The Carpenter (19 page)

—Pete, I wouldn’t ask you to spill nothing you don’t want to.

—Well, can you promise you’ll keep something between us? Lee put his hand out. Pete shook it.

—You talk about what you want to, Pete. I won’t break any trust with you.

—Okay, look. Sheila Adams, she teaches Sunday School. She’s ten years older than me. Last year, I was … you know, sleeping with her. She’s married. She wasn’t then, but she was engaged. I hadn’t ever slept with a woman before. But I’m getting ahead of myself. From the time I was eight till last spring I was at church, like I said. Every Sunday. But I think I knew for a long time that I didn’t belong. At the church, when the people get going, it’s what Barry calls the Baptism of Fire. They speak in tongues and
put their hands in the air and act crazy. But you want to know something about it? It never once worked for me. I never had the Baptism of Fire. I wanted it, I really did, but I never had it. A few years ago, I even quit pretending, quit faking that I was having the Baptism just so I’d look like everybody else. We’d be there at church, and while everybody else was with the spirit, I’d just daydream. Sometimes I thought about girls from school. If I really had guts I would have faced the facts and quit a long time ago. But I didn’t. I kept thinking I just had to hold out, open myself to God, pray more and do this and do that and then I’d feel the grace. I did stuff with the youth group. Why not? I never had a lot of friends at school. The youth group, we’d do retreats, we’d do lockdowns at the church—

—Lockdowns?

—Yeah, said Pete. Lockdowns are sleepovers at the church. Not lockdowns like you’d think of from jail, I guess. Sorry. Anyway, stuff with the youth group was alright. It made it so things at home were easygoing.

Lee nodded.

Pete was past sober and loose-jawed. He went on: Last fall, Sheila Adams started helping out. She wasn’t the youth pastor. She was the coordinator. I think she made the title up. I think she was bored. The guy she was engaged to was an engineer at the chemical factory. He was away for awhile, down in Central America, on a mission to help people purify their water. It was with the International Pentecostal Church. Sheila was at home, bored, so she started coordinating with the youth group. I knew her from around. She was young, she was kind of foxy. But I also knew her because of how into all of it she was. Talking in tongues, moving around, the whole bit. Sometimes she’d cry in a service. Cry and laugh at the same time. Look. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t know why it was me that she picked. Maybe it’s because I was the oddball. Who knows what goes through women’s heads.

—You’d never had sex with a woman before?

—Never. Here’s how it went. I told you about those lockdowns? We did one for New Year’s Eve. It was all pop and chips and games. About eleven o’clock my friend Billy and a couple other guys came by outside. I got out a window and smoked some grass with them. Then I went back inside. After midnight I was a little weirded out so I went walking around the church to clear my head. Sheila was in the office. She had a key, I don’t know why. She called me in. I thought she knew I’d been smoking grass and she was going to let me have it, but … there wasn’t much talk. She closed the door and it just happened. Just like that. I was looking over at Barry’s desk the whole time, which was maybe five minutes. That was how it started. January. She’d need something, she’d need help over at her house. She’d give me a lift home from meetings. Once I skipped class and we did it in the afternoon. I thought I was in love with her but I guess I knew I wasn’t. Whenever we actually talked about anything, all she ever said was, that’s nice, or that’s interesting. And if it was something complicated, she’d say, look in the Bible. But she wanted to have sex all the time, and I was happy to give. It was all I could think about. But then in March, Sheila found out her fiancé was coming home a couple months early. He’d gotten sick down there. He’d lost a bunch of weight. She told me we had to stop seeing each other. She said she was grateful for all the times I’d helped her out around her house. In a way I think she didn’t believe any of it actually happened. Me, I was a mess. I didn’t know how to deal with it but I knew I couldn’t say anything. I knew if even one person had any idea, how fast it would get out. Church people love to talk. I knew if it got out what it would do to us. I didn’t really care … about Barry. But Mom and Grandma, Luke, John, I care about them.

—You did just right, said Lee. So you quit going to church on account of this girl?

—Not right away. Sheila quit coordinating the youth group. I quit going to events. Her fiancé came back from his mission and
there was this big Welcome Home for him at the church. He was skinny and his skin was yellow. I was mad. I was so goddamn mad … But then we were at church this one Sunday in May. We were at church and everybody had the Baptism of Fire, hands in the air, talking in tongues. I saw Sheila, and she was right into it as usual. But the thing was, the face she was making, while she was blabbing out all these old languages, the face was the exact same as when she’d be having sex. Exact same. I don’t know why but I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever saw. I thought I was going to laugh my guts out right there in church. And then I knew. I knew how come I never had the Baptism of Fire. I didn’t go to church again. I quit school a couple weeks after that. It was the same there, Lee. Bullshit, all of it. I knew if I was going to head out west I was going to need to save some money. That’s all I’ve cared about ever since.

He’d halfway finished his beer. He was blinking against Lee’s cigarette smoke.

—Maybe I am passing up my chance for salvation. Maybe I’m going to hell. But I never chose to see through it all.

—I’m not sharp like you are, said Lee. I read the Bible a few times and I think there’s some real good stuff there. But they say God loves everybody. He cries if a bird dies. Sure. But then the same God would send somebody like you to hell forever? Just on account of you don’t get the call, same as some other people? I’m not sharp like you are, but I never got anybody, like a chaplain or a pastor, to work out that question so it made any sense.

—You don’t believe in hell?

—Sure I do. I seen it with my own eyes. It’s right here in the world where people make it for each other.

Lee didn’t know what advice he could give to Pete, if Pete was even looking for advice. Lee had known, of course, that Donna had left town to live somewhere else for several years, that Pete hadn’t been born here, but that was a different subject entirely.

They got a little drunker and they watched the television
movie for awhile. Just a few beers remained. Pete said he didn’t think he could drive home until he sobered up.

—You’ll end up in the goddamn ditch, said Lee. Stay here.

Lee got a deck of cards and dealt it out onto a TV tray. He said he was going to teach Pete a kind of poker called Fishing Hole that he’d learned inside. You could play with as few as two players or as many as seven. Everybody would ante in and then the whole deck got dealt and each player’s cards got tallied up for points against whatever hands he might have been able to make. Sometimes a certain guy would book a regular game and would be able to rake a small profit. They played a few rounds. Pete felt like he’d been inducted into a secret order.

—Did you always do carpentry? said Pete. Like, before?

—No. I did a few building jobs here and there in town with some guys I knew, but when I went up, I wasn’t anything at all. I got my trade after I got there.

—Right away? said Pete.

—It wasn’t right away, no. I’d been in there almost ten years.

—Oh.

They played another round of Fishing Hole. They were using pennies and nickels and cigarettes to make their bets. Lee was winning, and he took one of the cigarettes he’d won and he lit it. He took a drag and let out a stream of smoke.

—Joe Holmes, a con I knew, he was in the woodshop. He sort of got me interested in it.

—He was, what, your cellmate?

—No, we weren’t two to a drum. Joe Holmes, I just knew him. When he was a kid he used to steal cars. He got sent to the reformatory, got out, stole cars again. After awhile the Crown got tired of him taking up space at the reformatory so they locked him up for good. But he wasn’t a serious guy. He wasn’t a fighter or a scrapper or nothing. He’d been in the woodshop for a few years when I knew him. Everybody thought working in the infirmary was where it was at because it was an easy go, but Joe liked
the woodshop. He was kind of a trusty. The screws listened to him if he had something to say about the manning in the shop, and they didn’t give him much headache. And Joe, he just liked seeing things come together. That was all. He said he never knew that before he was inside.

—Do you still talk to him? Is he out?

—… No, said Lee. Say, did you know about the riot in 1971?

—I was a kid. It was just after Mom met Barry. Grandma got real upset when the riot was on the news. I don’t remember much more than that.

—The riot, right, I was there inside when it happened. There was this con named Dave Dempsey. He was a goof, Dempsey. He’d gotten sent up for kicking the shit out of his woman. She was a couple months pregnant when Dempsey had at her and she lost the kid. They nailed him hard for that. He was twenty years old, skinny, blond. To look at him when he got there—this was maybe 68 or 69—you’d think some old daddy would snap him up just as quick as can be, but Dempsey made himself useful. The real serious guys, they just put up with him. When they needed a guy to do something, Dempsey was who they used. And anyway … Dempsey and Joe Holmes …

Lee butted out the cigarette on the TV tray.

—You know what, buck, never mind.

Pete blinked sluggishly.

—What?

—None of that shit matters any more.

—I don’t know about that.

—I do, said Lee.

—So … Uh. I have to use your bathroom.

Pete went into the bathroom and closed the door and Lee could hear him dry-heaving and washing his face with cold water, and then Pete stumbled back into the living room.

He stayed the night at Lee’s. Lee set up the pullout bed and told Pete to sleep there. Pete was too drunk to argue. For himself,
Lee aligned the couch cushions against the wall next to the television. But for a long time, while Pete groaned with the spins and tried to sleep, Lee sat at the window, watching the street. Remembering.

Nobody had bad blood with Joe Holmes, that was the hell of it. But the riot was a strange time. It brought out what was lurking in the hearts of a lot of men.

It lasted four days. By the end of it, the army had set up camp outside the penitentiary and had readied their machine guns. All they were waiting for was the order. Lee was up at the top of the dome, laying low. In the beginning he’d had a hell of a good time with everybody else, tearing it all apart, lighting fires. The best time in years. But then there were certain boys who wanted to talk about rights this and rights that. And there were other boys who wanted to hold court. What that meant was tying up all the rapists and perverts and snitches and going to work on them with fire and iron bars. One man who’d fondled some schoolkids had his eyeballs gouged out and his ears melted. Lee knew some of the boys holding court. Dave Dempsey was one of them.

When they were sure the end was near, boys in ones and twos and in groups were going out to give themselves up. Some were in bad shape. Hungry or beaten or dehydrated. About five in the morning on the fourth day, Lee came down to give himself up. He wasn’t interested in prisoners’ rights. He was even less interested in getting chewed up by a machine gun.

Down on the bottom tier it was dark and wet with piss and water. There were fires burning. There were some men who couldn’t move. Out of it there came Joe Holmes, huffing and puffing from the chronic lung trouble he had. He was making his way out.

And then out of nowhere, Dave Dempsey. What was he doing? It looked like he was hugging Joe Holmes from behind, hugging him, saying, How does that get you off, baby? Then he dropped something and in the firelight Lee saw it was a screwdriver red
with blood, and Dempsey just turned and walked away same as if he was on the sidewalk doing his shopping.

Joe was down on his knees when Lee got to him. He was bleeding bad. He’d been stuck half a dozen times around where his kidneys were. His eyes rolled.

—Let’s get you out of here, Joe. Christ.

—It’s clear, said Joe.

—Come on with me.

—Can’t you see how clear it is?

After the riot Dave Dempsey and some of the others got packed off to the new super-max pen. If Dempsey ever had a reason for sticking Joe, he never said. Word got back to Lee that all Dempsey ever said was he should have stuck him in the neck. He laughed when he said it, Lee heard. Dempsey was a goof and full of shit. He got thrown off a tier a few years later, and was paralyzed.

Joe Holmes was in the hospital for a long time. Afterwards they had to commit him to a psych ward because he’d stopped talking. He just wandered around and never said anything. Joe Holmes who stole cars and went up and learned what it was to put something together with his hands. Joe Holmes who didn’t have bad blood with anybody.

You see that and you know for the first time what a thing of randomness is. You know how even if you have your affairs under control, there’s something else at work, something that’s aware of you. And it waits, until just the right time, and it steps out of the dark, just long enough to take shape and act and then disappear again.

I
n the early morning Peter drove them to the Owl Café for breakfast. Helen was not going to be working until later in the afternoon. Pete pushed his French toast around on his plate.
He was in rough shape. At six-thirty, Bud’s car was outside. Lee clapped Pete on the shoulder, told him he’d see him again soon. He picked up his lunch pail and his tool belt and went outside.

Bud and Lee drove north to the public landing. Under a single street light, they could see Clifton waiting for them on the pier. He was not supposed to be at work with them today because of his niece’s wedding. Wally was nowhere to be seen.