بخش 01 - فصل 09

1979 – 2014

Morris Randolph Bellamy was sentenced to life in prison on January 11th, 1979, and for a brief time things went fast before they went slow. And slow. And slow. His intake at Waynesville State Prison was completed by six P.M. the day of his sentencing. His cellmate, a convicted murderer named Roy Allgood, raped him for the first time forty-five minutes after lights-out.

‘Hold still and don’t you shit on my cock, young man,’ he whispered in Morris’s ear. ‘If you do that, I’ll cut your nose. You’ll look like a pig been bit by a allygator.’

Morris, who had been raped before, held still, biting his forearm to keep from screaming. He thought of Jimmy Gold, as Jimmy had been before he started chasing the Golden Buck. When he had still been an authentic hero. He thought of Harold Fineman, Jimmy’s high school friend (Morris had never had a high school friend himself), saying that all good things must end, which implied the converse was also true: bad things must end, too.

This particular bad thing went on for a long time, and while it did, Morris repeated Jimmy’s mantra from The Runner over and over in his mind: Shit don’t mean shit, shit don’t mean shit, shit don’t mean shit. It helped.

A little.

In the weeks that followed, he was ass-raped by Allgood on some nights and mouth-raped on others. On the whole, he preferred taking it up the ass, where there were no tastebuds. Either way, he thought that Cora Ann Hooper, the woman he had so foolishly attacked while in a blackout, was getting what she would probably have considered perfect justice. On the other hand, she’d only had to endure an unwanted invader once.

There was a clothing factory attached to Waynesville. The factory made jeans and the kind of shirts workmen wore. On his fifth day in the dyehouse, one of Allgood’s friends took him by the wrist, led Morris around the number three blue-vat, and told him to unbuckle his pants. ‘You just hold still and let me do the rest,’ he said. When he was finished, he said, ‘I ain’t a fag, or anything, but I got to get along, same as anyone. Tell anyone I’m a fag and I’ll fuckin kill you.’

‘I won’t,’ Morris said. Shit don’t mean shit, he told himself. Shit don’t mean shit.

One day in mid-March of 1979, a Hell’s Angel type with tattooed slabs of muscle strolled up to Morris in the exercise yard. ‘Can you write?’ this fellow said with an unmistakable Deep-South accent – kin you raht? ‘I hear you can write.’

‘Yes, I can write,’ Morris said. He saw Allgood approach, notice who was walking beside Morris, and sheer off toward the basketball court at the far end of the yard.

‘I’m Warren Duckworth. Most folks call me Duck.’

‘I’m Morris Bel—’

‘I know who you are. Write purty well, do you?’

‘Yes,’ Morris spoke with no hesitation or false modesty. The way Roy Allgood had suddenly found another place to be wasn’t lost on him.

‘Could you write a letter to my wife, if I sort of tell you what to say? Only put it in, like, better words?’

‘I could do that, and I will, but I’ve got a little problem.’

‘I know what your problem is,’ his new acquaintance said. ‘You write my wife a letter that’ll make her happy, maybe stop her divorce talk, you ain’t gonna have no more trouble with that skinny bitchboy in your house.’

I’m the skinny bitchboy in my house, Morris thought, but he felt the tiniest glimmer of hope. ‘Sir, I’m going to write your wife the prettiest letter she ever got in her life.’

Looking at Duckworth’s huge arms, he thought of something he’d seen on a nature program. There was a kind of bird that lived in the mouths of crocodiles, granted survival on a day-to-day basis by pecking bits of food out of the reptiles’ jaws. Morris thought that kind of bird probably had a pretty good deal.

‘I’d need some paper.’ Thinking of the reformatory, where five lousy sheets of Blue Horse was all you ever got, paper with big spots of pulp floating in it like pre-cancerous moles.

‘I’ll get you paper. All you want. You just write that letter, and at the end say ever’ word came from my mouth and you just wrote it down.’

‘Okay, tell me what would make her most happy to hear.’

Duck considered, then brightened. ‘That she throws a fine fuck?’

‘She’ll know that already.’ It was Morris’s turn to consider. ‘What part of her does she say she’d change, if she could?’

Duck’s frown deepened. ‘I dunno, she always says her ass is too big. But you can’t say that, it’ll make things worse instead of better.’

‘No, what I’ll write is how much you love to put your hands on it and squeeze it.’

Duck was smiling now. ‘Better watch out or I’ll be rapin you myself.’

‘What’s her favorite dress? Does she have one?’

‘Yeah, a green one. It’s silk. Her ma gave it to her last year, just before I went up. She wears that one when we go out dancin.’ He looked down at the ground. ‘She better not be dancin now, but she might be. I know that. Maybe I can’t write much more than my own fuckin name, but I ain’t no stupe.’

‘I could write how much you like to squeeze her bottom when she’s wearing that green dress, how’s that? I could say thinking of that gets you hot.’

Duck looked at Morris with an expression that was utterly foreign to Morris’s Waynesville experience. It was respect. ‘Say, that’s not bad.’

Morris was still working on it. Sex wasn’t all women thought about when they thought about men; sex wasn’t romance. ‘What color is her hair?’

‘Well, right now I don’t know. She’s what you call a brownette when there ain’t no dye in it.’

Brown didn’t sing, at least not to Morris, but there were ways you could skate around stuff like that. It occurred to him that this was very much like selling a product in an ad agency, and he pushed the idea away. Survival was survival. He said, ‘I’ll write how much you like to see the sun shining in her hair, especially in the morning.’

Duck didn’t reply. He was staring at Morris with his bushy eyebrows furrowed together.

‘What? No good?’

Duck seized Morris’s arm, and for one terrible moment Morris was sure he was going to break it like a dead branch. HATE was tattooed on the fingers of the big man’s knuckles. Duck breathed, ‘It’s like poitry. I’ll get you the paper tomorrow. There’s lots in the liberry.’

That night, when Morris returned to the cellblock after a three-to-nine shift spent blue-dying, his house was empty. Rolf Venziano, in the next cell, told Morris that Roy Allgood had been taken to the infirmary. When Allgood returned the next day, both his eyes were black and his nose had been splinted. He looked at Morris from his bunk, then rolled over and faced the wall.

Warren Duckworth was Morris’s first client. Over the next thirty-six years, he had many.

Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, lying on his back in his cell (by the early nineties he had a single, complete with a shelf of well-thumbed books), Morris would soothe himself by remembering his discovery of Jimmy Gold. That had been a shaft of bright sunlight in the confused and angry darkness of his adolescence.

By then his parents had been fighting all the time, and although he had grown to heartily dislike both of them, his mother had the better armor against the world, and so he adopted her sarcastic curl of a smile and the superior, debunking attitude that went with it. Except for English, where he got As (when he wanted to), he was a straight-C student. This drove Anita Bellamy into report-card-waving frenzies. He had no friends but plenty of enemies. Three times he suffered beatings. Two were administered by boys who just didn’t like his general attitude, but one boy had a more specific issue. This was a hulking senior football player named Pete Womack, who didn’t care for the way Morris was checking out his girlfriend one lunch period in the cafeteria.

‘What are you looking at, rat-face?’ Womack enquired, as the tables around Morris’s solitary position grew silent.

‘Her,’ Morris said. He was frightened, and when clearheaded, fright usually imposed at least a modicum of restraint on his behavior, but he had never been able to resist an audience.

‘Well, you want to quit it,’ Womack said, rather lamely. Giving him a chance. Perhaps Pete Womack was aware that he was six-two and two-twenty, while the skinny, red-lipped piece of freshman shit sitting by himself was five-seven and maybe a hundred and forty soaking wet. He might also have been aware that those watching – including his clearly embarrassed girlfriend – would take note of this disparity.

‘If she doesn’t want to be looked at,’ Morris said, ‘why does she dress like that?’

Morris considered this a compliment (of the left-handed variety, granted), but Womack felt differently. He ran around the table, fists raised. Morris got in a single punch, but it was a good one, blacking Womack’s eye. Of course after that he got his shit handed to him, and most righteously, but that one punch was a revelation. He would fight. It was good to know.

Both boys were suspended, and that night Morris got a twenty-minute lecture on passive resistance from his mother, along with the acid observation that fighting in cafeteria was generally not the sort of extracurricular activity the finer colleges looked for on the applications of prospective enrollees.

Behind her, his father raised his martini glass and dropped him a wink. It suggested that, even though George Bellamy mostly resided beneath his wife’s thumb and thin smile, he would also fight under certain circumstances. But running was still dear old dad’s default position, and during the second semester of Morris’s freshman year at Northfield, Georgie-Porgie ran right out of the marriage, pausing only to clean out what was left in the Bellamy bank account. The investments of which he had boasted either didn’t exist or had gone tits-up. Anita Bellamy was left with a stack of bills and a rebellious fourteen-year-old son.

Only two assets remained following her husband’s departure to parts unknown. One was the framed Pulitzer nomination for that book of hers. The other was the house where Morris had grown up, situated in the nicer section of the North Side. It was mortgage-free because she had steadfastly refused to co-sign the bank papers her husband brought home, for once immune to his rhapsodizing about an investment opportunity that was absolutely not to be missed. She sold it after he was gone, and they moved to Sycamore Street.

‘A comedown,’ she admitted to Morris during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, ‘but the financial reservoir will refill. And at least the neighborhood is white.’ She paused, replaying that remark, and added, ‘Not that I’m prejudiced.’

‘No, Ma,’ Morris said. ‘Who’d ever believe that?’

Ordinarily she hated being called Ma, and said so, but on that day she kept still, which made it a good day. It was always a good day when he got in a poke at her. There were so few opportunities.

During the early seventies, book reports were still a requirement in sophomore English at Northfield. The students were given a mimeographed list of approved books to choose from. Most looked like dreck to Morris, and, as usual, he wasn’t shy about saying so. ‘Look!’ he cried from his spot in the back row. ‘Forty flavors of American oatmeal!’

Some of the kids laughed. He could make them laugh, and although he couldn’t make them like him, that was absolutely okay. They were dead-enders headed for dead-end marriages and dead-end jobs. They would raise dead-end kids and dandle dead-end grandkids before coming to their own dead ends in dead-end hospitals and nursing homes, rocketing off into darkness believing they had lived the American Dream and Jesus would meet them at the gates of heaven with the Welcome Wagon. Morris was meant for better things. He just didn’t know what they were.

Miss Todd – then about the age Morris would be when he and his cohorts broke into John Rothstein’s house – asked him to stay after class. Morris lounged splay-legged at his desk as the other kids went out, expecting Todd to write him a detention slip. It would not be his first for mouthing off in class, but it would be his first in an English class, and he was sort of sorry about that. A vague thought occurred to him in his father’s voice – You’re burning too many bridges, Morrie – and was gone like a wisp of steam.

Instead of giving him a detention, Miss Todd (not exactly fair of face but with a holy-shit body) reached into her bulging book-bag and brought out a paperback with a red cover. Sketched on it in yellow was a boy lounging against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Above him was the title: The Runner.

‘You never miss a chance to be a smartass, do you?’ Miss Todd asked. She sat on the desk next to him. Her skirt was short, her thighs long, her hose shimmery.

Morris said nothing.

‘In this case, I saw it coming. Which is why I brought this book today. It’s a good-news bad-news thing, my know-it-all friend. You don’t get detention, but you don’t get to choose, either. You get to read this and only this. It’s not on the schoolboard’s Approved List, and I suppose I could get in trouble for giving it to you, but I’m counting on your better nature, which I like to believe is in there somewhere, minuscule though it may be.’

Morris glanced at the book, then looked over it at Miss Todd’s legs, making no attempt to disguise his interest.

She saw the direction of his gaze and smiled. For a moment Morris glimpsed a whole future for them, most of it spent in bed. He had heard of such things actually happening. Yummy teacher seeks teenage boy for extracurricular lessons in sex education.

This fantasy balloon lasted perhaps two seconds. She popped it with her smile still in place. ‘You and Jimmy Gold will get along. He’s a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.’ She stood up. Her skirt fell back into place two inches above her knees. ‘Good luck with your book report. And the next time you peek up a woman’s skirt, you might remember something Mark Twain said: “Any idler in need of a haircut can look.”’

Morris slunk from the classroom with his face burning, for once not just put in his place but rammed into it and hammered flat. He had an urge to chuck the paperback down a sewer drain as soon as he got off the bus on the corner of Sycamore and Elm, but held onto it. Not because he was afraid of detention or suspension, though. How could she do anything to him when the book wasn’t on the Approved List? He held onto it because of the boy on the cover. The boy looking through a drift of cigarette smoke with a kind of weary insolence.

He’s a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.

His mother wasn’t home, and wouldn’t be back until after ten. She was teaching adult education classes at City College to make extra money. Morris knew she loathed those classes, believing they were far beneath her skill set, and that was just fine with him. Sit on it, Ma, he thought. Sit on it and spin.

The freezer was stocked with TV dinners. He picked one at random and shoved it in the oven, thinking he’d read until it was done. After supper he might go upstairs, grab one of his father’s Playboys from under the bed (my inheritance from the old man, he sometimes thought), and choke the chicken for a while.

He neglected to set the stove timer, and it was the stench of burning beef stew that roused him from the book a full ninety minutes later. He had read the first hundred pages, no longer in this shitty little postwar tract home deep in the Tree Streets but wandering the streets of New York City with Jimmy Gold. Like a boy in a dream, Morris went to the kitchen, donned oven gloves, removed the congealed mass from the oven, tossed it in the trash, and went back to The Runner.

I’ll have to read it again, he thought. He felt as if he might be running a mild fever. And with a marker. There’s so much to underline and remember. So much.

For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts: Yes! That’s how it is! Yes! I saw that, too! And, of course, That’s what I think! That’s what I FEEL!

Morris wrote a ten-page book report on The Runner. It came back from Miss Todd with an A+ and a single comment: I knew you’d dig it.

He wanted to tell her it wasn’t digging; it was loving. True loving. And true love would never die.

The Runner Sees Action was every bit as good as The Runner, only instead of being a stranger in New York City, Jimmy was now a stranger in Europe, fighting his way across Germany, watching his friends die, and finally staring with a blankness beyond horror through the barbed wire at one of the concentration camps. The wandering, skeletal survivors confirmed what Jimmy had suspected for years, Rothstein wrote. It was all a mistake.

Using a stencil kit, Morris copied this line in Roman Gothic print and thumbtacked it to the door of his room, the one that would later be occupied by a boy named Peter Saubers.

His mother saw it hanging there, smiled her sarcastic curl of a smile, and said nothing. At least not then. Their argument over the Gold trilogy came two years later, after she had raced through the books herself. That argument resulted in Morris getting drunk; getting drunk resulted in breaking and entering and common assault; these crimes resulted in nine months at Riverview Youth Detention Center.

But before all that came The Runner Slows Down, which Morris read with increasing horror. Jimmy got married to a nice girl. Jimmy got a job in advertising. Jimmy began putting on weight. Jimmy’s wife got pregnant with the first of three little Golds, and they moved to the suburbs. Jimmy made friends there. He and his wife threw backyard barbecue parties. Jimmy presided over the grill wearing an apron that said THE CHEF IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Jimmy cheated on his wife, and his wife cheated right back. Jimmy took Alka-Seltzer for his acid indigestion and something called Miltown for his hangovers. Most of all, Jimmy pursued the Golden Buck.

Morris read these terrible developments with ever increasing dismay and growing rage. He supposed he felt the way his mother had when she discovered that her husband, whom she had believed comfortably under her thumb, had been cleaning out all the accounts even as he ran hither and yon, eagerly doing her bidding and never once raising a hand to slap that sarcastic curl of a smile off her overeducated face.

Morris kept hoping that Jimmy would wake up. That he would remember who he was – who he had been, at least – and trash the stupid and empty life he was leading. Instead of that, The Runner Slows Down ended with Jimmy celebrating his most successful ad campaign ever – Duzzy-Doo, for God’s sake – and crowing Just wait until next year!

In the detention center, Morris had been required to see a shrink once a week. The shrink’s name was Curtis Larsen. The boys called him Curd the Turd. Curd the Turd always ended their sessions by asking Morris the same question: ‘Whose fault is it that you’re in here, Morris?’

Most boys, even the cataclysmically stupid ones, knew the right answer to that question. Morris did, too, but refused to give it. ‘My mother’s,’ he said each time the question was asked.

At their final session, shortly before the end of Morris’s term, Curd the Turd folded his hands on his desk and looked at Morris for a long space of silent seconds. Morris knew Curd the Turd was waiting for him to drop his eyes. He refused to do it.

‘In my game,’ Curd the Turd finally said, ‘there’s a term for your response. It’s called blame avoidance. Will you be back in here if you continue to practice blame avoidance? Almost certainly not. You’ll be eighteen in a few months, so the next time you hit the jackpot – and there will be a next time – you’ll be tried as an adult. Unless, that is, you make a change. So, for the last time: whose fault is it that you’re in here?’

‘My mother’s,’ Morris said with no hesitation. Because it wasn’t blame avoidance, it was the truth. The logic was inarguable.

Between fifteen and seventeen, Morris read the first two books of the Gold trilogy obsessively, underlining and annotating. He reread The Runner Slows Down only once, and had to force himself to finish. Every time he picked it up, a ball of lead formed in his gut, because he knew what was going to happen. His resentment of Jimmy Gold’s creator grew. For Rothstein to destroy Jimmy like that! To not even allow him to go out in a blaze of glory, but to live! To compromise, and cut corners, and believe that sleeping with the Amway-selling slut down the street meant he was still a rebel!

Morris thought of writing Rothstein a letter, asking – no, demanding – that he explain himself, but he knew from the Time cover story that the sonofabitch didn’t even read his fan mail, let alone answer it.

As Ricky the Hippie would suggest to Pete Saubers years later, most young men and women who fall in love with the works of a particular writer – the Vonneguts, the Hesses, the Brautigans and Tolkiens – eventually find new idols. Disenchanted as he was with The Runner Slows Down, this might have happened to Morris. Before it could, there came the argument with the bitch who was determined to spoil his life since she could no longer get her hooks into the man who had spoiled hers. Anita Bellamy, with her framed near-miss Pulitzer and her sprayed dome of dyed blond hair and her sarcastic curl of a smile.

During her February vacation in 1973, she raced through all three Jimmy Gold novels in a single day. And they were his copies, his private copies, filched from his bedroom shelf. They littered the coffee table when he came in, The Runner Sees Action soaking up a condensation ring from her wineglass. For one of the few times in his adolescent life, Morris was speechless.

Anita wasn’t. ‘You’ve been talking about these for well over a year now, so I finally decided I had to see what all the excitement was about.’ She sipped her wine. ‘And since I had the week off, I read them. I thought it would take longer than a day, but there’s really not much content here, is there?’

‘You …’ He choked for a moment. Then: ‘You went in my room!’

‘You’ve never raised an objection when I go in to change your sheets, or when I return your clothes, all clean and folded. Perhaps you thought the Laundry Fairy did those little chores?’

‘Those books are mine! They were on my special shelf! You had no right to take them!’

‘I’ll be happy to put them back. And don’t worry, I didn’t disturb the magazines under your bed. I know boys need … amusement.’

He stepped forward on legs that felt like stilts and gathered up the paperbacks with hands that felt like hooks. The back cover of The Runner Sees Action was soaking from her goddam glass, and he thought, If one volume of the trilogy had to get wet, why couldn’t it have been The Runner Slows Down?

‘I’ll admit they’re interesting artifacts.’ She had begun speaking in her judicious lecture-hall voice. ‘If nothing else, they show the growth of a marginally talented writer. The first two are painfully jejune, of course, the way Tom Sawyer is jejune when compared to Huckleberry Finn, but the last one – although no Huck Finn – does show growth.’

‘The last one sucks!’ Morris shouted.

‘You needn’t raise your voice, Morris. You needn’t roar. You can defend your position without doing that.’ And here was that smile he hated, so thin and so sharp. ‘We’re having a discussion.’

‘I don’t want to have a fucking discussion!’

‘But we should have one!’ Anita cried, smiling. ‘Since I’ve spent my day – I won’t say wasted my day – trying to understand my self-centered and rather pretentiously intellectual son, who is currently carrying a C average in his classes.’

She waited for him to respond. He didn’t. There were traps everywhere. She could run rings around him when she wanted to, and right now she wanted to.

‘I notice that the first two volumes are tattered, almost falling out of their bindings, nearly read to death. There are copious underlinings and notes, some of which show the budding – I won’t say flowering, it can’t really be called that, can it, at least not yet – of an acute critical mind. But the third one looks almost new, and there are no underlinings at all. You don’t like what happened to him, do you? You don’t care for your Jimmy once he – and, by logical transference, the author – grew up.’

‘He sold out!’ Morris’s fists were clenched. His face was hot and throbbing, as it had been after Womack tuned up on him that day in the caff with everyone watching. But Morris had gotten in that one good punch, and he wanted to get one in now. He needed to. ‘Rothstein let him sell out! If you can’t see that, you’re stupid!’

‘No,’ she said. The smile was gone now. She leaned forward, set her glass on the coffee table, looking at him steadily all the while. ‘That’s the core of your misunderstanding. A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.’

‘That wasn’t Jimmy’s character! Fucking Rothstein changed him! He made Jimmy into a joke! He made him into … into everyone!’

Morris hated how weak that sounded, and he hated that his mother had baited him into defending a position that didn’t need defending, that was self-evident to anyone with half a brain and any feelings at all.

‘Morris.’ Very softly. ‘Once I wanted to be the female version of Jimmy, just as you want to be Jimmy now. Jimmy Gold, or someone like him, is the island of exile where most teenagers go to wait until childhood becomes adulthood. What you need to see – what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it – is that most of us become everyone. I certainly did.’ She looked around. ‘Why else would we be living here on Sycamore Street?’

‘Because you were stupid and let my father rob us blind!’

She winced at that (a hit, a palpable hit, Morris exulted), but then the sarcastic curl resurfaced. Like a piece of paper charring in an ashtray. ‘I admit there’s an element of truth in what you say, although you’re unkind to task me with it. But have you asked yourself why he robbed us blind?’

Morris was silent.

‘Because he refused to grow up. Your father is a potbellied Peter Pan who’s found some girl half his age to play Tinker Bell in bed.’

‘Put my books back or throw them in the trash,’ Morris said in a voice he barely recognized. To his horror, it sounded like his father’s voice. ‘I don’t care which. I’m getting out of here, and I’m not coming back.’

‘Oh, I think you will,’ she said, and she was right about that, but it was almost a year before he did, and by then she no longer knew him. If she ever had. ‘And you should read this third one a few more times, I think.’

She had to raise her voice to say the rest, because he was plunging down the hall, in the grip of emotions so strong he was almost blind. ‘Find some pity! Mr Rothstein did, and it’s the last book’s saving grace!’

The slam of the front door cut her off.

Morris stalked to the sidewalk with his head down, and when he reached it, he began to run. There was a strip mall with a liquor store in it three blocks away. When he got there, he sat on the bike rack outside Hobby Terrific and waited. The first two guys he spoke to refused his request (the second with a smile Morris longed to punch off his face), but the third was wearing thrift-shop clothes and walking with a pronounced list to port. He agreed to buy Morris a pint for two dollars, or a quart for five. Morris opted for the quart, and began drinking it beside the stream running through the undeveloped land between Sycamore and Birch Streets. By then the sun was going down. He had no memory of making his way to Sugar Heights in the boosted car, but there was no doubt that once he was there, he’d gotten into what Curd the Turd liked to call a mega jackpot.

Whose fault is it that you’re in here?

He supposed a little of the blame could go to the wino who’d bought an underage kid a quart of whiskey, but mostly it was his mother’s fault, and one good thing had come of it: when he was sentenced, there had been no sign of that sarcastic curl of a smile. He had finally wiped it off her face.

During prison lockdowns (there was at least one a month), Morris would lie on his bunk with his hands crossed behind his head and think about the fourth Jimmy Gold novel, wondering if it contained the redemption he had so longed for after closing The Runner Slows Down. Was it possible Jimmy had regained his old hopes and dreams? His old fire? If only he’d had two more days with it! Even one!

Although he doubted if even John Rothstein could have made a thing like that believable. Based on Morris’s own observations (his parents being his prime exemplars), when the fire went out, it usually went out for good. Yet some people did change. He remembered once bringing up that possibility to Andy Halliday, while they were having one of their many lunch-hour discussions. This was at the Happy Cup, just down the street from Grissom Books, where Andy worked, and not long after Morris had left City College, deciding what passed for higher education there was fucking pointless.

‘Nixon changed,’ Morris said. ‘The old Commie-hater opened trade relations with China. And Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Bill through Congress. If an old racist hyena like him could change his spots, I suppose anything is possible.’

‘Politicians.’ Andy sniffed, as at a bad smell. He was a skinny, crewcut fellow only a few years older than Morris. ‘They change out of expediency, not idealism. Ordinary people don’t even do that. They can’t. If they refuse to behave, they’re punished. Then, after punishment, they say okay, yes sir, and get with the program like the good little drones they are. Look at what happened to the Vietnam War protestors. Most of them are now living middle-class lives. Fat, happy, and voting Republican. Those who refused to knuckle under are in jail. Or on the run, like Katherine Ann Power.’

‘How can you call Jimmy Gold ordinary?’ Morris cried.

Andy had given him a patronizing look. ‘Oh, please. His entire story is an epic journey out of exceptionalism. The purpose of American culture is to create a norm, Morris. That means that extraordinary people must be leveled, and it happens to Jimmy. He ends up working in advertising, for God’s sake, and what greater agent of the norm is there in this fucked-up country? It’s Rothstein’s main point.’ He shook his head. ‘If you’re looking for optimism, buy a Harlequin Romance.’

Morris thought Andy was basically arguing for the sake of argument. A zealot’s eyes burned behind his nerdy hornrims, but even then Morris was getting the man’s measure. His zeal was for books as objects, not for the stories and ideas inside them.

They had lunch together two or three times a week, usually at the Cup, sometimes across the street from Grissom’s on the benches in Government Square. It was during one of these lunches that Andrew Halliday first mentioned the persistent rumor that John Rothstein had continued to write, but that his will specified all the work be burned upon his death.

‘No!’ Morris had cried, genuinely wounded. ‘That could never happen. Could it?’

Andy shrugged. ‘If it’s in the will, anything he’s written since he dropped out of sight is as good as ashes.’

‘You’re just making it up.’

‘The stuff about the will might just be a rumor, I grant you that, but it’s well accepted in bookstore circles that Rothstein never stopped writing.’

‘Bookstore circles,’ Morris had said doubtfully.

‘We have our own grapevine, Morris. Rothstein’s housekeeper does his shopping, okay? Not just groceries, either. Once every month or six weeks, she goes into White River Books in Berlin, which is the closest town of any size, to pick up books he’s ordered by phone. She’s told the people who work there that he writes every day from six in the morning until two in the afternoon. The owner told some other dealers at the Boston Book Fair, and the word got around.’

‘Holy shit,’ Morris had breathed. This conversation had taken place in June of 1976. Rothstein’s last published story, ‘The Perfect Banana Pie,’ had been published in 1960. If what Andy was saying was true, it meant that John Rothstein had been piling up fresh fiction for sixteen years. At even eight hundred words a day, that added up to … Morris couldn’t begin to do the math in his head, but it was a lot.

‘Holy shit is right,’ Andy said.

‘If he really wants all that burned when he dies, he’s crazy!’

‘Most writers are.’ Andy had leaned forward, smiling, as if what he said next were a joke. Maybe it was. To him, at least. ‘Here’s what I think – someone should mount a rescue mission. Maybe you, Morris. After all, you’re his number one fan.’

‘Not me,’ Morris said, ‘not after what he did to Jimmy Gold.’

‘Cool it, guy. You can’t blame a man for following his muse.’

‘Sure I can.’

‘Then steal em,’ Andy said, still smiling. ‘Call it theft as a protest on behalf of English literature. Bring em to me. I’ll sit on em awhile, then sell em. If they’re not senile gibberish, they might fetch as much as a million dollars. I’ll split with you. Fifty-fifty, even-Steven.’

‘They’d catch us.’

‘Don’t think so,’ Andy Halliday had replied. ‘There are ways.’

‘How long would you have to wait before you could sell them?’

‘A few years,’ Andy had replied, waving his hand as if he were talking about a couple of hours. ‘Five, maybe.’

A month later, heartily sick of living on Sycamore Street and haunted by the idea of all those manuscripts, Morris packed his beat-up Volvo and drove to Boston, where he got hired by a contractor building a couple of housing developments out in the burbs. The work had nearly killed him at first, but he had muscled up a little (not that he was ever going to look like Duck Duckworth), and after that he’d done okay. He even made a couple of friends: Freddy Dow and Curtis Rogers.

Once he called Andy. ‘Could you really sell unpublished Rothstein manuscripts?’

‘No doubt,’ Andy Halliday said. ‘Not right away, as I believe I said, but so what? We’re young. He’s not. Time would be on our side.’

Yes, and that would include time to read everything Rothstein had written since ‘The Perfect Banana Pie.’ Profit – even half a million dollars – was incidental. I am not a mercenary, Morris told himself. I am not interested in the Golden Buck. That shit don’t mean shit. Give me enough to live on – sort of like a grant – and I’ll be happy.

I am a scholar.

On the weekends, he began driving up to Talbot Corners, New Hampshire. In 1977, he began taking Curtis and Freddy with him. Gradually, a plan began to take shape. A simple one, the best kind. Your basic smash-and-grab.

Philosophers have debated the meaning of life for centuries, rarely coming to the same conclusion. Morris studied the subject himself over the years of his incarceration, but his inquiries were practical rather than cosmic. He wanted to know the meaning of life in a legal sense. What he found was pretty schizo. In some states, life meant exactly that. You were supposedly in until you died, with no possibility of parole. In some states, parole was considered after as little as two years. In others, it was five, seven, ten, or fifteen. In Nevada, parole was granted (or not) based on a complicated point system.

By the year 2001, the average life sentence of a man in the American prison system was thirty years and four months.

In the state where Morris was stacking time, lawmakers had created their own arcane definition of life, one based on demographics. In 1979, when Morris was convicted, the average American male lived to the age of seventy. Morris was twenty-three at the time, therefore he could consider his debt to society paid in forty-seven years.

Unless, that is, he were granted parole.

He became eligible the first time in 1990. Cora Ann Hooper appeared at the hearing. She was wearing a neat blue suit. Her graying hair was pulled back in a bun so tight it screeched. She held a large black purse in her lap. She recounted how Morris Bellamy had grabbed her as she passed the alley beside Shooter’s Tavern and told her of his intention to ‘rip off a piece.’ She told the five-member Parole Board how he had punched her and broken her nose when she managed to trigger the Police Alert device she kept in her purse. She told the board about the reek of alcohol on his breath and how he had gouged her stomach with his nails when he ripped off her underwear. She told them how Morris was ‘still choking me and hurting me with his organ’ when Officer Ellenton arrived and pulled him off. She told the board that she had attempted suicide in 1980, and was still under the care of a psychiatrist. She told the board that she was better since accepting Jesus Christ as her personal savior, but she still had nightmares. No, she told the board, she had never married. The thought of sex gave her panic attacks.

Parole was not granted. Several reasons were given on the green sheet passed to him through the bars that evening, but the one at the top was clearly the PB’s major consideration: Victim states she is still suffering.

Bitch.

Hooper appeared again in 1995, and again in 2000. In ’95, she wore the same blue suit. In the millennium year – by then she had gained at least forty pounds – she wore a brown one. In 2005, the suit was gray, and a large white cross hung on the growing shelf of her bosom. She held what appeared to be the same large black purse in her lap at each appearance. Presumably her Police Alert was inside. Maybe a can of Mace, as well. She was not summoned to these hearings; she volunteered.

And told her story.

Parole was not granted. Major reason given on the green sheet: Victim states she is still suffering.

Shit don’t mean shit, Morris told himself. Shit don’t mean shit.

Maybe not, but God, he wished he’d killed her.

By the time of his third turndown, Morris’s work as a writer was much in demand – he was, in the small world of Waynesville, a bestselling author. He wrote love letters to wives and girlfriends. He wrote letters to the children of inmates, a few of which confirmed the reality of Santa Claus in touching prose. He wrote job applications for prisoners whose release dates were coming up. He wrote themes for prisoners taking online college courses or working to get their GEDs. He was no jailhouse lawyer, but he did write letters to real lawyers on behalf of inmates from time to time, cogently explaining each case at hand and laying out the basis for appeal. In some cases lawyers were impressed by these letters, and – mindful of the money to be made from wrongful imprisonment suits that were successful – came on board. As DNA became of overriding importance in the appeals process, he wrote often to Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, the founders of the Innocence Project. One of those letters ultimately led to the release of an auto mechanic and part-time thief named Charles Roberson, who had been in Waynesville for twenty-seven years. Roberson got his freedom; Morris got Roberson’s eternal gratitude and nothing else … unless you counted his own growing reputation, and that was far from nothing. It had been a long time since he had been raped.

In 2004, Morris wrote his best letter ever, laboring over four drafts to get it exactly right. This letter was to Cora Ann Hooper. In it he told her that he lived with terrible remorse for what he had done, and promised that if he were granted parole, he would spend the rest of his life atoning for his one violent act, committed during an alcohol-induced blackout.

‘I attend AA meetings four times a week here,’ he wrote, ‘and now sponsor half a dozen recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. I would continue this work on the outside, at the St Patrick’s Halfway House on the North Side. I had a spiritual awakening, Ms Hooper, and have allowed Jesus into my life. You will understand how important this is, because I know you have also accepted Christ as your Savior. “Forgive us our trespasses,” He said, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Won’t you please forgive my trespass against you? I am no longer the man who hurt you so badly that night. I have had a soul conversion. I pray that you respond to my letter.’

Ten days later, his prayer for a response was answered. There was no return address on the envelope, but C.A. Hooper had been printed neatly on the back flap. Morris didn’t need to tear it open; some screw in the front office, assigned the duty of checking inmate mail, had already taken care of that. Inside was a single sheet of deckle-edged stationery. In the upper right corner and the lower left, fluffy kittens played with gray balls of twine. There was no salutation. A single line had been printed halfway down the page:

I hope you rot in there.

The bitch appeared at his hearing the following year, legs now clad in support hose, ankles slopping over her sensible shoes. She was like some overweight, vengeful swallow returning to the prison version of Capistrano. She once more told her story, and parole was once more not granted. Morris had been a model prisoner, and now there was just a single reason given on the inmate green sheet: Victim states she is still suffering.

Morris assured himself that shit did not mean shit and went back to his cell. Not exactly a penthouse apartment, just six by eight, but at least there were books. Books were escape. Books were freedom. He lay on his cot, imagining how pleasant it would be to have fifteen minutes alone with Cora Ann Hooper, and a power nailer.

Morris was by then working in the library, which was a wonderful change for the better. The guards didn’t much care how he spent his paltry budget, so it was no problem to subscribe to The American Bibliographer’s Newsletter. He also got a number of catalogues from rare book dealers around the country, which were free. Books by John Rothstein came up for sale frequently, offered at ever steeper prices. Morris found himself rooting for this the way some prisoners rooted for sports teams. The value of most writers went down after they died, but a fortunate few trended upward. Rothstein had become one of those. Once in awhile a signed Rothstein showed up in one of the catalogues. In the 2007 edition of Bauman’s Christmas catalogue, a copy of The Runner signed to Harper Lee – a so-called association copy – went for $17,000.

Morris also kept an eye on the city newspaper during his years of incarceration, and then, as the twenty-first century wrought its technological changes, various city websites. The land between Sycamore Street and Birch Street was still mired in that unending legal suit, which was just the way Morris liked it. He would get out eventually, and his trunk would be there, with the roots of that overhanging tree wrapped firmly around it. That the worth of those notebooks must by now be astronomical mattered less and less to him.

Once he had been young, and he supposed he would have enjoyed all the things young men chased after when their legs were strong and their balls were tight: travel and women, cars and women, big homes like the ones in Sugar Heights and women. Now he rarely even dreamed of such things, and the last woman with whom he’d had sex remained largely instrumental in keeping him locked up. The irony wasn’t lost on him. But that was okay. The things of the world fell by the wayside, you lost your speed and your eyesight and your fucking Electric Boogaloo, but literature was eternal, and that was what was waiting for him: a lost geography as yet seen by no eye but its creator’s. If he didn’t get to see that geography himself until he was seventy, so be it. There was the money, too – all those cash envelopes. Not a fortune by any means, but a nice little nest egg.

I have something to live for, he told himself. How many men in here can say that, especially once their thighs go flabby and their cocks only stand up when they need to pee?

Morris wrote several times to Andy Halliday, who now did have his own shop – Morris knew that from American Bibliographer’s Newsletter. He also knew that his old pal had gotten into trouble at least once, for trying to sell a stolen copy of James Agee’s most famous book, but had skated. Too bad. Morris would have dearly loved to welcome that cologne-wearing homo to Waynesville. There were plenty of bad boys here who would have been all too willing to put a hurt on him for Morrie Bellamy. Just a daydream, though. Even if Andy had been convicted, it probably would have been just a fine. At worst, he would have gotten sent to the country club at the west end of the state, where the white-collar thieves went.

None of Morris’s letters to Andy were answered.

In 2010, his personal swallow once more returned to Capistrano, wearing a black suit again, as if dressed for her own funeral. Which will be soon if she doesn’t lose some weight, Morris thought nastily. Cora Ann Hooper’s jowls now hung down at the sides of her neck in fleshy flapjacks, her eyes were all but buried in pouches of fat, her skin was sallow. She had replaced the black purse with a blue one, but everything else was the same. Bad dreams! Endless therapy! Life ruined thanks to the horrible beast who sprang out of the alley that night! So on and so forth, blah-blah-blah.

Aren’t you over that lousy rape yet? Morris thought. Aren’t you ever going to move on?

Morris went back to his cell thinking Shit don’t mean shit. It don’t mean fucking shit.

That was the year he turned fifty-five.

One day in March of 2014, a turnkey came to get Morris from the library, where he was sitting behind the main desk, reading American Pastoral for the third time. (It was by far Philip Roth’s best book, in Morris’s opinion.) The turnkey told him he was wanted in Admin.

‘What for?’ Morris asked, getting up. Trips to Admin were not ordinarily good news. Usually it was cops wanting you to roll on somebody, and threatening you with all kinds of dark shit if you refused to cooperate.

‘PB hearing.’

‘No,’ Morris said. ‘It’s a mistake. The board doesn’t hear me again until next year.’

‘I only do what they tell me,’ the turnkey said. ‘If you don’t want me to give you a mark, find somebody to take the desk and get the lead out of your ass.’

The Parole Board – now three men and three women – was convened in the conference room. Philip Downs, the Board’s legal counsel, made lucky seven. He read a letter from Cora Ann Hooper. It was an amazing letter. The bitch had cancer. That was good news, but what followed was even better. She was dropping all objections to Morris Bellamy’s parole. She said she was sorry she had waited so long. Downs then read a letter from the Midwest Culture and Arts Center, locally known as the MAC. They had hired many Waynesville parolees over the years, and were willing to take Morris Bellamy on as a part-time file clerk and computer operator starting in May, should parole be granted.

‘In light of your clean record over the past thirty-five years, and in light of Ms Hooper’s letter,’ Downs said, ‘I felt that putting the subject of your parole before the Board a year early was the right thing to do. Ms Hooper informs us that she doesn’t have much time, and I’m sure she’d like to get closure on this matter.’ He turned to them. ‘How say you, ladies and gentlemen?’

Morris already knew how the ladies and gentlemen would say; otherwise he never would have been brought here. The vote was 6–0 in favor of granting him parole.

‘How do you feel about that, Morris?’ Downs asked.

Morris, ordinarily good with words, was too stunned to say anything, but he didn’t have to. He burst into tears.

Two months later, after the obligatory pre-release counseling and shortly before his job at the MAC was scheduled to begin, he walked through Gate A and back into the free world. In his pocket were his earnings from thirty-five years in the dyehouse, the furniture workshop, and the library. It amounted to twenty-seven hundred dollars and change.

The Rothstein notebooks were finally within reach.