Cypress Grove

Chapter Eighteen

You don’t use your time, it’ll sure use you. Don’t talk it, walk it. Putting money in the hat for those about to bail. Passing around meager, prized possessions-sheets, T-shirts, a transistor radio with extra batteries, Bob’s Bodyshop calendar-as you leave. Homilies, slogans, customs. A world of things, objects. As though the narrowness and inaction of our days had excised verbs themselves from our lives. (And the pervasive violence an effort to reinvest them?) Everything ended a few yards past our eyes; it had to. That’s what you did to get by, you drew everything in close to yourself, let short sight take over. Soon enough, imagination, too, started shutting down.

Homilies-and a lot of time staring at the join of cinder blocks. Counting them, tracking where at one end of the cell there’s maybe a hail-inch before the top line of mortar, at the other end almost two. Or where a previous tenant scraped away the mortar between blocks on the wall beside his bed and the toilet. Did he spend that much time on the toilet? Boredom, like blind faith, engenders strange errand lists.

Nine hundred and sixty-four cinder blocks, from where I sat.

Six weeks in, I wrote away to New Orleans and Chicago for transcripts. Nothing about this endeavor proved easy. While you were allowed two letters a month postage provided, sending money remained a tricky prospect, and both schools required five-dollar fees. The prison chaplain came to my aid. Reading those transcripts once I got them was like looking in the mirror and finding someone else’s face. Could I ever have been that callow? Had I actually taken a course called Revolutionary Precepts, and what on earth might it have been about? Two semesters of medieval history? I hadn’t a single concept, movement or date left over from that.

Who was this person?

Someone, apparently, who’d been on the express train, a dozen or so stops away from getting a master’s degree. Strange how I’d managed to forget that. Stranger still to wonder where all of it-all those hours and years of burrowing, the knowledge issuing from them, the ambition that led to them-might have gone. None of it seemed to be in me anymore.

By this time I’d suffered through a cellmate in the bunk above murmuring words aloud as he read from his Bible and another given to Donald Goines’s Whoreson, Swamp Man and Kenyatta novels. Then Adrian came along, by which time I myself sat nose sunk like a tomahawk in college catalogs and bulletins. Our gray, featureless submarine went on plowing its way through gray, featureless days. And I, it seemed, while still submerged could complete my degree courtesy of the state that held me in such cautious esteem.

Nowadays, of course, in the house Internet Jack built, there’d be nothing much to it. But back then the labors involved proved Herculean. Each month or so I’d receive a thick envelope of material. I was expected to read through it, write the papers required and complete a test at its end, then mail the whole thing back, whereupon another envelope would arrive.

That was the theory. But often two or three months would go by before I received a packet, at which time I might be handed three of them, one, or a mostly empty envelope. Could have been inmates with a grudge working the mail room, some guard’s petty meddling or arrogant notion of control, or it could have been just plain workaday pilferage. Never an explanation, of course, and you learned quickly, once those doors slammed shut behind you, never to question. Had it not been for the protection afforded me by fish-nor-fowl status and, later, by one teacher’s taking an unwarranted interest, I’m sure the college soon would have scoured me from its pot. But it didn’t. I’d gone into serious overdraft, but checks were still being cashed.

October of that second year, I received my M.A. The elaborate certificate, on heavy cream-colored bond replete with Gothic lettering and Latin, came rolled in a tube such as the ones in which other inmates received the Barbarella, Harley-Davidson and R. Crumb posters taped to the walls of their cells. University regents wished to inquire, an attached letter read, as to whether I would be continuing my education at their facility. Forever a quick study, having now survived inside and in addition found my way through thickets of university regulations, I felt as though I’d turned myself into some kind of facility veteran, slippery enough to slalom around raindrops, savvy enough to ride the system’s thermals. Better the facility you know. You bet I will be, I told university regents.

If every year April comes down the hill like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers, then October steps up to the plate glum and serious-never more than that one.

Lifting a pound or two of prison clothes off the counter, I’d picked up a ton of grief with them. That I’d been a cop was not supposed to get out. But guards knew, which meant everyone knew, and every one of them, inmates and guards alike, had good reason to despise the various shipwrecks that had cast them up here. They weren’t able to slit society’s neck or shove the handle of a plumber’s helper up Warden Petit’s rear end, but there I was. From the first, starting out small and escalating the way violence always does, I’d met with confrontations on the yard, at mealtime, in the showers, at workshop. Two months and half a dozen scrambles in, I received a rare invitation from Warden Petit himself-I hadn’t been able to back off fast enough, and guards, looking away, had given me time to break the guy’s jaw before moving in-who wanted to tell me how proud he was of the way I was handling myself.

“Thank you, Warden.”

“Tremendous pressures on you out there. I appreciate that, you know. I see it. They never let up on a man, do they?” A triangular patch of hair had been left behind on his forehead as the rest withdrew. He made a show of consulting papers on the desk before him. “Like a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Scotch?” His eyes came back up to mine. I’d been given a folding chair designed, apparently, for maximal discomfort. Reminded me of the bunk and toilet in my cell.

“You’re dripping blood on my floor.” He keyed the intercom. “Get Levison in here,” he said, then to me: “Don’t worry,” as he smiled. “We’re used to it. And it’s not really my floor, is it?”

Petit was like those guys who as hospital administrators a decade or so later would start calling themselves CEOs, wanting to live just a little large. He wore a light gray suit that made him resemble nothing so much as a block of cement with a head balanced atop. The head kept nodding and bobbing about like it wasn’t placed well and might topple off any minute. Hope springs eternal.

“Absolutely not mine. It’s the taxpayers’ floor.”

His personal floors, I had no doubt, would be scoured clean. By inmates or trustees if not by his own scab-kneed wife.

“You’d best get on down there. Medic’s waiting for you at the infirmary.”

I was almost through the door when he said: “Turner?”

I stopped.

“You’re on good road. What, two months more? Don’t let ’em skid you out. Do it easy.”

“Do my best.”

As I left, Levison, seventy-plus if he was a day, shuffled past me carrying bucket and mop. Squirt bottles and rags hung on his pants like artillery.

Next morning, this guy steps up to me in the shower. I see him coming, the shank held down along his leg, see the fix in his eyes. At the last moment I shove out my hand and swing the heel up hard. The shank, a sharpened spoon, pierces his chin, pins his tongue. He opens his mouth trying to talk and I see the tongue flailing about in there, only the tip able to move as he slides down the shower wall.

Was that enough? Did I have to kill him? I don’t know. At the time it seemed I’d been left no choice. Another homily, another of the commandments we live by, says once a man steps up to you, you have to put him down.

Neither did the courts feel they had much choice. In their hands my three-year sentence blossomed to twenty-five.