The streets were thick with buses by the time I made it back from Scarborough to the Cumberland County Civic Center: yellow school buses, Peter Pan Trailways, in fact just about anything that had wheels and could accommodate more than six people. The Pirates were on a roll. Under coach Kevin Dineen they were at the top of the Atlantic Division of the AHL’s Eastern Conference. Earlier in the week they had beaten their nearest rivals, the Hartford Wolf Pack, 7–4. Now it was the turn of the Springfield Falcons and it looked like about five thousand fans had made their way to the Civic Center for the game.
Inside the arena, Crackers the Parrot was entertaining the crowd. To be more accurate, he was entertaining most of the crowd. There were some people who just didn’t want to be entertained.
“This has got to be the dumbest game ever,” said Louis. He was dressed in a gray cashmere coat over a black jacket and trousers, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of the coat, his chin buried in the folds of his red scarf. He acted like he’d just been forced out of a train somewhere in the middle of Siberia. His mildly Satanic beard had been dispensed with, and his hair was even more ruthlessly cut back than usual, its gray touches now barely visible. He and Angel had arrived earlier that day. I had bought a couple of extra tickets in case they wanted to come along to the game, but Angel had somehow managed to pick up a cold in Napa and was back at my place feeling sorry for himself. That left Louis as my reluctant escort for the evening.
Things between us had changed over the last year. In a way, I had always been closer to Angel. I knew more about his past, and when I was, however briefly, a cop, I had done what I could to help and protect him. I had seen something in him—even now I found it hard to explain precisely what it was, but perhaps it was a kind of decency, an empathy with those who had suffered, albeit one filtered murkily through his criminality—and had responded to it. I had seen something in his partner, too, but it was very different. Long before I had fired a gun in anger, Louis had killed. At first, he had done so out of a rage of his own, but he had quickly discovered he had a talent for it, and there were those who had been willing to pay him to utilize that ability on their behalf. He was once, I thought, not so different from Frank Merrick, although his moral compass had become surer than Merrick’s had ever been.
Yet Louis was also, I knew, not so different from me. He represented a side of me that I had long been reluctant to acknowledge—the urge to strike out, the impulse toward violence—and his presence in my life had forced me to come to terms with it, and, through that accommodation, to control it. In turn, I thought that I had given him an outlet for his own anger, a way of engaging with, and altering, the world that was worthy of him as a man. We had seen things in this last year that had changed both of us, confirming suspicions that we had both held about the nature of the honeycomb world but had rarely shared. We had found a common ground, however hollow it might have sounded beneath our feet.
“You know why you don’t see no black men playing this game?” he continued. “A) Because it’s slow. B) Because it’s dumb. And C) Because it’s cold. I mean, look at these guys.” He flicked through the pages of the official program. “Most of them ain’t even American. They’re Canadian. Like you don’t have enough slow-ass white men of your own, you got to import them from Canada.”
“We like giving jobs to Canadians,” I said. “It gives them the chance to earn some real dollars.”
“Yeah, I bet they send it back to their families, like in the Third World.” He watched with obvious disdain as the mascot frolicked on the ice. “Parrot is more of an athlete than they are.”
We were seated in Block E, right in the center overlooking the circle. There was no sign of Bill, the man Tween was putting our way, although it was clear from what Tween had said that he was likely to be the cautious type where Merrick was concerned. If he was smart, he would be watching us even now. He would be reassured to learn that Merrick was behind bars for a few days. It had bought us all a little more time, for which I was grateful, at least until I was forced to explain the subtle nuances of hockey to a man who thought sport started and finished on a basketball court or an athletics track.
“Come on,” I said. “That’s not fair. Wait until they get on the ice. Some of these guys are pretty fast.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” said Louis. “Carl Lewis was fast. Jesse Owens was fast. Even Ben Johnson was fast on his chemical ass. The Popsicles, on the other hand, they not fast. They like snowmen on flat tin cans.”
An announcement was made advising spectators that “obscene or abusive language” would not be tolerated.
“You can’t swear?” said Louis incredulously. “The fuck kind of sport is this?”
“It’s just for appearances,” I said, as a man with kids on either side of him glanced up at Louis disapprovingly from below, considered saying something, then thought better of it and contented himself with pulling his kids’ hats down over their ears.
Queen’s “We Will Rock You” was played, followed by Republica’s “Ready to Go.”
“Why is so much sports music shit?” asked Louis.
“This is white people’s music,” I explained. “It’s supposed to suck. That way, black people can’t show them up by dancing to it.”
The teams hit the ice. There was more music. As usual, prizes were given out all through the first period: free burgers and mall discounts, the occasional T-shirt or cap.
“Give me a break,” said Louis. “They got to give shit away just to keep folks in their seats.”
By the end of the first period, the Pirates were 2–0 up from Zenon Konopka and Geoff Peters. There was still no sign of Tween’s guy.
“Maybe he’s asleep somewhere,” suggested Louis. “Like here.”
Just as the teams emerged for the second period, a small, hard-looking man in an ancient Pirates jacket moved into the row from the right. He had a goatee and wore silver-rimmed glasses. His head was covered by a black Pirates hat, and his hands were hidden in the pockets of his jacket. He looked like any one of hundreds of other people in the crowd.
“Parker, right?” he said.
“That’s right. You’re Bill?”
He nodded but didn’t take his hands out of his pockets.
“How long have you been watching us?” I asked.
“Since before the first period,” he replied.
“You’re being pretty careful.”
“I figure it doesn’t hurt.”
“Frank Merrick’s in custody,” I said. “Yeah, well I didn’t know that, did I? What did they get him for?”
“Stalking.”
“They’re going to charge Frank Merrick with stalking?” He snorted in disbelief. “Give me a break. Why don’t they add jaywalking, or not having a license for his dog?”
“We wanted him held for a while,” I said. “The ‘why’ didn’t matter.”
Bill looked past me to where Louis was sitting. “No offense meant, but a black guy kind of stands out at a hockey game.”
“This is Maine. A black guy stands out just about anywhere.”
“I suppose, but you could have made him blend in some.”
“Does he look like the kind of guy who’s gonna wear a pirate’s hat and wave a plastic cutlass?”
Bill looked away from Louis.
“I guess not. A real cutlass, maybe.”
He sat back and didn’t say anything more for a time. With 3:18 to go in the second period, Shane Hynes hit a rocket from the right point. A minute and a half later, Jordan Smith made it 4–0. It was all over.
Bill stood.
“Let’s go get a beer,” he said. “That’s four consecutive wins, nine wins in ten games. Best start since the ninety-four-to-ninety-five inaugural, and I had to watch that in jail.”
“That count as cruel and unusual punishment?” asked Louis.
Bill gave him the eye.
“He’s not a fan,” I said.
“No shit.”
We walked outside and picked up three microbrews in plastic glasses. There was a steady stream of people already leaving the arena now that it looked like the Pirates had sewn everything up.
“I appreciated the ticket, by the way,” he said. “I don’t always have the funds to come here no more.”
“No problem,” I said.
He waited expectantly, his eyes fixed on the bulge in my jacket where my wallet was visible. I took it out and paid him the fifty. He folded the bills carefully and placed them in a pocket of his jeans. I was about to ask him about Merrick when, from inside the arena, came the unmistakable response to a Falcons’ goal.
“Goddammit!” said Bill. “We jinxed ’em by leaving.”
So it was back to our seats to wait for the start of the third period, but at least Bill was content to talk for a while about his time in Supermax while we did so. The Supermax system was designed to take out of the general population prisoners who were deemed to be especially violent, or escape risks, or a threat to others. Often, it was used as a form of punishment for those who broke the rules, or who were found with contraband. The Maine Supermax was opened in 1992 in Warren. It had one hundred maximum-security, solitary-confinement cells. With the closure of the old Thomaston State Prison at the start of the century, the new eleven-hundred-inmate prison was eventually built around the Supermax, like fortress walls around a citadel.
“We were both in the Max at the same time, Merrick and me,” he said. “I was doing twenty for burglary. Well, burglaries. You believe that? Twenty years. Goddamn killers get out in less. Anyway, the cops busted me for possession of a screwdriver and some wire. I only had the stuff to repair my goddamn radio. Told me I was an escape risk and sent me to the Max. After that, things got crazy. I hit a cop. I was pissed at him. I paid for it though. I stayed in the Max for the duration. Fuckin’ cops. I hate them.”
Inmates routinely referred to the prison guards as “cops.” After all, they were part of the same law enforcement edifice as the police, the prosecutors, and the judges.
“Bet you’ve never seen the inside of the SMU,” said Bill.
“Nope,” I said. The Supermax was off-limits to just about everyone who wasn’t a prisoner or a guard, but I’d heard enough about it to know that it wasn’t a place I ever wanted to be.
“It’s bad,” said Bill, and from the way he said it I knew that I wasn’t going to hear some exaggerated, hard-luck ex-con’s story. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything. He just wanted someone to listen.
“It stinks: shit, blood, puke. Stuff is on the floor, on the walls. Snow comes under the doors in winter. The vents make this noise all the time, and there’s something about it. You can’t block it out. I used to stuff toilet paper in my ears to try to stop myself from hearing it. I thought it was going to drive me nuts. It’s twenty-three-hour lockdown with one hour a day, five days a week, in the kennel. That’s what we call the exercise yard: thing is six feet wide, thirty feet long. I should know: I measured it myself for five years. Lights are on twenty-four/seven. There’s no TV, no radio, just noise and white light. They don’t even allow a man a toothbrush. They give you this useless fucking piece of plastic for your finger, but it’s not worth a damn.”
Bill opened his mouth and pointed with his finger at the gaps in his yellow teeth.
“I lost five teeth in there,” he said. “They just fell out. When you get down to it, the Max is a form of psychological torture. You know why you’re in there, but not what you can do to get out again. And that’s not the worst of it. You fuck up badly enough, and they send you to the ‘chair.’”
That I knew about. The “chair” was a restraining device used on those who managed to push the guards too far. Four or five guards wearing full body armor and carrying shields and Mace would storm a prisoner’s cell to perform the “extraction.” He would be Maced, pushed to the floor or onto his bed, then handcuffed. The cuffs would then be connected to leg irons and his clothes cut from his body, and then the prisoner would be carried, naked and screaming, to an observation room and there bound to a chair with straps where he would be left for hours in the cold. Incredibly, the prison authorities argued that the chair wasn’t used for punishment but only as a means of controlling inmates who were a threat to themselves or others. The Portland Phoenix had obtained a tape of an extraction, as all such operations were recorded by the prison, ostensibly to prove that the prisoners were not being mistreated. According to those who had seen it, it was hard to imagine how extractions and the chair qualified as anything other than state-sanctioned violence bordering on torture.
“They did it to me once,” said Bill, “after I coldcocked the cop. Never again. I kept my head down after that. That was no way to treat a man. They did it to Merrick, too, more than once, but they couldn’t break Frank. It was always the same reason, though. It never varied.”
“What do you mean?”
“Merrick was always being punished for the same thing. There was a kid in there, name of Kellog, Andy Kellog. He was crazy, but it wasn’t his fault. Everybody knew it. He’d been fucked with as a child, and he never recovered. Spoke about birds all the time. Men like birds.”
I interrupted Bill.
“Wait a minute, this kid Kellog had been abused?”
“That’s right.”
“Sexually abused?”
“Uh-huh. I guess the men who did it wore masks or something. I recalled Kellog from his time in Thomaston. Some of the others in the Max did too, but nobody ever seemed to know for sure what had happened to him. All we knew was that he’d been taken by the ‘men like birds,’ and not once either. A couple of times, and that was after others had been at him already. What was left when they were done with him wasn’t worth a nickel curse. Kid was medicated to hell and back. Only man who seemed to get through to him was Merrick, and I got to tell you, that was a surprise to me. Merrick wasn’t no social worker. He was hard. But this kid, man, Merrick tried to look out for him. It wasn’t no faggot thing either. First man who said that to Merrick was also the last. Merrick near took his head off, tried to force it through the bars of his cell. Nearly succeeded, too, until the cops came and broke it up. Then Kellog got transferred to the Max for throwing shit at guards, and Merrick, he found a way to go there too.”
“Merrick deliberately got himself transferred to the Supermax?”
“Yep, that’s what they say. Until Kellog went, Merrick had minded his own business, kept his head down, apart from those occasions when someone stepped out of line and threatened the kid or, if he was really dumb, tried to move up the order by knocking heads with Merrick. But after Kellog was transferred, Merrick did everything he could to rile the cops until they had no choice but to send him to Warren. Wasn’t much that he could do for the kid there, but he didn’t give up. He talked to the cops, tried to get them to send a mental health worker to check up on Kellog, even managed to talk the kid down once or twice when it seemed like he was going to get himself sent to the chair again. Guards took him out of his cell on occasion just so he could reason with the kid, but it didn’t always work. I tell you, Kellog lived in that chair. Maybe he still does, for all I know.”
“Kellog is still in there?”
“I don’t think he’s ever gonna get out, not alive. I think the kid wants to die. It’s a miracle he isn’t dead already.”
“What about Merrick? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about himself?”
“Nah, he was a loner. Only man he had time for was Kellog. I got to talk to him some, when our paths crossed on the way to the infirmary or to and from the kennel, but over the years we talked about as much as you and I have done tonight. I knew about his daughter, though. I think that was why he was looking out for Kellog.”
The final period started. I could see Bill’s attention immediately begin to transfer itself to the ice.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What did Merrick’s daughter have to do with Kellog?”
Reluctantly, Bill turned away from the action for the last time.
“Well, his daughter had gone missing,” he said. “He didn’t have much to remember her by. A couple of photographs, a drawing or two that the girl sent to him in jail before she disappeared. It was the drawings that attracted him to Kellog because Kellog and Merrick’s daughter, they’d drawn the same thing. They’d both drawn men with the heads of birds.”