Doing Time (12 page)

“I can let you call your folks,” he offered, gesturing to the phone.

“Thanks anyway,” I told him, figuring they wouldn't know what to make of me calling them. We had nothing to say.

“But they're letting you go to the funeral, right?” Hodgson asked, leaning against the bars of my house and trying to sound consoling. He could skip deftly from one prison heartache to the next as if they were footprints stenciled on a studio dance floor, but real world problems would always catch him short.

“Kruller told me I could,” I said. “In full equipment.”

“Are you shittin'me?” he whined. “Full equipment? You're minimum security, bro. They should give you a car to go up there, not chain you up like a, well, you know.”

“That's what I told him. He just gave me his that's-just-the-way-it-is speech. Said it was up to me if I wanted to go or not.”

I was sitting at the head of my bunk, my back to the wall, feeling like I should be doing something but not having a clue. Hodgson's company with Nana's hands so firmly on my shoulders was intolerable. I wanted to be left alone but knew the minute he wandered off I'd be crushed by the silence.

“It ain't right, Caine, chaining you up like that when you're so close to getting out.” He shook his head in disgust, warming to his subject. He was back in familiar territory; inmates treated like dogs and pigs riding roughshod over us because they were the ones with the dimestore badges and the power-trip egos.

“Full equipment.” He sneered, lighting another roll-your-own cigarette. “You know they're just busting your balls over Strazinski.”

“Naw,” I said quietly. “They're screwing with me because they can is all. The pigs like that friggin' Straz about as much as they do us. Did you ever see him when he's off that wall? They damn near shake their drawers loose acting like he's not there.”

He grins his best Hodgson smirk, the one that looks like it's been slashed in with a rusty straight razor.

“It must be a stone bitch,” he said, “to be a pig and have even your own kind think you're a piece of shit.”

I figure that's why Strazinski stays up on the wall whenever he can, sequestered in North Post, the gun tower that commands the prison street from where the road arches inelegantly past the craft shop, from the cell house to the yard. The only times I've ever seen him among the living was when he was pulling extra shifts. He clings to the periphery when he's not on his wall, glowering disdainfully at the inmates and avoiding the knots of officers gossiping and playing grab-ass. He looks as out of place in a crowd as he must feel, pressing his back to the wall and trying to be invisible. Older cons will argue how long he's been the Tower Pig, but none deny he's been on that wall longer than most of us have been inside it. His brother officers, doing their eight hours in the towers and loathing their isolation, don't know what to make of him. He's a freak, just like the mental cases who stand in the middle of their cells for hours at a go, staring at nothing.

“You ever wonder what he's like at home?” I asked presently.

“All the time,” Hodgson purred, waiting for me to bite. “The hell's the matter with you? I ain't thinking of him at all when I ain't got to. Besides, I don't figure he's any different there than he's here. Donnelson tells me his ol' lady ditched him years ago. He ain't got no kids. The friggin' guy must put in sixty hours a week. Might as well stick a cot in the tower and crash there.”

“I didn't know he was married,” I said.

“He ain't, at least he ain't been long as I've been here. You're getting sentimental on me, Caine. Save it for your folks. All that guy's done for you is get you ten days in the hole.”

Hodgson was hoping he'd get a rise out of me. He knew I was thinking of Nana again and was doing his best to try and keep me distracted. “All I'm saying? You can go on thinking that their making you go to the funeral all chained up ain't got nothing to do with you and Straz, but they still thought enough of him to put you in the Seg Unit over it. You hear what I'm saying? Just because he ain't real popular with them doesn't change his being one of their own kind.”

He was right, but I didn't want to be thinking of any of it; not pigs and inmates, not the last of my bridges over the wall collapsing with Nana's passing — things as unyielding as the metal bunk, bolted to the wall, on which I sat. I don't know how long he stayed there talking, jumping from one subject to the next. The more I listened, the more his voiced dissolved into a drone. I offered monosyllables and halfhearted grunts to try to convince him I wasn't shutting him out completely. Finally, he drifted off with a “see you in the morning” and a sympathetic thump on my bars. I listened to the scuff of his footsteps and then I listened to nothing, already dreading the caverns of a Thomaston night.

I would not cry for Nana, but I would want to, wringing myself out through the hours after lock-down with alt the recriminations and should-have-been's chanting in my head. I'd shed all my teats in the hole and in the weeks before.

Though Hodgson blamed Strazinski for my stretch in the hole a month ago, I'd gotten myself in that jam. It began the day Cassidy, the aspiring vegetable — who'd huff dry cleaning solvent if it was the only way to get high — stalked into my cell and pulled out a joint the size of his finger. “You want to burn this with me, just say the word,” he said, tossing a book of matches down onto the table like a dare. Cassidy's the kind of refugee who ambles through life like everything's casual, drifting in unannounced at the oddest moments to flash enough dope to get us both an extra year as if it were a candy bar. He must have tried to get me stoned fifty times through the year, but that day I didn't want to btood anymore about Nana wheezing from her hospital bed, those tubes in her arms, alone with the night. I didn't say no.

An hour later and on the way to the craft shop, anyone would have thought we were the best of buddies, telling war stories. I felt freer than I had in a very long time, bouncing down that road with a stoner jounce. I didn't feel the walls of Thomaston crushing me, leaving me unable to do more for Nana than wait for her to die.

Pausing at the foot of the craft shop stairs, out on the road and in the shadow of North Post, Cassidy was going on and on about this lady friend of his, a flaked-out hippie chick. I was digging it, and I was more interested in letting him finish than I was in getting upstairs to spend the afternoon acting like I was working. The river of inmates on their way to wherever had thinned to a trickle.

“You!” Strazinski roared from the wall above us, looking like he was having a raging hangover. “Yeah, you! How many times have I got to tell you people to get moving?!”

“Me?” I asked, my hands on my chest. I always play dumb with the pigs, It makes them nuts.

“Who the hell do you think I'm talking to, you moron?!”

“He's talking to us,” I snickered, turning to Cassidy, but Cassidy had turned to vapor, bolting up the stairs when Strazinski started his tirade.

“What do you need, someone to hold your hand to get you upstairs? Or do you need to be locked in for the day? What's your problem, Caine?!”

“What my problem?” I shouted back at the wall, “What's your problem? I'm the one that's going to work and you're the one acting like a headcase about it. Go on back inside your tower, Straz. You wouldn't know real work if someone rolled it in sand and shoved it up your ass!”

His face, chalky and time-furrowed, went the sweetest shade of vermilion.

“That's it! God damn it, that — is — it! Back to the blocks! You're tagged in!”

Seething, I managed to laugh at him as I turned back for the cell house with him still raging behind me.

“Have a nice day!” I yelled back over my shoulder while I snatched at the waistband of my sweat pants. I figured if he really wanted to see my butt headed back for the blocks, he might as well get the fifty-cent view. So I gave it to him. Both sun-starved cheeks and a vertical smile to remember me by.

Reviewing my case a week later, the chairman of the disciplinary board actually giggled when Straz's statement was read into the record. It had been months since anyone had mooned an officer. But amusement didn't prevent him from finding me guilty of a Class B Provocation charge and giving me ten days in the hole to contemplate my sins.

I didn't cry for my Nana the night before her funeral. Neither did I sleep. I rolled and tossed and jerked in disgust on a mattress little wider than my shoulders until, exhausted, I lay very still and watched the night pass on the bricks of the cell house wall. Across the way the steam pipe sputtered on, spitting hateful secrets to the twilight. I knew all the accusations, chapter and verse. I could already hear the hissing murmurs of the dozen remaining in my family as they gossiped busily in the pew, darting glances over their shoulders at me, shocked that I'd been allowed to attend and not in the least bit surprised that I'd disrespect my grandmother by showing up handcuffed to a chain around my waist, with a guard hovering to make sure I didn't bolt for the door. I could even hear the bolder ones giving me their glad-you-could-make-its and offering me their insincere bests after the service, convinced I'd never amount to more than all the hardware hanging off me. I couldn't blame them. Junkie thieves are rarely a prized seed among those who worked themselves to death for everything they owned. Every last one of them had given up on me a year before I managed to get myself thrown in Thomaston for a ten-year sabbatical.

Only Nana refused to surrender me to the void, for only she was too stubborn to let me go. She played ambassador right till the end, giving me all the family gossip and browbeating my parents into their annual Christmas visit, only to keep the conversation going when the silences got so thick you couldn't hack through them with a machete.

The morning of the funeral began with my toilet plugging up with the first flush of the day and ended with the intake officer wrapping a belly chain around my waist and cuffing my hands to it. Between was the chaos of scrounging and making do. I finally got something of a shine on my weathered biker boots and spent half an hour pawing through the wardrobe of the prison commissary until I found a suit that was a close-enough fit. Having found no needle for the thread I'd managed to scrape up, I tacked up the hems of the trousers with an office stapler.

“Caine,” Strazinski greeted me curtly as I was escorted into the intake area to find him not in his uniform but in a proper suit at least a size too small. “You're with me. Strip.”

No inmate enters or leaves Thomaston without a thorough strip-search. I've gotten naked for more cops than I have for former lovers. I stripped down mechanically, knowing the drill, all the while searching the room for someone else in civilian clothes, hoping this was some sort of joke. There were four officers in that room with me, and only Straz wore a suit. He'd pulled the short straw to be my escort home.

In the prison garage, he neither spoke to me nor looked me in the face. He held the car door open long enough for me to fumble into the back, then buckled the seat belt over me.

Strazinski wedged himself into the driver's seat, the wheel shoved into his starched white shirt, cleaving his belly. Growling and grumbling, he tried to adjust his seat, but the security mesh between us kept it permanently in place. He kept glancing into the mirror to see if I was amused by his predicament.

“It's going to be a hot one,” he said, addressing me for the first time since I stripped for him in Intake. “When we get to where we're going, you might want to take that jacket off and carry it inside.”

“I'll be fine,” I told him. “It might get warm, but it still covers most of the hardware.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “Kruller said full equipment, so you get full equipment.”

I wanted to tell him to go screw himself as he pulled the Chevy into brilliant sunlight. By blaming it on the boss, he didn't have to admit he was loving it. I slouched against the door and rested my cheek on the glass, watching the cracked asphalt of Route 1 hurtle past with cars in the opposing lane racing east. We were better than two miles down the road before I realized it was me and not they who were moving too quickly, their rush amplified by my starved perceptions and by the years I'd been inside.

“I got a messed-up question,” the Tower Pig said after we'd turned onto 17 and were torpedoing for Augusta and the places I once called home. “You do know where we're going, don't you?”

“You get us to Augusta and I'll get us to the church,” I told him, wanting to rub his nose in his ignorance.

“Fair enough,” he grumbled. “You've been away a long time, haven't you?”

“Eight years,” I said, watching the trees whirr past in kaleidoscope glimpses. Eight years, five months, and… eleven days, I thought.

“Long time,” he announced, studying me in the mirror. “I bet it ain't changed all that much, has it?”

“Not much,” I muttered to the window, still watching the trees and the undergrowth rioting in so many forgotten shades of green, green in a flood, all so impossibly thick and lush. They could not have been this dense when I bounded through them like a deer, the black earth and wet leaves like a sponge beneath ten-year-old feet. Through the hum of the Chevy I could hear the summer cicada shrill, knifed through by the buoyant cries of half-remembered friends frozen in child-voices.

“No,” Straz said presently, having thought it over. “Home never changes much.”

I said nothing. My stare drifted from the window to the security mesh to the floor.

“I'm sorry about your grandma,” he said.

I flinched. Back behind the walls, if he wasn't barking at inmates he may as well have been a mute. I didn't want him talking about her; I didn't want him talking. It seemed the farther we got from Thomaston the harder it was for him to keep his mouth shut and leave me to my silence.