Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [140]
Later, after it was all over and he had stopped struggling against the loss of his wife and son, and time had washed the bitterness from his blood, he would marvel at how long he had managed to stay innocent, dramatizing his adversity the way a kid does, as if to prove that it exists. By then the past would lie half-buried in his imagination and the future would stand before him as implacable, faceless, and beyond his power to control as it always had—but with the calming difference that now he knew it and accepted it. By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive. By then he would understand that fulfillment was only temporary, and desire the enemy of death.
By then he would realize that all the dramatic alternatives his pain brought to mind could not possibly satisfy him forever, but that they, too, were forms of his lifelong fistfight with an invisible enemy: to have killed her—he dreamed sweetly of this—would have satisfied his childhood urge to murder long after he stopped needing the urge as protection; to have walked, as he saw himself in horrible self-pity, out to the Golden Gate Bridge for the last long drop to eternity would have been only an act of revenge, hurting no one but himself. There were other alternatives, too, born out of a need to act, a need for drama. He could have become a professional thief, revenging himself on a society he no longer loved or hated. He could have gone for junk or alcohol as weapons against his pain; they worked for some men, but he knew they would not work for him. He could have left the city and chosen a square of dirt far away in the mountains of the West and become one of those sour, lonely farmers whose only friends are distant clouds and mountain rims—indeed, it was still an attractive dream, one he could not quite abandon. He could have gone to college and become sharp and gone into business and made ten million dollars and shown them all. He could have turned poet, living the quiet life, accepting in spiritual gain what he had lost in material failure.
Only once, in those months of self-sorrow and anguish, did he actually do anything. Caryl Chessman, twelve years a symbol of one man against the machine, lost his final appeal, and Jack joined, stiffly, self-consciously, a group of young men and women who marched across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the long freeway to San Quentin, and stood in all night vigil to protest the murder. In the long night he came to sense something of these young people: they were different from him; not just a younger generation, but different, harder, more sure of their rights and the rights of man. They were even a little frightening. In the morning, after Chessman was dead and they were walking back to the city, some teen-agers came along and jeered at them, called them filthy names and laughed at their passive expressionless refusal to be angered. Jack wanted to be like the others, untouched by the jeers, but he could not. One young punk stuck his acned face next to Jack’s and spit; without thinking, Jack hit him twice in a surge of delicious wrath, leaving him bleeding and unconscious for his friends to carry away. The other demonstrators looked at Jack without