Under Radar (13 page)

Had a shootout on top of Boot Hill.

They were fighting for the love of

The dance hall Madam,

Her first name was Karnovsky but they called her Lil.”

My father and his friends believed that parody had to be the final word, and finding the weakness in a form, they killed it and held the corpse worthless from the start. After a few drinks they would sing,

“Ooh baby, are you my baby?

Ooh baby, are you my baby?

Ooh baby, am I your Dad or your Mom?

Because, ooh baby, either way something is wrong.”

Tom sat up, still with his eyes closed, nauseated by the abstraction of his childhood.

“A variety show had a star, it's like if Bob Marley had a weekly television show and every week a different movie star and a different singer were on the show. The movie star would do comedy sketches with Bob. Bruce Lee would be a guest, and Bob would join him in a parody of
Enter the Dragon
. Maybe Bruce Lee would
play someone who was afraid of fighting. Or Bob would play a reggae singer who was deadly with his hands, but as a joke. And then let's say that every week there was a different singer, and this week, Bruce Lee was the guest star and Julio Iglesias was the guest singer. And Julio didn't sing reggae, and Bob Marley didn't sing romantic Latin ballads. So my father would take a Julio Iglesias song and give it a reggae beat, and he'd take a Bob Marley song and smooth the beat, give it a steady four-four beat, and add the violins. And then the two would sing in each other's styles. So that's what my father did for a living, except with Sebastian Cabot instead of Bruce Lee and Andy Williams instead of Julio Iglesias.”

Tom tried to describe Sebastian Cabot to a prison filled with Jamaican murderers, tried to make them understand Sebastian Cabot, an always bemused professional Englishman who played butlers and foppish rich men on American situation comedies, but it was impossible.

Where was the hanged man's story in all of this? This wasn't a story, not really. What was a story? What was a specific story he could tell from his vague childhood? There were so few. Everything else was television.

“One of my father's friends was a joke writer. He wrote a newspaper column with the three best jokes he heard every other day. He sailed a small boat in the Santa Monica Bay, and my father envied him, so he bought a sailboat. The first day we went sailing, my father almost drove the boat into a seawall. We were going slowly enough to stop the boat just before disaster, but my father
ran away from the front of the boat, I forget what he said, but he was frightened, and I could see that he was ready to quit. My father's fear was something I shouldn't have seen. I don't know how we took the boat back to the slip, maybe I turned on the engine, maybe he did, maybe someone gave us a hand. We went out again, and we learned to sail, but we never went anywhere. Out for a few hours and back, out for an afternoon and back. We never went anywhere. There's an island off the coast of Los Angeles, and we never sailed there. We should have gone, but my father was scared. And this changed my life, not having sailed to Catalina.”

But this was a complaint. Maybe that's a form by itself, he thought, like a waltz or a tango. No, they wanted a story.

Nothing emerged from him that he could have remembered only because a hanged man needed a confessor.

“I was at a McDonald's once, and I picked at the french fries of the man sitting next to me. He yelled at me and made me buy him a new bag. Before the man was taken to be hanged, he said this to me: “The Caesar held the golden staff of the tribe of Judah. Shaped like a shepherd's crook, the staff curved at the top to end as a lion's head. The ancient craftsman had wrapped the staff in the folds of a symbolic fabric. With the staff in his hand, Caesar could easily ken the praetor's curiosity. Caesar explained the sacred relic.

“‘There were once twelve brothers. They were jealous of the youngest and threw him into a pit. He was sold to slave traders and taken to Egypt. In later years, his brothers joined him. When their father died, Judah, the oldest, was compared to a lion. A lion guarding sheep. Now that's a puzzle, isn't it, Praetor?'

“‘I am a soldier, my lord, who grew up in Rome. I'm not an expert on animals.'

“‘But even soldiers think.'

“‘Not on duty, my lord.'

“‘You have no opinion?'

“‘I want to know what Caesar is thinking.'

“‘The lion who guards sheep seems at first to be the great reconciliation, Praetor. The predator shall guard the prey? The wild shall protect the domesticated? So the lion and the sheep both have to master their own natures. It's obvious what the lion is called upon to control, his appetite and power, but the sheep who allow themselves to be guarded by the lion must also fight their nature, their compulsion to panic and stampede. But there is an ancient prophecy, that the lion shall lie down with the lamb. So the lion will guard the sheep against other predators. Now, here's the riddle: the prophecy doesn't say what the lion will eat. If the lion has forsaken mutton, then he has to find other flesh. The lion cannot live on clover. But if he leaves the flock to hunt, who will stand guard? The lion shall guard the sheep, yes, but from whom and for what purpose? Listen to me, Praetor. The sheep make a
covenant with the lion and stand as guarantors of the lion's reformed character. But this is a strategy. The cattle and the deer, seeing the lion and the lamb so close, observing the lamb's trust in the lion, approach the lion for protection, and he eats them.'”

Tom heard only the end of the story as it left him. All the detail that had filled him up, so full that there was no room left for Tom, all that detail was gone, and now Tom felt himself become complete to himself. He listened for the sounds of the prison and discovered only silence. Even the guards walked softly.

Tom's head fell to his chest. The men helped him to his bed and covered him with a blanket.

The prisoners considered the story left to them by the hanged man. The story passed quickly through the prison. No one understood it precisely, and its indeterminate meaning was solved only by collective agreement and even dispute. Societies for interpretation gathered in the cells at night, and in the yard during the day, the prisoners separated themselves into academies of two or three. They passed along to other groups their sense of the story as best as they could, and then the groups broke up and re-formed with the men from other groups. Each prisoner then made for himself a new friend with whom he shared the task and pleasure of unpacking the story, passing their vision of its meaning back to another prisoner, who in his turn had also made for himself a friend, so each prisoner became student of one and teacher of another, and the two of them together took the pieces of
their own meaning and the meaning gathered from their students, passing that collation into the circulating rivers of meaning, where others in turn joined new students and new teachers and, after working the story through their own lives, brought those fresh renditions to someone older or wiser or simply someone new. No leader emerged or could emerge to pronounce the final commentary; the chain linked to itself in so many places that the entire prison quickly forged a steel girdle of teachers and students, all deciphering the enigma of what the hanged man told the American. The story tugged each man in a special way. It was not a simple story, but it was made of simple pieces. Each man heard the story in the voice of his mother or the voice of his father. Each man, to make sense of things, had to tear himself away from the story in favor of the reality of his own life. To understand the story, each, in the sessions of long study with his friends, first had to confess his crimes and sins.

Of the many informers among them, the power of the story of Judah's staff overwhelmed their routine impulse to run to the guards to barter every scrap of useful information for privilege, however small the bonus.

Life in the prison changed. No one fought. The yard was quiet, not silent, but to the warden, who heard the vibrant babble of the men at shared study one day about three weeks after the disclosure of Tom's hidden story, this culture of politeness was a frightening and inexplicable threat. He had searched for the right word and found “politeness” and said so to his wife.

“These men are the worst of the worst,” he said to her, “and now they're as calm and agreeable as girls born to wealth and raised by loving parents.”

The warden and his wife negotiated his career together, and she visited the prison the next morning. She opened his window and put her ear to the main yard and listened seriously for three or four minutes. When she brought her head back into the room, she told her husband to immediately call the minister of justice and security, and to tell him that an informer had given him the guarantee that a riot or an escape attempt was a matter of days away. She cautioned the warden to tell the prime minister that the informer, on return to his cell, was murdered.

The army responded to the prime minister's call after the minister of justice and security deferred to the prime minister. The minister of justice and security understood the risks in quelling a rebellion in an island prison when the culture of the island was little different, in so many respects, from life inside the walls. He assured the prime minister that half a dozen informers had been murdered before they had even informed, that the riot leaders were taking no chances and were getting revenge in anticipation of betrayal. So the prime minister gave his assent to the mission, and the prison's guards made room for soldiers who filled the prison one morning two hours before dawn. They tore about the cells, forcing the men to stand naked in the sun while dogs and experts in concealment
searched through the prison for signs of the mass escape of whose imminence there was no doubt.

The prisoners obliged calmly. The soldiers chose a few of them at random, including the old man, to beat in front of the rest, and those who were beaten gave no resistance, so that the soldiers felt shame and reluctance for their cruelty.

By the time the men were hauled into the prison yard, stripped of their clothes, and locked in place naked, member to buttocks in a coiled serpentine, each had achieved a sanctified humiliation that accepted and contained his degradation. So completely and placidly and with such incomprehensible grace did the men receive this debasement that to the eyes of the soldiers, the men were clothed.

Of course no guns were found. The few knives that turned up, which the colonel in charge showed the warden, were of no consequence and in no way suggested the arsenal necessary for this many men to overwhelm armed guards and steel and stone.

Each of the men in line, without sharing a spoken word with his neighbors, knew in his heart that this spectacle, this theater of authority and power, could at any moment's alarm become, after one bloody hour, a mountain of corpses, but they did not and would not provoke an attack. So in peace they fulfilled the purpose of the hanged man's wretched need to unburden himself of the story held too long without an audience. The soldiers
returned to the barracks. The warden's wife went home. The warden cleared his desk. The naked men in the yard were given their clothes, their papers, their wallets, their watches and rings, the chains and charms they had surrendered on entry, and told they were free.

Later, each would tell someone he loved, “You have a choice. There is destiny, yes, there it is, here it is, the unpolluted moment, the intersection of open possibility. And what do you do when you come to that moment? You meet the moment and then what? Fulfill, sacrifice, nullify, or evade?”

Tom walked out of the prison, his hair white, his nose broken. He stopped at the waterfront, a mile away. Across the harbor, cargo ships docked beneath cranes that loaded and unloaded with so little noise and so much activity that it seemed a conspiracy against the island. Someone is making money somewhere, Tom thought. I cannot save them all. He looked down at the water drifting slowly along the seawall, at the small fish feeding on the scum and the grasses, and as his vision expanded, as his eyes relaxed, the crabs hidden in the rocks caught his attention with their movement.

He was thinking about himself, not to think of his own self-disinterest, but to call this condition egoless would assign to him a stale, impossible transcendence. Tom lodged himself in the elements of the harbor, there he was in the sun, the rusting iron, seagulls, crab shells, the vendor selling mango ices from a wagon, Japanese cargo ships, a beer truck, the man and woman fighting
over love, she chasing him, her tired rubber sandals slapping her feet, trucks and motorcycles grinding their gears, the air.

If on the quay his mother, in Jamaica and mysteriously still alive and walking on the same path, had seen him from a long way off, his form, his outline, his silhouette, what a mother knows of her son, and had she been wearing a watch, and had he asked her for the time, testing the disguise imposed by his destiny, yes, she would have heard something in this damaged stranger's voice that reminded her of the son lost to prison, and yes, with a freshly surfaced agony she would have given him the time, quick as panic that becomes riot, and then moved on.

Horrible things happen. We all know this. A man kills another man. This happens every day. Now we know a few pieces of the story of one man who killed another man, in full mind of his actions. The murderer disappears from the world that knew him. He returns to the world under a new astrological sign, the ellipsis, the invisible constellations discovered by their effect, not their light. He has been missing from the world, but the world goes on, syntactically correct. Well, perhaps not correct or even legitimate, but full of its own sustaining sense.

To those who knew him, his life becomes a November field, all stubble after the harvest, cleared for the search for meaning. How did this happen? they ask one another. What did we really know about him? That question is the effect of his ellipsis….