Читать книгу You Are Free to Go - Sarah Yaw - Страница 8

Moses doesn’t have the opportunity to count blessings very often, so when he walks into the mail room, the seasoned wood of the counters and the boxes used for sorting that have been here since the prison’s beginning a century and a half ago, the old, oiled smell of the room, and the light tickle of her citrusy perfume move him. She stands on the other side of the low wall. She wears her uniform. Institutional slacks, a conservative white shirt tucked in, comfortable rubber shoes that let her stand for hours. A fuzzy lavender fleece cardigan keeps her warm. Her hair, shoulder-length, blond, soft and curled, is lightened by whispers of white. She lights him up the way a mother does her child. Lila is an island Moses claimed for himself when he was lucky enough to get transferred from laundry fourteen years ago.

“I’m glad you’re here, Moses,” she says, “We’re all backed up.”

She smiles. He grins. She pulls a brown paper package off the sorting table where she works, opening letters, removing contraband. “Surprise for you,” she says.

It’s no surprise. Moses has been waiting weeks. She brings him the box and, breaking protocol, hands him the letter opener only she uses. Like a kid who won’t rip the wrapping, he slices along the edges of the box and makes clean cuts. When he’s done he hands the opener back to her, and before he opens the box, she walks back to her sorting table and locks the letter opener in a drawer.

Moses waits for her to get back to his side before he flips up the top and looks in. He removes the bubble wrap and takes out his new glasses. They are in a brown faux leather slipcase. Attached to them is an envelope. It says, Please Read Carefully. He places the envelope on the table next to the box.

He’s not up on fashion since he’s been inside for thirty years, but he’s sure these glasses are ugly. Medium brown, solid plastic. The lenses are trapezoids with rounded edges; the nosepiece has an opening that shows the space between the eyebrows.

“Let’s see them on,” she says.

He’s embarrassed. Moses has always taken care of himself. Keeps fit and has always known he has a good look. His dark hair is slicked off his face. He could always get a girl with a sideways glance—he has that kind of eyes. He keeps his fresh mouth open in an irreverent smirk, which makes him look young and up to no good, and it used to drive the girls crazy. On the inside he maintains himself. Spends his eighteen cents an hour on the right things: Soap. Toothpaste. Shampoo. Hair gel. Cigarettes, his only luxury. Unlike some of these lowlifes who trade their commissary credits for drugs and think it’s OK to smell like they’re rotting from the gut out. Like Collin, Georgy, and Don. They hang around in the gallery of B block all day watching television, getting stoned. Georgy, that cross-eyed, pimple-faced illiterate, spends his whole day with a Hardenberg phone book trying to get people to read him numbers so he can call girls collect and hope someday someone will care he’s in here and pay him a visit. Moses doesn’t do that anymore. He used to, but he’s reformed. Accepts his punishment, tries not to cheat God.

“Put ‘em on,” she says. “Here, I’ll get you a mirror so you can see how you look.” She crosses the room to the locked door that leads to a small office where she keeps her essentials. Moses can’t be alone in the mailroom. He knows this. She looks back at him. He nods and she unlocks the door and disappears.

Moses puts the glasses on and opens the envelope. Inside is a piece of official stationery from the optometrist, Dr. Thomas J. Rothschild, and the state Department of Corrections. It reads:

The Rules and Responsibilities of Glasses Ownership

Congratulations. Your good behavior has earned you the right to own a pair of Rothschild glasses. Glasses are a privilege granted only to those who earn it. They can be taken away at any moment. Please note the following:

Glasses may not be used as a weapon in any way.

Glasses must remain in one piece. If there is a missing piece, they will be confiscated immediately and a full search and seizure of all inmate belongings will be conducted until the missing piece is recovered and accounted for. If the missing piece is not recovered, it will be assumed that it has been stashed as a weapon, and the prisoner will be punished according to section 11.214 of the Prisoner Code of Conduct, thus resulting in loss of the right to own future eyeglasses, and /or keeplock or isolation.

All repairs must be made by Dr. Thomas J. Rothschild as surrogate of the State of New York Department of Corrections and will be made at the expense of the owner. Commissary credits can be used to cover the cost of repairs and/or replacement.

Sincerely,

Dr. Thomas J. Rothschild, O.D.

Lila returns with a fancy compact in her palm. “Oh, they look very nice,” she says. “How do they feel?”

Moses looks around the room and adjusts them on his face. “They’re ugly, aren’t they? I don’t think I need them.” He’s lying. Everything looks clearer. He can see the cobwebs on the ceiling, the dirt on the floor. (Corn, the porter who cleans in the mailroom, could use a pair, but his popcorn habit keeps him flat broke.) Moses looks back at Lila. He can see the fine lines around her eyes, the parentheses around her smile. She looks pleased for him, so he’s not going to let on that this is humiliating. He feels old.

“Take a look.” She holds up the compact for him.

The compact is white and gold and has an embossed emblem on the outside like a royal seal that reminds him of the ones he stole as a child in Buffalo. He used to sneak into the elegant homes on Elmwood Avenue, find the lady of the house’s dressing table, and steal the vanity sets, the brushes, the long-handled mirrors, the compacts filled with silky powders and puffs. These were his mother’s favorites, the ultimate symbol of wealth and luxury. He’d kneel next to wherever she laid—her bed, the rough and lumpy couch—and give them to her the way a subject presents an offering to a queen. But first, he’d clean the hair from the brushes and roll it between his fingers into a silky ball, hold it to his nose and smell, rub it along his cheek, then add it to his collection. He kept boxes of women’s hair, sorted by color, under his bed. In his cell, he has a Styrofoam cooler of Lila’s hair under his cot. He keeps a small ball of it in his pocket and fingers it when he needs to calm himself. There’s one in his pocket now.

He tries to find himself in the compact she is holding up for him and all he can see is a gigantic nostril.

“Other side,” he says.

“Oh, right,” she says, and flips it so he can see his whole face.

He wants to hold the compact. Wants to feel something luxurious, the weight of it like gold, heavy in his palm. He hasn’t touched money or anything that feels like wealth in years. He takes it from her, and his hand covers hers. Moses sees a blush rise to her cheek, and it thrills him. He loves that he can still do this to a woman. He loves that he can do this to Lila.

“It was my grandmother’s,” she says, looking off to the side.

“My mother had one of these,” he says.

Moses expects to see how good he looks. The glasses are horrible. But that’s not the worst of it. The hair at his temples is almost completely white. His teeth are yellow; his skin is gray and old, the color of clouds. Deep cutting lines map out years on his face. What the fuck, he thinks. He doesn’t say this aloud. He’d never swear in front of a lady.

He snaps the compact shut and hands it to her. “I like what I’ve read so far,” he says, turning away. “I think that Aschenbach has a good perspective on the world.” Aschenbach is the main character, or the protagonist, as Lila instructed him, of Thomas Mann’s story, “Death in Venice.” He’s reading it because she’s reading it for her college World Literature class. He’s always trying to impress Lila, so Moses doesn’t tell her that Mann should think about writing a story that doesn’t require a dictionary because Moses can’t use one—until now the small print was torture—so he keeps getting caught up on unfamiliar vocabulary and hasn’t gotten very far in the story. Nevertheless, he likes what he knows about Aschenbach so far. Like Aschenbach, Moses has come to believe in the redemptive power of work. His job in the mailroom has given him significant position in the prison among the guards (except Miller, of course) of which he is very proud, and this, combined with the pleasant routine of his friendship with Jorge, and the settling in of time, has given Moses some contentment and unlikely faith that he’s already paid his dues for what he did, and he’s come to believe that from here on out it’s just the simple decomposition of the body and then all this crap will be over with and he’ll be free of this life and on to the next and the next will be a whole lot better.

In the meantime, having important work in the world and the ability to bring a blush to the cheek of a good, chaste woman like Lila (a rarity) and having a good friend like Jorge who is well-liked and has Moses’ back when the B block lowlifes act up, these are the good things. He’s been inside since he was a young man and life on the outside wasn’t ever so good, so life now is the best it’s ever been. He’s learned to feign weakness around the young, violent gangbangers to prove his irrelevance. He farts whenever he’s around them so they think he’s old and weak and they tell him go die and call him motherfucker. His pride doesn’t suffer from this. Moses is a survivor. And he, like Aschenbach, believes that the position he’s earned through his hard work proves he’s above the lowlifes.

He tells Lila he feels connected to Aschenbach in this very way. Then she says, “I find it strange, frankly, that you think Aschenbach is the sort of character you’d want to identify with, given your feelings about homosexuals and pedophiles.”

Humiliation aches in his teeth, and anger tightens his tendons. Why did he speak before he knew the story? Lila has promised to ask her professor if he would read and grade a critical literary paper on “Death in Venice” if Moses were to write one. She knows his greatest desire is to go to college. The paper was her idea. She probably regrets it now.

He puts his hand in his pocket and fingers her hair. He’s not angry at Lila. Lila is pure as snow with that flossy, bouncy hair and that smooth, motherly skin and her practical pants and her practical rubber shoes that protect her feet from all the standing. Lila is the perfect, pure woman. He’s angry with Jorge for waking in fits of fury and laughter last night while Moses tried to read. He’s angry at Miller for forcing them all to go to chow early this morning, cutting into his reading time, for holding him in the gallery for an extra long time before he was cleared to report to work. He’s angry with himself. For getting old. For not being able to see.

He stays quiet for a while and focuses on the job at hand, sorting the letters by block and by cell, pulling all the letters for inmates who can’t receive mail for one reason or another.

Lila returns to her post on the other side of the low wall that divides the mailroom and is silent, too. (Moses must always stay on his side of the wall. Always.) Lila focuses on opening the mail and removing contraband: joints sent by lovers, baggies of heroin sent by brazen friends, razor blades sent by sworn enemies. She dumps them into a bin where all the contraband goes, then she reads the letters with a big black pen in her hand, blocking out anything she deems dangerous or incendiary.

Moses has seen some wild things working in the mailroom. Letters sent by women to that Berkowitz son of a bitch years after his incarceration, panties sent to the preppie Central Park strangler. Who were the women who asked for it like that? Who sent underwear and overtures to these disgusting men? He distracts himself thinking of this. Thinking how low all the people around him are. When his sorting is over, before he loads up his satchel, before he straps it over his shoulder for his daily delivery, Moses admits, “I haven’t gotten very far in the story. I promise to finish it over the weekend.”

“I look forward to talking to you about it Monday then, Moses. I’ll see you when you return,” she says.

The prison is a walled city. It runs east-west and was built along a river by the very prisoners it was to house. The river, which Moses has only seen twice, is the reason for the location of the prison. It provided power for Industry, which was at the heart of the philosophy that built this place: inmates would find redemption through labor. The goods manufactured here would offset the costs of the prisoners’ incarceration.

During a period of budget crisis a decade and a half ago, the state attempted to defray the costs of a growing prison population by hiring fewer corrections officers. There was a decision at the highest levels to evaluate the responsibilities of the prison guards and identify tasks that could be assumed by prison labor. By law, prisoners are allowed to send and receive mail. Each of the five stacked rows in each of the four cell blocks that run the length of the complex houses an official U.S. mailbox. It was the daily job of the COs to empty this box, deliver the mail to the outgoing bins in the mailroom, and then retrieve the mail for their row and deliver it to each of the inmates. Over the years, there had been complaints from the officers. More than a few COs felt like servants and were gladly willing to offer up these tasks to a trustworthy inmate. The state agreed, and an inmate in each facility was identified to work in the mailroom and deliver the mail to those who could not retrieve their own for reasons of illness, age, or punishment. The matter of emptying the US mailboxes was reserved for the COs; it was considered distasteful by all to give an inmate a key to anything, let alone the property of the United States government. So a job was created, and Moses chosen by the Warden himself.

His rounds, therefore, are the proudest part of his day. And he is endowed, as he leaves the administration building at the most easterly end and ventures from the clean and respectable offices out into the shaded alley between the hospital and administration and then out into the sun that shines on the yard—a large concrete court flanked by five-story blocks, built block on block of stone, and striped like old-school uniforms with lines of barred windows—with a sense of importance that grows each day. As he carries his bag he feels the weight of his office, a position that dwells in the in-between, and his confidence grows. He is, according to the historical intentions of the place, a success. He walks along the cavernous walls of block housing that stack men on men with the stride of a man who has earned a place, his glasses hidden in his breast pocket.

Moses decides on a few things to talk about when he sees Lila after his rounds so her lasting impression of him for the weekend won’t be that he has subconscious sexual desires for little boys. He plans to ask about her garden, about the bulbs she planted last fall, to ask what the trees in the park by her house look like. Have they begun to bud out? Are there flowers? Are there leaves? There are no trees in the prison yard like there used to be, so Moses doesn’t know spring anymore, except its upbeat warmth in the breezes; he doesn’t know fall except its tugging chill that pulls at his bones. If it wasn’t for Lila and the decorations she puts out with each upcoming holiday like a kindergarten teacher, Christmas-less years would pass unnoticed. At Easter, there are pastel egg cut-outs on the walls, for Halloween, a witch, at Christmas a crèche made from pictures cut out of magazines by the porters who clean the mailroom: The three wise men, Fidel Castro, Omar Sharif, and Yasser Arafat; Mother Mary, Benazir Bhutto; the baby Jesus, Brad Pitt.

Moses passes a line of porters and he nods at them. “Moses,” they say, acknowledging him respectfully because of his job. He enters A block at the center of the yard. He climbs the steps and opens the door with purpose, walks through standing tall so his number can be seen on the breast of his green shirt, and the guards open doors for him. As he makes his way through the gates into the lower gallery of A block and starts down row one giving out letters to keeplocks, he acts like he’s as free as a CO. When he is finished with his row, he strides haughtily along the cells so as to inspire a little envy in those not allowed to move about as he is, and makes his way to the stairs at the front entrance of the gallery. A CO unlocks the gate for him and he ascends into the birdcage. Rows two through five have long pathways that run along the cells, and there is a cage of bars that runs from the second story floor to the ceiling to keep men from falling to their deaths. Moses doesn’t like the upper rows. He doesn’t live on one. He lives on the ground floor because of his age and because of his good behavior. Nowhere else in the prison does Moses feel more confined than in the birdcage, so he keeps to the outside of the pathway to distance himself from the men in their cells and he stays out of trouble. Until he doesn’t. One of the letters he’s palming slips out of his hand and glides gently to the floor. Just the corner of it slides under the cell bars. Moses glances at the cell’s inhabitant. There’s one quiet, angry-looking Latino lying on his cot reading a porno with Spanish all over the front of it. And that burns Moses’ ass, all the Spanish in America. He bends down to grab the letter and says, “Learn some English, muchacho.” Before he knows it, the guy’s at the bars, and as Moses stands, a fist meets him in the temple. The punch sends him across the pathway. The bars keep him from going over the edge to the gallery floor below. He sees stars. The guy yells something at him in Spanish and jumps around like an ape. Moses, just for fun, turns his back to him and farts audibly, flips him the bird and takes off down the path, his satchel hitting his hip in time with his heavy breath.

The block is mostly empty. It’s three p.m., rec time for A block, a quiet time. But all the keeplocks are at the bars reaching out trying to get Moses as he flies past feeling giddy despite the stars he’s seeing and the ringing that’s settled into his ears from the blow.

He looks up and sees the officer in charge look out from his office, blurry-eyed and bored. The officer yells down for number forty-three to settle down, and Moses knows that the keeplock just got another two weeks in his cell without rec time or meals with the general population and that makes Moses’ day. He thinks people like that need to be shown their place. He thinks it’s his job to do it.

The mailroom is empty. He looks around for her. Goes to the low wall and looks to the left into the intake room, as if she’s hiding in there. “Hello?” he calls, but she doesn’t answer. He looks at her station, packed up and tidy. Her grandmother’s compact is pushed off in a corner, set neatly on a stack of sticky notes. It is strange that she is not here. He quietly opens the door in the low wall and walks to her station. He’s never been there before. He’s never broken the rules. He picks up the compact. Turns it over in his hand like a nugget. He smells it. It’s sweet from the fake smells that cover up the real meaty smell of a woman. He pulls on the drawer where she keeps her letter opener, but it’s locked.

He hears the lock on the door to her office and he quickly moves across the room and slips through the low door. He hovers over his sorting table, pretending to look for something. She walks in from the other room and looks a little caught off guard, though he always comes back at the end of his rounds. She smells like sweet smelling soap and there’s a red mark on her face where she was messing with a pimple. He imagines her hands damp and cold from running under the faucet after sitting on the toilet, wiping herself.

There’s something different about today. It’s quiet. Lila is alone; there are no visitors here to gossip.

“I’m done for the day,” he says and puts his satchel away under his sorting table.

“OK,” she says in a quiet voice, as if she’s just discovered that they were alone for the first time without the company of tasks. “Where are your glasses?” she asks and Moses feels silly that he didn’t want to wear them on his rounds. He puts his hand on his breast pocket to put them on, but they’re gone.

“They fell out,” he says innocently, but inside he boils, imagining the keeplock who nailed him stomping and crushing his spectacles with glee.

“Where did you lose them? A block? I’ll call down there,” she says. She turns to use the phone. Moses likes watching her do this. Loves the concern he hears in her voice when she says, “Hi, Jack. Moses thinks he lost his glasses. Would you take a look and let me know if they’re there? He spent a year saving up for them and they’ve just arrived.” She turns to Moses who’s been staring at her back. “He’s going to look. Did you hear them fall? Wait…” She holds a finger up. “You do. Thank you.” Then she listens to the CO on the other end of the line, thanks him again and hangs up.

“He said you were hurt today.”

Moses sticks his hand in his pocket and touches her hair. “Just some angry keeplock. It was nothing.”

“Is that where he got you?” she asks. “There’s a mark.”

Moses puts his hand on his face and suddenly feels for himself, though he gets leveled running into someone or something just about every week. Seeing Lila’s reaction to the truth of this place makes him pity himself. He hangs his head. This is better than asking about her garden.

She comes over to take a closer look and stands nearer to him than she normally does. She inspects the mark on his face and puts her cool fingers to it. He can smell the sweet smell of her hand soap. He can see the red blotch on her face where she was squeezing the pimple. He thinks he can detect the raw smell of her blood. He wants to touch her. “Do you want me to call the infirmary?” she asks.

“No.” Moses pulls away.

There are factors that determine whether or not he gets to go to work, like fights and assaults on the guards, and decisions among the guards to keep everyone on their toes by disrupting mail delivery for a few days so the men are reminded that they are no longer citizens, not in here. On these days, Moses isn’t called to work. A trip to the infirmary is a sure way to blow this out of proportion. Sometimes the biggest assaults go ignored and the smallest, like this, can cause disastrous interruptions. The decisions of the guards are random; it’s best to keep a low profile.

“If you say so. It’s going to get blue.”

“Did he say he has the glasses?”

“Yes. He has them in the OIC office. You can go get them when you’re done here. Jenkin is the officer in charge. But I forgot the good news! Wilthauser will read your paper. The catch is you must have it ready for me to bring to him next Wednesday; it’s the last day of class. He’s going to read it when he grades the rest of the papers, and he’ll grade it based on the same criteria he uses for the rest of us. No special treatment.”

Moses claps his hands together. “Hot dog!” he says. “That’s good news. Hot dog!”

“I knew you’d be happy. Go get your glasses and get to work. Remember, you can’t just summarize. You have to prove why or how something happens in the story through analysis of literary devices or character development, so remember this while you’re reading. I’m doing a Freudian reading of the work,” she says proudly. “I’m glad for you, Moses. You’re a smart man. You deserve to feel like one.”

Lila turns away and Moses sees a beautiful ringlet, a single strand of sun, clinging to the back of her fleece. He reaches forward and hooks his finger through it. As she walks, it unravels itself from the fleece and wraps itself tightly around his finger.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jenkin asks when Moses forgets who he is and barges into the office. Jenkin is sitting with his feet up on the desk, looking at the porno keeplock forty-three was reading before he clocked Moses. At first Moses thinks it was confiscated, but then he sees his glasses on the table dangerously close to the CO’s feet. “These yours?” Jenkin asks.

He knows they’re his.

The CO uncrosses his feet and uses one to gently slip the glasses to the floor. They land lens down under the tilted-up leg of Jenkin’s chair. “Go ahead. Get ‘em,” Jenkin says, pretending not to pay attention to Moses. Pretending to look at the porno. Moses bends down on one knee and reaches for them. “Mucha caliente puta, cuarenta y tres!” Jenkin yells to the keeplock. The keeplock yells something back fast and cackles. Moses reaches his hand to the glasses, but Jenkin lets the chair drop and Moses pulls his hand out of the way. Jenkin stops just shy of the glasses and leans back again, casually. Moses wants to take the leg of that chair and flip Jenkin over. But he doesn’t. He can do this. He can suffer the humiliation of this ignorant bastard for the thrill of proving himself to Lila, to a professor. He’s imagined the praise the professor will shower on his work. He’s imagined the lecture he’ll give to his students about the best paper in the class being written not by them, despite all their advantages, but by an unexpected talent discovered by Lila Hathaway. He thinks of this as he reaches for the glasses and Jenkin lets the leg drop. Moses gets his hand over the glasses in time and the leg grinds into the top of it. Jenkin bends over, “Don’t cause any trouble around here again,” and lets the chair up.

Moses takes the glasses and puts them on. They are bent and loose. His knee is stiff from kneeling and he has to put his good hand on the floor to steady himself because the other hand feels like it might be dead.

“Get the hell out of here,” Jenkin says, opening the magazine. Moses makes his way to the stairs outside of the OIC office where he waits for Jenkin to come and unlock the gate for him. Jenkin stays where he is. He sexy whistles real loud; forty-three yells something in Spanish and all the keeplocks come to the bars. The one closest to Moses spits on Moses over and over again. A loogie lands on his prominent left cheekbone.

From Administration there are exactly seven locked doors Moses must approach and await a guard to let him through. If there are other guards, employees or civilians passing through, he must stop exactly where he is, step aside, back against the wall, eyes averted, and wait until the passageway is cleared. Once cleared, the guard can let him pass and lock the door behind him. Upon entering B block there are several doors in a row. He must wait for the first to be unlocked, then step through, wait for the guard to lock the door behind him, step aside while he unlocks the next door, step through only a few feet, and, once again, await the guard as he locks the door behind him. It is a laborious commute replete with a lot of waiting around, and when he’s had a long day, like today, he feels the burden of his incarceration.

To finally enter the open gallery of the ground floor of B block is like pulling off a stop-and-go highway into neighborhoods of suburban residential quiet. But instead of green everywhere, it is a concrete landscape. The calm is not typical. He lives in special quarters where the inmates are mostly older, mostly quiet, mostly peaceful. This is where they bring tours of college criminal justice students, local dignitaries, state DOC officials, and others the prison administration wants to impress. The only thugs are Collin, Georgy, and Don, but they are here because it is a privilege to live here and they are afforded ill-begotten amenities all the time. Moses ignores the loud television and the men milling around. He is exhausted from delivering letters, sore on the temple from forty-three, covered in spit and desperately in need of a piss. But before he reaches his cell, he hears the distinctly lazy voice of Sergeant Ed Cavanaugh coming from within.

“I’m quite sure Gina is still alive and nothing has happened to her, Jorge. She’s living in New York City and working for the Evening News with Arthur Fairchild. Jorge, you know this. You watch the show in the evenings just like Sid and me. We watch him almost every evening and we always look for Gina’s name at the end of the program. Besides, I’m sure Shell would have told me if something had happened to Gina.” Moses watches Ed bob and duck as he talks to avoid the flutter of wings.

Sergeant Ed Cavanaugh is either mean or weak, depending on his mood. He’s never kept his pecker in his pants and whenever he cheats on his wife everybody knows it because he blows up like a balloon and has to get bigger pants. This is widely known because he has a confessionary streak a mile wide and he talks to the wrong people about the wrong things a lot, including prisoners. Cavanaugh thinks he’s father of the year because of all the good he’s done for Jorge—and Moses doesn’t fault him that. He has done that. But Moses believes that the faith Jorge shows in him is his one miscalculation in life.

Cavanaugh is sitting on Moses’ cot, his knees off to the side because the space between the cots, which is less than a foot, does not fit his giant legs. Cavanaugh holds a letter in his hand. It is not one of Gina’s letters, the ones Jorge rereads all through the day and into the night, remembering his daughter first as a little girl who wrote only in crayon, then as a whiz kid in science and math, then as a lanky, ivy-bound teenager who broke his heart by abandoning their mutual love of science, ornithology specifically, to study broadcasting, and who, today, is a fancy Upper East Side resident and producer of serious TV news. This is a different letter. From the door of the cell, Moses can see that Jorge wrote it himself. This agitates Moses. Jorge never writes a letter without having Moses read it for errors of spelling or subject-verb agreement, even the letters he writes to his daughter, because Moses learned his grammar from nuns and Jorge, a perfectionist, is afflicted by his mother tongue.

Cavanaugh leans forward with a dramatically knitted brow. He worries his fingers along the edge of the letter and ignores Moses. The cell is already crowded and simply can’t fit three men, two cots, the locker that doubles as a desk, the comby, a seatless john and sink in one, and at least ten sparrows. Birds fill the room and fly playfully just over their heads; the cell is just seven by seven by seven. Jorge sits slumped by the weight of a great and recurring worry for his daughter. A small sparrow with a red thread tied to one leg sits on his shoulder, preening and chirping a sweet chirp that is returned by another sparrow sitting on the locker. There are spots of dried white droppings on the floor, on the edge of the sink, on Moses’ clear plastic typewriter, on the concrete walls and the edge of the john, even on Gina’s diploma from Brown. Jorge has not cleaned today.

“Well, I can’t remember who is dead and who is alive anymore of these days,” Jorge says in a moment of honesty about the slips and jumps his mind’s been making. But the confession isn’t anything Moses wants to hear. Lately, a lifetime of poorly treated epilepsy is catching up with Jorge. He’s forgetful. He’s confused. And at his very worst, he’s questioned his deepest beliefs.

Everybody likes Jorge. He’s kind and he lives his faith and everyone believes in his goodness. The guards. Even Georgy, Collin, and Don. Without him, Moses would get his ass kicked daily. Of this Moses is only too aware. When Jorge’s family was still a family and they used to come inside for respite weekends in the trailers in the yard and Moses was left alone to fend for himself, he would get pummeled. Jorge would return with the pink glow of love and Moses would have a purpled eye ready to pop like a ripe plum. Without Jorge, he’d be ashes by now. Without him he would surely run into the fist that would kill him, but that’s not the half of it. In Moses’ weakest moments, when he needs something to believe in, Jorge is his faith.

Moses steps further into the cell and walks into Cavanaugh’s knees. The birds respond with a group ascent out of the cell. Moses swats at them; they know to scatter when he arrives. Cavanaugh is not so well-trained. Instead, he looks at Moses but doesn’t see him. He looks worried. Jorge is scaring Cavanaugh into believing that he is near the end with his dementia, and Cavanaugh, that pussy, is buying it. Of course Moses knows this is stupidity. Jorge’s been slipping for years.

Cavanaugh finally stands. He towers over Moses, looks down at him, and they resume their roles. Moses lowers his head, backs out of the cell and waits for Cavanaugh to notice that he’s waiting to go in. As an afterthought, Cavanaugh waves his huge hand, and Moses scurries directly to the john. He pisses and drains some of the life from his aggravation.

Jorge says to Ed, “If Gina is still alive, as you tell me, then it must be Gina, not Marie—do you hear me, Ed? Not Marie!—that comes for claiming me. I am afraid for what she would do. Gina will bury me; I will have the last rights. Marie will throw my ashes into the trash or forget me behind in the back of the closet when she moves to Miami and I will be stuck in purgatory.”

“Do you mind?” Moses says looking at Jorge. “I’d like to have some peace and quiet. I have reading to do.” He sits on his cot and pulls the World Literature Anthology onto his lap. He opens to “Death in Venice,” and as he begins to read, he thinks of Lila and is disgusted with himself. He fears what he is about to learn about Aschenbach.

Cavanaugh fills the cell door and blocks the light. “Jorge, I assure you. You have a long life to live yet. You’re healthier than most men I know. But in the event…” Ed stops. “I will make sure Gina gets this letter. You’ll be in good hands.” Ed steps forward and leans down awkwardly and shakes Jorge’s hand. Jorge grabs on. “I wasn’t a real father. Not like you are,” he says. “But without you, Gina would have had a death in my heart long ago.”

“Oh, come on with all the faggotry,” Moses says. “We’ll cry when you’re dead, Jorge. In the meantime, peace.”

Jorge waves his hand at Moses and laughs at him. “You, friend, will miss the most of me.”

“I won’t miss all this noise.”

Ed looks at Jorge with concern. “Good night, men.”

When he’s sure Ed is gone, Moses swings his feet to the side of his bed, squeezes down on his knees between the cots, his back to Jorge, and pulls the cooler of Lila’s hair out from under it. He takes out the ball in his pocket and inspects it to see if he can find the new strand. He can’t. He smells the ball of hair and caresses his cheek with it, then puts it in the box. He looks over his shoulder to make sure Jorge isn’t paying attention, and he reaches his right hand, the one with the bruise forming from Jenkin’s chair, into his pocket and pulls out the compact. He holds it greedily in his palms. It’s heavy and warm. He holds it up and smells it, then stashes it quickly away under the bed of hair.