My grandfather cleaned himself up and returned to his own cell. He lay on his cot for hours, trying to focus his thoughts on his family and on the time remaining until the day they would be reunited, which diminished every day by a greater percentage than the one before. He powered up the Zeiss projector in his skull and eagerly sought Cassiopeia and Andromeda in their courses—and Cepheus, the husband and father. That’s you, he told himself. You are Cepheus. You are not Perseus. You are not a hero. It’s not your job to rescue anybody. But he could not sustain the planetarium show tonight. There was too much light pouring in from the stanchion outside his window. There was still a tang of vomit in the air.
Storch was going to be kept under observation at the county hospital for four days. On the first day of his absence my grandfather told the guard in charge of the grounds crew that he needed fence wire to repair the antenna of a “lousy made-in-Japan” radio set that had come into the shop. For a purpose directly opposed to his present one, my grandfather had earned the guards’ trust. He was believed. Once inside the potting shed, my grandfather filled the rolled cuffs of his trousers with Hi-Yield. He had noticed the grounds crew mixing this crystalline white powder with water and applying it to tree stumps at the edge of the meadow. The crew called it stump killer; it acted to soften the stumps so that rain was enough to dissolve them. The active ingredient was basically chemical fertilizer: potassium nitrate.
The second day and third day of Storch’s absence, my grandfather devoted to obtaining a quantity of sugar. This was trickier; the kitchen kept an eye on sugar because it could be used to make hooch. The cubes were counted and doled out with tongs, two to a prisoner per meal. My grandfather would have to stockpile for weeks. He thought of another approach. It was foolish, dangerous, and shameless but it would be efficient, and anyway, shamelessness was often the missing piece of many otherwise brilliant schemes.
A word that often cropped up when people talked or wrote about the warden of the Wallkill prison, Dr. Walter M. Wallack, was tireless. For every problem that arose in the life and administration of the prison, he came up with three possible solutions. He was always on the move. You never saw him sitting down. He arrived early and went home late. Part of this tirelessness was no doubt constitutional or even moral (he was a good man), but you could not discount the fact that he consumed—the legend varied—between fifteen and twenty cups of coffee a day, black and sweet. He kept a percolator in his office, on top of a low bookshelf by the door, and an ample supply of sugar.
After breakfast on the second day my grandfather begged one of the cooks for an empty drum of Quaker oats. That evening he went to the Hut and built a radio inside the cardboard drum. He sank a tuning knob through the Q of Quaker and a volume pot through the O of Oats. He cannibalized a speaker cone from a junked unit and cut a grille for it out of the drum’s paper lid. The next day he got permission to deliver the radio to Wallack in his office.
He found Wallack behind his desk—standing up, as usual. There was a nice leather swivel chair, but Wallack almost never sat down in it. He stood, and he leaned on the top of a filing cabinet when he needed to jot something in his legal pad. The desk was bare except for a telephone, a calendar blotter, and a crude paper rocket, a foot high, clearly if unconsciously modeled on the V-2.
“Very kind of you,” Wallack said, taking the radio from my grandfather. “Very clever. Theo will love it, I’m sure.”
My grandfather showed Wallack how to operate the radio, suggesting that the warden move closer to the window to get better reception. He moved closer to the door and the shelf with the coffee percolator. Dr. Wallack turned to face the window and twiddled the knobs. He found Mozart. He found Eddie Fisher. While his back was to the room, my grandfather leaned over and grabbed one of a dozen unopened boxes of sugar cubes on the shelf below the percolator. He reached around to grab hold of his own shirt collar, jerked it away from his neck, and dropped the box of sugar cubes down the back of his shirt.
Dr. Wallack turned back and my grandfather had to put his eyes somewhere, so he put them on the rocket. A loving but clumsy hand had shaped the fins, nosecone, and sweep of the fuselage from strips of thin card around a tube left over from a roll of paper towels. The paper was crusted with dried mucilage and blotched with red, white, and blue paint, but the rocket’s proportions were pretty good. There were stars and stripes and the legend u.s.a. written twenty times all up and down the thing in execrable handwriting.
“Theo’s work,” Dr. Wallack said.
“I figured.”
“Gone space-mad, like all the other boys since Sputnik went up. Building rockets. Rockets to the Moon! Trying to figure out how to make them really fly.”
“Interesting problem,” my grandfather said. “I’ll think about it.” All you would need, he idly thought, is a little bit of sugar.
He backed out of the room, scuttled past the warden’s secretary, and then hurried to his cell to hide the sugar cubes.
On the third night after lights-out, my grandfather sat on his cot with some tape, wire, a flashlight battery, and the guts of an old clock from the scrap heap in the Hut. Working by the blare of light through the window, he ground the cubes to powder in the box and then mixed in KNO3, packing the sugar box as tightly as he could with the “candy,” as it was known. After an hour’s patient work he had a configuration of wire, battery, candy, and time that was both plausible and strictly nur zu demonstrationszwecken. He was not sure how plausible it was that Hub Gorman would know how to construct even a rudimentary explosive device like this one, but he also wasn’t sure it really mattered. The mere presence of it in Gorman’s cell, once my grandfather had tipped off the guards, would likely be enough to get Gorman transferred out of Wallkill to Green Haven or Auburn or someplace where he really belonged. Hub Gorman did not belong in a prison that had beehives, a creamery, a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a photo enlarger.
27
Dr. Storch was returned to the prison in the ambulance on the tenth of October, a Tuesday. When my grandfather heard about it after chow he went to the Hut and looked in through the door. Dr. Storch was at the S-38, lenses glinting, face gaunt and livid as an El Greco Christ’s in the glow of the radio’s half-moons. He had the headset on and his movements on the dial were exceedingly fine, as if homing in on a single voice in the great megahertz chorale. My grandfather felt his eyes burn, and the muscles of his chest seemed to curl like a fist around his heart. When he first learned that the dentist would survive his suicide attempt, he had felt powerful relief; the news about Hub Gorman had added a disturbing wrinkle. On seeing Dr. Storch’s gaunt suffering face again, however, all he felt was shame. He ought to have stood up for the poor bastard in the first place. He left the Hut, went to his cell, and waited for the lights to be put out.
He woke to a chill touch, long dry fingers pulling at his wrist.
“Shh.”
He sat up and looked out the window of his cell. It was never easy to judge the time of night with the floodlights spilling in the yard outside. Call it about an hour before dawn. Dr. Storch winced, to show that he was sorry for waking my grandfather. He held up both hands and made a pushing motion that said, I know, I know, but trust me. He gestured to the doorway of the cell and then to the ceiling. He wanted my grandfather to follow him up to the roof.
A visit to the roof of this particular cell block was an exploit often discussed among the Wallkill population. It was a subject of debate. Generally, it was agreed to be possible, but no one among the current crop of inmates would, or could, acknowledge having done it. A solid minority believed that the roof passage was a legend that had originated as deliberate misinformation, a trap laid by some unscrupulous guard to lure unwary prisoners into infraction. These men claimed that a guard was paid a bounty every time he caught an inmate in the act of trying to escape.