Carnival of Shadows (6 page)

February 11, 1953, a Wednesday, a day when Michael Travis, special agent, had been mentioned in dispatches to the director himself.

But the significance of what had happened that day in February of 1953 bore a far greater weight due to the events that immediately followed the death of his father, the blunt reality of the Nebraska State Welfare Institution, and his first meeting with Anthony Scarapetto.

4

For Michael Travis, it was a change, and a hard one at that. Looking back, it was as if he had two distinct ranges of memory set against the horizon of his mind: the
before
and the
after
. The first was dark, the second darker.
Before
meant the ever-present threat of liquor-fueled violence, the ferocity of his father’s outbursts, all of this tempered by the two sides of his mother, the beaten, bloodied, swollen-faced wife, possessing barely strength enough to breathe, and on the other side his
real
mother, loving, somehow ever-forgiving, convincing herself that all it would take was to believe
enough
to make it all change for the better. It never did and now never could. The
after
was something else entirely, though equally strange, immeasurably new, and frighteningly real.

For a long time after his father’s death, Michael did not speak. Already a quiet one, he became silent. People with letters trailing their names said he was
emotionally traumatized
, understandably so, and would eventually come back to reality. They asked him about his thoughts, his feelings, what was really going on
inside
. He did not care to answer their questions, and so he did not. He did not speak of the dreams, for there was little he could recall of them once he woke, and he would not have known what to say anyway.

Michael became a ward of the state of Nebraska: the court his father, due process his mother, and he the bastard child that fell through the gap in between.

Janette Alice Travis, a mere thirty-one years of age, was charged, arraigned, and remanded for trial. As the county prosecutor and public defender prepared their cases, she was held west of York in the State Reformatory for Women. There had already been intimations that the state would press for the death penalty. Sheriff John Baxter, if nothing else, was a man who understood law as needful for the survival of a society and thus was duty bound to relay precisely what Janette Travis had said to him upon his approaching the scene of the crime. It was to be those few words that damned her.

Was premeditated, John. No use hidin’ from the truth. Been thinkin’ about killin’ him for just the longest time…

Had she not said such a thing, there might have been a prayer, but it seemed the state prosecutor had blood on his teeth, and he wasn’t going to fall victim to pleas for clemency, mitigating circumstances, et al. The previous two governorships had seen no executions. Before them, Governor Arthur J. Weaver, back in May of ’29, had seen only one murderer pine-boxed out of death row. If Janette Travis went such a way, then it would be the first execution under the current governorship of Dwight Griswold, the first woman ever to take her place in the Big Chair up at Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln.

Maybe the state prosecutor, a bullfrog of a man called Frederick Wyatt, and the state’s DA, Lyle Samuelson, figured such a thing was worth brownie points on the old career scoring card.

Whatever went on in the minds and hearts of the bureaucratic and judicial collective responsible for the expedition of Janette Travis’s case, none of it gave a thought for Michael, even then sojourned in the inappropriately named Nebraska State Welfare Institution, for institution it may very well have been, but
welfare
could not have figured any less in its concerns.

State Welfare was an ex-military facility a couple of dozen miles north of St. Paul. There were no armed guards or watchtowers; there were no dogs or alarms or gun galleries. The doors were locked, and the custodians, as they were known, were uniformed and carried whistles and nightsticks. The big boss of the hot sauce during Michael Travis’s period of tenure was Warden Seymour Cordell, ex-cop, ex-penitentiary governor, head as hard as a pool ball, face like a worn-out leather mailbag, absent of pretty much any kind of feeling save a gritty and downbeat pragmatism that was doled out by the handful to anyone within arm’s reach.

Michael Travis was inducted at State Welfare on Monday, August 24, 1942, just five days after the death of his father. He had not seen or heard from his mother during those five days and had not been given any information regarding her circumstances or whereabouts. Those five days had been spent in the holding cells of the Flatwater Sheriff’s Department, simply because there was nowhere else to put him. A perfunctory inquiry into existing relatives had turned up nothing. It appeared that both maternal and paternal grandparents were deceased, as was Janette’s one maternal aunt, Clara Pardoe, herself a liquor-widow. Clara had had a son, Bernard, who was Janette’s cousin, though he was dead. Bernard had been briefly married to a woman called Esther, though she could not be easily located.

So, five days of jail food and serge blankets later, Michael Travis was driven twenty or thirty miles upstate to Welfare, and once he had been stripped, deloused, clippered and uniformed, he found himself standing before Warden Cordell, a custodian behind him, another at the door.

Warden Cordell sat behind a beat-to-shit desk as wide as a football field. The chair within which he sat was a wooden roller, and each time he shifted, it creaked like a ship. He read through the single sheet of paper that sat in the manila file in front of him, and then he leaned back and looked at Michael for what seemed like half an eternity.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “and not a great deal younger than yourself, I did something wicked. I killed a cat. It was a mean cat, a vicious little son of a bitch, and it sat on the veranda of my folks’ house like it owned the place. I would shoo it away, kick it every once in a while, but it was a tough creature, and it just kept on coming back for more. My ma used to throw it tidbits, you know? Encourage it. I hated the thing. Hated it with a passion. But I’ll tell you this now, son, that cat was not a quitter. No matter the times I kicked it or pelted it with rocks, it would just keep on coming back for more. Seemed the urge to survive was a great deal stronger than the fear of pain.”

Cordell paused for a moment, as if caught in reverie, and then he looked back at Michael and went on talking.

“Anyways, one day, I got tired of this cat, and I coaxed it up on the veranda with a piece of chicken and then I bashed its head in with a stone. That was that. The cat was dead. And you know something? I damned well missed that son of a bitch. I missed him something bad. Real sorry that I killed him, but—”

Cordell waved his hand dismissively.

“What you gonna do, eh? The past is the past, and there ain’t no reason for cryin’ on it, right?”

Michael stood impassive, implacable. He didn’t want to say anything in case it was the wrong thing.

“Well, believe it or not, son, there’s a coupla reasons for tellin’ you that story. Firstly, like I said before, there ain’t no use cryin’ on what’s been an’ gone. Life kicks us this way and that, and kicks us good. You may think that you’re the only one who ever got kicked this hard, but I can assure you that there’s a good deal of kids here that has had it as tough, some even tougher. Okay, so your ma is up at the reformatory for killing your pa, but at least you got a ma, son. At least for a while.”

Cordell smiled like he was delivering some good news in among all this other business.

“Anyways, second reason I told you about the cat is perhaps more relevant to your present situation. I learned from that experience that cats is tough. Well, I learned from working here that kids is tough too, often tougher than cats. There is rules and reggerlations. They is ironbound and immovable. You break those rules, we gonna fix you up so you see the error of your ways. You break the rules a third time, well, that’s when we put you in the Choke Hole, and that ain’t a place you wanna go, believe me now, son. That is
not
a place you wanna go visit.”

Cordell paused and squinted at Michael.

“You hearin’ me, son?”

Michael nodded. “Yes, sir, I am.”

“You got nothin’ to say for yourself?”

“No, sir, I have nothing to say.”

Cordell smiled. “Polite, I’ll give you that. Respectful. I’m just sayin’ that I don’t want to have to bash your head in with a stone, you see? Figuratively speakin’, o’ course. But from what I can see, it appears we’re gonna have very little trouble gettin’ you settled in here, son.”

“No trouble at all, sir.”

“Well, okay. So I done read your paperwork, I understand you had some difficulties, but seein’ as how there ain’t no one to look after you, you get us. You ain’t no thief as far as I can see. You ain’t never been in trouble with the law, right?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, let me warn you about some of these here boys. Some of them are all teeth and claws, and those you gotta watch out for. They feel threatened by change, threatened by newcomers, threatened by things only they can see, as far as I can tell. And then some of them are just noise and nothin’ else, and you don’t gotta be afraid of them. They bark, but they don’t got no teeth to bite with. Then there’s the quiet ones, and they’s the most dangerous of all. We have ourselves a couple of really crazy ones, but we keep them out of the main circulation of events, and that makes life a lot easier for everyone.”

Cordell rose from his creaking chair and walked around the desk.

“I hope you ain’t gonna be a troublesome one, son, because I just got enough on my hands without all of that. It don’t never get you nowhere ’cept the Choke Hole, or Chokey, as they see fit to call it now, and—like I said afore—that’s a place you don’t wanna go once, let alone twice. I understand you ain’t here because of some bad thing you did, but still, if you figure that our own lives are our responsibility, then you ended up here ’cause of yourself and no one else, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Cordell smiled, and for a moment his awkward leather face took on an almost avuncular warmth. He extended his hand, and Michael took it—warily at first—and then when he realized that Cordell was doing nothing but shaking his hand, Michael returned that gesture with a firm response.

“Good handshake says a lot about a man,” Cordell said. “And you done looked me in the eye while I was talkin’ to you. You ain’t no regular delinquent, son. I can see that plain as day. Don’t let them see your weaknesses. If you let them get a foothold, they climb all over you and kick you to pieces before sundown.”

Michael Travis felt his hand being released, and then Cordell gripped his shoulder, wished him a final “Good luck, son,” and then he was escorted out of Cordell’s office and down the hallway.

The custodian who walked with him stopped at a locked door. “My name is Officer Hibbert,” he said. “Through here we have something called the cubes. They are little rooms, cells if you like, and they ain’t got nothin’ in them but four white walls, a bed, a chair, a locker for your clothes, and a towel. You gonna be in here for two weeks. This is just the way it is. You get your food through a mailbox in the door, and you come out for an hour’s walk around the yard between ten and eleven in the morning. If you have some difficulty or problem while in your cube, then you knock on the door three times. You then wait fifteen minutes. If there is no response, then you can knock on the door again. You wait until you are attended to. Any violation of that routine or any violation of any other regulation means a full day in Chokey. A full day is twenty-four hours. You will receive a copy of the facility regulations tomorrow, and you’d be advised to read it.”

Hibbert paused and looked at Michael closely. “You do read, right?”

“Yes, sir, I can read.”

“Good, ’cause I am dog-tired of having to read that whole thing out loud and explainin’ all them words. Anyways, that’s the deal, kid. This is for your own good. This is so’s you get used to the idea of your own company. This is so’s you learn how to mind your own business and no one else’s. Now, I am gonna take you on through there and put you in your cube. You’d be advised to not start thinking about minutes or hours or days. Just makes it worse. Just get your head down and sleep as much as you can, and these two weeks will go like nothin’.”

Hibbert took his key chain from his belt, found a key, opened the door, and walked Michael through. The corridor was painted white and stretched for a good eighty or ninety feet. On each side, spaced perhaps eight feet apart, were doors facing each other. The doors had a single lever handle, and low to the ground was a bolted shutter perhaps a foot wide and three inches deep.

Hibbert walked half the length of the corridor, Michael right behind him, and then he stopped to open the door.

“I will not be on duty tomorrow morning, and so another officer will come to supervise your exercise time. Dinner is at six.” Hibbert looked at his watch. “Three and a half hours from now.”

Hibbert opened the door and ushered Michael in, and before Michael even had a moment to turn and look at the man, the door had closed tight behind him and he was locked inside.

“Like I said, son,” Hibbert said through the locked door, “you try and sleep as much as you can. Don’t do no good to be thinkin’.”

He heard Hibbert’s footsteps retreating all the way to the hallway door, heard it open, slam shut, heard the key turn with a sharp finality, and then there was silence.

Hibbert’s advice might have been wise, but Michael was a thinker. He had always been a thinker. His mother figured he thought too much.
Some people just are that way
, she’d say.
Some people want an answer for everything. They want to know why and how and when and where. That’s a double-edged sword, mind. Sometimes you wind up with a whole basket of answers you’d have done better without.

Michael did not believe that there was such a thing. Any answer, even a bad one, was better than no answer at all.

But, as was often the case, there were questions that would forever be nothing but questions, because no one had the answer.

Michael thought about his mother. He knew she was in the State Reformatory for Women just west of York. He did not know what kind of room she was in, whether she was alone or with other women. He did not know if she was well or sick or if someone had already beaten her half to death. Such things happened in prison. He knew this.