by JT Pearson
An Unkindness of Ravens
By JT Pearson
copyright 2013 Joseph Pearson
“Hey, boss, I want to talk to you.”
“Go away.”
“Come on, Jeff, turn around.” The visitor sat down, his back against the bars, and his knees tucked in with his arms wrapped around them, inches from the edge of the bed that was snuggly fitted to the tiny confines. “I just need to tell you something.”
“You’re not real. Please go away, Jack. I want you to stop talking to me.” Jeff continued to lay motionlessly facing the wall, easily mistaken for dead if it weren’t for the occasional rise and fall of his rib cage.
“I’m as real as you are, boss.”
Jeff had been laying on that cot in that four by six foot cell facing the same wall, rotting by himself for nearly five years, separated from the regular prison population by recommendation of the prison psychiatrist. The doctor had classified Jeff as delusional, dangerous, confrontational, and irreverent, with an extreme aversion to authority. For years the doctor had been trying to get Jeff to participate in group therapy. Jeff’s real crime when he had been on the outside had been that he was poor. His daughter had needed an operation in order to live and he had nowhere near the money that it would cost. Desperation forced his hand to do the only thing that he could think of to get the money to save Heidi. He tried to knock off a bank. During the attempted robbery things went wrong when a guard decided that he was going to play hero. He sprung up from the floor where Jeff had asked him to lay still and wait until he was out of the building and pulled a gun that he’d had hidden on his ankle. Jeff shot him more out of surprise than anything else. The guard died instantly. Jeff got out of the bank with the money but was picked up by police later. An outside camera had picked him up removing his mask, and someone that knew him saw his face on the nightly news and tipped off the authorities. Jeff ended up getting sentenced to prison, and his daughter Heidi later died. And now, when the doctor spoke to Jeff about therapy he knew who really needed therapy. It was the bastards that would let a four year old girl go to the grave because her daddy didn’t make enough money to pay for all of the fancy gadgets and technology that were available for the rich. Jeff shifted on the cot causing the modest wool blanket to slip from his shoulder, revealing the durable jump suit that he’d been issued to wear since the day of his incarceration. It needed a good wash as much as his long dirty coffee-colored hair that splayed out on the bed to the middle of his back. His face was wrapped in a matted blonde and red beard. He’d gotten so thin wasting away on the cot that when the blanket wasn’t over him the definition of his spine could be seen through his coveralls. Lately, he had been suffering headaches so severe that it felt like he had an aggravated hornets’ nest where his brain should’ve been. Other times it felt like a winged creature was trapped in his skull and trying desperately to flap its way to freedom.
The visitor seated parallel to the foot of his cot had a tall, slender man’s body but a rabbit’s head. Jeff knew this without turning over to look at him because he had spent his third year behind bars talking hour after hour, month after month, to this strange being that had suddenly appeared to him. Eventually Jeff decided that Jack – the name that the figure had given him – was simply an imaginary companion that his mind had created in a moment of desperation. Anything to spell the loneliness.
“They’re going to give you an opportunity to get out of this place for a while, boss. The governor contacted the warden.”
BANG! Jeff twitched, while the rabbit nearly leapt from his skin.
“Son of a bitch! I hate that! I don’t know how you put up with that all of the time, boss. It gets me every time.”
The pipe that ran under Jeff’s cell either clanged loudly or clunked quietly whenever the hot water surged through it. Then the cell that was usually cold and damp feeling then became far too hot and humid. The two extreme conditions of his cell dancing dosey doe were a constant added torture.
“The boys from the big energy companies are lookin for all of the former dirt jockeys like you that they can find, and the government has given them the green light to look in places like this damned hole. The energy grid is still blowing up all over the country. They thought that it was the terrorists. Remember how they thought that, boss? But it wasn’t. It’s the new fuel. That CLX5912 wears everything thin, just burns up the walls of the lines and tanks and vats, everything, until it leaks, and then KABOOM! The big energy boys can’t even keep the stuff in those reinforced holding tanks. They gotta keep building new storage vats, one after the other, and transferring all of the fuel before it works a hole in the walls and explodes. That shit goes up as soon as it reaches the oxygen. Or sometimes it burns right down through the bottom of the tank into the earth and disappears. It’s a lot more potent than big energy realized when they redesigned the energy grid and converted the whole system over from the old stuff. We even run the Womb through the grid now. But now the country’s in it with both feet and there’s no turning back. We can’t afford to weaken the Womb and let the Chinese get in here with us. Mother has warned us that if we drop our defense shield she won’t intervene this time.” Mother was the name of the global group that had succeeded NATO. The Womb was the name of the dome of energy that protected the country from outside attacks, surrounding the United States from two hundred miles outside its entire perimeter. “No, no, can’t afford to let the Chinese get the drop on us you know, boss. Every place the lines make a turn in the energy grid the CLX5912 has been burning a hole in the wall that eventually causes an explosion. But you know big energy wouldn’t even shut the shit down if the Chinese gave us a respite, boss. Oh no, big energy couldn’t do that. It always comes down to green over red. Instead, they just send crews of dirt monkeys out there to bandage it so that we can keep the life blood of the greatest country the planet has ever known moving. Give me a break. Poor ol’ blue collar cowboys are blowing apart like cherry bombs. But you know how it is. We need the production. They can’t possibly shut a couple of lines down so that the men can work on it without getting vaporized when the grid springs a leak. You can’t slow down production, boss. You can’t do that.” Jack leaned his head back against the bars in frustration. “It’s a shit deal but we gotta take it.” He stretched his legs out under Jeff’s cot and sighed. “Are ya listenin at all, boss? We gotta get out of this place. I can’t take it in here much longer. I feel like I’m just about to snap. Go completely bonkers loco wild. Permanently leave the reservation this time, boss. I swear it’s going to happen. Let’s take the deal and get out on the outside for a little while. I need to breathe the air, see the sun, the chiquitas with their long legs. Heidi would want that for us. She would, boss. She really would.”
A second guard approached the guard that was already standing outside Jeff’s cell watching him.
“What did he say when you explained that the warden was going to talk to him?”
“I’m not sure he even hears me. I’ve been trying to talk to him for about an hour. He barely stirs. Mumbles once in a while.”
“You’d be lucky if you could manage mumbling once in a while after being confined by yourself for five years.”
The second guard leaned in to the bars in an attempt to get a better look at the man in the cell.
“I heard that he was a Native American. He don’t look like it to me.”
“Half. His daddy was white. Mama was a squaw. He grew up on the res and everything.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Just leave him be. The warden can deal with him if she wants to.”
Both guards walked away.
