Art Graham
King County Jail
Seattle, Washington
January 20th, 1984
Dear Janice,
I, Arthur W. Graham, am not guilty of any crime, even though I have been convicted of one. I do not say that I am innocent or that I did not do what they said I did, which was sell a policeman eighty-four ounces of marijuana in a brown grocery bag from Safeway, each ounce wrapped in an individual plastic baggie, just as you yourself have done a hundred times before. This crime, this stupid law that I have broken, does not make me evil. I’m as much of a criminal as a kid breaking a school rule. Selling weed isn’t a crime.
You told me that you couldn’t be married to a criminal. I have a number of things to say to that. One, as I have already pointed out, I’m not a criminal.
Two, you are my wife. We are married. We made promises to each other; how could you just back out on them and the kids like that? You married me; that means you love me. How could you back out on the man that you love?
Three, I stuck by you. So what if I’m a criminal now? I stayed married to you even though you were fat.
Four, you helped me do it. So what if I was the one they caught? You watered the plants. You smoked the bud. You helped me. You still have our pipe. Do you smoke it with your new friend? I bet the two of you have smoked all our stuff and here I sleep every night in a cold cell with a real criminal, some guy who won’t even tell the rest of us what he did.
He talks in his sleep and I listen to him and listen and listen because I think I heard him say one night something about burying a body off on the side of Tiger Mountain.
I’m not sure if you will write back but I wanted to clear my name.
Your Loving Husband
Art
+
Frederick W. Graham
Veterans Hospital
New Haven, Connecticut
13 Feb 1984
Janice & Artie,
Well, well:
I sure was pleased to hear from you. I sure hope to hear from your mother one of these days. I miss all of you terrible, Art, and you better believe it too. Janice, you are the very best thing that ever has happened to Art. Art has not had it easy but now I hope he can. I don’t mean work-wise, I mean home life. Art, how big a lawn do you have? Now, guess what I want for Christmas. Well now look, I want a picture of you and Janice. You know, about six by nine, I guess, regular size. No frame as I want to make my own. I have a lot of things stacked away, and one day I’m going to build a nice cabin and gather up all my things. This is no dream as I already have shopped around for a good single lot and I guess it will be around Deer Park, north of Spokane.
Now, about my condition. Well Art, I’m much better and honest to God, no cancer. You see, I was right in cutting out of that Spokane Hospital. I just had a hunch I didn’t have cancer even after he had set up the operation date; so I cut out. Now these new doctors just started from scratch. First X-ray showed growths all through my system. The Doctor says, so we’ll take one out and send it to a pathologist and in the meantime you are to be fed IV, as they call intravenous feeding. “Man, you are just bones,” he said. I weighed 128 pounds and Gene had to help me into the hospital. I couldn’t eat nothing. Well imagine my surprise when in came the doctor one evening saying, “Man, this won’t keep until morning; no cancer, but your red blood corpuscles are eating up your white ones and in ten minutes you are starting on whole blood transfusions and the swellings are enlarged lymph glands and we can bring them to normal by radium isotopes and you’re going to be just like a new man before long now!” That doctor shook his head and said, “Be prepared for some rough treatment for a while.” Well rough she was but I’m coming uphill now and I’m making my own white corpuscles. Also the glands are way down and I’m getting stronger every day.
Uncle Forrest and Uncle Gene were up to see me yesterday. Forrest looks like a million bucks. Draws 100 percent pension and 100 percent Social Security. He drives a new car, dresses like a Wall Street banker, and doesn’t booze very much. He has sure changed. He can work long enough to make $1,650 per year and comes here to do so in the winter. Gene’s business is very good and getting better all the time, as it should as he does great work and has a good business head and everyone likes him, as they do Forrest. It’s good to see someone make good.
I can throw a rock into Long Island Sound from here. Right by New London sub base. I still can hardly wait to get back to good old Washington State. Have not had a drink since I been here. Forrest sure treats me good, no questions asked. I miss your mother sometimes almost more than I can stand but I have to stand it until I get better, no choice. I know when I’m holding a losing hand every time. I never gave Grant County as good a looking over as I wanted to, as I was sick and getting low on loot. I stayed around a week in Snoqualmie because someone swore to me they seen Laura there, but she might have just been passing through. I should have tried Coulee City longer but, as I say, Money! Money! Well someday they can find me, right now I got a fight on my hands and I aim to win. Cold here today. Now my good people, write me and be as good as you can and good to one another above all. Be happy too, as life is queer. I sign off now with much love to both of you forever.
Old Dad
+
King County Jail
Seattle, Washington
February 17th, 1984
Dear Jan,
Jim Coil, my cell mate, told me what he’s doing here. He’s just waiting to be taken down to Oregon to be tried for a double murder. He broke into his girlfriend’s house and kept finding her with different men.
The first time he broke in, he crashed through her plate-glass window. The man ran out of the bedroom in a pair of boxers, swinging one of those gigantic wooden forks that people hang on their walls. It must have belonged to Jim’s girlfriend. Jim ducked under this guy and started to choke him. Pam came in with the spoon that matched the fork and smacked the guy she had just been with on the head. She hugged Jim and told him she wouldn’t do it again.
A few days later Jim lost his job and came home in the middle of the day. He tried the door. The door was locked. As he set his bag of groceries in the kitchen he heard the noise of his girlfriend going at it in the bedroom. He snuck in there and caught her with a different guy. What was Jim supposed to do?
He and Pam went out for dinner that night at Black Angus. While they ate their steaks he told her he would have to kill her if she slept with anyone other than him.
Two months later, Pam told Jim she was moving out. Where to, Jim wanted to know. I’m moving to Oregon, she said. Who with? No one you know, she said. He had tried to make her a wife and she just didn’t work out. So Jim followed her and her new boyfriend to Oregon where she was moving into his apartment. Jim soaked both of them in kerosene and burned them and their building to the ground.
The guards tell me that there’s nothing to do for a guy like Jim. He’s going to go to prison and stay there. You can’t fix a guy like that, one guard told me. “The wiring’s off in his brain. When you’ve got a toaster that always burns your bread,” this guard said, “you throw it out.”
I don’t know. I’m not a toaster. Don’t throw me away. We can work things out.
Your Loving Husband
Arthur Graham
+
King County Jail
Seattle, Washington
February 21st, 1984
Dear Jan,
I have something to tell you, something I never told you when you asked me to tell you something that I hadn’t told you before. Since you are not returning my letters or answering the phone, I will tell you.
My mother used to cut my hair in the late fifties before I started going to the barber. We were really poor because she had just left my father. I’d sit shirtless in the kitchen. The water that she used rolled down my back. The silver flash of the scissors, their blades sliding over each other, made every hair follicle on the back of my neck clench so tight that my hair stood up. After my mother finished, it looked like someone had pressed half of a very hairy coconut to my head.
My mother didn’t use a mirror. She gauged the evenness of the bowl line by looking at me. After my hair was cut I swept the brown strands into a pile. I dropped it into a brown bag from the grocery store.
When I was old enough, my mother took me to the barber in Snoqualmie. On the way to his shop, she told me how in the very old days people used to go to the barber to get bled. My mother said that people, then, thought that blood carried sickness in it. So they would drain out the sick blood. By the time we got to the barber I thought it would be like a meat shop or something, with odd tools hanging from hooks and fluorescent lights and a man in a special bleeding suit.
Instead, the shop was small and poorly lit except for a row of lights around the mirror. It was so dark, I could hardly see into the back of the room. He only had one chair.
He was small and gray, but his hair was dyed a black so black it looked the hair of King Kong. I sat in the unfamiliar vinyl-backed chair—it even had a special platform for me to rest my feet on. He put a white apron over me, fastening it at my neck. In the mirrors—the walls were covered with mirrors—I could see myself. I saw the chairs back into forever. My bowl head was reproduced forever. He snipped carefully until my hair no longer looked like the Cannibal King’s head. I had hoped for a head shaved like everyone else in school. He parted the hair in the middle as if I were a 1930s vegetable seller in an Al Capone movie. He swept the hair into two wings. When he turned the buzzer on, I shrunk into the blanket. Don’t worry, he said, and he tossed a bloody ear into my lap.
I screamed. I threw the floppy body part onto the floor where it bounced.
My mother leaned over and picked it up. It’s fake, she said.
The barber cut my hair and when it was done I walked down the sidewalk in Snoqualmie catching myself in the windows of the stores. I still didn’t look like anyone else I knew.
Love You, Art
+
Art Graham
King County Jail
Seattle, Washington
February 29th, 1984
Dear Jan,
I’m going to be released tomorrow and then I’m going to be on probation for two years. I would like to get together with you. I’ve been thinking and as soon as I find you, for sure, everything will be all right. Maybe we can go to the party Paul Lane is going to throw for me when I’m out of the clink? We can go on a date or something?
A couple of the guards from the jail said they’d like to drop by. One of them has been slipping me joints since he found out what I was in here for. He wants me to fix him up with someone who can get him some sweet bud.
I just want to be honest with you, like I have always been, well, pretty much honest. But you know that as soon as everything is back to normal, I’m just going to go back to doing what I have always done. Not that I’m going to run out and buy halide lights as soon as I get out so that I can grow immediately; but you know, things were pretty good between us. Why would you want to screw something like that up?
Love, Art
————————-
This is part four of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.