Winter-Kill

Flash-Foreword…

As the brief merciful shroud of sleep fell away, I desperately needed to scratch the persistent torturous itching of my legs, arms, and back. In my cell, it was difficult to see anything with only the distant night-light flickering weakly through the bars, but I certainly heard them. I knew from all the previous mornings over the past months it wasn’t bedbugs, or some kind of allergy. The probable cause was far more terrifying. I hadn’t seen them since the game, but from their strange restless movement, the spooky high pitched screeching and low yelping sounds coming from up in the corner close to the metal ceiling, I was sure something far worse threatened.

Dawn crept in as gloomy light from my one tiny, elevated and barred window slowly inched its way across the steel wall. The narrow ledge, though, was dark and would remain so for another hour. Still, driven by the itching and the creepy din, I had to see more…had to know for sure so, if necessary, I could scream for help…whatever good that might do. Barefoot, I balanced at full height on the free-standing bed with its rickety metal legs… The ledge, though, was perhaps 9 feet above the floor, the ceiling about 10 but, sinking into the mattress, I wasn’t high enough yet. I put my foot one further step up onto the metal tray bolted to the wall over one end of the bed, and tested. Immediately, it folded down almost vertically under my weight. Now, in desperation to see, and goaded by the itching, I cleverly lifted and leaned the bed on end against the wall, then climbed it like a ladder using its wire-like, sagging springs as rungs, which of course cut painfully into my feet.

Still, the sound, but nothing visible. I did, however, after teetering precariously, finally manage to pull the whole damned bed upside down on top of me crashing my head against the wall and my back onto the hard floor. I lay there for several minutes, not out cold but—dizzy and in pain—close to it. As I struggled to clear my head, turn over and pull the mattress off, I suddenly heard the familiar morning rattle of keys. Arms flailing, I squirmed half out of the wreckage just as Marvin, my guard, a heavyset black man with a long scar across one cheek, the only human being I’d been in contact with for months, entered with my breakfast tray. Stopping short, pushing back his army fatigue cap, he looked around, startled at the mess and my position in it.

“Hey man! What in hell? …Git on your feet!” he barked angrily like the top sergeant he once was. Now!”

I finally found a way to scramble up. “Mornin, Marvin.” Marvin shook his head in total disbelief.

“Sorry,” I said. “Got the itchies. Thought I saw bedbugs.”

“Ain’t no bedbugs in here, white boy!” he said, highly indignant as if I’d insulted both his meticulous jail housekeeping and his honor. “Pick up the muthafuckin’ bed!”

I did as I was told, replacing the mattress at the same time. Then, with his foot, he shoved it back to the wall, finally dumping the already cold gruel directly on it. “Eat up!”

My head, aching and still spinning, I sat down with a loud, sagging bedspring creak next to the cold smelly mess on the bunched-up blanket. “Hey Marvin, where’s Shelby?” I’d asked that same question every morning, and every morning he ignored it. “How about Creiner, where’s he at? Same non-response. “Okay, here’s one I’m sure you can answer: Carlee Stecher. Where’s she at?”

He gestured toward my so-called breakfast. “…Elstein, you gonna eat that? If not, I’ll git you a bucket and broom.”

“Marvin, you try eating this crap.”

He actually snickered as he went for the door, exited, and came back two minutes later with a dustpan. “Jes pick it up or shovel it in this with your hands. We ain’t got but one broom the county give us, man, and it’s gone.

“Big surprise, Marvin. Nobody in here but us crooks.

Watching as I slid the cold oatmeal glop into the pan, he must have felt some pity. “That Stiker woman, she the one with red hair?” I nodded. He tried to remember: “Maybe three. Maybe four…”

“Four what?”

“Weeks! She be gone four weeks.”

That surprised me, but maybe it meant I’d be released next. “So… I’m the only inmate now, that right?” He of course didn’t answer. “Okay, what about Shelby? How long is he gonna let me stew in here? No hearing; no court appearance; no nothing. Just punishment for what happened at the game, right?”

He brightened a little at mention of the game. “Ain’t seen Chief Shelby quite a time. Ain’t seen that friend of his with the funny specs neither.”

I knew he meant my boss, Otto the bookie, who wore pince-nez glasses clipped to his nose. “You know,” I informed him, “keeping me in isolation like this is illegal. And no lawyer… Nobody in to see me.” As he pushed open the door, I had one more thought: “Hey, Marv, maybe you could get me something I need. He stopped for a minute, dustpan in hand. “What I’d like… What I really need is a pen or pencil and some writing paper, like one of those yellow pads.” To illustrate, I made a writing motion on my palm. “Anything like that. Tell ‘em I wanna confess.” At least, I thought, I could make marks on the wall to record the passage of time.

He looked at me kind of funny, stepped out and, with a loud clang, pulled my steel cage door shut behind him, locking it from the outside. I figured I’d never see a pad or pencil, but I knew it was possible because previous prisoners had scrawled their names, sentence times left, and various curses all over the walls. They, it seemed, had been mostly short-timers here in the Syracuse police lockup, unlike me, for whom they’d thrown away the key.

I lay back rocking on the unsteady creaky bed, hands behind my head, bored even before my long empty day began. Maybe writing a kind of diary, a few notes, would help kill the tedium or…I played with the word…could be some kind of evidence.

That’s when I started to hear those creepy scratching noises again… Demons! Yes, demons I’d already met: lizard-like open-mouthed creatures with big bulging, hooded red eyes…I can’t go on… And, of course, along with that very accurate memory, the horrible itching increased.

I stretched my entire body, trying desperately to see them on the five inch ledge and fell back when I suddenly heard music and an echoing chorus:

“Tootsie on a stick,

Tootsie on a stick,

Tootsie on a stick,

Oh won’t you come and take a lick!

Take a lick Lick the stick!”

“Tootsie on a stick,

Tootsie on a stick,

Orange and grape, lime, banana, and citrus punch.

Tootsie pop, tootsiepop, oh tootsie, tootsie, tootsie Pop!”

I shoved myself up, stretching again until finally, on my knees, I could see some movement in the increasing light. Not the demons I expected, but unbelievably, to my absolute shock, at the front of the ledge, through a vision-clouding mist I saw the tiny doll-like figure of a beautiful girl with flaming red hair; a girl I knew well dancing a solo Lindy, arms outstretched, twisting, turning…somersaulting! Was I crazy? Was she real? How could she be?

“Come and be my tootsiepop, tell you why

Kisses sweeter than cherry pie

And when she does her crazy dance

Man I don’t stand a snowball’s chance…”

“Oh tootsie, tootsie, tootsie

Oh tootsie, tootsie, tootsie

Call my baby tootsiepop

Tell you why

Cause he’s sweeter than cherry pie.”

It reached a crescendo. Not the rock beat, not even my raking fingernails digging deeper still into my bleeding scratches, but my anger, my fury welling up from some deep-down unknowable place inside my brain and set loose: an unreasonable, uncontrollable fury