“Tell us first,” Clem said. “Then we take the bag off.”
“No, man. Take the bag off first.”
“See ya, Melvin.” Zig slung his satchel over his shoulder and headed toward the door.
“Lock ‘n’ Leave Mini-Storage. Lock ‘n’ Leave Mini-Storage.”
Zig paused at the door, hand on the knob. “You got a key?”
“No, man. No way. Conrad keeps the key. Only Conrad.”
“What’s the locker number?”
“I don’t know, man. I forget, I forget! Come on, man. Take this fucking bag off!”
“Tell us the locker number.”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Oh, Christ, man, please.”
“What was that?”
“Seven-oh-four, man. Try locker seven-oh-four. I’m not sure. Bag, man. Bag. Please.”
Zig looked at him for a moment, debating. Then he looked over at Clem, who shrugged. Zig really didn’t want to make a second trip back to this dump. He went back and tightened the drawstring around Melvin’s neck.
Eight-thirty in the morning and here they were at Fisherman’s Wharf, Max gripping his second coffee of the day and looking as bewildered as Max ever looked.
“Seasides like me not,” he muttered, barely audible above the slap of waves and the wind whipping in off the bay. “Look, even the gulls have lost their mirth,” he said, pointing at a row of scruffy birds on the back of a bench.
Max was wearing a windbreaker with Stuyvesant Town stencilled on the back, and a Merrill Lynch baseball cap. No one could possibly mistake him for the man who had robbed the Margot Peabody fundraiser the night before. This morning he looked like a soccer dad, which, to give him his due, until rather recently he actually was. He used to show up at Owen’s games, wearing that cap and jacket, and bellow encouragement from the sidelines. The unsettling thing was, he bellowed encouragement to whoever happened to control the ball. He just liked to see goals, he didn’t mind which team scored them.
“I want to win!” Owen had cried. “My friends think you’re crazy! The coach hates you!”
“A goal is a wonderful thing,” Max said. “It doesn’t become a better thing just because your team scored it.”
Eventually Owen quit sports just to avoid the humiliation, but Max never threw clothes away, no matter how old and worn, so here he was in full regalia. Lately, Owen had been asking himself if Max is ever out of costume.
Not that he was asking himself any questions at the moment. He was reading from some pages he had downloaded off the Internet. The papers were curling in the waterfront damp, and he had to grip them tightly against the wind.
“Tell me again, my starry-eyed son, why we are going to this place at six o’clock in the morning.”
“It’s eight-thirty. They say to go early or it gets too crowded and you can’t enjoy the visit.”
“And why are we visiting a prison in the first place?”
“Oh, come on, Max. You saw the Clint Eastwood movie.”
“Yes, but he was leaving the place, which is what any sensible person does with a prison. No sane person, or even mad person whose medications are in order, goes to a prison.”
“It’s a disused prison, Max. A decommissioned prison.”
“But look at it.”
Max gestured with his paper cup toward the island. Gulls, apparently now awake, circled its lighthouse and the forlorn buildings that looked as if they might slide off the rock into the lethal currents of San Francisco Bay. Even from this distance Owen could feel it putting an indefinable pressure on his heart.
“You’ll enjoy it once we’re there,” he said, not that Max had any choice. This was their deal on their summer road trips: Max chose the shows, but Owen chose the sights they saw in their off-hours.
He read the prison history aloud to Max as they crossed over in the ferry. There were perhaps two dozen people on board, some paging through guidebooks, others snapping pictures. As they approached, Owen opened his backpack and took out his own camera. He took several shots, showing the best ones to Max on the stamp-size digital screen, but Max just harrumphed and looked away.
Owen manoeuvred them over to the ferry’s exit so that they could be first off. “It says be sure to go up to the cellblocks first,” he explained, “before everyone crowds in and spoils the atmosphere.”
“It’s not possible to spoil the atmosphere of a cellblock.”
It was a steep climb, and Owen herded Max along as if he were an irritable old camel. When they got to the top, Max sat down heavily on a bench, red in the face and puffing.
“Wow, look at the city,” Owen said, snapping another picture. “It looks great with the sun hitting it.”
But Max was staring in front of them. “What manner of fiend would lock a human being up on a godforsaken rock like this?”
“These were not minor criminals,” Owen said. “These were hit men. Multiple murderers.”
“Not likely to be improved by sea air and a sound regimen, then.”
Max’s mood didn’t improve when they visited cellblock D, which was once reserved for the worst of the worst. Toilets in the solitary confinement cells were holes in the floor. In some of these, the light had been kept on twenty-four hours a day. In others, there was no light at all.
Max cheered up when they got to cellblock B, which had housed Frank Morris, who, along with two fellow prisoners, managed to pull off the only successful escape in Alcatraz’s history. He and his colleagues had chiselled away at the cement around an air vent, using tools such as a metal spoon soldered with silver they had melted down from a dime, and an electric drill created out of a vacuum cleaner motor stolen from the prison shop. They covered their exit by placing papier mache heads in their beds. The heads were now on display on the bunks.
“What ghastly wigs,” Max said. “Must have made them out of old paintbrushes. Now, may we please leave? What kind of nephew hauls his gentle old uncle off to prison on a bright sunny day?”
By now the rest of the ferry-load of visitors had made their way up to the cellblocks. The place was taking on a Disneyland feel.
“Just one last stop,” Owen said.
It was in block C, his downloaded material informed them, that a psychic visiting the prison had been disturbed by a “disruptive spirit” named Butcher. Deep in the night, long ago, inmates had awoken to the sound of a prisoner yelling for help, screaming that a wild creature with red eyes was trying to kill him. The next day, it turned out, one Abie Maldowitz had died in his bed, apparently suffocated. He had been a hit man for the mob, and his nickname had been “The Butcher.”
Cellblock C was as dank a ruin as the rest of the place.
“Get me out of this house, Benvolio,” Max said, “or I shall faint. Truly, Owen. The exit. Now.”
They had to walk against the incoming crowds to get out. The sun had taken the chill out of the air, but the wind was still howling around the prison, and their windbreakers flapped like pennants. They walked past the ruin of the warden’s house, past the gardens that the guards’ wives had planted, long overgrown, and sat on a large flat rock facing the water.
Max immediately decided that he should have used the washroom and lumbered back toward the prison, leaving Owen staring at the gulls, the whitecaps and the enormous freighters in the bay. He had something important he had been waiting to tell Max. Something Max was not going to want to hear. He had thought the ferry ride and the sea air might provide a good occasion, but Alcatraz was having an unsettling effect on his guardian, and now did not seem an opportune moment. He was beginning to wonder why Max was taking so long when a voice called out behind him.
“Excuse me, I think I’ve found something of yours.”
Owen turned to see Max being led down the hill toward him by a chubby young man in a yellow pullover.
“They need more signs,” Max said. “All these bloody brambles look the same.”
“Seemed a little disoriented,” the young man said in a quieter voice.