Part 36 (1/2)

What happened?

Shut up.

What'd you do to Eddie?

Shut up. You'll find out soon enough.

Sutton stands on the corner, the wind at his back. He looks at the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge a block away. It's swaying in the wind. Or maybe Sutton is swaying. A woman wrapped in two threadbare coats walks past him, guiding a little girl on a bike with training wheels. One training wheel is missing.

Bleak f.u.c.kin corner, Sutton says, huddling deep into Reporter's trench coat.

Reporter pulls out his notebook, waits for the little girl to pa.s.s. So Eddie died here, Mr. Sutton?

Better if he had. No, he was shot here, but he lived. One of the bullets cut his optic nerve. He spent the next twenty years groping around a cell at Dannemora. A judge set him free in '53. Eddie walked out of court with a cane, everything he owned wrapped in a sheet. They said he'd learned to read Braille. I saw that in the paper, I wept.

Reporter is writing, s.h.i.+vering. He shakes his pen. Ink's frozen, he mutters.

Sutton reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out Bartender's pen, hands it to Reporter.

Why did they shoot Eddie, Mr. Sutton?

The cops said he went for his gun.

Willie, Photographer says, your hands are shaking.

Sutton looks at his hands. He nods. He fumbles for his cigarettes, puts one in his mouth, pats his pockets. Either of you got a light?

Photographer hands him his Zippo.

Was anyone else in the car with Eddie, Mr. Sutton?

Sutton lights the Zippo, touches the flame to his Chesterfield. Eddie's girlfriend, he says. Nina. She threw herself across Eddie's body. That's love for you. She got a finger shot clean off. She wrote to me in the joint for years. Her letters were tough to read.

Emotional?

Illegible. She had four fingers.

What happened to Plank?

He told the cops everything. Which still might not have been a disaster. But he told them where I lived. He just never forgave me for not letting him play dress-up.

What?

I warned myself a hundred times not to let that numbwit know where I lived. I knew he wasn't a right guy. I knew. But Eddie kept vouching for him. Later I found out. At Dannemora some guys were trying to make Eddie their girlfriend. He was a great fighter, but he was slowing down, and he couldn't take on five guys at once. Plank stepped in, saved Eddie's a.s.s. After that, in Eddie's book, Plank had a free pa.s.s. Eddie-loyal to a fault. I should have known. Ah what am I saying? I did know. I did. But I didn't act on it. Your gut kid. You remember Willie told you: In a tight corner your gut is the only real partner you've got.

SEVENTEEN.

Two guards drag him down a long dim corridor. They toss him into a box, four by six, with a stone floor, stone walls, an extra-low stone ceiling. And a wall-mounted shelf of rusted iron. The bed, he guesses.

They shut the door.

Darkness.

Total, seamless.

Their footsteps grow faint. The door at the end of the corridor creaks, slams.

He looks around. He can see nothing. But he can hear everything. His blood slugging through his veins, his lungs expanding and contracting, his heart. He never realized until now that ribs are nothing but bars made of bone, and the heart is just a scared prisoner pounding to get out.

Easy, boy.

He shuts his eyes, curls into a tight ball.

His leg jerks. Did he just fall asleep? He opens his eyes. Is he asleep now? The darkness is darker. Almost liquid.

He looks up, down. Where is he? With great effort he remembers. Eastern State Penitentiary. Downtown Philly. He's been here nine months, he thinks. Maybe a year. A few days ago the guards caught him making a papier-mache bust of his head-with real hair saved from his haircuts. He'd planned to put the head on his bunk, to make the guards think he was sleeping, then hacksaw his way out.

They found his hacksaws too.

The warden, Hardboiled Smith, seemed personally insulted that Willie would try to leave Eastern State before his fifty years was up. Capone just did a bit at Eastern State, and even Scarface didn't have the nerve to try an early departure. So Hardboiled ordered Willie thrown into the punishment block, also known as Iso. Also known as a Dark Cell. Willie dimly remembers Hardboiled saying: You can rot there for all I give a s.h.i.+t.

How long ago was that? Two days? Two months?

He sits up, blinks. He wonders if this is the kind of darkness Daddo saw. The kind Eddie now sees. He wonders if the darkness of death can be any more complete. He prays that he'll know soon. His arm jerks. Another muscle spasm. Did he just fall asleep again? How long was he out? Ten minutes? Ten hours? The not-knowing gnaws at the edges of his mind.

There are only two breaks in the darkness each day. A Judas hole claps open, a hand with a tin plate of food comes through. Willie doesn't know what the food is, and tasting it doesn't solve the mystery. Cornmeal? Oatmeal? Farina? It doesn't matter. He scoops some into his mouth with his fingers, pushes the plate aside.

He's allowed no visitors, no letters, no radio. No books. He'd kill for a book, though it would be useless in this darkness. To simply hold a book, to imagine what it might say, would be comfort. He vows, if he ever gets out of this Dark Cell, he's going to memorize books, poems, so they'll always be in his head, just in case.

He imagines his cell crowded with all the people he's ever known, sitting, standing along the wall. They exhort him, joke with him. The nerve of this warden, they say, thinking he can break the likes of Willie Sutton. Yes, Willie tells them-it's funny isn't it? They laugh. He laughs. He screams with laughter. All the jokes in the world have been condensed into one joke that only Willie gets. Just as suddenly the joke isn't funny. It's tragic. He weeps.

In his third week of Iso he wakes to a voice. h.e.l.lo, Willie.

At last they're letting him have a visitor. Ah but not just any visitor. He crawls to her, wraps his arms around her legs, rests his head on her lap. How did our lives get so crossways, Bess? I don't know, Willie. I thought we'd be together always, Bess. Me too, Willie.

It should be the simplest thing, Willie tells her, you love someone, they love you back. You said love was simple. But it's not. Not for us. We must be cursed. I must be cursed.

Oh Willie.

Nothing has panned out for me. As a kid I thought I'd grow up to be happy. And good-I thought I'd be a good person, Bess. But I'm as bad as they come. The judge said.

No no no. You're a good man who's done bad things.

What's the difference?

There's a difference.