Good Behavior Page 2

  “Sure,” I said. “I blaspheme the Holy Spirit all the time.”

  This threw Arnold into severe doubt as to whether I was actually savable, but after much deliberation he finally decided that I was. I pretended to be relieved.

  P-1 was on the first floor next to Sallyport, and right outside my cell door was the table where the guards would sign in new inmates. On weekends, there’d be a parade of drunks and degenerates, fighting with the cops, pissing down their legs, puking on the table. You might think the spectacle would be something worth looking forward to, but in reality it just meant noise—lots and lots of noise. I watched the guards subdue belligerent drunks, would-be suicides bang their heads on my cell door with half a dozen guards on top of them, girls drunk and underage try to strip off their clothes—this was nice, but rare.

  The crazies were the worst. P-1 was at the intersection of two hallways, with the suicide-watch cells straight ahead of my cell door so their doors were visible to me. There was one crazy who looked just like Charles Manson—somehow all crazies manage to look just like Manson—and was on suicide watch for weeks. During rec one day he managed to get hold of a tiny, thin strip of plastic. With this he dug through the skin on his arm and extracted a vein, which he then chewed through. I watched the guards gather outside his cell door with their rubber gloves on; then they opened his door and rushed him. When the door swung open, I saw blood smeared all over it. After moments of scuffle, they dragged him out and pinned him to the floor of the hallway. He was screaming, covered with blood. When the medics finally arrived, they strapped him to a gurney, and he looked right into my eyes as they wheeled him out through Sallyport. I’ve never seen such misery in a human being.

  My parents came to visit me often. My mom came every week, either with Dad or with my brother. They would stand outside my cell and we’d speak through the little window in my cell door.

  I told my mom on the phone that I was checking out the Bible, not because I was seriously checking it out but because I thought this might be something she’d like to hear.

  She said, “Don’t tell your dad or your brother about that.”

  So I didn’t say anything else about it. This wasn’t because they’d have much of an opinion about whether or not I believed in God, but because everyone knows how pathetic and exceptionally phony jailhouse religion looks.

  [ FOUR ]

  I grew up in a small town—a very small town. Brickville is about forty miles west of Indianapolis, out in the flat country, surrounded by infinite corn and soybean fields. There are just around four hundred houses in Brickville, and one stoplight. It takes less than ten minutes to walk from one edge of town to the other.

  There was once a bar, but it closed up. There is no police department in town. If anything happened, you called the sheriff’s department, and it took them forty-five minutes to get there. Public fights seemed relatively common.

  Our house was a run-down hundred-year-old structure, fairly large but falling apart. On the side of the house, the external wall of our living room bulged out mysteriously. It was as if the house had a tumor. My dad eventually tore the wall out and replaced it. Dad was constantly working on the house. But he painted it all—all of it—battleship gray. It looked like a small prison.

  I remember one day when I was eight my brother, Jim, and I were playing in the alley beside our house and this drunk stumbled down it, holding a hand to his head. He had blood all over his shirt, and before he spoke to us he spat out a mouthful of blood. This was before they paved the alley, so when the glob of spit hit the ground, it immediately soaked into the dirt. I couldn’t take my eyes off the red spot of mud. The guy asked if we had a wet towel he could use to clean up before he went home to his wife, so my brother went into the house and got a bowl of warm water, a washcloth, and a towel.

  We watched the guy wipe off his face. I didn’t say a word the whole time. I just watched the pink water drip from the guy’s chin, watched swirls of red go round and round in the bowl.

  My brother, who is five years older than me, said, “So, what’d you do, get in a fight?”

  The guy said, “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  After he was clean, he thanked us and walked on.

  There was a mural on the side of a building right in the center of Brickville. At the top it said THE ROLL OF HONOR, and underneath were hundreds of names of people who died in foreign wars. The mural was red, white, and blue, with American flags all over it. Beneath the mural, jutting out into the sidewalk, was a stoop, where a group of hoods could generally be found hanging out, either on the stoop or around the corner in the pizza shop.

  At any given time, there were really very few people on the streets of Brickville. It was a very slow, quiet little town. It was a farm community, but there were several factories nearby. The people who lived there were either farmers or factory workers. The houses were clean and the lawns were well kept, and the farmers gathered at the diner every morning right across the street from my house. Brickville was busiest first thing in the morning, and at around ten it went quiet again. At four p.m. the shifts at the factories ended, and the factory workers headed to the carryout next door to my house for a six-pack of beer and cigarettes; the school buses brought the kids back to town around the same time, so things got kind of festive then.

  There was a feeling in Brickville of being entirely isolated. The rest of the world happened in some far-off exotic place. The names of great cities and other countries were mispronounced, because they felt so unnatural in the mouths of Brickville citizens. Anything that happened outside our county was something dubious and unnecessary.

  It was a genuinely safe place to grow up, and nothing ever changed there.

  Of course my dad couldn’t appreciate this, and so neither could I. If I was standing near a window and the light cast my silhouette on the shades, Dad would say, “Get away from there. You never know what kind of sick fucker’s out there. Remember the .22 killer. Shot people through their windows.”

  “What,” I remember him asking my mom, “if there was a bunch of Manson Family members camping in the lot over here?”

  “I hope they wouldn’t be,” Mom said.

  “What if they were?”

  “Who are the Mansons?” I asked.

  “Never mind, Natey,” Mom said.

  “They come in at night and cut you up in your sleep,” Dad told me. “It can happen. Believe me. They cut a baby out of a pregnant woman.”

  “They didn’t catch them?” I ask.

  “Not all of them. They could be anywhere.”

  And he was dead serious.

  So I never felt that Brickville was safe. I never felt that anywhere was safe. The farmers who gathered at the diner across the street were the same kind of farmers who mobbed together with torches and lynched people they didn’t like, and the factory workers were thieves and rapists and liars you couldn’t trust, and the Manson Family could turn up at any time, anywhere.

  I was probably nine years old. Dad was washing up in the bathroom one morning and I was sitting at the dining room table playing with a Matchbox car.

  Dad said, “Nate, go get my shirt off the floor in the living room.”

  We didn’t have air-conditioning, so during the summer months Mom and Dad would drag their mattress downstairs and sleep on it in the living room. His shirt was beside the mattress. I grabbed his shirt and a revolver fell out of it onto the floor. I picked it up, looked around. What the hell?

  I had the gun in one hand and his shirt in the other, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, when he looked over from his shaving.

  Truly shocked, he said, “What are you doing with that?”

  “It was in your shirt.”

  “How’d it get there?” He took it from me.

  “I don’t know.”

  He believed me, but he didn’t know how it got there either. I remember lying in bed countless nights after that, staring up at the ceiling, listening for noises, wonder
ing if this was the night that Dad was going to lose his mind and shoot all of us in our beds.

  There was a place off Miller Run Road just west of the Adrienne River called Miller Falls. You pulled your car into a little dirt parking area and entered the woods by a footpath that descended a hundred feet to the bottom of a ravine. Then you walked two miles to a waterfall that flowed only after a great rain. If you went any other time, it was dry.

  When Dad heard about this place, he immediately took us to see it. I don’t remember how impressed I was with the falls. The most significant part of this experience was the walk back to the car. As we ascended this steep footpath back up out of the ravine, we were met by a gang of bikers, probably a dozen of them, all with shaggy beards and leather jackets and heavy boots and chains clanking all over. They were like a small horde of Vikings thundering toward us. I panicked. I absolutely panicked. Seized with terror, I clutched my mom’s hand and wailed my lungs out. The tears rolled down my face and I screamed for our lives.

  Dad nodded to the bikers, and they nodded back and said, “How ya doin’?”

  And Dad said, “Good, you?”

  And they said, “All right.”

  Meanwhile I wasn’t waiting for the switchblades to come out. I had let go of Mom’s hand and made a run for it. Mom came after me, and when she found me, I was huddled under the car in a fetal position praying for God to save us somehow. All I can say is, this is what happens to a six-year-old who’d already seen every Hells Angels movie ever made—and, believe me, there are a lot of Hells Angels movies, and they are all bad.

  [ FIVE ]

  My cellmate, Arnold, became intolerable sooner than I’d expected. Just because he was now right with the Holy Spirit didn’t mean that he was above tormenting another human being. A guard walked by our cell one day whistling, and I said, “God, I hate it when people fucking whistle.”

  “Why?” Arnold asked.

  “I don’t know. I just hate it.”

  He grinned slightly, and began to whistle.

  At first I thought it was a joke. I laughed. But he didn’t stop. He whistled for days. I mean for days.

  Imagine being trapped in a room with someone who will not stop whistling. Imagine trying to sleep while they whistle, trying to read while they whistle, trying to take a shit while they whistle in your face. Whistling doesn’t even have to annoy you the way it does me. You could actually like the sound of whistling, and still, this kind of torture would make you want to kill yourself. My only peace was when he slept, and then I sat on my bunk and stared at him, imagining jamming a pencil into his ear. Not just imagining it—actually wondering if I would have to do it.

  I did ask him to stop, but Arnold quickly found himself directly in front of me. He bellowed into my face as loud as he could, with sudden and murderous violence, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?!”

  The guy scared the hell out of me. He was fucking nuts. I backed away and sat down on my bunk, and he continued his whistling gleefully.

  Finally, one day as we were being taken out to rec, I asked a guard, Leonard, if there was any way I could be put into a private cell. He nodded, as if he’d known I would at some point ask this. Before the day was through, I found myself alone, and at peace, in P-13 up on the third floor, with a window overlooking the rec yard.

  [ SIX ]

  My dad used to hunt groundhogs somewhat regularly, but I never saw him do it, until one day when I was five, I think. He shot it on the railroad tracks from a distance of about twenty yards. The thing was scurrying across the tracks as my dad took aim with what kind of rifle I don’t remember, but it must have been a big one. He fired. The groundhog let out an awful squeal and stood up on its hind legs. Its entrails were hanging out. Somehow my dad had blown its stomach out. It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen. Dad dropped the gun to his side and stood still for a moment, stunned, I think, by how awful the sight was. Then he walked to the groundhog and shot it again, killing it this time.

  I don’t think Dad ever seriously hunted again after that. He still kills animals, sure, but because they’ve invaded his property—which is still, I think, kind of insane—but he doesn’t hunt, technically speaking—he defends. He has little holes in the screen in his bedroom window and a .22 rifle leaning against the wall. Mom yells at him for shooting from inside their bedroom, but he says he doesn’t have time to go outside.

  “They’re too fucking fast,” he says. “They’re gone by the time I get out there.”

  Mom throws up her hands. “Then don’t kill them,” she says.

  “But I have to! They’re taking over.”

  She shakes her head, like she always does, seeing that it’s pointless to argue.

  Late one night Dad and Mom were fighting. It was a tremendous explosion of violent yelling. I was in bed, I was tiny, I didn’t understand anything about anything but I understood something was completely wrong. Dad was yelling, “Then I’ll just fucking leave! I’ll fucking walk out that goddamn door.”

  I wailed like it was the end of the world. My bedroom door opened and there was Dad, in his leather motorcycle jacket with guns in his arms—several rifles—and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He came in. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  I sat up and yelled, “You’re going! You’re going!”

  He came over to my bed and leaned the guns against the side of it. As he bent down and kissed me on the forehead, hugged me, the ember fell off his cigarette and burned a hole in my pillowcase. He smelled like beer and smoke, and his jacket was cold and smooth.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. And he didn’t. He didn’t leave.

  Dad said that his teachers in high school—ninth grade was the furthest he got, so I always assumed he was talking about ninth-grade teachers—would draw pictures of him during class because he was so beautiful. His hair was perfect. Curly ringlets on his forehead in the center, sides slicked back into a ducktail at the rear. He was James Dean if James Dean was a thug. Leather motorcycle jacket and black leather railroad boots, white T-shirt and black jeans. On a summer day he’d roll his Camel filterless cigarettes up in the sleeve of his T-shirt. He had jailhouse tattoos on his arms and hands. One says GIRLS BORN TO RAISE KIDS. He said that originally the word “girls” was absent, but no one understood. He had to explain himself—this probably means he had to fight—too often, so he changed the meaning of the statement by adding that one word. Another says BORN TO LOSE.

  To hear my dad’s stories, and he told stories all the time—not the same stories over and over, mind you, but different ones, and when he did repeat himself, the story didn’t change, so you knew he wasn’t lying; it deepened, broadened, gained more dimensions, became more real and more interesting—but to listen to him briefly, you’d think that he had been nothing but a thug, a beer-drinking, fist-swinging little psychopath—at barely ninety pounds, the scrawniest and most excitable little bastard you’d ever see. Hitchhiking from his hometown in the hills to the city and back again with his brother, drunk the whole way and stopping at every bar they passed, Dad with a .38 pistol in his pocket. They met a guy who showed them a bag of money and wouldn’t tell them where he got it. Dad wanted to pop the guy and dump him in the woods, take the money, but his brother talked him out of it.

  I imagine them both hunched over a little table covered with empty beer bottles and cigarette ashes. Dad’s eyes are gleaming with vicious excitement, but his brother’s cool, relaxed.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Dad says. “A whole lot of money.”

  “Yup.” My uncle leans back in his chair and takes a swig of beer. “And they’ll fry you in the electric chair.”

  “But, shit …” Dad looks back over at the guy, who’s sitting at the bar. He fingers the .38 and imagines all that money; then he imagines forty thousand volts, and he shrugs off the idea.

  You can hear a man repeat two different stories about doing time and get the impression that he spent more time
in lockup than he did outside. You can hear him tell three stories about hitchhiking and imagine that he spent half his life on the road. He can tell you about an old couple who picked him up on a lonely road. The old lady opens the glove compartment and inside is a revolver. She says to her husband, “We gonna do this one like we did the last one?” So he leaps out of the car at the next stop sign and runs for his fucking life.

  He can tell you about the time he was walking on a highway near Wheeling one night at two or three in the morning and spotted a car idling on the shoulder with its parking lights on. Another car pulls up beside it and there are gunshots, both interiors lit up by the flash of gunfire, and the second car drives off. When he gets up to the remaining car and looks in, he sees a fresh corpse with half its head missing and blood all over the place, so he takes off into the woods and sticks to the hills, in case anybody sees him.

  He can tell you about the three different times that he died, clinically died, flatlined, and came back to life: once from drowning, once from bleeding to death, and once from blood poisoning. He can tell you about all the people he knew who died under truly disturbing circumstances—not the least of which was his own father, crushed by a hundred million tons of rock.

  And then there was the girl who cussed like a sailor. He’d take his friends to her house—they’d walk ten miles just to hear her cuss.

  He can tell you he joined the marine corps to fight in Vietnam because he thought that if he did then maybe another man, one with a wife and kids, might be spared, but he was discharged because of his bad leg. About the fights he started with his drill sergeants because he didn’t like their attitudes.

  You could hear a man tell you all these things, and more, and wonder what kind of world he lived in—what other reality did he occupy where so many absurd and fantastic things happen to one man?

  If he’s your father, you will spend your life listening to these stories, formulating expectations of your world based on them, and soon you’ll expect much more from the world than you’re likely to get. And you’ll learn to expect violence.