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 Medellín 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 señor 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
H
e 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.
Dear Mr. Ed Nye:
As I informed your brother, all our best efforts to locate the individual known as JFK have to this point in time been unsuccessful. Lacking further funds to continue, we are obliged to terminate the investigation.
Sincerely,
Bill Brice
The third letter had come two years after that.
Dear Mr. Nye:
We at the Red Legal Commune obtained your name from a list of state prisoners and have since learned something of your case. Although there is nothing we can do to assist you in a legal way, we are committed to demonstrating solidarity with our incarcerated brothers and sisters. Many of our supporters are interested in corresponding with inmates. If you are interested, please let us know at the above address.