Part 14 (1/2)

I looked down at the two flesh-colored Band-Aids forming a cross on the calf of my right leg.

That morning I had made a start.

I had locked myself in the bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water, and taken out a Gillette blade.

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing.

Then I thought maybe I ought to spill a little blood for practice, so I sat on the edge of the tub and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg.

I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.

I thought of getting into the tub then, but I realized my dallying had used up the better part of the morning, and that my mother would probably come home and find me before I was done.

So I bandaged the cut, packed up my Gillette blades and caught the eleven-thirty bus to Boston.

”Sorry, baby, there's no subway to the Deer Island Prison, it's on a niland.”

”No, it's not on an island, it used to be on an island, but they filled up the water with dirt and now it joins on to the mainland.”

”There's no subway.”

”I've got to get there.”

”Hey,” the fat man in the ticket booth peered at me through the grating, ”don't cry. Who you got there, honey, some relative?”

People shoved and b.u.mped by me in the artificially lit dark, hurrying after the trains that rumbled in and out of the intestinal tunnels under Scollay Square. I could feel the tears start to spurt from the screwed-up nozzles of my eyes.

”It's my fa father.”

The fat man consulted a diagram on the wall of his booth. ”Here's how you do,” he said, ”you take a car from that track over there and get off at Orient Heights and then hop a bus with The Point on it.” He beamed at me. ”It'll run you straight to the prison gate.”

”Hey you!” A young fellow in a blue uniform waved from the hut.

I waved back and kept on going.

”Hey you!”

I stopped, and walked slowly over to the hut that perched like a circular living room on the waste of sands.

”Hey, you can't go any further. That's prison property, no trespa.s.sers allowed.”

”I thought you could go anyplace along the beach,” I said. ”So ”So long as you stayed under the tideline.” long as you stayed under the tideline.”

The fellow thought a minute.

Then he said, ”Not this beach.”

He had a pleasant, fresh face.

”You've a nice place here,” I said. ”It's like a little house.”

He glanced back into the room, with its braided rug and chintz curtains. He smiled.

”We even got a coffee pot.”

”I used to live near here.”

”No kidding. I was born and brought up in this town myself.”

I looked across the sands to the parking lot and the barred gate, and past the barred gate to the narrow road, lapped by the ocean on both sides, that led out to the one-time island.

The red brick buildings of the prison looked friendly, like the buildings of a seaside college. On a green hump of lawn to the left, I could see small white spots and slightly larger pink spots moving about. I asked the guard what they were, and he said, ”Them's pigs 'n' chickens.”

I was thinking that if rd had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids by now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of little kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.

”How do you get into that prison?”

”You get a pa.s.s.”

”No, how do you get locked locked in?” in?”

”Oh,” the guard laughed, ”you steal a car, you rob a store.”

”You got any murderers in there?”

”No. Murderers go to a big state place.”

”Who else is in there?”

”Well, the first day of winter we get these old b.u.ms out of Boston. They heave a brick through a window” and then they get picked up and spend the winter out of the cold, with TV and plenty to eat, and basketball games on the weekend.”

”That's nice.”

”Nice if you like it,” said the guard.

I said good-bye and started to move off, glancing back over my shoulder only once. The guard still stood in the doorway of his observation booth, and when I turned he lifted his arm in a salute.

The log I sat on was lead-heavy and smelled of tar. Under the stout, gray cylinder of the water tower on its commanding hill, the sandbar curved out into the sea. At high tide the bar completely submerged itself.