Doing Time Read online

  “What my problem?” I shouted back at the wall, “What’s your problem? I’m the one that’s going to work and you’re the one acting like a headcase about it. Go on back inside your tower, Straz. You wouldn’t know real work if someone rolled it in sand and shoved it up your ass!”

  His face, chalky and time-furrowed, went the sweetest shade of vermilion.

  “That’s it! God damn it, that — is — it! Back to the blocks! You’re tagged in!”

  Seething, I managed to laugh at him as I turned back for the cell house with him still raging behind me.

  “Have a nice day!” I yelled back over my shoulder while I snatched at the waistband of my sweat pants. I figured if he really wanted to see my butt headed back for the blocks, he might as well get the fifty-cent view. So I gave it to him. Both sun-starved cheeks and a vertical smile to remember me by.

  Reviewing my case a week later, the chairman of the disciplinary board actually giggled when Straz’s statement was read into the record. It had been months since anyone had mooned an officer. But amusement didn’t prevent him from finding me guilty of a Class B Provocation charge and giving me ten days in the hole to contemplate my sins.

  I didn’t cry for my Nana the night before her funeral. Neither did I sleep. I rolled and tossed and jerked in disgust on a mattress little wider than my shoulders until, exhausted, I lay very still and watched the night pass on the bricks of the cell house wall. Across the way the steam pipe sputtered on, spitting hateful secrets to the twilight. I knew all the accusations, chapter and verse. I could already hear the hissing murmurs of the dozen remaining in my family as they gossiped busily in the pew, darting glances over their shoulders at me, shocked that I’d been allowed to attend and not in the least bit surprised that I’d disrespect my grandmother by showing up handcuffed to a chain around my waist, with a guard hovering to make sure I didn’t bolt for the door. I could even hear the bolder ones giving me their glad-you-could-make-its and offering me their insincere bests after the service, convinced I’d never amount to more than all the hardware hanging off me. I couldn’t blame them. Junkie thieves are rarely a prized seed among those who worked themselves to death for everything they owned. Every last one of them had given up on me a year before I managed to get myself thrown in Thomaston for a ten-year sabbatical.

  Only Nana refused to surrender me to the void, for only she was too stubborn to let me go. She played ambassador right till the end, giving me all the family gossip and browbeating my parents into their annual Christmas visit, only to keep the conversation going when the silences got so thick you couldn’t hack through them with a machete.

  The morning of the funeral began with my toilet plugging up with the first flush of the day and ended with the intake officer wrapping a belly chain around my waist and cuffing my hands to it. Between was the chaos of scrounging and making do. I finally got something of a shine on my weathered biker boots and spent half an hour pawing through the wardrobe of the prison commissary until I found a suit that was a close-enough fit. Having found no needle for the thread I’d managed to scrape up, I tacked up the hems of the trousers with an office stapler.

  “Caine,” Strazinski greeted me curtly as I was escorted into the intake area to find him not in his uniform but in a proper suit at least a size too small. “You’re with me. Strip.”

  No inmate enters or leaves Thomaston without a thorough strip-search. I’ve gotten naked for more cops than I have for former lovers. I stripped down mechanically, knowing the drill, all the while searching the room for someone else in civilian clothes, hoping this was some sort of joke. There were four officers in that room with me, and only Straz wore a suit. He’d pulled the short straw to be my escort home.

  In the prison garage, he neither spoke to me nor looked me in the face. He held the car door open long enough for me to fumble into the back, then buckled the seat belt over me.

  Strazinski wedged himself into the driver’s seat, the wheel shoved into his starched white shirt, cleaving his belly. Growling and grumbling, he tried to adjust his seat, but the security mesh between us kept it permanently in place. He kept glancing into the mirror to see if I was amused by his predicament.

  “It’s going to be a hot one,” he said, addressing me for the first time since I stripped for him in Intake. “When we get to where we’re going, you might want to take that jacket off and carry it inside.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “It might get warm, but it still covers most of the hardware.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “Kruller said full equipment, so you get full equipment.”

  I wanted to tell him to go screw himself as he pulled the Chevy into brilliant sunlight. By blaming it on the boss, he didn’t have to admit he was loving it. I slouched against the door and rested my cheek on the glass, watching the cracked asphalt of Route 1 hurtle past with cars in the opposing lane racing east. We were better than two miles down the road before I realized it was me and not they who were moving too quickly, their rush amplified by my starved perceptions and by the years I’d been inside.

  “I got a messed-up question,” the Tower Pig said after we’d turned onto 17 and were torpedoing for Augusta and the places I once called home. “You do know where we’re going, don’t you?”

  “You get us to Augusta and I’ll get us to the church,” I told him, wanting to rub his nose in his ignorance.

  “Fair enough,” he grumbled. “You’ve been away a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Eight years,” I said, watching the trees whirr past in kaleidoscope glimpses. Eight years, five months, and… eleven days, I thought.

  “Long time,” he announced, studying me in the mirror. “I bet it ain’t changed all that much, has it?”

  “Not much,” I muttered to the window, still watching the trees and the undergrowth rioting in so many forgotten shades of green, green in a flood, all so impossibly thick and lush. They could not have been this dense when I bounded through them like a deer, the black earth and wet leaves like a sponge beneath ten-year-old feet. Through the hum of the Chevy I could hear the summer cicada shrill, knifed through by the buoyant cries of half-remembered friends frozen in child-voices.

  “No,” Straz said presently, having thought it over. “Home never changes much.”

  I said nothing. My stare drifted from the window to the security mesh to the floor.

  “I’m sorry about your grandma,” he said.

  I flinched. Back behind the walls, if he wasn’t barking at inmates he may as well have been a mute. I didn’t want him talking about her; I didn’t want him talking. It seemed the farther we got from Thomaston the harder it was for him to keep his mouth shut and leave me to my silence.

  “I lost my mother last year,” he said quietly. “This stuff’s the worst, but what’re you going to do, right? Get up, go to work, do your time. It gets easier someday.”

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” I offered weakly, looking at him for the first time in miles. I stared at the back of his head the rest of the way into Augusta, watching the roll of fat at the base of his skull, pinched by the threadbare collar of his jacket, and waiting for him to speak.

  Like every other city in Maine, Augusta bounds from the urban to the suburbs to the sticks in seconds. The broad wedge of St. Andrew’s — the Roman Church meets seventies architecture — is shoved into the spine of a knoll wreathed in the conifers and hemlock walling out the erratically spaced lots and sagging roofs from the proper monotony of homes with identical floorplans and freshly mowed lawns.

  I watched the church growing from its hill, remembering the masses I attended with Nana and how we’d go out for ice cream afterward. I scanned the faces of the mourners moving solemnly up the narrow asphalt path toward the rectory, recognizing none of them. Dumpy white-haired ladies in orthopedic shoes and old men in hom-burg hats despite July like a blast furnace. These were Nana’s friends, I reckoned, pinochle players and retirement community denizens, all the faces who gathered
for twice-weekly High Mass and for all the funerals as their members slowly fell away.

  In the lee of the hill, in the broad oval of the parking lot behind St. Andrew’s, Strazinski hid the Impala in among the hulking Buicks and salt-rusted Toyotas.

  “So this is it?” he asked, and craned his neck to study the shingled cliff of St. Andrew’s south wall.

  “Funny-looking church,” he said, glancing back at me when 1 didn’t comment. “I guess I’m just used to them big stone Franco churches they got around here.”

  “I think that’s why I liked this place when I was a kid,” I told him when he opened my door and the heat hit me like a wall. “It wasn’t like everywhere else.”

  At the base of the wall, ignoring the mourners drifting past them from the parking lot and hiding from the padre, two altarboys in black cassocks and white bibs pecked at a forbidden cigarette as if the filter burned their lips. I tucked my wrists in closer to my waist and pinched the tails of my jacket in with my arms, hiding what I could of the chain. Straz stood off away from me, his hands parked on the roll where his hips should be.

  “We going?” I asked.

  “Give me your hands,” he said presently, decisively, as he fished in his pocket for his keyring.

  I flushed, exultant and trying not to show it, and shoved my wrists as far toward him as they would go, six inches from my waist.

  “You shouldn’t have to be going in there like this,” he said as the cuffs popped free and he turned his attention to the padlock on the belly chain. The hot summer air chilled my wrists where the steel had been.

  “I appreciate it,” I mumbled as the chain fell away from my waist and Straz bundled it into the back of the car, leaving me standing there unfettered in my borrowed suit, like anyone else in the parking lot. For the first time in eight years I was on the right side of the walls of Thomaston and looking like a free man. Nana would have loved it.

  “If you really appreciate it,” Straz said, looking me in the eye, “you’ll remember one thing: This never happened. If Kruller catches wind of this, then it’s my butt that’s hanging out. Still, no one should have to bury their grandmother chained up like that. Got it?”

  “I got it. And, look, whether you believe it or not, it’ll sure mean a lot to my family not seeing me like that… and maybe it means a lot to me, too, you know? Thanks.”

  His fleshy brow crinkled, not knowing how to take being spoken to like that.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, opening his jacket to show me the gleaming butt of his .38 in its cross-draw holster. “Just you remember that it’s too friggin’ hot for me to be running after you.”

  “I love you too, Straz.” I grinned, stepping off for the path ahead of him.

  Nana’s casket was white and shone like ivory on its gurney before the altar. The priest had not yet made his entrance. There had to be a hundred people in there, massed in a semicircle around the coffin, lined up in the pews with their heads bowed. I could hear only the whispers of pages as the organist, hunched at her bench and hidden beneath her hat’s broad brim, flipped through her hymnal, biding her time. Strazinski dipped his fingers in the holy water at the door and crossed himself.

  “What?” he whispered, catching me watching him. “You figure I got to be French to be a Catholic? Hell, even the friggin’ Pope’s Polish.” Then his hand was on my shoulder. “Go on and sit with your folks. I’ll be back here by the door. Don’t get lost now.”

  Taking a seat by himself, he left me standing in the aisle at the back of the church, scanning those gathered for a place to sit. My family was assembled in the pews immediately in front of Nana. My father, grayer and more railish than he’d been when I saw him last Christmas, was the first to notice me. The wrinkles of his crow’s-feet pinched, his eyes hardening as he whispered in my mother’s ear. Her shoulders trembled and sagged. I could just hear her sobs from where I stood in the rear. I watched the news of my presence ripple from them and through the pews with quick curt glances and feverish whispers. My sister leaned more deeply against the husband I’d not yet met, the crown of her head in the ginger of his beard as he sized me up from over his shoulder.

  Through the ride up from Thomaston, bouncing around in the back of the prison’s Impala, I’d steeled myself up to march right in, ignoring my chains, and impose myself on them because that’s what Nana would have wanted. I barely acknowledged them before I turned from them and slipped into the pew beside Strazinski, knowing she’d understand. He tensed awkwardly as I sat, then nodded sympathetically. I watched his vast bulk relax from the corner of my eye. He shook his head and watched the altar, waiting on the organist and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

  1998, Maine State Prison Thomaston, Maine

  The Night the Owl Interrupted

  Daniel Roseboom

  Dixon said he’d lost his pump already, curling his arms profoundly, scrutinizing the bulge of biceps. Big snowflakes fused to the burrs of his green knit hat and melted over his warm sweatshirts.

  I let the heavy lid slap closed over the weight box and sighed at having made it through another cold routine. The winter workouts were becoming lethargic in the blinding spotlight beams of the prison yard. I inhaled and the air crystallized and tickled my moist nostril hairs.

  “It’s these cheap weights,” Dixon said, squeezing out one last curl.

  He was right. It was the futile equipment, the warped barbells and spurred cables and rusty plates. It was the wicked weather and the absence of motivation. Ultimately it was the monotony of prison ambience: the razor-wire fences, the dirt and concrete ground, the Great Wall stacked with gun towers resembling tiny huts lit with big round spotlights. It was a battle with confinement and fatigue.

  A flock of pigeons perched on the Great Wall and the gun towers’ shingled peaks. There was an instant ripple of feathers as they abruptly flapped away toward the black sky. It reminded me of when I used to go hunting with my father before my incarceration, when our presence in the woods was momentarily powerful and our prey sensed it fearfully.

  I noticed other inmates closing up their weight courts and weaving through the maze of bulky weight boxes and machinery to get to the main yard. The routine was over and it was time to go.

  I slipped into my state coat but left it unzipped, as did Dixon. It was imprudent to zip it, especially after a workout when one’s muscles were tired and tight. It was wise to stay as loose and flexible as possible, ready for the unpredictable dangers in the political battleground of the main yard.

  I followed Dixon off the weight court and we siphoned into the stream of inmates lumbering along the main walkway through the tables divided according to racial or political decree. They sat at tables or stood in a huddle around a television drinking cup after cup of coffee to stay warm, cheering as the last minutes of a football game ticked away. Others rapped in rhythmic harmony to a metal tabletop and snap of many fingers. Some merely waited, standing erect in the snow-fail with their hands stuffed in warm pockets, rocking on their heels, wondering if the announcement to “return to the blocks” would ever crackle over the weathered speakers. The need to get into the prison blocks, into our cells, and beneath wool blankets always intensified as the cold long evening stretched on.

  A damp snowflake settled on my eyelash and, just as I blinked to cleanse the blur, a feathered creature of brilliant white sailed across my path. I froze beside Dixon and other astonished inmates. The bird flapped its powerful wings and climbed to the prison block windows. It curled its steel talons into the wire mesh, adjusting thick wings against its body. Its feathery head bobbed and swiveled as it surveyed the area.

  The yard was quiet. The eternal hype of rap lyrics, the shouts and whistles of football philosophy, the political arguments and subtle threats of inmate reasoning were all scooped up and tossed away. It was as if a magical wind had swept the yard of its life and carried it off to the dark sky, where it remained suspended, its essence lingering in bulky suspense.

  I felt
euphoric. My heartbeat thumped in my ears as adrenaline spurted into my bloodstream. Then suddenly the heavy bird plummeted down. Inches from the ground, its wings unfolded and caught a breeze that lifted it into a sensuous arc of freedom. Inmates parted for the bird’s flight up the main walkway and then turned to watch it gracefully settle on the shingled peak of an officer’s watch booth.

  We gathered around the little booth and watched the owl twitch its wings. Shuffling its feet on the snow-dusted peak like a cat padding about a pillow, it found its perch. It curved its muscular neck and, with its beak, scratched the tuft of feathers on its chest. Then, with its dark round eyes, it looked at us and blinked.

  Two officers inside the booth gazed at the hundred or more inmates encompassing their little haven.

  “They look nervous,” I said.

  Dixon elbowed an inmate at his side and they grinned in unison at the two officers. Not long after, the announcement exploded from the rusty speakers.

  “THE YARD IS CLOSED… RETURN TO THE BLOCKS.”

  The snow continued to layer our shoulders and hats as we remained steadfast. One of the officers spoke into a phone; the other twitched like a trapped mouse, eyes bulging and rolling from one group of inmates to the next. The officer hung up the phone and nodded to his partner.

  If we refused to enter the blocks what would they do? What law were we breaking by watching a snow owl? Would they rush at us with batons and shields and beat down every last one of us? Would an officer emerge from the dark cove of the gun tower and fire hot bullets into our flesh?

  Then I realized something very peculiar about this formation of inmates, this aggregation of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. We were a unit of power. There was no racial discrimination to inhibit our combined strength, no political force to determine what would go down. We were the elite of this cramped atmosphere, able to strike back if struck upon.

  Inmates gazed with unblinking eyes at the fixed monument on the booth’s shingled peak. I wondered if they, too, were aware of our power. Would this power emerge as a riot where a few would take charge and eventually lose, or would everyone participate and stand proud against the threat of the system?