Jude

by Kate Morgenroth

  Three weeks after Benito arrived, Jude was released from solitary. He was thin and pale and moved slowly, as if he had just recovered from a long sickness, and Benito laughed when he saw him. “This is the famous Duck?” he scoffed. “This is the guy who’s so tough?”

  He said it loud enough for Jude to hear as he was passing by.

  Jude stopped and looked Benito up and down. “Who’s this?” he said, and his voice was rough with disuse.

  “He’s just drove up, Duck,” Old Man River said. “Thinks he can take you.”

  Several men standing nearby chuckled at that.

  “I know I can,” Benito retorted, annoyed.

  “Seriously, who’s next?” Jude said, turning away from Benito. He usually heard something about his challengers while still in solitary, and he liked imagining the fights. This time he had heard nothing.

  “He’s it,” Old Man River said.

  Jude shook his head. “No, really.”

  “What, you scared?” Benito taunted. “The mighty Duck is scared to face me? You know what I say to the mighty Duck?” He was getting revved up. “I say fuck the Duck. That’s what I say. Fuck the fucking Duck.”

  Jude looked at him again, and for the first time Benito had a stirring of unease. There was something in Jude’s gaze that unsettled him. The eyes that looked at him were flat, dead eyes. He felt as if he was being inspected like a side of beef.

  “Well, if this is the best you can do …,” Jude said.

  “I’m the best there is,” Benito shot back.

  Then Benito saw a spark kindle. “That right?” Jude drawled. “Well, I guess we’ll see.”

  “I guess you will,” he promised.

  “When?” The eyes that looked at Benito weren’t dead anymore.

  “Tomorrow,” Benito said, ignoring the flutter of fear. “After the work shift.”

  *

  THE NEXT NIGHT was a beautiful evening. The air felt cool after the heat of the day, but the asphalt still felt warm to the touch. There was a light breeze that riffled the hair of the inmates as they stood waiting for the two fighters to arrive. The guards, as always, had a piece of the action so they wouldn’t arrive until it was all conveniently over.

  Jude got there first. He stood a little apart, his hands in his pockets, a strange, faraway look on his face.

  Benito arrived a few minutes later with a confident grin; he had purchased a piece of insurance to make sure he would win.

  When Jude took his hands out of his pockets, Benito felt the crowd step back.

  Benito dropped to a crouch, his hand going to his waistband, where he had a short length of pipe tucked away as a little surprise, but the thin, sickly-looking kid in front of him just stood. Benito feinted forward and the kid didn’t even flinch.

  “Come on, pussy. You want me? You want me?” Benito taunted. He feinted forward again and threw a clumsy uppercut.

  Jude actually staggered a little before the punch even landed. He had seen the punch coming, but when he was about to duck out of the way, he felt the ground lurch beneath his feet, his inner ear betraying him, and Benito’s fist glanced off his chin.

  The crowd let out a hiss of surprise, and Benito danced back again, out of the reach of Jude’s fists. If he had just pressed his advantage, Benito might have had him then, but Jude righted himself and shook his head clear. The pain from the blow sharpened his mind, and he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and curled his hands into fists.

  The easy punch charged Benito with confidence; he discarded his early caution and lunged forward, intending to use his weight advantage by grabbing Jude in a wrestler’s hold and throwing him to the ground. But before Benito could get his arms around his opponent, Jude’s fist had buried itself in the high, soft part of his gut, and he was the one on his knees, struggling to draw a breath. He clambered to his feet, but no sooner was he up than Jude hit him again, a blow to the side of his head that sent him staggering.

  Benito backed away, and the ring of men around him bulged to give him more room. He heard a low murmur from the crowd. Well, he’d show this punk, he thought, and he pulled the pipe out.

  The murmur changed to cheers and laughter. Someone called out, “Now, that’s a bone crusher.”

  Suddenly rediscovering his confidence, Benito passed the pipe from one hand to the other. He suspected that Jude might have something as well—a club or more probably a knife—so Benito was watching for him to retrieve a weapon. That was the reason he didn’t see the look on Jude’s face. If he had, he might have had more warning.

  Jude was just coming off a three-month stint in the infirmary and solitary—the longest yet. The need to fight had built in him like an addict’s craving. Jude felt himself slipping, giving in to the rage. Later he wasn’t even sure how it had happened. Abruptly he found himself with the pipe in his fist, the man sprawled on the ground in front of him, and he was swinging it like John Henry with his hammer. Each blow landed with a dull thud.

  Once again Jude raised the pipe high above his head, but suddenly he froze there, arm uplifted. All around him was a deep, terrible silence. The men were staring at him. Jude blinked and looked at the broken figure on the ground. Benito didn’t stir. In fact, he hadn’t even moved under the last few blows. Jude’s fingers loosened and the pipe dropped, ringing hollow on the pavement.

  Fats stepped up, stooped to retrieve the pipe, and passed it to another man in the crowd. A few others squatted by Benito and rolled him over. The crowd closed in so Jude couldn’t see, and he let Fats lead him back inside.

  Five minutes later Jude found himself back in the cellblock, sitting at a table with Fats. Fats had the cards out and was dealing. “Pick them up,” Fats hissed.

  “Was he dead?” Jude said.

  “I don’t know. Pick up the goddamned cards.”

  “Why bother?” Jude said. “They know I was the one fighting.”

  “They might know,” Fats whispered, “but they don’t have any proof. That might be real important. Am I your stickman or what? Don’t I look out for you? Just trust me on this one.”

  The guards came for him ten minutes later. There were two of them, and they arranged themselves one on either side of Jude’s chair.

  “All right,” the one on his right said. “Let’s go.”

  Fats spoke up. “Go where?”

  They didn’t look at Fats when they answered; they kept their eyes on Jude and their hands on their batons. They knew that there had been some trouble in the past. Twice guards had tried to take Jude back to solitary when he was still keyed up from the fight, and he had not gone quietly.

  “You know where, Fats. He’s headed right back to solitary.”

  “What for?” Fats persisted. “He hasn’t done anything.”

  “Yeah, right. Come on, now.”

  “How ’bout you let me finish this game?” Jude said.

  “Wish we could.” One of the guards tried to drop a hand on Jude’s shoulder, but Jude shrugged it off sharply and stood.

  “Easy there,” the other guard said as both men took a step back. Almost, Jude thought, as if they were afraid.

  31

  BENITO WAS ALIVE, but barely. Reports from the infirmary said it was touch and go whether he would hang on. If Benito died, Jude could get a life sentence.

  Jude lay on his bunk in solitary, staring at the overhead lights and thinking about the men who were lifers. They had a look to them, a smell, the air of men who were beyond the rest of them somehow. Everyone else counted down to the next parole hearing or watched their date of release crawl closer. The lifers clung to a sort of hope too. They still poured over trial transcripts and law books to find the hole in the case that could get them an appeal, but deep down they, and everyone else, knew that there was only one date for them to count down to, and that was a different kind of release.

  Jude couldn’t sleep—couldn’t even close his eyes because whenever he did, his eyelids provided the screen for images he didn’t want
to face. He saw his father carefully packing the dime bags at the kitchen table. He saw Anna’s face as it had looked when she took the stand in court. He saw his father’s body on the kitchen floor. He saw Harry’s face when he had told Jude that he wasn’t worth it.

  There were times when Jude thought he must have fallen asleep with his eyes open. At least, he hoped he had fallen asleep, because it was either that or he was losing his mind. He imagined he saw his father standing over him, and his father held a pipe high over his head, about to bring it down on him. Something shifted and it was Jude standing there with the pipe and Benito on the ground, but in his dream Benito opened his eyes and said, “You’re just like your father.” Then Benito’s face turned into his mother’s and she cringed away from him, crying, “No, Anthony. Please.” He would shout at her, “I’m not Anthony,” but she still cowered away from him and didn’t seem to hear.

  On the third day a guard came to the door of his cell in the middle of the afternoon.

  Jude raised himself on his hands, and he felt his arms tremble under his weight.

  “Hey,” the guard said. “Benito’s gonna make it. Thought you might like to know.” He turned and walked back down the hallway. Jude let himself slowly back down onto the mattress.

  His neighbor in the next cell said, “Hey, great news.”

  “What? What news?” the men down the range called out.

  “Dig this out, Jude got paid. He drew a free pass on this one.”

  The block of cells was boisterous that night. The men were buoyed by the feeling that one of their own had gotten away with something in a place where the smallest triumphs were precious. In the midst of the celebration, when the noise hit one of those strange, sudden lulls, the man in the cell next to Jude’s thought he heard something. The first time he heard it, he frowned and crossed to the door of his cell.

  In the next lull he heard it again. It was a low noise—barely audible—but it raised the hairs on the backs of his arms. It was the sound of someone crying.

  32

  “YOU’RE LUCKY—JUST goddamned lucky you’re not serving Buck Rogers time,” Fats said to Jude.

  They were sitting outside in the yard, up against the wall in the shade, but the shade didn’t offer much relief—it was still close to ninety with the blacktop and the bricks holding heat like an oven.

  It had been a long two months in solitary—the longest two months of Jude’s life. When he got out, he saw the other inmates noting the difference in him. He had dropped at least ten pounds, and his prison shirt hung on his shoulders as on a hanger. He shuffled when he walked, like an old man or a lifer.

  And he didn’t ask about the next fight.

  He waited for someone to bring it up, but no one mentioned anything. In fact, no one spoke to him much at all. Instead they sent Fats over to talk to him.

  “I heard it was touch and go,” Fats said. “Flip of a coin. If it had come down tails, you’d be here for the big bitch and not this little five-year walk in the park. You hear me?”

  Jude nodded.

  “There’s something else, too. Nobody wants to fight you no more. That’s it, Duck,” Fats said. “You’re done.”

  Jude closed his eyes. “Yeah. I know.”

  To his surprise, Fats said, “Thank God for that. They elected me to tell you. I was kinda worried how you’d take it.”

  Jude opened his eyes. His friend’s narrow face was creased with a huge smile of relief.

  “What did you think I would do?” Jude asked him.

  “What do you think?” Fats said. “I thought you’d beat the shit out of me.”

  “I guess I deserve that,” Jude said, sounding very tired.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Jude waved off the apology he sensed coming. “You’re probably right.”

  They sat in the shade of the building, the sweat meandering down their foreheads and dripping into their eyes. The shadows shortened as the sun reached higher. Their toes were in the sun. Then their feet. When it reached their knees, Jude said, “In solitary I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not make it’?” Fats asked.

  “I was thinking about cutting up. I was checking the cell for places high enough to tie a sheet,” Jude said.

  “Damn. Was that when you thought Benito was gonna kick it?”

  “No, it was after I found out he was gonna be okay.”

  “After? That don’t make no sense at all.”

  “Before all I was thinkin’ about was whether he was gonna make it or not, but after I found out … I had to face up to a whole lot of other shit.”

  “I can see how facing a lifetime here at the Graybar Hotel would make you want to waste yourself, but what was so bad that you wanted to string yourself up when you just got your friggin’ life back?”

  “Me,” Jude said. “Me.”

  Fats didn’t say anything.

  “It’s like I woke up from a bad dream and realized that it was all true. My worst nightmare come true.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I would end up like my father. It’s the one thing I said I would never do. Anything, as long as I wasn’t like him.”

  “What did he do that was so bad? Was he an ex-con? Did he kill somebody?”

  “No,” Jude said. “Nothing like that.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “He hit me. Before that, he hit my mother.”

  “So? You never hit your wife or your kid. You just beat up on some assholes that would have done the same to you if they got the chance. I don’t see how it’s the same thing at all.”

  “I don’t know if I can explain how it’s the same thing, but it is.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay,” Jude agreed. “But you can’t laugh.”

  Fats said, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “All right. I know I’m just like my pops because I understand him. I never did before, but now I know why he hit my mother and why he hit me. I can see how he came to that. I don’t just see it, I feel it. I know it. I know what it felt like to be my father.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Oh God.” Jude gave a laugh that was half sob. “It feels like you’ve got enough rage to fill the entire world, and it’s too much. After a while you can’t hold it all in, and when it spills out, you hurt someone. My father spent his whole life angry. I’d rather die than live like that.”

  “But you didn’t try it, did you?” Fats said. “If you’d tried and they caught you, you’d be in that other wing now. You’d be a cat like all the other Looney Tunes.”

  “No, I didn’t. You know why?”

  “Don’t tell me you got religion?”

  “No.” Jude smiled. “No, that’s not it. It’s just I started thinking.”

  “Dangerous,” Fats observed.

  “I started thinking—I only ever wanted two things in my life. One was to be as different from my father as it was possible to be. You know how well I’ve done with that.”

  “So what’s this other thing?”

  “I wanted to show my mother I was worth something. I wanted to make her proud.”

  “How the hell are you gonna do that?”

  Jude had spent most of the last two months trying to answer that question. He told Fats what he had decided on. “I’m gonna be a lawyer.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You asked,” Jude said.

  “You can’t be a lawyer when you’re a ex-con, can you? There must be some sort of law against it.”

  “I looked into that. Turns out anybody can go to law school,” Jude said. “And there’s no law against convicted felons becoming lawyers. Hell, there was a guy who was a cop killer who got permission to take the bar. You just have to get approved by this committee, called the Character and Fitness Committee. All you have to do is convince them that you’ve reformed—that you’ve become an upstanding citizen.”

>   “Oh, well, I guess that’s no problem. We’ll just ignore the fact that you’re in prison. Just put that aside for a minute, do you even have your GED?”

  “No,” Jude admitted. “But I’ll get it.”

  “You need a college degree, too, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “This is crazy. It’ll take years.”

  “Years I have,” Jude pointed out.

  “More years than you have in here,” Fats said. “I don’t know that you can become a lawyer in prison. That seems like it might be kinda difficult.”

  “So I’ll do the law school thing after. I’m gonna do it, Fats.”

  “All right, you’re gonna do it, but let me ask you one more question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “After you become this hotshot lawyer, how much will you charge old friends who saved your ass?”

  Jude grinned. “Double. At least.”

  33

  JUDE DIDN’T EXPECT it to be easy—there wasn’t much in his life that had been easy—but he didn’t expect it to be quite so hard, either. He’d heard of kids who managed to graduate high school without knowing how to read, and he thought that he was experiencing something of what they felt. How had he gotten so far and learned so little? If all he had wanted was his GED, he could have managed to scrape by without too much effort, but Jude was looking at college as well, and he knew he’d need better-than-average grades to get into a law school after that. He found the difference between learning enough to get by and learning enough to understand was like the gulf between thought and action. He had been a junior in high school when he was arrested, but he found he had to go all the way back to seventh-grade level in most subjects and work up from there.

  It wasn’t just the school work, or the fact that every day he felt more stupid than the last. There was also the anger. It didn’t just go away because he’d decided he didn’t want to feel it. It was there every time he had to ask permission to use the bathroom, every time he opened a book and discovered that it hadn’t gotten any easier since the last time he closed it, every time any inmate got released or admitted, every time the door of his cell shut at night, every time he thought of Harry.