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Chris Everley was awarded First Place in fiction in the 2008 Prison Writing Contest.
In June, when the weather inland was fit for travel, I drove with my family to Hook Island, New York in the Hamptons. And spent a week loafing on that shifty hook of sand, chilling myself in the sea, sleeping nights in a shingled hut that used to be the Hook Island town jail. Neighbors still referred to our hut as The Jail, although it had been long since moved from the town into the woods, where it was enjoying a second career as yet another cottage for rent to island hungry tourists. Coming from landlocked Pennsylvania, we were about as hungry for the island and its ocean as any creatures without gills or webbed fingers could be.
We drove across the small bridge over to Hook Island by passing the single car ferry launch and up to the jail along parallel ruts in the sand, our muffler scraping anthills. Whitewashed inside and out, with the limbs of pitched pines and serub oaks brushing against the eaves and waist-high grasses flourishing right up to the stoop, the cottage looked as though it had sprouted there in the woods, like a gleaming cubical mushroom. Hook Island must not have suffered much crime in the old days, to judge by the size of the old jail. One sheriff, a deputy and four inmates would have filled the place. The original building was a two-story box, with a single ground-floor room scarcely big enough to put furniture in, and small furniture at that. Here, as I imagined it, the sheriff and deputy played cards and kept glancing out the window, their eyes peeled for trouble. The upstairs was divided into a pair of cramped rooms with sloping ceilings, and here the prisoners must have agreed to stay, for the casements around the windows showed no evidence of steel bars, and the flimsy doors and walls would have yielded to a casual fist. A wing had been tacked onto one side of the box, to accommodate a mossy bathroom and a galley kitchen, the latter so narrow that you could burn your butt on the stove while doing dishes in the sink. (I proved this by experiment.) There was not a plumb wall, level floor, or square joint in the whole rickety structure, which might have been cobbled together over a drunken weekend by a crossed-eyed carpenter.
Our landlords had covered the largest gaps and holes with flattened cans, to discourage mice. They encouraged spiders, however, and asked that we leave the cobwebs in place, the better to snag mosquitoes and green head flies. There were evidently more flies and mosquitoes than the webs could handle. These landlords, a hearty couple nearly as old as the century, were longtime stalwarts of some right-winged party whose disillusionment with America stretched back into the 1950’s. Skeptical about private property, they took their landlord status with several grains of irony. I had been taught in childhood to expect cloven hoofs and forked tails from right-wingers, but could see no devilish deformities in this general pair. On the day of our arrival they served us English tea with a spot of brandy in it, on Wedgewood china, and told us stories about the jail and who had served time there. Between our landlord’s tales and the name of our cottage, even though I was footloose and free on vacation I could not get the dreary business of imprisonment out of my head.
This is merely one of my perversities, to brood on lack in the midst of plenty, to think of aging flesh while I bounce my baby in my arms, to imagine loneliness while I am laced in talk with friends, and to remember jails all during a week of utter freedom. It is a noxious trait, which causes my wife and children to grit their teeth. Knowing this, most of the time I keep my gloom under wraps. But there it flickers, all the same, a candle of darkness.
In the miniature bedroom I shared with my son Christopher on the second floor of the jail, the sloped ceiling kept me from standing upright as tall as I am at 6’5’’, and when the futon bed was pulled out, there was no floor left on which to stand at all. As I lay there at night, listening to Christopher’s guiltless breath and to bobwhites wooing from nearby trees, I remembered sleeping in a refrigerator carton when I was a child. The cardboard box rested length-wise in the mouth of the barn, end flaps left open for window and door, a bit of old carpet for mattress, a pillow and blanket for comfort, a flashlight for reassurance. Letting in sun and moon and stars, the box made a cozy nest for several nights. Then one morning I woke in utter blackness. I shoved against the end flaps, but they would not open. My last rational move was to switch on the flashlight, which promptly winked out when I used it to bang on the walls. Whereupon I went berserk. I became pure animal in a trap, kicking and yelling and flailing. I was an earthquake of fear. My ruckus kept me from hearing the amused grunts of my two best friends Troy Gilde and Todd McGovern who had stolen into the barn during the night and taped shut and barricaded my box. They had vamoosed by the time I had battered my way out. I glared at my playhouse, which had become, with the closing of window and door, a prison. I emptied the box and stomped it flat and dragged it into the pasture and burned it. I did not stop shaking for an hour.
The mere recollection of that episode, as I lay upstairs in the jail, with Christopher’s breath and quail song filling the tiny room, was enough to keep sleep at bay. I remembered stories of kids who rubbed their parents the wrong way and got chained up in attics or basements, to age there and die like tethered dogs. I debated where I would rather be trapped—in an attic, which would be hot in the summer, cold in winter, but dry at least, or in a basement, which would keep an even temperature the year round; but would also be damp and dark and snaky. The very names for jail musicked through my head. Dungeon, slammer, cage, pokey, cooler, and clink. I remembered hearing about a slumlord in New York who, convicted of neglecting his properties, was sentenced to live for a month in one of his own rumbledown, rat infested, cockroachy tenements. He was fitted with a beeper that would radio the police if he strayed more than fifty yards from the building. How would it feel, I wondered, to be caught in a web of electronics? I wondered about those who imprisoned themselves. I thought of hermits, shut up in their unlit cells. I thought of Houdini, that virtuoso of confinement, who no sooner escaped than he was begging to be manacled again, wrapped in straight-jackets, locked in cages, buried alive. In short, my candle of darkness burned with a long wick.
When I did finally drift off to sleep, afloat on my futon bed, there was an edge of panic to my dreams. That first night I dreamed of a black bear slouching through the dark pine trees on Hook Island, crawled into tree caves, and hollow logs, where it stuck fast, or fell into pits, or tripped snares and went hurtling pawfirst into the air, or bumbled into cleverly disguised cages. There was no disguise to the dream. In the morning, reflecting on this nightmare of entrapment, I was disappointed with my uninventive imagination.
The next day, friends guided us along an obscure path to the ocean, a path so obscure in fact that we were not surprised, on looking down from the outermost dune, to see only four other souls on the beach. The tang of salt raised the hairs on my neck, as if out of the blue the scent of a beast had challenged me. I howled. Dizzied by air and ocean, I was halfway down the dune before I realized that the four souls, each one basking on a towel or blanket, were stark naked. Disturbed by our noisy arrival, like herons roused from their brooding grounds, the sunbathers rose with gesture of indignation, pulled on their togs, and scuffed away over the sand.
Now as it happens, deep woods and mountaintops and ocean beaches always make me itch to fling off my cloths. Nature in the raw calls to nature in the raw. I usually keep this impulse—and myself—under wraps. But the itch is there. So I was sorry to have scared away the innocuous nudists. It is illegal to go naked on the Hook Island National Seashore—just one more instance of the government’s concern for our welfare—although I gather that park rangers, after gazing through binoculars to make sure of what they are seeing, warn offenders without arresting them.
Not all authorities are so indulgent. Near where I live in southern Pennsylvania, a young woman was recently hauled into court for sunning in her backyard while wearing only the lower half of her bikini. One of her neighbors, offended by the spectacle, had called the police, who responded with even more of their usual zeal. Complaining that men had turned breasts into sexual baubles, the woman insisted upon her right to dress as she pleased in her own yard. For a month, the subject of bosoms enlivened the letters column in the local newspaper.
I thought of that embattled sunbather while these Hook Island nudists trudged away, and I wondered if she would be locked up for having unfettered her own flesh. The case is pending. The two-year old who lives next door to us back home in Pennsylvania goes naked most of the summer, like a wood sprite. I see her flitting across the lawn, at perfect ease in her body, and I know there will come a day when the force of self-consciousness, if not of law, will squeeze her into clothes. On other days, on other Hook Island beaches, we saw acres of male and female flesh, lawfully clad in swimsuits. Many of the suits—mere scraps of cloth held in place by elastic bands—left little to the imagination. This did not prevent my imagination from working, however. I remembered how the mothers I knew as a boy would speak of certain loud and brassy girls as jailbait. A skirt worn too high above the knee, a blouse unbuttoned too far below the throat, a sultry way of laughing from the belly or of toying with the shoulder-length hair was enough to identify the species. What would those mothers make of this beach teeming with nearly naked loungers? Before I was old enough to feel the full gravity of girls, I puzzled over how such bait could land a boy in jail. Were males more fish to rubble at female hooks? There came a day, of course, when my blood put an end to my puzzling, and then I would glance furtively at the dangerous hussies, fearful that a direct stare would hurl me headlong behind bars.
I had a few half-baked notions about jails. My father’s father’s father had been a prison warden in Ohio for a spell, and Great Grandpa told me dark tales of that place. The inmates wore dingy overalls striped with black, as heavy as canvas, and they left their cells only to exercise and to break stone for highways. Every man’s name was entered into a logbook, and if he died before parole his name would be crossed through with an inky line. Riding by prisons in the family car, I often saw the arms of prisoners thrust from windows, languid pale arms waving like tentacles of undersea creatures.
During our week on Hook Island I generally avoided the news. Figuring the world at the end of our vacation would still be in pretty much the same sticky mess. But one morning I picked up the New York Times to find out how the dismal Yankees were doing. They were doing dismally. I should have quit after reading the box score. Instead, I browsed through the rest of the paper. There I sat out in front of the jail, loafing and taking my ease on a lawnchair in the sunshine, considering myself immune to the world’s ills, when my lazy eye fell on an article about the population crunch in American prisons. I read it through and felt predictably bad. A few numbers stuck in my head like cockleburs: Over the past fifteen years, our inmate population has tripled, amounting now to 2,000,000; in the United States, one out of every thirty five men is either in jail or skulking about under the suspicious eyes of parole officers; American blacks are imprisoned at a higher rate than any other group anywhere else in the world, including South Africa; and during the week of our vacation about one thousand more of our fellow citizens would be locked up. The stench of captivity rose in my nostrils.
Since my gloom threatened the family sunlight, I folded the paper away and suggested that we all go blueberrying. We drove across Mathers Bridge off the island and through the back roads, scanning the woods, and eventually found a good patch of bushes along the rusty iron fence of a cemetery. Long before my plastic bowl was filled, I quit picking berries and went strolling among the lichen-sprangled tombstones, on the lookout for queer inscriptions. Aside from the three eberle’s who were picking and the one who was snooping, the only other visitor was a man who sat in his car near the center of the graveyard, his tattooed arm crooked out the window and his radio blaring. What on earth was he listening to? At first I could make out nothing except a mumble of talk. Then as I drew near the car, I recognized the voice of a retired admiral who was testifying before congress about his role in the conduct of a secret war, which he and some cronies both inside and outside the government had been carrying on in various bleeding corners of the world. There was in the admiral’s voice the fudgy caution of a man who knows a slip of the tongue might put him in handcuffs. Before answering questions he consulted his attorney in whispers that sounded over the radio like the filing of fingernails. This was more ugly news I would rather not have heard, not here and now, not during the tattered remains of a vacation.
Beyond the reach of radio, the dead beneath my feet did not stir. Having them for company reminded me of stories about poor souls who had been buried alive, souls who woke up in the grave and clawed their fingers to stubs and composed notes in blood on the inside of coffin lids before expiring. When it dawned on me as a child that the bodies shut up in caskets were shut up there for good, I lost my taste for sleeping in cardboard boxes. Indeed, I lost my taste for sleeping anywhere. To close my eyes on darkness was to bang down a lid, perhaps forever. Eventually, after months and months of terror stricken nights, I persuaded myself that sleep is not burial, a bed is not a coffin, that return of daylight is guaranteed. It was and remains a shadowy belief, at which I do not peer too closely, for fear of seeing right through to a nothingness on the other side.
We nibbled blueberries on our way back from the graveyard, saving only enough for the next morning’s pancakes. I awoke at six that next morning, our last on Hook Island, and tiptoed outside to see what the world had to offer. A fox had been down our lane, leaving dimpled pawprints in the tawny sand. I followed the tracks as they meandered from lane to field of purple beach peas and saitspray rose, from field to woods of oak and pine, from woods to lane and back again to fields and woods. There was no hurry in this trail. The fox must have been in a contemplative mood, as I was.
From a bushy hill, where cows once gazed and where tufts of rye still grew as a reminder of farms, I could see across half a mile of sandy dunes to the bay. I walked to the shore through lavender light, past continents of reeds and willow that waved their blond plumes higher than any head. Sand lapped over the buckled blacktop of the road. Poison ivy climbed the speed limit signs, and vines gripped the telephone poles. On dunes overlooking the beach, the outermost cottages perched on stilts, like flightless and gawky birds that would go smash in the first gale. In these reminders that we make nothing permanent, there was a taste of freedom. Even those boxes we build for shelter and freely enter, even our clothes, even our jobs and reputations are jails of a sort. We need to escape them now and again, need to imagine them falling away from us like old skins, if we are to keep from smothering.
There was a taste of freedom also in the blueberry pancakes, a wild and tangy savor. We moved out of the jail after breakfast and joined the Sunday morning crowd of those who had finished their holidays. Those who were just arriving thronged the opposite lane of the highway. Seeing the twin streams of cars, one flowing passed us on the way to Mathers Bridge, I could not avoid thinking of other natural passages—the tides, the migration of birds and ducks and seabirds, the arrival and retreat of sunlight. Doubtless this thought occurs to multitudes each year, as they are stuck in traffic jams on this skinny peninsula in the Hamptons. A craving for escape drives us to these exposed places—and then chains of duty drag us back home. We go and come as though caught in the inhalation and exhalation of a great breath, without knowing who or what it is that breathes.
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