The Mars Room(74)

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The day after he gave her what she wanted, Gordon drove into town. He parked on Stanville’s main street, which featured storefronts with soaped windows. There was a small Catholic church on the end of the block. An old building with thick adobe walls. The doors were open. It looked cool inside.

Our Lady of the Valley smelled like the lining of an old woman’s purse. Our Lady’s Pocketbook, which had been collecting powdery makeup residue and mold spores for decades. Gordon had no religion, though the idea of mercy, offered by churches, a Christian god, but never the state, had been in his thoughts. He sat down at the end of a row of pews. On the other side of the aisle was a confession booth. The sinner’s side had a screen for talking to the priest. The screen was a metal plate randomly hole-punched. It looked like a road sign riddled with bullets.

Wind was moving through the church, from a single propped door in the back. Papers somewhere lifted and flapped, suggesting presence, but then again not. Suggesting wind stirring papers, and no one present, except Gordon. He stared into the vents, from his seat on the pew.

There were real, epistemological limits to knowledge. Also, to judgment.

I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.



* * *



It was Thoreau who’d said that first.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Why was Thoreau Thoreau, while Ted Kaczynski was Ted? One stayed formal in Gordon’s mind, the other, strictly first-name basis. Ted.

It was more familiar to be angry and bad. Maybe that was why.



* * *



Norman Mailer had not smuggled wire cutters into a prison to give to Jack Henry Abbott. Norman Mailer wrote letters, used influence. Mailer bragged that Abbott’s release was his doing, bragged until suddenly it was a liability to have his name involved, and then denied his role, and then could not resist bragging again, said he’d do it all over for art, for the sake of art. It was 1981 and they put poor Abbott in a halfway house on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was surrounded by junkies and sleaze and took to carrying a weapon for protection. He knew nothing of living in society and mistook one thing for another, thought he was being threatened in the old way, the jailhouse way. Took out his knife and stuck it deep in his attacker’s heart. You don’t have much time to fight in prison, and so your moves are gambits, prearranged. Guy died immediately, there on First Avenue. Jack Henry Abbott went back to prison and so much for dinners with celebrities and writers and good-looking women with names like Norris. Who the fuck names their wife Norris? He means their daughter. Gordon knows you don’t name a wife.



* * *



Gordon’s cabin was mostly packed. Two cartons of books, some cook pots, a Melitta thing you place over a cup, clothes in garbage bags. He put a log in his stove, watched the gold-blue liquid updraft, to be sure it caught, and then he typed her name. He had made rules, and this was one, to look only now.

Romy Leslie Hall.

Nothing. No entries found.

Romy L Hall. Hall prison Stanville. San Francisco life sentence Hall.

He looked and looked, as the wood burned down, shifted softly, embers making their mealy tick.

Jimmy San Francisco teach Art Institute. Nothing. He spent hours looking through the faculty lists. There was a James Darling in the film department. Googled James Darling. Film festivals. Artist’s statement. But he wasn’t even sure this was the guy.

He listened to a dog bark, somewhere down the mountain.

People in that area made nature domestic, and also hostile, with their guard dogs, their beware-of dogs. German shepherds. Dobermans.

The dog barked and barked, down the mountain, echoing up it. An excavating three a.m. bark, digging and digging at nothing.





25


The next summer I set a booby trap intended to kill someone, but I won’t say what kind or where, because if this page is ever found, the trap might be harmlessly removed. I also strung a neck-height wire for motorcyclists across the divide trail above Rooster Bill Creek, after roaring motors spoiled a hike for me. Later I found that someone had wrapped the wire safely around a tree. Unfortunately I doubt anyone was hurt by it.



* * *



Up South Fork Humbug, I shot a cow in the head with my .30-30 and then got the hell out of there. I mean a rancher’s cow, not an elk cow. I also went down at dawn and smashed my neighbor’s mailbox with my axe in such a way that it looked as if some vehicle might have hit it.



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The following November I traveled from Montana back to the Chicago area, mainly for one reason: So that I could more safely attempt to murder a scientist, businessman, or the like. I would also like to kill a communist.



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I emphasize that my motivation is personal revenge on those who deprive or threaten to deprive my own autonomy. I don’t pretend to have any kind of philosophical or moralistic justification.





26


Sammy’s date was coming up. We’d been in prison together almost four years. It was October and every day the sky was the same blue dome, us, under it, also in blue. Some would get release dates and go. Sammy would go, and good for her. The forever feeling on main yard, of thousands of women in blue, would stay, and I would stay.