimes he wished he had "the PB." I thought he meant "TB," short for "tuberculosis," another common affliction at the prison-common enough that I have it now.

It turned out that "PB" was short for "Parole Board," which is what the convicts called AIDS.

That was when we first met, back in 1991, when he said that sometimes he wished he had the PB, and long before I myself contracted TB.

Alphabet soup!

HE WAS HUNGRY for descriptions of this valley, to which he had been sentenced for the rest of his life and where he could expect to be buried, but which he had never seen. Not only the convicts but their visitors, too, were kept as ignorant as possible of the precise geographical situation of the prison, so that anybody escaping would have no clear idea of what to watch out for or which way to go.

Visitors were brought into the cul-de-sac of the valley from Rochester in buses with blacked-out windows. Convicts themselves were delivered in windowless steel boxes capable of holding 10 of them wearing leg irons and handcuffs, mounted on the beds of trucks. The buses and the steel boxes were never opened until they were well inside the prison walls.

These were exceedingly dangerous and resourceful criminals, after all. While the j.a.panese had taken over the operation of Athena by the time I got there, hoping to operate it at a profit, the blacked-out buses and steel boxes had been in use long before they got there. Those morbid forms of transportation became a common sight on the road to and from Rochester in maybe 1977, about 2 years after I and my little family took up residence in Scipio.

The only change the j.a.panese made in the vehicles, which was under way when I went to work over there in 1991, was to remount the old steel boxes on new j.a.panese trucks.

SO IT WAS in violation of long-standing prison policy that I told Alton Darwin and other lifers all they wanted to know about the valley. I thought they were ent.i.tled to know about the great forest, which was their forest now, and the beautiful lake, which was their lake now, and the beautiful little college, which was where the music from the bells was coming from.

And of course, this enriched their dreams of escaping, but what were those but what we could call in any other context the virtue hope? I never thought they would ever really get out of here and make use of the knowledge I had given them of the countryside, and neither did they.

I USED TO do the same sort of thing in Vietnam, too, helping mortally wounded soldiers dream that they would soon be well and home again.

Why not?

I AM AS sorry as anybody that Darwin and all the rest really tasted freedom. They were horrible news for themselves and everyone. A lot of them were real homicidal maniacs. Darwin wasn't 1 of those, but even as the convicts were crossing the ice to Scipio, he was giving orders as if he were an Emperor, as if the break were his idea, although he had had nothing to do with it. He hadn't known it was coming.

Those who had actually breached the walls and opened the cells had come down from Rochester to free only 1 convict. They got him, and they were headed out of the valley and had no interest in conquering Scipio and its little army of 6 regular policemen and 3 unarmed campus cops, and an unknown number of firearms in private hands.

ALTON DARWIN WAS the first example I had ever seen of leadership in the raw. He was a man without any badges of rank, and with no previously existing organization or widely understood plan of action. He had been a modest, unremarkable man in prison. The moment he got out, though, sudden delusions of grandeur made him the only man who knew what to do next, which was to attack Scipio, where glory and riches awaited all who dared to follow him.

"Follow me!" he cried, and some did. He was a sociopath, I think, in love with himself and no one else, craving action for its own sake, and indifferent to any long-term consequences, a cla.s.sic Man of Destiny.

MOST DID NOT even follow him down the slope and out onto the ice. They returned to the prison, where they had beds of their own, and shelter from the weather, and food and water, although no heat or electricity. They chose to be good boys, concluding correctly that bad boys roaming free in the valley, but completely surrounded by the forces of law and order, would be shot on sight in a day or 2, or maybe even sooner. They were color-coded, after all.

In the Mohiga Valley, their skin alone sufficed as a prison uniform.

ABOUT HALF OF those who followed Darwin out onto the ice turned back before they reached Scipio. This was before they were fired upon and suffered their first casualty. One of those who went back to the prison told me that he was sickened when he realized how much murder and rape there would be when they reached the other side in just a few minutes.

"I thought about all the little children fast asleep in their beds," he said. He had handed over the gun he had stolen from the prison armory to the man next to him, there in the middle of beautiful Lake Mohiga. "He didn't have a gun," he said, "until I gave him 1."

"Did you wish each other good luck or anything like that?" I asked him.

"We didn't say anything," he told me. "n.o.body was saying anything but the man in front."

"And what was he saying?" I asked.

He replied with terrible emptiness, " 'Follow me, follow me, follow me.' "

"LIFE'S A BAD dream," he said. "Do you know that?"

ALTON DARWIN'S CHARISMATIC delusions of grandeur went on and on. He declared himself to be President of a new country. He set up his headquarters in the Board of Trustees Room of Samoza Hall, with the big long table for his desk.

I visited him there at high noon on the second day after the great escape. He told me that this new country of his was going to cut down the virgin forest on the other side of the lake and sell the wood to the j.a.panese. He would use the money to refurbish the abandoned industrial buildings in Scipio down below. He didn't know yet what they would manufacture, but he was thinking hard about that. He would welcome any suggestions I might have.

n.o.body would dare attack him, he said, for fear he would harm his hostages. He held the entire Board of Trustees captive, but not the College President, Henry "Tex" Johnson, nor his wife, Zuzu. I had come to ask Darwin if he had any idea what had become of Tex and Zuzu. He didn't know.

Zuzu, it would turn out, had been killed by a person or persons unknown, possibly raped, possibly not. We will never know. It was not an ideal time for Forensic Medicine. Tex, meanwhile, was ascending the tower of the library here with a rifle and ammunition. He was going clear to the top, to turn the belfry itself into a sniper's nest.

ALTON DARWIN WAS never worried, no matter how bad things got. He laughed when he heard that paratroops, advancing on foot, had surrounded the prison across the lake and, on our side, were digging in to the west and south of Scipio. State Police and vigilantes had already set up a roadblock at the head of the lake. Alton Darwin laughed as though he had achieved a great victory.

I knew people like that in Vietnam. Jack Patton had that sort of courage. I could be as brave as Jack over there. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was shot at more and killed more people. But I was worried sick most of the time. Jack never worried. He told me so.

I asked him how he could be that way. He said, "I think I must have a screw loose. I can't care about what might happen next to me or anyone."

Alton Darwin had the same untightened screw. He was a convicted ma.s.s murderer, but never showed any remorse that I could see.

DURING MY LAST year in Vietnam, I, too, reacted at press briefings as though our defeats were victories. But I was under orders to do that. That wasn't my natural disposition.

ALTON DARWIN, AND this was true of Jack Patton, too, spoke of trivial and serious matters in the same tone of voice, with the same gestures and facial expressions. Nothing mattered more or less than anything else.

Alton Darwin, I remember, was talking to me with seemingly deep concern about how many of the convicts who had crossed the ice with him to Scipio were deserting, were going back across the ice to the prison, or turning themselves in at the roadblock at the head of the lake in hopes of amnesty. The deserters were worriers. They didn't want to die, and they didn't want to be held responsible, even though many of them were responsible, for the murders and rapes in Scipio.

So I was pondering the desertion problem when Alton Darwin said with exactly the same intensity, "I can skate on ice. Do you believe that?"

"I beg your pardon?" I said.

"I could always roller-skate," he said. "But I never got a chance to ice-skate till this morning."

That morning, with the phones dead and the electricity cut off, with unburied bodies everywhere, and with all the food in Scipio already consumed as though by a locust plague, he had gone up to Cohen Rink and put on ice skates for the first time in his life. After a few tottering steps, he had found himself gliding around and around, and around and around.

"Roller-skating and ice-skating are just about the very same thing!" he told me triumphantly, as though he had made a scientific discovery that was going to throw an entirely new light on what had seemed a hopeless situation. "Same muscles!" he said importantly.

THAT'S WHAT HE was doing when he was fatally shot about an hour later. He was out on the rink, gliding around and around, and around and around. I'd left him in his office, and I a.s.sumed that he was still up there. But there he was on the rink instead, going around and around, and around and around.

A shot rang out, and he fell down.

Several of his followers went to him, and he said something to them, and then he died.

IT WAS A beautiful shot, if Darwin was really the man the College President was shooting at. He could have been shooting at me, since he knew I used to make love to his wife Zuzu when he was out of the house.

If he was shooting at Darwin instead of me, he solved one of the most difficult problems in marksmanship, marksmanship, the same problem solved by Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot President Kennedy, which is where to aim when you are high above your target. the same problem solved by Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot President Kennedy, which is where to aim when you are high above your target.

As I say, "Beautiful shot."

I ASKED LATER what Alton Darwin's last words had been, and was told that they made no sense. His last words had been, "See the n.i.g.g.e.r fly the airplane."

10.

SOMETIMES ALTON DARWIN would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. "Drugs were food," he said. "I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwards. Then it's time to eat stones again."

I THOUGHT VERY little about the prison during the 15 years I was a teacher at Tarkington, as big and brutal as it was across the lake, and growing all the time. When we went picnicking at the head of the lake, or went up to Rochester on some errand or other, I saw plenty of blacked-out buses and steel boxes on the backs of trucks. Alton Darwin might have been in one of those boxes. Then again, since the steel boxes were also used to carry freight, there might have been nothing but Diet Pepsi and toilet paper in there.

Whatever was in there was none of my business until Tarkington fired me.

SOMETIMES WHEN I was playing the bells and getting particularly loud echoes from the prison walls, usually in the dead of the wintertime, I would have the feeling that I was sh.e.l.ling the prison. In Vietnam, conversely, if I happened to be back with the artillery, and the guns were lobbing sh.e.l.ls at who knows what in some jungle, it seemed very much like music, interesting noises for the sake of interesting noises, and nothing more.

DURING A SUMMER field exercise when Jack Patton and I were still cadets, I remember, we were asleep in a tent and the artillery opened up nearby.

We awoke. Jack said to me, "They're playing our tune, Gene. They're playing our tune."

BEFORE I WENT to work at Athena, I had seen only 3 convicts anywhere in the valley. Most people in Scipio hadn't seen even 1. I wouldn't have seen even 1, either, if a truck with a steel box in back hadn't broken down at the head of the lake. I was picnicking there, near the water, with Margaret, my wife, and Mildred, my mother-in-law. Mildred was crazy as a bedbug by then, but Margaret was still sane, and there seemed a good chance that she always would be.

I was only 45, foolishly confident that I would go on teaching here until I reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2010, 9 years from now. What in fact will happen to me in 9 more years? That is like worrying about a cheese spoiling if you don't put it in the refrigerator. What can happen to a pricelessly stinky cheese that hasn't already happened to it?

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, NO danger to herself or anyone else, adored fishing. I had put a worm on her hook for her and pitched it out to a spot that looked promising. She gripped the rod with both hands, sure as always that something miraculous was about to happen.

She was right this time.

I looked up at the top of the bank, and there was a prison truck with smoke pouring out of its engine compartment. There were only 2 guards on board, and 1 of them was the driver. They bailed out. They had already radioed the prison for help. They were both white. This was before the j.a.panese took over Athena as a business proposition, before the road signs all the way from Rochester were in both English and j.a.panese.

It looked as though the truck might catch fire, so the 2 guards unlocked the little door in the back of the steel box and told the prisoners to come out. And then they backed off and waited with sawed-off automatic shotguns leveled at the little door.

Out the prisoners came. There were only 3 of them, clumsy in leg irons, and their handcuffs were shackled to chains around their waists. Two were black and 1 was white, or possibly a light Hispanic. This was before the Supreme Court confirmed that it was indeed cruel and inhuman punishment to confine a person in a place where his or her race was greatly outnumbered by another 1.

The races were still mixed in prisons throughout the country. When I later went to work at Athena, though, there was nothing but people who had been cla.s.sified as Black in there.

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW DID not turn around to see the smoking van and all. She was obsessed by what might happen at any moment at the other end of her fishline. But Margaret and I gawked. For us back then, prisoners were like p.o.r.nography, common things nice people shouldn't want to see, even though the biggest industry by far in this valley was punishment.

When Margaret and I talked about it later, she didn't say it was like p.o.r.nography. She said it was like seeing animals on their way to a slaughterhouse.

WE, IN TURN, must have looked to those convicts like people in Paradise. It was a balmy day in the springtime. A sailboat race was going on to the south of us. The college had just been given 30 little sloops by a grateful parent who had cleaned out the biggest savings and loan bank in California.

Our brand-new Mercedes sedan was parked on the beach nearby. It cost more than my annual salary at Tarkington. The car was a gift from the mother of a student of mine named Pierre LeGrand. His maternal grandfather had been dictator of Haiti, and had taken the treasury of that country with him when he was overthrown. That was why Pierre's mother was so rich. He was very unpopular. He tried to win friends by making expensive gifts to them, but that didn't work, so he tried to hang himself from a girder of the water tower on top of Musket Mountain. I happened to be up there, in the bushes with the wife of the coach of the Tennis Team.

So I cut him down with my Swiss Army knife. That was how I got the Mercedes.

Pierre would have better luck 2 years later, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and a campus joke was that now I had to give the Mercedes back.

So there were plenty of heartaches in what, as I've said, must have looked to those 3 convicts like Paradise. There was no way they could tell that my mother-in-law was as crazy as a bedbug, as long as she kept her back to them. They could not know, and neither could I, of course, that hereditary insanity would hit my pretty wife like a ton of bricks in about 6 months' time and turn her into a hag as scary as her mother.

IF WE HAD had our 2 kids with us on the beach, that would have completed the illusion that we lived in Paradise. They could have depicted another generation that found life as comfortable as we did. Both s.e.xes would have been represented. We had a girl named Melanie and a boy named Eugene Debs Hartke, Jr. But they weren't kids anymore. Melanie was 21, and studying mathematics at Cambridge University in England. Eugene Jr. was completing his senior year at Deerfield Academy in Ma.s.sachusetts, and was 18, and had his own rock-and-roll band, and had composed maybe 100 songs by then.

But Melanie would have spoiled our tableau on the beach. Like my mother until she went to Weight Watchers, she was very heavy. That must be hereditary. If she had kept her back to the convicts, she might at least have concealed the fact that she had a bulbous nose like the late, great, alcoholic comedian W. C. Fields. Melanie, thank goodness, was not also an alcoholic.

But her brother was.