The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “And what’s that?”

  “Bullshit!” My head and neck constricted with the word and I wanted to throw the phone up against the glass of the car and snap it in half. A man walked by and stared at me through the windshield until I glared back and offered him the finger.

  “It bothers you that much?”

  “Bothered’s not what I’m feeling.”

  “Then what exactly?”

  I held the phone up in front of my face. Squeezed my eyes closed, looking for the right word. “Contempt.”

  “Because he lied to you the night he got arrested and you stood up for him or because he actually killed a man?”

  “Both! Are you happy?” I snapped on the car’s air, hit defrost and followed the fog as it began to clear from the front window.

  “He could never be like you, Lee. He wasn’t that strong.”

  Maybe he wasn’t. “But he could have tried.”

  I picked up on her soft cries, as she struggled to find her voice on the other side of the line. “Trying to live up to you is too hard. I know about that—I tried. And it just about killed me.”

  I felt myself twisting on those words, and like barbed hooks she left me to hang on them. They were sharp and painful, the way they stabbed me from a distance. And I didn’t find it fair. “Amy, you have to. Amy? Oh, you little…” The line was dead. She’d hung up on me. I scrolled through the received numbers list and pushed send. Voicemail. “Fuck you then!”

  Inside the room, I dropped back on the bed, felt the worn folder under my left arm. Tape from one of the corners gathered over the seam and twisted off into a ravel that my fingers had knotted years ago. I traced the cover with my hand. A blue rubber band clung to the outside of the folder, winding up and snapping back into place under my palm. After a minute the anxiety in my body slowly defused.

  I slid the rubber band off and let it thump across the room out of sight. Tape crackled as I pushed back the makeshift cover, its contents breathing fresh air for the first time in nearly a decade. It brought with it a restless smell, all bitter and old, and full of the dead.

  On top was a typed letter from my brother. It wasn’t dated.

  Dear Lee, it read.

  Hope you’re doing well, at least better than I am. Do yourself a favor…never end up on death row in Holman Prison. And I know what your thinking, but it sure as hell ain’t the Ritz Carlton, (not that I been and all) but honestly, there can’t be a worse place in this world to be. And you know me; I’ve been in a few between here and Duluth. It’s bad LSD. It’s like tripping in hell or some place, and Warden Pinkerton, he ain’t the devil, but he’s close. You remember the devil, bro? I do.

  Well enough about you, let’s talk about me for a while. I had the shits yesterday. Ain’t that a step out or what? You probably didn’t know I was gonna talk about toilet time. It’s just one of the perks that comes along with having to stay in this hole. You get to drink and eat food that smells like pea soup. I had 2 bowls of mystery meat yesterday and what I did to the can twice should get me a consecutive life sentence if the state don’t get to kill me first. By the way I didn’t get my Marlboros. I know she’s busy and all, but can you ask Amy if she wouldn’t mind getting me those pretty soon? I ain’t got a lot to do except read books they’ll allow me to have in my cell. I mean damn, a man’s gotta have his vices.

  I got an hour in the yard this morning to workout the knots in my back from sleeping on that shit-hole mattress they done did give us. Try spending your day in a cell that’s 8 feet long by 5 feet wide. We’re supposed to have 60 square feet of space to move around in here, but that ain’t happening. Not that you’re crying for me and all. Besides, I wrote the piss ass congressman, Smelly Smelton, that fucker and told him how we’re getting treated like animals in this dump. If he calls you just forward him my number. Ha ha. Anyway, he hadn’t written back. I suspect he won’t. Come March I’m changing my call list and putting that son-of-bitch’s number on the top of the pecking order. We’ll see if he likes hearing from me everyday. And if the guards are reading this, you can go to hell!!!!! I got privacy on my side, the first fucking amendment.

  I hadn’t been getting the time to work on my case like I’m supposed too. They all think I’m lying. But I’ll tell them just like I’m telling you, I ain’t ever loved a nigger, but I ain’t never killed one neither. There’s one named Rubert Cribbs that sometimes brings me my books to read. He’s a nigger. I ain’t got nothing but good things to say about him. Besides it ain’t his fault he is what he is. He’s nice to me and I’m nice to him. You could say we got us a working relationship. Sometimes he even brings me cigarettes to smoke. But I’m sure he’s looking forward to seeing me get the shit knocked out of me in that chair. Probably ain’t a nigger in the state not waiting for that.

  I’ll stop here, I know you’re busy. You always are.

  Your brother,

  Paul

  I massaged the area around my temples, the bones beneath my skin unlocking familiar thunderclouds, those rolling precursors I’d grown to recognize as the beginning of an intense migraine. My brother’s letter lay across my chest, its noxious message rising and falling like crude black waves over a sea of white. I couldn’t comprehend why Paul eventually sought his own demise in the form of another’s destruction. How he could rationalize such hate and compulsion of a race? That it would lead to his taking part in the brutal slaying of a black man named Charles Pritchard. Lying on the bed, hands clasped over my eyes, I realized there would never be an easy answer. I’d leave my brother tomorrow, for probably the last time, and knowing him, I’d still have an unbearable desire to know the truth.

  Dozens of arrests led up to his being charged with murder, a string of previous crimes ranging from months to years locked away, his body slowly amassing itself in tattoos of hate and Aryan pride. Stacks of newspaper clippings piled up in the folder under his letters. I stopped flipping through them when I came to the one of Paul the day he was apprehended. The same picture they had blown up during the D.A.’s closing and printed onto a poster board for the jury to see. Looking at it then, I could still make out the tattoo that covered the larger part of his chest, the way it wrapped around his side, then beneath his thin handcuffed arm. Though difficult to make out, my mind recalled the detail of the Knight Rider on horseback, a bound black figure in its wake, the classic eye bulge and saucer lip characteristics of old cartoons and caricatures depicting slaves, drawn in familiar prison blue ink. I was sure the tattoo played an instrumental part in the jury’s verdict.

  My head was killing me. I popped a Vicodin and finally shoved the pictures over to the side of the bed. When I closed my eyes, all of the unsettling images drifted through my head. Then I was gone.

  *****

  Over a vast spread of trees, soft clouds folded into cushions of gray-blue sky. Rays of sun penetrated the foliage along the nearly deserted stretch of wooded road, its lazy beams meandering in a ghostly dance. Further down, straddling an open field and surrounded by 30 foot tall fences amassed with barbed wire, sat Holman Prison. Enormous towers protected the facility like large opposing rooks, an obscure face-off on some far removed chess board. Rifles draped across the uniformed arms of guards as they watched over the yard where twenty or more prisoners shuffled back and forth. Barbed wire glinted in the warming sun like teeth in a faceless machine.

  A guard met me at the visitor’s waiting room. There was a glassed-in-booth against the far wall that contained two guards and a bank of video monitors. They sat in front of several large sloping control panels, clip boards in both their hands, every so often scanning them over, writing and gazing up at the screens above them. Things had hardly changed since my last visit. I wondered if Paul looked the same; if I would recognize him at all. I imagined Holman Prison took a lot out of a man year after year. A sick ache wrapped its way around my stomach as if to reinforce the thought of it.

  I was studying the grooves in the tile floor when the guard came to get me.
I stood up, shaking the rust out of my joints, and walked over to the door. A buzz came through the wall, followed by two clinks. He pointed down the wall. “You’re going to want to follow that pathway until it comes to an end. You’ll be buzzed through once you get there.”

  I stood under a tin roof where metal picnic tables were arranged on a concrete pad. Several guards stood present in various corners, batons strapped to their sides with enough lead in them to regulate a coma. Two stood outside the gate in a separate runway. They were both heavily armed. A spent woman and her daughter sat beside a baby-faced man near the middle of the picnic tables. Every so often she would lean into his ear and whisper something, and then he would make an effort at smiling.

  “How’s it going, Lee?”

  I turned around at the sound of my name. It took a second to register the fact that it was Paul. His face was different. Pale complexioned and older looking in age than I’d expected. Wrinkles graced the corners of his eyes and lips.

  “Paul.” I nodded at him with a little uncertainty. Much of what I felt balled up in a knot of guilt at the sight of him. I hardly recognized my own brother.

  Without much of a hesitation, Paul threw his arms around me, the sound of chains clinking softly in my ears. “It’s been awhile, ain’t it, bro?”

  “Yeah, it has.” I was surprised by the sudden closeness. I hadn’t hugged him since we were boys. The act alone was uncomfortable. And surprisingly, a little shame came with wanting to disperse with pleasantries.

  “You look good.” Nicotine stained his teeth when he smiled. “You really do.”

  “So do you, Paul.” His baldhead had a couple days of stubble set in and he looked thinner than the last time I remembered, but lean, not unhealthy. Eyes that had one time been shifty and caged, carried a look of weight about them. “You do bald well.”

  He looked around past me to the door. “Where’s Amy?”

  “She couldn’t make it.”

  “I see.” There was a look of disappointment in his face.

  “Yeah, she had a shoot in New York. Or whatever—she’s coming down next Friday.”

  “Really?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Who knows?

  “Well, that leaves you and me, bro.” He glanced back over at the couple with the little girl. “I saw you looking at Bruce when they let you in.”

  “Bruce?”

  “Skinny bitch with the sleazy face.”

  Bitch? His description caught me off guard. “His wife’s names—”

  “I meant him, and that’s his girlfriend, not his wife. She comes on the first and third Fridays.” Paul turned back to me. “Killed two people in an armed robbery.”

  It was like having my nose too close to the bars at the zoo. “What happened?”

  “He and two other ass fucks popped a restaurant owner and some other woman buyin’ a sandwich. Claims he wasn’t the shooter. But I ain’t buying it. Somebody’ll get around to taking out the trash.”

  A cold sense of dread shifted its way through me like a ghost. I stared around, marking the exits again. Something in me wanted to leave.

  “So, what else’s going on?” I managed feebly.

  He leaned back and popped his knuckles. “Just easing back into general population, bro.”

  “And how’s that working?”

  “Same as it ever would. How’re you doing?”

  “You know,” I said, “I can’t complain. How about you?”

  “I’ve come to grips with the fact that I ain’t getting out of here, but that’s better’n where I was going a year ago.”

  A certain amount of emptiness marked his words, and I couldn’t relate to his hell. I didn’t know how. So I just agreed with him. “I guess so.”

  Paul rubbed the top of his head and rested his chin on his hand. “I gotta tell you, I’m getting used to the idea of living again, but part of me still dreams about dying in that chair. You spend close to twenty years thinking it’s coming, and you sort of just accept it. I never really thought it’d happen that…”

  I waited for him to finish but he just sat there staring at the table. “You never really thought what would happen?” But I thought I knew.

  Paul finally came around. “Did Amy talk to you about why I needed to see you?”

  “A little.”

  He stood up. “Let’s take a walk around the yard. I need a smoke.” He was already reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. Heavy chains paraded around his ankles as he walked. “You wanna know something?”

  “What?” I squinted out through the morning sun.

  “I hated you all my life.”

  A warm shiver of blood settled in my face. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”

  He interlocked his hands in front of his pants and turned away again, walking with his cigarette bobbing between his lips. “I’m pretty sure the feeling’s mutual.”

  “Thirty years ago you probably wouldn’t be far off base. But we are brothers,” I said, moving in beside him again, as though the connection of that one word would bridge our troubled relationship.

  “Ain’t life full of some shit? I mean, how in the hell did it come to this?” He held out his arms like they could explain it.

  “Come to what?”

  Paul took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaled and flicked the filter onto the ground, then stepped on it. “You never got it, did you? You never got any of it.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  He smiled at me like he was letting me in on some great secret. “You know you cut me out on everything, bro. They loved you more, sucked up to you more. It was like the damn Brady Bunch. You never made a mistake. And when you did you always fell on your feet and not your ass.”

  What fucking family were you living with? “That’s your reason? Warren beat the piss out of me like some damn dog. Don’t act like you never saw it.”

  “You were the fucking Marsha Brady of the lot and I might as well have been the stain in Jan’s pants.”

  My fist balled up, and I kept it clenched against my leg as a reminder I didn’t have take it lying down. “Paul, I thought I heard ’em all, but, you’ve got some issues, brother.”

  “You know, I was tired of your mouth when we were kids.” He whirled around on me, grabbing at my arm or anything that might give him some leverage.

  I stepped back and brushed him off. “Has your brain checked out? Because I don’t see a sign.”

  Paul began to laugh. Held out his arm and pointed at me as he reached in his pocket, found another cigarette, and lit it up. Even as the smoke blew out of the side of his mouth he never looked away. His gaze became a shift in climate, something trembling and cold. It reminded me of when we were kids, the swelling of anger in his eyes, like black water twisting beneath a shifting ice flow. I backed up even further, not wanting to look over my shoulder for the nearest guard, but doing it anyway.

  “Look at the pussy run,” he jeered, flipping his hands in front of him like a silly chicken caught in the chains. “Run pussy, run.”

  A streak of anger burned through me like a three second fuse, and the adrenaline about knocked me down. “I’ve got some breaking news for you, shit for brains. This ain’t TV Land. It’s the real world. So you can loosen up the orange jumpsuit and get to pulling that clicker out of your ass.”

  Turning around, I headed back under the metal roofing.

  “Where you going, bro?”

  “To sit down. And quit calling me fucking bro.”

  “If I didn’t know any better,” he called, “I’d say you’re trying to get away from me.”

  “You know, when I got here I didn’t see the long term parking for the short bus. It must be backed up to your cell.”

  “Still got a knack for that smart ass mouth, don’t ya?”

  I didn’t answer him, hoping to change the subject. “Look, I came down because Amy said you wanted to talk. Well, here I am. Don’t wanna argue with you
because I could give a shit—got enough of that when we were kids. So if you’ve got something you wanna tell me, you need to get busy with it.”

  “What you think you getting out of me? Some big confession? You got it all wrong, bro.”

  I stood to leave with that. “Whatever you told Amy, I don’t care. I thought maybe somewhere I did, but I don’t. I was wrong.”

  “Don’t hit the road because of me. The party’s just getting started.”

  “The party?” I sized up his face. “That what you think this is?”

  Paul just sat there playing with his lighter. “Sit down. If you leave I’m headed back to a cell.”

  “You chose this.”