Lights Out

1

Man is the word. You can’t stop hearing it when you’re inside. “You crazy, man?” “You fuckin’ with me, man?” “Fuck you, man.” “Shi’, man.” “Sheet, man.” “Shit, man.” It doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just an itch that no one can stop scratching, a sore tooth no one can stop probing.

Fifteen years is a long time for scratching and probing, longer when there’s nothing to do but mop floors and sew mailbags, all for fifty-five cents an hour. You’ve got to find ways of making time go faster. Nails-during his third year they started calling him Nails, but his real name was Eddie Nye-Nails took up weight lifting. That made time go faster, but not fast enough. What he needed was a way to make time disappear. That’s what led him to reading. Nails probably hadn’t read a book in his life, except for high-school assignments, and, much earlier, Muskets and Doubloons, but in the room they called the library, with its blue-white strip lighting, steel chairs and tables bolted to the floor, yawning corrections officers, he ploughed through everything on the shelves. He started with Max Brand. After a while he learned that the better the book, the closer time shrank to the vanishing point. Seven years later he was reading Tolstoy, still searching for the story so perfect it would kill time dead. Old books were better. Nothing written in the twentieth century worked at all.

Poems were best, especially long ones with rhymes and a beat. One day Eddie came upon “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He returned to it over and over, not unlike a child who can’t stop looking at a bloody crucifixion on the wall at Grandma’s house.

Eddie read the papers too. Funny thing about the papers. Although he read every word, including the weather in places he’d never heard of and subjects he had no interest in, like the stock market, recipes, dance reviews, he somehow didn’t get it. Everything just floated by-megabytes, Japanese cars, yuppies, the end of the Cold War, all that. Eddie knew things were happening, but they were far away and meaningless. Like looking through binoculars from the wrong end. Of course, you could say it was Eddie who was far away. He had to be, to get away from time.

Not that he didn’t want out. That happens to some of the longtimers, but didn’t happen to Eddie. It wasn’t that he had plans: he couldn’t form any. But he wanted out, all right, so bad that with two or three months to go he started getting wired. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t sit still. In consequence, his memory of events in those months wasn’t too clear. It lacked, for example, some of the details, the nuances, of El Rojo’s first contact.

At the time, Eddie had a cell on the first tier of the north wing of F-Block. Cell F-31 measured four paces from the bars to the seatless steel toilet, a pace and a half from the steel bunks to the steel side wall. Eddie had the top bunk, Prof slept on the bottom. Prof wasn’t in for long. Forgery. Three and a half to eight, but probably much less with parole. Eddie had had lots of cellmates-Gerald, who had split his wife’s skull with his son’s Little League bat; Moonie, who’d shot some bystanders in a drive-by; Grodowicz, who’d botched a kidnapping by detouring to sodomize the hostages; Rafael DeJesus, a smuggler and occasional killer of illegal aliens who’d taught Eddie Spanish; a kid whose name Eddie no longer remembered, who hadn’t been able to stop stealing cars and had finally run over twins in a twin stroller at the end of a high-speed chase; Jonathan C. McBright, a professional bank robber and by far the easiest to live with; another guy who’d killed his wife, but unlike Gerald denied it and cried in the night; and others, who’d done more of the same.

They came, they put up their decorations, they served their time or got paroled, got transferred, got killed, or killed themselves. Eddie kept his distance from his cellmates, from everybody. That was the secret of being a successful con. When they were gone, Eddie took down their decorations, tossed them in the corridor at mopping-up time, nodded hello to the next arrival. He never put up decorations of his own.

Prof was almost as austere. He’d taped just two pictures to the wall above his bunk. One was a studio portrait of his wife, Tiffany, and their two kids, all wearing matching reindeer sweaters and smiling like the kind of family used for selling something wholesome. The other, much bigger, was a photo of a powerfully built woman with a two-pronged dildo inserted into her body and an impatient expression on her face, as though she was already late to her next appointment. The juxtaposition of the pictures didn’t seem to bother Prof; maybe he didn’t even notice. Eddie noticed, but it didn’t bother him. In fifteen years he’d seen everything, everything that could be taped to a wall.

Something clicked in the steel walls of F-Block. Eddie heard Prof sit up on the bottom bunk. “Hey, big guy, whaddya know?” he said. The barred door slid open. “We’re free.” Prof had a sense of humor. Not as good as Rafael DeJesus’s though. DeJesus had been really funny. He’d even performed at Catch A Rising Star once, after jumping bail.

Prof went into the corridor. Eddie heard it fill quickly with restless, noisy men. They’d been in lockdown for five days, all because Willie Boggs had lost another appeal. That had led to a demonstration of Willie’s supporters outside, a demonstration covered by local news and therefore seen inside. The footage had fed delusions of hope on death row, causing a commotion that spread to Max and then to F-Block. Lock-down reminded everyone what the situation really was and that all Willie’s pastors, ACLU lawyers, and anti-death penalty crusaders-including the head of Amnesty International, the justice ministers of two Scandinavian countries, and Mother Teresa-couldn’t put Humpty together again. The only appeal left was to the governor’s clemency, of which in his ten years of office he had shown none.

Eddie climbed down off the bunk. He took his Remington cordless from his lockless locker and shaved his face by touch. Mirrors had been confiscated years ago, following a shard slashing on the third tier. Fat drops of blood had plopped down onto the floor outside F-31, as though from a roof after the passing of a red storm. Eddie ran his fingers over the top of his head, felt stubble. He shaved that too, feeling the razor buzz against his naked skull. Not unpleasant.

He went out, into the line of men moving toward the checkpoint that led to the mess hall. He smelled their smells, saw the details on their unsunned skins, the details he always saw, couldn’t not see, although they no longer made an impression: the scars, the bruises, the dried semen stains, the open sores, the tattoos. Eddie had a tattoo on the inside of his left biceps, self-administered with a sharpened pocket comb and a bottle of red food coloring during his only stay in the hole, at the end of year two. In block letters about half an inch high it said “Yeah?” It was a joke he no longer got.

Eddie passed through the scanner but turned into the east wing before he got to the mess hall, and walked to the library. “Not eatin’, Nails?” said the C.O. outside the door, patting him down. Eddie went inside, making no reply. “Got to keep your strength up,” the guard called after him. “For when you’re in the real world.”

Eddie sat in his favorite chair, the only one in the library not bolted to the floor. Left over from an earlier era, it was a sagging armchair, spavined and sprung, too heavy to be used as a weapon. He was almost finished with the morning paper, in the middle of a book review on the last page that was panning a novel because it contained “elements of melodrama,” when Willie Boggs shuffled in, a C.O. on either side, loosely grasping his mahogany-colored arms above the elbow. Willie had a proud face and erect bearing; he only shuffled because of the shackles around his ankles. He saw Eddie and nodded. Eddie nodded back. Willie looked the way he always did, except that the skin bordering his lips might have been a little chalky. He took a few books off the law shelf and sat at a table. The C.O.s unlocked his handcuffs and sat beside him, eyes glazing almost at once. Willie opened a book, found the page he wanted, took out a note pad, started writing. He was the best writ-writer in the system. That’s why he was still alive.

Eddie folded up the paper and took down the collected Coleridge. Coleridge opened to “The Ancient Mariner” by itself; in fact to page 248, where the central problem was. Eddie stared at the stanza:

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-

Why look’st thou so?”-With my cross-bow

I shot the ALBATROSS.

No explanation, unless you count the small-print text in the left-hand margin-“The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen”-and Eddie didn’t consider it much of an explanation, didn’t even know if the small print was part of the poem or added later by someone else. No explanation. In one verse everything’s cool with the bird, in the next the guy plugs it. Why? Eddie had been through it a thousand times, without getting any closer to the answer. That didn’t mean much. Eddie knew there must be plenty he didn’t understand about “The Ancient Mariner.” For example, it had only recently struck him that there might be a reason the mariner stopped only one of the three wedding guests, instead of telling the story to all of them. Maybe the wedding guest wasn’t saying, “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” but, “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” So Eddie wasn’t sure he even understood the first verse.

Just shot the albatross. Why? Because he was jealous it could fly? Because he wanted to suffer? Because he was afraid of sailing fast? Or just because it was possible to do? None of those answers felt right. It occurred to him that the shooting was melodramatic. Maybe the whole goddamn thing was melodramatic. The reviewer would have panned Coleridge too, if he’d been alive at the time.

Eddie looked up. Willie Boggs and his guards were gone. Another man sat at the long table, alone. He was reading Business Week. This, Eddie realized, was his first close look at the state’s most famous inmate. El Rojo, they called him. His face had been on the cover of Time magazine the week they’d caught him. The face reminded Eddie of a picture he’d seen in one of the books, a picture of a Spanish king, Charles the Something. He had red hair, translucent skin, a long nose, a long chin, long delicate fingers with long manicured nails. The only difference was that, as one of the founders of the Medellin cartel, he had probably been richer than all the kings of Spain put together. Maybe he still was. El Rojo shook his head at something he read and turned the page.

Eddie closed his eyes. True, he hadn’t been sleeping lately, but he’d been sleeping for almost fifteen solid years before that. He couldn’t be tired. But he kept his eyes shut anyway. Everyone said he had to make plans. He tried to picture himself in the future, outside. All he saw was the red lining of his eyelids. “Her lips were red, her looks were free, her locks were yellow as gold.” The specter LIFE-IN-DEATH. Was it important that she was a woman? Woman, in fact, with a capital W. Why?

“Arsewipe. Hey. I’m talkin’ to you. Arsewipe.”

Eddie opened his eyes. Standing over him was an inmate Eddie had never seen before. He was big. Prof called Eddie “big guy,” but Eddie wasn’t really big. When he’d come in, at nineteen, he’d been six one and weighed about one seventy. In fifteen years he’d added twenty pounds, mostly muscle, but he wasn’t big, not compared to the man calling him arsewipe. This man must have weighed three hundred pounds; not svelte, but not fat either. He had a slack, heavy face, long greasy hair, a long greasy beard, a few teeth, and a half-healed hole in his upper lip where a ring must have fit-jewelry was forbidden. It was like waking to a nightmare. Eddie closed his eyes. It wasn’t the first time.

“Hey. Arsewipe.” Eddie felt a kick on the sole of his right foot. A hard kick. He opened his eyes.

“I’m talkin’ to you. You’re in my chair.”

“Guess again,” Eddie said, conscious as he spoke of El Rojo’s gaze.

“Huh?” the big man said. He thought for a moment, mouth open. Eddie noticed that the big man was wearing a ring after all-a gold one stuck in the fleshy tip of his tongue. He gave Eddie another kick.

“You’re new,” Eddie said.

The big man’s forehead creased. “I’m new here. I’m not new to the scene, you fuckin’ fuckhead. I did four fuckin’ years in fuckin’ Q, man. And I always had a favorite fuckin’ chair in the fuckin’ library at fuckin’ Q. See? So get up. Unless you want me to tear your fuckin’ head off.” And he kicked again, this time with a windup. Eddie winced; he couldn’t help himself.

“You’re not giving me much choice,” he said.

“Move, faggot.”

Eddie rose. The big man, a head taller, took him by the shoulder and gave him a push to help him on his way. Eddie let himself be pushed, but at the same time he pivoted and stuck his hand into the middle of that slack face, stuck it right into the fleshy wet maw, sliding his index finger through that stupid tongue ring. The big man’s hands went up then, but he was much too slow. Eddie had curled his finger around the tongue ring; now he yanked.

First there was a ripping sound and the ring came free in Eddie’s hand. Then the big man spouted blood. The pain hadn’t quite hit him when Eddie caught one of his massive wrists in both hands, spun behind the broad back and jerked the wrist up as high as it would go. Something snapped in the big lump of shoulder; muffled by all the muscle, it sounded no louder than a breaking wishbone on Thanksgiving. The big man bellowed and fell forward on the table, not far from El Rojo. Did El Rojo move away at all, or simply sit there? That was the kind of detail Eddie couldn’t remember later.

The big man was moaning and writhing when C.O.s came bursting in. Eddie was sitting in his chair.

“What the fuck?” said one of the C.O.s.

“Melodrama happens in real life,” Eddie explained.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

El Rojo spoke. “The senor bit his tongue,” he said. “You know how that… what is the English word? Smarts? That doesn’t sound right.”

The C.O. opened his mouth, as though to say something. Then he closed it. They took the big man away. He left a pool of blood on the table. El Rojo noticed that it had spread to one corner of Business Week and seeped through the pages. He pushed the magazine away with distaste.

“Thanks,” Eddie said.

“Don’t mention it.” El Rojo examined something in his hand: the tongue ring. Eddie couldn’t remember how he’d gotten it. El Rojo slipped it into his shirt pocket and looked at Eddie. He had liquid amber eyes, like pools of maple syrup. “Melodrama happens in real life?” he said.

Eddie shrugged.

El Rojo smiled at him. He had the whitest smile Eddie had seen in fifteen years, marred by a missing canine. “Smoke?” he said, as though they were sitting in a quiet club somewhere.

“I’m trying to quit.” Quitting wasn’t easy inside, where cigarettes were money and the American Lung Association had no influence.

“For when you are released?” asked El Rojo. His voice too reminded Eddie of maple syrup; smooth like some old black-and-white screen star’s, one with a trace of accent.

Eddie made that connection, but he said: “How’d you know I was getting out?”

El Rojo answered with a question. “You’re the one they call Nails?”

“Yeah.”

“Everybody knows you. Or almost everybody,” he added, glancing at the pool of blood. Then he laughed. There was nothing cultured about his laughter. It sounded more like the utterance of a crow than of some black-and-white smoothie.

El Rojo shook two cigarettes out of a pack. “How can one more hurt you?” he asked. One of Eddie’s rules for life inside was to take nothing from anyone, and he was in El Rojo’s debt already, but he took the cigarette. What the hell. He was getting out. El Rojo lit a match, offered the flame to Eddie, then sucked at it himself. They exhaled two smoke clouds that became one in the air. “My name is Angel,” said El Rojo, giving it the Spanish pronunciation.

“It is?”

El Rojo showed his beautiful teeth. “Angel Cruz,” he said. “Cruz Rojo, you see. Kind of a joke.”

“Because you supply the medicine.”

El Rojo laughed his cawing laugh. “That’s part of it,” he said. “You’ve got brains. I like that.” He held out his hand. Eddie took it, felt the long, slightly damp fingers wrap around the back of his palm. Those fingers reminded him of something in “The Mariner,” but he couldn’t think what. He drew deeply on the cigarette. Cigarettes helped you think.

“See?” said El Rojo. “What’s one more?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, blowing another cloud of smoke. “I’m getting out.”

2

He was nineteen, still in many ways a boy; an athletic boy with a swimmer’s body, light hair, unmarred skin. Three lifers got him in the showers. One was called Louie. Louie was the best bridge player in the joint; he’d been working on his game for twenty years. Before that he’d raped and killed a sorority sister in Pennsylvania, was still cutting her up when the police arrived. The other two were overgrown and mildly retarded brothers from the Ozarks who did what Louie said. Louie could have used one more helper. It took too long to get the boy down. They had to break his jaw and a few of his ribs. Even then, the boy kept thrashing until hit on the head with a cast-iron shower faucet ripped out of the wall. After that, they did what they wanted.

Day 5,478: his last. Eddie Nye awoke before six, remembered, disbelieved. Maybe it was only day 300 and he had dreamed the rest. “Christ,” he thought, but must have spoken aloud, because from the bottom bunk he heard Prof say, “What you got to be pissed about?” and he knew it was true.

Before breakfast, Eddie went through his locker. The clothes, all state issue, he tossed on the bunk. The books, magazines, and Remington cordless he left for Prof.

“Not takin’ the razor, man?” said Prof, watching from his bunk.

Eddie shook his head. He unstrapped his watch and handed it to Prof as well. “Hey,” said Prof.

“Just take it,” Eddie told him. He could feel Prof thinking: But I already got a watch; and What’s he pullin’? But Prof was too smart to say anything; at least, he wanted to leave the impression he was smart. Forgers were supposed to be smart, and maybe some still were. But Prof was a modern forger-he dealt in official documents, bribing government clerks for the real thing. And Eddie was past caring what was going on in Prof’s mind. All he wanted was to walk out of there clean, completely clean.

Eddie rummaged in the locker. At the bottom lay his mail. Four letters. The first, almost fifteen years old to the day, was a consolation note from his lawyer. Eddie had forgotten his name. He checked the letterhead: Glenn Weems, of Smith and Weems. Eddie tried to picture him and couldn’t.

The second, from Wm. P. Brice, Investigation and Security, was dated a few months later.

The third letter had come two years after that.

Eddie had written back, asking Molly Schumer to send a picture of herself. She had sent back letter number four: an envelope containing a photograph of the entire Red Legal Commune, posed on a lawn outside a brick row house with a raised fist painted on the door. Molly Schumer had circled her face in the photo. A round face, maybe a little plump, but laughing, and framed by golden curls that glinted in sunshine. She wore a tie-dyed shirt, tight around full breasts. A man in granny glasses had his arm around her shoulder, but everyone had their arms around everyone. Eddie had written back, asking for a picture of Molly all by herself, at the beach maybe. There had been no reply.

Eddie held his collected correspondence over the toilet, lit a match. The old paper ignited and flamed immediately, like a torch. Eddie was aware of Prof watching in fascination, not because he was burning letters or because fires were against the rules, but simply at the sight of fire itself. Eddie dropped the flaming wad into the steel bowl, wondering whether the Red Legal Commune still existed. “Do they still have communes, shit like that?” he asked Prof.

“Whaddya mean, exactly?”

Someone rapped on the bars. Eddie, stepping in front of the toilet, turned and saw a guard he didn’t know. He smelled smoke, heard Prof unwisely sniffing the air; but the C.O. didn’t appear to notice anything.

“Man wants to see you,” he said to Eddie. He had a pink pass in his hand.

“What man?”

“I don’t do interviews,” the guard said. “Move.”

Eddie moved, out of the cell, past the scanner, out of F, across the yard, into C, past the scanner, up to the third tier, along to C-93, the last cell. It was a single, the same size as all the other cells but containing only one bunk. El Rojo was sitting on it, staring at a photograph on his wall, or perhaps at nothing, listening to his cassette player. Eddie recognized the tune: “Malaguena.” El Rojo felt their presence and turned.

“My friend,” he said. “Ven aca.”

Eddie went in.

“Five minutes,” the C.O. said, and went away.

“Sit down,” El Rojo said.

Eddie sat on the bed. He looked at the picture on the wall. It showed a dark-haired boy of about nine or ten, riding a white horse. He wore an all-black cowboy outfit that looked like real leather and was aiming a pistol right at the camera. The pistol looked real too.

“My son,” El Rojo said. Eddie felt the other man’s gaze on his profile. “We call him Gaucho, although his real name is Simon. After the Liberator.”

Eddie wasn’t sure what liberator El Rojo was talking about, but he nodded anyway. Simon the Liberator was smiling; he had beautiful white teeth, a lot like his father’s.

“A fine boy,” El Rojo said. “And a dead shot.”

“Isn’t he a little young for that?”

“Too young to learn the importance of self-defense? I find that amusing, coming from a man of your reputation.” El Rojo smiled, revealing the missing tooth that differentiated the father’s smile from the son’s. “You must be something of a marksman yourself, amigo.”

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

Pause. “You shock me.” El Rojo’s maple-syrup eyes held Eddie in their gaze. “But you don’t do badly with a nail and an elastico, do you?” He laughed his crow laugh, kept laughing it for a long time, until a tear ran down his cheek. Then he laid his long hand on Eddie’s shoulder and gave a little squeeze. “To business,” said El Rojo. “Tell me your plans.”

“A steam bath,” Eddie said. “After that I’d only be guessing.”

He expected more laughter, but there was none. El Rojo nodded, as though a hunch had been confirmed. “I could use someone like you.”

How, Eddie wondered, flexing his shoulder slightly. El Rojo got the message and his hand fell away. I’ll be out and you’ll be here.

Did El Rojo read his mind? “Who can predict the future?” he said.

The judge who sentenced me, Eddie thought, deciding that El Rojo still didn’t know how bad it was. Why should Eddie be the one to tell him?

“Think about it,” El Rojo said.

“About what?”

“Employment. Good salaries and generous bonuses. No benefits, I’m afraid.”

“What kind of employment?”

“Steady employment, amigo. Do you mind if I offer some advice?”

Eddie didn’t mind.

“You’ve never been locked up before, have you?”

“I’ve been here for fifteen years.”

“I know that. But this is your first sentence.”

Eddie nodded.

“Then you’ve never been released before. Unlike me. As a young man, I spent two years in La Picota. My own fault. I failed to understand the system then, even the primitive system of ours. Two years. An important period in my development, I see now. But even more important was the lesson I learned when I got out.” He started to put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder again, changed his mind. “Time changes everything, amigo,” he went on. “So you cannot simply resume life where you left off. And I suspect that is what you want to do.”

“I wasn’t busted in a steam bath,” Eddie said.

El Rojo showed his teeth. “I admire spirit,” he replied. “Regrettably, it counts for nothing in this world.”

The guard was at the door. El Rojo rose. Again they shook hands, again those long damp fingers stirred some memory. “Be seeing you,” El Rojo said.

Was it a joke? El Rojo had one of those three-digit sentences that get a judge’s name out in front of the public. Walking down the corridor with the C.O. behind him, Eddie laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You,” said Eddie. “Running errands for a con.”

The back of Eddie’s neck prickled, in anticipation of a blow. But the guard didn’t hit him; he just said, “Fuck you, asshole,” and without much force.

Before breakfast, Prof handed Eddie a cardboard tube. “Mind mailing this when you’re out?”

“Sure,” Eddie said, checking the address: 367 Parchman Ave. #3, Brooklyn, NY.

“A present for Tiffany. Here’s a pack of Camels to pay for the stamps.”

“Forget it.”

Breakfast was fried Spam, tapioca pudding, coffee. Eddie just had coffee. He didn’t want to take anything with him when he went, not even inside his body. With that in mind, he returned to F-31 and sat on the toilet. He was wiping himself when a C.O. came, one he knew. “Move it, Nails. You can jerk off all you like on the outside.”

“How’s that different from here?” Eddie said, getting up.

They went down to the showers. It was an open room off the gym with a cement floor and faucets spaced around the walls. The C.O. stood outside the door while Eddie stripped off his inmate denims and scrubbed under a stream of water that was never hot enough. He thought to himself: Yes. I can go to a steam bath somewhere. I can do it today.

The Ozark brothers had been easy. They liked to work out together with heavy weights, one lifting, the other acting as safety. The boy had walked up one morning when they were all alone at the bench press, Brother A on his back, grunting under a bar bent with weights, Brother B leaning over him to help lower the bar in the bracket at the end of the set. They had the music cranked up and didn’t hear a thing. The boy didn’t think. He just picked up a ten-pound barbell and brought it down on the back of Brother B’s head. Brother B fell forward onto the heavy bar Brother A was just raising on his last rep. The bar came down on Brother A’s Adam’s apple-the boy caught the look of comprehension dawning in his eyes as it slipped from his grasp-then crashed to the floor. They found A and B lying face to face, belly to belly, on the bench.

Eddie toweled off. The C.O. handed him a brown-paper package. Inside Eddie found a suit of clothes. Not a suit, exactly-a bright green short-sleeved shirt, beige trousers with belt loops, a brown leather belt, white socks, BVDs, a khaki windbreaker-but civilian clothes. Eddie found that his hands were trembling as he got dressed. He realized he was nervous. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt in a long time. What did he have to be nervous about? He was getting out.

“No shoes,” the C.O. said. “The taxpayers won’t spring for shoes. But they still throw in the belt.”

It was the belt that counted, of course. Eddie hadn’t worn a belt in fifteen years. He buckled it and said: “Now I can string myself up whenever I want.”

“Be my guest.”

Eddie laced on his old and smelly basketball high-tops and picked up Prof’s cardboard tube. Then they went up the stairs, through the scanner, and out of F-Block. The yard was full of men in denim. Eddie felt a little funny in his green shirt. They went past a touch football game. There was a brief pause as Eddie went by. He felt eyes on him. Then someone said, “Snap the ball, shithead,” leather smacked flesh, and Eddie walked through another scanner and into Admin.

The C.O. knocked on a door that said “Director of Treatment.” The door opened, but before Eddie could go in, an inmate came out. El Rojo. He stopped, smiled his white but gap-toothed smile.

“Amigo,” he said. “Today’s the day, no?”

As if they hadn’t been talking an hour ago. “Yup,” Eddie said.

“Excellent.” El Rojo leaned against the wall, in no hurry, took out cigarettes, offered one to Eddie.

“No, thanks,” Eddie said.

El Rojo laid his long-fingered hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Gentle, but Eddie felt the strength in those fingers, and the dampness. And he remembered the image that had eluded him:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

“Smoke it later, my friend, outside,” El Rojo was saying. He lowered his voice. “After.”

“After what?”

El Rojo kept his voice low. “After you get laid for me.” A burst of crow laughter followed, was quickly throttled.

“Get laid for you?” asked Eddie, looking into the maple-syrup eyes, aware of complexity in their depths, beyond his understanding.

“It will make me happy just to think about it,” El Rojo replied.

Eddie shrugged, took the cigarette, and put it in the pocket of his green shirt. El Rojo removed his hand from Eddie’s shoulder, extended it for shaking.

“Adios.”

“So long.” That was the truth, given El Rojo’s sentence and the fact that Eddie wasn’t coming back.

Eddie went in. He smelled a piney smell and thought of Christmas. The director of treatment, sitting at his desk behind a sign saying “Floyd K. Messer, M.D., Ph.D.,” had the right body type for the Santa role. He had fat cheeks, reddened by the sun-photographs of him posing beside hooked game fish hung on the walls. He had curly graying hair and a trim gray beard that, grown out, might have looked just right. All he needed was to learn how to make his eyes twinkle.

Dr. Messer was gazing at a computer screen, his fat white fingers poised over the keyboard. “Take a pew, son,” he said, without looking up.

Eddie sat down on the other side of the desk. The piney smell was stronger. “What kind of treatment program you putting him on?” Eddie said.

Dr. Messer looked up. “Who would you be talking about, son?”

“El Rojo, or whatever the hell his name is.”

Dr. Messer gave him a long stare. “Is that any business of yours?” Dr. Messer waited for an answer. When none came, his fat fingers descended on the keys. “Nye,” he murmured, tapping slowly. “Edward Nicholas.” There was a pause. Then he put on a pair of glasses and bent closer to the machine. From where he sat, Eddie couldn’t see the screen; he watched the tiny green letters reflected in the doctor’s glasses.

“You’ve done a long stretch,” Dr. Messer said, still murmuring but a little more loudly now, so that Eddie wasn’t sure if he was still talking to himself. “Comparatively,” the doctor added. He looked puzzled. For a wild moment, Eddie thought that something had happened, that they weren’t going to let him go. The pores in his armpits opened; a drop of sweat rolled down his ribs, under the new green shirt. Dr. Messer tapped at the keys. “You should have been out in less than…” Tiny words scrolled down his lenses. Dr. Messer searched for their meaning in silence. Eddie realized that everything was all right. It was just that Dr. Messer didn’t know who he was, didn’t remember.

How many years had passed since he had last been in this office? Eddie wasn’t sure, but he recalled the occasion clearly. It was during the period of Dr. Messer’s enthusiasm for soliciting inmate volunteers for drug-company tests. Eddie had agreed to take one little red pill a day for six weeks. At the beginning, someone from the drug company had given him a local anesthetic and taken one gram of muscle from inside his forearm. At the end, another gram was required, for comparison. By that time, Dr. Messer had been trained in the procedure. He took the gram himself, but something went wrong with the anesthetic, although Dr. Messer hadn’t believed Eddie about that, and then, with the big square-ended instrument dug deep in his flesh, it was too late for Eddie to do anything without making things worse. The arm had been useless for months. The drug company paid Eddie ninety dollars-forty for each procedure and ten for taking the pills. He’d spent it at the canteen, mostly on Pepsi, ripple potato chips, and cigarettes.

Dr. Messer said: “Ah.” He nodded to himself, removed his glasses and turned to Eddie. Christmas-tree smell wafted across the desk. “Well, son. Got any plans? Thirty-four’s not old, not in this day and age.”

Eddie said: “What were the results of the experiment?”

Dr. Messer blinked. “Experiment?” His forehead creased in a way Santa’s never would. “I asked you about your plans.”

“Plans?” said Eddie.

“Like what you’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next year,” Dr. Messer explained impatiently.

“Steam bath,” Eddie said.

The forehead creases deepened. “You want to work in a steam bath?”

Eddie was silent.

Dr. Messer took a deep breath and said: “What did you do before?”

“Before?”

“Before here.” The impatient tone was back, beyond the control of deep-breathing techniques.

Eddie considered his answer. What had he done? There’d been swimming, of course. And Jack, Galleon Beach, Mandy, the Packers, the whole fuckup. “Not much,” Eddie said. The names, their syllables strange and familiar as returning to the house you were born in, stayed in his mind. “But as a friend of mine says,” he added, “you can’t expect to take up where you left off.”

“Your friend sounds wise.”

“For an ax murderer,” Eddie said, stretching the truth a little.

Dr. Messer, long accustomed to conversation with those less bright than himself, took another deep breath. “The point is it’s expensive outside these walls. In here we give you your three squares per and a place to sleep. Out there you got to earn it. You’re gonna need a job. Unless you’re in line for a fat inheritance or something.” Dr. Messer turned up the corners of his mouth to show he was being funny. Eddie said nothing. Dr. Messer’s lips turned down. He tapped the screen with his glasses. “Says here you’re an ‘inadequate personality.’ Know what that means?”

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

Dr. Messer’s fat fingers tightened slightly around the frames of his glasses. “That just proves the point, son.” He tapped the screen again, harder now. Maybe it was a symbolic way of knocking sense into Eddie. Or just knocking him. “Five to fifteen, but everybody knows you’re out in three and a half, four. Any half-assed adequate personality would’ve been. Any half-assed adequate personality wouldn’t have fucked up his parole. But you did the whole nickel and dime, like the dumbest con in the joint.”

All at once, Eddie thought: Why do I have to listen to this anymore? I’m gone. He looked into the untwinkling eyes and said: “In your opinion.”

“In my opinion?” Dr. Messer’s voice rose, but not much, a few decibels. The door opened and the C.O. stuck his head in.

“Everything okay, Dr. Messer?” He wasn’t gone yet.

“Couldn’t be better.”

The door closed. “Tell you something,” Dr. Messer said, starting to smile. “I’ve been in corrections for twenty-three years. It’s the shittiest work in the world. The pay is shitty, the benefits are shitty, the hours are shitty. But the shittiest part is, you got to deal with the likes of you. One look and I know your whole story, past, present, and future. And you know something, son? Summing up, so to speak? I’ll be seeing you again. Soon.” He was smiling broadly now, but resembling Santa less and less. He tossed a brown envelope at Eddie. Eddie caught it and started to rise.

“Count it,” Dr. Messer said. “Just so’s there’s no misunderstandings.”

Eddie opened the envelope and counted his gate money. Three hundred and thirty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. It wasn’t a gift. That’s what he’d earned, minus what he’d spent in the canteen.

“Sign here.”

Eddie wrote “Edward N. Nye” on a form Messer slid across the desk. Then he stuck the money in the pocket of his new pants and went out. There were no good-byes.

The C.O. led him along a corridor and down a damp stairway. They entered a dark space. The only light came from a dusty ceiling bulb. It shone on a white station wagon with government plates. “Get in,” said the C.O.

Eddie stepped forward, fumbled for a moment with the door-it had a recessed handle he was unfamiliar with-and climbed in the backseat. From the front came a voice: “Hokay?”

“Okay what?” said Eddie.

The driver turned to him and shrugged. He was a dark-skinned man with a thin mustache and a Tampa Bay baseball cap. Did Tampa Bay have a team? “No hablo ingles,” said the driver.

He switched on the engine. A big door opened in front of them, exposing a rectangle of dazzling light. They drove out into it.

Out, along a couple hundred feet of pavement that led to the perimeter fence, where guards checked under the hood, under the seats, under the chassis, and waved them through. The guards, their shotguns, the fence, the gate, all blurred in Eddie’s vision. The light was so bright it hurt his eyes, made them water uncontrollably. Was one of the guards staring at him? Don’t think I’m crying, motherfucker, Eddie thought. It’s nothing like that-just this light.

Out, past a woman in black holding a sign that read “Free Willie Boggs,” and onto a highway with other cars, a highway lined with other signs, signs Eddie tried to read through the dazzlement: Motel 6, Mufflers 4U, Lanny’s Used Tires, Bud Lite, Pink Lady Lounge, All the Shrimp You Cn Eat $6.95, XXX Video, Happy Hour. The driver turned on the radio. “… skies overcast, temperature in the mid sixties,” it said; then the driver switched to a Spanish station where an announcer was saying the same thing. Overcast? Eddie looked out. He saw no clouds, but the sky wasn’t blue. It was gold-thick, dense, rich; all the way down to the ground.

And then his gaze fell on the side mirror. He saw a medieval vision in it: a fortress of stone, shimmering in the glare. Eddie had never seen his prison before, not from the outside. They had brought him in at night. Now he watched in the mirror as the gray walls shrank, their lines lost distinction, wavering in the golden light. It might have been a mirage.

Louie. Louie hadn’t been so easy. Louie knew what had happened to the Ozark brothers, even if no one else did. Had the boy made plans or simply seized an opportunity? Louie didn’t know, and what difference did it make? He could never be alone, that was all.

It took two years. The boy-although there wasn’t much boy left by that time-found a half-inch-wide elastic band one day, wrapped around a discarded envelope in the yard. If he’d had a coat hanger or a cleft stick the rest would have been easy, but coat hangers were forbidden and there were no trees in the yard. He tried to stretch the band between his thumb and index finger, but it was too thick. The only way was to take one end of the band in his teeth and pull with his left hand. That left the right hand free.

He stole a four-inch nail from the shop, carried it through the strip search glued to his palate, hanging down his throat. Back in his cell he took it out, along with part of the lining of the roof of his mouth. Late at night he would practice, holding the band taut between his teeth and his left hand, setting the head of the nail in the band, pulling it back, firing into his pillow for silence. A technique that took a long time to perfect, but that was the one thing he had.

Louie liked to play bridge at a table in a corner of the rec room. The boy took to playing Ping-Pong. The first time he came in, Louie didn’t take his eyes off him. The boy didn’t even glance at Louie. He just played Ping-Pong. He was good at it. He came every afternoon. Louie got used to his presence. He got used to the fact that sometimes the ball got away and a player had to come over to the bridge table and pick it up. He got used to the boy coming to pick it up.

Money was bet at those bridge games, although it changed hands later. And Louie took most of it-he knew how to bid, how to count cards, how to cheat if he had to. It was a lot to think about. One afternoon, Louie was wondering whether to go to six spades when the Ping-Pong ball came bouncing across the floor. Louie heard it but didn’t look up, not until he felt a stillness in the room. Then he saw the boy kneeling on the floor, at the far side of the table, in a funny sideways position, yanking at a rubber band held between his teeth and squinting right at the middle of Louie’s forehead. It was so weird, he never saw the nail at all.

“Hokay,” said the driver, pulling into a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.

Eddie got out. The white station wagon backed up, wheeled around, was gone. Eddie stood in the middle of the lot. From the sky came a tremendous chirping din. Eddie looked around, not aware at first of its source. He located it, finally, in the branches of a sick-looking scrub pine at the edge of the lot-a single brown bird he couldn’t identify. A bird. Its song stunned him. He remembered:

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky

I heard the sky-lark sing;

Sometimes all little birds that are,

How they seemed to fill the sea and air

With their sweet jargoning!

Eddie never had figured out “jargoning,” but now he understood the exclamation mark and, wiping his eyes, thought of getting down and kissing the pavement of the Dunkin’ Donuts lot. A funny idea; it made him laugh out loud. He heard his own laughter, didn’t like the sound, stopped.

No one likes a card sharp, so no one liked Louie, and no one talked. That was enough to keep the boy from getting life. It wasn’t enough to stop them from withdrawing parole. The normal laissez-faire toward popular killings doesn’t apply when you’re inside. Nails. At first black humor, later just his name.

Cars whizzed by on the highway. Eddie watched them for a while, then gazed through the window of Dunkin’ Dunuts where people sat at a counter, sipping, chewing, talking, doing the crossword. Then he noticed the bus station next door. A Greyhound Americruiser was scrolling through its destinations: Jax, Atlanta, Baltimore, Philly, NY. Eddie walked toward it. Ordinary walking. Didn’t mean a thing. He just felt like going that way and he did. A long stretch, he thought. Comparatively, as Dr. Messer had said. Especially comparatively for an innocent man.

A red convertible stopped nearby. A woman got out. She had thick black hair, red lips, smooth double-cream-coffee skin, long legs, and a short black leather skirt. Eddie couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was coming his way. Eddie forced himself to stop staring, turned toward the bus station.

“Hey you!”

Eddie kept going.

“Hey, you!”

Was she calling him? He turned back.

“Me?”

She laughed. She was close now, still coming toward him, her breasts jiggling under a little halter top, nipples protruding, hips swelling under the leather skirt: all these details spun through Eddie’s mind in confusion. “Yeah, you,” she said. “Wanna have some fun?”