At Wallkill in the evenings your time, for the most part, was your own. The recreation room had table tennis, board games, and a monstrous console with a record player and a radio. Partway through my grandfather’s stretch, Dr. Wallack, the warden, had a new Philco television brought in at his own expense and installed beside the radio, so the men could watch the fights on Friday night. The casualty rate for Ping-Pong balls exceeded the rate of resupply, and the records for some reason were devoted primarily to polka music or instruction in Portuguese. Many of the board games were on their fourth or fifth set of tokens, counters, and dice, improvised or crafted by inmates from spools, bottle caps, corks, modeling clay. In the case of Monopoly, the entire board had been redrafted onto a sheet of pine by some wistful or ironic cartographer who substituted the streets of Albany, New York, for those of Atlantic City, discounting all the properties by fifty percent. Reception on the television was dreadful, but many of the men would watch anything that passed across the screen of the Philco, furious blizzards of static, prizefighting ghosts.
Some of the prisoners, having exhausted the recreation room’s store of wonders, simply retired to their cells every night. Many joined a prayer circle or weekly Bible study. Most of them took up a hobby sooner or later. They painted in watercolors and oils. They carved duck decoys, built birdhouses, bent sheets of metal into napkin holders. They turned table legs on lathes and then affixed them to tabletops they had coped and mortised. They put in extra time caring for the livestock, in particular the horses. My grandfather naturally found his way to the so-called Hut, where in addition to a Hallicrafters shortwave radio and a darkroom there was a radio repair workbench.
People from the towns and villages around Wallkill would bring their radios to the prison to be repaired for the price of parts. Radios went on the fritz in interesting ways and could be repaired in ways that were satisfying. It was a matter of having the right parts and the proper tools and then ruling out the possibilities one by one. To my grandfather that was more or less a recipe for solace. When he lay awake in his bunk at night, his own problems felt so amorphous; in his dreams they were as infinite as mirrors reflecting one another. But in the radio repair shop, in the innards of a Magnavox, problems could be picked off, hunted down, cornered. They could be eliminated with a cotton swab, a piece of copper braid, or a drop of solder. And he had always loved the sugary tang of solder smoke, hot off the tip of the iron.
Even on those nights when Dr. Storch showed up in the Hut, he was easier for my grandfather to handle or to ignore. Storch would put on a headset and sit for hours in front of the Hallicrafters in the corner. He took in the news from Rádio Nacional in Brazil, from Radio Moscow, from Deutsche Welle. He monitored the chatter and technical rundowns broadcast by stargazers and weather watchers around the world who had been recruited to record and transmit their observations during this International Geophysical Year. He lost himself amid the interlacing transmissions of a million solitary amateurs reaching out to one another in the night.
On the first Friday evening of my grandfather’s first October at Wallkill, Hub Gorman wandered into the Hut. It was not a customary haunt of Gorman’s, and my grandfather saw at once that he was looking to make trouble. Gorman stood for a moment just inside the doorway. He nodded to my grandfather. His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions. He had spotted Dr. Storch in the corner, his back to the door and the trouble that had just shambled through it.
Gorman started across the lab with practiced slowness. The man took his time to do almost anything: roll a cigarette, get out of a chair, finish a bowl of chile con carne, lick the spoon. When a guard gave him an order, he pondered it. His languor was partly a kind of insubordination through indifference. It was also a manner of predation. He was an alligator sunning himself on a rock.
“Gorman,” my grandfather said. “C’mere, look at this.”
Gorman stopped. He was only two or three feet from Dr. Storch. He cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a string of squibs going off. He turned with the usual show of hastelessness.
My grandfather held up a gaudy gold and red box that once held two dozen Romeo y Julietas.
“Don’t smoke,” Gorman said. He pointed at his mouth with a knobby finger. “Chew gum.”
“Not cigars.”
The cleft between Gorman’s cheeks and brows diminished. He made his way over to the electronics workbench.
“Don’t bring him over here, dumbass,” said another prisoner, who had served as a radioman on the Abraham Lincoln during the war. “What do you care if he wants to fuck with the Nazi?”
“What is it?” Gorman said. Across the hemisphere of his left arm, some jarhead tattooist had mapped, island by greenish-black island, month by month, year by year, the bloody advance of the 10th Marines on the empire of Japan. The shoulder featured a mushroom cloud labeled nagasaki, where the 10th had patrolled the cinders postwar.
“It’s a radio. Made out of a cigar box.”
It was the work of a night, completed just five minutes or so before Gorman’s appearance in the Hut. My grandfather had intended to present it as a gift for the warden’s grandson, Theodore, the next time the boy visited; Theodore took an interest in science. He was bright and forthright and not in awe of the prison, its inmates, or his grandfather. Among inmates who pined for their own children, Theodore was a great favorite. They showered him with matchstick Eiffel Towers and tin can roadsters.
My grandfather handed the cigar box to Gorman, who hefted it. “Heavy.”
“It runs on a flashlight battery.”
My grandfather opened the lid to show Gorman the battery amid the capacitors and wires. He took out the little gray earphone on its braided gray wire, and Gorman poked it into the pleats and convolutions of his deformed right ear. My grandfather showed Gorman how to turn on and tune the radio. Gorman asked him to find the “church station” and my grandfather did. Gorman grinned. “Hey,” he said. “A radio in a cigar box. That’s pretty neat.”
But Gorman did not leave to go play with his new toy, as my grandfather had hoped. He found a stool and sat, listening to a radio preacher. He stared at the back of Dr. Storch’s head while the cricket in his cauliflower ear preached damnation. Then, without any apparent stimulus or cue, he stood up, tugged the earphone loose, wrapped the thin wire around three fingers, put the coil of wire inside the cigar box, and laid the box on the stool. The animal inside him was ready to dine.
Gorman sidled over to the radio corner. My grandfather opened his mouth to warn Dr. Storch, but just at that moment the dentist’s shoulders tensed, and he turned to face his looming tormentor, eyes level with Guadalcanal on the back of Gorman’s wrist. Gorman crouched beside Storch and laid his arm across the man’s bony shoulders. He put his mouth to Storch’s ear. His lips moved. He spoke into Storch’s ear for a long time, renewing his grip on Storch’s shoulders every few minutes. His voice was low, and the precise text of his sermon remained a mystery to my grandfather thirty years later. When he was through delivering it, he let Storch shed the yoke of his arm. He unbent himself and looked down at Storch with a pastoral smile. “Okay?” he said, audibly now. “That going to be all right with you?”
Storch was crying. The howls of the ionosphere leaked from the earpiece of the Hallicrafters’ headset.
“Alfred? I can’t hear you.”
“How about you leave the poor bastard alone for a change?” said my grandfather.
Gorman’s chin, followed by his lips, was on its way back down to the neighborhood of Storch’s left ear. It took a long moment for my grandfather’s words to have their effect. Gorman turned to my grandfather, raising himself to his full height. He had three, call it four, inches on my grandfather. In the hollow of his face, his pocket-change eyes flickered. With practiced care, he reviewed the stats he had amassed and recorded so far on my grandfather. The smile that he had pasted to his face fell off. My grandfather never saw it again. Gorman raised his hands to just below his chin, getting his guard up. He agitated the thumbs. “How about I stick these things right into your fucking eyeballs, okay? And then get Alfred here to lick the jelly off them?” he said. The notion genuinely seemed to appeal to him. “Then I can fuck both bloody holes in your skull.”
Against his better judgment, my grandfather glanced at Storch, who had stopped crying but whose cheeks were fiery red. The lenses of his eyeglasses were fogged, but my grandfather could see through the fog that Storch expected him—needed him—to do something, to stand up for him, to fight. He needed my grandfather to be his friend.
My grandfather stared at the gaudy labels of radio tubes in their boxes ranged on a shelf against the wall and serially counted to ten, first in English, then in German, and finally in Yiddish. Even if he could survive a fight with Hub Gorman, which was far from certain, months or years might be added to his bid as a result. He might be transferred to someplace far worse than Wallkill, someplace where the fights were butchery and the sentences long. And in the end Storch would still be a hapless nudnik of an ex-dentist, and my mother and grandmother would be obliged to stumble onward, lost and alone.
Gorman picked up the cigar box, took out the earphone, and poked it back into his ear. He turned the knob that controlled tuning and stopped at something that sounded like it might be jump blues, a 4/4 scratch of drums. Gorman bobbed his head in time, then winked at my grandfather. “A radio in a cigar box,” he said. “That is just neat.”
That night the shortwave frequencies lit up with the news that the Soviet Union had used a rocket to deploy Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit around the earth. The satellite transmitted a signal every three tenths of a second on a frequency of twenty megahertz, and between those pulses another signal on forty megahertz. Radio amateurs and shortwave listeners all over the world were able to tune in and listen to what struck many of them as the voice of the future itself.
Dr. Storch did not hear the signals, and my grandfather did not learn about Sputnik’s deployment until the next day. As soon as Gorman was gone, Dr. Storch hung the radio headset from its peg on the wall, got up from the swivel chair, and walked out of the Hut without looking at my grandfather. When he got back to his cell, he swallowed fifty-two aspirin tablets he had painstakingly accumulated over a period of years by pretending to suffer from chronic headaches.
That night a grinding sound woke my grandfather, like a key being turned in the ignition of an engine that was already running. It was the sound of Dr. Storch vomiting. My grandfather ignored it for as long as he could, which was not very long, although it felt like forever. He got up and went into Dr. Storch’s cell, reeling at the rancid smell of undigested aspirin. Dr. Storch lay conscious and making a sound that was somewhere between a low rhythmic moan of pain that would not stop throbbing and a sigh of unbearable regret.
“Never mind,” he said to my grandfather, though he was confused and did not seem to know it was my grandfather grabbing him, dragging him out into the corridor, raising an alarm. “Never mind, never mind.”
After the medical staff had come with a stretcher and carried Dr. Storch off to the prison’s ambulance, my grandfather got hold of a bucket and mop and did what he could about the mess in Storch’s cell so that it would be all right when they returned him. They would keep him a few days, then bring him back, and it would all start over again for him with Gorman, only now it would be worse. Gorman would be encouraged by his near-miss, and Storch would be more vulnerable than ever.
My grandfather cleaned himself up and returned to his own cell. He lay on his cot for hours, trying to focus his thoughts on his family and on the time remaining until the day they would be reunited, which diminished every day by a greater percentage than the one before. He powered up the Zeiss projector in his skull and eagerly sought Cassiopeia and Andromeda in their courses—and Cepheus, the husband and father. That’s you, he told himself. You are Cepheus. You are not Perseus. You are not a hero. It’s not your job to rescue anybody. But he could not sustain the planetarium show tonight. There was too much light pouring in from the stanchion outside his window. There was still a tang of vomit in the air.
Storch was going to be kept under observation at the county hospital for four days. On the first day of his absence my grandfather told the guard in charge of the grounds crew that he needed fence wire to repair the antenna of a “lousy made-in-Japan” radio set that had come into the shop. For a purpose directly opposed to his present one, my grandfather had earned the guards’ trust. He was believed. Once inside the potting shed, my grandfather filled the rolled cuffs of his trousers with Hi-Yield. He had noticed the grounds crew mixing this crystalline white powder with water and applying it to tree stumps at the edge of the meadow. The crew called it stump killer; it acted to soften the stumps so that rain was enough to dissolve them. The active ingredient was basically chemical fertilizer: potassium nitrate.
The second day and third day of Storch’s absence, my grandfather devoted to obtaining a quantity of sugar. This was trickier; the kitchen kept an eye on sugar because it could be used to make hooch. The cubes were counted and doled out with tongs, two to a prisoner per meal. My grandfather would have to stockpile for weeks. He thought of another approach. It was foolish, dangerous, and shameless but it would be efficient, and anyway, shamelessness was often the missing piece of many otherwise brilliant schemes.
A word that often cropped up when people talked or wrote about the warden of the Wallkill prison, Dr. Walter M. Wallack, was tireless. For every problem that arose in the life and administration of the prison, he came up with three possible solutions. He was always on the move. You never saw him sitting down. He arrived early and went home late. Part of this tirelessness was no doubt constitutional or even moral (he was a good man), but you could not discount the fact that he consumed—the legend varied—between fifteen and twenty cups of coffee a day, black and sweet. He kept a percolator in his office, on top of a low bookshelf by the door, and an ample supply of sugar.
After breakfast on the second day my grandfather begged one of the cooks for an empty drum of Quaker oats. That evening he went to the Hut and built a radio inside the cardboard drum. He sank a tuning knob through the Q of Quaker and a volume pot through the O of Oats. He cannibalized a speaker cone from a junked unit and cut a grille for it out of the drum’s paper lid. The next day he got permission to deliver the radio to Wallack in his office.
He found Wallack behind his desk—standing up, as usual. There was a nice leather swivel chair, but Wallack almost never sat down in it. He stood, and he leaned on the top of a filing cabinet when he needed to jot something in his legal pad. The desk was bare except for a telephone, a calendar blotter, and a crude paper rocket, a foot high, clearly if unconsciously modeled on the V-2.
“Very kind of you,” Wallack said, taking the radio from my grandfather. “Very clever. Theo will love it, I’m sure.”
My grandfather showed Wallack how to operate the radio, suggesting that the warden move closer to the window to get better reception. He moved closer to the door and the shelf with the coffee percolator. Dr. Wallack turned to face the window and twiddled the knobs. He found Mozart. He found Eddie Fisher. While his back was to the room, my grandfather leaned over and grabbed one of a dozen unopened boxes of sugar cubes on the shelf below the percolator. He reached around to grab hold of his own shirt collar, jerked it away from his neck, and dropped the box of sugar cubes down the back of his shirt.
Dr. Wallack turned back and my grandfather had to put his eyes somewhere, so he put them on the rocket. A loving but clumsy hand had shaped the fins, nosecone, and sweep of the fuselage from strips of thin card around a tube left over from a roll of paper towels. The paper was crusted with dried mucilage and blotched with red, white, and blue paint, but the rocket’s proportions were pretty good. There were stars and stripes and the legend u.s.a. written twenty times all up and down the thing in execrable handwriting.
“Theo’s work,” Dr. Wallack said.
“I figured.”
“Gone space-mad, like all the other boys since Sputnik went up. Building rockets. Rockets to the Moon! Trying to figure out how to make them really fly.”
“Interesting problem,” my grandfather said. “I’ll think about it.” All you would need, he idly thought, is a little bit of sugar.
He backed out of the room, scuttled past the warden’s secretary, and then hurried to his cell to hide the sugar cubes.
On the third night after lights-out, my grandfather sat on his cot with some tape, wire, a flashlight battery, and the guts of an old clock from the scrap heap in the Hut. Working by the blare of light through the window, he ground the cubes to powder in the box and then mixed in KNO3, packing the sugar box as tightly as he could with the “candy,” as it was known. After an hour’s patient work he had a configuration of wire, battery, candy, and time that was both plausible and strictly nur zu demonstrationszwecken. He was not sure how plausible it was that Hub Gorman would know how to construct even a rudimentary explosive device like this one, but he also wasn’t sure it really mattered. The mere presence of it in Gorman’s cell, once my grandfather had tipped off the guards, would likely be enough to get Gorman transferred out of Wallkill to Green Haven or Auburn or someplace where he really belonged. Hub Gorman did not belong in a prison that had beehives, a creamery, a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a photo enlarger.