Linhart’s Beautiful Beast

Chapter 1-3

Dinner over, the guards opened cell gates, and within minutes, Joe was caged in. It had been stew and bread again tonight. He ate better in Linhart than he had in the city jail. Warden Cooke insisted on it. In exchange for better food, the warden agreed to keep quiet about what was really going on in the Icebox. Joe supposed Cooke was getting rich off Murphy’s dirty money. It worked for him. Yet he knew his mother hadn’t had any meat stew tonight. No, she’d probably gone to bed with nothing in her belly but hunger. Joe wished he could let her know he was doing all right, but if he wrote to her, she’d feel everything again.

His silence was the only decent thing he had left to offer his mother. She’d lost a son to a war she didn’t understand and the other was locked up in this jail because of his stupid fists.

Inside the cell, Joe found Dubois lying on his side again, facing the wall. From his breathing, he could see Dubois wasn’t really asleep. He must have been starving by now. After that blizzard. That long walk.

“Here.” Joe pulled a piece of bread out of his sweater sleeve and put it on Dubois’s pillow, in front of his face. He stood back and waited. Food in cells was strictly forbidden. Joe watched for Dubois’s reaction, waiting for a clue to his character.

“For me?” Dubois asked, sitting up with the bread in his hand. His hair was darker red in this light. Shadows cut up his delicate face.

Joe still couldn’t figure out why, but in the mess hall tonight, he’d been sitting at his usual table, talking with Novak and Levin, when suddenly, he’d decided he’d bring Dubois his share of bread.

“And you’re giving it to me?”

“Hurry up and eat it before one of the bulls sees it in here.”

Dubois tore into it, and within a few seconds the bread was gone. He’d done what Joe had hoped he’d do. He’d accepted the offering without making a fuss and disposed of it quickly.

Sitting back, Dubois brushed the crumbs off his wool sweater. He patted himself down, probably for a cigarette, but then his features tensed as he must have realized those little treasures were gone now. Joe would have saved his cigarettes. He’d have rationed them. But Dubois had probably never had to ration anything in his life, not even after the crash of twenty-nine.

Joe realized the evening was getting late and he had work to do. He found his paper and a pencil and opened his tin box which still smelled of tea. In there, he kept the pictures of the inmates’ wives and girlfriends. Using a wooden plank as a writing board, he settled in for an hour of writing. The first letter would be for Mila, Tobias’s girl, a dark haired woman with a crooked nose and very big lips. She didn’t look happy on her portrait, but then again, she was married to Tobias the Butcher.

Joe started. With his right hand in a bandage, it would be difficult, but he managed it after a while.

My dearest Mia,

There’s an aching in my heart. An aching as long and sharp as the icicle hanging in the window I don’t have. I think of you. I think of the sun.

Joe realized he’d written her name wrong and squeezed an l in there.

The nights remind me of every mistake I’ve ever made, but the blacker and colder they are, the closer I feel to real penance.

Dubois stood and paced again.

Joe tried to ignore him.

I remember the scent of your hair. I remember the sweetness of your mouth. These memories keep me alive in here. They make me want to fight to stay sane and healthy.

Dubois was looking down at him. “I suppose that’s the chamber pot there.” He pointed to the corner, at the two buckets.

“Yeah…the one on the left is for the paper only, and you get five sheets a day. They pick up the waste in the morning.” Joe stared down at the letter in progress, hoping Dubois wouldn’t notice he was embarrassed. “If you need…privacy, pull that sheet around the corner there.”

Dubois looked at the corner, but didn’t move. He’d get used to it. They all got used to it. After a moment, Dubois sat down again. Joe guessed he didn’t have to go that bad.

He put his pencil to the paper.

Mila, your name is like a warm wind through these barren halls, and in the heart of the night, between the hours of the dead and the living―

But he was getting carried away. This was Tobias after all.

“Oh, to hell with it!” Dubois jumped to his feet and dashed for the corner.

When Joe heard the rush of Dubois’s urine hitting the bottom of the pale, he set his jaw and stared down at the words on the page. He knew if he looked up, he might see Dubois’s c**k.

He wouldn’t be able to hold back.

Sweat pooled under his arms and Joe tore the letter up. He wanted Dubois to go. He had to leave the cell.

“It was so terrible that you had to crumple it like that?” Dubois sat on his cot and tipped his head, questioning him with clear candid eyes.

Joe needed to take his sweater off, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do anything with Dubois watching him so earnestly.

“Is that letter for your wife?”

Joe pulled his sweater off. The back of his shirt was wet with sweat. “No,” he said, after a long pause. “I write letters for the other inmates.” He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off. The cold air blew him out like a match. He was in his under shirt.

Dubois’s eyes roamed all over his shoulders and arms. “You were in a fire,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, but I was a little kid. I don’t remember it.” The burn scars on Joe’s shoulders, back, and upper arms, were the only proof he’d once felt something else than this cold.

“Your house burned.”

Joe noticed Dubois didn’t ask questions, but only stated facts, as if he were reading his life story on Joe’s face.

“They got me out before the fire melted the blanket to my back.”

Dubois didn’t look away. “Your family survived.”

Joe picked up his board, paper, and pencil. “Yeah, my mother and me got out all right. Well, I need to work now.”

“Of course. Is this fresh water?” Dubois stood by the pot filled with what was left of Joe’s daily drinking water. “May I have a drink of it?”

“Whenever you need it.”

Dubois unhooked the cup off the wall and filled it up. “There’s no sink in this cell. No toilet. It’s awful.’’

“Nowhere to hook the pipes. And they’d freeze anyway.’

Dubois drank greedily and Joe wondered why he’d waited so long to ask him for water.

“You write letters for them? Why?” Dubois sat down again, leaning forward on his knees, closer to Joe’s bunk.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember how it started.”

“To their wives?”

“Sometimes their mothers.”

“I see.” Again, Dubois looked panicked, the fear getting the best of him. Joe knew the young man was scared. Scared of the night. The first night was always the cruelest, but he couldn’t help him, so he went back to his letter. But he wasn’t himself tonight. Joe crumpled the letter again. This would have to be the last effort tonight.

Dubois’s hands were shaking now. His face was deathly pale. He stared wildly at the darkening hall.

Joe had to say something. Had to give this man some kind of peace. “He’ll come for you,” he said. “Your father.”

Dubois quickly turned away from him, lying down again. He hugged his knees and faced the wall.

The night was coming.

“What is that?” Dubois turned to him. “Did you hear that?”

Joe had gotten used to them and hardly heard them at all. “The hole is just beneath us. You hear the men hollering sometimes.”

“Solitary confinement.”

“It won’t happen to you, all right?”

“Joe.” Dubois said his name like it was something special.

“What?”

“How do you stand it?”

“I don’t stand it.”

“But you hear them, screaming down there.”

Joe shrugged and stuffed his papers under the cot. “Maybe I’m screaming louder inside.”

Dubois ran both his hands over his ginger hair and widened his eyes, as though trying to wake from a nightmare. “I’ll never sleep again.”

But later, Dubois was moaning in his sleep.