“What is going on here?” I asked.
“This,” Gerry said, indicating the pile of skis, “is my latest project. I’m going to increase my sales sixfold. It’ll take the Midwest by storm. You know they’re already filming a sequel to Impossible Journey?”
“No,” I said. “I meant, what’s going on with these kids? Where’s their mother?”
“Oh.” Gerry looked down to the kids doing push-ups. Every time they reached another increment of ten, they pushed off hard enough to clap their hands and sound off—“Thirty!”—so when Gerry spoke his voice was a mix of pride and sorrow. “The ex — old lady, she’s having some health issues. I’m kind of watching the kids till she rebounds a little, at least until she gets her short-term memory back. They’re good kids, though, you know? They grow on you. I mean, do not lay any free time on their hands. Do not let them out of your sight. But, you know, you get used to having them around.”
“Even if you have to keep them in a jail cell?”
Gerry was in another place. He didn’t even hear me. “My ex — old lady, she was making the kids breakfast, like every other day,” he said. “I warned her about that toaster trick a hundred times.”
I watched his eyes closely. It was like he was there, watching it happen.
“What?” I asked. “Did she put a knife in it or something?”
Gerry shook his head. “You think that woman’d learn.”
“She was shocked? And it had happened before?”
Gerry looked off, as if all those fancy machines could help him craft the words. “I never thought I’d get her back,” he said. “She took off for all those years — I thought she was gone for good. All I did was work and work. You know, you get into this loop where you only let yourself look forward. I had two night jobs. I begged Sheriff Dan for extra shifts. I’ve arrested everyone in town — two, three times. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. And this is how I get her back. This is how she returns to me. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’ll take it. If this is how it has to be, I’ll take it.”
I put my hand on Gerry’s shoulder. “I hear what you’re saying.”
He slapped my hand away, as if I’d offended him, then took it out on the kids. After one of those piercing two-finger whistles I could never do, he yelled, “Double time.”
The kids clutched the cement for all they were worth, elbows knocking as they drove it home, clapping twice between sets. When they chanted “Fifty!” Gerry sensed he’d made his point. He called “Cut!” and the kids popped up, faces glowing as they looked to Gerry for approval. By way of praise, Gerry brushed the dust off all their painter’s pants and lined them up again. Little Pat came up and hugged Gerry’s leg.
Gerry turned to me. “Look,” he said, “this project is taking longer than I thought. We’ve got a quota to fill, and then I’ve got to get these kids to their first hockey practice. Can you find your cell on your own?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I suppose.”
He pulled a map from his pocket. “You’re in Building C-3.” He pointed to the old freshman dorm. “Your room’s on the second floor. Go straight there, and do not cross the perimeter wire. If you step off campus, the alarm sounds, and then they hunt you down. Then you get transferred to a real prison.”
* * *
Outside, the sun shot purple halos through bilevel clouds, and a mist raced between the buildings, furling like parachute silk, smelling of the chinaberry hedges it passed through. The light, indeterminate and bright, made my eyes weep in the corners, where bits of sawdust had lodged.
Before me, the prison campus was a series of mirror-bright fields punctuated by old-timey buildings whose bricks had leached whiter with each winter. The current freeze held broken branches fast in the trees. An aerial antenna slumped under a baggy suit of ice. Clutched by a trellis of brown ivy was a yellow T-shirt, still looking summery and surprised. I couldn’t quite make myself move toward any of these buildings. How could I sentence myself to some teeny dorm room? How could I resign myself to slacking off the remainder of my days on a freshman bunkbed? I had no way of knowing it, but as I stamped my feet with indecision, the annals of primitive technology were rewriting themselves. A new day had dawned in science, and though I didn’t understand it yet, I was the Adam of anthropology. There was so little time.
Then it came to me: the Unknown Indian. I hadn’t been on this campus in years, since long before it’d become a minimum-security prison, but I suddenly realized there was a place I needed to go. I pulled up the hood of my prison-issue blizzard overalls and tucked my hands inside the jumpsuit’s sleeves. I gauged the wind, dropped a shoulder, and set off for what had once been Parkton College’s humanities building. Down in the basement there was an exhibit called the Tomb of the Unknown Indian, a collection that began with some ceremonial graves discovered during the school’s construction, and had over the years expanded into quite an archive of death ephemera.
Despite the tithing wind, the prison’s population of white males was out in full force, clustering in groups of ten to fifteen, showing the cold their backs. The puffy eyes of billionaires tracked me as I passed their chummy cadres, smoking Canadian cigarettes under a work-detail awning, or gripping foam coffee cups in the lee of a laundry van. There was something ganglike in the way they huddled, and I decided I’d take Sheriff Dan’s advice: I wasn’t going to speak to any of them.
Heading downhill past the gymnasium, I passed a group of older corporate types, all wearing their blue prison bibs, all sporting military crew cuts. And in front of the library stood a group of young lions, hair slicked down, glasses lean and wiry, which was probably the look on Wall Street when they were arrested for crimes like price fixing and securities fraud. Beyond them, through the library’s windows, I could see the shelves were still loaded with books, bolstering my faith that the Unknown Indian exhibit would still be there.
I cruised by the old Memorial Union, whose little collegiate movie theater was hosting a monthlong Hitchcock, film festival for the viewing pleasure of the titans of white-collar crime. Perhaps at this very moment, the moviegoers included Michael Milken, Charles Keating, Fife Symington, and Ivan Boesky. The matinee was The Birds, a film whose paranoia and hubris were laughable. As if our feathered friends were the ones conspiring to eradicate us. Tonight’s screening was Psycho, the most frightening movie ever made. What sick freak could think up that story line, what kind of person would leave his decaying mother’s corpse in the basement?
Finally, I came to the old humanities building. The main doors were inset with dark wood, and heavy shocks hissed them open and closed. I made for the basement doors at the end of the hall. Passing rows of classrooms, I noticed through the little windows that all the old rooms had been converted into sound booths. Through the security glass, you could see blue-bibbed inmates using the old language-lab equipment to record books for the blind. In room after room, men wore pastel plastic headsets and read works like White Fang and Beloved into outdated, modular microphones. Lord, how would I make it through a day here, let alone a month?
I headed downstairs, where a repository of regional grave paraphernalia was on display. Though I’d viewed the artifacts before, there might be something I’d see in a new light, something that would help me understand Keno. The collection was famous for a set of seventeenth-century Nakota coup sticks and a primitive polished-shell mirror used only by Ojibway men who’d completed a rite-of-passage ceremony called “The Life of the Long Body.” The exhibit also boasted a Mandan breastplate made from rose sea coral. Most famous of all was a set of twenty duck decoys, hand-woven from bulrush reeds, discovered during the dam’s earthmoving phase. The decoys carbon-dated back three thousand years.