Night letter, p.1
Night Letter, page 1
MORE CRITICAL PRAISE FOR STERLING WATSON
For The Committee
“In this sharply crafted novel, his seventh, [Watson] recreates the era with rich detail and a creeping sense of dread … The Committee is the kind of story that makes you hope it can’t happen here—but reminds you that it already has.”
—Tampa Bay Times
“Watson has written a fine, eloquent, powerful book and its message will remain timely. Let us heed its warning even as we savor the story so well told in its pages.”
—Southern Literary Review
“Historians, of necessity, are skeptical of historical fiction. But there is the atypical work, such as Patrick Smith’s A Land Remembered, that historians praise for its historical verisimilitude. Sterling Watson’s The Committee has a narrower scope than Smith’s Florida epic, but Watson accurately conveys the emotional turmoil induced in Floridians by the Johns Committee in the 1950s.”
—Florida Times-Union
“[A] captivating read and an absorbing tale about the abuses that can arise from intolerance and prejudice. It carries a warning from the past to the siloed, fractured communities of today.”
—Historical Novel Society
“The Committee is at once a historical, political, and academic novel, and it is one that succeeds on all these fronts … Those who yearn for a return to the solid, established 50s may not know just what it is they are wishing for. The Committee should serve as a wholesome reminder.”
—Reviewing the Evidence
“The Committee takes place on campus, but deserves to be included with those ‘academic’ novels like Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and Jane Smiley’s Moo, all books that burst out of their scholarly settings to light up the characters and societies they live in. And life in Gainesville in the 1950s doesn’t bear looking at too closely: Without being preachy or didactic, Watson’s book exposes the race, class, and gender wars running below the picturesque pathways like tainted water; there’s been some progress since then, but the reader is led to wonder how meaningful it’s been … This book will hold you to the very end, and after.”
—Creative Loafing Tampa
“The Johns Committee, a real, if lesser-known, McCarthy-esque group active in Florida, hovers over this tense, character-driven novel set in 1958 … Watson ably evokes a sense of the McCarthy era’s regional impact in this thought-provoking story.”
—Publishers Weekly
For Suitcase City
“[T]he telling is masterful … Sit back and enjoy Watson’s latest. It’s better than bourbon on the rocks.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Hypnotically beautiful novel … Paranoia has been defined as ‘seeing too much pattern.’ Author Watson can make us sweaty victims of that madness, partaking of it, suffering from it, and loving every minute.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Watson’s magic is in pacing and taut prose … Suitcase City is an absorbing thriller, a vivid adventure in a bright, humid, perilous underworld … [A] tense, bloody thriller with a strong sense of place and a soft heart.”
—Shelf Awareness, starred review
“A noir gem … A deeply contemplative and darkly poetic prose style complements the well-crafted plot.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A solid revenge tale … There is plenty of action to be had in this suspense tale, but it is the examination of the characters’ motivations that really makes it shine. For fans of Lee Child and Nicci French.”
—Library Journal
“Watson weaves … questions about race into a plot that takes one bloody turn after another, a crescendo of violence that ends with a day at sea that might be the most chilling of all.”
—Tampa Bay Times
“[An] irresistible earworm of a novel … With its airtight atmosphere of impending, life-sinking doom, and taut language evoking palpable Gulf Coast Florida seediness, Suitcase City duly takes its place alongside the best works of former Floridian Pete Dexter, and the brilliant Tampa novels of Dennis Lehane …”
—Paste Magazine
“Gripping … As [Watson] spins additional threads within the plot, deepening our interest in even minor characters, his grip remains steady.… Peeling back the layers of Tampa society to reveal a crosshatching of race and class—the country club scenes are particularly fine—Watson stealthily heightens the suspense.”
—Barnes & Noble Review
“The novels of Sterling Watson are to be treasured and passed on to the next generation.”
—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River
“Suitcase City [is] such a damn great book, a too-rare (and sometimes nearly too real) depiction of the wildly different worlds that exist side by side in the city by the bay … Events uncoil with an unflashy confidence and understated poetry, drawing in diverse characters whose deep inner lives give the wire-tight plot a thumping, nervous heart.”
—Creative Loafing Tampa
NIGHT
LETTER
BY STERLING WATSON
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2023 Sterling Watson
ISBN: 978-1-63614-063-6
EISBN: 978-1-63614-064-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933225
First printing
Akashic Books
Brooklyn, New York
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook: AkashicBooks
E-mail: info@akashicbooks.com
Website: www.akashicbooks.com
Also by Sterling Watson
The Committee
Suitcase City
Fighting in the Shade
The Calling
Blind Tongues
Sweet Dream Baby
Deadly Sweet
Weep No More My Brother
For Kath, again
… every form of refuge has its price.
—Glenn Frey and Don Henley
ONE
“You’ve never opened up with me, Travis, not really. You’re good at saying what you think I want to hear, and I have to admit you’ve been pretty convincing on a couple of occasions, but the simple truth is we’ve been wasting our time, and we both know it.”
I pull on my Thoughtful Smile, and Dr. Janeway pushes back in his green leather swivel chair and holds his tortoiseshell fountain pen level in front of his chin. He holds it perfectly parallel to the floor and rolls it with his thumbs and forefingers. It’s a thing he does, but not the only thing. When his legs are crossed, he picks at the little diamonds on his argyle socks. When I say something that surprises him, he pretends to take notes while he gets over being pissed off at me or thinks of what to ask me next. He has a lot of little habits, and I’ve learned to read them. It’s valuable knowledge. I can tell when he’s angry, when he thinks I’m making progress, when I’m getting to him, and when I’m putting him in doubt. I think he’s an obsessive-compulsive personality.
He rolls the pen and watches me, and I have to admit I’m surprised. This is our last session. I’m leaving next week, and I didn’t think he’d break what I call our COB, Contract of Bullshit. He’s telling me the truth, now that it’s too late for the truth to do either of us any good. Too late for me to give him back some of the same. For years, he’s waited for me to break down and cry and tell him some deep dark secret. The real reason I did what I did. The thing that’s not in any court record or file or disciplinary report. Maybe it’s my mother. Maybe I’ll suddenly remember that she accidentally stuck my pee-pee with a diaper pin when I was a baby or that she couldn’t show her love to me like she should have. Maybe that’s why I did what got me sent here.
One of the things Dr. Janeway doesn’t know is I’ve been reading up on psychology in the library and learning how he thinks and how to dance with him. How to get in step with the sick music he hears in his head and do the therapy bop with him—make him happy and stay pretty happy myself. As happy as you can be in a place like this. This is my last miserable hour with him, and he’s telling me I haven’t fooled him and we both know it. Well, maybe I have and maybe I haven’t, but the simple truth is my time is almost up. I’m eighteen, and they can’t hold me any longer. The law made them choose: send me to a real prison or let me go. A judge said they had to let me go. Six years was enough of my life for them to take.
I tighten my Thoughtful Smile a little, add some Wrinkles of Anguish to my forehead, and say, “I don’t know, Dr. Janeway. I think a lot of our sessions have been very helpful. And you might think this is a little strange …” He perks up here, his eyes widening, his chin rising an inch above the tortoiseshell horizon. “… but I’ve come to think of us as, well, friends. I mean in a limited sort of way …” I let this trail off like I don’t really understand it myself. Like it’s a good thing for me to leave here today still puzzled about the exact nature of the friendship between a therapist and a fucked-up kid with homicidal tendencies.
Maybe I’ve gone too far. It’s not exactly angry, the way he puts the pen down on the polished desktop. His pale-blue eyes get smaller, cooler. His hair is gray now, but his eyes haven’t changed like some eyes do. I used to think they reminded me of my Grandpa Hollister’s eyes. Police eyes. Eyes that always expect the worst.
“Travis,” he says, “I want you to know something. It’s something I wouldn’t ordinarily tell a …” It stops him. He doesn’t know what to call me. He doesn’t like the word “patient.” I’m not a client because I don’t pay him. The state of Nebraska does that. He can’t call me an inmate, and “boy” doesn’t quite capture the sorry nature of my standing. Underling, I’m thinking. “… tell someone like you, but I’m going to tell you. I recommended that the judge release you, yet I had my doubts.”
He raises his hand to stop me from objecting. (I wasn’t going to object.) “Not about your violent tendencies. I think you’ve conquered those. What I’m worried about is the possibility that you’ve become an institutionalized personality. In some ways, I think you’ve accommodated yourself too well to … this setting. Here all of your needs and many of your wants have been taken care of in a very structured way. I’m worried about what will happen to you on the outside, away from this …” Dr. Janeway looks at the windows of the little office where we meet. All I can see from my side of his desk is the water tower with Bridgedale School for Boys written on it in big black letters. The guys joke about those words: Crime School for Boys, they say when they’re sitting around bullshitting about the best ways to hot-wire a car. Bridge to Hell School, they call it. Outside the windows, beyond the tower, a couple of turkey buzzards ride the hot currents. There are always two or three of them up there, insolently wheeling, looking down. I’ve envied them.
Dr. Janeway looks back at me. “… away from the routine and the support you have here. It’s a different world out there now, Travis. There’s a lot going on nobody ever expected when you came here.” He stops. He seems a little embarrassed, like he’s letting me see his own fears, not describing mine. I know what he means. I hear it on my illegal radio. Lyndon Johnson’s president now, and there’s a lot of bad news, and the music’s different than when I came here. It’s still sexy crazy, but there’s an evil edge now too. There’s a war in Vietnam and a lot of the guys have left here for the army.
Sometimes I just watch Dr. Janeway’s mouth move. Now I photograph him with my eyes and count the ways he’s changed in six years. First of all, he wasn’t supposed to stay here. We used to meet in Mr. Bronovich’s office because it was all temporary, and Dr. Janeway was this Ivy League guy who looked like the Hathaway man doing research on very bad boys, and he always let you know in little ways that he was just passing through your shitty world of deviance and dead-end time servers like Mr. Bronovich. Now Dr. Janeway is permanent and has his own office about the size of a closet. Three years ago, Mr. Bronovich went on to be the head of the State Division of Corrections.
I used to examine Dr. Janeway’s tweeds and his Cordovan shoes and his tortoiseshell glasses that match his fancy fountain pen and try them on in my mind. You have to do something when you’re stuck with him for an hour making progress. I used to sit here imagining myself in his job and his life and in his head, then I’d go look him up in the library. Sometimes I’d find him in magazines, sometimes in the novels I’d read. You know the kind, by guys like Marquand and O’Hara, only you can’t get all of O’Hara in here. Not the sexy ones. Guys like Janeway go home to women like Emily, Thomas Harrow’s second wife. They have kids at Choate or Phillips Exeter. They drink martinis on the terrace and look down on their servants in amused and gentle ways (the servants never get this, of course). I’ve learned from Dr. Janeway all the little put-downs I’m not supposed to understand. The ways he has of telling me that even before I was a deviant and a criminal I wasn’t cut from his kind of cloth.
This morning Dr. Janeway looks old and tired. His tweeds don’t seem so stylish. I wonder if he’s noticed that the cool guys aren’t dressing like the Hathaway man anymore. He isn’t brisk and in a hurry anymore, just stooped and annoyed. It’s been a long time since he let anything slip about his research or the book he’s writing about violent boys, and the position he’s going to have on the faculty of some college in leafy New England. This morning Dr. Janeway looks like the beginning of one big failure, and I’m happy to see him, even though he’s telling me I’m an institutionalized personality, and I won’t make it on the outside because I’m used to the comforts the State of Nebraska provides for me. I could tell him a thing or two about survival, but I won’t, not even on our last day. Today I’ll be just like always. I’ll walk out of his life leaving him wondering about progress. Wondering if some people don’t change no matter how many hours they spend with guys like him and their good intentions and their theories.
Dr. Janeway’s eyes narrow like they sometimes do, and he says, “Travis, I’m sorry you chose not to write about your problems. You’re a good writer. You’ve got some talent in that direction. It would have been good for you to put down some of your thoughts about what you did and why you did it. About who you were then and who you are now.”
I play my part, slowly shake my head, sincerely puzzled about why I haven’t used my talent for writing. I wonder if he knows I would kill him if I could for stealing the Delia Book from me. For having my locker tossed and for ripping open my mattress and finding the Delia Book I wrote and the drawings I drew and all the letters I sent only in my heart. I’m sure of one thing: in this last hour, we won’t talk about that.
I came back one night from my job in the furniture factory, high as one of those turkey buzzards from sniffing varnish all afternoon, and the Delia Book was gone and I was expecting a DR and time added to my stay and maybe some shitty work detail like cleaning out the grease trap in the mess hall, but nothing happened. I was only fourteen at the time, and at first I was relieved. Two days passed, and I didn’t get called in by Mr. Bronovich, and the counselors (that’s what they call the guards here) weren’t staring turds at me. Then Friday came, time for my appointment with Dr. Janeway, and I saw it immediately. It was in his eyes. He was excited. He had the Delia Book. He’d asked me to write about my case, my progress, why I stabbed Jimmy Pultney, and I’d told him I would. But I didn’t. I only wrote about Delia. So he had them take the book, and he wasn’t going to say anything about it. It was a test, a setup. He wouldn’t mention it unless I did. Well, you already know what I did. I’d let them rip my tongue back to its root before I’d ever mention the Delia Book to Dr. Janeway.
So I swallowed what I saw in Dr. Janeway’s eyes and what I could have done to him for it, and we had our session as usual that day, and on and on, for all the days. And he never mentioned it, and I never did either. That’s therapy for you, that’s medical science of the mind. The Janeway variety.
I had a week of sleepless nights thinking he might burn the Delia Book, but, finally, I knew he wouldn’t. Just like I knew who took it and why, I knew he’d keep it. He’d read and reread it, and knowing that hurt deep like a broken bone, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Now I square myself up in my chair and look him straight in the eyes and say, “I know it’s going to be tough out there, Dr. Janeway. You can’t stay in a place like this for six years and miss everything that’s happened outside and not have some … difficulty adjusting. But I’m going to make it. I know I am. I’ve learned a lot in here … about myself, about what to do and not to do when I get out.” I’m Travis Making Progress with Wrinkles of Anguish on my forehead and a Not-Too-Assertive Smile fitted firmly to my lips. I say, “I’ve learned a lot from you, Dr. Janeway, even if you don’t think I have. And I want to thank you for it.”
The few other times I’ve thanked him, he’s let me go early. He likes a good ending. But this time I know he won’t, and I don’t want him to. We’ll stay till the last minute turns. I know I’m going to miss our sessions. There’s not a lot you can control in this place. There’s a lot that’s unpredictable, mostly in the lives of the other guys and the things they can do to you if you’re not careful. But I’ve learned to control Dr. Janeway. Except for the time he stole the Delia Book, and I know what to do about that.
