Living Right on Wrong Street (3 page)

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Authors: Titus Pollard

BOOK: Living Right on Wrong Street
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“What's your best guess?” Monica asked.
“The case results apparently haven't been entered into the database. It's only been thirty days since the judgment was rendered. His timing was lucky.”
“Or blessed,” Monica said. “I imagine if I convince Job to call Paradise Schools and ask to correct his app, they would do it.”
“I wouldn't make a call. I wouldn't try to make things right with the district. Monica, I wouldn't do a thing.”
“Why not?”
“If he's already lied on the application and they're considering him for the job, I wouldn't try to undo it. That's definite grounds to take back their job offer. My advice is that you leave it alone in hopes that this school district never finds out the truth, and that when they do, it's so far into his career that they won't care.”
“You're telling me that in the future this can come back to haunt us?” Monica asked.
“Truthfully? It could haunt you in the worst way.”
Chapter 2
And they shall be gathered together as prisoners are gathered in the pit.
Isaiah 24:22a
 
 
Delvin Storm was in a tight spot. He had never been to a place like this before. The guards had locked the prison doors behind him, but he wasn't thinking about literal, geographical, touch the ground with your fingers kind of places.
His surroundings had already formed a print in his mind. Oil slick, gun-barrel gray walls. Heavy-gauge metal furniture, bolted down with screws larger than those found in the average toolbox. Yellow lines were painted on the floors of hallways. Ammonia mixed with urine, marijuana, and blood. What he could touch, see, taste, and smell was the dream. His mental picture gave him a reality.
He was fresh felon fodder; he was in Ashland Minimum Security Facility looking like an international playboy. He was in that spot for a dime, receiving day-to-day schoolings on his new life from strange acquaintances. He saw a lot of people around, but nobody he felt he could trust. A decade—thirty-six months with an early parole—was a long time for everyone to be his enemy.
“Get used to the grub, 'cause it ain't getting no better,” a booming voice declared with uncanny mysticism.
“Humph,” Delvin grunted, refusing to look up to see who had made the statement. He focused on his meal. Quick-fix potatoes right out of the cardboard packaging, pork and beans with that recognizable generic aftertaste and cold, processed chicken dogs in discount bakery buns. For dessert, he had fruit cocktail with too many peaches and not enough cherries. He yearned for deliverance from the worst food he had ever tasted.
“You hard o' hearing?” asked another voice.
Delvin nodded up and down and side to side. He figured all it would take is one faulty verbal move, and an exploding light bulb or a shank in the back could be his fate. A nod in no particular direction was safe for the moment.
“I guess the cat's got his tongue, huh fellas?” asked the booming voice whose resonance cut far above the others in the eating hall.
His eyes shifted to the loudmouth, Caucasian, gargantuan figure with the cropped haircut and sleeveless shirt. He had the guy—he silently nicknamed him Pectorals—figured out from jump street. Pectorals was trying to be the don of FCI-Ashland. Delvin wasn't afraid of the guy, and no one else seemed to be either.
“Whatcha in for, huh?” Pectorals boomed.
Delvin brushed his fingertips across his forehead, remaining speechless.
Good question. Not a hard one, but good.
“Man, you don't say a word, do ya?” The guy continued to chide.
Delvin heard talking, but he interpreted it as reverberations, not real words. There was too much on his mind to entertain needless conversation. Since Pectorals couldn't help him get paroled, they had nothing to discuss.
“Hey,” he said, spitting as he spoke, “I guess you're deaf.”
“Naw, man, that ain't it,” another man spoke up. “Looks to me like he just don't talk to nobody.”
Delvin took a peripheral look at this man, named him Saks, as in Fifth Avenue. The guy was as white as a sheet, with a contrasting mop of red hair, neatly placed. He had sleeves on his shirt, but had chosen to roll and crease them as a personal fashion statement.
Pectorals said, “I guess he's our new Mr. Uppity.”
“Leave him alone,” Saks said. “We were all uppity at one time or another. We all wore Hickey Freeman's with custom-made tab collars, barrel cuffs starched n' pressed by the locals. That's why they call us white-collar cons.”
Sporadic laughter consumed the mess hall. Delvin searched and found no humor.
He had the criminal and personality profiles of specific men fixed into his mental Rolodex. He glanced at the securities fraud expert sitting next to the European portrait fencer. The U.S. Treasury counterfeiter stood against the west wall chatting with the mass copyright infringement specialist; big-time, money-making criminals, and he was among them. He could have, at any moment, opened his mouth and told his life history, but he figured that the less known, the better shown.
“I can't figure you out. I ain't trying to make you my ace-duce; just letting you know that prison time is a mutha, and I'm hear to listen, 'n case you need an ear,” Pectorals continued.
“Get off him, Stinson. You see he's on the new and doesn't wanna talk,” Saks insisted.
Delvin locked in on what Saks had just said; Pectorals's real name was Stinson.
“Shucks, he can't keep silent the whole time in here. He'll talk ... eventually,” Stinson said.
Delvin reasoned that truer words couldn't have been spoken, but the when, where, and how to his bio would have his seal of approval before it was disseminated.
“Prison life makes you do and think funny things. You're right, dude, I know he'll talk. Maybe sooner, maybe later.”
Delvin determined he would make it later. He traced the cuticles of his manicured hand, thinking how quickly he had learned to improvise a nail tech's instrument from a plastic knife and paper clips, and the damage it could do to a loudmouth instigator.
“Gotta name?” Stinson asked.
Delvin hung on to his lip.
“Hey, man,” Stinson said. “Givin' your name ain't gon' kill you.”
Delvin gripped his plastic spoon as a weapon, but it gave way as he attacked a dig of pork and beans. He imagined his less than fourth class rations as Hollandaise sauce, filet mignon, or chicken cordon bleu, but his taste buds wouldn't cooperate. He gulped his Kool-Aid, the air from his nostrils fogging his plastic cup.
Stinson moved closer, narrowing Delvin's personal space. “That's right. Getting to ya, ain't it? Got some freedom—but you ain't really got none. Maybe now and then you get some homemade mash or a bale from the commissary. Spa membership gone, but at least you're here with us at the Crossbar Hilton.” He nodded and laughed with the slickness of a bull. “Like I said a while ago, get used to it.”
Delvin felt turbulence in the declaration.
Show nothing, say nothing
, he reminded himself.
“I know some things, many things,” a slim, slew-footed, asphalt-black inmate spouted off in a low tone, through the teeth. “Information, that's what's up. Dangerous thing, information. Can be used for a multiplicity of ideas, theories, end-results and goals. Power's in the hands and minds of those who have it. It's suicide for those who don't.”
Delvin felt a chill of exposure from the hand of an inmate with whom he had not made acquaintance. That non-entity was preparing to dispel his name, his being. He struggled to hinder the inmate from speaking any further, but nothing came to mind that wouldn't yield a regrettable consequence.
“Storm,” spoke the nameless voice.
“Huh?” asked Saks.
“Storm,” he repeated. “Still working on the first name, but Storm is his last.” He turned to Delvin. “Isn't that your label, your given, the tag below the family crest?”
Delvin's heartbeat raced, and his temples throbbed. Determined not to let any other information leak, he lunged forward and gripped his shirt. “You got any other information you want to share about me?”
“Storm,” another inmate acknowledged,
“What's he in for, Murphy?”
Delvin heard the real name. He decided to tag the imprisoned Encyclopedia Brown with another label. “Yeah, SOB, what am I in for?”
Murphy twisted his body in an attempt to break loose of the grip. “I don't know,” he said. “My sources can't be revealed, but they do come with the assurance of 100% reliability.”
More guards were ordered to mess hall.
Delvin ripped Murphy's collar, but hung on. “Let me assure you of this. I don't want people knowing about me. See to it, or you're a dead man. You got it?”
Murphy nodded, failing to speak.
Loose tongues and investigations. That's what landed him in this hellhole, and he dared this man to intimidate him another minute.
Prison guards dashed from their posts as inmates scattered like children in a playground scuffle.
“Beat your feet!” one of the guards demanded. The room was filled with the simultaneous sounds of batons drumming iron tables, lunch trays banging against walls, handcuffs clanging belt buckles and voices trimming open air.
A battery of guards took hold of Delvin and carried him off to confinement as they quelled the disturbance. As they rushed him through the block, a tall, African American inmate with a Holy Qur'ân in hand said, “God must clear our hearts and minds of evil.”
If the guard had given Delvin opportunity, he would have told the book-carrying inmate that there was no God in there.
A week had gone by. The smell of the prison library was unique: the pungency of masculine sweat, the dankness of grimy books, and the vacuity of cold steel amid sticky concrete.
In that twenty by twenty-five room, makeshift inmate attorneys hammered out cases for their paroles and appeals. Many spent all of their free time submerging their craniums into one hard back, then another.
Delvin weaved in and out of the rows of books eyeing the titles and holding some in his mind for later checkout. He had a strong notion that this was the very place he could enjoy a respite from inmates seeking out the fine details of his résumé. Or so he thought.
“So ... you made it out of Siberia, huh, newbie ?”
Stinson was like a stink that he couldn't be rid of. He had come from around a corner, slightly startling Delvin, but not enough to break his silence.
Stinson grunted. “You're too ornery for the hole to break you. I don't see how you made it through that seven-day blickum looking halfway fit, considering all they give you is one square a day.”
Delvin thought about the ease of choking that mess down once a day rather than three times a day. As far as he was concerned, Siberia had been a vacation.
“What made you crazy in the mess hall, man? We thought you were gonna kill Murphy. He couldn't do certain things on the toilet for about four days after that.”
Delvin had hoped his stunt scared Murphy. He wasn't going to kill him, just make him think twice before spreading information.
Stinson pulled a toothpick out of his breast pocket, scraped it between his teeth, and nestled it back into the pocket. “He ain't said nothing else about you to anybody. And to shut him up—that's a lot. You need to chill, though. You're gonna need a friend in this place.” He snickered. “'Cause the only time you'll want to be alone is when you masturbate.”
Delvin glared up at Stinson. His prison mate didn't know that he adored opportunities to be alone.
Annoyed with his unwelcome shadow, Delvin walked over to the newspaper rack, a wooden contraption with half-moon slots holding reed dowel sticks. Each of the twenty-some dowels held an edition of
Washington Post
,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
,
New York Times
, and other state, regional, and local papers. He picked up a copy of the
Courier-Journal
, hoping that Stinson would be able to decode his
buddy talk is over
signal. It didn't work.
“You probably get better stock market info from the
Wall Street Journal
, big shot,” Stinson said.
Delvin heard him, but offered no response. His eyes did a quick read of the articles on the upcoming Juneteenth observances and the Louisville arrest statistics per capita, but halted on a small notice in the Real Estate Transfers:
Joseph B. & Monica Wright to Nathan & Edwina Robinson, 4213 N. Lakespur Dr., June 2, $565,950.
He reread that section of the paper like the Cliff notes for an SAT exam question. His muscles contracted. Internal eruptions threw all his body functions off-base. Job Wright had sold his home for a fresh start; there Delvin was, standing still and going nowhere fast. His conscience wanted Job Wright dead. Delvin slowly and methodically ripped the newspaper to pieces, until they were smaller than if they'd been run through an electric shredder. He swept them off the table onto the floor.
“Storm,” a guard said, pounding his baton into his massive fists, “you better have that cleaned up before you leave. Do it!”
“What's wrong with you, Storm? Are you trying to go back in the hole? You'll be in solitude for a month next time. These guards are crazy, man. Calm down,” Stinson said.
Delvin looked around and saw that a few more guards and some nosy inmates had congregated in the library. He began placing the scraps in the garbage.
Stinson bent down beside Delvin and helped to gather up the scraps. He whispered, “Don't let the Ashland fool you. Minimum security doesn't mean they've got their backs turned. They'd find your silver-haired butt in these Kentucky hills blindfolded.”

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