“Don’t bring him over here, dumbass,” said another prisoner, who had served as a radioman on the Abraham Lincoln during the war. “What do you care if he wants to fuck with the Nazi?”
“What is it?” Gorman said. Across the hemisphere of his left arm, some jarhead tattooist had mapped, island by greenish-black island, month by month, year by year, the bloody advance of the 10th Marines on the empire of Japan. The shoulder featured a mushroom cloud labeled nagasaki, where the 10th had patrolled the cinders postwar.
“It’s a radio. Made out of a cigar box.”
It was the work of a night, completed just five minutes or so before Gorman’s appearance in the Hut. My grandfather had intended to present it as a gift for the warden’s grandson, Theodore, the next time the boy visited; Theodore took an interest in science. He was bright and forthright and not in awe of the prison, its inmates, or his grandfather. Among inmates who pined for their own children, Theodore was a great favorite. They showered him with matchstick Eiffel Towers and tin can roadsters.
My grandfather handed the cigar box to Gorman, who hefted it. “Heavy.”
“It runs on a flashlight battery.”
My grandfather opened the lid to show Gorman the battery amid the capacitors and wires. He took out the little gray earphone on its braided gray wire, and Gorman poked it into the pleats and convolutions of his deformed right ear. My grandfather showed Gorman how to turn on and tune the radio. Gorman asked him to find the “church station” and my grandfather did. Gorman grinned. “Hey,” he said. “A radio in a cigar box. That’s pretty neat.”
But Gorman did not leave to go play with his new toy, as my grandfather had hoped. He found a stool and sat, listening to a radio preacher. He stared at the back of Dr. Storch’s head while the cricket in his cauliflower ear preached damnation. Then, without any apparent stimulus or cue, he stood up, tugged the earphone loose, wrapped the thin wire around three fingers, put the coil of wire inside the cigar box, and laid the box on the stool. The animal inside him was ready to dine.
Gorman sidled over to the radio corner. My grandfather opened his mouth to warn Dr. Storch, but just at that moment the dentist’s shoulders tensed, and he turned to face his looming tormentor, eyes level with Guadalcanal on the back of Gorman’s wrist. Gorman crouched beside Storch and laid his arm across the man’s bony shoulders. He put his mouth to Storch’s ear. His lips moved. He spoke into Storch’s ear for a long time, renewing his grip on Storch’s shoulders every few minutes. His voice was low, and the precise text of his sermon remained a mystery to my grandfather thirty years later. When he was through delivering it, he let Storch shed the yoke of his arm. He unbent himself and looked down at Storch with a pastoral smile. “Okay?” he said, audibly now. “That going to be all right with you?”
Storch was crying. The howls of the ionosphere leaked from the earpiece of the Hallicrafters’ headset.
“Alfred? I can’t hear you.”
“How about you leave the poor bastard alone for a change?” said my grandfather.
Gorman’s chin, followed by his lips, was on its way back down to the neighborhood of Storch’s left ear. It took a long moment for my grandfather’s words to have their effect. Gorman turned to my grandfather, raising himself to his full height. He had three, call it four, inches on my grandfather. In the hollow of his face, his pocket-change eyes flickered. With practiced care, he reviewed the stats he had amassed and recorded so far on my grandfather. The smile that he had pasted to his face fell off. My grandfather never saw it again. Gorman raised his hands to just below his chin, getting his guard up. He agitated the thumbs. “How about I stick these things right into your fucking eyeballs, okay? And then get Alfred here to lick the jelly off them?” he said. The notion genuinely seemed to appeal to him. “Then I can fuck both bloody holes in your skull.”
Against his better judgment, my grandfather glanced at Storch, who had stopped crying but whose cheeks were fiery red. The lenses of his eyeglasses were fogged, but my grandfather could see through the fog that Storch expected him—needed him—to do something, to stand up for him, to fight. He needed my grandfather to be his friend.
My grandfather stared at the gaudy labels of radio tubes in their boxes ranged on a shelf against the wall and serially counted to ten, first in English, then in German, and finally in Yiddish. Even if he could survive a fight with Hub Gorman, which was far from certain, months or years might be added to his bid as a result. He might be transferred to someplace far worse than Wallkill, someplace where the fights were butchery and the sentences long. And in the end Storch would still be a hapless nudnik of an ex-dentist, and my mother and grandmother would be obliged to stumble onward, lost and alone.
Gorman picked up the cigar box, took out the earphone, and poked it back into his ear. He turned the knob that controlled tuning and stopped at something that sounded like it might be jump blues, a 4/4 scratch of drums. Gorman bobbed his head in time, then winked at my grandfather. “A radio in a cigar box,” he said. “That is just neat.”
That night the shortwave frequencies lit up with the news that the Soviet Union had used a rocket to deploy Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit around the earth. The satellite transmitted a signal every three tenths of a second on a frequency of twenty megahertz, and between those pulses another signal on forty megahertz. Radio amateurs and shortwave listeners all over the world were able to tune in and listen to what struck many of them as the voice of the future itself.
Dr. Storch did not hear the signals, and my grandfather did not learn about Sputnik’s deployment until the next day. As soon as Gorman was gone, Dr. Storch hung the radio headset from its peg on the wall, got up from the swivel chair, and walked out of the Hut without looking at my grandfather. When he got back to his cell, he swallowed fifty-two aspirin tablets he had painstakingly accumulated over a period of years by pretending to suffer from chronic headaches.
That night a grinding sound woke my grandfather, like a key being turned in the ignition of an engine that was already running. It was the sound of Dr. Storch vomiting. My grandfather ignored it for as long as he could, which was not very long, although it felt like forever. He got up and went into Dr. Storch’s cell, reeling at the rancid smell of undigested aspirin. Dr. Storch lay conscious and making a sound that was somewhere between a low rhythmic moan of pain that would not stop throbbing and a sigh of unbearable regret.
“Never mind,” he said to my grandfather, though he was confused and did not seem to know it was my grandfather grabbing him, dragging him out into the corridor, raising an alarm. “Never mind, never mind.”
After the medical staff had come with a stretcher and carried Dr. Storch off to the prison’s ambulance, my grandfather got hold of a bucket and mop and did what he could about the mess in Storch’s cell so that it would be all right when they returned him. They would keep him a few days, then bring him back, and it would all start over again for him with Gorman, only now it would be worse. Gorman would be encouraged by his near-miss, and Storch would be more vulnerable than ever.