Cage's Bend Read online

  A cold wind stirs the curtains. I stand up to close the window and gaze at the moon. I can remember Vanderbilt a year and a half ago, I can remember two weeks ago, but I can’t remember where I was this morning. I try and try but I only see the graphs on the walls and smell the dizzying fumes. Where was I this morning? I scream silently. I walk barefoot around the room looking for a clock and the ticking draws me to a heap of clothes and I find it under them. Eight-thirty. It’s only just night. Why were we sleeping? I’m wide awake now. I pick up my pants and find something in my pocket, the bulletin from St. Paul’s, and I remember the morning with relief—like discovering your location after wandering around lost in the woods for hours.

  I laugh and Sylvia mumbles from the bed. From the church I’d run right back here. We’d started tripping around three in the morning, seven hours before the service. I haven’t slept much the last month, only a few hours a night, and I was exhausted and crawled right back in bed and slept for eight hours. Now I’m refreshed. Ready to rip. Lock and load.

  “What are you laughing at?” Sylvia sits up, the sheets sliding down to her belly, revealing her teardrop breasts.

  “My sermon.” I crawl beside her. “I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe the Holy Ghost.”

  Sylvia smiles. “It was impressive.”

  I kiss her breasts for a long time. She arches her back. I wrap one arm around her thin waist, pull our bodies together. We seem to melt into each other. I trace my tongue down her belly, along the blades of her hips until she is grinding her ass slowly.

  “Fuck me,” she says.

  I slide inside her, get up on my toes so my pelvis is pressing against her clitoris.

  “I love your cock.”

  “I love being inside you.”

  Her breathing grows heavier. She lifts her head and licks my chest. I’m getting too excited, so I picture the waves lapping the shore, skidding back to sea, and rolling back to the beach until she is breathing fast, yelling, “Kill me. Kill me. Oh, kill me!”

  I rise up on my arms, drive myself in and out of her, watching her face tense. Then she moans and her body goes slack, her eyes roll up so only white shows through the slits of her lids. A woman’s face is most beautiful immediately after coming, flushed and soft, radiant. I watch the flickering transformation, then pull her legs up in the air, her knees behind her head, and hammer my flanks between her thighs, borne on a furious rush, a wind howling up a mountainside, the promise of reaching a new summit, the ultimate peak, a union of souls, and then I come and the climax is a cruel swindle as I fall, down, down, down into blackness, utterly alone. It is the disenchantment that makes a man rush out of a woman’s bedroom as if fleeing the scene of a crime.

  “That was wonderful,” Sylvia says, her eyes open and focused, the ephemeral beauty gone.

  “Yeah, it was great,” I say, rolling onto my back. “I’m hungry.”

  Sylvia pulls the sheet up and closes her eyes. I get up, pull on some clothes, and go downstairs. Outside the front windows, Harper is riding up on his bicycle. I go out on the porch. “Hey, Harpo.”

  “You finally woke up.” He comes through the gate. Halfway across the yard he stops and looks at all the boats, shakes his head. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I could run a marathon.”

  Harper comes to the edge of the porch. “Listen, Cage, I think we ought to go to the police station. That cop said if you went in to talk, you’d get off with a slap on the wrist, but it’d be worse if they came after you.”

  “Why?”

  “Disturbing the peace. Public drunkenness. I don’t know.” Harper seems uncomfortable, like he feels guilty. “The cop called me this afternoon and said that those checks you’ve been bouncing have caught up with you.”

  “I’m not going to any damn police station.” The idea terrifies me. What if they give me a drug test? They might railroad me into a rehab program right off the island and blow all my plans apart. “I’ll cover those checks if I can just keep working.”

  A squad car rolls out of the darkness in front of the yard.

  I walk quickly inside, run up the stairs, and grab my passport—never leave home without it—and a stash of cash in my sock drawer. Sylvia rouses for a few seconds, squints at me, and rolls over. I kiss her on the back of the neck and tell her I love her but she doesn’t stir, so I fly out of the room and down the back stairs four at a time, my feet just barely touching the edges, and run out the back.

  A cop is standing in the yard a few feet from the door in the moonlight.

  “Hi.” I slow down as if I’m just coming out for a stroll. Just beyond his reach I dash to his side. He lunges and tackles me. I hit the ground with a heavy thump that knocks the wind out of me and I see little bursts of color. As the air comes back in my lungs, I try to squirm away from him and he says, “Hold still, asswipe.”

  “Hey, I didn’t do a thing. I’ll have you arrested for assault. Tackling me like I was a criminal.” Rage fills my body at the injustice and I say, “Would you kindly get off me, Officer?”

  He bends my arm around my back until my elbow feels like it’s going to break, and says, “Now let’s walk slowly around to the front.”

  “All right.” I start walking.

  “Hurry up,” he says, pushing my forearm to send a shooting pain through my elbow.

  I kick him in the shin, spin around in the direction of the arm he’s holding and punch him in the face. He staggers back, cupping his chin.

  I run across the yard toward a path that goes to the beach.

  “Freeze, motherfucker!” he yells when I’m halfway to the bushes. No way he’s going to pull the trigger, I think, and keep running when a shot whizzes over my head. I stop and raise my hands. I turn around and see him aiming the gun with both hands. I have to laugh at the serious look on his face. A bad actor playing a cop.

  “Whoa now, son, hold on,” I say.

  Harper and the cop from church come running around the house.

  “First this bastard tackles me.” I point at the cop who is still leveling the gun at me. “Then he shoves me and then he tries to shoot me. Clear-cut police brutality.”

  “The asshole hit me in the face.” The cop holsters the gun.

  “After you nearly broke my elbow,” I say.

  “Cage Rutledge,” says the other cop.

  “Yeah.”

  “I have a warrant for your arrest.” He pulls my arms around my back and tightens the handcuffs until they’re biting into my wrists.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. “For what?”

  “Fraud.”

  “And resisting arrest,” says the other cop. “And assaulting an officer.”

  The cop from church leads me around the house, reading my rights. Around front I see Sylvia peeking out of an upstairs bathroom window. She’s probably flushing her stash down the toilet. “You going to bail me out, Harper?”

  Harper doesn’t say yes. He looks at me with tears in the corners of his eyes. “I’ll follow you down in your Bronco.”

  One cop shoves me in the back of the squad car, knocking my head against the door frame. I see Harper asking them something. Suddenly I feel trapped in a cage. “You insular catamite pederasts!” I yell and thrash about the seat. The handcuffs cut deeper into my wrists. My plans are crumbling around me. If I can’t get out and finish a boat, I’ll never cover my debts. The whole house of cards will fall. The postdated checks will come due soon and the mountain of debt will rise up like a volcanic atoll. The space between the wire mesh and windows shrinks until I can barely breathe. I kick the wire but it doesn’t bend. “This isn’t fair! I don’t deserve this! I didn’t do anything,” I scream as the cops get in the car. I take a deep breath and lower my voice. “Will you please let me tell my girlfriend good-bye?”

  “Kiss your own ass good-bye,” one cop says from the passenger seat without turning his head.

  “Fuck you!” I kick one foot through the door window, spraying the glass out
side on the road.

  “That was cooperative,” the other cop says, opening his door.

  “Cage.” Harper’s face, lit up by the car lights coming up the street, seems to float in the hole in the window. “Get ahold of yourself. You’re just making it worse.”

  One cop opens the other door, drags me out by my collar, and lets me fall on the shoulder. His knee on my back, he grips my head with one hand and grinds my face into the shell gravel, crushing my nose and tearing my lips for a couple of seconds. He says into my ear, “You just lay quiet until the wagon gets here. You’re going to love the wagon.”

  “Cage.” Sylvia sits on her knees and cradles my head. Her face is dark, haloed by the red taillights of the car.

  “Your face would launch a thousand ships.” I remember the first time I told her that. I’d towed the sloop from the harbor and was unloading it in front of the Taylors’ house. She was walking down the road toward the beach and stopped and asked what I was going to do with her. Rebuild her, I’d replied. Sail her to Ireland at the end of the summer, pay homage to my progenitors. She laughed and said she always wanted to crew across the Atlantic. You can christen her, I said. Your face would launch a thousand ships.

  “God, Cage, why?”

  “The checks. Those goddamn checks.”

  “They’ll let you out, right?” She’s sobbing. “You’ll get out soon.”

  “I don’t know. Someone might have to bail me out.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  Headlights from another car suddenly illuminate Sylvia, and the sound of its idling drowns out her sobs. She looks younger than I’ve ever seen her, only a child. Two more cops walk into the light. One glances down at me, then at the cop I hit, who is leaning on the trunk of the squad car smoking a cigarette. “Fucker broke my finger when I tackled him.”

  “Another brat too big for his britches?”

  The cop exhales smoke and nods. “The waffle treatment.”

  “Excuse me, miss,” the new one says. Staring up from his legs is like sighting up a tree trunk. “Move away now.”

  He picks me up by my belt and walks me along the road like I was a rag doll, then tosses me face-first through the open rear doors of a van. I twist and take the impact on my shoulder then roll onto my back.

  “Don’t hurt him!” Sylvia shrieks.

  I’m trying to stand up when the doors close and it’s dark except in the front, through the mesh, where the glare of the headlights comes through the windshield. The cops get inside. The van pulls away and I fall on my ass. I scoot across to the mesh screen and stand up, hunching over, my head scraping the roof.

  “I’m sorry I hit your colleague. I was out of my head. I’m kind of confused these days. Will y’all apologize for me?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the driver says.

  The big one says, “Heat up the grill.”

  We turn onto the highway into town and the driver floors the car, goes through the gears like he’s in a drag race, sending me sliding backward until I hit the rear metal doors with a loud crash, then he slams on the brakes until I’m rolling forward, head over heels, the tires screeching against the road, and my face smacks into the mesh, the little cop yelling, Waffled! and the world is starbursts of red and yellow, the big one’s deep belly laugh and the little one’s nasal cackle, the grind of the accelerating transmission, then the heavy thud of my back hitting the floor. I can’t breathe, my lungs stunned, paralyzed. I skid slowly on my back until my head nudges the rear doors and still my jaw jerks my mouth open and shut like a fish in a dry bucket gasping for water. I must have landed wrong on the handcuffs, snapping the spinal link to my lungs, like pulling a plug from an electrical socket. Dizzy, my brain begins to suffocate.

  Everything is clear and simple, though here in the ultimate moment it remains impossible to declare if this end derived from fate or free will. Now is the time for my last thoughts but it’s hard to think at all with the vacuum beneath my ribs on the edge of exploding, so I struggle for perspective and see: I’m dying from a freak accident in a police van driven by two utter strangers, the first fatality of the Nantucket waffle treatment. The absurdity of my death strikes me as so funny my chest and knees jackknife together in a convulsion that yanks me up off the floor, and a last laugh escapes my throat with no sound. And then there is air.

  My head is spinning from careening from one side of the road to the other, banging from starboard to port and back. I lie curled like a bruised, manacled fetus, timing my kicks to stop the sides from slamming me. When I miss, the wheel well punches me on the forehead. The doors open before I know that we’ve stopped. I lift my head and see two dark figures, like Klansmen in black robes, blurry in the square of yellow light, speaking a foreign language. One reaches toward me and drags me by the scruff of the neck out of the van and holds me upright. He barks something in Russian and lets go of my collar. I find myself sprawling in grass at his feet, choking back a rising tide of vomit then hurling it all up on one of his leather shoes.

  “You slimebag motherfucker.”

  They’re speaking English after all. The shoe jerks away.

  “I’ll kick the fucker’s teeth out.” The little cop’s voice.

  “Not in front of the station,” says the big one, lifting me from behind.

  The world clicks back into focus in the fluorescent light inside the station. I see for the first time the faces of the two men apprehending me, like escorts to hell who have no connection to you and will never see you again. A new watershed moment in my life. Like graduating from college. A rite of passage. The big one dumps me on a chair and says, “Lieutenant, here’s the crazy carpenter that kicked out the squad car window.”

  The lieutenant’s ruddy bald head rises up slowly from behind the counter, a cobra out of a basket, followed by his powder-blue pleated uniform shirt. I’m sure I met him at a clambake last month and strain to remember his name. He looks at me with a bored, deadpan expression, then recognition flickers through his eyes and he says, “The guitar player from New Orleans.”

  “Baton Rouge,” I manage. “How you doing?”

  “Fair to middling.” He squeezes a pin in his fist and taps it lightly on the counter, concern beginning to animate his face.

  “I hear that. You ever had the waffle treatment?”

  The lieutenant pauses with his mouth half open in a reluctant smile.

  “Going back to the Bohners’?” I hurry on, taking control. “They asked me to come play next week.” I squirm against the handcuffs behind my back.

  The lieutenant nods. “They invited Sally and me, too.”

  His name comes to me and I say earnestly, “Listen, Bobby, would you kindly tell them to take these shackles off? I ain’t no Ted Bundy. I can barely stand up. They waffled me across the damn island. I just threw up outside and I’m feeling sick again.”

  The lieutenant tells the big cop to remove the cuffs.

  “Thanks. Where’s the head?” I need to ditch the nickel of pot and the Moroccan pipe in my pocket before they search me. When I take a step, the room lurches into motion like a merry-go-round, Bobby’s bald dome orbiting behind the big one’s, and the little cackling cop’s face farther out there like Uranus. I watch the room revolve a couple of times and repeat to myself, Remember the root of the problem. “Listen,” I say aloud, smiling at the circling heads. “Those checks, I’ll cover those checks.” I try to focus on Bobby’s red planet but all three faces swing by faster and faster, blending into one ring.

  Harper

  A little chapel built for a race of smaller men, the courtroom in Nantucket, erected by anal Quaker millionaires in the last century, seems cramped even with only a handful of people. After two days in a ten-by-ten cell Cage looks scared, like a trapped animal, wearing rumpled seersucker that I didn’t have time to take to the cleaners. At the table beside him John Hawthorne, a handsome young man in a tan suit, looks like an advertisement for Brooks Brothers. He handles property work for the Slades, the one
couple from New York who bothered to show up here. Yesterday, when Cage and I met with Hawthorne at the jail, he seemed like an astute, empathetic guy. He told us he would have Cage out in a couple of days.

  Mom and Dad are traveling in Ireland after a bishops’ conference in Canterbury and I haven’t been able to reach them. Cage told me to stop trying. He wants to explain everything himself. When he jerks his head around to look at me on the bench directly behind him, I raise my arm at the elbow and make a fist. He doesn’t smile. In a dark suit the prosecutor looks like a young Marlon Brando. He rode up the cobblestone street on a Harley. After the judge calls the hearing to order, when Brando stands up to speak, he glares at Cage like he’s looking at a hardened killer and lists a litany of offenses—the checks, speeding tickets I didn’t know about, drunken antisocial behavior in bars, disrupting the Sunday service at St. Paul’s.

  Brando calls Dr. Ian Lamb, the one psychiatrist on the island, to testify whether Cage is sane enough to stand trial. Hawthorne looks caught off guard. Cage told me that in a bar a few months ago he had offended Dr. Lamb, telling him that every shrink he had known socially was alcoholic or deeply fucked up in some other way, but that yesterday Lamb had been friendly when they spoke in his cell for fifteen minutes, mainly about Cage’s travels in Mexico. Forty-something and tan from afternoons on his fishing boat, the good doctor has a kind, sad face.

  “Mr. Rutledge has shown himself to be unpredictable and prone to violence. In my professional opinion he is not fit to stand trial,” Dr. Lamb tells the court. “It is the best interest of the court to remand him to Bridgewater for further evaluation. He could well suffer from a deep-seated illness which accounts for his recent erratic behavior.”