Part 21 (1/2)

HIROs.h.i.+ MATSUMOTO THREW on some clothes! He drove up the hill in his Isuzu jeep!

He was fired upon by the Jamaicans!

He bailed out of his Isuzu! He ran into the National Forest!

He got lost in the pitch blackness. He was wearing sandals and no socks.

It took him 2 days to find his way back out of the forest, which was almost as dark in the daytime as it was at night.

Yes. And gangrene was feasting on his frostbitten feet.

I MYSELF STAYED down by the lake.

I sent Mildred and Margaret back to bed.

I heard what must have been the Jamaicans' shots at the Isuzu. Those were their parting shots. After that came silence.

My brain came up with this scenario: An attempted escape had been thwarted, possibly with some loss of life. The explosion at the beginning had been a bomb made by the convicts from nail parings or playing cards or who knows what?

They could make bombs and alcohol out of anything, usually in a toilet.

I MISREAD THE silence as good news.

I dreaded a continuation of the shooting, which would have meant to me that the j.a.panese farm boys had developed a taste for killing with guns, which can suddenly become, for the uninitiated, easy and fun.

I envisioned convicts, in or out of their cells, becoming ducks in a shooting gallery.

I IMAGINED, NOW that there was silence, that order had been restored, and that an English-speaking j.a.panese was notifying the Scipio Police Department and the State Police and the County Sheriff about the squashed escape attempt, and probably asking for doctors and ambulances.

Whereas the j.a.panese had been bamboozled and overwhelmed so quickly that their telephone lines were cut and their radio was smashed before they could get in touch with anyone.

THERE WAS A full moon that night, but its rays could not reach the floor of the National Forest.

THE j.a.pANESE WERE not hurt. The Jamaicans disarmed them and sent them up the moonlit road to the head of the lake. They told them not to stop running until they got all the way back to Tokyo.

Most of them had never seen Tokyo.

And they did not arrive at the head of the lake hollering b.l.o.o.d.y murder and flagging down pa.s.sing cars. They hid up there. If the United States was against them, who could be for them?

I HAD NO gun.

If a few convicts had broken out and were still at large, I thought, and they came down into our ghost town, they would know me and think well of me. I would give them whatever they wanted, food, money, bandages, clothes, the Mercedes.

No matter what I gave them, I thought, since they were color-coded, they would never escape from this valley, from this lily-white cul-de-sac.

There was nothing but White people all the way to Rochester's city-limits sign.

I WENT TO my rowboat, which I had turned upside down for the wintertime. I sat down astride its slick and glossy bow, which was aimed at the old barge terminal of Scipio.

They still had lights over in Scipio, which was a nice boost for my complacency.

There wasn't any excitement over there, despite the noise at the prison. The lights in several houses went off. None went on. Only 1 car was moving. It was going slowly down Clinton Street. It stopped and turned off its lights in the parking lot behind the Black Cat Cafe.

The little red light atop the water tower on the summit of Musket Mountain winked off and on, off and on. It became a sort of mantra for me, so that I sank even deeper into thoughtless meditation, as though scuba diving in lukewarm bouillon.

OFF AND ON that little light winked, off and on, off and on.

How long did it give me rapture from so far away? Three minutes? Ten minutes? Hard to say.

I was brought back to full wakefulness by a strange transformation in the appearance of the frozen lake to the north of me. It had come alive somehow, but noiselessly.

And then I realized that I was watching 100s of men engaged in a sort of project which I myself had planned and led many times in Vietnam, which was a surprise attack.

It was I who broke the silence. A name tore itself from my lips before I could stop it.

The name? ”Muriel!”

35.

MURIEL PECK WASN'T a barmaid anymore. She was a Full Professor of English at Tarkington, making good use of her Swarthmore education. She was asleep at the time of the surprise attack, all alone in faculty housing, a vine-covered cottage at the top of Clinton Street. Like me, she had sent her 2 kids to expensive boarding schools.

I asked her one time if she ever thought of marrying again. She said, ”Didn't you notice? I married you.”