Twenty-One

That night in his cell Mr Nice Guy masturbated to thoughts of Barbara but the freshness of her image, the coconut scent of her hair, actually brought him sadness. He drifted off into a nervous sleep, uncomfortable bursts of sunshine in his brain making him toss and moan. His machine was backfiring. This image receded only to be replaced by the appearance of his mother. “Rub my feet, dear,” she said. “Rub my feet.”

“But I can’t. I can’t. You know I can’t.” A horrible sense of helplessness taunted him.

Yet she insisted, even as he fell to his knees and protested, reminding her, “Mom, you don’t have any legs.”

“I know that, silly. But these phantom feet are killing me.”

So, dutifully, he grasped at space in front of her, and began to polish the air.

“Oooh,” she said, “oooh.”

He began to weep, his fingers gripping round the untouchable heels and ankles.

With a cry and a jerk, Mr Nice Guy kicked down his covers, rolled to one side. His eyes fluttered open, then closed again, and he thought: What a horrible dream.

There was the sound of footsteps pounding down the metal stairs. Muffled cries, growing louder. He rolled over onto his other side, his nostrils flaring. Cries and pounding. Then a BANG! in his cell as the door swung open.

“What?” he cried, sitting up, promptly cracking his head on the ceiling, lying down again, rubbing his skull, moaning. Oh, these dreams! He’d never had such dreams!

“Get up, asshole!” a voice yelled. Mr Nice Guy opened his eyes, blinking. “Get up!” A hand jabbed at him through his blanket. “Get up! This is our chance. Run, man!”

When he turned, the invader was already leaving. Light spilled in from the hallway. Yes, his door was open.

Amazed, he told himself: This Is Not A Dream. He slid down from his bunk, his bare feet on the cold concrete, and tiptoed in his underwear toward the opening. He heard shouts and curses in the stairwell, and several men ran past his door. Men in stripes—prisoners. He smelled smoke, too.

Smoke!

He poked his head into the corridor. To the left hung a haze, churning toward him. A prisoner emerged from the cloud and ran past with a yell as emergency buzzers began to whelp.

Mr Nice Guy hesitated at the threshold, thinking: Oh my, the guards are going to come down on us big time, once they get control again. But the haze approached his door, the fumes grew stronger and stronger, and he knew he couldn’t stay there long. So he went back, hurried into his stripes, his boots, and before leaving, reached into his personal affairs to retrieve his father’s moustache.

Reggie huffed and puffed, Barbara closed her eyes and ran her hands over her breasts, remembering Jerry’s touch. It was like that.

Whope! Whope! Whope! went the buzzer as Mr Nice Guy climbed down the metal staircase. He heard a gunshot and immediately crouched lower. The smoke was thicker now. He lifted up the front of his shirt, pressed it to his face to relieve the burning in his sinuses. Presently he saw someone lying in his path—an arm thrown back, the twist of the torso—and knew the man was dead. He would’ve preferred to go in another direction but with the smoke behind him there was nothing to do but step over the body. Soon he caught up with several other men in stripes and followed them, though they didn’t seem to know where they were going either, for they bickered in confusion and swore at each other. As the fumes grew denser they stayed close, each following the heels of the man in front of him. No one dared go off alone. The main thing was to keep moving.

But now smoke was coming at them from the other direction, too. Tears in their eyes, groping at the walls as they went, they stumbled on, while the temperature rose and heat rolled in waves. For several panicky seconds they stopped to deliberate about whether they should turn back, but the man in front declared that they couldn’t, that this was their only way. So they continued, following him, and reached another set of stairs leading down, which they followed to another level, treading on several bodies in the process, whose softness underfoot made Mr Nice Guy shudder.

Oh, of all the pickles he’d been in, and by now he’d seen a few, this was certainly the worst! He pressed forward, wondering if James had been able to escape the infirmary. What about Doc and Myler’s section? By now their numbers had grown: there were prisoners behind following him through the smoke. As if he knew where he was going! When the fellows in front paused, the line bunched and each man bumped into the man in front of him, hacking and coughing. The head of the line started pulling and prying on a hatch in the floor. Were they going further down?

No: as soon as the hatch opened, men began to emerge, crawling out like a stream of ants. The line cheered and coughed, prisoners clapped and hollered. “We got The Pit! We got The Pit!” Then they continued, shirts pressed to their faces, the smoke so thick now that it was a blind trek.

Dear God, he thought. Deliver me from this hell.

A nice feeling gathered in her, both high and low, and at the same time there was a constriction in her throat, an anticipation. Tears seeped quickly out of the corners of her eyes, running down each side of her face. Another slow spasm, and her chin trembled uncontrollably. She tossed her head from side to side, and sobbed.

“What is it?” asked Reggie, looking down. His hair hung over her.

Her mouth crumpled. She tried to pull herself free, for she knew what she had to say to him.

When they stumbled into the breech, passing through a sort of concrete rupture, eyes still weeping with smoke, the night air cut into Mr Nice Guy’s lungs so wonderfully that he felt drunk. Gunshots went pip pop pip and seemed toylike, almost gnatty, insignificant, but all the while he kept low and greedily drank in the fresh air. Oh, it was wonderful! A helicopter reverberating overhead suddenly emitted a blinding beam of light: a voice horned from above.

In a few seconds, though, the P.A. system cut out with a squawk and the helicopter rose wildly to the left, for one of the prisoners in front of Mr Nice Guy had lifted a long barrel and started firing: tongues of orange spat into the darkness. Only then he realized that some of his companions were armed. There was a terrible sputter and screech as the helicopter tilted straight up, and in its haste to maneuver away, got caught up in electrical suspension wires. Now it pulled like a trapped insect till the wires suddenly broke and the helicopter swung violently in the other direction, careening straight into the prison wall with a scrape of sparks, then a cracking explosion—a blaze Mr Nice Guy felt on his cheek, a gargantuan firefly self-immolating.

Men raised their arms to the sky and cheered as flames rained down. They ran through the arch, Mr Nice Guy with them in the pack. On the other side there were cars waiting and Mr Nice Guy piled in with the rest, eight men on top of each other in a confusion of elbows and knees, doors flapping as they roared off into the night.