Gutzon Borglum chiseled Mount Rushmore. I painted the Old Joliet Prison. I covered its many concrete floors with two-part epoxy I mixed myself in five-gallon buckets. I brushed marine spar varnish on oak handrails in the Administration Building. I slathered paint on concrete block walls and Rust-O-leum on steel doors leading to all the tiers. I painted everything, including the trim on the tall windows and signs outside that admonished visitors to leave their weapons and contraband behind. I painted everything in the Big House, that garbage dump of humanity and stockpile of nightmares. I even posed for the prison newspaper, a four-inch brush in my right hand and a foot on a step ladder. It doesn’t matter why I was sent up, why I killed a man, if that’s what I did and maybe I did, or whether I knew how to paint before I came to be incarcerated, was a union painter or scab labor or an illegal of one kind of immigrant or another, but I always knew how to paint, knew like an otter knows how to swim, like a peacock knows when to display its feathers. The judge gave me 35-50 with the possibility of parole, which meant the DA didn’t think I killed the man on purpose, and the judge might have thought the victim deserved it. I was 33 when I was sent up, sent to this cold and damp and cruel compound with a thousand other men, watched by screws who were more afraid of the inmates than we were of them, tolerating traveling preachers who came to pray with us or just give someone his last rights, sometimes having sex with other men, yes, that too, but I had my job to fall back on, to look forward to, and I did it every day. I was not discouraged or dissuaded or distraught because long as I could paint, I knew I was still alive. I didn’t choose to be in Joliet, but I chose to be the Artist of the Old Joliet Prison.

***

A prison wall is high, which is about all you need to know about it, the guard towers have spotlights, and a cell block is a cell block. Yet the Administration Building at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet looked like a medieval English castle; I almost expected a drawbridge to drop down when the van transporting me pulled up to the front gate. The building had turrets at the corners that looked like rooks in a chess set but those were men in black with long rifles looking down at me, not colorful archers with crossbows. It was a prison made for Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, and me.

“Yes, sir. No, sir. Of course, sir.”

“You don’t have to call me that every time,” the warden said. The man had a square jaw and butch haircut, and his shirt was wrinkled from the August heat and humidity in Downstate Illinois. He’d read my file and he’d stopped at “Occupation.” It said, “house painter,” and it was true. I’d started painting after dropping out of high school and was self-taught, self-taught like old Blues musicians are on a six-string steel guitar. I’d begun painting small apartments and old clapboard houses in the neighborhood and I had a good reputation, and soon I was painting small churches and then interiors in Lake Shore Drive apartments and rich people’s houses in Wilmette and gangsters’ homes in Oak Park.

“What do you like about painting?” the warden asked. He had an office like a corporate suite, walnut desk and brass fixtures and lots of light, at least for a prison, and I stood on a thick carpet on the other side of his desk. Two guards stood back, but they were guarding me. I told him I liked painting because I wasn’t dependent on anyone else and I didn’t have to fix any mistakes other than my own. It was why I never liked team sports in school, or sitting in neat rows in class waiting for everyone else to finish their work when I already was done.

“You painted Tony Accardo’s house, I hear.”

“I had connections,” I told him. I wasn’t being a smartass. I’d made connections over the years.

“You watched a lot of hits go down, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t ask too many questions. The chauffeurs knew a lot more than me.”

“But now you’re here.”

***

Here’s the proper way to paint a wall. First, you need to remove any surface dust and grime by wiping down with a dry cloth. You don’t wash the walls yet. That’ll just smear everything. Only afterward do you wash the walls with a weak soap solution, and you rinse afterwards. Soap is more oily than people realize. The prison had a mechanical shaker like all the paint stores do but I stirred my paint by hand, and I liked to transfer the paint from the five-gallon plastic jugs into one-gallon metal cans, which I’d hang from a hook near the top of my step ladder for small jobs or detail work, or I’d pour the paint into a tray and work with a long-handled roller for large walls.

To do a cell correctly takes two days. “You know we just gonna fuck it up once you leave,” a con might say but I had my self-respect. I’d seen “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” when I was a boy and that captured British officer who demanded his men build the best bridge they could even if it was for the Japanese, and I’d heard that some Jews in the concentration camps did good work behind the barbed wire because they only knew how to do good work so maybe it was the same thing. I was a prisoner, but it was my life and I only did good work.

I didn’t do high ceilings. One cell block had five tiers and the prison wouldn’t bring in a boom lift. I did offices but mostly I painted cells. These were the hardest to do because most of the cons had scratched the walls with some sharp object they’d managed to fashion or written on the walls with wax crayons or just pissed on them out of defiance. There might even be blood from someone banging his head against the wall. I’d always read the inscriptions, the inmates’ glyphs and testaments. They didn’t do it or they were sorry they did; may God forgive them or why has God forsaken them; Mary Jane was a good fuck or I’m gonna kill the bitch. One man had marked the dates of his service in the Army and underlined “honorably discharged,” and another wrote “Ph.D.” after his name. Mostly, though, they played tic-tac-toe on the walls.

Sometimes the guards would move an inmate to another cell while I worked and sometimes the men were okay with me and they watched from their bunks.

“They pay you for paintin’?” a guy asked one day.

“They wire my bank in Zurich.”

“Where’s Zurich?”

I’d hum a tune or whistle on the job, too, and when I needed a break I’d take out a harmonica one of the other inmates bequeathed me before he got out – I’d need it, he said – and he left me a couple of manuals, including an old Bob Dylan songbook to learn on. I’d play children’s camp songs and old Negro spirituals, the really slow, easy stuff, but a few Bob Dylan tunes, as well, How does it feel? To be without a home, Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone, especially that one.

Most people don’t know that you have to buy a lot of your things in prison. I was always careful to save as much as possible from my pay, which was 12 cents an hour, for when I got out. It was a contradiction because I wasn’t sure I’d get out before I died. But maybe, just maybe. I didn’t dream on it and I didn’t mark off the days on a calendar. But as time went on I thought I might find something interesting if I did get out. Would the world be different? That was one thing. And to know what freedom was when most people don’t, it sort of grew on me. Every minute would be the sunrise. But sometimes I would lose awareness of where I was and what I was doing, letting nothing enter my mind like the Buddhist priests know how to do. I’d be a leaf in the dead, still air. The rules said I’d be credited for my pay, that I could have it when I got out, if I got out, or I could spend it on candy or cigarettes. It was something to look forward to, I guess.

After a while the prison let me order paint directly, inventory it, even hire an assistant. “You’ll probably need help painting the chapel. Why don’t you hire someone?” I had several takers and I interviewed all of them, men with resumes in the laundry, the kitchen or bakery, the grounds crew, too. I chose a young guy with a bad limp who claimed he could climb a ladder good, “You bet,” he’d said, but I wouldn’t let him go up more than two steps. Somebody had made fun of him at a rec softball game and he bashed the man’s head in with a wood bat. That’s how he got sent up. “What did you do before?” I asked him. I expected him to say accountant or middle school teacher, probably in some small town or other, but he’d been a cop in one of the ‘burbs, “A good one,” he vouchsafed, catching child molesters, wife beaters, hit and run, and a few illegals, some of whom he’d let go and others he and his partner would cuff and turn over to ICE.

“You ever shoot anyone?” I asked.

“No. I’d fire into the air, real ‘Stop in the name of the law’ crap, stuff like that. Well, there was one guy who’d taken hostages inside a crisis pregnancy clinic. We had the place surrounded and he finally came out firing, so he got about 50, 60 slugs in him. You could see him wiggle a little even after he was down but they kept firing at him. The coroner explained that it’s a spinal cord thing. Leads to involuntary movements. The bullets can’t really move a 200-pound man or whatever. Not enough mass. That’s only in the movies.”

“So, you were one of the cops taking target practice?”

Murray, that was my assistant, nodded. “I hold in a lot of anger and it comes out sometimes.”

“Well, painting is like meditation,” I told him. “It’ll bring you down.”

***

The warden called me in one day and said he’d heard good things about me, that he could see I really take my job seriously. He wanted me to paint his living quarters and he showed me the color scheme his wife had selected, a kind of peachy off-white for the walls and a light almond color for the woodwork, nothing too risky. I was surprised to hear that he and his wife lived behind the walls. “Our two boys went to high school in town and then off to college,” he told me. “One’s studying physics in Champaign and the other’s pre-law down in Carbondale.” I agreed.

Mrs. Jacobs greeted me at the door when I arrived to size up the job. Walking into the crib, seeing fine furniture to sit on and eat at, framed pictures hanging on the walls and real hardwood floors, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I wasn’t really in prison, that I was still a humble union painter plying my trade, albeit for 12 cents an hour now, that maybe nothing had changed in my life. The woman looked a lot like pictures of Mamie Eisenhower I’d seen – the same kind of cotton dress with a tight waist and full skirt, and her hair was permed and tinted a silver blue like a lot older women used to have done. The living room and dining room had nine-foot ceilings and crown molding, and one of the bedrooms had been converted into a home office with steel file cabinets, glass-door bookcases, and lots of electronic equipment. A telescope on a tripod near one of the windows, too. The skies were pretty clear at night on the outskirts of Joliet. Mrs. Jacobs was so polite and patient as I ran my hands along the walls, looked to see if they were really flat, or if the window trim showed signs of water penetration and rot.

“You want all the walls the same color?” I asked.

“Why, do you think that’s a poor idea?” She didn’t sound offended, more like she was afraid she’d made a mistake. She had very good diction, like she’d studied speech.

I shook my head then. “Not at all. I’m just adding up how much paint to order,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, sounding relieved.

“It’s a nice color you chose,” I added. “It’ll look very nice.” It’s the kind of thing I often had to say to clients.

I needed two weeks to paint everything properly. The warden smoked so I had to brush and degrease the walls first, and I ordered some replacement window and door trim from the carpentry shop. I had my breakfast and dinner in the prison, but Mrs. Jacobs served me ham sandwiches and a glass of milk for lunch every day. I think she missed her boys. And she set out Sweet Peas in a slim glass vase every day that she placed in the center of her oval dining table. Maybe she was an optimist.

The warden would come in from time-to-time, either because he was eager to see the progress or just to remind me of what I was and who he was, and he’d go into another room with his wife and talk about things. I didn’t try to listen.

Most of their windows faced the West and I liked to follow the sun as it fell to Earth.

 

Then they announced the old prison was closing and all inmates would be transferred to a new facility. There’d been rumors all along, but there are more rumors in prison than rats. The move promised to be an upgrade for most inmates – new exercise machines, big screen TVs, better ventilation. In time, they bused everyone to the new prison, all chained together, many with heads bent low, others spitting at the screws, but mostly just dragging. I didn’t want to go, however, because I hadn’t finished the job. Painting the Old Joliet Prison was going to take years, even with help, and this was my prison, not some big, new Super 8 motel. But how could I stay? They’d leave the electricity and water on for me? I’d have my own security detail? It would be like Napolean in Saint Helena, but I was no Napoleon. I asked the warden if I could stay. “Let me stay in the old prison,” I said. “The paint will be peeling and falling to the ground, falling like dead skin. The metal bars will all be corroded and need sanding with steel wool, and every leak in a window recaulked. I’ll eat MRE’s. I’ll raise chickens. I’ll dig holes in the prison yard to relieve myself. I’ll chop up old furniture for fire. And when I’m finished you can claim all the credit. And if I need to start over by the time I finish, I’ll start over. Let me stay.”

“You’ll go crazy in here all alone,” he said.

“I haven’t yet,” I said.

“Yes, you have,” he said.

“How so?” I asked.

“You don’t want to leave.”

***

The move happened in February 2002 and I wasn’t allowed back into the old prison until a couple of years later. The interior was a mess and the warden had remembered my offer. My first night back I lay in bed listening to sounds of a hinge creaking when a heavy metal door swung back and forth, the wind whistling through a tall chimney in the boiler room, and mice congregating. I had my paint brushes and painter’s caps in a neat pile across from my narrow bed, and outside my window I heard a diesel truck changing gears on a nearby highway and a fast motorcycle moving up the passing lane, and I remembered a poem they’d made us read in high school, Animals Are Passing From Our Lives, about a load of pigs on their way to slaughter but one protests both his fate and the world’s indifference. “Not this pig,” the pig declares, though all hope is lost. Not this pig, indeed.

There was much work to do, including two tiers in the East Wing that I hadn’t visited yet. The tool room had been left unlocked and I had my choice of ladders and makeshift scaffolding, so there were some high ceilings I decided I’d tackle after all. I was able to walk freely throughout the place, including the guard towers. I liked climbing their steps. There was the view, the Ausland, and I felt like a sailor in the crow’s nest spotting land. It was almost like a Cinerama movie.

There was no electricity but I managed to wrap the ends of discarded billy clubs with rags I’d drench in turpentine and spirits and light up my evenings that way. I had a Gillette razor and I could order blades from the new prison’s commissary but I had to pay for everything, so I generally trimmed my beard and cut my hair with a pair of scissors. I washed my clothes and underwear with bar soap in a big stainless steel sink in one of the kitchens, and if there was no rain I’d take sponge baths. I’d do that sometimes inside the West Wing, which had five tiers, and I’d look up at the cells and the catwalks and railings and I’d imagine that I was putting on a good show for the people, or that Elvis Presley had come out from one of those cells in his blue jeans and striped shirt and started singing “Jailhouse Rock,” but all the people were applauding me, not him.

The paint inside the old prison was flaking in a way I’d never seen before. The little chips of paint were like fingernails that had been pulled from someone’s hands and flicked to the ground, all hard and curled and sharp-edged and as plentiful as seashells on the ocean shore. They crunched and snapped when I stepped on them and I could see my footprints when I crossed from one end of a room to the other. Wind whistled and whirled through the chimneys, the rats and mice scurried along the skirting boards, and the flies and mosquitoes were a constant surveillance, like enemy spotter planes in war. There was mold on some of the walls, but less than I expected – air had circulated pretty well in the cell blocks and gymnasium and chapel, an advantage of broken windows and exterior doors that moved with a change in air pressure. I hadn’t realized just how big a place the prison complex was. It had been populated by inmates and guards and social workers before so it just seemed stuffed then. Now, empty, it looked bigger, or made me smaller.

I slept under blankets in winter and naked in summer, and in time I learned to capture more rainwater during a deluge or snow I’d melt in pails over little fires I’d make out on the receiving docks where I could open the overhead doors and let the smoke escape, and the MREs came regular every Friday which was how I kept track of time, that and when I’d realize the sun wasn’t as high or as low in the sky as it was just a few months previous, and I found a few books to read and I would read them all except for the Bible, and when I was done painting for the day, or had finished a book or just a chapter, I’d write something in what I thought might be my diary. I’d found reams of paper and a pack of 12 Bic pens in an office and took ‘em.

Food, drinking water and paint deliveries came regular. A small pickup truck would pull up to a gate and I’d hear a loud horn sounding. I could complain about the many echo caverns inside the prison, the many walls and fences and barriers of various kinds, mental as well as physical, but I always listened for the delivery truck’s arrival. I might be startled or I might be relieved that it had arrived, but after a while the experience helped anchor me in place. I was a prisoner, I was dependent, but I mattered. That’s what the truck and its horn represented. Anyway, this was the deal I’d made so I couldn’t complain.

“McAllister, you doin’ okay?”

“Yeah, boss. I’m all right.”

“You look like your losin’ weight, pal.”

“Can you get me some more corn flakes?”

“We got some Nescafe for you. You want it?”

“Sure. I’ll sprinkle it on my chocolate mousse.”

The screws who came by weren’t bad people. Sometimes they’d come inside to check on my progress. Once a year they’d show up with a blood pressure monitor, a needle to draw some blood, and a little sealed cup to collect a urine sample. I’d leave an order for more paint or a new roller, things like that, or for personal items, toothpaste, mainly. They were surprised when I asked for a lawn mower one Friday.

“How you gonna run it without gasoline? You know we can’t let you have any gasoline.” The grass always got ridiculous. It wasn’t prairie grass, which would be all right, especially with the Purple Coneflowers and Black-eyed Susans in summer, but they’d planted turf grass in front of the Administration Building and in the prison yard, made it look like you were coming to a nice place like a retirement community or timeshare, and I told the guy I wanted a reel push mower to cut the grass. They didn’t have any at the new prison, but this one guard said he’d look for one at Goodwill when he had the chance.

A few months later the same guard had something for me. It was a reel mower, rusty, with one side of the upper handle bent, but it would do. “You owe me $5,” he said. I was going to give him a chit, which was a joke, and he said he was only joking as well. “We took up a collection and paid for it ourselves.” I was going to tell him I was touched but then I thought it would sound facetious. The fact was that I was touched.

“You really bought it for me?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “I found it in the alley behind my house. My neighbor just bought a riding mower.” Still, the man had not forgotten me. I think he understood I was doing something important in the Old Joliet Prison, maybe he’d worked in it a long time before being transferred and he wanted to support me in some way. Either that, or he was a Christian man who was somehow embarrassed to show it too much.

The buildings on the old prison campus were all decrepit yet still fierce. They reminded me of old boxers. I heard tornado sirens go off one spring day and I felt safe. I felt the earth rumble one day and I knew we weren’t far from the New Madrid fault line but I felt safe. I followed the weather much more closely than I had before, the meteorology of things as I liked to think of it, and I realized that I remembered more from my schooling than I would have expected. Nothing I learned in school was of any value or relevancy, I’d long thought, but now I thought maybe I was wrong. I’d read a book about a man who lived in a coastal French town before World War II and always lamented the meaninglessness of life and the conventionality of other people and I liked his point of view. I agreed with it entirely. But then I saw I was wrong. When I was young, when the road ahead was bubbling with opportunity, I thought life was meaningless. Now that I had nothing, I thought my life was worth having.

There was no running water in the prison but sometimes I’d go into a shower room and I would fancy a woman there and I’d take off my clothes and slide around the corner into the tiled shower room and there would be women and we’d have sex, me and one of the women who’d come forward to greet me, we’d have sex while the other women showered, oblivious to us, as if we weren’t there, as if we weren’t having sex, weren’t even real. But it was real if I imagined it. Alone like I was in that prison, my life like it was, if I imagined it then it was real enough.

I always specified Sherwin-Williams paint. I did up most cells in SW 7014, an old white with a greyish tinge. It seemed right against the blackness of the steel bars and the medium grey of the metal bed frames and springs that would hold the thin mattresses, though most of the mattresses had been retired, but that wasn’t entirely true. Hundreds of old mattresses were stockpiled near the incinerators, but the incinerators weren’t working any longer and everyone had left before the last of the mattresses could be loaded into the fires. Rodents lived there now, and bugs and beetles and worms. Fungus, I imagined. I wasn’t going to paint there. SW 7014 got boring after a while, so I specified SW 6057, which they called malted milk. It would be a kind of pink to most people. The pink would turn to brown if given enough time, brown like dried blood. I liked that it symbolized the blood of all the inmates as their lives left them, a memory of them disappearing. Then one spring I ordered yellow tints and lilac tints because I realized that I was becoming depressed and I thought these colors would brighten my days, liven me up, to hell with the walls. And after a further while I began painting different colors in the cells. I’d asked for a designer magazine and the guards brought me one on one of their Friday visits. It was a few years old, I couldn’t be sure, it had a date on the cover but I’d lost my fix on the current year by then so I wasn’t sure how dated it was, and I saw that I was spot-on with cool grays, but also that these people were doing wonderful things with mauve and light green and even bold reds. It was so exciting to discover these things.

I specified semi-gloss for one of the kitchens, not including the backsplashes, which were tiled with 6-inch squares. I had rolls of masking tape that I hung horizontally and painted over to create the illusion of chair rails; sometimes I’d stripe walls vertically to create the illusion of board and batten. There were interrogation rooms I did and in them I just flung drops of leftover paint from various cans against the walls like a Jackson Pollack painting to symbolize the craziness of it all, and I painted some of the staff toilets, which had doors in the stalls, different stark colors – black and red and green and Navy blue, what I thought of as a Beatnik theme. I imagined talking to someone who waited for me to finish so he could use the toilet in private.

“What brings you here?”

“Man, I gotta take a shit. What you think?”

“Are you constipated?”

“Am I what? You some kind of pervert?”

“Yes, I am now.”

It was disgusting, but I could feel my bowels move, too, when one of my imaginary friends was taking a shit, and then I’d make a mental note to order more toilet paper.

It was terribly hot one summer, swampy hot and humid like I was inside a hot springs with just enough air to not die. I painted mostly in the nude then, got paint on me pretty good, and would rinse off in a big tub of storm water I’d collected but without soap because I didn’t want the paint to come off too soon. Some would come off when I continued to sweat, but by mid-August I was a coat of many colors. I thought that was pretty funny. I greeted my friends on a Friday and I waited for them to say something about my current state, to give me a reality check, but they never said anything. They didn’t smirk, laugh or gesture. A woman was part of the team that day and it was so exciting. It was her I really wanted to notice, to speak up, but she said nothing. We had sex that night anyway, I think.

I thought about atonement for the murder I’d committed, but not often. The guy deserved it, actually. Maybe not the death penalty, but he was in the wrong and I wasn’t. He was a fellow painter and we often did jobs together, ones that were too big or too taxing for just one person, or when the client wanted it done fast so we’d help each other that way. It all averaged out. Then a lawyer said we should start an LLC, a corporation, and put the money into the company and pay ourselves a salary out of it. There’d be tax benefits, we’d build a brand, maybe hire people to work for us on salary, branch out, become a franchise, go public and be listed on Wall Street, and Flynn, that was my partner, was all for it and I admit I sort of liked the scent of it as well. I’d never thought of becoming rich as a painter but, on reflection, why not? I was curious more than greedy. What would it be like to have a lot of money, or more than enough, just rolling in it? I thought about all the things I could do then, buy a sailing boat, go to a fantasy baseball camp with ex-Major Leaguers, buy a vacation home in Door County, where one of my old clients, a professor at Northwestern, had a second home he always talked about, or take a cruise up to Alaska. What would it be like to have stockbrokers wanting to talk to me, women giving me the eye because I dressed like I was rich because I was rich and all the Michigan Avenue tailors would teach me how to dress. It would be theater to me and I was curious. I doubted that I really would do much different with my life if I did have money, though. Season tickets to the Blackhawks? That would be about it for extravagances.

Well, we did it. We established an LLC. Miami-Illinois Paint and Restoration, LLC. The lawyer suggested the name, said the name Chicago came from a Miami-Illinois Indian word. “The rich people will get it, some of them,” he said. “You don’t want the pikers anyway.”

We ran the company for a couple of years, very successfully, too. We had orders three and four months out and had to take on help sometimes for the really big jobs. We just drew modest salaries all along, at least I did. Then, one day, and I know there’s always a “Then, one day,” I went to see the lawyer and I asked to see the books, how our finances were doing and the investments in the stock market that he’d suggested and all that business. He had a nice office on the mezzanine of a bank building on La Salle Street, real Italian marble floors in the entrance and real brass trim on the elevators. He said he was glad to see me and how was I doing and let’s look all that up on the new computer. Have some coffee, too. He had his own coffee maker on a sideboard in his office. Or how about a beer or a Coca-Cola. He had a mini-fridge in the office, too. I sat comfortably in a comfortable chair opposite his big walnut desk as he tapped this key and that key and scrolled through his computer screen and he didn’t say anything for quite a while and then I noticed he had a sort of worried expression on his face and he was holding his raised fist to his chin and then he leaned forward and said it. “What the fuck,” he declared. “Do you know about this, Patrick?” he asked. Patrick is my Christian name. Patrick Barry McAllister. I sat up.

“Flynn has drawn out all the money from the bank accounts.”

I swallowed and leaned forward. “Say that again?”

The lawyer looked at me quizzically. “You didn’t know about this? He didn’t tell you?”

“What was it for?”

The lawyer looked back at his screen. “It wasn’t for paint supplies, I can tell you that. He cashed out his 401K, too. Even paid the penalty for early withdrawal.” Then he looked up at me again. “When did you see him last?”

When had I seen Flynn last? Oh, yes, he was going on vacation with his new honey. Flynn had a thing for women, different girls, each new one more exciting than the last one. I never liked his taste in women. “He said he was traveling to Mexico.” It was winter, it was Chicago, it was Mexico. Made sense, actually. At the time. I didn’t think anything of it.

Flynn’s car was still parked inside his apartment building’s garage when I went to look for him, so I decided to pull a detail on the street in front until he came back for it. The superintendent at his building noticed me and asked what I was doing in front of his building. I told him I was waiting for someone. “Oh, yeah,” he’d said. “Someone real important, huh?”

“To me he is.” The superintendent stood silently by, like he was thinking of what to say or do, and he saw I wasn’t going to say anything more to him, like I didn’t think I had to tell him shit, and after a while he just nodded to no one in particular and turned to go back in the building.

Flynn didn’t notice me the next day when I saw him headed to the front door of the apartment building, and I jumped out of my seat and followed him in, grabbing the door by the edge before it shut. I stuck my gun right in the small of his back. “Don’t turn around,” I warned him. “Just keep walking.” He knew it was me, of course.

“This is some movie you saw? ‘Don’t turn around’ shit?”

“Dude, this is your life on the line.”

He talked like a thousand actors I’d seen on late night TV, too. You know I wouldn’t do no stuff like that, man. I was gonna split the money with you, Bugsy. He had some cash on hand that he said he’d give me, and he’d wire the rest later. He opened the top drawer of a chest in his living room and I watched him close because I knew he might pull out a gun instead, and when he did just that I shot first. I could have left him to die but I dialed 911 on his phone and called for an ambulance. I wasn’t worried. He’d gotten a shot off, too, so I’d fired in self-defense, which would be my story. A neighbor who heard the shooting came to the door and knocked on it frantically, and then I heard the neighbor run back to their apartment and slam the door hard. They were going to call the police anyway, and maybe other tenants would do the same or they’d watch from their windows if I tried to flee, so I knew it would be better if I didn’t run, if I called the police myself. I wasn’t too worried, but I was a little worried.

Flynn did not die at my feet. He died two days later in the hospital. For a time, after my conviction, I asked myself what if the doctors had managed to save him. The law wouldn’t have been so hard on me. Maybe they’d have let me keep my share of the money instead of confiscating it, what was left after I paid the lawyer, which was a different lawyer than the one Flynn and I had for our business. The new lawyer, a young woman, managed to get the charges reduced to second-degree murder but that was all. It didn’t help my cause that I’d brought a gun with me that day.

A lot of killers, the ones who aren’t professionals, they say they didn’t think about the consequences when they killed someone. Then, it would usually be the wife’s lover or a business partner, but betrayal either way. Maybe I was in a fit of rage when I pulled the trigger, an altered mental state or something, but I think of Jim Croce sometimes, “It may sound funny, but I come to get my money back.”

 

I lived and worked in the Old Joliet Prison, as it came to be called, until 2023. The formal name change was like older neighborhoods in a city – once they’re gentrified the Realtors give them new names and everybody thinks they’re cool again. I like to think I had something to do with saving the Old Joliet Prison. In fact, I know I did.

I didn’t know that I’d ever get out, but one day I was handed an official looking envelope by a guard who’d come to see me. There was no stamp on it and it was not sealed but the guard assured me it was official. “What’s it say?” I asked. I assumed he’d read it.

“Just open it, pal” he said. He’d read it, all right. It was my parole. I’d had two parole hearings and was denied the first time. The board had asked if I regretted killing Flynn and I said that I regretted matters coming to that, which apparently was not good enough for these pompous, sanctimonious fools. How many murders, how many wars, could be avoided if good people didn’t let things get out of hand, get too far, until there was no stopping what should not have been inevitable in the first place? The parole board wanted remorse, but how do you show remorse anyway? You kill yourself – that would be the only irrefutable evidence I can think of. But Flynn left a lot of girlfriends behind, maybe a few babies. Maybe I should have been sorry for them.

I didn’t make the same mistake the second time, though. Sheila, my trial lawyer, was semi-retired by then and represented me pro bono. She said she’d forgiven me for committing murder, that I’d just made a terrible mistake and haven’t we all, sometimes, somewhere, funny lawyer she was, despite all still looking for the best in people. Yet months went by before I heard back and now I heard. You can go. Pack up. God speed. Report to your parole officer monthly and don’t leave the state without permission.

The world puts on a new face every day. Nothing ever is the same. Reagan, Ford, the first Bush, and a holdout – Jimmy Carter – all died while I was in prison, come and gone like a comet. The old warden died and I never had an audience with the new one in the new prison across town. The old warden’s wife died after she moved away and I didn’t know who to send a card to. It was 2023. They gave me clean street clothes from Receiving and Dispatch, and there was a few hundred dollars saved for me, down to the last penny. They didn’t add interest.

I was 59 when I got out. I didn’t have any family left, and I’d never married, which you probably could tell. I could look up old acquaintances but I didn’t want to. Most of them knew I’d been sent up. I’d just be an intruder. Well, there was this one woman. She worked the counter at a Sherwin-Williams on Irving Park Road in Chicago and I bought a lot of paint there. It was never a flirtation but she was the friendly sort, always asking about a job, what someone’s fancy house or apartment looked like on the inside, why I’d chosen this color or finish over that one, always warning me about inhaling too many fumes like she wanted me to be around for a long time. Her name was Freda.

After I got off the Greyhound bus I rode the ‘L’ to the Irving Park stop, then hopped on a CTA bus traveling west. I was headed back to the starting blocks and from there I might begin my life again, reboot like the computer geeks say, or said. But the street looked different as the bus trundled west. Part of it was how the cars looked different, mostly hatchback cars and tall station wagons. Where were the long, low sedans? And the storefronts were different, with merchandise often on folding tables in front and hand-painted signs in various languages over the large picture windows. The bus smelled pretty much the same, though, diesel fumes and old dirt and chemical cleaner. There weren’t many passengers beside me this day, just a few cleaning ladies and a young guy sleeping on the back bench. I hadn’t saved my transfer so I had to put a $5 bill in the fare box and those don’t give change.

The paint store was gone. When I got off the bus, when I walked up to the storefront at Irving Park Road and Austin Avenue I saw that it was some exotic second-hand import/export travel agency and currency exchange thing now, also with a hand-painted shingle, and I admitted to myself that I knew all along Freda wouldn’t be there, of course I knew, I had to know, the store wouldn’t be there, that nothing from my past would be present. I’d just come to get it out of my system, to give up the ghost. It had been a whirlwind 25 years. Or maybe 26 or 27 if I count the arrest and trial.

A cop car rolled slowly by, then stopped opposite me on the other side of the street. There were two of them inside and the driver had one arm outside the window and the other arm wrapped around the steering wheel while he looked at me. I nodded at him but he didn’t flinch. Some immigrant rushed by me on the sidewalk and I followed her with my eyes for a moment, then I looked back at the cop. He turned his head and muttered something to his partner, and he drove off. I turned and looked more closely inside this omnibus store. A tall pane of glass in the display windows had been boarded up with plywood, like someone had thrown a rock through it recently, and maybe that’s exactly what had happened, maybe the damage had been boarded up to stop the looters before the glaziers could come. The cop wasn’t looking at me at all, but at the broken plate glass and the neatly trimmed plywood. It was hot and it was only going to get hotter, grit in the air and high humidity. I thought of the Lovin’ Spoonful song, ‘Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.’

I remembered the addresses of most of the jobs I’d done and I could go knock on doors, Remember be? Got any painting you need done? But it was too pathetic. I didn’t have a union card anymore though maybe I could get it back. It was at that moment that the inside of me collapsed. It was like video of a building after the explosions go off to demolish it. The collapse will look like it’s in slow motion but it’s a real crash. It’s 9/11. I felt like crying. I didn’t think Mama would come to hold me to her bosom and comb her fingers through my hair. It was just how I felt. I was sadness itself.

I decided to walk back to the Irving Park ‘L’ stop. The walk would do me good, I believed. I didn’t pass too many people on the street but they gave me a wide berth if I did, so they saw something about me that day. The walk did me good. I remembered that professor in Evanston, the one who’d told me about his cabin up in Door County, and how I’d done such a nice job on his apartment and he wanted me to come up some day and paint it, too, stain the outside, treat the porch planks, shellac the knotty pine paneling on the inside. Said I could stay in the cottage while I worked. They even had a Sherwin-Williams store nearby, which he thought was funny. “Don’t you think that’s peculiar?” That’s what he’d said. All I could say to him at the time was yes, that’s pretty strange, and follow with a fake laugh, but coincidences do happen. I didn’t want to lose him as a client then, of course. I decided to go to Door County straightaway.

***

I’d shaved with a razor and cut my hair after my release and I had a new outfit – a blue chambray shirt, chino pants, and a small knapsack filled with a few other items – as well as my original leather boots that the prison had kept all these years. The leather was dry and cracked and the sole on the right shoe was beginning to separate and I only took them because I didn’t want to wear my prison shoes out. But they wouldn’t do. They looked like I’d robbed a grave. I stopped in a shoe store Downtown and asked to see 6-inch boots, moc-toe style, Red Wing or Thorogood manufacture preferred. The salesman was this slight, weasely looking dude dressed in a white short-sleeve shirt with an American flag tie and he brought out a Chinese-made product, the kind with glued-on soles made to look like Goodyear welt construction but weren’t, what they would sell at Kmart, or Walmart now. “What are these?” I asked. I didn’t mean to give him a hard time because he was a weasely-looking little man who dressed in a white short-sleeve shirt adorned with a red, white and blue tie, but they weren’t what I’d asked for.

“Well, what you’re asking for are quite expensive,” he replied. He seemed genuinely surprised that I was making an issue of it. I understood. He thought I couldn’t afford better. The Thorogoods started at $260, he explained, the Red Wings more. No, I couldn’t spare that kind of cash. I had to watch my purse. I scanned the aisles and walls of the store, the loose displays of women’s high heels and flats and men’s pointy-toed dress shoes, and I overheard another customer ask a woman how do these look, which shoes did she like better, but there weren’t many customers in the store, and I looked up at the ceiling, a coffered tin ceiling, but the tins had been painted over a dozen times in a very flat white, and two fans spun slowly and the salesman with the ridiculous shirt and tie waited patiently to see what I was going to do. I bent over and tried on the cheap boots, stood and stretched and walked up and down an aisle in them. I could feel him looking at me the whole while. “Sure, I’ll take them,” I said. “I’ll wear them out.” They were made of a cheap suede, a kind of orangey-brown color, but the soles were flexible enough. I left my old boots by the bench where I’d sat.

I went to buy my ticket for Green Bay but the bus didn’t leave until 7:20 am the next morning, so I checked into the Jesus Saves John 3:16 Homeless Shelter and Mission about a mile south the station. It looked like it was housed in a former warehouse, windows too small to be a past factory and too far apart to have been office space or a workingman’s hotel, so it was a warehouse. A line had formed by the time I got there, and an AIDS and Hepatitis clinic shared space on the ground floor. After registering, including submitting to a hair lice check and rolling up my sleeves so a worker could look for needle tracks, I was allowed in.

“Passin’ through?” a man seated in a chair next to me in the day room asked. We both were waiting on dinner. The man was older than me, a beat-down man with only a few teeth and whiskers that grew out of his nose and ears like wood burrs. He was hollowed out like a felled, rotting tree trunk, and he sat leaning so far forward in his chair I thought maybe he had a curved spine.

“You been in ‘Nam,” he asked after turning to me, looking me over for a few seconds before speaking. “First Gulf War?” I wasn’t old enough for the former, but only then realized I would have been old enough for the latter. The gnarly, bent man sighed. “I was in ‘Nam myself. Rats as big as hedgehogs.”

Once in the dining hall I sat in silence with my head bowed during the benediction, as everyone did. Some guy dressed in a kind of prayer shawl over his shoulders stood on a portable stand at the front and told us about Jesus love, but dinner was fine – roast beef and mashed potatoes, whole milk, and peach cobbler. Sometimes you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat. There was quite a lot of chatter in the hall during the eating, but you could tell who’d had a really hard life by the depth of their gaze, people who you’d think couldn’t do this much longer, this being homelessness and statelessness and most of all, friendlessness. I’d see people like that and I’d think of that poem again, not this pig. I watched a little TV after the meal, then found a bunk and decided to turn in early. Sometimes you don’t realize how tired you are until sit on a bed. “Don’t take your boots off,” a man in the cot next to me advised. I was halfway through unlacing them. “They won’t be there in the morning if you do.”

Breakfast the next day was hot, including bacon, eggs, biscuits and oatmeal, a good breakfast, one that I knew would keep me all day, keep me all the way to Door County. I felt good, actually, like I was on a journey, one with an actual destination. I think people who came to America in the steerage of tramp steamers must have felt like that, like they were on a journey to something better, which is all that matters when you don’t have anything. Like farmers on the prairie who’d survived a hard winter and it’s going to be spring. That’s what invigorates a person. You’re making it, and then you’ve made it.

For a few moments, I felt like a hobo during the Depression on the way to the big rock candy mountain. I wasn’t sure of anything.

***

The bus that would take me to Green Bay loaded at the Greyhound terminal on West Harrison, a place teeming with humanity coming in from the margins just like me, everyone looking for a ticket to somewhere better than where they were, but just as likely to be their next station of the cross. I had to weave my way between all the teen runaways from Downstate, lost little girls with a small carry-on and a backpack, the urban cowboys, too, who wore Western style shirts with pearl buttons and stitched leather boots with stacked heels that clicked loudly on the hard terminal floor. I listened to the crackling loudspeakers announcing departures, now leaving for Des Moines and Rockford and Kenosha, some headed to Nashville or Dallas-Fort Worth, even a cancellation, “All passengers get off the bus,” and even someone who asked me for any spare change I might have and which way to the nearest homeless shelter. Bus stations so often are for people who have nowhere to go in their lives they might as well tell the ticket agents, “Surprise me,” and go there.

Once on board, I sat next to a young mother with a baby that still needed nursing. The woman carried a fabric valise that she asked me to store on the parcel rack above – she and the baby were in the window seat – and she turned to the side when she nursed the baby, her shoulder high to protect her modesty. Once on the way, the bus brashly cutting off other traffic, while the phlegmatic and feverish among us didn’t bother to cover their mouths when they coughed and hacked. “You have no respect for women,” a lady screamed as she emerged from the small toilet in the back and worked her way up to her seat, holding on to rails with each step. “Can’t you men lift the toilet seat!” No one responded. You take a leak and part of your stream misses, or a dump and you fail to flush, and when you’re finished with your business you just leave. It’s how some people are. I’d taken a long leak before boarding the bus because I already knew what the lady was talking about.

The trip up to Green Bay took us past cliché red barns, past a farmer dragging a tiller behind his blue Ford tractor, and milk cows in the distance chewing on hay from a bunk feeder. The morning had been cool up in Wisconsin and the fog was thick in the low-lying areas and dips in the highway; at times it felt it was like we were flying through clouds in an old twin-prop, the drone and surge of the bus’s motor adding to the effect. Suddenly, though, the driver downshifted, and downshifted again, the engine and transmission straining to hold together each time, and we came to a quick, full stop. Other passengers slid their windows open wide and looked out, or they stood and peered past the driver at what lay ahead. We’d stopped behind a long line of cars and smoke was rising a hundred yards farther up; no traffic came from the opposite direction. Soon, emergency vehicles approached from behind, their wailing sirens declaring the emergency, and they drove on the shoulder to our right and in the empty southbound lane on the left. ‘What happened? Do you think anyone was hurt?’ It was just the mutterings of people who had no information or way to get it.

“Everyone, please, back in your seats,” shouted the driver. People were crowding the aisle, and slowly they began to push toward the front of the bus, moving like a lava flow.

“Driver!” someone yelled, “Go out and see what’s going on, why don’t you.” The driver vainly tried to hold back this horde of disbelievers, then he fell back in his seat, almost in retreat.

“Open the fucking door,” another passenger demanded. It sounded menacing, and the driver did as he was told. I followed the crowd out; we tramped forward, and other people stepped out from their cars, too. It was like a scene from a sci-fi movie, we were being drawn to something extraterrestrial, and when we reached the police line the cops tried to stop us, too, but we just kept going, the flow of lava.

How long are you dead for when you die? That’s what I thought when I saw EMTs in no hurry putting a limp body in the back of an ambulance, when I saw a crisp and darkened corpse hanging from the open driver’s side door of a small sedan, its head like a rotting melon. Other bodies, too, were falling out of other cars like the dead in Pompeii after Mount Vesuvius erupted – multiple vehicles had piled into other vehicles, the crunch of metal in my imagination so present I could see and hear the crash from different angles like in a Hollywood movie. Weeds along the roadside hissed and crackled from the spreading fire, and the brightness, even opulence, of the burning cars and shrubs only increased the longer I stood, mesmerized. The hot metal, the burning flesh, the firefighters’ foam, it was a pig roast, though I knew I was being cruel to think like that.

“Please, everybody back,” a state trooper implored, and finally people seemed to have had their fill. Yes, people had some respect for the dead, but only because they would want some acknowledgement of their own deaths, some recognition for having lived at all, which was the invisible contract every generation makes with the next.

I trudged back to the Greyhound with the others, now we were like workers after a long day in the fields, and when I returned to my seat I saw that the young mother and child I’d left behind had not moved at all. The woman had taken a diaper out of her bag and was changing the baby, had spread him out on my seat, and she smiled at me and me at her, how I envied her at that moment, her serene smile, her purpose in life, she would be distracted by nothing other than what was best for the child. I almost asked if I could hold the baby when she was finished changing him.

 

The dirt road to the professor’s cabin wound through cedar and poplar stands just as he’d described to me years earlier. The sun had not quite set when I approached but it was darkening in the corridor between the trees as I walked hopefully forward. He’d told me that he used a 4×4 while up here and I saw the rusting hulk of a Ford Bronco in a little turnoff along the way, up on blocks but pretty intact. It was about a mile in from the paved road before the cabin came into focus between the shadows. A pile of wood splits off to the side was uncovered and grey from the previous winter, and the cabin’s planed log siding had been painted a state park brown but was badly faded and streaked with tree sap. The cedar shake roof was missing a few shingles while moss or fungus grew on others. But it was not abandoned. A late-model Jeep was parked off to the right and a glow came from behind the cabin as a thin trail of smoke rose above the roof line. Someone was having a cookout, maybe him. I walked gently around the cabin and stopped a few feet short of a very old man. A bottle of whisky rested on a glass-topped patio table, and the man sat reclining in an Adirondack chair with a half-filled snifter in his left hand. The man hummed some tune I didn’t recognize but it was the professor. His jowls sagged and his hair was a lot thinner, what was left of it, but it was him. He snorted at something he must have observed inside his head, something that crossed his mind, then laughed a kind of contemptuous laugh. I don’t think he noticed me right away, but as I was about to announce myself he turned with a start.

“Who are you,” he cried. “Get out!”

As he sought to climb out of his chair he stumbled to the patio floor and I rushed to help him up.

“Who are you,” he continued. “I have a gun. Don’t you think you can steal anything from me!” He didn’t seem too threatening, though, and I helped brush him off.

“It’s me, McAllister,” I said. “The painter. Remember?”

He stood back and looked me over, scanning me from top to bottom. “You went to jail for murder,” he said. “It was in all the papers. How did you escape? I’m going to call the police. We have police out here. Don’t you think otherwise.”

He reached for the bottle of Scotch and refilled his glass. “Anyway, you can’t hide here. I won’t have it. I have a reputation to maintain.”

Prof. Hilliard must have 80 years old, and the man was more of a contradiction than me. Learned and accomplished as he was, a real professor, he made no sense in his personal life. He’d have pot parties for some of his students in Evanston, and he’d dress in the oddest clothes, plaid golfer’s knickers, or he’d wear bolo ties over mock turtlenecks. I thought he might be gay but never asked.

“McAllister, yes. Let me look at you. You haven’t changed a bit. Well, yes, of course, you’ve changed a lot. Haven’t we all. Did you really escape? Well, let’s drink to that. Prison reform! Storm the Bastille. Let me get you a glass.”

The professor returned in a few moments with a fresh bottle of whisky and I watched as he unscrewed the cap, as he poured the whiskey to the brim in a small tumbler for me, which I tasted cautiously. It had been a long, long time since I’d had the taste of alcohol in my mouth and I hadn’t eaten since morning. I seated myself in a matching Adirondack chair before finishing the drink. The professor taught philosophy at Northwestern and I remembered the afternoon he’d launched into a discourse on Hegel and how spirit moved thorough the world on its way to a final stage of history when everything would be fine, firmly fine and forever, I remembered. “Marx was only replying to that, you know,” he’d said. “He just substituted money for spirit. When the end of capitalism inevitably arrived, that’s when everything would be fine. So, tell me, what have you been up to, McAllister?”

“I just got out of prison,” I said matter of factly. “I got out early for good behavior.”

He screwed up his face. “You were in jail? Were you arrested at the protests?”

“The protests?”

“Over apartheid in South Africa. We all took a bus to Washington for the demonstration. I’m sure you were there, McAllister.”

So, the old man was senile, not merely drunk. I told him about my prison life, only a little bit, and he asked me if I could smell the Linden trees which were in flower nearby and had I seen his missing Macaw on my way in that afternoon. He asked if I had sex in prison like all prisoners have to. He poured us both drink after drink, it grew dark, and the little campfire the professor had built turned to embers and the moon began to rise over the treetops to the East and you could see quite a few stars at night up in Door County. “Come, let’s go to bed now,” the professor said after he rose from his chair. “I want to suck your cock. I’ve missed you so badly, McAllister.”

I stayed through Labor Day and a bit beyond. There was a lot of work for me to do. We’d drive to Green Bay for supplies, buy shingles at a specialty store, buy 5-gallon buckets of exterior paint at the Sherwin-Williams for the cabin, and new trim for the windows and baseboards at Home Depot. I re-caulked all the windows inside and out, as well as the bathtub and sinks. I rented an oscillating floor sander for the wide-plank poplar floor and shellacked the knotty pine interior walls. It was a small house and no job really took that long but I was only working for room and board. I didn’t work too fast.

The professor continued to ask about my life, did I think I’d made the most of my life, what would I do differently if I could do everything all over again, or what did I think about death. “You know, this is it,” he said one evening. “We won’t be, you see.” We were eating pan-fried lake trout that we’d caught earlier in the day when he spoke about death. He knew quite a bit about fishing, about lures and time of day and how to clean a fish. I thought maybe he was worried about his own mortality when he’d ask me about mine because he was older than me. I’d drive him to his doctor appointments in Green Bay, not that he couldn’t drive himself, but it seemed right if he was seeing a doctor that I should be part of his care team, as it were. I’d take him to see a cardiologist or an oncologist so I knew he wasn’t really healthy. We had a calendar we pinned to a wall in the kitchen and I’d make sure to write down all his appointments because he would forget sometimes. The calendar was from an auto parts store with girls sitting on the fender of a classic car for each month or sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open and her long leg hanging out. “You’ve killed a man,” he said. “You know more about death than most people.”

Most people think life is precious, but only their own or that of a family member, I told him. Otherwise, it’s just talk. But, yes, I might have a different perspective on the matter because I had been an agent of death. “Not an angel of death, but an agent of death.” I told him I didn’t think I was a killer, though.

“But you did kill a man,” he repeated.

“Yes, but I don’t go around killing people. I go around painting things, so I’m a painter.”

“Killing is not your profession, not your métier, in other words.” He explained what the French word meant but he didn’t have to. I understood what he was getting at.

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s what I did, not what I do.”

The professor said he regretted death more than feared it, but that he was in no hurry. “Why would I be? I’d miss out on all the wonderful things, like the leaves emerging from little buds, like frying my own fresh fish, or someone like you coming into my life again.”

“Life is full of surprises, I guess.”

“Oh, don’t be banal, McAllister,” he said. “It’s your native honesty and directness that I like. You don’t have to play me like you do sometimes, like maybe you had to do in prison or in business or in front of that parole board you told me about. But, you know what the real surprise is?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. I didn’t look up as I waited for him to tell me.

“It’s that we’re alive at all. A miracle and a surprise are really the same thing. That caterpillar outside our door is no less a surprise and a miracle than we are.”

***

I didn’t allow the professor much sex. I was in the position to say, “Not tonight, Henry,” which wasn’t the professor’s first name but he liked to be called that so he was Henry, or I could say that I was too tired or that I had a headache and it was all too funny because it worked. He’d retreat and say how he understood, how sorry he was to be an imposition, and I’d say maybe tomorrow or something like that. The professor was a resolute man in his own way, but he needed to be reassured sometimes.

The professor had been a handsome and dapper young man, I discovered. He wanted me to see all his old photos, his college graduation portrait, a black and white studio shot of him outfitted in his cap and gown, and others of him kayaking up in Canada and standing beneath the Eifel Tower, or him at a lectern delivering a speech after he’d won an award for distinguished service to something or other. He was tall and I saw that he always was lean, that it wasn’t just his age and frailty, the way he was now, that he’d had this wan look about him when he was younger, too. I guess I hadn’t noticed that before. He would look like he was thinking about something terrible and wanted to know what he could do about it. I was reminded of photos of Abraham Lincoln I’d seen where he, too, seemed so distant.

The professor told me he was married once but his wife divorced him when she found out. He didn’t have to say what she’d found out. “You never married again?” I asked.

“I was more discrete. I had partners, of course. And there were the grad students. Only grad students. And I never went to bars or hung out in the toilets at state parks on weekdays or anything like that. There would be a look in a man’s eye at a conference or the way we might brush against each other and you can tell, then I might be bold enough to make a suggestion. You make ambiguous statements at first, but if they are what you think, and they know you are, too, it’s pretty clear. There was shame at first, of course, but I got over that. I called it acceptance but then that became controversial language inside the movement. One has a physical handicap or an injury in war and one just has to accept it and accommodate oneself to the new reality, but the implication is always that it would be better if one weren’t in such and such a bad state. Homosexuality cannot be something you accept, however. That would imply it’s less than perfect, or less than the norm, less than being heterosexual, in other words. Instead, you should be grateful for the gift of loving another man. That’s where celebrating it comes from, though I think that’s a silly word. What about you?”

The professor did not pay me for sex. He paid me for improvements I was making to the cabin, just my keep and a little money extra. I didn’t think I was taking advantage of him. It was all transactional, like America itself. But maybe I was. I let him do whatever he wanted with my body. I mean, I wasn’t doing it. He was. I could be thinking about anything when he sucked me off. I’d come, and it just didn’t matter how I’d been brought to a climax. But I did like how he would lie in bed afterward and lean on an elbow as he’d rub my tummy and smile, and I could lay my head back and look up at the little vaulted ceiling in the bedroom comfortable in the knowledge that I had nothing to apologize for.

“You’re pansexual,” he once told me. “I’m envious. That’s a real gift.”

I didn’t know if it was a true. I didn’t care about any labels, though. I just liked to get off.

I’d once picked up one of those free weekly newspapers in Green Bay and the professor saw me scanning the personals later in the evening. “What are you doing?” he asked, not in any angry or distrustful manner, but he did seem fearful of what the answer might be. I told him the truth, that I was looking for women to fuck. “Oh, I understand,” he said. “I’m not possessive. I’m willing to share you.”

***

We lived so close to Lake Michigan you could hear the waves roll in, and we went to the shore often. It was just a short trek through some woods and brush, maybe some thorns, and we’d get to the sandy beach and, behold, it would be there. What was this great body of water? How did it get there? That’s what I’d ask myself. It seemed to be all the water in the world. We’d sit at the edge of the cool, refreshing water, our shoes off, or lounge on folding aluminum chairs that we sometimes brought along, the kind with striped webbing that you don’t see much anymore, or we’d sit on cheap beach towels we bought at Dollar Tree. The bugs were a problem until you decided to love them, not hate them. You couldn’t ignore them. The bugs in prison didn’t bite as much but they’d crawl over your body, which was unpleasant for sure, and the mosquitoes and gnats existed like freelances of old, like olde English knights on horseback who did as they may, as knights always were described in books I’d read as a boy. The mosquitoes in Door County would bite and it would itch, but what is the difference between pleasure and pain anyway? An orgasm is both pleasure and pain, a sharp, burning, almost incision-like pain as you come and it’s only good because it’s part of sex, not a punishment this time. I learned to submit to all the bites and itching and the histamine rush when the mosquitoes would bite – yes, that’s what it was, a histamine rush – and it would leave me almost breathless and my heart would race and I’d feel a certain intensity when the itching was about to overwhelm me and then I’d let go and it would be just like I’d climaxed.

***

The professor died on Labor Day. I found him dropped on the floor in the kitchen after I’d returned from a little bait and tackle store a couple of miles away that sold raw milk and local farm eggs. I wasn’t startled to see him on the kitchen floor, curled like he was returning to the womb. There was no need to panic or rush; I knew he was dead, his stillness like a stuffed animal, the cabin like a tomb. I put my bag of groceries down and kneeled near him so I could listen for any breathing, and I pressed on his carotid artery in his neck to see if he had any blood pressure. It was as expected. I don’t know how long I kneeled beside him, or whether I ran my fingers through his hair affectionately, and I reflected more on the passage of time in all our lives than on this, one man’s passing. Everything ends and everything goes on. That’s what I knew. I stood and called the emergency services but told the dispatcher there was no emergency, only that a man had died.

“Someone died?” she said.

I didn’t want to be facetious, so I gave her a bit of history. He was fine this morning but he’d been in failing health for a long time. I took him to all his medical appointments. I think someone should come to collect the body. A police car pulled up in about an hour.

“And who are you?” the younger of the two cops asked. The older guy was fat and disinterested; the younger cop was a skinny, blonde, Aryan-looking kid who seemed too eager, so maybe he was a rookie trying to make an impression.

“I’m the painter,” I said. That got both men’s interest. I explained that I’d been staying in the house while rehabbing everything. The young cop looked about the kitchen and stepped into the living room for a moment, then returned.

“He let you stay here?”

“We knew each other from years back. I painted his old apartment in Evanston. He was a professor at Northwestern.” The body was just lying there. The sun was getting high in the sky, the wind was southerly.

They asked to see some ID. I had ID, but what I had was not exactly what you want to show policemen who are questioning you when there’s a body at your feet. What I had was a piece of paper that showed I’d been discharged from the Joliet Correctional Center, which was the name of the new prison, and was on parole. It’s not like today where Illinois at least gives you a 90-day state ID card that looks just like a regular state ID card. The two cops mulled what they were looking at and they looked at each other, knowing looks.

“You got any weapons here?”

The professor owned a .22 rifle and a small pistol. He wasn’t a nut like some of our neighbors. “I can’t own a firearm, but the owner had a couple,” I said. “He hasn’t been shot. He was being treated for chronic kidney disease and heart failure. He was 80, 81 years old.” They cuffed me and put me in the back of their squad car, an older Chevy Impala, and they locked the doors. What they call the cage separated me from the front seats. I didn’t like it, but maybe they were good cops doing due diligence. It’s what they had to do to be sure. After another half-hour or so an ambulance came to collect the body. Everybody seemed to know everybody and nobody was in too much of a hurry. A little after that the fat cop and the rookie came out from the house and let me out of the squad car.

“So, you’re a famous man, McAllister,” the fat cop said. “We called down to the Department of Corrections in Illinois and they said they know you, that you’re the artist of Old Joliet Prison. Did you really live in that shit hole of an abandoned prison for 20-odd years?”

I wasn’t under arrest. I was, but I didn’t feel like I was under arrest. They explained I’d have to be sent back to Illinois because I’d violated parole, but they were in no hurry and they uncuffed me. I was able to them my story.

THE END