Moonglow by Michael Chabon
But Gorman did not leave to go play with his new toy, as my grandfather had hoped. He found a stool and sat, listening to a radio preacher. He stared at the back of Dr. Storch’s head while the cricket in his cauliflower ear preached damnation. Then, without any apparent stimulus or cue, he stood up, tugged the earphone loose, wrapped the thin wire around three fingers, put the coil of wire inside the cigar box, and laid the box on the stool. The animal inside him was ready to dine.
Gorman sidled over to the radio corner. My grandfather opened his mouth to warn Dr. Storch, but just at that moment the dentist’s shoulders tensed, and he turned to face his looming tormentor, eyes level with Guadalcanal on the back of Gorman’s wrist. Gorman crouched beside Storch and laid his arm across the man’s bony shoulders. He put his mouth to Storch’s ear. His lips moved. He spoke into Storch’s ear for a long time, renewing his grip on Storch’s shoulders every few minutes. His voice was low, and the precise text of his sermon remained a mystery to my grandfather thirty years later. When he was through delivering it, he let Storch shed the yoke of his arm. He unbent himself and looked down at Storch with a pastoral smile. “Okay?” he said, audibly now. “That going to be all right with you?”
Storch was crying. The howls of the ionosphere leaked from the earpiece of the Hallicrafters’ headset.
“Alfred? I can’t hear you.”
“How about you leave the poor bastard alone for a change?” said my grandfather.
Gorman’s chin, followed by his lips, was on its way back down to the neighborhood of Storch’s left ear. It took a long moment for my grandfather’s words to have their effect. Gorman turned to my grandfather, raising himself to his full height. He had three, call it four, inches on my grandfather. In the hollow of his face, his pocket-change eyes flickered. With practiced care, he reviewed the stats he had amassed and recorded so far on my grandfather. The smile that he had pasted to his face fell off. My grandfather never saw it again. Gorman raised his hands to just below his chin, getting his guard up. He agitated the thumbs. “How about I stick these things right into your fucking eyeballs, okay? And then get Alfred here to lick the jelly off them?” he said. The notion genuinely seemed to appeal to him. “Then I can fuck both bloody holes in your skull.”
Against his better judgment, my grandfather glanced at Storch, who had stopped crying but whose cheeks were fiery red. The lenses of his eyeglasses were fogged, but my grandfather could see through the fog that Storch expected him—needed him—to do something, to stand up for him, to fight. He needed my grandfather to be his friend.
My grandfather stared at the gaudy labels of radio tubes in their boxes ranged on a shelf against the wall and serially counted to ten, first in English, then in German, and finally in Yiddish. Even if he could survive a fight with Hub Gorman, which was far from certain, months or years might be added to his bid as a result. He might be transferred to someplace far worse than Wallkill, someplace where the fights were butchery and the sentences long. And in the end Storch would still be a hapless nudnik of an ex-dentist, and my mother and grandmother would be obliged to stumble onward, lost and alone.
Gorman picked up the cigar box, took out the earphone, and poked it back into his ear. He turned the knob that controlled tuning and stopped at something that sounded like it might be jump blues, a 4/4 scratch of drums. Gorman bobbed his head in time, then winked at my grandfather. “A radio in a cigar box,” he said. “That is just neat.”
That night the shortwave frequencies lit up with the news that the Soviet Union had used a rocket to deploy Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit around the earth. The satellite transmitted a signal every three tenths of a second on a frequency of twenty megahertz, and between those pulses another signal on forty megahertz. Radio amateurs and shortwave listeners all over the world were able to tune in and listen to what struck many of them as the voice of the future itself.
Dr. Storch did not hear the signals, and my grandfather did not learn about Sputnik’s deployment until the next day. As soon as Gorman was gone, Dr. Storch hung the radio headset from its peg on the wall, got up from the swivel chair, and walked out of the Hut without looking at my grandfather. When he got back to his cell, he swallowed fifty-two aspirin tablets he had painstakingly accumulated over a period of years by pretending to suffer from chronic headaches.
That night a grinding sound woke my grandfather, like a key being turned in the ignition of an engine that was already running. It was the sound of Dr. Storch vomiting. My grandfather ignored it for as long as he could, which was not very long, although it felt like forever. He got up and went into Dr. Storch’s cell, reeling at the rancid smell of undigested aspirin. Dr. Storch lay conscious and making a sound that was somewhere between a low rhythmic moan of pain that would not stop throbbing and a sigh of unbearable regret.
“Never mind,” he said to my grandfather, though he was confused and did not seem to know it was my grandfather grabbing him, dragging him out into the corridor, raising an alarm. “Never mind, never mind.”
After the medical staff had come with a stretcher and carried Dr. Storch off to the prison’s ambulance, my grandfather got hold of a bucket and mop and did what he could about the mess in Storch’s cell so that it would be all right when they returned him. They would keep him a few days, then bring him back, and it would all start over again for him with Gorman, only now it would be worse. Gorman would be encouraged by his near-miss, and Storch would be more vulnerable than ever.
My grandfather cleaned himself up and returned to his own cell. He lay on his cot for hours, trying to focus his thoughts on his family and on the time remaining until the day they would be reunited, which diminished every day by a greater percentage than the one before. He powered up the Zeiss projector in his skull and eagerly sought Cassiopeia and Andromeda in their courses—and Cepheus, the husband and father. That’s you, he told himself. You are Cepheus. You are not Perseus. You are not a hero. It’s not your job to rescue anybody. But he could not sustain the planetarium show tonight. There was too much light pouring in from the stanchion outside his window. There was still a tang of vomit in the air.
Storch was going to be kept under observation at the county hospital for four days. On the first day of his absence my grandfather told the guard in charge of the grounds crew that he needed fence wire to repair the antenna of a “lousy made-in-Japan” radio set that had come into the shop. For a purpose directly opposed to his present one, my grandfather had earned the guards’ trust. He was believed. Once inside the potting shed, my grandfather filled the rolled cuffs of his trousers with Hi-Yield. He had noticed the grounds crew mixing this crystalline white powder with water and applying it to tree stumps at the edge of the meadow. The crew called it stump killer; it acted to soften the stumps so that rain was enough to dissolve them. The active ingredient was basically chemical fertilizer: potassium nitrate.
The second day and third day of Storch’s absence, my grandfather devoted to obtaining a quantity of sugar. This was trickier; the kitchen kept an eye on sugar because it could be used to make hooch. The cubes were counted and doled out with tongs, two to a prisoner per meal. My grandfather would have to stockpile for weeks. He thought of another approach. It was foolish, dangerous, and shameless but it would be efficient, and anyway, shamelessness was often the missing piece of many otherwise brilliant schemes.
A word that often cropped up when people talked or wrote about the warden of the Wallkill prison, Dr. Walter M. Wallack, was tireless. For every problem that arose in the life and administration of the prison, he came up with three possible solutions. He was always on the move. You never saw him sitting down. He arrived early and went home late. Part of this tirelessness was no doubt constitutional or even moral (he was a good man), but you could not discount the fact that he consumed—the legend varied—between fifteen and twenty cups of coffee a day, black and sweet. He kept a percolator in his office, on top of a low bookshelf by the door, and an ample supply of s
After breakfast on the second day my grandfather begged one of the cooks for an empty drum of Quaker oats. That evening he went to the Hut and built a radio inside the cardboard drum. He sank a tuning knob through the Q of Quaker and a volume pot through the O of Oats. He cannibalized a speaker cone from a junked unit and cut a grille for it out of the drum’s paper lid. The next day he got permission to deliver the radio to Wallack in his office.
He found Wallack behind his desk—standing up, as usual. There was a nice leather swivel chair, but Wallack almost never sat down in it. He stood, and he leaned on the top of a filing cabinet when he needed to jot something in his legal pad. The desk was bare except for a telephone, a calendar blotter, and a crude paper rocket, a foot high, clearly if unconsciously modeled on the V-2.
“Very kind of you,” Wallack said, taking the radio from my grandfather. “Very clever. Theo will love it, I’m sure.”
My grandfather showed Wallack how to operate the radio, suggesting that the warden move closer to the window to get better reception. He moved closer to the door and the shelf with the coffee percolator. Dr. Wallack turned to face the window and twiddled the knobs. He found Mozart. He found Eddie Fisher. While his back was to the room, my grandfather leaned over and grabbed one of a dozen unopened boxes of sugar cubes on the shelf below the percolator. He reached around to grab hold of his own shirt collar, jerked it away from his neck, and dropped the box of sugar cubes down the back of his shirt.
Dr. Wallack turned back and my grandfather had to put his eyes somewhere, so he put them on the rocket. A loving but clumsy hand had shaped the fins, nosecone, and sweep of the fuselage from strips of thin card around a tube left over from a roll of paper towels. The paper was crusted with dried mucilage and blotched with red, white, and blue paint, but the rocket’s proportions were pretty good. There were stars and stripes and the legend u.s.a. written twenty times all up and down the thing in execrable handwriting.
“Theo’s work,” Dr. Wallack said.
“I figured.”
“Gone space-mad, like all the other boys since Sputnik went up. Building rockets. Rockets to the Moon! Trying to figure out how to make them really fly.”
“Interesting problem,” my grandfather said. “I’ll think about it.” All you would need, he idly thought, is a little bit of sugar.
He backed out of the room, scuttled past the warden’s secretary, and then hurried to his cell to hide the sugar cubes.
On the third night after lights-out, my grandfather sat on his cot with some tape, wire, a flashlight battery, and the guts of an old clock from the scrap heap in the Hut. Working by the blare of light through the window, he ground the cubes to powder in the box and then mixed in KNO3, packing the sugar box as tightly as he could with the “candy,” as it was known. After an hour’s patient work he had a configuration of wire, battery, candy, and time that was both plausible and strictly nur zu demonstrationszwecken. He was not sure how plausible it was that Hub Gorman would know how to construct even a rudimentary explosive device like this one, but he also wasn’t sure it really mattered. The mere presence of it in Gorman’s cell, once my grandfather had tipped off the guards, would likely be enough to get Gorman transferred out of Wallkill to Green Haven or Auburn or someplace where he really belonged. Hub Gorman did not belong in a prison that had beehives, a creamery, a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a photo enlarger.
27
Dr. Storch was returned to the prison in the ambulance on the tenth of October, a Tuesday. When my grandfather heard about it after chow he went to the Hut and looked in through the door. Dr. Storch was at the S-38, lenses glinting, face gaunt and livid as an El Greco Christ’s in the glow of the radio’s half-moons. He had the headset on and his movements on the dial were exceedingly fine, as if homing in on a single voice in the great megahertz chorale. My grandfather felt his eyes burn, and the muscles of his chest seemed to curl like a fist around his heart. When he first learned that the dentist would survive his suicide attempt, he had felt powerful relief; the news about Hub Gorman had added a disturbing wrinkle. On seeing Dr. Storch’s gaunt suffering face again, however, all he felt was shame. He ought to have stood up for the poor bastard in the first place. He left the Hut, went to his cell, and waited for the lights to be put out.
He woke to a chill touch, long dry fingers pulling at his wrist.
“Shh.”
He sat up and looked out the window of his cell. It was never easy to judge the time of night with the floodlights spilling in the yard outside. Call it about an hour before dawn. Dr. Storch winced, to show that he was sorry for waking my grandfather. He held up both hands and made a pushing motion that said, I know, I know, but trust me. He gestured to the doorway of the cell and then to the ceiling. He wanted my grandfather to follow him up to the roof.
A visit to the roof of this particular cell block was an exploit often discussed among the Wallkill population. It was a subject of debate. Generally, it was agreed to be possible, but no one among the current crop of inmates would, or could, acknowledge having done it. A solid minority believed that the roof passage was a legend that had originated as deliberate misinformation, a trap laid by some unscrupulous guard to lure unwary prisoners into infraction. These men claimed that a guard was paid a bounty every time he caught an inmate in the act of trying to escape.
My grandfather pulled on a shirt and trousers and started to put on his shoes. Storch shook his head. They went out into the corridor. They stepped softly, and kept their thighs apart so that a whisper of twill would not betray them. They turned onto another corridor and went along past the doors of other men’s cells to the end. There was a blank brick wall about five feet wide.
Dr. Storch crouched down by the base of the wall. He reached into the waistband of his trousers. It was too dark for my grandfather to see what he had in the waistband, but later he found out that it was two heavy-duty paperclips, unbent up to the last involution so that they made a pair of hooks. Dr. Storch slid these hooks under the bottom edge of the wall about three feet apart. He held his breath and let it out and lifted the bottom of the wall up and outward. It was a hinged wooden panel covered with a layer of bricks cut very thin and applied in a way that matched the course of the genuine wall. Behind it, a rectangular opening of the same dimensions as the panel led into an air duct. My grandfather afterward theorized that at one time there had been a grille over the opening and that some clever prisoner had replaced it with the panel, camouflaged so well that, when installed, it looked as if it belonged.
Dr. Storch sat down and slid his legs through, then poured the rest of himself into the hole. My grandfather heard a creak of metal, a pause, then another creak. Pause, creak, pause: The sound took on the familiar cadence of a man climbing a ladder. My grandfather hesitated. He had already taken too many crazy chances in the past week. He knew that following Storch would be tempting fate. If this exploit went wrong, it would be hard not to look back and say that he was asking to get caught. God knew he had enough on his conscience to justify that view of the matter.
Inside the airduct was a smell like the taste of a new filling. My grandfather grasped the first of the rungs and pulled himself up through the darkness. The rungs had been crafted, no doubt by the same gifted engineer, from the springs of shock absorbers, likely pilfered from the prison motor pool. Whoever the guy was, he had compressed each spring between two heavy blocks of wood, clad with pieces of tire, and then allowed the spring to expand across the duct. Pressure and rubber tread held the rungs in place at the back of the duct, leaving barely enough room for the vertical passage of a man. A little under three minutes after they began the climb, they were standing on the roof. It was a clear night full of stars. A poignant smell of leaf smoke blew in from the backyard of some fortunate free man.
“Which way?” my grandfather said in just above a whisper, having deduced what Dr. Storch had brought him to see.
“Northeast,” Dr. Storch whispered back.
Anticipating that someone—the U.S. or Russia—would manage sooner or later to loft a satellite into orbit, a Harvard astronomer and well-known science fiction fan named Fred Whipple had taken advantage of the publicity around the International Geophysical Year to organize a network of amateurs connected by shortwave radio. Upon news of Sputnik’s launch they had mobilized themselves all over the country, going out every night to watch the sky and report details of time and orientation.
They stood in the cold and the dark. Far away the lights of some town glittered. My grandfather inclined his face to the vast heavens until his neck began to ache.
“I was told there was an explosion,” Storch said.
“Hell of a thing.”
“He was making moonshine?”
“So goes the theory.”
There had been nothing left of the candy bomb in Gorman’s cell, and very little left of the cell and Gorman. There was an attempt at investigation, but the scene had been so heavily contaminated by the first guards to respond to the sound of the blast that no firm conclusions were ever drawn. My grandfather couldn’t figure it out, either, but he was inclined to blame the detonation on some unforeseen interaction between the clockworks in the oatmeal box and the radio in the cigar box.
“My friend,” said the German, his voice thickened by emotion, “was it you?”
“Only very indirectly,” my grandfather said. He told Dr. Storch about the sugar and the KNO3 and explained his theory of the radio’s detonation, which was really not much of a theory, as Dr. Storch pointed out.
“I would be more inclined to blame a discharge of static electricity,” Dr. Storch said. “Perhaps from Gorman’s wool blanket. At this time of the year, the air is so dry. I’m sure you’ve noticed the sparks when your hands pass across the bedclothes in the dark.”