The bathroom. Three feet by four. One window. Toilet, sink and shower, all basically built on top of one another. Lavender tile.
The kitchen. Avocado sink, avocado stove, avocado refrigerator. Yellow formica counter, the size of a pizza box. A wallpaper of avocados on a yellow background. Yellow metal cabinets. An extremely narrow window over the extremely narrow sink. Floor-space the size of an airmail stamp, covered in yellow vinyl tile.
“Elwood laid it all out himself,” Mrs. Tutt told us, and through her despair a note of pride could be heard in Elwood’s accomplishment. “He didn’t have no architect to help him or nothing.”
“Mm hm,” I said, and Max said, “Is that right?”
Mrs. Tutt became silent. She had shown us everything, she had regaled us with her store of anecdotes-Roderick, Elwood-and now there was nothing left but our decision. Clutching her elbows, hunching her shoulders, she gazed dismally at us.
Max glanced at me. “What do you think?” he said.
I looked around. It was amazing; here in this small upstate New York town, far from the world, thirty years of family-handymanism, of do-it-yourselfitis, had reached its apotheosis in this one-car garage. “It’s,” I said, “the ugliest thing I ever saw in my life.”
“Right,” he said.
“So we’ll take it,” I said.
“Right,” he said. He turned to Mrs. Tutt. “We’ll take it.”
36
LIFE, LIKE THE ARMY, is a case of hurry-up- and-wait. After all the frantic chaos of December and much of January, life suddenly settled down into something that could almost be described as placid; though a life composed of four or five jail-breaks a week can never truly be described as placid, I suppose.
Nevertheless, calmness had settled, and God knows I was grateful for it. The apartment was a boon, a base, a lovely refuge from the world, though in fact I used it less often than I did Marian’s place. But just knowing it was there, it was mine, gave me a feeling of stability and safety.
Then there was Marian. I think what I loved about her most was her inability to take me seriously. She thought it was funny that I was an escaped con, that I had been spending months walking a tightrope between various horrible contingencies. Whenever we talked, and particularly when I spoke miserably and grimly about all the problems facing me, the end result was always that Marian would become helpless with mirth. How she loved to laugh!
She also gave me a book called “The Trickster” by Paul Radin, which was all about a cycle of myths among American Indians concerning a trickster figure, a prankster or practical joker, whose symbolic meaning was much more than that. He was both creator and destroyer, both good and evil, both helpful and harmful, and by the end of the cycle he had outgrown his pranks and had gone to work to make the Earth a useful place for mankind. “The trickster is the undifferentiated form,” Marian told me, after I’d read the book. “He doesn’t know who or what he is or what his purpose is. He gets into a fight with his arm because he doesn’t realize it’s part of him. He wanders and gets into trouble because he doesn’t have any goal. At the end he matures into self-awareness, and finds out he’s supposed to help human beings, that’s why he was sent to Earth. I think maybe you were like that, all practical jokers are like that. They don’t know who they are yet, it’s a case of arrested development.”
“Seems like a roundabout way,” I said, “to tell me I’m childish.” Which also made her laugh.
As to the robbing of the banks, that had temporarily ceased to be a problem. Not that Phil or the others had given up their ideas of committing the robberies, not at all. Quite the reverse; Phil, battered by fate and failure, simply became more and more dogged, hunching his shoulders and setting his teeth and looking increasingly disgusted. And the others followed his lead; none of them wanted to quit.
Well, they might as well quit. All at once I was full of ploys. Within three days of the bomb scare phone call, I had two more stunts to pull, and the sudden conviction that I’d never run out of ideas. How silly I’d been to go into despair; my mind had come through in the clutch, hadn’t it?
The next scheduled bank robbery was for Friday, January 28th, two weeks after the bomb scare attempt. I was ready well in advance, and this time I wouldn’t stop it by doing anything to the bank. Instead, I took a walk late Thursday night, went over to where the typewriter repairman kept his truck, and did everything to that poor truck that I’d ever done to any vehicle. All at once.
I felt rather bad about that, though. Not only because it was a kind of backsliding, a return to a renounced former self, but also because of the trouble I was making the typewriter repairman. But I had no choice; it was either inconvenience for him, or utter destruction for me.
So that truck got the business. Sand in the gas tank was merely the garnish. Wiring was ripped out, radiator hoses were punctured, the gas pedal spring was removed ... I don’t want to repeat the whole catalog. Suffice it to say that when I was finished the only way that truck was going to leave that parking space was behind a tower. Which gave me my last bit of vandalism: I removed the lug nuts from the rear wheels. The truck would be towed less than a block before the rear wheels would fall off.
The following afternoon, when Joe and Eddie didn’t show up at five-thirty, Phil began to get very grim-looking. Jerry, who told me later that he’d been afraid Phil might go berserk, might leap to his feet, pull out a pistol and start shooting everybody in sight out of simple frustration, began to try to placate Phil with reassurances and hearty little pep talks that sounded as hollow as a snare drum. He was still being desperately cheerful, in fact, at ten minutes to six, when a cab pulled up in front of the luncheonette and Joe and Eddie climbed out, Joe carrying the typewriter and Eddie wearing his guard uniform beneath his overcoat. Phil just looked at them through the window, and nodded. He didn’t say a word.
'‘The truck wasn’t there,” Joe said, and though much discussion followed-everybody talking except Phil, who was dangerously quiet-there was really nothing else that anybody could add to that. So far as I know, none of the gang ever did find out why the truck hadn’t been in its proper place that day.
The next robbery attempt was on Monday the fourteenth of February, and I’d been ready with my counterattack to that one for nearly a month, but when the time came I didn’t have to do anything at all. God stepped in and gave me a hand, for which I was grateful; the northeast got one of those record snowfalls without at least one of which no northern winter is complete. Everything was closed that day, including both banks. And all the schools; instead of robbing a bank, I spent that day tobogganning with Marian. That was the day I discovered it actually is possible to have sex outdoors during a snowstorm. With a toboggan beneath you and a blanket above you, body heat will do the rest. And there ain’t nothing like sex to produce body heat.
It was just around this same time that Andy Butler got the word that he was being thrown out of prison. Clemency it was called, but it was the same inclement thing that had been done to Peter Corse: throw the old men out of jail. In Andy’s case, he was literally being thrown out into the snow.
Everybody felt bad about it, even the guards and the warden. The prisoners got up a petition, asking the Governor of the state to permit Andy to stay, but nothing came of it. We did have a speech from the warden in the mess hall one noontime that I happened to be present for-I was the only tunnel insider there-in which he tried to explain that it was impossible to get the message across to administrators or Civil Service people or public officials that there were men who wanted to be in prison, who were better off in prison, and who should be permitted to stay in prison. “Ideas like that contradict everything such officials believe,” he said. “They’re trying to punish you men. Telling them some of you want to be here could only confuse them at the best, or actively annoy them at the worst.” Most of the prisoners were more direct individuals than that, and rather than try to work out the intricacies of the warden’s thought most of them merely decided the son of a bitch didn’t care and was only protecting himself and was the enemy anyway, so what can you expect?