Dog in a Cage

They called him dangerous. And wild. And said watch out, you don't know when he's liable to turn on you. He wasn't wild. Or dangerous. And he only ever turned on anyone that one time, and he paid for it, and he learned his lesson. He had been like a dog in a cage poked with sticks until he exploded. Poke anyone with sticks long enough, and they'll blow up. Turn into something else. Just a matter of how long you poked, and did you use the right sticks?

For Jimmy it was his big brother Will. That was the only stick his stepdad had needed. Will ran away five years ago, and all they'd heard from him since was one phone call to his old girlfriend. He called her on Christmas the year after he left. Said Merry Christmas and he still loved her. Jimmy's stepdad hated Will. For leaving. For being unbendable. For working out from under his thumb. Will was an iron bar Mr. Stepdad couldn't break, bend, or budge. He drove him away. Everyone knew it. But he kept at Jimmy about it. Your brother this. Your brother that. Your brother, probably queer. Your brother, couldn't take living with you. This is all your fault. Day and night. He never let up with that stuff. When he drank, which was most of the time, it was worse. His eyes would light up like tail lights, red and brittle.

Jimmy's mom was no help to anyone. She was gone to two different jobs, and probably two different men, too. If she knew what was happening at home, she didn't say anything about it. So it was Jimmy and the stepdad. Jimmy more alone than if he'd been by himself. Always thinking about Will. Worrying about him too. Will was a good kid, but not the toughest nut on the tree. Jimmy neither.

He cracked, his shell split down the middle, and he attacked old stepdad with a chair. Bought himself three years in juvie, and when he came out just last month, everyone started up with the dangerous and wild talk. History's written by the survivor. And Mr. Stepdad had survived the chair with nothing more than two teeth out and a scar on his forehead in the shape of a fish hook.

Biography

He knew nothing. About everything. Too lazy to lie, he didn’t bother making excuses. There was no misunderstanding to blame. No bad reception, crossed wires, or background noise. No dozing middleman. There was only him. Him and the vast, sterile canyon where his knowledge should have been.

His biography would have read like a pamphlet on how not to live to be 39 years old. The graphic design would have been minimal, drawn from presets and templates mostly. School, school, another school, a larger school. He read the books he was told to read, grasping only the most superficial elements. His sense of literature was like that of someone who had never been above the second floor of any structure. How things fit together, how one thing informed something else with which it enjoyed no apparent connection. These things were beyond him. That this river wound, eventually, around a mountain, and emptied into an ocean. No. Too far removed. Too big. Too…

Names, he remembered. Situations in which he encountered names, he could also remember. But the important things—why he should care, the webs of people he encountered. The important things dripped away, down the many drains his ignorance bore around him. He understood the rules, or thought he did. He understood money intimately. Or thought he did. Money’s role in acquiring this or that. Yes, of course. Money’s role in shaping and guiding and manifesting people’s beliefs and actions. No, not at all.

He had friends. Or recurring acquaintances, more like. Small talk. Going for drinks. Hanging out. Everything fit into one of these small bottles arranged by someone else on shelves constructed by someone else. He was not unintelligent. Just spectacularly uneducated. Uneducable. He had tastes, favored this style over that one. He commanded opinions on many, hundreds, of topics. He knew nothing about them all.

Prison Junk

When Fairley told me what he had done, I got sick. With the phone falling from my ear, I gagged and bucked and thought I'd puke right on the dining room floor. It took me a few seconds to get myself together. Get the acid out of my mouth. Get the phone back to my ear. The wave rolled over me and I started putting two and two together. It wasn't Saturday morning, between ten and ten-thirty, Fairley's usual time calling collect from prison.

I should have known something was up as soon as the phone rang. Sunday at nine. At night. He was way off. He was out. Way out. As in Out. As in Broke Out. I didn't even want him calling me when he was holed up. I didn't even want to be connected to him by a phone call. And now. Now they'd trace him through me. I was the weak link here, not including the big rotting weak link inside Fairley's moth-eaten brain. Breaking out, from Durand? With two months left on your state nickel? That homemade prison junk had finally chewed away the wrong part of his brain. Rat poison will do that.

My mind was drowning in possibilities, and I swear I saw myself in leg irons, which they do still use up at Durand. I saw them, on one of the rare occasions I visited Fairley there. A guy was being forced down the hall, hobbled by ancient, historical metal cuffs around his ankles. I looked back around to the glass, the glass with the machined perforations, and waited for Fairley to make his grand entrance. A door slammed somewhere at the end of a nameless corridor and I felt it in my spine. It rippled through me like a shockwave, and I knew this was definitely the last time I was ever visiting Fairley again. Last time I was visiting anyone on the inside.

I didn't want to be talking to him right then. I thought about just hanging up. But who knew what he'd do to me then? He knew where I was. And he knew people who could find me no matter where I went or how I changed. All I knew was he was somewhere between Durand and here, and he said he wasn't alone.

The Pusher

Menlo was having trouble breathing. A large man with big arms was leaning on his chest. Leaning hard, putting everything he had into it. His shoulders rippled and the tension stood out along his jawline in wriggling tremors. The man wore a patterned vest over a broad expanse of bare chest. An earring winked from one ear. He was bald. Completely bald—shiningly so—as though he was inhospitable to hair and all the happier for it.

He had been there since the night before, pushing on Menlo's chest so hard it was all Menlo could do to gasp pitifully. He thought about calling an ambulance. Or at least calling in to work. But what would he say? "A large man is pushing on my chest really, really hard." He knew how that would sound. Menlo wasn't a drinker, but did anyone at Deerwald, Rimmy, and Traff know that? When they heard about the man, they'd sigh and put the phone back down and put an indelible black mark next to Menlo's name in the company register.

So it was just Menlo and the chest-pusher. He shifted his position to work some different pushing muscles and Menlo started seeing spots. The pressing was pressing the oxygen right out of him. Quick sips of air—that's all he could manage with this man leaning against him this way. The man didn't talk. He kept up a steady grunt of exertion, but no conversation. No explanation. No "I'm sorry about this." Nothing. Just the pressure and the grunting like a whining motor as he pressed against Menlo's chest, his knuckles whitening and his wrists stiffening up. He lifted one hand and cranked it around in a circle to wring out the cramp. Then he got back to work.

Menlo craned his neck, to see around the bulk of the man and into the kitchen, to the happy, round clock on the wall. He was very late.