From the Chrysalis: a novel Read online

  Sandy McAllister altered his looks from time to time, depending on his target, but it was always something showy: a sports figure, a circus ring master, a Bible salesman. Right now he was aping Jesus with disciples at his feet, but Dace thought he looked more like Rasputin, with his long, stringy hair slicked back from his forehead and his mad monk eyes. He had quite an audience, though. A bunch of dumb cons.

  Dace glanced back at Fat Frank in the tower. He was cradling his assault rifle like it was his firstborn child. The jerk even kissed it from time to time.

  “C’mon. Give me the effing letter.” Rick spat on the ground. “What do you think I’m gonna do with it, use it like the Bible and light up a smoke?”

  “Not on your fucking life,” Dace said. “The rest of these goons will just want to read it, too.”

  Nobody got the mail Dace did. Like a good book, Liza’s letters transported him right out of jail. He kept them in his mattress, removing just enough stuffing to make room. The screws were supposed to check the bedding, but they never did.

  Rick looked so agitated that Dace almost relented. The poor guy probably just wanted a diversion. Maybe he’d read him a chunk. He wasn’t fast enough, though.

  “Keep your kite,” Rick said, then took off to talk to a man from another range. A short termer who was due to be paroled in a few days. Most of those men, short termers, were future oriented. Almost nobody talked about their pasts and only a real goof asked. B Block had their hour in the exercise yard every morning between 7:30 and 8:30. This was their only opportunity to talk to people on other ranges without bringing down the heat. Whatever happened in the Yard, the guard in the gun cage turned a blind eye as long as he could. There was supposed to be a guard walking along the inner wall, but he was usually busy someplace else.

  Dace wanted to talk to a couple of guys too, but he got distracted. A hawk soared over the barbed wire and he thought about the farm. He walked the perimeter of the yard, checking for a nest.

  Minutes later, Rick caught up with him again. He’d found a hardball some place. An older con and a few companions were hunkered down in a corner of the yard shooting craps, but nothing else was going on. Even broom ball, an easy game to equip, had been nixed. Too many people getting hurt. Yeah, right. He’d never met a screw who gave a good goddamn about cuts and bruises.

  Dace glanced at the ball in Rick’s hand. It was perfectly round, the soft curve of a woman’s breast. Christ, he wished he was still dead down there. It had been easier that way.

  “Nah,” he said, nodding towards the crowd at the bottom of the yard. “You give me that ball and I might—”

  “—ram it up Rasputin’s ass.”

  “Yeah, well, look at him. Thinks he’s a Prophet or something. And the screws let him. Sure he’s harmless, but there’s no way he should be here.”

  Rick rolled his eyes. What the hell did he care? Cons like Sandy came and went. With any luck, somebody would ice him in the shower. “Absolutely nuts,” he agreed, tossing the ball from one hardened palm to the other as he scanned the yard for another partner.

  “He’s up to something. Maybe I’ll go have a listen.”

  “Yeah, you do that, buddy. You’re shit for company today.”

  Dace hadn’t gone more than ten steps when he heard somebody say, “Hey! That’s mine.”

  By the time he’d spun around, a well-built farm boy was staring Rick down. Where the hell had he come from? Dace had never seen him before, but he knew his kind. The guy didn’t want a friend, he wanted a name. Dace started back. Somebody behind him caught the half-smoked cigarette he flicked to the ground.

  Sandy McAllister heard the farm boy, too. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!” he shouted, trying to divert attention from the new kid on the block.

  Every eye had shifted to Rick and the kid, though. “Nobody owns anything here,” Rick said softly, his voice cool, his eyes hard and flat, his reputation on the line.

  Christ, Dace thought. Why the hell had he left him?

  Many of the spectators were already drooling with anticipation. “It’s a fight!” they crowed. It shouldn’t have been, except the fish was too stupid to know it. To cross a solid like Rick or Dace, you had to be pretty damn new.

  The kid had time to say, “Well, I do,” before Rick clocked him in the mouth.

  In the commotion that followed, Dace lost sight of them both, but the kid was awfully confident for a fish in a fight. Then he saw it: a little spark of light. Aw Jeez, another stupid punk. They were hatching in the dirt today.

  “Watch it,” he yelled at Rick. The kid pretended to fall to the ground, but pulled a thin-bladed knife from the seam of his pants instead. “He has a shiv. Or did,” he said, coming up behind him. He kneed the kid in the kidneys, grabbed something and twisted hard. Luckily, it was just the boy’s arm. The shiv clattered to the ground. A loud snap elicited a single scream and the next thing Dace knew, the boy was sliding like water down his legs.

  His heart beating fast, he sidestepped the mess. The boy, who looked about eighteen, was twisting in the packed dirt. Dace’s eyes raked the ground, but the weapon, a homemade stiletto probably made from a sharpened spoon, was gone. Maybe it was under the boy, but Dace didn’t dare touch him again. If he did he’d kill the little bugger for sure. The boy rolled on the ground, clutching his wrist. Dace could see the kid’s fat tonsils when he screamed. By this time, everybody had taken a giant step back.

  Fat Frank was still in the gun cage. “Shut the fuck up,” he shouted, before radioing for more help. Not supposed to be by myself, not with all these bloody cons, they heard him say. Why the hell are we always so short staffed? What’s the point of sending everybody to the new place? What am I supposed to do with this crazy lot? My gun? Of course I have my gun, asshole. Dropping the radio, sweating hard, he bolted downstairs in his steel-belted boots. Dace half-expected him to keep on going, but he didn’t.

  The boy’s screams had downgraded to moans, but he was still writhing around. Two or three more minutes passed. The guard’s eyes darted over the scene, rabbit-like. Nobody moved while he made up his mind what to do.

  “Everybody up against the wall,” he finally bellowed. Pointing his gun straight at them, he spat out some stale gum. He was shaking a little, but trying not to show it. He sighed and smiled, displaying a set of stumpy teeth. Oh, Christ, he must have an idea. “Well,” he said, “Let’s have some fun here. Everybody strip! You guys were fighting over something. I want that shiv or whatever it was. And somebody’d better tell me who started this, or you’re all in the Hole.”

  When they didn’t move straight away, he hollered again. And waited some more. It was the boy on the ground who finally broke the silence. “Nobody started anything,” he gasped, his face wet with tears. “But I think I broke my goddamn wrist playing ball.”

  “You ain’t supposed to have no ball,” the guard said, kicking the boy in his left side and getting another piercing scream.

  Everybody started to undress, almost welcoming the hot air on their sweat-soaked skin. The wounded boy was exempt.

  “Hey,” Rick whispered to Dace as they shrugged off their pants, “For a punk, he sure learns fast.”

  Chapter 5

  The Convict’s Cousin

  There will be time, there will be time

  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

  There will be time to murder and create,

  And time for all the works and days of hands

  That lift and drop a question on your plate;

  Time for you and time for me,

  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

  And for a hundred visions and revisions,

  Before the taking of a toast and tea

  *[ Eliot, T.S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock]

  Maitland, Ontario, August 26, 1971:

  Liza folded Dace’s most recent letter, already a month old, and put it inside a suede shoulder bag with her wallet, her passport, some bits of Kleenex,
a lipstick tube and her new keys. She had a couple of paperbacks, too. The downtown Maitland bus was here, its doors gaping open. She climbed the steps behind a couple of older ladies, thinking someday she’d be old too, but it was hard to imagine. The steps shook under her feet. What if she hadn’t tightened the ankle straps on her wedged sandals enough?

  Her mind bounced to and fro, a butterfly trapped in a jam jar. A good thing that boy had dummied up or Dace would have ended up in the Hole, no visitors allowed. He’d been caught before. Helping out a friend? What kind of friends did he have in there? He never mentioned names. He couldn’t.

  The bus fare was clenched so tightly in her hand she had to force her fingers to relax. When she dropped the change into his box, the driver looked her up and down like she was put on earth for his pleasure. She hesitated, realizing she had almost forgotten how to count Canadian coins. More women came up behind her, some with children yapping at their heels. Instinctively, she backed away from the sticky little hands. The bus driver looked at the young mothers in the same proprietary way, his bright bluejay eyes almost dangling out of his capped head.

  “Make up yer mind, honey, I haven’t got all day,” he rumbled in his old man’s voice, motioning her to the back of the bus with a nicotine-stained thumb. “The sc—” If he were saying scum, she couldn’t believe her ears, so she revised what she was hearing to: the guy waiting for you might have all day, but I don’t, and bowed her head to hide her blush, embarrassed other people could hear.

  Damn, she thought, easing down the aisle, hiding her anger behind her waist-length hair. Styles were a little behind in Ireland, so back in Dublin she had let her hair grow and grow. The floor of the bus slanted slightly, tilting up to meet her face and she grabbed hold of a seat for balance. What was wrong with her? Why hadn’t she told that old coot off? She had to speak up. If she didn’t … well, who cared.

  She was going to see Dace. Nothing else mattered. Searching for a window seat, a single line of poetry flitted through her head: There will be time, there will be time, to prepare a face for the faces that you meet …

  Time. Yes, she reminded herself, she still had time, no matter what had happened in Dublin, no matter what she’d gone and done. Because the world belonged to the young and privileged in America in 1971, or that’s what older folks said, people like her grandmother who’d struggled through the Great Depression and World War II so a girl like her could reap the benefits: a university education.

  And she would, she would. It was her chance to make good, to do something with her life. Everybody said so. Get an education. Fall in love, write books, have children, do anything she wanted. Hurry, hurry, she thought. She was the same age as the rest of the first years at Maitland University, but an accelerated sense of time made her feel older than she was. Used up. That and knowing what she had done.

  Several kindly Irish people had told her she still had time to make a new life, but she wasn’t sure. Life had a way of plummeting forward. Hurry up, hurry up, let’s be forty. Let’s have some peace. Not that she expected to make forty. Forty was old. Her parents were still in their forties, and their forties looked like a mountain peak with a landslide down the other side, rushing past the sites of all their old regrets. As if they had exhausted all their possibilities, she thought, irritated with herself for having anything on her mind except Dace.

  Sitting on the edge of the last vacant window seat, her bag on the aisle seat, she looked out at some battered brick walls. Why were bus stops located in such dismal places? She might as well be back in Dublin gazing at warehouses on the north side instead of in Maitland by the lake.

  My God, was the bumpy-faced driver on a coffee break or what? What on earth was taking him so long?

  At last the bus jolted forward, dislodging a tattered copy of The Great Gatsby from her bag. It was the kind of story she’d always favoured, one with a dark Byronic male character. She looked around, hoping nobody else had noticed. Not that most people cared about books. Still, she hated people knowing what she was doing, even what she was reading. Maybe because she’d been keeping secrets for so long: the divorce of her parents, her cousin’s incarceration, and dear God, her relationship with an older man in Dublin. Jesus, she wished she’d waited. But he hadn’t really let her.

  Tucking Gatsby out of sight, she stifled a sigh, too keyed up to read, but a magnet for any fool who wanted to talk. Something about her had always invited confidences from strangers. Or maybe it was just that any sort of sounding board would do. Much as she enjoyed listening to other people’s stories, finding out what made them tick, she wasn’t in the mood today.

  So much had happened since she’d disembarked from her Aer Lingus flight at Toronto International Airport three days before. She’d stopped overnight in the Ford Hotel across from the bus station, then headed straight to her assigned university residence in Maitland, a city she’d never even visited before.

  Liza had left for Ireland five years earlier. Then the twins had gone to their father’s house in Scarborough last year because dear Dad had gotten a new wife. He hadn’t wanted the boys, but he’d had no choice after they were picked up for drinking underage and his ex-wife got hysterical.

  Liza chewed her lip and looked as if she were focusing on the bustle outside her window, but the street scene had vanished.

  Dad had tried to knock some sense into her hard-drinking, truant brothers, with predictable results. The twins, as they would always be known, were almost seventeen and keen to avoid finishing high school. They spent their days sleeping until noon and their nights drinking bootleg beer and smoking grass. Dad had a grade eight education. He wanted his sons to get their grade twelve diplomas at least, but Liza, well … She’s a girl, he’d said when her grandmother wrote to ask if there were any money for her university tuition. Just wait. Someday she’ll get married and all that education would be wasted.

  He was her father. Sooner or later she would have to visit both her parents and make amends. That’s what an adult would do, Gran said so, and of course she was right. Even if it were a colossal waste of time. By now she’d read enough of the great American authors: Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, Williams, and Thomas Wolfe, to know she could never go home again, except in the physical sense. She was grown up now. Somehow, somewhere, she’d make a new home for herself. But she couldn’t just forget her parents, no matter what. And she couldn’t expect them to visit her. Too expensive. Well, lots of reasons really.

  Her mom, especially her mom. Maybe when she felt stronger she could visit her. After she settled into residence. Her classes in Sociology, English, Political Science, Philosophy and Journalism were beginning next week though, and she was already so nervous she could barely eat.

  Squirming on her seat, she thought about getting into university. How on earth had she pulled off such a stunt? Where had she even come up with such an idea? Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. Maybe it had something to do with walking through Trinity all the time, where so many writers had studied. She’d loved that place.

  A small smile crossed her face. It was exhilarating to be back in Ontario on her own. Nobody even knew she was back from Dublin, never mind that she was going to Maitland University. Well, almost nobody. Dace knew, except he was in no place to share his knowledge. Maybe he’d told his father, but Uncle Norm was a silent, solemn man, a slow leak like herself when it came to sharing tales. In her secret heart, she was thrilled with her own daring, and at night when she imagined her father finding out and getting absolutely stiff with rage—because he really did think education was wasted on women—adrenalin flooded her body from her head to her toes. As long as she wasn’t living with him he didn’t worry her at all.

  A nicer girl might have felt sorrier for Dad. He’d been angry for as long as she could remember. And Mom, well, she didn’t get mad much. She tended to be a talker, more prone to migraines than rages. Mom was always wrong when she opened her mouth. “Don’t be so stupid!” her husband had been apt to sp
lutter, inciting spectators to nervous laughter. Over the years, although her mother’s conversational skills had been honed to chatter, her listening skills had remained undeveloped. In the end, even her usually failsafe intuition about her husband’s moods had eluded her.

  So Liza knew better than to plan a tête-à-tête with her mother, although she would have liked another confidante besides Dace. The part of herself that she recognized as unkind might even have enjoyed upsetting her, though she didn’t want to hurt her. There was no reason to hurt her, since her father already had. Why had she allowed him to hurt her? He wasn’t worth it. No man was. Granny Magill was right. She was always right.

  The woman in front of Liza had a strident voice. Liza had hesitated to use that word ever since she’d noticed it was only applied to women, but this one definitely qualified. And she also had, as Liza had noticed before she’d even sat down, bleached blond hair and a blubbery body too old for her face.

  Her voice took over the entire bus. “So this is the last time, I told him. Get straight, or me and the kids is outta here. I been visiting guys in prison for twenty years. First my Dad, now him. Whatsamatter with me? I goes to Jonesy: Why do I get only garbage? I ain’t garbage.”

  “You never said he was garbage! You never!” her younger companion shrieked. Liza, who was used to much softer spoken Irish women, surreptitiously covered her ears.

  “Well, no, but I thought it. I am too sick of gettin’ garbage,” the blond repeated.

  “Well, sure you are,” her friend murmured. Liza detected the burr of a Scottish brogue in her speech. “And sure it’s a hard life, but you’ll feel better when you lay off the sauce. AA saved my life.”

  “Oh, Christ. Irma, you sound like you got religion or something since you went with that there AA. Bunch of Jesus freaks is what they are.”

  Liza cleared her throat, hoping the women would take a hint.