Page 37 of Street of Angels


  The Hole, for a man used to a regular sort of family and to having friends or neighbors near at hand, was like falling down a dark well or maybe like life under a rock, where you can’t see others and others can’t see you, and where yelling for help brings only friendless, hollow echoes. For Mark John, yanked from the safety of his mother’s arms and Flowers Avenue and Jeff Davis Elementary, yanked from small town to small town and one isolated farm to another across the western half of the country, and from friendships never quite fully-formed, the Hole was just more of the same. Certainly, in comparison, it was better than the clamor of life in an Army barracks or a prison cell block.

  #

  In darkness relieved only by dim light that filtered in through the Hole’s small rectangle of tempered glass, he imagined stars overhead. He had been taught the names of the major constellations as a boy, and now he put that knowledge to use, pointing out each one of them as he had learned them from an old ranch hand somewhere in Montana (or was it Colorado?). Pulsing like diamond necklaces on black velvet, the stars seemed to call to him, their massive gravitational forces to pull at him, until he felt as though he might fall right off the face of the earth and into their waiting arms...

  The stars shine in the night sky, and on the horizon a crescent moon rises over low hills. He hears the sound of footfalls. Someone is running but he doesn’t yet know who. Behind him, before him, all around him, stretch miles and miles of plains, every square yard nothing but rock and dust.

  Added to the footfalls he hears breathing and the growing sound of a heartbeat, none of them in sync. He catches a glimpse of running feet, of dust kicked into the moonlit air.

  A fourth sound is added--hoofbeats. At first the hoofbeats are distant or possibly they come from a lone horse. But that is about to quickly change. He sees running feet again, this time moving faster. The frequency and volume of each breath, of each footfall, of each heartbeat, grows. Now they are beginning to come into sync.

  The volume of hoofbeats grows.

  He is in a race in the dark. Up ahead he expects to see the hills drawing closer--and instead sees them receding into the distance. The feet are almost a blur, but they seem to be going nowhere. The hills and the moon are yet more distant, growing eternally inaccessible. Fueled by fear, heartbeat and sharply labored breathing and footfalls are almost one.

  The hoofbeats are no longer that of a lone horse. They are obviously something much more dangerous. It has become the sound of a stampede, and if he doesn’t get out of the way he’ll be trampled underfoot by ten thousand horses. And then, it happens! He falls, tumbling end-over-end-over-end-over-end through the dust, with moon and stars and dirt revolving about his head.

  All is still. No more footfalls, no more running feet. Just sharp breaths and a hammering heart and what could now be, instead of stampeding horses, the roar of a helicopter. He looks up and sees neither horses nor a chopper. A UFO hovers overhead, lights strobing ominously.

  From a black hole in the belly of the ship, a gangplank snakes to the ground. Out spills a horde of little green men. They swarm over him like a tide, grabbing at him, chittering noisily. He hears screams of terror, and knows they are his own.

  The little green men swarm up the gangplank, carrying him aloft. As he is about to be swallowed by the black hole, two disembodied human heads hove into view. He cries out in his struggle to escape, and manages one last look at the earth he’s leaving behind. There, in the UFO’s eerie lights, a little boy is sprawled in the dirt. The face is the same as his own. The legs are not. They are thin sticks lying at impossible angles.

  The crippled boy whimpers. Tears stream down his cheeks. Struggling is futile. He is left behind.

  Again, the disembodied heads loom over him. The little green men sweep him into the darkness…

  He awoke in an icy sweat, with knees drawn up under his chin and his arms shielding his head. Blood pounded in his ears, marking time like a metronome in the vast, eternal darkness. Every joint felt as though bound by ice crystals, and every extremity rimed by frost. He heard creaking noises as his body slowly unfolded itself. His sight registered nothing. Hands outstretched for obstacles, like a man struck blind, he explored the limits of the walls, the bars, the floor around him, until he cracked one knee up against the steel bed frame. Reassured by pain, he lay back down and was at last able to force open his eyes. There was light in the Hole, shadowy, it was true, but nonetheless softly invading the cell from beyond the barred door.

  He wiped tears from his eyes. Years would pass before the disembodied heads resolved themselves into two faces he recognized.

  #

  “I found this and thought it might be something you wanted to keep.”

  Mark John opened one eye for his new cell mate. While the authorities had returned him straight to his old cell from the Hole, Jaime had been transferred out, not just to another cell but to another facility. Thank God, his godawful wall hangings had made the transfer with him--a matchstick Mission church, matchstick burros, matchstick sombreros, and worst of all a matchstick crucifix with its suffering Christ crudely drawn in felt tip marker. Losing Jaime was no loss, that was for sure. But the new man didn’t know the rules and would have to be taught, if he didn’t know better than to touch other people’s stuff. Then again, Jaime had never been much for following the rules of prison etiquette. Mark John hoped his new “cellie” would be different. He didn’t want to see another Jaime taking the old Jaime’s place. If the universe was crazy enough to send him the same--

  “What is it?” he asked tiredly. Coming from the Hole after a month’s isolation left him feeling disjointed and out of sorts, like he’d been drugged, or like he’d stepped from one world into another.

  The new cellie held out his hand, offering a flattened wad of paper held between his thumb and forefinger. “I know it looks like trash, but I thought I better double check before tossing it.”

  Mark John reached for the piece of paper. The other man watched, waiting to see what he would do with it, and was answered with an insolent stare.

  “If you’re worried, I didn’t read it--” he said, turning away to sit at the desk.

  Just so long as the new cellie understood. With barely a glance at what was in his hand, Mark John crushed the flattened wad of paper and tossed it toward the wastebasket.

  “Trash, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry, thought it might be a letter somebody would want to keep.”

  “What’s your name?” Mark John asked.

  “Cal Jankowski. And to save you the time and trouble, yes, Jankowski is a Polish name.”

  Mark John peered over his bunk and saw the man was busy with something at the desk.

  “I never met me a Po-lack.”

  Cal Jankowski was blond, of medium height and build. He snickered in response, evidently unoffended and more interested in what he was doing than in arguing.

  “I said I never met me a Po-lack before.”

  “Well, most of us are smart enough to stay out of jail. That’s probably why a bird like you never met one before.”

  “Oh, a wiseacre Po-lack. So what’s a wiseacre Po-lack doing in the ’Bama Big House?”

  “Wishing I was a whole lot smarter,” he said.

  Even in his disoriented, weakened state, Mark John had to chuckle. He looked again over the edge of his bunk and glimpsed a ruler in his cell mate’s hand. Gradually, he realized a picture of a church was taking shape. He groaned loudly enough for the other man to hear.

  Cal continued to work. “What’s your problem?”

  “You Catholic? My last cellie had crucifixes and churches and--and all that crap--all over the wall. He was one, stupid...”

  Cal waited until Mark John’s voice trailed off in the usual curses, before answering. “No, I’m not Catholic.”

  “Religious, though.”

  “No,” he said, indifferently glancing over h
is shoulder. “My old man was a preacher before he decided he could make more money selling real estate, but I don’t believe in that stuff. It’s just that drawing up plans keeps my hands busy, and churches are some of the most architecturally interesting pieces to work on. Good discipline for the mind.”

  “Hmmh.” Mark John had taken a quarter of mechanical drawing at one of the high schools he’d visited in his life with Bert and Mertie. “So what did you do, stab somebody with a compass?”

  “Is that how the criminal mind works?”

  “Bashed his head in with your T-square, huh?”

  “Resisting arrest, assaulting an officer,” Cal answered reluctantly.

  “What? You a car thief or something? A bank robber?”

  He sighed. “Civil rights marcher,” he admitted.

  “Whooieeee!” Mark John said, laughing. “You really aren’t one of those smart Po-lacks. Here in the South? Don’t you know they don’t like nigger lovers down here?”

  “Everything was fine, until the Gestapo picked me out of the crowd and tickled me with their nightsticks.”

  He turned and tapped his nose with one finger. Mark John had failed to notice the twisted, disfigured nose. Over his right eye there was a bony lump in the middle of his brow ridge.

  “I was in the hospital for nearly a month. They didn’t fix my nose properly, and there wasn’t much to do about the fractured skull, except to let it heal. They arrested me the day I walked out of the hospital.”

  “True story?” Mark John asked.

  “True story.”

  “So then, what you’re saying is--” he began, suddenly tittering.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re innocent!” Mark John exploded in a gale of laughter. “Me too! Me too!”

  The new cellmate stared, lips compressed in a thin smile. He waited until the laughter subsided. “Actually, I did resist arrest, and I did assault an officer--more than one, when it comes down to it.”

  “You’re not saying you were innocent?”

  “I wasn’t about to lie there and let them beat me to death--no, I wasn’t innocent, not innocent as charged, at least.”

  Mark John felt as though the world reeled about his head. Maybe it was the change in coming from Solitary. Maybe it was the shock of Jaime’s sudden transfer. Sometimes he found any change in routine disturbed him. Or was it that he felt almost as if a fresh breeze were blowing through the cell?

  “You’re probably the only honest man in the joint,” he commented at last.

  “But for the grace of God,” Cal muttered in return, blissfully unaware that irony was wasted on his new cellmate.

  Behind him, Mark John swung one leg over the edge of his bunk and rolled out of bed. A second later, he shouldered Jankowski aside and bent over to search the wastebasket.

  “Where’d it go?” He demanded.

  Cal scowled irritably, too preoccupied with the plans for his magnificent cathedral to consider why Mark John might rummage through the trash.

  “Where’d it go?” Mark John screamed, at the same time shoving him away from the desk.

  The suddenness of the attack caught Cal off balance. Except for an old playground trick borrowed perhaps from watching Batman and Robin or the Green Hornet, he would have been sent flying against the cell bars. Instead, he reached out as he fell and grabbed for Mark John’s undershirt. The real trick was to land on his back without injury while planting one foot in the center of his opponent’s chest. Momentum did the rest. The look of sheer terror on Mark John’s face as he spun over his head was almost worth landing in the Alabama State Pen.

  His new cellie’s scream of surprise was cut short by his impact against the bars of their cell. Jankowski rolled to his feet and stood over him, hands on knees, staring down. No blood. Not yet. His legs and arms didn’t seem at odd angles, either. Just a long, drawn out groan.

  “Where did what go?” He demanded.

  “The letter!” Mark John said, groaning still.

  “Letter?”

  “The one you found!” Mark John managed through gritted teeth.

  “Oh.” He swiveled around and saw the letter at once, on the floor underneath his bunk. Scraping it out with his foot, he kicked it in Mark John’s direction.

  “If this was your idea of proving you’re the Alpha male, forget it,” Cal said. “I’m smarter than you and I know how to take care of myself.”

  “What’s an Alpha male?” Mark John asked from the floor. The paper wad was now in his hand, clutched as if it was a diamond.

  “The Alpha--aw, nuts,” he said, falling onto his bunk, knowing he was wasting his breath. It was obvious his new cell mate was uneducated and unstable, and it was perfectly obvious to him that he needed to quickly learn how to deal with the man, both to save his own sanity and to keep out of trouble with the prison authorities.

  “Think you could teach me how to draw like you?”

  Cal was a man of deep thought and deeper concentration, sinking quickly into a world of his own to consider his problems and how to deal with them, when the voice seemingly spoke from out of a subterranean place in his consciousness.

  “What?” He asked, unsure of whether he’d heard a voice or not.

  “I said, could you teach me how to draw like that--houses and churches and stuff? You know?”

  “Teach you drafting, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  He exhaled through pursed lips. He was thinking. “It’s not like we have the proper instruments--the proper tools or books,” he said doubtfully.

  “We could make them or maybe order them from the outside,” Mark John said, slowly getting to his feet. He waved both hands, his excitement growing. “We could maybe see if there’s something in the prison library!”

  Cal stared from his bunk, thinking of the possibilities. Even without the proper tools, he had always been able to improvise. A tack and a piece of string knotted around a Ticonderoga pencil stub served for a compass. A beat up, six-inch transparent plastic ruler stood in for a professional one, while a balsa wood yardstick cut into two pieces and tacked together approximated his T-square. He couldn’t do precision work with such garbage for instruments, but in the nearly forty-two months he’d spent in the pen, he’d nevertheless been able to keep himself sharp by making do. And as a former architecture student, now prisoner of the State of Alabama, it wasn’t like he was seeing big commissions for his drawings of houses, churches, and museums, all executed on college-ruled paper. He wondered if training an unstable mind in the art and science of draftsmanship, even of architecture, could properly channel it, give it better foundations or moorings, or if in the end he would simply have himself an unstable draftsman for a cellie. He certainly didn’t have any inflated hopes of someday raising the man to his own level of skill and knowledge.

  “I guess we could try,” he said, still uncertain, thinking it would be little better than an experiment.

  “Oh, not try,” Mark John corrected him, as he climbed back onto his bunk. “It’s my chance man, I’ve always wished I could draw like that. I know we can do it--we’ll start tomorrow.”

  “All right, okay,” Cal muttered, unbuttoning his jeans in preparation for bed. When his head hit the pillow and the lights went down on the cell block moments later, he was wondering about his cell mate’s letter. What had that been about? Had the man forgotten about it? Would he just as easily forget about wanting to learn drafting by morning? Just how unstable was he?

  “Hey, man,” Mark John said in the half-light, the darkest it gets on a cell block because of security lighting.

  “Yes?” He responded. He wasn’t one to use yeah in answering anyone. Like his drawings, his mind was too orderly, too disciplined, to sink quite that far into verbal laziness.

  “Why would you care about some Negro’s rights?”

  Momentarily stunned, he didn’t answer. No one ever asked him that question in prison; instead, it was
always about why he was a nigger lover. Mark John’s question gave him pause; it seemed to suggest an open mind, which he wouldn’t have expected from his new cellie.

  “You still there?” Mark John asked, poking his head over the edge of his bunk. “You out for the count?”

  “I’m here, don’t worry, I haven’t gone anywhere,” he said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You really want an answer?”

  “Sure.”

  He sighed, not wishing to embroil himself in a lengthy discussion or to provoke another wrestling match between the two of them.

  “You promise to think about it rationally?” He asked.

  “Rationally? Depends what you mean by that.”

  Cal kept his groan to himself. “I mean no heated arguments or fights about it. It’s late, all right?”

  “Oh, sure, rationally. No problem.”

  “Okay,” he said, settling in his mind the approach he wanted to take. “It all has to do with evolution and the dignity of man at the top of the evolutionary ladder. If I don’t allow someone of a different skin color the same rights I have, how can I expect to keep my own rights?”

  There was silence from the top bunk. No rejoinders, no questions. For the moment, not even the sound of breathing. He felt the bed shake. Then he heard it, muffled laughter, like someone using a pillow to deaden the sound. It went on for a long time.

  After a brief silence, he heard Mark John call his name. “Cal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think maybe you could teach me that judo stuff, too?”

  ****

  Chapter 46

  Mertie’s penmanship had never been what you would call elegant. It wasn’t exactly childish, either, in that overly optimistic way in which some women write, with flower blossoms replacing the dots over i’s, and smiley faces peeping out at you from the o’s. It was simply the handwriting of someone who’d never had the proper kind of instruction or enough of it. Perhaps she’d been pulled out of school at the age when she was just about to pick up the knack of writing cursive, just about but not quite.

  Mark John was one of the few people who could interpret her chicken scratches without difficulty, which made sense, though he didn’t know it. He could not yet remember being pulled out of school at about the time he was just about to learn cursive, and that it was Mertie’s handwriting he emulated, copying her scrawl for practice as they drove cross country, always one step ahead of pursuit of one kind or another. One kind or another meaning not always pursuit by the law. Bert didn’t much discriminate between offending the law or others as lawless as himself. He always figured it was a big country--as long as he kept moving, a moving target had the advantage, a philosophy that worked for him for a long time. His current imprisonment only proved that philosophy, since he’d been arrested after stopping in one place for too long. But enough about Bert.