by Lee Child
The donut eater went out into the corridor and came back a long moment later with a tray. On it were covered plates, paper cups and a Thermos. He put the tray on the table and the two of them swung out through the corridor. Locked the door from the outside. It went quiet as a tomb in there.
We ate. Fish and rice. Friday food. Coffee in the Thermos. Hubble didn’t speak. He left most of the coffee for me. Score one for Hubble. I put the debris on the tray and the tray on the floor. Another three hours to waste. I tipped my chair back and put my feet up on the table. Not comfortable, but as good as I was going to get. A warm evening. September in Georgia.
I looked over at Hubble without curiosity. He was still silent. I had never heard him speak except on Finlay’s speakerphone. He looked back at me. His face was full of dejection and fear. He looked at me like I was a creature from another world. He stared at me like I worried him. Then he looked away.
MAYBE I WOULDN’T HEAD BACK TO THE GULF. BUT IT WAS too late in the year to head north. Too cold up there. Maybe skip right down to the islands. Jamaica, maybe. Good music there. A hut on the beach. Live out the winter in a hut on a Jamaica beach. Smoke a pound of grass a week. Do whatever Jamaica people do. Maybe two pounds of grass a week with someone to share the hut. Roscoe kept drifting into the picture. Her uniform shirt was fabulously crisp. A crisp tight blue shirt. I had never seen a shirt look better. On a Jamaica beach in the sun she wouldn’t need a shirt. I didn’t think that would prove to be any kind of a major problem.
It was her wink that did it to me. She took my coffee cup. She said I had nice eyes. And she winked. Got to mean something, right? The eyes thing, I’ve heard that before. An English girl I’d had good times with for a while, she liked my eyes. Said it all the time. They’re blue. Equally people have said they look like icebergs in an Arctic sea. If I concentrate I can stop them blinking. Gives a stare an intimidating effect. Useful. But Roscoe’s wink had been the best part of the day. The only part of the day, really, except Eno’s scrambled eggs, which weren’t bad. Eggs you can get anywhere. But I’d miss Roscoe. I floated on through the empty evening.
NOT LONG AFTER TEN THE DOOR FROM THE CORRIDOR WAS unlocked. A uniformed man came in. He carried a clipboard. And a shotgun. I looked him over. A son of the South. A heavy, fleshy man. Reddened skin, a big hard belly and a wide neck. Small eyes. A tight greasy uniform straining to contain him. Probably born right there on the farm they commandeered to build the prison. Assistant Warden Spivey. This shift’s top boy. Understaffed and harassed. Ushering the short-stay guests around by himself. With a shotgun in his big red farmer’s hands.
He studied his clipboard.
“Which one of you is Hubble?” he asked.
He had a high-pitched voice. At odds with his bulk. Hubble raised his hand briefly, like a boy at grade school. Spivey’s little eyes flicked over him. Up and down. Like a snake’s eyes. He grunted and signaled with the clipboard. We formed up and moved out. Hubble was blank and acquiescent. Like an exhausted trooper.
“Turn left and follow the red line,” Spivey said.
He waved left with the shotgun. There was a red line painted on the wall at waist height. It was a fire lane guide. I guessed it must lead outside, but we were going in the wrong direction. Into the prison, not out of it. We followed the red line through corridors, up stairs and around corners. Hubble first, then me. Then Spivey with the shotgun. It was very dark. Just dim emergency lighting. Spivey called a halt on a landing. He overrode an electronic lock with his key. A lock which would spring the fire door when the alarm went.
“No talking,” he said. “Rules here say absolute silence at all times after lights out. Cell at the end on the right.”
We stepped in through the out door. The foul odor of prison hit me. The night exhalation of countless dispirited men. It was nearly pitch black. A night-light glowed dimly. I sensed rather than saw rows of cells. I heard the babble of night sounds. Breathing and snoring. Muttering and whimpering. Spivey walked us to the end of the row. Pointed to an empty cell. We crowded in. Spivey swung the bars shut behind us. They locked automatically. He walked away.
The cell was very dark. I could just about see a bunk bed, a sink and a john. Not much floor space. I took off my coat and lobbed it onto the top bunk. Reached up and remade the bed with the pillow away from the bars. I liked it better that way. Worn sheet and blanket, but they smelled clean enough.
Hubble sat quietly on the lower bed. I used the john and rinsed my face at the sink. Pulled myself up into bed. Took off my shoes. Left them on the foot of the bed. I wanted to know where they were. Shoes can get stolen, and these were good shoes. Bought many years ago in Oxford, England. A university town near the airbase where I was stationed. Big heavy shoes with hard soles and a thick welt.
The bed was too short for me, but most beds are. I lay there in the dark and listened to the restless prison. Then I closed my eyes and floated back to Jamaica with Roscoe. I must have fallen asleep there with her because the next thing I knew it was Saturday. I was still in prison. And an even worse day was beginning.
6
I WAS WOKEN UP BY BRIGHT LIGHTS COMING ON. THE PRISON had no windows. Day and night were created by electricity. At seven o’clock the building was suddenly flooded with light. No dawn or soft twilight. Just circuit breakers thrown shut at seven.
The bright light did not make the cell look any better. The front wall was bars. Half would open outward on a hinge to form the door. The two stacked beds occupied just about half the width and most of the length. On the back wall were a steel sink and a steel toilet pan. The walls were masonry. Part poured concrete and part old bricks. All thickly covered with paint. The walls looked massively thick. Like a dungeon. Above my head was a low concrete ceiling. The cell didn’t feel like a room bounded by walls, floor, ceiling. It felt like a solid block of masonry with a tiny living space grudgingly burrowed in.
Outside, the restless night mutter was replaced by the clatter of daytime. Everything was metal, brick, concrete. Noises were amplified and echoed around. It sounded like hell. Through the bars I could see nothing. Opposite our cell was a blank wall. Lying in bed I didn’t have the angle to see down the row. I threw off the cover and found my shoes. Put them on and laced them up. Lay down again. Hubble was sitting on the bottom bunk. His tan boat shoes were planted on the concrete floor. I wondered if he’d sat like that all night or if he’d slept.
Next person I saw was a cleaner. He moved into view outside our bars. This was a very old guy with a broom. An old black man with a fringe of snow-white hair. Bent up with age. Fragile like a wizened old bird. His orange prison uniform was washed almost white. He must have been eighty. Must have been inside for sixty years. Maybe stole a chicken in the Depression. Still paying his debt to society.
He stabbed the broom randomly over the corridor. His spine forced his face parallel to the floor. He rolled his head like a swimmer to see from side to side. He caught sight of Hubble and me and stopped. Rested on his broom and shook his head. Gave a kind of reflective chuckle. Shook his head again. He was chuckling away. An appreciative, delighted chuckle. Like at long last, after all these years, he’d been granted the sight of a fabled thing. Like a unicorn or a mermaid. He kept trying to speak, raising his hand as if his point was going to require emphasis. But every time, he’d start up with the chuckling again and need to clutch the broom. I didn’t hurry him. I could wait. I had all weekend. He had the rest of his life.
“Well, yes indeed.” He grinned. He had no teeth. “Well, yes indeed.”
I looked over at him.
“Well, yes what, Granddad?” I grinned back.
He was cackling away. This was going to take a while.
“Yes indeed,” he said. Now he had the chuckling under control. “I’ve been in this joint since God’s dog was a puppy, yes sir. Since Adam was a young boy. But here’s something I ain’t never seen. No sir, not in all those years.”
“What ain’t you never seen, o
ld man?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, “I been here all these years, and I ain’t never seen anybody in that cell wearing clothes like yours, man.”
“You don’t like my clothes?” I said. Surprised.
“I didn’t say that, no sir, I didn’t say I don’t like your clothes,” he said. “I like your clothes just fine. A very fine set of clothes, yes sir, yes indeed, very fine.”
“So what’s the story?” I asked.
The old guy was cackling away to himself.
“The quality of the clothes ain’t the issue,” he said. “No sir, that ain’t the issue at all. It’s the fact you’re wearing them, man, like not wearing the orange uniform. I never saw that before, and like I say, man, I been here since the earth cooled, since the dinosaurs said enough is enough. Now I seen everything, I really have, yes sir.”
“But guys on the holding floor don’t wear the uniform,” I said.
“Yes indeed, that sure is true,” the old man said. “That’s a fact, for sure.”
“The guards said so,” I confirmed.
“They would say so,” he agreed. “Because that’s the rules, and the guards, they know the rules, yes sir, they know them because they make them.”
“So what’s the issue, old man?” I said.
“Well, like I say, you’re not wearing the orange suit,” he said.
We were going around in circles here.
“But I don’t have to wear it,” I said.
He was amazed. The sharp bird eyes locked in on me.
“You don’t?” he said. “Why’s that, man? Tell me.”
“Because we don’t wear it on the holding floor,” I said. “You just agreed with that, right?”
There was a silence. He and I got the message simultaneously.
“You think this is the holding floor?” he asked me.
“Isn’t this the holding floor?” I asked him at the same time.
The old guy paused a beat. Lifted his broom and crabbed back out of sight. Quickly as he could. Shouting incredulously as he went.
“This ain’t the holding floor, man,” he whooped. “Holding floor is the top floor. Floor six. This here is floor three. You’re on floor three, man. This is lifers, man. This is categorized dangerous people, man. This ain’t even general population. This is the worst, man. Yes, indeed, you boys are in the wrong place. You boys are in trouble, yes indeed. You gonna get visitors. They gonna check you boys out. Oh man, I’m out of here.”
EVALUATE. LONG EXPERIENCE HAD TAUGHT ME TO EVALUATE and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive. First of all you evaluate. Analyze the situation. Identify the downside. Assess the upside. Plan accordingly. Do all that and you give yourself a better chance of getting through to the other stuff later.
We were not in the holding pens on the sixth floor. Not where unconvicted prisoners should be. We were among dangerous lifers on the third. There was no upside. The downside was extensive. We were new boys on a convict floor. We would not survive without status. We had no status. We would be challenged. We would be made to embrace our position at the absolute bottom of the pecking order. We faced an unpleasant weekend. Potentially a lethal one.
I remembered an army guy, a deserter. Young guy, not a bad recruit, went AWOL because he got some nut religion. Got into trouble in Washington, demonstrating. Ended up thrown in jail, among bad guys like on this floor. Died on his first night. Anally raped. An estimated fifty times. And at the autopsy they found a pint of semen in his stomach. A new boy with no status. Right at the bottom of the pecking order. Available to all those above him.
Assess. I could call on some heavy training. And experience. Not intended for prison life, but it would help. I had gone through a lot of unpleasant education. Not just in the army. Stretching right back into childhood. Between grade school and high school military kids like me get to go to twenty, maybe thirty new schools. Some on bases, most in local neighborhoods. In some tough places. Philippines, Korea, Iceland, Germany, Scotland, Japan, Vietnam. All over the world. The first day at each new school, I was a new boy. With no status. Lots of first days. I quickly learned how to get status. In sandy hot schoolyards, in cold wet school-yards, my brother and I had slugged it out together, back to back. We had got status.
Then in the service itself, that brutality was refined. I was trained by experts. Guys who traced their own training back to World War Two, Korea, Vietnam. People who had survived things I had only read about in books. They taught me methods, details, skills. Most of all they taught me attitude. They taught me that inhibitions would kill me. Hit early, hit hard. Kill with the first blow. Get your retaliation in first. Cheat. The gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t there to train anybody. They were already dead.
AT SEVEN THIRTY THERE WAS A RAGGED CLUNK ALONG THE row of cells. The time switch had unlocked the cages. Our bars sagged open an inch. Hubble sat motionless. Still silent. I had no plan. Best option would be to find a guard. Explain and get transferred. But I didn’t expect to find a guard. On floors like this they wouldn’t patrol singly. They would move in pairs, possibly in groups of three or four. The prison was understaffed. That had been made clear last night. Unlikely to be enough manpower to provide groups of guards on each floor. Probability was I wouldn’t see a guard all day. They would wait in a crew room. Operate as a crash squad responding to emergencies. And if I did see a guard, what would I say? I shouldn’t be here? They must hear that all day long. They would ask, who put you here? I would say Spivey, the top boy. They would say, well that’s OK then, right? So the only plan was no plan. Wait and see. React accordingly. Objective, survival until Monday.
I could hear the grinding as the other inmates swung back their gates and latched them open. I could hear movement and shouted conversation as they strolled out to start another pointless day. I waited.
Not long to wait. From my tight angle on the bed, head away from the door, I saw our next-door neighbors stroll out. They merged with a small knot of men. They were all dressed the same. Orange prison uniform. Red bandannas tight over shaved heads. Huge black guys. Obviously bodybuilders. Several had torn the sleeves off their shirts. Suggesting that no available garment could contain their massive bulk. They may have been right. An impressive sight.
The nearest guy was wearing pale sunglasses. The sort which darken in the sun. Silver halide. The guy had probably last seen the sun in the seventies. May never see it again. So the shades were redundant, but they looked good. Like the muscles. Like the bandannas and the torn shirts. All image. I waited.
The guy with the sunglasses spotted us. His look of surprise quickly changed to excitement. He alerted the group’s biggest guy by hitting his arm. The big man looked round. He looked blank. Then he grinned. I waited. The knot of men assembled outside our cell. They gazed in. The big guy pulled open our gate. The others passed it from hand to hand through its arc. They latched it open.
“Look what they sent us,” the big guy said. “You know what they sent us?”
“What they sent us?” the sunglasses guy said.
“They sent us fresh meat,” the big guy answered.
“They sure did, man,” the sunglasses guy said. “Fresh meat.”
“Fresh meat for everybody,” the big guy said.
He grinned. He looked around his gang and they all grinned back. Exchanged low fives. I waited. The big guy stepped half a pace into our cell. He was enormous. Maybe an inch or two shorter than me but probably twice as heavy. He filled the doorway. His dull eyes flicked over me, then Hubble.
“Yo, white boy, come here,” he said. To Hubble.
I could sense Hubble’s panic. He didn’t move.
“Come here, white boy,” the big guy repeated. Quietly.
Hubble stood up. Took half a pace toward th
e man at the door. The big guy was glaring with that rage glare that is supposed to chill you with its ferocity.
“This is Red Boy territory, man,” the big guy said. Explaining the bandannas. “What’s whitey doing in Red Boy territory?”
Hubble said nothing in reply.
“Residency tax, man,” the big guy said. “Like they got in Florida hotels, man. You got to pay the tax. Give me your sweater, white boy.”
Hubble was rigid with fear.
“Give me your sweater, white boy,” he said again. Quietly.
Hubble unwrapped his expensive white sweater and held it out. The big man took it and threw it behind him without looking.
“Give me the eyeglasses, white boy,” he said.
Hubble flicked a despairing glance up at me. Took off his gold glasses. Held them out. The big man took them and dropped them to the floor. Crunched them under his shoe. Screwed his foot around. The glasses smashed and splintered. The big man scraped his foot back and flicked the wreckage backward into the corridor. The other guys all took turns stamping on them.
“Good boy,” the big guy said. “You paid the tax.”
Hubble was trembling.
“Now come here, white boy,” said his tormentor.
Hubble shuffled nearer.
“Closer, white boy,” the big man said.
Hubble shuffled nearer. Until he was a foot away. He was shaking.
“On your knees, white boy,” said the big guy.
Hubble knelt.
“Unzip me, whitey,” he said.
Hubble did nothing. Filled with panic.
