Tales of Desire Page 3

  With the mechanical cruelty of the law, the execution of Oliver’s sentence had given him several months in which to expect it and they were the months of summer. In his stifling cubicle there was very little to do while waiting for death and time enough with the impetus of disaster for the boy’s malleable nature to be remolded still again, and the instrument of this process became the letters.

  He sat on a folding chair or sprawled on his cot those first few weeks in the death house in a way that was not unlike the way in which he had stood against a brick-wall in rain-soaked dungarees and skivvy shirt on the New Orleans corner till someone had asked him for the time or a light. He was given a deck of cards with stains of candy bars on them and tattered books of comic and adventure cartoons to pass away time with. And there was a radio at the end of the corridor. But Oliver was cut off from the world that blared through the mouth of the radio and from that world of one-dimensional clownery and heroism in the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum which the cartoon strips celebrated. All of these rushed by him instead of with him, and only the letters remained in connection with him.

  After a while he not only read all of the letters, but folded them back in their envelopes and began to accumulate them in rubber bands on a shelf. One night without thinking he took them down from the shelf and placed them beneath his pillow, and he went to sleep with his one hand resting on them.

  A few weeks before the time for his execution Oliver began to write out replies to those men who had begged to hear from him. He used a soft lead pencil that dwindled rapidly to a stub beneath his awkward pressure. He wrote on manila paper and mailed the replies in government stamped envelopes to all of those cities that he had formerly haunted.

  Having had no surviving family to write to, this was Oliver’s first attempt at writing letters. He wrote at first with a laborious stiffness. The composition of the simplest sentence would knot up the muscles in his one powerful arm, but as the writing went on a greater laxity developed in a wonderfully short time. Soon the sentences gathered momentum as springs that clear out a channel and they began to flow out almost expressively after a while and to ring with the crudely eloquent backwoods speech of the South, to which had been added the salty idioms of the underworld he had moved in, and the road, and the sea. Into them went the warm and vivid talk that liquor and generous dealing had brought from his lips on certain occasions, the chansons de geste which American tongues throw away so casually in bars and hotel bedrooms. The cartoon symbol of laughter was often employed, that heavily drawn HA-HA with its tail of exclamatory punctuation, its stars and spirals, and setting that down on paper was what gave him most relief, for it had the feel of the boiling intensity in him. He would often include a rough illustration, a sketch of the chair that he was condemned to sit in.

  The letters would go like this.

  “Yes, I remember you plainly. I met you in the park in back of the public library, or was it the men’s room in the Greyhound depot. I met so many they sometimes get mixed up. However you stand out plainly. You asked for the time or a light and we got to talking and first thing I knew we was in your apartment drinking. And how is Chicago now that it’s summer again? I sure would appreciate feeling those cool lake breezes or pouring down shots of that wonderful Five Star Connyack where we was shacked up that day. I tell you it’s hot in this cooler. Cooler is good. Ha-ha! One thing I can sure count on is it’s going to get hotter before it gets cooler again. If you get what I mean. I mean the chair on the wire that is patiently waiting for me to sit down in it. The date is the tenth of August and you are invited except that you cannot get in. It is very exclusive. I guess you would like to know if I am afraid. The answer is Yes. I do not look forward to it. I was a boxer until I lost my arm and after that happened I seemed to go through a change which I cannot account for except I was very disgusted with all of the world. I guess I stopped caring about what happened to me. That is to say I had lost my self-respect.

  “I went all over the country without any plans except to keep moving. I picked up strangers in every city I went to. I had experience with them which only meant money to me and a place to shack up for the night and liquor and food. I never thought it could mean very much to them. Now all of these letters like yours have proven it did. I meant something very important to hundreds of people whose faces and names had slipped clean out of my mind as soon as I left them. I feel as if I had run up a debt of some kind. Not money but feelings. I treated some of them so badly. Went off without even so much as saying goodbye in spite of all their generosity to me and even took things which hadn’t been given to me. I cannot imagine how some of these men could forgive me. If I had known then, I mean when I was outside, that such true feelings could even be found in strangers, I mean of the kind that I picked up for a living, I guess I might have felt there was more to live for. Anyhow now the situation is hopeless. All will be over for me in a very short while. Ha-ha!

  “You probably didn’t know that I was an artist as well as being a one-armed champion boxer and therefore I am going to draw you a wonderful picture!”

  This writing of letters became his one occupation and as a stone gathers heat when lain among coals, the doomed man’s brain grew warmer and warmer with a sense of communion. Coming prior to disaster, this change might have been a salvation. It might have offered a center for personal integration which the boy had not had since the mandala dream of the prize ring had gone with the arm. A personality without a center throws up a wall and lives in a state of siege. So Oliver had cultivated his cold and absolute insularity behind which had lain the ruined city of the crippled champion. Within those battlements had been little or nothing to put up a fight for survival. Now something was stirring within.

  But this coming to life was unmerciful, coming so late. The indifference had passed off when it should have remained to make death easier for him. And time passed quicker. In the changeless enclosure of his cell the time that stood between the youth and his death wore away like the soft lead pencil that he wrote with, until only a stub too small for his grasp was left him.

  But how alive he still was!

  Before imprisonment he had thought of his maimed body as something that, being broken, was only fit for abuse. You God-damned cripple, he used to groan to himself. The excitement he stirred in others had been incomprehensible and disgusting to him. But lately the torrent of letters from men whom he had forgotten who couldn’t stop thinking of him had begun to revive his self-interest. Autoerotic sensations began to flower in him. He felt the sorrowful pleasure that stirred his groin in response to manipulation. Lying nude on the cot in the southern July, his one large hand made joyless love to his body, exploring all of those erogenous zones that the fingers of others, hundreds of strangers’ fingers, had clasped with a hunger that now was beginning to be understandable to him. Too late, this resurrection. Better for all those rainbows of the flesh to have stayed with the arm cut off in San Diego.

  During the earlier period of his confinement Oliver had not particularly noticed or cared about the spatial limitations of his cell. Then he had been satisfied to sit on the edge of his cot and move no more than was necessary for bodily functions. That had been merciful. However, it was now gone and every morning he seemed to wake up in a space that had mysteriously diminished while he slept. The inner repressions took this way of screaming for their release. The restlessness became a phobia and the phobia was turning into panic. He could not remain still for a moment. His heavy foot pads sounded from the end of the hall like an ape’s, for he walked barefooted with rapid, shuffling strides around and around the little space of his cage. He talked to himself in a monotonous undertone that grew louder, as the days passed, until it began to compete with the endless chatter and blare of the guards’ radio. At first he would hush up when he was ordered to, but later his panic deafened him to the guards’ voices, until they shouted threats at him. Then he would grip the bars of his cage door and shout back at them names and curses more v
iolent than their own. The doomed boy’s behavior cut off whatever acts of humanity these hard men might have shown him as he drew close to his death. Finally, on the third day before his execution, they punished one of his tantrums by turning the fire-hose on him, until he was crushed to the floor in a strangling heap. He lay there and sobbed and cursed with his brain spinning through a dizzy spiral of nightmares.

  By this time, the writing of letters was altogether cut off, but during his quieter intervals he drew wild pictures in his manila tablet and printed out the violent comic-strip symbols, especially the immense HA-HA with its screaming punctuation. Sedatives were put in his food in the last few days, but the drugs were burned up in the furnace of his nerves and the little sleep they gave him would plunge him in worse nightmares than the ones of waking.

  The day before he would die Oliver received a visitor in the death cell.

  The visitor was a young Lutheran minister who had just come out of the seminary and had not yet received an appointment to a church. Oliver had refused to see the prison chaplain. This had been mentioned in the local newspapers with a picture of Oliver and a caption. Condemned Youth Refuses Consolation of Faith. It had spoken also of the hard and unrepentant nature of the boy who was to die very soon and of his violent behavior in the prison. But the picture was incongruous to these facts, the face of the blond youth having a virile but tender beauty of the sort that some painter of the Renaissance might have slyly attributed to a juvenile saint, a look which had sometimes inspired commentators to call him “the baby-faced killer.”

  From the moment that he had seen this photograph the Lutheran minister had been following out a series of compulsions so strong that he appeared to himself to be surrendering to an outside power. His earnestness was so apparent that he had no trouble convincing the warden that his mission to the youth was divinely inspired, but by the time the pass was issued, the force of his compulsions had so exhausted the young minister that he fell into a state of nervous panic and would have fled from the building if he had not been attended by a guard.

  He found Oliver seated on the edge of his cot senselessly rubbing the sole of a bare foot. He wore only a pair of shorts and his sweating body radiated a warmth that struck the visitor like a powerful spotlight. The appearance of the boy had not been falsely reported. At his first swift glance the minister’s mind shot back to an obsession of his childhood when he had gone all of one summer daily to the zoo to look at a golden panther. The animal was supposed to be particularly savage and a sign on its cage had admonished visitors to keep their distance. But the look in the animal’s eyes was so radiant with innocence that the child, who was very timid and harassed by reasonless anxieties, had found a mysterious comfort in meeting their gaze and had come to see them staring benignly out of the darkness when his own eyes were closed before sleeping. Then he would cry himself to sleep for pity of the animal’s imprisonment and an unfathomable longing that moved through all of his body.

  But one night he dreamed of the panther in a shameful way. The immense clear eyes had appeared to him in a forest and he had thought, if I lie down very quietly the panther will come near me and I am not afraid of him because of our long communions through the bars. He took off his clothes before lying down in the forest. A chill wind began to stir and he felt himself shivering. Then a little fear started in his nerves. He began to doubt his security with the panther and he was afraid to open his eyes again, but he reached out and slowly and noiselessly as possible gathered some leaves about his shuddering nudity and lay under them in a tightly curled position trying to breathe as softly as possible and hoping that now the panther would not discover him. But the chill little wind grew stronger and the leaves blew away. Then all at once he was warm in spite of the windy darkness about him and he realized that the warmth was that of the golden panther coming near him. It was no longer any use trying to conceal himself and it was too late to make an attempt at flight, and so with a sigh the dreamer uncurled his body from its tight position and lay outstretched and spread-eagled in an attitude of absolute trust and submission. Something began to stroke him and presently because of its liquid heat he realized that it was the tongue of the beast bathing him as such animals bathe their young, starting at his feet but progressing slowly up the length of his legs until the narcotic touch arrived at his loins, and then the dream had taken the shameful turn and he had awakened burning with shame beneath the damp and aching initial of Eros.

  He had visited the golden panther only once after that and had found himself unable to meet the radiant scrutiny of the beast without mortification. And so the idyl had ended, or had seemed to end. But here was the look of the golden panther again, the innocence in the danger, an exact parallel so unmistakably clear that the minister knew it and felt the childish instinct to curl into a protective circle and cover his body with leaves. Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out a box of tablets.

  The very clear gaze of the boy was now fixed on him, but neither of them had spoken and the guard had closed the door of the cell and withdrawn to his station at the end of the corridor, which was out of their sight.

  “What is that?” asked the boy.

  “Barbital tablets. I am not very well,” the minister whispered.

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “A little functional trouble of the heart.”

  He had put the tablet on his tongue, but the tongue was utterly dry. He could not swallow.

  “Water?” he whispered.

  Oliver got up and went to the tap. He filled an enamelled tin cup with tepid water and handed it to his caller.

  “What have you come here for?” he asked the young man.

  “Just for a talk.”

  “I have got nothing to say but the deal is rugged.”

  “Then let me read something to you?”

  “What’s something?”

  “The twenty-first Psalm.”

  “I told them I didn’t want no chaplain in here.”

  “I am not the chaplain, I am just—”

  “Just what?”

  “A stranger with sympathy for the misunderstood.”

  Oliver shrugged and went on rubbing the sole of his foot. The minister sighed and coughed.

  “Are you prepared,” he whispered.

  “I’m not prepared for the hot seat, if that’s what you mean. But the seat is prepared for me, so what is the difference?”

  “I am talking about Eternity,” said the minister. “This world of ours, this transitory existence, is just a threshold to something Immense beyond.”

  “Bull,” said Oliver.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you are face to face with the last adventure!”

  This answer had shot from his tongue with a sort of exultant power. He was embarrassed by the boy’s steady look. He turned away from it as he finally had from the golden panther’s the last time he had gone to him.

  “Ha-ha!” said Oliver.

  “I’m only trying to help you realize—”

  Oliver cut in.

  “I was a boxer. I lost my arm. Why was that?”

  “Because you persisted in error.”

  “Bull,” said Oliver. “I was not the driver of the car. I yelled at the son of a bitch, slow down, you fucker. Then came the crash. A boxer, my arm comes off. Explain that to me.”

  “It gave you the chance of a lifetime.”

  “A chance for what?”

  “To grow your spiritual arms and reach for God.” He leaned toward Oliver and gripped the prisoner’s knees. “Don’t think of me as a man, but as a connection!”

  “Huh?”

  “A wire that is plugged in your heart and charged with a message from God.”

  The curiously ambient look of the condemned youth was fixed on his visitor’s face for several seconds.

  Then he said, “Wet that towel.”

  “What towel?”

  “Th
e one that is over the chair you’re sitting in.”

  “It’s not very clean.”

  “I guess it is clean enough to use on Ollie.”

  “What do you want to do with it?”

  “Rub the sweat off my back.”

  The minister dampened the crumpled and stiffened cloth and handed it to the boy.

  “You do it for me.”

  “Do what?”

  “Rub the sweat off my back.”

  He rolled on his stomach with a long-drawn sigh, an exhalation that brought again to his frightened visitor’s mind the golden panther of fifteen years ago. The rubbing went on for a minute.

  “Do I smell?” asked Oliver

  “No. Why?”

  “I am clean,” said the boy. “I took a bath after breakfast.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have always been careful to keep myself clean. I was a very clean fighter—and a very clean whore!”

  He said, “Ha-ha! Did you know that I was a whore?”

  “No,” said the other.

  “Well, that’s what I was all right. That was my second profession.”

  The rubbing continued for another minute, during which an invisible drummer had seemed to the minister to be advancing from the end of the corridor to the door of the cell and then to come through the bars and stand directly above them.

  It was his heartbeat. Now it was becoming irregular and his breath whistled. He dropped the towel and dug in his white shirt pocket for the box of sedatives, but when he removed it he found that the cardboard was pulpy with sweat and the tablets had oozed together in a white paste.

  “Go on,” said Oliver. “It feels good.”