The Cage Keeper Read online

  “It was Monday and I was halfway through my morning chores when this young man from Rocky Mountain Bank came down to the house. He sat awhile and had coffee and pie, made small talk, you know. Then the sonuvabitch got up and politely left us a form letter on how to partially liquidate our property and avoid foreclosure by the bank. After he left, why Lorraine and I just stared at that piece of paper like it was a rattlesnake somebody’d dropped in our bed. That was Monday. Two days later my wife and I are finishing a fried-chicken lunch and that letter is still on the table where it was left. Then—and you are not goin’ to believe this, Allen—then, a knock came on the screen door in the front. I got up first, hoping it might be that young sonuvabitch come to say he left the papers at the wrong house. But it wasn’t. I knew what it was in seconds, though. I mean my world stopped when I saw that army captain with the chaplain’s cross pinned on him. He said that there’d been an unfortunate error in communications and my deepest condolences, sir, but your son’s body has been stateside for a week. He was down at Fort Carson.” Elroy stops talking. The wind is really pushing outside. I want to ask him to turn on the engine and the heat, but I don’t. I’m seeing that picture of his kid and wife in my head. I’m seeing the boy with the blond hair and Elroy’s Cro-Magnon forehead, his somewhat happy face.

  “Lorraine and I got in my pickup to go fetch him, and Lord, she was wailing. God, it was more than I could stand. We had the windows down the whole way, and do you know what I thought as I drove down that highway to get what was left of my boy? Lorraine cryin’ beside me like somebody had stuck her with a knife? I thought: When did it happen? Lord, when did I die? Because the wind off the road was hot as fire and my wife was a screaming demon and I knew sure as shit that I had died in my sleep and gone straight to hell. At the gate they were very nice, two young corporals, and they had Lorraine go in the air-conditioned Officers’ Quarters. Then a young E-3 got into my truck and directed me to a big hangar. And man, that concrete was so blindin’ bright I didn’t believe any of it was real. And you know? It wasn’t. Not like any of the real your average man has ever lived. We drove into the hangar and turned off the ignition and, for a second, my eyes couldn’t adjust to the dark of the place. Then while I was standing and leaning against my truck, and trying to get used to the light, a man came over and said: ‘Name?’ And I said, ‘McElroy.’ By this time my eyes had adjusted to the place and, by God, I couldn’t believe what they were seeing. I was looking at fifty or sixty of those gray metal coffins lined against both walls like lumber in a lumber yard, and this man, who was some kind of a sergeant, was flipping through the names of dead boys on his clipboard. He said, ‘McElroy, James A.’ Then he handed his list to the E-3, who got into a forklift with it and drove off. Now Jesus, my knees were about to give way and I had to lean against the hood of my truck. I watched that machine drive along that awful row of boxes ’til it stopped. Well, that’s when I had to turn my head. I looked outside over the concrete to the security gate and Officers’ Quarters beside it. When I turned back around that sonuvabitch was coming at me with my Jimmy’s coffin. When he swung around to the back of my pickup he stopped and said: ‘Please lower your tailgate, sir.’ I did this. Then he lowered that thing into the bed of my truck and I watched it go down, and I looked at that E-3 and saw him chewing gum. He was looking just as bored as could be. He wanted to finish this detail and go fuck his girl. The last few inches he let it drop, and that is when I lost it, Allen. I tore after that sonuvabitch like a bulldog. I got in about four good punches when that clipboard sergeant jerked me from behind. Well, that is the last thing he ever did, kid, because I pushed him outside and got on top of him and knocked his head into the concrete until he was no more. I mean to say I killed him. I never saw my boy’s funeral either. The Honorable Judge Barton didn’t think I deserved it. His exact words, too. ‘You’ve lost that privilege,’ he said.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yep.”

  “Elroy, I—”

  “It was an election year, too. And that old judge wasn’t about to appear soft on a man who kills soldiers who are getting killed enough as it is. Never mind the fact that one of them was my boy. Don’t mind that. He gave me the full twenty.”

  We are quiet. The radio antenna makes a long low ringing sound as the wind hits it in just the right place, but I can’t see it. The snow on the windshield must be a good half inch deep. My nose is stopped up. My eye feels full of something, too. I can no longer feel my fingers and toes. I don’t know if it’s from the cold or from the rope. I don’t know anything right now. “Could you turn on the heat, please?”

  Elroy starts the engine and the heat. He turns on the headlights then flicks on the wipers. They move slowly, but push away the snow. It’s coming down in swirls in front of the headlights. I see a fresh layer of it on the snowbank in front of us.

  “Could you loosen the rope on my hands and feet, Elroy? I think they’re going to fall off.”

  He looks at me, and in the light I see his eyes glisten. God. He even cries without a sound. He sniffles, wipes his nose on his sleeve, then pulls the Bowie from the inside lining of his jacket, leans over, and cuts all the way through the rope around my wrists. When it falls free he sits back and I open and shut my hands. I wince at the pain-tingle of them coming alive again. They feel as swollen as my eye, as stopped up as my nose. I am not in good shape.

  “A fair pound of your flesh is all I ask, sir.”

  I look quickly at Elroy. He is holding the handle of the knife between his clasped palms, the blade sticking straight up past his fingers.

  “What?”

  “The flesh of the man who owes me. It’s a play, Allen. The Merchant of Venice. I even acted the entire role of Shylock once. Ah, but I have forgotten that, too. Those were my cultured days in Greeley, kid. Those were days of suspended disbelief. What some fools call faith.” Elroy rests his Bowie in his lap. I look at my watch; it’s ten-seventeen, but this fact gives me no bearing. It could be morning or night, weekday or weekend, I don’t know. I have only felt this way once before, when your whole constitution just goes liquid and will take on any shape that wants it. I want to reach over and touch Elroy’s shoulder, tell him I know how gutted and ripped open he feels. But I don’t move. I look straight ahead at the windshield wipers pushing away the snow as it falls, see the snowbank in front of us. I smell exhaust and imagine dying in this car with buzzed and deathly sad Douglas Agnes McElroy. I think of my brother, Mark, and his pretty, plump wife, Anne. I can’t imagine that they’re living life as usual in their condominium park just outside of Denver. I can’t imagine that they don’t know things aren’t so good with me right now. And Leon. He’s working the night shift waiting for Wilson so he can make it down to The Rhino before last call. Do they really not know that I am stuck in my car in Wyoming with escapee McElroy? Do they really not know that my eye is closed up from where he punched me? That my legs are tied? That he has the biggest knife I have ever seen and is getting drunk and morose and now, shit, unpredictable?

  “Will you help me get to Saskatchewan, Allen?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “I don’t want to make you do it anymore.” Elroy’s voice just got as high and wavering as an old man’s—full of phlegm. “I am tired of hitting my head against the wall.”

  “Let’s go back, then.”

  “Nope.” He clears his throat, rolls down the window, and spits outside. “No, kid. We are not going back. I am never going back. I am driving to Saskatchewan. It is there or dust for me. I am through with your Fascist House and every other manner of institution, for that matter. Never mind the eleven years of my life. Forget that. I gave my boy to this land.” With that last word, he picks the knife up out of his lap, clutches the handle, then stabs the point into the soft of my dashboard. He pushes all the way in, sliding the blade under the vinyl until I can see only the handle. He wipes his nose and sits up straight. We are both still, looking through the windshield together like som
ething out there might have an answer for all of this. I look at Elroy behind the wheel and think of his black hair and smiling face in that oval portrait. I smell beer, then actually turn to reach for one, when Elroy snaps out of his trance and bangs the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. “God damn, Allen. Our time has come.”

  He puts the car in gear then jerks forward towards the snowbank. He gets her in reverse then pulls around the utility station and out into the road. He brakes and the wheels lock and we slide in the dark. Then we’re driving back through the residential neighborhood, all lit up with discount-store electric cheer, heading for the 7-Eleven and, I think, a felony. I have never felt more gray about anything in my life. I almost want to nudge him and shout, “Not yet, Elroy. The store will be open for two more hours.” But I stop myself. The road is soft with snow beneath us and we’re gliding over it fast, too fast. I’m so nervous my left eye opens. It pulls apart sticky then burns. My right eye fills up and I wipe it dry as we hit the road between the Christmas houses and the 7-Eleven. There’s one car parked in front of the store, the same one that was there two hours ago, the fat lady’s. Elroy swerves into the parking lot and we do a half doughnut then slide and come to rest parallel to the curb in front of the place.

  “A pound, a pound. A pound of Saskatchewownd,” Elroy says in a voice both raspy and clear. He opens the door, pulls the knife out of my dash, belches, then turns to me in the light of my car. He’s breathing fast, like we just ran here. “You can do it if you like, Allen. There’s no feeling like it.” He looks through the windshield at the store. “Has she seen us?”

  “She’s looking right at us.”

  “Then it’s now or never.” He smiles, pats me on the leg, and in seconds, is inside the store. There is a hot-coffee sign taped to the window in front of the counter and I have to lower my head close to the dashboard to see. My heart is beating very fast. McElroy is standing at the counter with my cap on his head and his dungaree jacket buttoned up to his throat, his collars flipped up like Elvis. He’s got his hands behind his back and is smiling red-faced like he is embarrassed but excited too, like the woman behind the counter is looking at a part of him he didn’t ask for but can’t do anything about either. I can’t see the fat lady’s head because of the sign in the window, but she is standing up facing Elroy and her polyester pea green turtleneck is sticking with static to her belly. Then McElroy moves very quickly and has his rough hand on her shoulder and is holding his huge Bowie knife an inch from her stomach. I see her plump fingers as her body turns towards the register. They have rings on them, lots of them, and I know that one of them is a wedding ring. I think I am going to throw up. I open my door and start to get out but my legs stay hugged together and I fall on my side and bang my head on the snowy concrete. I pull myself up until I am standing, holding on to the roof of my car, and I start to hop towards the glass door. “You’re not going to do this, Elroy! You’re not going to do this!” I make it to the curb and reach for the door’s handle, when I see Elroy backing away from the counter. He has his hands and knife up in the air beside him and he is talking and smiling. I swing open the door then see her and the raised pistol, then hear it go thack, thack, thack; but I don’t see it anymore because I am looking at Elroy as he takes one in his right shoulder, then twists and hunches as he gets one in the neck, then lunges sideways into a shelf as he catches the last in his back. His Bowie hits the floor before he does and clatters and spins down the aisle towards the coolers. Then the fat lady, pale as death, points her trembling gun at me. I jerk my hands over my head. “I’m not with him. I’m his hostage. I’m not with him.” She keeps that pistol pointed at me and I see her chin start to quiver. I point at my feet. “Look. He tied me up. Look at my face. He did this.” She lowers her gun, then sits down on her TV chair. “Oh, my Jesus,” she says. “Oh, my holy Jesus.”

  I looked at Elroy curled up against the shelf on the floor. My cap is sitting way back on his head and his eyes are closed. There’s a small hole just under the jaw and blood is leaving it in a pulsing, peaceful trickle. I hear the fat woman weeping. I let go of the door, lean back against it, and close my eye.

  3

  The officers from the Platte County Police Department were very nice; they patched up my eye and after I spent an hour and a half writing reports with them, they offered to put me up for the night in a hotel. But I turned them down. I’m just too keyed up to sleep. I pass a car on my right then get into the traveling lane. The highway is wet and slick but clear of snow. It’s still coming down, but not nearly as hard. I touch my cheek under my left eye and feel the sticky stuff left over from the adhesive tape and gauze. I got rid of all that as I left the station, and I alternate holding my left eye open and keeping it closed. Right now it’s closed and the eighteen wheeler in front of me looks like it could be two car lengths ahead of me, or six. I look at my watch, one thirty-two A.M. Twenty-four hours ago almost to the minute, I was lugging McElroy’s things down to the tomb of the center: his radical books and immaculate work clothes, the picture of his dead son and runaway wife.

  In the passing lane I leave the semi behind me, rub the slit in the upholstery of my dash, and hear what my brother, Mark, will say about all of this: “We’ll throw everything at him, Alley. We’ll put that fucker back behind the walls forever.” I think of that fat woman after she pulled the trigger three times and watched what the kick and blast in her hands could do to a man. There was no color in her face at all; her flesh got as white and lifeless-looking as bread dough. Then she slumped in her stool and covered her face with the hands that had done it, that had known more power in a few seconds than she had probably ever imagined. I have never seen anyone shot before. A man’s body doesn’t take them straight and unflinching like a silhouetted target. I wonder if the beer in Elroy’s belly gave him any relief at all. I doubt it.

  I drive and drive and think of nothing. At three thirty-four A.M., I pass to the west of Cheyenne. The streets and some of the buildings are still lit up. And the sidewalks are dusted with snow, no footprints on them yet. At four oh-two A.M. I cross the state line into Colorado. The road is dry in front of me, no fresh snow anywhere. When I get into Bellington I pull into Winchell’s and buy two chocolate eclairs and a large coffee with a little cream, no sugar. There are no customers and the girl behind the counter looks young, around seventeen. When she takes my money she looks up at my face.

  “Wow. The other guy looks worse, I hope.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Good. Have a nice night.”

  “You, too.” I take my bag and as I’m leaving, I think how wrong it is for a girl that age to be watching a cash register at this time of the night. Then I imagine a big .45, or a long .357, or a short and flat .380 semiautomatic probably sitting under the counter to back her up. I get back on the road and eat my eclairs all at once. If my father had been working at the 7-Eleven in Wyoming last night, what would he have done? Would he have gone for Elroy’s vital-organ zones? Or would he have aimed for his elbows and knees and shoulders?

  Just before Longmont I finish my coffee and decide to take 119 southwest to Boulder instead of continuing straight on down into Denver and my apartment. This thing with Elroy’s going to take a long report. I’d just as soon get it done with now. I open my left eye as I go through a blinking yellow traffic light in the center of Longmont, then close it as I hit the rushing yellow lines of 119 heading towards Niwot. There is snow on both sides of the road, old snow. I run my fingers through my hair then miss something and know it’s my wool cap. I remember the way it looked on Elroy as he lay bleeding, curled up and still. It was almost jolted off him, but then stayed, sitting on the back of his unconscious head as pointed and idiotic-looking as a party hat.

  When I drive through Niwot I see the Sunoco station up ahead and I open my left eye to that same kid sitting in the lighted office leaning back in his chair reading a magazine. That’s what Wilson’s doing right now I know, reading when he should
be outside doing a perimeter check before daybreak, walking around the center, cold or not, shining his flashlight up under window ledges, looking for nickel bags on a string.

  At five thirty-six in the morning I drive into Boulder. The streetlights are almost blue in this town, and as I pass the park on my left, I look at the way that light looks natural when cast upon the snow. Muddy River Johnson died in that park, and I think how Elroy’s and Muddy River’s gear share the same space in the basement at the center; but Johnson’s dead and Elroy is lying in a hospital in Wyoming with three .38-caliber holes in him. I pass The Rhino, then the mall and Rocky Mountain Bank on my right. I see the green glimmer of the electric-eye alarm system cast over the floor of the bank’s lobby. When I get to Broadway I stop, put on my indicator, then take a left up the street. My heart flutters a second in my chest, stops, then flutters again. I feel very strange. Not tired really, but past tired, not fully in my body. At the top of the hill, a dairy truck is pulled up to the side of Pau-Pau’s Variety Store. The driver is wearing a hat and gloves and a thick-looking coat and is unloading full milk crates into the light of the store. He doesn’t notice me or my Monte Carlo as I turn right and drive past him onto University down through fraternity row. Over the roofs of the big houses are the white rise and dip of the foothills. I look in the direction of the French restaurant but only see the steep icy face of Dead Goat Ridge.

  I turn into the alley in the back of the center, park behind Wilson’s motorcycle, turn off my engine and lights, and just sit here. There’s the faint buzzing of someone’s alarm clock going off. I look out my windshield up at the darkened windows of the men’s wing and see one of them wide open: Buck’s. I imagine his three-hundred-and-thirty-two-pound body waking up to piss and wash, then dress and put on his forty-pound custom made Satan’s Siblings leather jacket that he keeps draped over a chair beneath the window. I think of Bill Paxton’s snoring face doing subtle brain damage to Glenn Peters and Russ Haywood. And I imagine Maggie Nickerson waking up then walking to the women’s rest room with her blue sleeping cap pulled tightly over her scalp, her old face still puffy with sleep. I think of these people and I wish Leon was working now. Then after I finished writing my report, he and I could go down to the Montview Hotel for breakfast, order blueberry pancakes and syrup with three eggs over easy and two double orders of bacon with lots of hot coffee. We’d sit and eat, and in between bites I’d tell him all about my night with Elroy. Leon’s face would get very serious and he’d stop chewing when I’d tell him about Elroy’s son. Then he’d shake his head and tell me I’d better go home and rest and put ice over my eye. We leave the waitress a big tip, then walk to our separate cars and make plans to get together for a few beers at The Rhino later on. I would get into my Monte Carlo and leave Boulder heading east towards Denver and my apartment, electric blanket, and bed. I would be driving, wired as all hell, but I would see Elroy looking over that shimmering stretch of concrete to the air-conditioned Officers’ Quarters for his wife, then turning to see his son’s coffin coming at him then being dumped into his pickup truck like a load of bricks, then him going after the kid and the clipboard sergeant grabbing Elroy from behind, and Elroy slamming the guy’s head against concrete until he was dead and Elroy wasn’t just Elroy anymore, but a murderer.