Also … it was interesting. He wouldn’t mind hunting through the notebooks and finding the one where it started. Seeing if it really was good. Because you couldn’t tell if a novel was good from just a single page, could you?
Pete closed his eyes and began to drift napward. Ordinarily he wasn’t much of a day-sleeper, but it had been a busy morning, the house was empty and quiet, and he decided to let himself go. Why not? Everything was right, at least right now, and that was his doing. He deserved a nap.
That name, though – Jimmy Gold.
Pete could swear he’d heard it before. In class, maybe? Mrs Swidrowski giving them background on one of the authors they were reading? Maybe. She liked to do that.
Maybe I’ll google it later on, Pete thought. I could do that. I could …
He slept.
1978
Morris sat on a steel bunk with his throbbing head lowered and his hands dangling between his orange-clad thighs, breathing in a poison atmosphere of piss, puke, and disinfectant. His stomach was a lead ball that seemed to have expanded until it filled him from crotch to Adam’s apple. His eyes pulsed in their sockets. His mouth tasted like a dumpster. His gut ached and his face hurt. His sinuses were stuffed. Somewhere a hoarse and despairing voice was chanting, ‘I need a lover that won’t drive me cray-zee, I need a lover that won’t drive me cray-zee, I need a lover that won’t drive me cray-zee …’
‘Shut up!’ someone shouted. ‘You’re drivin me crazy, asshole!’
A pause. Then:
‘I need a lover that won’t drive me cray-zee!’
The lead in Morris’s belly liquefied and gurgled. He slid off the bunk, landed on his knees (provoking a fresh bolt of agony in his head), and hung his gaping mouth over the functional steel toilet. For a moment there was nothing. Then everything clenched and he ejected what looked like two gallons of yellow toothpaste. For a moment the pain in his head was so huge that he thought it would simply explode, and in that moment Morris hoped it would. Anything to end the pain.
Instead of dying, he threw up again. A pint instead of a gallon this time, but it burned. The next one was a dry heave. Wait, not completely dry; thick strings of mucus hung from his lips like cobwebs, swinging back and forth. He had to brush them away.
‘Somebody’s feelin it!’ a voice shouted.
Shouts and cackles of laughter greeted this sally. To Morris it sounded as if he were locked up in a zoo, and he supposed he was, only this was the kind where the cages held humans. The orange jumpsuit he was wearing proved it.
How had he gotten here?
He couldn’t remember, any more than he could remember how he’d gotten into the house he’d trashed in Sugar Heights. What he could remember was his own house, on Sycamore Street. And the trunk, of course. Burying the trunk. There had been money in his pocket, two hundred dollars of John Rothstein’s money, and he had gone down to Zoney’s to get a couple of beers because his head ached and he was feeling lonely. He had talked to the clerk, he was pretty sure of that, but he couldn’t remember what they had discussed. Baseball? Probably not. He had a Groundhogs cap, but that was as far as his interest went. After that, almost nothing. All he could be sure of was that something had gone horribly wrong. When you woke up wearing an orange jumpsuit, that was an easy deduction to make.
He crawled back to the bunk, pulled himself up, drew his knees to his chest, and clasped his hands around them. It was cold in the cell. He began to shiver.
I might have asked that clerk what his favorite bar was. One I could get to on the bus. And I went there, didn’t I? Went there and got drunk. In spite of all I know about what it does to me. Not just a little loaded, either – standing-up, falling-down shitfaced drunk.
Oh yes, undoubtedly, in spite of all he knew. Which was bad, but he couldn’t remember the crazy things afterward, and that was worse. After the third drink (sometimes only second), he fell down a dark hole and didn’t climb back out until he woke up hungover but sober. Blackout drinking was what they called it. And in those blackouts, he almost always got up to … well, call it hijinks. Hijinks was how he’d ended up in Riverview Youth Detention, and doubtless how he’d ended up here. Wherever here was.
Hijinks.
Fucking hijinks.
Morris hoped it had been a good old-fashioned bar fight and not more breaking and entering. Not a repeat of his Sugar Heights adventure, in other words. Because he was well past his teenage years now and it wouldn’t be the reformatory this time, no sir. Still, he would do the time if he had done the crime. Just as long as the crime had nothing to do with the murder of a certain genius American writer, please God. If it did, he would not be breathing free air again for a long time. Maybe never. Because it wasn’t just Rothstein, was it? And now a memory did arise: Curtis Rogers asking if New Hampshire had the death penalty.
Morris lay on the bunk, shivering, thinking, That can’t be why I’m here. It can’t.