Jude Page 18

  The urge to fight hadn’t magically left him either. It was as if his battles in prison had opened a new window into his soul, and what had been a sport had turned into an addiction. As with most addictions, he didn’t discover the strength of it until he had to give it up. Even with the Benito scare the craving didn’t just go away. He found the need remained, like an alcoholic’s thirst. The smallest things could trigger it—the wrong word, a suspicious glance, the accidental knock of shoulders in a crowded hallway. Jude kept his fists stuffed deep in his pockets and his head down, but the energy needed to come out somewhere. He tried lifting at the weight pile, but that only seemed to make it worse. He always seemed to come off a workout itching to fight.

  He stopped lifting, but he knew he needed to find something else. Then he discovered running. He loved feeling the pain bursting in his lungs and the exhaustion in his legs. He loved feeling it and plowing through anyway. It reminded him of the struggle in a really good fight, when you felt the only thing that kept you going was stubbornness.

  For the first year Jude felt that sheer stubbornness was the only thing that kept him going with the studying as well. On weekends he had help from volunteers who taught classes at the prison, but during the week he studied on his own, and that was hard—he wasn’t sure if he could have made it through without Mack.

  Mack was his dishwashing partner. With all the time he’d spent in the infirmary and in seg, Jude had worked only a few days, but when he returned, he was back in his old spot, and Mack retrieved a thick book from his back pocket and started reading. Jude was fresh off of Benito at the time, and he didn’t want to start a fight, so he washed without complaining. He put up with it for three days before he asked Fats if he knew anything about his work partner.

  “Poor bastard,” Fats said. “It wouldn’t hurt to give him a couple weeks’ rest.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “He’s been on dishwashing duty for God knows how long. Years.”

  “Shouldn’t he have moved up to loading and unloading the machines at least?”

  “It’s a crime he’s in the kitchen at all. He’s got a Ph.D. in science or some crazy shit. He don’t look like a Ph.D., does he? Big as a damn truck.”

  “Is that how he got his name?” Jude wondered.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. That or Mack’s just his name. Anyway, the story is that he pissed off the warden, and the warden said he wasn’t no better than any other convict. That all his brains and degrees didn’t make a damn bit of difference here, and he could just spend the rest of his sentence washing dishes.”

  “How long is his sentence?”

  Fats made a face. “He’s a lifer. And the whole time you’ve been in seg, they didn’t assign him anyone else to take your place.”

  Over the next week Jude washed in silence and let Mack read. It was a big book, and Jude tried to catch a glimpse of the title, but Mack always kept it folded open. Finally Jude worked up the courage to say, “Hey, if I’m going to do all the dishes, at least you could help break the monotony.”

  “I’m reading,” Mack said, not looking up.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Why don’t you read a couple pages out loud?”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Try me.”

  To Jude’s surprise, Mack did. And he was right, Jude didn’t like it. Or rather, he didn’t understand it, but when Mack stopped after a few pages and said, “Well?” Jude said, “Beats just standing here.”

  As Mack kept reading, Jude was able to follow a bit better, and by the end of the day Jude was engrossed in the story. When Mack closed the book, Jude said, “Hey, that’s not too bad. What is it?”

  “Moby Dick.”

  Jude recognized the name. “I heard of that.”

  Mack smiled, and Jude knew that it was a stupid thing to say.

  “I thought you were a scientist or something,” Jude went on quickly.

  “I used to teach science, but I minored in English as an undergrad,” Mack said.

  “I’m gonna get my degree,” Jude told him.

  “Are you thinking of majoring in English?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  The next day Mack opened the book and asked, “Do you want me to go on?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  The guys in the kitchen started calling their sink the book club. It took several months and a score of books before Jude ventured to voice an opinion, but by the end of the first year Mack had become Jude’s unofficial teacher.

  With a lot of hard work he was able to pass his GED in under a year, and one of the weekend volunteers recommended him for a job in the prison office, but Jude turned it down to stay with Mack. He began a correspondence program to earn his college degree, and he told Mack he wanted to major in English lit. Six months later he was offered another position, and this time Mack got wind of it before Jude had a chance to turn it down.

  “Take the damn job,” Mack said. “We can still work in the evenings, and when you get out, you don’t want the prison kitchen to be the only job you ever had. You may be a hotshot honors student now, but you still need work experience—something better than washing dishes.”

  So Jude went to work in the prison offices, though he often told Mack that washing dishes with him beat the hell out of filing and learning to type. Prison time, usually hard to fill, was no problem for Jude. He studied every chance he got and actually had to reserve time for cards with Fats and Old Man River. But Jude still had his bad nights—they were the nights that he thought of Harry.

  IN THE WINTER of Jude’s fourth year Old Man River caught a cold. Instead of clearing up, it hung on with a stubbornness equal to River’s own and ultimately turned into pneumonia. He was moved into the infirmary, and Jude knew the old man wasn’t coming back when they assigned Jude a new roommate.

  River knew it too. They had given him one of the few private rooms, and that was always a sure sign. He complained about it to Jude.

  “Damn people, they stick you in a tiny cell you’re supposed to share with another man, make sure you never have a moment alone to yourself for fifty goddamned years—not even to go to the bathroom—and as soon as you start to get used to it, they stick you in a room alone to die. Now, I ask you, does that make any sense?”

  “No,” Jude said.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not going to die? That I still have a good bit of life left in these old bones?”

  “No,” Jude said.

  “Goddamned unfeeling bastard,” River said with satisfaction. “You were never one for bullshit, I’ll give you that, and you were the only cellmate I ever had who didn’t stink to high heaven.”

  “Okay, what do you want, River?” Jude said. Over the years he had come to realize that River gave out his doubtful attempts at praise only when he wanted something.

  “Nothing,” the old man snapped irritably. “Why do you assume I want something?”

  Jude waited.

  “And what if I do want something? Isn’t a dying man allowed a last request?”

  “Sure. Of course. What is it?”

  “I want you to hear my confession,” River said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do I look like I have time to kid?”

  “All right, let’s get this over with,” Jude said.

  River pulled a cigarette from the packet on his bedside table, lit it, and took a deep drag. Exhaling, he said, “I never told you the story of what I did to end up here, did I?”

  “Armed robbery, wasn’t it?”

  “Armed robbery,” the old man chuckled. “That makes it sound so serious. I went into a drugstore with a lousy Derringer—at least thirty years old—that I stole from my grandfather’s dresser, and you know what the take was, that is if I had gotten away with it? Grand total of twenty-four dollars and thirty-three cents.” He laughed, his mouth opening wide enough for Jude to see the fillings in his back teeth. “Armed robbery. Oh yeah. O
h yeah.

  “It was all because I wanted to take my girl out that weekend and show her a good time, and I needed some cash. It was the only way to get enough. Tell you the truth, I’d done it a couple of times before without a hitch. They always handed over the money without a peep. I was smart and I always went for the places that wouldn’t have a whole lot lying around. I thought, who’s gonna make a fuss about a few bucks?

  “And I was right. I kept myself in cash and no one got hurt, but then there was this guy, this fucking guy,” and River’s voice thickened with anger. “You know, it was partly my fault. I should’ve known. He was one of those foreigners, from one of those Arab countries or something. A brother wouldn’t have been so tightfisted, and a white man would have been smarter, but this guy, this guy, he says that he’s not going to give me a dime. I got hot under the collar, and I started waving the gun around. He caved in and opened the register, supposedly to get the money, and what do you think? The guy came up with a piece. It was pure instinct. I pulled the trigger and the damn bullet hit him, I swear, right between the eyes.

  “A woman came running out of the back screaming her head off, and I fired at her. She went down, and I leaned over the counter to get the cash out of the register. I was so pissed off I cleaned it out. That was my first mistake. Usually I just went for the bills and left the change, but this time I didn’t want to leave them with a penny. All told, it was eighteen dollars in bills and six dollars and thirty-three cents in change.

  “And just as I was leaving this couple walks into the store. I mean, it was two in the morning and they stroll in like it’s the middle of the afternoon. If it wasn’t for them, I still could have gotten away clean. I shot them on my way out, and that was my second mistake. I was worried about being identified, but taking the time to shoot them slowed me down enough that the police were able to get me just a couple of blocks away.

  “I was just a stupid kid. I was so jazzed I hadn’t thought to get rid of the gun, but I don’t suppose that would have made much difference anyway because I had blood on my clothes and my shoes, and my fingerprints were all over the cash register.

  “So the way I figure it, that was pretty much the last day of my life. Since then I just been doing what other men told me to do—sleeping when they told me to sleep, eating when they told me to eat. That robbery was the last real act of my life, and all because—”

  He broke off abruptly and sat there, the cigarette still burning between his fingers. It had burned itself almost to the filter, but he took a short drag to smoke it to the nub.

  “I been here a long time. Fifty-six years, I think. Maybe it’s fifty-five or fifty-seven. I’m starting to lose track, but that’s a long time to go between the last day of your life and your reward in heaven. I been waiting a long time—a real long time—and I don’t guess I need to tell you that to make it through that kind of time, you need something. Something to hold on to.”

  Jude nodded. He knew.

  “Well, this is what I never told anybody. The thing I held on to was that one shot. God help me, I’m proud of that shot. My first try, bang, through the forehead.” He went to take another drag, but he found that the cigarette had gone out. He flicked it to the floor.

  “My lawyer told me the reason I didn’t get the chair was that I only managed to kill the one guy. The other three pulled through. I might not even have gotten life if the guy hadn’t died.” River paused, and when he spoke next, he looked Jude straight in the eye.

  “I been going to service for near fifty years now, and for fifty years I’ve been hearing about forgiveness. You’ve got to forgive, and if you don’t, you won’t be forgiven your sins. I didn’t try too hard. I always thought it would just come with time, but it hasn’t. I spent so much time being proud of that shot, and now it’s too late. I can’t forgive him.”

  “Him?” Jude said.

  “The only reason I’m here and he’s dead is that he was so greedy he couldn’t spare me twenty-four dollars and thirty-three cents. So I’m proud of that goddamned shot. Right between the eyes. I couldn’t have lived through the last fifty years without it, and now I can’t give it up. I can’t give it up.”

  “That’s okay. You’re trying. I think that makes a difference.”

  “You think so?” River asked hopefully.

  Jude had no idea, but he wanted to say anything he could to comfort his friend. “I’m sure it does.”

  “I don’t know when it happened,” River said. “I don’t know when it turned into something that I needed to keep going.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you ever look around at all the men here, look at yourself, and think, God, what a waste? What a shameless waste? I think that’s what did it for me. I saw the waste of my life and I thought, there’s got to be a reason. It’s got to be somebody’s fault, and I figured I was bearing the punishment, I didn’t have to carry the blame, too. That’s just too much.”

  Jude thought of Nick and his death—how no one wanted to blame him. He had died, so he couldn’t bear the burden of guilt as well. Then Jude thought of Harry. But it really was Harry’s fault he was here, he told himself.

  “You tell me,” River said. “Tell me the truth, now. Whose fault do you think it was?”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to say, “It was your fault. Of course it was your fault.” Instead he said, “Why can’t you share it?”

  “Share it?” the old man repeated. “Share it? That don’t solve anything. That just makes it worse.”

  “How does it make it worse?” Jude asked.

  The old man explained, and his answer made more sense than anything Jude had heard before. He said, “If we share it, then I need to forgive two people instead of just one, and if I can’t forgive him, how the hell can I forgive myself?”

  34

  JUDE WAS AT the end of his fourth year, he had three quarters of the credits he needed to graduate from college, he’d gone through two room-mates since River and almost all the decent books in the prison library, but he had never gotten a visitor since the day Anna and Harry came. It had been more than two hundred Sundays without his name showing up once on the list. Until that particular Sunday.

  Jude was playing poker with Fats and Hammerhead and Mack as the guard read out the list of inmates.

  “Hey,” Fats said, “didn’t they just call your name?”

  “You’re stalling,” Jude accused him. “Bite the bullet and call the bet. Unless you want to fold?”

  “Screw you, I’m taking you for all you’re worth.”

  But before they could finish the hand, a guard walked up to them. “What are you, deaf? Get your ass up there.”

  Jude looked up. “What?”

  “If you want to see your visitor, I’d suggest you move it.”

  “I told you,” Fats crowed. “It’s a forfeit.”

  But Jude didn’t even hear him. A visitor, he thought. He had a visitor. He fought off a wave of nausea. It was Anna. Who else could it be?

  Since he’d been in jail, she’d won a second two-year term, and she would be up for a third this coming fall. However, he hadn’t heard this from her; he’d discovered this through old copies of the newspaper in the prison library. He also found out from the paper that she and Harry had gotten married during her second term. Since reading about her marriage, he’d stopped expecting to hear from her. He knew that Harry would do his best to keep them apart, but Jude decided that was fine. He could wait until he really had something to show her—like a letter of acceptance to law school.

  Now that she was here, he didn’t know whether to be excited or disappointed. He didn’t want their reunion to be like this, here, when he didn’t even have his college degree yet, but he also couldn’t just leave her sitting there.

  He stood, let the guard cuff him, and followed the others through the hallways to the visiting rooms. He tried to look calm, but he could feel the muscles of his legs trembling as if he had just finished one of his
long runs. The guard opened the door, let him in, and closed it behind him.

  It wasn’t Anna. Or even Harry. It was a complete stranger.

  He was a young man, blond with model-perfect features behind horn-rimmed glasses.

  “I think you’ve made a mistake,” Jude said.

  The young man shook his head. “I haven’t made a mistake. But I guess you don’t remember me, Jude.”

  Jude. He had called him Jude. No one was supposed to know he was Jude here. His dummy prison file was supposed to protect his identity. “Should I?” Jude managed to ask.

  “I guess there’s no real reason you would.” The young man smiled ruefully. “I’m Davis Marshall.”

  “Davis Marshall,” Jude repeated, and the name was familiar.

  “I was in your class—at Benton. Once I asked you for an interview for the school paper.”

  “I never did an interview for the school paper,” he said.

  “That’s ’cause you told me to get lost.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I did an article on your trial. I cut school and tried to sneak in. The first day it was packed and they wouldn’t let me through. The next day, though, I got there really early, and I got a seat. I remember you just sat there like you didn’t have a care in the world, and I figured you didn’t. I was sure it would all come out in the defense.”

  Jude wanted to ask what Davis had thought would come out in the defense, but he didn’t dare. Instead he said, “How did you find me?”

  Davis grinned. “Trade secrets. Can’t reveal the sources, but the truth is, it wasn’t that difficult. Other people could have found you if they wanted to, but I guess they just never tried hard enough. No reason, I suppose. Old news.”

  “So why did you?” Jude asked.

  “Well, after I graduated from Benton, I went to Northwestern, and I’m majoring in journalism. For the last two summers I’ve been interning at the Courant, and they’ve already offered me a job for when I get out, but they told me that you’ve got to have some years under your belt before they put you on the news desk—that or a big story.”