Death Row: The Ninth Ring

April 27, 2017, 11:24 am

≫ Next: This Friendship Has Been Terminated

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By Michael Lambrix

Few books I´ve read over the many years I’ve spent in solitary confinement on Florida´s infamous “death row” have had more impact on me than Dante´s Inferno. Obviously fictional, Inferno becomes branded upon the soul as it depicts a journey through the depths of hell, describing in detail the horrors that await the damned.

At the beginning the unfortunate soul is told that the only means of escape is to descend into hell. If he can survive passing through the nine rings, each worse than the one before, only then can he escape from eternal damnation. No one yet has accomplished this.

As they pass through the gateway into hell, he takes note of what is written above …”Abandon hope, all ye who enter.” Like any mortal man would, he hesitates, unable to shake the feeling that something truly evil awaits him beyond.

They proceed along their descent, finding that there are many levels in hell, each assigned to a particular form of transgression – and each far worse than the one before. Dante paints a vivid picture of the torment inflicted upon the souls of those sinners, making the Biblical lake of fire and brimstone seem merciful.

Finally, they reach the Ninth Ring, an incomprehensible abode buried deep within the bowels of hell. Reserved exclusively for the “worst of the worst,” the worst punishment imaginable is inflicted here.

But to my surprise, the ultimate punishment is not physical such as the precious image of worms feeding upon the flesh and the other physical tortures only the most depraved mind could imagine. The Ninth Ring is an icy realm reserved for very few, each incarnated and frozen solid in eternal silence. Conscious of the passage of time for all eternity. Condemned to silence and solitude, unable to cry out in their misery or find the comfort of another´s compassionate touch.

The Ninth Ring is a vivid description of what life is like on America´s death row for the thousands sentenced to a fate far worse than death. Condemned to solitary confinement designed to break not the body but the soul, we are “frozen” in an eternal state of limbo, slowly succumbing to the abandonment of hope, and madness that consumes from within.

Our society professes pride in the preservation of human rights, but there´s an institution most choose to ignore. Some call it the price of freedom, but within the past generation America has evolved into a society that boasts the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Over two million of its citizens are cast into contemporary gulags, forced to endure punishment motivated less by convictions for crime as it is the billions made each year by private corporations feeding off the misery of the imprisoned under the auspices of criminal “justice”. (See, “Trump and the Prison Industry” by Fredreka Schouten, USA Today , February 24, 2017, illustrating how private corporations donate obscene amounts of money to political campaigns, with the expectation of receiving billion dollar contracts)

Like with Dante´s “Inferno”, our contemporary prison system is comprised of many rings, each far worse than the one before. At the very bottom of the Beast one will find the Ninth Ring – “death row”.

When we speak of the death penalty, most attention is focused on the execution, an event that does not take place often until decades later. Few give any thought to the many years between imposition of sentence and execution. Fewer still acknowledge that of the thousands currently under sentence of death, a small percentage will actually face execution. In truth, the vast majority are condemned to a fate far worse than death itself –decades of solitary confinement where they slowly rot in both body and mind.

I came to Florida´s “death row” in March 1984. At the time, I was 23 years old. I am now 57 years old. Over twenty years ago I wrote about “life” on death row was about (“Cruel and Unusual: An Intimate Look at the Death Penalty; C. Michael Lambrix. The Madison Edge, February 10, 1993). At the time, Florida´s death-sentenced prisoners were housed at Florida State Prison (read: “Alcatraz of the South”). I described it as follows:

Upon being sentenced to death, each of us is kept in a segregated unit and each assigned our own cell in solitary confinement, designed to intentionally isolate us and deprive us of any ability to meaningfully interact with one another. Not even for one moment are we allowed to forget that we are warehoused there, and waiting to die.

Each bare concrete cell measures approximately six feet by nine foot, including the steel bunk solidly affixed to the wall on one side, and the combination toilet/sink securely attached to the rear wall, and a single steel footlocker in which all our personal property is stored. No property is allowed to be out of that footlocker unless it is being used at that moment. Nothing – not even a single photograph of a loved one - is allowed to be affixed to the walls. Each of the three walls are painted while the cell front is a wall of steel bars that look outward to the catwalks where the guards make their rounds. There are no windows and the only source of natural light comes from the dusty, distant window located on the outer catwalk far from our reach.

At best, there is less than 30 square feet of open area in each cell in which we can “walk” (three short steps each way) and move around. Although prison officials like to say that we are in our solitary cells an average of 23 hours a day, in truth departures from the cell are relatively rare and as brief as possible Each time, we are securely handcuffed, chained and shackled.

The routinely scheduled departures are limited to a short shower three times a week in a designated “shower cell” located at the front of each tier and twice weekly we are allowed to participate in two hours of “outdoor recreation” on a fenced concrete pad. It is not uncommon for many to forego recreation for years at a time, electing instead to remain in their cells. All the time spent in solitary deprives them of the ability to socially interact. They retreat into their own world, the solitary cell becoming their own “security blanket.” Many abandon any interest in contact with others.

Conditions of our imprisonment are incomprehensible to most. For too many years we were forced to live in an environment infested with cockroaches, insects and rodents. Many of us would even make pets of rodents, or spiders, or even cockroaches, out of desperation for interaction with any form of life. Although we could talk to and hear others in adjacent cells, we could not see or touch them. A pet provided a needed surrogate for interaction.

Ventilation was minimal, and in long, hot and unbearably humid Florida summers, our concrete crypts became ovens. Our only relief from overwhelming heat would be to stand naked in our steel toilets and pour cool water over our sweating bodies. In recent years, and only after pursuit of a Federal civil action, we are each allowed to purchase an 8-inch plastic fan. Those who cannot afford to purchase their own fan continue to do without.

In winter months the death row unit at Florida State Prison often becomes so cold that a thin layer of ice will form in the toilet. When the heating system would work, it provided only minimal relief. Each prisoner is provided a coarse, wool “horse blanket” often worn ragged and riddled with holes. The only warmth for months at a time would be to get winter clothes (thermal underwear, sweatshirts, etc), purchasing them from the prison “store,” but many don´t have the money to do so.

Then there´s the food…by law, they are required to feed us but this is one area of prison administration that goes to great lengths to operate as cheaply as possible. As if saving money wasn´t itself a means by which to reduce our diet preparation and delivery methods further reduce it to something unfit for human consumption. By maintaining quality that discourages consumption, they encourage us to purchase our food from the prison “canteen” at escalated cost.

The unspoken truth of the American prison industry is that countless corporations compete each year for exclusive contract allowing them to sell to prisoners products of inferior quality at escalated price. Each year the captive market generates millions of dollars for politically-connected vendors who then make substantial contributions to elected officials. Like all prisoners, those on death row are forced to ask what they can from family and friends just to survive day by day.

Family and friends are what keeps us going, a fragile thread that dangling in front of each of us as we desperately try to maintain contact with the real world. But more often than not, both family and friends drift away, letters and visits growing fewer and further apart as the years pass. Although those sentenced to death are technically allowed a social visit each week, in reality those are few and far between.

Although I am blessed with family that remains by my side, and receive a social visit on average once monthly, the majority receive far less. Many receive no visits at all for many years at a time. Maintaining a semblance of a social relationship becomes impossible after prolonged isolation, their social skills eroding as they succumb to the inevitable mental degradation and retreat into a world of their own. Some even elect to forego minimal interaction with adjacent neighboring cells.

The solitary cell becomes a cocoon. Every meal is served and consumed there without table or chair, cold trays passed through the door and balanced the lap.

Those are just the tangible aspects of our endless solitary confinement. Words are inadequate to truly define the deprivation so deliberately inflicted upon the condemned. Not months, or even years, but decade after decade of solitary confinement under sentences of death, leaving each of us utterly powerless to influence our existence. We are methodically reduced to something less than human in this regime, our fates infinitely prolonged, constantly reminded that the only purpose for our continued existence is to be warehoused until it is our time to die. When our appointed time does finally come, if we survive that long, our death tomorrow will come at the hands of those that feed us today.

Isolation of the condemned pales in comparison to the alienation from prolonged solitary confinement. It is in our nature to interact with others. Each of us fundamentally needs to be part of something more than ourselves.

Those sentenced to “life” in prison for crimes indistinguishable from our own are afforded the luxury of community. They are housed in “general population” where they spend little time confined to a cell aside from the hours they sleep.

They eat in open dining halls and are able to converse with others. Assigned a job, they are rewarded with the sense of accomplishment that comes from self-sufficiency and being a contributing member of their community.

They are able to form social groups, often forging friendships with others, finding common ground in people and places they once knew out there in the real world. They can participate in religious activities, communing in spiritual fellowship and even go to church.

Community can never exist for those arbitrarily condemned to life in solitary confinement under the pretense of being sentenced to death. All we have are the fading memories of a life lived so long ago.

Then there´s the forbidden fruit we call “hope”; the imaginary sweetness we allow ourselves to long for. Yet each time our teeth sink into reality we taste only bitterness. One court after another denies our appeals and with each, we take one more step toward the gallows.

As the years slowly pass, meaning drifts further away. Family and friends become distant, strangers whose lives go on while ours remains trapped in time. As that hope fades, anger grows stronger, filling an emotional void. We find ourselves increasingly intolerant towards the slightest imperfections of others around us, causing unnecessary conflict and alienating us further, even from those similarly confined.

Many of us begin to fantasize about the only realistic escape: death. It creeps up on you, its siren song whispering. Before you realize it, there you are in the stillness of the night, lying on your bunk with your eyes wide shut, imagining you had already had taken your last breath. Imagining death, and its promise to end the misery.

But it doesn´t end. Fantasizing about slicing your wrists, or stringing yourself up at the end of a sheet is much easier than actually doing it. When the news comes that one of your own did find the strength to bring an end to their own misery, there´s a momentary sense of loss that quickly evolves into an overwhelming envy. You find yourself asking, “If only it could have been me.”

Often someone we´ve known for years, or even decades, and lived in close to, is told he has a terminal illness, most often cancer. And then for months, sometimes years, we continue to live in close proximity as that person slowly succumbs to death. As the proverbial “lowest of the low”, we are extended no empathy or compassion from the prison system or society in general. A terminally ill condemned prisoner will remain in a regular death row cell until their condition progresses to the point they can no longer feed and bathe themselves. Only then are they transferred to a medical unit, where they die.

For the most part we look out for each other because when it comes down to it, nobody else will. We try to become hospices for one another, doing what little we can to help a terminally ill fellow prisoner. Society may see us as no more than cold-blooded killers and “monsters”; but the empathy and compassion we extend to one of our own remains is a testament that even in the “worst of the worst”, there are redeemable qualities if only we are willing to recognize them.

Whether unexpected suicide, prolonged terminal illness, or one of our own being led away to “death watch”, each loss takes something from the rest of us personally. It´s hard to say why that is, but it is. Every time one whom we´ve lived around for years dies -- as the death row population continues to grow older, it happens more frequently, they take with them a piece of each of us and hopelessness consumes even more of us.

Those who have never seen it cannot understand the emptiness within the eyes of those who’ve held on to hope for too long only to be crushed beneath it. They are the living dead. Not one of us immune, and even the strongest among us knows that we too might wake up tomorrow and join their ranks.

Especially in here, hope is a seductive mistress that keeps you going only to turn on you, leaving you broken and depressed. Being on death row is like going down with a sinking ship once so called life, and finding yourself stranded on the open sea. Human nature compels us to constantly search the horizon for a ship that will save us – that´s hope. All the while, helplessly watching others around us slowly sink beneath the murky surface, or unexpectedly fall victim to the creatures of the sea.

As hope fades away, we become that much more to desperate to hold on to it. Hope itself becomes the weight dragging us under. Time and time again those distant ships on the horizon prove to be nothing more than mirages within our own imaginations. Hope transforms into belief that we have been betrayed. Like a succubus it turns on us, consuming our very souls, leaving us empty and abandoned.

Throughout the years I have prayed that God would just let me die. I´m told He is a merciful God, and yet not so merciful as to allow this misery to end. For that I found myself angry at God as if he had betrayed me by forcing me to continue to live while so many others around me were allowed to die and I keep asking, “Why not me?”

Those that somehow find the strength to survive the years with some measure of sanity and self-identity, are then rewarded with the signing of their “death warrant,” removed from their familiar surroundings, they are led away to the bowels of the beast that is Florida State Prison, placed in the solitary cell feet from the execution chamber, they’re forced to then count down the days until they will die.

I’ve been in that cell where so many spent their final days, most recently when Florida Governor Rick Scott signed my latest death warrant on November 30, 2015. I spent 72 days in “cell one,” counting down the days to my own scheduled execution. A few days before I was to be put to death for a crime that I’m innocent of (please check out southernjustice.net), I received a temporary stay of execution and although I am now still awaiting the decision on whether I will live or die, I have been moved back to the regular death row wing as I anxiously await my fate (you can view a six part PBS documentary about my death watch experience here.) .

For my family and friends, that news of a temporary reprieve was cause to celebrate. But I know better. At any time the court could lift the stay of execution and have me put to death. I´ve been through this before (read: “The Day God Died”). A temporary reprieve is judicially sanctioned Russian Roulette…they put that gun to my head with the promise of pulling the trigger at precisely 6:00 p.m. on February 11, 2016. They pulled that trigger, and it landed on an empty chamber. The cold steel of the gun remains pressed to my head and the fear of death remains. Next time it might just land on a loaded chamber.

Do I now dare to hope this temporary reprieve will result in something more lasting? I can almost see the seductive mistress of hope smiling, and if I listen closely, I can hear the sirens’ call. There´s still a part of me desperately wanting to embrace hope once again… but do I really dare to?

As I weigh these thoughts, I need only look around this cell. I know that each of the last 23 men who previously occupied this very cell each desperately held on to that same hope and without exception each of them are now dead (read: “Execution Day – Involuntary Witness to Murder”).

I have ordered my last meal and the warden had me measured for the dark blue suit I will wear when they kill me. But death will have to wait a little longer. And I will remain the solitary soul entombed in ice unable to move and yet only too aware of all around me… frozen in time and space on this Ninth Ring.

After all that has been inflicted upon me under the perverse pretense of administering “justice” in the end my only reward is the ritual of “death watch.”

The punishment this presumably “civilized” society has chosen to impose upon me is not an act of God, but the product of a “Christian society.” I find myself once again praying that if only all those responsible for inflicting this misery upon me will themselves be blessed with the same measure of “mercy and compassion” they have extended to me. I am disgusted by that thought since it reduces me to the same evil of vengeance that has consumed them.

As I remain in this state of judicial limbo, not knowing whether in the coming days I will live or die, I think of those words Socrates so long ago spoke to the tribunal that condemned him. Perhaps those will be the same words that I speak as I lay strapped to that gurney and about to breathe my very last breath… “to which of us go the worst fate – you or I”

Michael Lambrix 482053
Florida State Prison
P.O. Box 800
Raiford, FL 32083-0800

For more information on Mike's case, visit:

http://www.save-innocents.com/save-michael-lambrix.html

http://murderpedia.org/male.L/l/lambrix-michael-ray.htm

http://cellone.wlrn.digital

↧

This Friendship Has Been Terminated

May 4, 2017, 5:06 pm

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By Timothy Pauley

Commotion is the nature of the visiting room, but I could tell this was different. A particularly abusive prison guard had just approached people seated nearby. A young man from down the tier was visiting his aging parents. No reason for the guard to speak to them. No way were they trying to disrupt anything.

It became apparent that these facts did not matter. Without trying to pay attention, I soon learned the guard’s undue attention was over the dreaded hand rule. In the visiting room has tables with chairs situated around them. The hand rule says that your hands have to remain on top of the table at all times. Seems simple enough, until you realize the tables are just high enough that this simple act results in constant pain if anyone over thirty complies. The aching in the shoulders sets in within two minutes. After that, it´s an effort of will to keep your hands held that high for such an extended period of time.

Most of the guards know this. Many of them are sympathetic. They understand the spirit of the rule. If your hands are under the table, sliding up your girlfriend’s leg, well, you can´t do that. If you´re simply relaxing your aching shoulders for a few minutes, no harm, no foul.

The more abusive guards, however, live for those moments when they can impart some kind of correction on someone. In this case, my neighbor´s mother had to be made to comply. If he let that go, who knows where it might lead. Next thing you know, someone might want to hug their child or something.

The brief encounter at the table concluded rather quickly. I overheard the abusive guard tell my neighbor that he´d already been warned. The guard placed his hands on his hips and declared, “This visit is terminated.”

My neighbor had to turn and leave or risk being thrown in the hole and having all future visits taken as well. The look on his parents´ faces was tragic. This can´t be happening. But it was. The only one who got any satisfaction was the abusive guard who quickly went back to the desk to brag about what he had just done.

Visits aren´t the only things routinely terminated in prison. The whole system is set up to terminate various parts of your existence until one day you wake up and discover you are only a shell of the person you once were. You might have come to prison with friends, family, dreams and a number of other things that helped define who you were. Within a few years, these components of your life have been systematically eliminated. You are now just you, whatever that means. And anything you value is subject to termination at a moment´s notice.

The last time I saw him, the old bastard was just sitting there taking it all in. We´d walked many miles around the prison track over the years, but on the eve of his release we were parked on the bleachers and he was surveying the giant cage that had contained him for these past two decades.

Conversation was not as easy as it had been all over those years. One of us was on the way down a path back to freedom and the other was stuck in groundhog day, only with one less friend to ease the suffering of it. There really was nothing to say. We both knew. And we were both happy at least one of us was moving on, finally.

“Clear the yard,” the tower guard announced. As we walked out the gate to return to our respective cages, I turned and held out my hand. “I´m sure gonna miss you Johnny,” I said with tears in my eyes. “Likewise,” was all he could get out. Neither of us dared say any more. Two grown men standing there crying at the yard gate would only add insult to injury.

I walked back to my cage, contemplating how diminished my life would be without my friend. Just like my neighbor´s visit, this friendship was being terminated. A friendship that had grown close over the years was now being torn out by the roots, leaving a gaping hole in my life with only tears to fill.

This wasn´t the first time I´d suffered such a loss. If I didn´t die very soon, it certainly would not be the last. The only way to avoid such things was to isolate and never let anyone get close. But what kind of life is that? No life at all, really. So I know that this will happen again. I know how it will feel. I know that the pain will linger for a long time.

At some point it gets better. The friendships that were terminated when I was transferred to another prison were much easier. The new environment required much attention, easing the sense of loss. Often it also brought with it ghosts of friendships past when I would encounter friendships that had been terminated years before.

The loss of a friendship terminated by release is the most devastating. How can you not be happy for your friend? He is getting out of prison. Of course you want this for all of your friends. Only a self-centered asshole would not be happy at a moment like this.

Yet there is a giant hole in your life. One that, try as you might, cannot be ignored. Regardless of your intentions, thoughts of this keep resurfacing. It´s inevitable.

The Department of Corrections, in their infinite wisdom, know all about this phenomenon. They have made rules to increase the impact. When a prisoner is transferred to another prison, they are prohibited from maintaining contact with their friends left behind. When a prisoner is released, they are discouraged by their parole officer from having any contact with another convict. This friendship is over when we say it is, seems to be the message.

The days that follow are the worst. Perhaps it´s something you ran across on television the night before. Perhaps it´s a bizarre incident you witnessed. Whatever the case, the first thought is how your friend will get a kick out of this. Then the realization sets in that there is no one to tell. Just shut up and keep doing this time. That friendship has been terminated.

Timothy Pauley 273053
Washington State Reformatory Unit
P.O. Box 777
Monroe, WA 98272-0777

↧

The Face Of Justice?

May 11, 2017, 3:42 pm

≫ Next: Song For An Old Gal

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By Robert Pruett

In life we sometimes meet people who leave indelible impressions on us, whose faces we'd recognize in a crowd regardless of how long it had been. I‘m usually not one to forget a face, so I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to discover I knew the person I was speaking with...

It was first round of rec, about 6am-ish, and I was in the dayroom exercising, trying to whip myself back into shape. I was down on F-pod, the disciplinary pod, where they house administrative segregation with death row, although they have us separated by sections. They put an Ad Seg inmate in the dayroom across from me, a middle-aged white guy covered in tattoos. I didn't recognize him as anyone I‘d seen over there before, so between sets of push-ups I introduced myself. "What's up, dude? What do they call you?"

"Crow," He replied, staring at me curiously. "Robert? Robert Pruett? Don't you remember me, man? We were neighbors on Connelly unit... We exchanged letters for a bit after you were sentenced and it was still allowed,"

At first I thought he had to be confused or delusional, but then I snapped, Crow... "Crowder? James Crowder?! He smiled and nodded. "Man, I didn't recognize you with all those tattoos!! Wow, you look so different!!" Once I got a good look at him I DID recognize him, and all the memories came flooding back!! When I met him we were in Ad Seg and he had very few tattoos, and none were on his head or face. It was 2001 and we both were going through crises at the time. In the few months that we were neighbors we shared countless stories through the crack between our cells. His were very poignant and heart wrenching, and the details of them have stuck with me all of these years. I told him, "Dude, I have often wondered what happened with you! I have told countless friends all about you over the years, the crazy stories of your life in here and the evocative and sad ones from your childhood... I never forgot you, man. In many ways, I always felt you had it even worse than me...”

James Crowder (before)

James "Crow" Crowder could be the poster child for all that's wrong with this system. His childhood is eerily similar to that of many others inside these walls, even of those here on the row. As a small child he lived in a constant state of fear of his mother, who regularly abused him and his brother. In every story he shared about her from his youth there was a trace of the terror she beat into them, and he made it abundantly clear that disobedience wasn't an option for them. She had her boys out robbing and stealing with her when they were still in elementary, teaching them the ways of the streets. By the time she decided they needed to stop James was about 14 and already addicted to the easy money and fast life. When she gave him an ultimatum to cut it out or leave her place, he moved out to live on his own...

It goes to follow that James would end up in prison before long, and that‘s just how it turned out for him when he was barely 19 years old and got a 40 year sentence for robbery. It was 1988 and his world had just collapsed after his wife signed a statement against him to clear herself of charges against her. He signed for the time because he was dejected about her betrayal and afraid of getting even more after angering his attorney who believed his previous story. Better to sign for the 40, he thought, than risk taking it to trial. Little did he know things would get progressively worse for him inside the TDCJ.

What happens to a youngster when he's thrust into this environment? From experience I can tell you it quickly changes you and often destroys any trace of innocence you might still have. James came in in 1988 when the TDCJ was a war zone, when there were frequent riots, gang wars, rapes, murders and many unspeakable things happening daily. Things weren‘t as bad when I came in in 1996, but I recall the fear and pressure, how every move I made was scrutinized by the older cons and predators for signs of weakness that they could exploit, and how dangerous each day was. You can either "Fight, Fuck, or bust a $60!" ($60 was the spend limit back then for commissary). The options most youngsters have been given as soon as they step off the chain bus for decades here in the TDCJ. Telling the guards to protect you isn‘t an option for most. Most guards will just laugh at you and tell you to man up, get out there and fight. And should they try to protect you by placing you in protective custody everyone will know you "broke weak" or "caught out," and the consequences for that type of snitching are infinitely more worse than the bruises from fighting...

Prison life conditions many youngsters to become violent and aggressive in the face of threats and disrespect, and as many have noted over the years it doesn‘t provide rehabilitation so much as it teaches many to become better criminals. Many youngsters like James come in here and exist in such a constant state of fear that they cannot focus on educating themselves. When they get disciplined for fighting to protect themselves they also receive a six month ban from all educational classes... Whose bright idea was it to ever kick a prisoner out of classes when they misbehave? Why not work even more at helping them correct their behavior and grow out of negative patterns?? Why not help disobedient prisoners learn to survive in this environment? Or better yet, why not create an environment in which the youngsters aren't living in constant fear? And try to modify their behavior without removing them from educational classes? All that does is increase their time spent on the cellblocks living in fear, fighting more and "learning to be better criminals" from the older cons...

When James first arrived within the TDCJ he had hopes of being released someday but things quickly spiraled out of control. He fought to earn his respect and protect himself. Before long he felt threatened by a prisoner to the point of him deciding to carry a weapon, just in case... He ended up stabbing the guy in self defense. "I was way more afraid of him than he was of me," He told me. He got 5 years added to his sentence for it...

James, like so many of us, didn't have much connection to the free world after his arrival, so he struggled to make store and didn't get visits. (He recently told me that he has had 2 visits over the past 20 years!!) I know how it feels to be in here with lots of time and not feel any love coming from the outside, not knowing who's your friend in here, and dealing with the perpetual stress of daily life inside these dangerous walls. When we were neighbors, James confided in me that he’d succumbed at times and did drugs back then, which is why not long after, he got more years added to his sentence when he was caught with a few joints of weed and sentenced to an additional four years...

It would get worse for James. He received another 60 year term for a stabbing here on Polunsky when it was still the "Terrible Terrell" unit in 1995, back when this was widely considered the worst unit in the state. It was a case of self defense, but the way things unfolded he felt he'd be better off signing than taking a chance at going to trial with his past record. But little did he know, Texas had just passed a law that September stating that any sentences added for crimes committed within the TDJC must be STACKED to previous sentences; He'd signed for the 60 thinking his other sentences would "eat it up," meaning it'd be ran concurrent. But the new law made his plea deal for the 60 run consecutive.

Fast forward to 2001 when I met James. He was out in the general population on Connally unit. A youngster living on the pod with him was slapped over an incident involving wine being found by the guards. He didn‘t fight back. The result? They forced him into sex slavery. James saw what was going on and felt bad for the guy, so he made a deal with the person who owned him and bought him out of slavery. They developed a close bond but when the youngster wanted to be moved to a unit closer to home he concocted a lie about James. The youngster later recanted his statement, signing another one saying he lied, but during the investigation James was caught with another weapon and charged with it. At that point he decided he had nothing to lose by taking the case to trial. On the stand he testified for himself: "I didn't invent knives in prison. They were here when I got here. I don‘t like it (meaning the violent culture of this place), but it ain't my prison. It's yours. I'm just trying to survive in it.”

On his birthday, November 20th, 2003, he was sentenced to 20 years, giving him a grand total of 129 years TDCJ time.

In the four or five months that we were neighbors on Connally unit I grew to love and care about James like a brother. I sensed his deep despair and related to him because I'd felt the same hopelessness myself for so long. Despite how he might look on paper, James is a good person with a kind heart, and I could feel while that talking to him briefly down on F-pod recently. When we were first moved next to each other on Connally the first thing he did was give me some coffee and asked if I needed anything else. I never felt his generosity came with a price; it's just who he is. He didn’t have to intervene and save that youngster from slavery months before we first met. In fact, doing so put him in harm's way, but it was the right thing to do and exemplifies his character. The conversations we had back then are still so vivid in my memory, and I thoroughly enjoyed his sharp wit, sense of humor, and how easy it was to get engrossed in the imagery of his stories.

But I was shocked to see him covered in tattoos now!! I asked him why he did it. He said, "I decided to make a caricature of myself: a prisoner with no hope or expectations of freedom so they would stop piling sentences on me. 'Ya got me already!‘ I have criminal codes (Texas Law) as sideburns: B.01 is 'career criminal;‘ 12.02 is the federal code for 'criminally insane!' A subliminal ‘fuck you!‘ to the administration."

James Crowder (today) #504867
Polunsky Unit
3872 FM 350 South
Livingston, TX 77351

I smiled and assured him he looked the part now. He added, "Yeah, but I still want people to know that, despite appearances, I'm not crazy. And I still want to get out. That I love music and books, and given a choice, I am peaceful. I was thrown in a shark tank at a young age and had to pretend to be a shark to keep from becoming a minnow...I'm a perfect example of everything wrong with the system. Yet there‘s still a real, thinking and caring person in here."

Sadly, countless other souls inside these walls have similar stories as my friend James'. You'd think that more effort would be focused on education, rehabilitation, and the administration would work on eliminating the fear and other conditions that enforce negative patterns of behavior... that they'd focus on helping youngsters learn and grow into productive members of society in order to return them to the free world someday... Perhaps someday such changes will come and future generations of young prisoners will have a better chance of surviving this place.

Robert Pruett 999411
Polunsky Unit
3872 FM 350 South
Livingston, TX 77351

↧

Song For An Old Gal

May 18, 2017, 2:31 pm

≫ Next: Several Harsh Sentences, Written Consecutively

≪ Previous: The Face Of Justice?

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By Frank Ross

Jim Buck parked his car a block from the Silver Banjo Tavern. The sun had slipped behind those westward hills, and a warm autumn breeze came across the valley with long, dusty shadows.

Jim stopped outside the Banjo and dug in his pocket for the note. He read the message to himself: Jim, meet me around six o'clock at the Banjo. Bring the money. Red.

Inside, Jim froze; he couldn’t see a thing. They’d changed the lighting. New things had a way of disturbing him. He took the first vacant stool.

“What’ll you have, mister?” asked the barmaid.

“Oh,” said Jim, surprised.

“First time being here?”

“No, but it’s been a while.” He was having a problem keeping his eyes off the woman’s large breasts. “Carl - uh, he don’t work here no more?”

“Why, he certainly do. I’m expecting him - any minute now,” she said, smiling. “You ain’t his son, are you, mister?"

“No.” He looked about. “They sure changed things up a bit.”

“Been about two years now,” she said, coming a little closer. “Where you been, mister?”

“Nowhere, really. I live right down the road about sixty miles.”

“If you won’t mind my asking.. .” The barmaid leaned forward, bringing herself very close. “When was your last time here in Silverville?”

“Well, I could tell you right down to the moment,” said Jim, amused. “If I had myself a large T.J. Bourbon.”

“I can’t believe myself,” she apologized. “How’d you want that?"

Jim was staring at her breasts again.

“How’d you want - ” She was liking his distraction.

“Uh...branch water will be fine,” he said, catching himself

“My pleasure.” She went off, swaying her hips.

Jim thought the young woman appeared a bit overripe, though cute as all hell. Nursing babies crossed his mind.

The barmaid returned and poured twice the normal amount and was about to make herself comfortable when a customer called; her face showed annoyance. “Now don’t you go and get lost, mister.”

The redheaded man stood back, watching Jim. He shook his head and walked over.

“Ain’t been waitin’ long, have you, Jim?”

“Hi, Red,” he said. “Come and join me.”

“I really hate. . ." Red took a stool. “Jim, hate puttin’ you through this.”

“Wish you wouldn’t put it that way,” said Jim. “Why hell, we’ve been friends since we were boys.”

“Yeah, I know.” Red took a cigarette from his pack and lit it. “Man kinda wants to stand on his own.”

“I ain’t never met a fella that stood any taller than you, Red.” Jim took a big swallow of bourbon. “Hell, guess I’ve told a thousand folks that.”

“Jim, I don’t wanta vex you none.”

“Seems to me, you’re trying your best.”

“Goddamn you.”

“That’s better, partner.” He glanced around. “Where’s that nice little lady?”

“Up to your old tricks. Ain’t been in town a hot hour - and startin’ all over again.”

“Red, she stuck ’em right up in my face.” He took another swallow. “I could see the imprint of her nipples.”

“Few years back," Red laughed, “you would’ve jumped up howling.”

“Yeah, but those days are gone,” said Jim. “Man gotta put away the toys.”

“You sound pretty sure of yourself”

“I’ve been toein’ the line.”

“How long has it been now?”

“Today is our second anniversary.”

“I’ll be damned.” Red flung his arm around Jim’s shoulder. “I’m right proud of you, Jim.”

"Me too,” he said. “Never stuck to nothing this long.”

“How’s the family?"

“Fine. Sally’s folks are here. My sister, Annie, and her fat husband came in from Denver last night.”

“Sounds like you’re doin’ a little celebratin’.”

“You know how Sally is,” said Jim. “She makes a lot of fuss over things like that. Goes plannin’ way in advance for ’em.” He took an envelope out of his pocket. “There’s ten thousand dollars here.”

“Jim, that’s twice the amount...” Red’s eyes got watery. “I don’t know when I’ll see myself clear.”

“You sure know how to bring on bad weather.”

“What in hell do you want a man - ”

“It wouldn’t hurt none to fetch that nice lady.” Jim tapped his empty glass. “I’ve gotten damn thirsty.”

“Jim, you’re on.” He looked hard at him. “Maybe you’d rather have her breast-feed you?”

“Swell idea. My health should come first."

Red laughed. “Didn’t we used to give ’em hell?"

“Sure did,” said Jim, starting to get up.

“All jokin’ aside - don’t seem right not buyin’ you a drink.”
“I can’t be late for Sally’s dinner.”

“Aw hell,” said Red, pointing. “Would you just look what’s comin’.”

Carl was a tall, robust old bartender. He hurried down the walkway behind the bar, grinning all over himself.

“Goddamn - what dragged you into town, Jim‘?” He clapped his big hands. “Think this calls for a drink.”

“Why in hell ain’t you gone?" Red grinned.

“He’s too goddamn old," added Jim.

“Nicely said - smart alecks. When I get back, I’ll make you sing that tune outta your ass.” Carl started to turn. “Jim, that reminds me. On my way in - I saw a friend of yours sittin' down at the end of the bar.”

“Hell,” said Jim, looking toward the rear. “It’s so dark in here, I can’t see that far.”

“Yeah, still there,” said Carl, squinting his eyes.

“Well, give him a bottle on me.”

“Jim, ain’t a him.”

“Ain’t a him?”

“No sir. It’s - Lucy.”

“Christ,” cried Red. “Christ”

“I’d better get those drinks,” mumbled Carl, rushing off.

“Damnedest thing - Lucy and me here at the same time.” Jim looked at Red. “Coincidence - or what?”

“Jim, I don’t know how to put this.”

“Do it some kinda way, won’t you?”

“It’s all my fault.”

“How’d you mean that?”

“I all but - invited her here.”
“Shouldn’t joke that way.”

“I ain’t."

Carl carried everything on a rectangular tray. He placed a bottle in front of each man when a customer called. The old bartender toweled the area about the men before he went off.

“Gettin’ back to what you was sayin’, Red.”

“Took my Sara to the depot this morning.” He choked, then gulped down the rest of his drink. “I was surprised to see Lucy there. Been in town for a week, on account of her sister Betty was sick.” He poured another drink. “Had her bags - she even hugged and kissed Sara good-bye. I saw her get on the train with my own eyes.”

“You told her - I’d be here tonight?”

“I didn’t have any idea - she’d double back.”

“You must've forgot how Lucy was.”

“Jim, I forgot how both of you were.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Christ, you should’ve seen your face when Carl told you."

They spotted the old bartender coming toward them.

“Kinda hoggish - couldn’t have our first drink together,” he said, pouring and downing his bourbon. “Jim, you want me to take Lucy something’?”

“No, don’t bother. I’ll mosey down that way pretty soon.” He caught the old bartender’s eye, shifted his eyes toward Red.

“You did know - Lucy was back in town?” asked Carl, playing along with Jim’s joke.

“Can’t say I did, Carl,” said Jim, stealing a look at Red.

“Must’ve come as a shock?”

“You might say - a damned earthquake.”

Red glanced at them suspiciously.
“Lucy plannin’ on stayin’ a while?” Carl asked, holding back a smile.

“Don’t ask me - ask Cupid over there.”

“Jim, goddamn you and Carl.”

Carl had himself a big laugh.

“l’m gonna go back and speak to Lucy,” said Jim. “Red, if you wait I’ll give you a lift.”

“I got my old pickup outside.”

“Well, take care of yourself.”

“I’m gonna hang ’round for a while - keep Carl some company.”

“Good, then I’ll see you before I leave.”

The men watched Jim walk away. His black outfit merged with the darkness of the tavern and was lost in the shadows.

“I never knew a fella that walked so forceful - and yet so damn easy.”

“Yeah,” said Red. “Jim can saunter some.”

“Red, you know Jim better than anybody.” Carl filled his glass almost to the brim. “What say his chances? I mean, what you think gonna come outta all of this‘?”

“I don’t know - and I’m worried,” said Red. “Had to happen sooner or later.”

“Sally’s a good woman,” said Carl. “You couldn’t find a better wife.”

“You’re right, can’t get ’round that,” he agreed. “On the other hand - Lucy ain’t a bad gal either.”

“Yeah. Folks was kinda lookin’ for Jim to marry her.”

“I never got the handle from Jim - but it seemed to brew ’round a lot of petty things. Lucy wanted a small spread and Jim wanted half the damned state.” Red rubbed his knees. “That was ’round the time he was thinkin’ politics - Lucy didn’t want none of that. She wanted a bunch of kids. Jim wanted a couple.” He finished his drink. “Carl, that goes to show - him and Sally ain't had none yet. Mind you, I never did get it from him.”

“Yeah, but - Lucy was still wild as hell.”

“I know most folks thought that - but Carl, I’ll tell you right now, she wasn’t. Lucy only carried on that way to be with Jim.”

***

Jim paused when he saw Lucy. He was disturbed. He hated to admit it but he was. His breath came in short spurts as he tried to resist that old familiar warmth creeping over him. The large brim of her hat was drawn deep to her left, and her back still beautifully straight under the lace shawl; Jim’s hands flinched, remembering when her lovely back was bare. He headed toward Lucy with sudden quick steps.

Lucy had caught Jim’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar and lowered her head.

“Evenin’, Lucy.”

She whirled around as if surprised. “Oh, Jim. You sure know how to catch a lady off guard.”

He dragged a stool closer to her. “How you been, Lucy?”

“Can’t complain none, Jim,” she said, reaching out and touching his hand.

***

Red and Carl fell into an anticipation of a vigil that might last half the night. Carl brought out a tray of glasses and began polishing them. Red had resorted to examining each puff he took from his cigarette, then he started wondering whether a new glass would improve his drink.

“Carl, give me another glass, will you?”

“Don’t mind workin’ a man none, your kind.”

“Keep thinkin’ - know I shouldn’t be.” He looked toward the rear. “But - l keep thinkin’ Jim’s gonna mess ’round and give up the whole shebang.”

“Red, you’re jumpin’ the gun. Why hell, he ain’t been back there more than half an hour.”

“But if Jim had any intention on makin’ Sally’s dinner - he’d be fixin’ to leave ’bout right now.”

“I’ll say this for Lucy.” Carl held a polished glass up to the light. “She’s the best-lookin’ woman ever seen in these parts. When I went back there to serve ’em - I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”

“How were they carryin’ on?”

“Same old way.”

Red groaned. “Christ."

“She was up on his lap - and Jim was smilin’ like all hell.” '

“I wouldn’t be none at all shocked if Jim up and left here tomorrow with Lucy.”

The old bartender’s mouth dropped open. Red turned to see what Carl was staring at and saw Jim coming toward them.

“Figure up my debt, will you?" Jim reached in his pocket. “I gotta be movin’ down the road.”

“Hell, it’s on the house, Jim,” said Carl.

“I’m pullin’ up too,” said Red.

“Adios.” Carl watched them walk out the front door.

The autumn night was clear and the stars sharp-pointed, while light breezes rustled through the street-lined treetops, tossing golden-brown leaves along the sidewalk. Jim and Red stopped under the street arc-light.

“Had me worried there for a little while, Jim.”

“For a while it was touch-and-go.”

“That was the last thing I’d have aimed to happen.”

“Don’t trouble none about it,” said Jim, looking at his watch. “Damn, it ain’t near late as I’d thought.”

“Yeah, you got good time.” He glanced toward the Silver Banjo. “If you don’t mind me askin’ - how’d Lucy take it?"

“She handled it well enough,” said Jim, and wondered. “Well, I guess as good as I did.”

“Feel a little guilty myself. All that time back there - I was only thinkin’ on your behalf;” he said. “Damn shame, didn’t give Lucy no concern at all.”

“Red, don’t worry yourself none.” Jim slapped him on the back. “She’s a tough old gal?

“That’s what’s botherin’ me,” he said, pushing some leaves with his foot. “Lucy - she ain’t tough."

“What?” Jim drew back. “You got too many T.J.’s in you.”

“Jim, you know damn well I ain’t drunk.”

“Well, you`re still talkin’ outta your head.”

“Lucy’s a timid soul - shy, that’s right - all her life,” he pointed out. “The way I see it - she did everythin’ to please you. Yeah, and what did her hero do - up and abandoned her.”

Jim stared at him.

“That’s right. Yeah. All that taggin’ all over hell with you - I’ll tell you right now, Lucy always hated it.”

“You’re crazy,” snapped Jim and backed away.

“I wish you were right,” called Red, watching Jim hurry up the street.

Jim couldn’t shake off his best friend’s outburst. He knew that Red wasn’t just sayin’ those things. He wasn’t built that way. He would’ve never spoken those words. Why’d he believe all those things if they weren’t true? He took out his keys as he approached his car.

“Mister Jim.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing around.

“Reckon you saw Miss Lucy?” asked a young black boy.

“Yeah”

“Good night, Mister Jim,” said the boy, turning away.

“Hey, boy - is that all?”

“Miss Lucy said to make sure - uh, you didn’t get outta town without her seein’ you.”

“Night, boy,” said Jim, wondering how much Lucy had paid him. Then came the beeping of a horn and Red yelling out of his truck. Jim waved and watched the old pickup’s taillights fade into the night. He put his keys into his pocket and started back down the street toward the Silver Banjo.

Carl held back a smile when he saw Jim walk from the shadows to the bar. Jim whispered something in the old bartender’s ear.

“Sure, Jim,” he said, nodding his head. “I’ll fix you right up." Yeah, I sure will, he thought, watching Jim heading toward the rear. “You son of a bitch.”

Lucy’s head was bent and Jim’s arrival went unobserved.

“Howdy.”

Lucy looked up slowly, her hazel eyes blinking to focus. She reached out and touched Jim timidly, as though to reassure herself. “Why - why, Jim.”

Jim sat down, taking her hands. “Lucy, your hands - as cold as ice.”

She smiled weakly.

***

Jim led Lucy to the little hall by the arm; they climbed the narrow stairs slowly, then headed along the corridor, checking the numbers on each door.

Inside the large room there were matching golden drapes at the windows. Jim sat sipping his drink on the loveseat while admiring the big, shiny brass bed across the room.

The sound of running water came from behind the bathroom door where Lucy tidied herself. The turning of the doorknob brought his impatient eyes toward the hall where Lucy appeared.

“Lucy - ”

“Just a minute, Jim”

He watched Lucy crossing the room, carrying her hat and shawl at her side. She paused to look at her reflection in the mirror on the wall.

“Lucy - ”

She smiled at him.

“Lucy - ” He patted the loveseat cushion.

She laid her things aside and came over and sat beside him.

Jim handed Lucy her drink; they touched glasses.

***

“Jim, let me get you another drink.” Lucy stood up and took his empty glass.

“You barely touched your drink.”

“I’ve always been a slow starter,” said Lucy, smiling.

Jim watched her preparing his drink at the buffet, standing so straight, so attentive, and he felt a deep-rooted regret while he removed his boots.

"Jim, don’t.” She rushed back with his drink.

He took his glass and wondered what she was up to.

“I want us to do it like we used to.” Lucy picked up his boots, set them out on the carpet in the middle of the room, then she removed her shoes, laying them beside the boots.

“Jim,” she said, looking at the big brass bed. “One time or other, we must’ve used every single room here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I sorta fancy that little old utility room best.”

“Why, that was just awful,” she replied. “Had my legs all dangling, me squirming on those old shelves, and you laughing your silly head off.”

“Come here.” Jim stroked the loveseat. He always liked the way Lucy walked, and watching her, he felt an old urge.

“Jim,” she said, snuggling against him. “Think the hospital will be able to help Sara’s eyes?”

“Supposed to be the best in the country.”

“I certainly hope so - for Red’s sake.”

“He said she’d go blind without the operation.”
“Jesus, I sure wish them well,” she said. “Red’s worried to death.”

“Yeah,” he said and looked down at Lucy thoughtfully. “He’s worrying about you too.”

“Why, I can’t imagine what could give him a reason.”

“Guess he thought about all those menfolks chasing you all ’round Chicago.”

“There’s no - ” She checked herself; then flashed a bewitching smile. “A lady has a right to fun sometimes.”

“So, you do have a bunch of fellas?”

“Jim, you know - I’m kinda wild.”

“What’s their handles‘?”

Lucy paled. “Well - ”

“They do have names, don’t they?”

“Why - yes, of course,” she said and stood up. “I’m going to freshen up my drink.”

“That’s the same one you started with.” He studied her.

“I need some ice, Jim.” She went to the buffet, slipped some ice cubes in her glass. She knew he was watching her. “Jim, you know I was never good at names.” She went to the bed, sat her drink on the night table, and started fluffing up the pillows.

“Lucy, you know what I was thinkin’ ’bout?” He was studying her very closely.
“The time we three went out hoboin’.”

“Jim, we sure had some fun.” She sat on the bed. “I cut my hair to pass for a boy.”

“You did enjoy those times, didn’t you?”

“Why, sure.”

“Red said something different.”

“I can’t imagine him thinking a thing like that.”

“He said you always hated those things.”
Lucy stiffened.

“Why didn’t you say something, Lucy'?”

“You wanted me to go - don’t you remember?”

“You mean - Red was right‘?”

“I didn’t want to cut my hair,” said Lucy. “Run all over the countryside in those old men’s clothes.”

“What ’bout all those fellas up in Chicago?”

“Jim, starting over takes a little time.”

He stood up.

“I know I’m a tough gal - you always said that, but - ”

“Lucy, it’s been over two years now.”

“It’s hard getting used to new folks,” she said. “I guess - I know I will in time.”

Jim went to the bed and lifted her up by the hand. “Let’s go to bed.” He put his arm over her shoulders.

“No, Jim.” She resisted. “Let’s do it like we used to.”

“It’s been a long time, Lucy.”

She led him by the hand out where the boots and shoes lay. Then, without a word being passed, they started undressing each other. Their eyes began an old conversation, their hands moved politely, sometimes one aided the other; and afterward, they stood in silence.

“Now, Jim,” she sighed, closing her eyes. “Like you used to.”

He picked her up in his arms and carried her toward the bed. Lucy peeped over Jim’s shoulder and smiled at the single pile of clothes. He sat down on the bed, still holding Lucy in his arms, squirmed back until he was about in the middle of the bed, and then he began to rock her in his arms.

“Jim, go ahead,” whispered Lucy.

He kept rocking her.

“Like your momma used to do you.”

He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Then he felt her tears drop and run down his chest. Jim tightened his grip about her. He held Lucy in a way he had never held anyone.

“Sing for me, Jim.”

Jim cleared his throat. “Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you - way across the wide
Missouri - ”

THE END

Frank Ross AM7185

SCI Graterford

P.O. Box 244

Graterford, PA 19426-0244

Kathryn Fanning, an editor/lecturer and a native of Oklahoma, had the most influence on developing Frank Ross's craft, though he always adds with a chuckle, “She was a severe taskmaster”. Ms. Fanning has denied it. A reporter, after interviewing both Fanning and Ross, stated she believed his side of the story. But whether he writes about a good ol' boy trying to pursue a hooker to go away with him; a monster-hunting Vietnam Vet; an ill-fated first love of a little boy; a prisoner working in a vacant house who falls in love with a ghost; or the collection's title character, Nora, a black woman who can pass for while but insists on being colored in 1890 America – the folks who are in these tales go a long way to bare their souls to him.

↧

Several Harsh Sentences, Written Consecutively

May 25, 2017, 5:34 pm

≫ Next: The Magic Lantern Chapter Two

≪ Previous: Song For An Old Gal

Please make a donation to support Minutes Before Six

By Wesley Atkinson

For as long as I can remember, I have lived a double life. If I were to go missing, my mother might describe me to authorities as a good young man, smart and kind, loving. On the streets I have a very different reputation, one built of stories that might make you unsure whether to laugh, cry, or pray.

I became a criminal as a child. When I was nine years old my friend‘s dad bought brand new bikes for his son and me. "Nothing in life comes for free," he told us. If we wanted to keep them we‘d have to work them off. We both nodded solemnly that of course we would. He handed us each a backpack and told us exactly where to take them and when to be there. We rode to a corner a few neighborhoods away, the shadiest part of Santa Cruz, where my mom never would have let me be, for any reason. A man stood at the meeting spot, waiting for those backpacks.

This became routine, like a paper route--except I knew we weren't delivering newspapers. We sometimes watched my friend's dad package bricks of crank the size of my Social Studies textbook and stack them carefully in the backpacks. I knew better than to ask or say anything about it.

In our neighborhood, most of the grimiest street life unfolded in the alleys. I was definitely not allowed to play or even pass through the one behind our house. So of course that's where I wanted to go. I saw my first dead body in our alley, a few houses down from our own. I was ten. My friend and I stood there silently, staring down at the dead man half-hidden in the bushes. He was starting to smell. I remember being scared and excited at the same time, fascinated with the proof of how extreme a certain type of life can be. I never knew what happened to him, before or after that. It‘s not like there was some big investigation. People in that neighborhood didn‘t call the police.

Not long after, I watched my older cousin beat a man senseless then push his face through a car window. The man's face was gashed open, much of his blood spread about the scene. I was in awe of the violence and admired my cousin for being the one giving the beating, not taking it. I figured everyone had to be one or the other.

When I was eleven, my friend's father said, "You guys aren‘t really kids anymore." He put his hands on our shoulders, staring us in the eye, one then the other. "Today you become men."

He gave us each a revolver and a small bag of crank that we owed him for. "It‘s time to earn your own way."

My mornings were spent with my mom and sister, kid mornings full of cartoons and sugary cereal. Nothing to worry about, no responsibilities aside from chores. In the summertime I would go outside around noon to "play." Between my front porch and the hidey hole in the alley where I kept my gun I would transform, harden. Prepare to make my rounds.

I was to ride through the hood, scoping the allies and dopesale corners for cops. If I spotted a cop I was to ride to the nearest dealer's house and tell them where the cops were hiding. If I saw a new dealer trying to perpetrate, I was to draw my pistol, rob them and run them off. A wandering dealer was typically new to the game, so an 11 year-old kid pointing a shaky revolver at his face was usually enough to dissuade him from setting up shop on that particular corner. He would leave, maybe a little grateful that nothing but his pockets had been emptied. A few let their pride convince them to return. In those cases I was under strict orders to shoot, no questions asked.

I sold meth and heroin every day but did not know much about them, aside from their street value. I would take to school with me vacuum-packed bricks of heroin and meth, tucked safely in my backpack, and on the way home meet someone to drop it off. In the fifth grade someone reported me for selling drugs at school. The cops came into my classroom and arrested me. Took me to the principal‘s office and searched my locker, my backpack. They found nothing but some empty containers. I thought I had outsmarted the law, even though I was expelled from school. I would never return.

One night I got drunk at a friend‘s house. Wasted, really, because when you're 13 alcohol hits you like that. My friend‘s family had taken in a roommate, a 28 year-old man. He asked if I wanted to play his X-Box with him. "Sure," I said, and stumbled into his room. He asked me if I did uppers. I didn't know what he meant. He pulled out a glass pipe. "Hit this," he said.

I blew out an enormous lungful of smoke. In the space of a few ramped up heartbeats I was no longer drunk. I felt supercharged, full of energy. I had finally met methamphetamines in person.

The next day he asked me if I wanted to get high again. Of course I did. I expected him to pull out the glass pipe and load it, like he‘d done the night before. But he arranged a different set of items: a glass of water and a spoon. Two syringes. I watched him crush a piece of crank in the spoon, dissolving it into water, and draw it up into one of the syringes. I studied his movements, the gentle press of the needle tip against the cotton. The tiny slurping sound it made at the end, like when you push air between your teeth with your tongue. I was just curious enough, and careless enough, to be talked through my first hit. The effect was almost violent, like getting punched in the face with an alternate reality. Both my inner and outer lives would never be the same.

I began hanging out with a new crowd, the users. But they seemed to have no purpose aside from getting high. I still wanted to make money, I wanted to be somebody. I kept using, but returned to dealing.

I was at least five years younger than everyone else in my circle of "friends," so my job was to hold contraband. At 14 I was riding the city bus around Portland, Oregon, carrying a duffel bag full of crank, heroin and a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun. That year I had my first brush with death. A man shot me in the chest while I was selling crack from the passenger seat. Luckily for me, he was only packing a .22 pistol. The bullet entered above my right nipple and bounced off a rib, lodging against my collarbone. At my girfriend's house I worked the bullet along beneath the skin until I could push it out the entrance hole. I took some selfies in the mirror while still bleeding out of my chest. That experience taught me to respect violence, always expect it and never be caught unarmed. As a result, I was caught armed. I became a felon at 14, a possession of firearm charge, the first of many felonies I would rack up before I turned 16: thefts, second degree burglaries, residential burglaries.

When I was 16, two friends and I decided to break into e liquor store. We stole 521 bottles of booze because 520 just didn't seem like enough. One of my friends severed an artery in his wrist on the plate-glass window we'd broken to gain entrance. The cops didn't need a bloodhound to follow the actual blood trail to the nearby apartment where we'd stashed enough booze to stock a cocktail bar. I looked out the window and saw them closing in, flashlights wagging up the sidewalk. I grabbed my backpack and ducked out the back. A few hours later I called the apartment to find out what had happened. My friend told me over the phone that the coast was clear. Somehow they'd missed the apartment, he said. Come on over. When I got there the police were inside patiently waiting for my friends to convince me to return.

I was sent to Maple Lane Juvenile Prison to serve an eighteen month sentence. Nothing I had ever endured, none of the chaos and turmoil of street life compared to what I faced in juvenile prison. Living conditions were sickening, and in retrospect, inhumane. I was locked down in a cell with no toilet or running water. Staff issued me a jug, the word "urinal" stamped on the lid. After weeks of use, urine would crystallize on the inside of the jug, accumulating to the point of clogging the opening. I had to bang it on the shower walls to empty it. The smell of urine permeated everything, the cell, common areas, the showers--no amount of cleaning could counter the ammonia reek. The guards would bait us, belittling and verbally abusing us until we were ready to snap, willing to fight a losing fight rather than endure another minute of it. Then they would lock us down for 72 hours, shut into a reeking cell with a piss jug.

Conflicts in juvenile prison were resolved with violence, no matter how slight. A year and a half of that was supposed to somehow reform me, cure me of my criminal ways. What it did was strengthen my resolve. I knew then that if I could survive prison intact, I was a man. By the time I turned 18 I had nearly a decade in the dope game, and had been involved in robberies, burglaries, violent assaults, stabbings, shootings, and prison. I will turn 26 in a few weeks, and I have been locked up for nearly every birthday since my sixteenth.

I've been beat down, tied up and thrown in the trunk of a car more than once.

I've been jumped and robbed many times--a few of those times I was beaten so badly I couldn't let my family see me for weeks.

I've been shot. Shot at. Attacked with a knife. One of my attackers I stabbed through the bottom of his jaw because I thought I was going to die. The tip of my knife protruded from his face above his lip, next to his nose.

My friend and I robbed a drug dealer once, and my friend didn‘t believe the man when he said he had no more dope. He cut the man‘s ear off.

Another friend of mine blew the side of his head off with a shotgun, a few feet from me.

I witnessed four people surround my homeboy in his car while one of them shot him in the head with a sawed off shotgun.

I was sitting beside a partner on his bed when a man shot him in the face, than rummaged through his pockets for his phone. He called my dead friend's sister to tell her that he was running the area again. When he hung up he asked me why I thought I should live.

I was walking with my girlfriend when a gunfight erupted in the neighborhood. A stray bullet struck her in the head. She died next to me.

In some ways my years spent in prison have been the easiest. After that first sentence, being locked up meant nothing. I can't call prison enjoyable, but I believe it‘s saved me more than once. Life inside has normalcy, structure. The streets are where the mayhem is. Being locked up so often, and for so much of my life made me lose hope for anything else. I never had thoughts of turning my life around, of doing good. It just didn't seem realistic.

In here I'm part of a community, going about my daily routine. Out there I'm nothing but a menace, so the judges and police say.

I've been sentenced by the same judge that sent my dad and three uncles to prison. My dad escaped from county jail, went on the run and robbed a bunch of banks before turning himself in. He was my role model, my inspirational male figure.

I‘ve deprived my mom of the son she once had, robbed my sisters of the brother they needed. I have a daughter who may never know me because of the lifestyle I‘ve chosen.

All I can do now is reflect on my life, the pattern of decisions that led me here. It's not like I can present some valid reason for choosing such a destructive path. If I say I'm a product of my environment, then I'm not really owning it.

I have nothing to show for my life thus far aside from nightmares and scars. The inner ones hurt the most. I have anxiety bordering on paranoia that I will run into someone from my past, someone who has a bullet waiting for me over one of the many mistakes I made as a kid on drugs, impressionable and influenced by older people. For many years I was told that "doing the right thing” meant doing some very bad things. Some of those actions were under duress, fear of being beaten. Some I did on my own because it fit in with everything else I'd known and done.

As I near the end of this four-year sentence, I am becoming aware for the first time of how profoundly prison has affected me, how far behind I am in life, in free world terms. I have become comfortable in prison because in here I could relax—each day I wake up knowing no one will shoot me, and they probably won‘t stab me. But I have mistaken prison for a healthy environment only because all I can compare it to is the worst sort of life out there. The scars of prison are more subtle than the ones I carry from the free world. My social skills are limited to dealing with prisoners and criminals. I've never had a legitimate job, and the idea of one is terrifying. All I know about is prison. My only conversation topics are prison, and outlaw tales. I've seen prison break men much stronger than me. The fact that I fit in so well here makes me feel I‘m made for this, that I have no chance at success. I‘m filled with self-doubt.

I‘m afraid to open up to free people. When they begin to understand how wild my childhood was, they get a little scared and pull away. They judge me by my past and usually refuse to get to know who I am now.

I‘m not proud of the fact that everything I wrote here is true. How can such a past make me who I am but not define me? Sometimes I fear never meeting someone who can look beyond my past to who I truly am now. I dream of having a family, of living right and working for a living. Of not having to worry about being robbed, or fear someone's vengeance. But I'm so afraid of failing that I don't know where to begin. I've disappointed my family countless times. My mom has lost so much sleep wondering if I were alive or not. I've caused her a lifetime of pain. If only I could make her proud. For so long I've wished I knew how.

Despite the corrupting nature of the prison environment, I have met here the only positive and productive friends I've ever had. The walls close me in, try to convince me I need bars and chain link to survive. But a few of the people I've come to know in here have helped me to expand my mind, to see the free world and myself in a new light.

Several months ago I landed a job in mechanical maintenance, one of the best jobs in the prison. The only job where a guy can learn anything that matters. A small crew with low turnover, it's s difficult job to land. One of my friends is a skilled welder, and took me under his wing after helping to get me hired. I picked it up quickly. I began to see this as an option, a way to make a real living one day.

Then the guards discovered several gallons of homemade wine in my cell. I went to the hole for a few days and lost my job, the clearance even to step foot in that part of the prison. I am so used to disappointment, and disappointing others, that I accepted this turn of events as the usual result of my actions. I gave up.

But my friend, the one who'd gotten me the job, did not. He spoke to our boss, an ex c/o who some describe as having the soul of a prison guard, explaining my background and what this job meant to me, to my future. He was always a decent boss, but rigid about the rules. Not exactly a sympathetic guy.

First my boss spoke to the administration on my behalf-- the captain, the custody unit supervisor and program manager. They all said that no way would they reward bad behavior with a second chance. Think of the precedent, they said. I was astonished that he‘d gone to bat for me. No one ever has before. He'd given it a sincere effort, but been up against some heavyweights. I chalked it up.

But my boss did not. He wrote the warden on my behalf, the first time he‘d done so in the 14 years he‘s worked here. When he didn't get a timely response, he went to the warden's office and pleaded my case in person. The warden sided with him, against administration.

I'm back to going to work every day in maintenance, under the conditions that I regularly attend A/A and N/A and keep my nose clean.

I asked my boss why he would stick his neck out for me. He said he‘s never seen someone walk into a shop for the first time and within weeks be able to weld competently. He said I have a natural ability for this kind of work. And that I could get a real job on the streets with the skills I have right now. I told him his reputation as a hard ass is in question.

I‘ve taken to heart the fact that someone like him could see value in me. For the first time, I have positive expectations to live up to.

I'm the youngest on my crew by 14 years. In talking with these men I've learned not only snippets of life skills, but that my past doesn't have to define me. Some of them have pasts, too. But they‘re more than what their central file says.

When I get out this October I‘ll have the potential to be an asset to a real company. That surprises me almost as much as the fact that I know it to be true. I've come a long way from where and who I was. I hope I have enough momentum to complete the journey to becoming the father, brother and son my family deserves.

Wesley Atkinson 361772
Washington State Reformatory Unit
P.O. Box 777
Monroe, WA 98272-0777

↧

The Magic Lantern Chapter Two

June 1, 2017, 2:36 pm

≫ Next: The Struggle

≪ Previous: Several Harsh Sentences, Written Consecutively

Please make a donation to support Minutes Before Six

By Anthony Engles

To read Chapter One, click here

Square One

Colleen sat with her arms crossed in front of her, lips pressed tightly together as she looked out the windshield. Faded white broken lines advanced toward her in a never ending succession. The weathered gray asphalt of Highway 11 separated freshly cultivated timothy and alfalfa fields in every direction until they merged with the horizon in a hazy blur.

"That‘s how bikers do it, hon," Austin continued. "They slowly infiltrate these funky little towns, and before you know it, they've got their greasy fingers in everybody‘s pie. It's their standard M.O. The local yokels are too scared or too stupid to pull their heads out of their asses until it’s too late."

Colleen bristled.

"Those stupid yokels are my parents," she said. "And Mom says there's only a couple and that they don't bother anybody. She says they keep to themselves and are very respectful. At least it won't be like the gang-bangers shooting each other every night in Oak Park.”

“Maybe not yet. Besides, we didn’t live in Oak Park."

Austin's voice was weary. He had been driving since eight in the morning and now it was close to three in the afternoon. He seemed to hunch over the steering wheel of their newer white Chevy Tahoe; his blue oxford button-down shirt hung limp from his arms. Dark stubble peppered with gray covered his jaw and made him look older than his forty-two years. Only his blue eyes- Ricky Nelson blue Colleen's mother had called them - crackled with the suspicious curiosity of a hard-bitten, big-city detective. He shook his head slowly from side to side, his eyes locked on the road.

"I still say we're making a mistake," he said. "We should have stayed in Antelope. We could have worked on our problems there just as easily."

Colleen closed her eyes and took off her glasses to rub her temples.

"There's no point in discussing it any further, so please let's just drop it. We're both tired, and I don't want to fight."

"I'm just voicing my opinion. I don't like it."

"You don't have to like it. It's not about you. It’s not even about us right now."

"How can we have a healthy fresh start if we're not in agreement on a big issue like this? It's crazy, just packing up twenty-two years of our lives that we built together back to Podunk, Nowhere."

"It's done, Austin. I need to be close to my family after everything that's happened. I just want to get back to square one. We‘ve been through this a hundred times."

"I've tried to explain --"

“No more explanations. No more apologies. We're past all. What I want is for you to support me in some of the changes I've decided to make on my own terms. It's our marriage's last chance."

Austin fell silent. He looked forward, the muscles of his jaw working while he absorbed Colleen's words. A mile passed before he finally spoke.

"Okay," he said. "Who knows, maybe you'll discover the biker mama within. Maybe run off to Sturgis with some guy named Spider."

Colleen got up on her seat and crawled over to him. She put her arms around his neck and planted several kisses on his cheeks and lips.

"I could get a tattoo," she said, making her voice husky. She bit his earlobe. "Would you like that?"

Austin chuckled.

"That could be kinda sexy," he said.

Colleen smiled and returned to her seat. The tension that hung between them since Biggs Junction evaporated, leaving a still calm. She settled back and tried to enjoy the rest of the ride.

Colleen had forgotten that a true, deep-blue sky existed in places beyond Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley where the air was always a brassy, russet color. A light, bright-green peach fuzz of feed grass made its first appearance of the year -- still two days before the official beginning of spring. The distant Blue Mountains formed a dark band that stretched along the east, and then vanished in a blur of brown, green and gray to the north. Several miles to the northwest a sun-faded green water tower appeared-a lone structure in the middle of nowhere that rose from the earth like a steel sentinel.

"Walla Walla," Austin said.

He kept his eyes forward and said nothing more -- the two words hung malignant in the silence of the cab for several miles. Colleen breathed a quiet sigh of relief that Austin had decided not to drag out those old bones; the subject had not been broached for several years and there was no reason to bring it up now. The situation was like a simmering stew made from foul ingredients that no one ever dared to lift the lid to check. Thankfully, Austin had never used that part of their history together as a weapon against her to make her life any more hellish than it already was.

Just under a year ago, Colleen had been a cross word and a slap away from throwing a few things in a suitcase and walking away from Austin and their marriage. She had given him two options: They could both return to Vermilion together as a couple so that she could be close to her family, or she could return alone and Austin could stay in Antelope or live wherever he wanted -- maybe not alone but without her. Up until several months ago, Colleen's self-esteem was perhaps a bit tarnished but remained largely intact. Now it stood battered and cracked with heavy structural damage; without positive reinforcement and nurturing, it threatened to crumble around her. She had been forced to make drastic decisions for the sake of self-preservation, and with the support of her parents, she would stand firm.

Colleen fiddled with the turner on the stereo. She settled for a country station, partially for clarity, but also because Austin enjoyed Rodney Atkins-a subtle way to extend their delicate armistice. She leaned back and smoothed the front of her dress--a cotton paisley print she had selected for comfort over fashion. Her feet were delightfully bare, with her favorite sandals kicked off to the side.

"Everything okay?" Austin asked. He reached across the cab and gave her hand a squeeze. Colleen realized that she had fallen into a thoughtful silence since passing the prison town. She looked over at Austin and mustered a genuine smile; the one that he used to say could light up a room.

"Yeah," she said. "a little nervous, maybe."

"About what?"

"I don't know," she said- "Change. The unknown. I'll be okay."

"Of course you will. Just keep it simple."

Keep it Simple.

Colleen kept the annoyance off her face and held her tongue. Austin had picked up the phrase at his first A/A meeting and beat her over the head with it ever since -- long after his brief and futile attempt at complete sobriety. Simplicity was what she had chosen when she decided to marry him after her high-school graduation so long ago. Get married have babies raise them in a loving family environment, an environment where the father doesn‘t disappear for days at a time, and when he doesn't come –

Colleen stopped herself. She took an eraser and wiped the chalkboard in her mind. She had to stop thinking like that, just as she had finally learned to curtail the little nips and jabs that had always been on the tip of her tongue, tiny malicious arrows, ever ready to fly. Besides, she was tired of being a bitch; she just wanted to forgive and move on.

They ascended a low rise, and the small farming town of Northfield spread out before them, a veritable portrait of rural mediocrity. Its own water tower stood as a rust-streaked graffiti covered exemplification of such -- a local artist had devoted an exorbitant amount of time and white paint to create a giant swastika with tines pointed in the wrong direction.

Long ago, Colleen and Austin had spent many nights driving around the back roads of Northfield. He had been a senior, she a junior. Sometimes they would drive down here after the football game on Friday nights. Austin would drink beer and drive around while they planned their future together. They always wound up at the end of a dark old farm road in Austin’s 65 Olds Delta 88, in the back seat as big as a single bed. With the windows rolled down, they would listen to the crickets and breathless words of undying devotion to each other -- words that people barely older than children had any business using. It was on one of those nights that Colleen had given Austin her virginity.

As they drove through Northfield, Colleen managed to keep her emotions in check until they passed the Tastee-Freeze where Austin had proposed to her. He always swore that he had been inspired by the John Cougar song. Colleen stole a glance at him to see if they were anywhere close to being on the same plane, any sign of recognition or vestige of nostalgia. He caught her though and looked at her intently.

"What's the matter? Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

Colleen had a lump in her throat and couldn't speak. She shook her head, but with too much enthusiasm. She wanted to lunge over to Austin's side of the truck, take his head in her hands, and kiss him hard on the mouth, to tell him that she should have seen it coming and tried harder to be a more attentive, impassioned wife-not just the mother of his daughter. Not just the woman who spent her days cooking and cleaning. She wanted to spring on him like a panther and punch him in the face over and over and scream obscenities at him until blood flowed from his nose and mouth for what he had done to their lives and their marriage. Instead, Colleen folded her arms in front of her and looked out her window at all the new strip malls and shopping centers as Northfield passed by.

Northfield behind them, they drove north on Highway 469. They passed through another verdant stretch of timothy, the ankle-high tender young grass reaching toward the mid-afternoon sun. After several miles of pasture land, the Tahoe began another winding ascent into a more mountainous terrain; towering ponderosa and tamarack pines crowded both sides of the road, throwing cool flickering shadows upon them. Colleen cracked her window and the crisp smell of the forest rushed in.

30 miles of hairpin turns and wooded hillsides rolled by before they crested the rise that overlooked Vermilion in the saddle of the valley, split in two by the sinuous Snake River. Colleen sat up in her seat like a giddy young girl, excited at the prospect of new beginnings. They descended a gentle wooded grade and soon crossed the four-way intersection with the old Shell station to the left across the street from the Quickie-Mart. A new motel, the Thunderbird, took up the entire block on the northeast corner.

"Sure you don't want to check in?" Austin asked. "We could probably still get a room without a reservation this time of year."

Colleen shook her head.

"I‘m sure. We'll have fun."

They crossed the muddy expanse of the river and the bridge landed on the north bank where Highway 469 turned into Dora Road. Colleen was astounded at how touristy this part of town -- once just sagging buildings half-empty and failing family businesses -- had become; both sides of the street were lined with quaint shops that sold hand-blown glass figurines, hand-crafted leather goods and even full-sized fountains made of copper and brass, tastefully stained with verdigris. There was a feel of local artistry here, possibly the hub of Vermilion‘s cultural entity, but it had carefully kept pretense at arm’s length. Sidewalks were swept and tidy and the plate-glass windows gleamed from recent washing. Fresh asphalt paved the street-flawless black with immaculate white stripes down the center.

"Smells like dirty money," Austin said.

***

Their new home lay a mile and a half down a washboard and pothole-riddled gravel road called Lariat 5 miles north of town. Here the pines yielded to thick stands of larch and oak amidst heavy patches of foliage and wild berry bushes, still gray and leafless awaiting the vernal equinox to resurrect them.

Beyond a sharp bend to the right, the forest on the northern side of the road opened up to encircle a small cluster of two mobile homes and a dilapidated brown cracker-box house with beige trim in a clearing. They drove slowly past the first mobile, a weathered single-wide with a vintage Camaro parked in front- -shark-gray dappled with flat-burgundy primer spots.

Set back 40 yards beyond a shabby yellow lawn sat another home, positioned parallel so the front slider faced the road. The trailer was bisque colored with long vertical streaks of dried rust from old screws, fronted with a home-made porch made out of plywood and two-by-fours -- the railing bowed and stone colored with age. Moored in front was an early seventies Ford LTD that seemed in danger of being swallowed by knee-length dead grass.

The tiny brown house was theirs and faced inwards. The three domiciles formed a square with an invisible side adjacent to the road. A mighty juniper tree provided a permanent and majestic central point in this ramshackle array of man-made junk. Austin pulled into the gravel drive in front of the house and cut the engine.

Colleen stepped out of the truck and stretched. Her ears buzzed from being on the road, but there was no other sound except for the ticking of the engine -- no nearby traffic or other city noise that had been woven into the fabric of her life for so long. The absence of even a distant car alarm or siren seemed surreal. Austin made a noise of disgust.

"Swell," he said.

Near the thick trunk of the juniper lay four metal trash cans dumped on their sides. Garbage littered the lawn, scattered about by local dogs or animals. Several Hefty bags sat chewed open with dirty diapers, beer cans, spent coffee filters with moldy grounds and a wide assortment of other trash strewn about in a 15-foot radius from the tree.

A child‘s scream shattered the afternoon stillness. A half grown black Lab trotted out from behind the trailer in the back lot with three laughing children in hot pursuit. The dog carried a piece of chewed up Styrofoam in its mouth-the type that raw meat comes on wrapped in cellophane from the grocery store. There was movement behind the sliding glass door of the far trailer, and Collen thought she saw the shadow of someone looking on. She and Austin watched the kids' futile attempt to capture the over-grown puppy for a few moments, then climbed the steps to the covered porch.

Inside the house, Colleen was greeted with the distinct smell of new carpet and Pine-Sol. She smiled and inhaled deeply through her nose. The living room to the left and kitchen to the right were devoid of any furnishings. An island covered with Formica separated the two rooms with cabinets that hung from the ceiling. Colleen bent down at the knees to run her fingers along the new beige shag carpet. She enjoyed the way it felt.

"I'll bring our stuff in from the truck," Austin said from behind her and went back out the sliding glass door.

Colleen stood again. She began to explore the layout, starting with the kitchen. A fresh coat of wax had been recently applied to the slightly-yellowed linoleum floor. A full-sized bay window at the front of the kitchen faced south and overlooked the heavily-wooded forest across the road, another unexpected joy.

Austin came in with a sleeping bag under each arm and a suitcase in each hand. He dumped everything on the floor in the center of the living room.

"Want help?" Colleen asked.

"There‘s just a couple of things left. Finish your inspection."

Colleen smiled and went to the large picture window that faced east. An abandoned garden plot ample enough to provide for a large family lay covered with rotting vines and oak leaves with a dense forest of trees and thick underbrush beyond.

She walked down the hall and looked in the first doorway on the left. The small closet-size room would serve as temporary storage space since this house was a third of the size as their last.

Colleen inspected the small bathroom and laundry area then moved to the far north-end of the house to the spacious master bedroom. A single three-by-six window provided outside light from the north wall. Colleen leaned against the doorjamb and in her mind arranged the furniture that would arrive tomorrow. While she stood there, brow creased in concentration, Austin came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. He nudged her ponytail aside with his nose and kissed the nape of her neck. Colleen‘s body involuntarily tensed up, but only for a split second -- enough time to strain the brief interlude. Austin released her and took a step back. Colleen felt the urge to say something but Austin broke the silence first, mercifully allowing the awkward moment to pass.

"Your back is going to hate your guts for deciding to camp out on the floor," he said.

"It'll be romantic," Colleen said. She put her arms around his waist, trying to capture the lost moment. "Maybe we can fool around."

It had been almost a year since they had slept together and Colleen surprised herself by suggesting it. Austin blinked, also taken momentarily aback, but he recovered quickly. He kissed her on the lips. He had just slipped his hand around to her lower back when a tentative knock on the glass of the front slider reached them.

"Ah, must be the welcome wagon," Austin said. "I don't suppose you packed any Rid. My scalp itches just looking at those brats."

"Shhh! Let's just go greet them and try to be nice neighbors," Colleen said. "For once."

Colleen turned Austin around in the doorway, swatted him on the butt, then pushed him gently towards the living room. Austin rounded the corner and hesitated when he saw their visitor. Colleen almost ran into the back of him.

The young woman was in her early to mid-twenties with a voluminous crop of blond hair that spilled out through an opening at the back of a simple ball cap. She was short and quite full figured and wore a black T-shirt, extremely-tight jeans with ripped knees and tennis shoes covered with old food and grease. She held a parcel of aluminum foil while she looked absently out towards the road. Colleen thought that if the girl gained an ounce she would be overweight, but as she stood now, she had a figure like one of the bombshells that drove men crazy back in the forties and fifties. The hair stood up on the back of Colleen's neck, and she prepared to extend her claws.

Austin beat her to the slider and slid it open. The young woman ignored Austin's Officer Poncharello smile, however, and looked past him, directly at Colleen. Her dazzling-blue eyes were the color of sapphires hidden in the freezer.

"Hi," she said, "You must be the Millers."

Her voice was shy with a latent obnoxious quality that Colleen assumed would blossom as they became better acquainted. The girl extended her hand nervously, almost dropping the aluminum foil package. Colleen smiled and took the girl's hand, reaching underneath Austin‘s arm.

"We are. I'm Colleen and this is my husband Austin."

Austin shook the young woman's hand politely.

"I'm Tina. Me and my husband Cody live over there."

She turned around and pointed to the trailer across the dead lawn, the one with the Camaro parked in front. Colleen could hear the three kids screaming and laughing behind the back trailer.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Tina," said Colleen. She relaxed, seeing that Tina focused on her instead of Austin. Austin was aloof, but well behaved.

"Cody ain't home right now, but he told me to come over and make you feel welcome," Tina said. She extended the package towards Colleen. "Here, these are for you guys."

"What's this?" Colleen asked. She took it and lifted a part of a loose flap of aluminum.

"Oatmeal cookies. They're okay, I guess. I ate one to make sure I wasn't poisoning you guys or anything. They're kinda salty."

Colleen laughed politely and invited Tina in. Austin tried one of the cookies. He raised his eyebrows and nodded dramatically. Colleen shot him a warning look not to overdo it.

Tina took a single step into the doorway, and then froze as if obeying a previous order not to proceed any further. When she knelt down and ran her fingers across the new carpet as Colleen had done, Colleen felt an immediate kinship with their pretty new neighbor.

"We seen the carpet guys over here a couple of weeks ago," Tina said. "The old stuff that came out was pretty nasty. The whole place was."

"Why?" asked Colleen. "Who lived here?"

"Her name was Edith. She was a real sweet lady, but she had a bunch of cats that stunk real bad. It took Big Norma and me a week to scrub this place down."

Colleen and Austin looked at each other.

"Big Norma lives back in that trailer at the end of the lot," said Tina. "Those three pests chasing that stupid dog around belong to her. Patty paid Norma and me to clean this house up. Patty's your sister, right?"

"Yes," Colleen said. "The place looks wonderful. Thank you."

Tina shrugged and blushed slightly, then turned away. The last of the late afternoon sun slipped down towards the horizon and caught her hair in an explosion of platinum and light.

"What happened to Edith?" Austin asked.

Tina looked at him full-on for the first time.

"She died. She didn't have no family or nothing. Just them nasty-ass cats. Kinda sad."

"Poor lady," said Colleen. "Maybe sometime you could show me what she had planted in her garden."

"Oh, she had all kinds of stuff," said Tina, suddenly animated. "She even taught me how to can vegetables. I got my own set-up and everything."

"Maybe we could plant some things together," said Colleen. "I've always wanted a full-sized garden."

"I'd like that," said Tina.

Tina stuffed her hands in her back pockets and looked out at the lawn. The three kids came back around and cut a diagonal path across the grass. The Labrador puppy stayed just ahead of them and disappeared behind Tina's trailer, his three pursuers close behind.

"So, when‘s all your stuff gonna get here?" Tina asked. She pointed to the pile of sleeping bags, luggage, and cooler. "I hope that ain't it."

Tina snorted and laughed at her own little joke then became serious again.

"I‘m sorry, I shouldn't be so nosy. Cody says I need to learn to mind my own business."

Colleen shook her head.

"You‘re perfectly fine, hon," she said. "The moving truck should be here tomorrow morning. We wanted to be here, so we got here early."

"We thought we'd camp out tonight," said Austin.

"Outside?" Tina asked.

Austin laughed, and Colleen elbowed his arm.

"He meant we're going to sleep in here, on the floor," said Colleen. If Tina's feelings were bruised, she did not show it.

"Oh," she said. "Well, if you guys need anything, let me know. I‘ll be home in a few hours."

"Why don't you stay, Tina?" Colleen said. "We have beer and stuff for sandwiches."

"I'd like to take you up on a beer, but I can't. I have to get to work. Cody'll be home tonight, but it'll be real late. Maybe I'll bring him over to introduce you guys tomorrow."

Colleen and Austin followed Tina out to the porch. With some effort, she extracted a set of keys from her front pocket. The black Lab pup bounded into the yard. The three kids appeared from the back of Tina's trailer - still running, but slowed down by half, their faces flushed and sweaty. The oldest boy brandished a hatchet or hammer handle that he apparently intended to use as a club to brain the puppy. The next down in age was a little girl with blond hair that needed to be washed. She held a rusty leash that lacked three feet of chain. The youngest boy was around four years-old with bright-red hair that sat like a sweaty mop on his head. All three kids wore dirty clothes that were in bad repair and fit poorly. They all stopped in the middle of the lawn and tried to regain their breath. The dog stopped several feet away and turned to face them. It panted and wagged its tail. After a brief pause, the kids started the chase again. The pup sprung gleefully into the air and led them across the lawn once again.

"That's Joshua, Micaela, and Ezra," said Tina. She pointed to them in turn from the oldest to the youngest.

“Big Norma's on welfare and don't do nothin' but pump out brats and clean out the food bank once a week. The money she got from your sister for helping clean your house is probably the only she's earned since she had Joshua."

The three kids ran in front of the porch, close enough for Colleen to detect the odor of perspiration. Tina suddenly addressed the trio in a loud voice.

"Why don't you kids stop spending so much time chasing that stupid dog around and spend more time picking up trash. I don't see why I should have to pick up shitty diapers when I don't even have a baby."

The kids skidded to a halt and looked up. The oldest, Joshua, glared at Tina.

"We‘re trying to catch him so we can take him down to Safeway to find him a home. Then he won't get in the trash anymore, Mrs. Busybody."

"Besides, you ain't our boss, Tina," said the girl, Micaela.

Tina exhaled with contempt.

"Fine. I hope you all get bit and get rabies. I'm gonna laugh my ass off when they put that long-ass needle in your stomachs."

"Why don't you shut your fat mouth, Tina!" said Joshua.

The three were off again. As if to taunt Tina, the Lab pranced toward the juniper tree and snatched up a rolled-up, disposable diaper in its jaws. It made two or three bounding leaps, tail wagging furiously to celebrate the find, then loped back around and stopped in mid-motion to throw its pursuers off the trail. It then bolted towards the steps that led up to the porch where Colleen, Austin, and Tina stood.

Colleen gasped and stumbled backwards. She grabbed Austin's shirt for balance and swung behind him. The dog broke left at the last second and darted back onto the lawn.

"I was only kidding, hon," said Tina. "He‘s only a puppy. He ain't bit no one yet."

Colleen's heart pounded in her throat. Her mouth had dried up, and it was difficult for her to breathe. Still, she managed a smile.

"I‘m okay, I'm okay," she said. "He just startled me."

A loud bellow vibrated the wooden porch they stood on and echoed into the forest across the road. The command was unintelligible to Colleen, but the three kids understood it; they stopped in their tracks, turned on their heels and walked towards the back trailer with heads hung grudgingly like child laborers returning to the sweatshop. On the swayed, weather-beaten porch stood a mountain of a woman in a faded-yellow moo-moo.

"Big Norma," Tina announced. She looked at her watch. "Shit! I gotta go, I'm late!"

She trotted down the steps and walked quickly towards the Camaro, her keys jangling and body jiggling in all the right places. The Lab thought she was there

to play until she picked up an empty tomato can and hurled it in its direction.

"When my husband gets home I hope he fills your black ass with buckshot, you little fucker," Tina said.

Colleen looked over just in time to see Austin openly enjoying the young woman's charms. She sighed and took him by the hand then led him into the house.

Colleen lay awake in her sleeping bag and listened to Austin's ragged breathing as he slept soundly next to her. She envied his heavy slumber - brought on by many hours of driving and the several cans of Coors he had drank to wash down two sandwiches. There it was again, Colleen thought. Why did she continually put a negative spin on everything?

When would she finally be able to find her strength and move in a positive direction?

Tina had come home several hours earlier, but the bare-bulb porch light on her trailer still glowed, lighting up the lawn and much of the living room where Colleen and Austin were camped out. They had found a spot in the northwest corner where they could hide from the glare and make love in the semi-darkness. It was not the light that kept Colleen awake, however it was the silence. Without the sounds of the city, Colleen's mind had no distractions to focus on. She seldom drank because alcohol gave her a headache. When it was quiet and she was wide awake, she could slowly and painfully dissect herself with laser-

like precision.

Colleen shifted positions and lay on her side, facing away from Austin. She replayed their lovemaking session in her mind over and over. It had been eleven and a half months since the last time, but she realized she wasn’t ready, not emotionally. She had just gone through the motions, made the right movements or noises at the appropriate time, enhanced by words of praise and sighs of satisfaction. The very first time Austin had peeled her panties off with trembling fingers in the back of his car, she had responded the same way. How old had she been then? It didn't matter - her breasts were budding and she had had her first period over a year before, but in her teen mind it had been too soon. Only now it wasn't the fear of getting pregnant, her father finding out, or being labeled a slut at school that squeezed her heart or impeded the flow of blood to her pelvis: It was the image of the other woman that haunted her. It had felt like the whore stood over them while they copulated, her hands on her hips and eyebrows raised. You've got to be kidding, Austin. How can you actually enjoy fucking her after you've been with me?

Colleen had met Dianne Fletcher and her own husband once, during the Policeman's Ball one year at the Exhibition Hall on J Street. Colleen could not remember the husband's name or any of his unremarkable features, only that he sold insurance. Coleen remembered that much because he had approached her while she was standing off to the side casually observing how good Austin and Dianne looked together. The husband - Tom or Nick or whatever his name was-had the audacity to ask Colleen about their coverage while Austin and Dianne accepted a joint award for service in the City of Sacramento.

The affair technically never happened. Neither Austin or Dianne ever admitted that they had traversed those boundaries, Dianne's actual words to a legion of reporters that day on the steps of the State Capitol - the official last day of Austin's career as one of Sacramento's most productive detectives. Even under the crushing weight of hostile reporters and questions about other departmental corruption that cut to the bone, Austin and Dianne had looked like a beautiful couple - equanimous and unscathed under the barrage; Austin with his military cropped hair and block-cut C.H.P.-style mustache that he used to wear, Dianne with deep flame-red hair, flawless skin and impeccably tailored navy-blue power suit.

Colleen sat up. She tried to will the images of Dianne Fletcher from her mind, but with no success. She crawled quietly out of her sleeping bag and crept over to the cooler wearing only panties and an over-sized T-shirt. She pulled out a can of Coors, flicked an ice cube off the top, then returned to the dark corner of the living room and leaned against the wall. When she popped the top, Austin grunted in his sleep and rolled over, mumbling something unintelligible. Colleen took a sip of the icy-cold beer and savored the mild alcoholic aftertaste it left on her tongue; she knew that although only a few drinks would give her a headache in the morning, she would be able to spend the rest of the night in peace.

By the time Colleen finished just under half the beer, her brain felt fuzzy. Tiny lights popped in her vision and her tongue felt chilled and thick. She got up and walked bare-footed across the carpet into the kitchen, momentarily exposing herself to the harsh light on Tina‘s porch, and poured the remaining beer down the sink. While she stood on the linoleum, she felt the floor begin to vibrate - lightly at first - until a deep rumble shook the house as though a police helicopter was flying overhead. Colleen darted over to the slider to peer out, careful to stay out of sight.

Two choppers pulled into Tina's driveway and stopped behind the Camaro. The ground thumped for several seconds, then both bikes simultaneously fell silent. Colleen watched the two bikers dismount and walk up the steps. The two entered the trailer and the porch light went out, plunging Colleen into complete blackness. She returned to her sleeping bag and looked at the Indi-glo of Austin's watch before falling into a beer induced, dreamless slumber; it was 2:48.

To be continued...

Anthony Engles 832039
Coyote Ridge Corrections Center
P.O. Box 769
Connell, WA 99326

My name is Anthony Scott Engles, born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1965. After a brief stint in the Navy, I pretty much roamed around the country, waiting tables and bartending. I settled in Spokane in 1994, then got pretty heavy into survivalism and related activities. I got in a shoot out with Stevens County Deputies in 2003 and wounded one of them. I’m serving a 30-year sentence in Washington State, where I have done the majority of my writing. I have one short story published and several unpublished short stories and poems.

↧

The Struggle

June 8, 2017, 5:09 pm

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Bill Van Poyck was executed by the state of Florida on June 12, 2013.

This story was submitted by his loving sister, Lisa,

and we consider it a great honor to be able to share it with you

By William Van Poyck

“I always hoped he’d be a normal boy, eventually,” his father had often observed in moments of private pain. “But even when he was just a little skipper, not much bigger than a freckle, Earl was different than the others.” For as long as anyone could remember, Earl Voorhees had been different. Not in the sense of better or worse, at least not initially. Just different. As for his father, there would be no triumph of hope over experience, and between the two would lie a continuum of consequences.

Earl paced the concrete floor, as was his custom, ninety-minutes a night with a surgeon’s precision, moving in the deliberate way of men who take possession of a place by walking through it. He was handsome in an irregular way, of average height but powerfully built, with naturally broad shoulders, thick, corded limbs and large hands as square as shovels. He walked with a smooth, athletic grace and with each step his calves and forearms bulged in near caricature, like an homage to Popeye. Even his head, atop a stout neck and crowned with short dark hair, bespoke a reserved energy, like a coiled spring. His open face expressed a straightforward manner, with even teeth and clear, vivid blue eyes that everyone talked about. A man of above-average intelligence with a sharp wit and disarming smile, he carried with him an air of order, a certain gravity, a largeness reflecting the residue of a life lived in the arena.

As a child Earl was fearless, a trait which informed the core of his being. From an early age, he endured his own solitude, waging a relentless battle with fear, a private conflict experienced at the level of his soul, as Jacob wrestling with the angel at Jabbok. Earl grappled with fear as one would a tangible presence, a struggle that marked his character with its ineffaceable traces, until his ultimate victory cut itself, like the facets of a diamond, into his hardest places.

“It’s complicated the way people turn out,” his Aunt Helen was known to remark when asked about Earl. “If only his father, well…” and her voice would trail off, only to rise sharply when asked about Scott, Earl’s older brother. “He was an unfit vessel,” she would insist in her Florida cracker accent, “just a bad seed.” She would hug her Bible and blame Scott for taking little Earl down the wrong path.

Earl paced, lost in reflection, his calloused soles chafing rhythmically against the floor. He lived much of his life inhabiting the past, for the present was grim and his future elusive. He cast his mind back, peeling away the layers of his memory like a ripe onion, to those childhood days when he sensed he was capable of anything but responsible for nothing. His earliest memories of his lifelong struggle were grounded in Miami, a sleepy town still comfortable with its rural southern roots. A land of slow days and burning sun, of undulating sawgrass and fishing camps. A time just beginning to be marked by the singsong Spanglish patois echoing across domino games suffused with the pungent smoke of hand-rolled cigars.

It began as a solitary endeavor, driven by indiscernible imperatives, his jumping off of roofs. He came to call it “roofing,” and he recalled the first time at his own house. Earl remembered the beguiling call to the roof edge, the battle of will, edging ever closer, the churning gut and the taste of fear rising up to fill his mouth. Then, that moment of transcendence as he committed himself with infrangible determination and leaped. On the ground, stunned but unhurt, he triumphantly raised his arms in victory. For the first time, he felt truly alive. That was the beginning. Earl was seven. That summer, one by one, he conquered the neighbors’ homes, roofing them all, in search of ever more challenging tests. At night, unable to sleep, he stepped out of his house, roaming far and wide until he found a suitable roof. Only after forcing himself to jump, only after again feeling alive, was he able to return home and sleep soundly. Later, he drew the neighborhood boys into his competition, daring them to match his jumps. It was always Earl who emerged the triumphant winner, arms raised. And when he occasionally hurt himself he refused to acknowledge pain or regrets. The other boys’ interest soon flagged, in direct proportion to the height of the roofs, until they finally agreed Earl was just crazy and he was again left alone to his solitary pursuit.

At age eight, Earl bent a paper clip and jammed it into an electrical socket. The shock blew him across the room amid a shower of sparks. His father beat him with his belt, cursing his stupidity. The next day Earl cut an extension cord down to a three-foot section, skinning the insulation back from the tips. Plugging it in, he sweated in anxious anticipation, heart pounding, eyes locked on the shiny copper wires lying on the ground. Then, with a grim determination, he pressed both palms down on the bare wires. The violent surge shook his frame, knocking him down. But Earl scrambled to his feet and danced about like a victorious prize-fighter, relishing another victory over fear. I must make pain my best friend, Earl decided, and that became a lifetime mantra. Earl unplugged the wire and carefully put it away, but from that point on the wire became a trusted companion, stored away until the inexplicable need drew him back and forced upon him another test of will. For many years, in times of need, Earl resorted to the wire, a self-affirmation of his courage and fortitude.

Earl stopped at the window to deeply breathe in cool air, the breath of empty space. He stared out into the luminous night, his mind drifting, the memories recurring like a skipping record. He saw, then touched the livid scar creasing his forearm like a purple vine. He was nine when he picked up a blue steel double-edged razor blade and a thought invaded his mind. It refused to leave, taunting him, telling him he was a coward unless… Earl resisted, struggled, argued and reasoned, but, in the end, he viciously slashed the blade across the underside of his forearm, from left to right. He stared in astonishment as the flesh parted, gaping open, momentarily painless and bloodless, offering the briefest glimpse of gleaming bone, white and shiny as sink porcelain, of sinewy muscle sheath and severed veins, spurting like tiny maroon garden hoses. The wound instantly filled with blood and pain, overflowing, gushing hot and red. Earl calmly wrapped a towel around his arm, walked into the kitchen and announced he was hurt. After the hospital and the many stitches, Earl was unable to explain why he did it. He felt his father’s belt that night but he only remembered the taste of victory.

“Earl could be a lovable boy,” an elementary school teacher once reflected. “He bubbled over with curiosity, and was a bundle of energy, full of life. The thing I recall the most was how much he loved to read.”

Earl turned his leg, eyeing the triangular shape scar on his calf. He was ten, perhaps eleven, when he saw Aunt Helen’s unattended ironing board, the iron plugged in, upright, with wisps of steam feathering its tip. Seized by that familiar irresistible urge he picked the iron up, clenched his teeth and pressed it against his calf, held it tight as the skin sizzled, never uttering a word through the odor of burnt flesh. Days later, when the large, ugly burn became infected his father noticed it. Earl took the belt stroke like a stoic monk, secretly pleased with another victory, and a scar to bear witness.

Earl stood sentinel at the open window, framed starkly against the rising moon. The night swung wide before him as he inhaled cool air, concentrating on his breathing technique. He suddenly thought of the father he never really knew. As a child, Earl would rummage through his father’s wartime memorabilia, hidden deep in a closet in the den. It was forbidden territory. Earl would secretly pore over these belongings, the old photographs turned yellow and cracked, the ancient newspaper articles turned brittle as egg shells. He touched them, held them, breathed in their essence, seeking an echo of his father’s true voice. The war medals, and there were a lot of them, fascinated him. In a musty old brown leather kit with leather straps and metal buckles stamped “U.S. Army”, lay the guns. A big Colt .45 model 1911 semi-automatic service pistol. A German Luger. A smallish semi-automatic taken off an Italian general he captured near Messina, Italy, in the summer of 1943. And, wrapped in a stiff, olive drab canvas duffel bag, a squat, heavy .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun. Earl held these weapons, felt their weight and heft, played war games with them, held fast by a mysterious allure that drew him back to them time and again. Earl had heard of his father’s war exploits, mostly from others, and Earl knew that these guns had been there, fought there, killed there. Alone, without training or guidance, Earl taught himself how to operate them, to disassemble and reassemble them, and in due time, how to shoot them.

Earl reached up and touched the small scar on his chest, smiling faintly. He recalled the long-ago summer when he and three buddies were exploring the South Miami woods in search of adventure. When one of the boys produced a handful of .22 caliber bullets, Earl impulsively suggested they make a fire and throw the bullets in. At first, as Earl tossed a single round in to the flames, they all hid behind trees some distance back. Bang! There was an unimpressive explosion and a small shower of embers. Earl stood a little closer to the fire when he dropped the next bullet in, while the others hung back. Bang! Again and again Earl dropped the bullets. Bang! Bang! Each time Earl stood a little closer until, finally, he refused to retreat at all. Bang! Bang! Bang! The others peered from behind their pine trees, then yelled when Earl, standing implacably, dropped all the remaining bullets into the flames. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! One by one they exploded, blowing sparks and burning sticks into the air. Smiling broadly, Earl turned, facing the boys with arms raised, fists clenched in triumph. They stared back, speechless, pointing, and when Earl looked down the blood was coursing down his chest. Only then did he feel the pain. Earl simply pressed a palm to the wound and jogged home, leaving his friends crying in fear. The wound proved not to be overly serious, a fragment of lead with little penetration. That night, after the stitches, after the belt, Earl lay in bed, smiling with satisfaction - of the four boys, he was the only one who did not cry.

“Earl tracked his life by the number and ferocity of the battles he won, as if any other time was unworthy of notice,” his high school wrestling coach had opined.

Earl reached up and touched the steel bars across his window. He was tired, though not sleepy, burdened with the fatigue of a man who has found himself on the wrong side of too many struggles. He lay down on his bunk, sorting through vague childhood memories drifting through his mind like refrains in a minor key. He settled on some familiar ones, of his own golden summer, before the serious troubles began. He was fifteen and his brother, Scott, was back in prison. Earl was befriended by Walter, a local Metro-Dade cop and charter member of The Biscayne Gremlins, a small freshwater cave diving group. Walter introduced Earl to cave diving, and when Earl had a dozen dives under his belt, Walter agreed to let him accompany some Gremlins on a special dive.

It was an impressively hot summer morning when Earl, Walter and four other Gremlins arrived at Withlacoochee Springs in North Central Florida. The particular cave they would explore was known as ‘The Blue Chute’. Eighty-feet below the surface of the cool spring lay a gaping horizontal fault line in the limestone, which opened up into an extensive network of tunnels, passageways and chambers.

Walter pulled Earl aside just before they went down. “Remember,” Walter said, gripping Earl’s shoulder, “the most important attribute of a successful cave diver is the ability to overcome fear and resist your natural urge to panic. Giving into these means to die.”

The Blue Chute extended over 2,500 feet, though its limits had never been reached. On this day, the plan was to go in about 800 feet. They would all go down together but, at a predetermined point, they would split into three separate two-man teams, going separate ways, to minimize any silt out. Too many divers together could kick up the talcum powder fine silt, blocking out all light, creating potentially fatal disorientation. Walter and Earl would team together.

The divers stood on the old macadam road, reviewing their safety procedures. Everyone knew where the emergency air tanks were; everyone knew the directions to their location in case they had to recite them to would-be rescuers; everyone knew the phone number to the nearest hospital. Each diver had two lights and four regulators: two first-stage regulators and two second-stage regulators. Each diver knew exactly how much air he had and how much he could use before he had to turn around and surface. Walter soberly reminded them that The Blue Chute had already claimed the lives of five divers in three separate accidents, the most recent just last year. Then, one by one they dropped into the crystal-clear water and descended.

Below, at the limestone opening, Earl saw the knotted white nylon line, permanently anchored by previous divers, leading deep into the black crevice. The line, Earl knew, was their life. Of all the safety equipment, the line was paramount. It was knotted in code: one knot followed by two knots meant you were going deeper into the system; two knots followed by one knot meant you were on your way out. As Earl swam through the opening, the narrow passageway immediately jogged upward, then straightened back out. Negotiating that bend, Earl saw the diffused sunlight grow increasingly dim until it finally disappeared and he turned on his lamp. There was no other light here, nothing, other than their own, and the void stretching beyond his lamp’s beam possessed the utter darkness of a tangible presence. Earl felt his pulse quicken as his heart surged perceptibly. Earl oriented himself in the pressing darkness, his entire world reduced to that narrow beam. His eyes moved in practiced cadence, from nylon line to wrist, checking his watch and computing his time. Then to his depth and pressure gauges. Then back to the white line. Line. Watch. Gauges. Then back again.

They slowly moved in single file through the narrow tunnel until, suddenly, Earl glided into a large cavern. Their lights arced across the inky expanse, probing the cavern’s limits, reflecting back from monumental stone formations manning the perimeter. Stalactites hung down from the ceiling far above, an indication, Earl knew, that this cave had once been dry. Earl hovered in effortless awe, like an astronaut in deepest space, the silence broken only by the rhythmic hiss of his regulator. The rock formations resembled grotesque medieval gargoyles hiding in the shadows and Earl imagined he was floating in a vast, primal stone cathedral. Then, the six divers floated to the center, some motioning at the numerous side tunnels branching off from the cavern, likes spokes radiating from a wheel’s hub. The divers paired up, going off in different directions.

Earl followed Walter into one of the tunnels, his heart jumping slightly as the walls closed in. He grabbed the safety line and focused on the moment. Line. Watch. Gauges. They were two hundred and eighty feet in. Seven-minutes in. Earl’s tanks were at 2,600 psi. Deeper and deeper they went into the blackness, the tunnel walls so confining that Earl’s hands and shoulders brushed their sides. His grip on the line tightened and his breathing increased. He felt his heart thumping his chest. He sought to push back the anxiety nibbling at the edges of his mind. Line. Watch. Gauges. The tunnel became narrower and his tanks banged the rocks above. How much further were they going, Earl wondered. Did Walter really know where they were going? How would they turn around? Earl pulled mightily at his mouthpiece, tasting the metallic bite of the cold air. Line. Watch. Gauges.

Suddenly, the nylon line ended as the bottom fell away and Earl shot out into an immense grotto, much larger than the first. He drifted over the vast expanse, playing his light across the chasm. He could see neither ceiling or bottom. The entire chamber was gently washed in an eerie bioluminescent blue that rippled iridescently wherever their lights penetrated. Earl felt he was suspended in the heart of an enormous liquid diamond, bathed in a soft, effulgent light of luminous transparency. He floated serenely, overwhelmed by the beauty. He was totally at peace, lost in a magical moment. Long minutes passed as both men, alone in their thoughts, floated in the crystalline abyss.

Walter appeared at Earl’s side, grinning wide, making an “OK” sign with his fingers. Then he pointed at his watch, signaled “OK”, and motioned Earl to follow. Walter slid into a dark tunnel amid a cascade of air bubbles. Earl hesitated at the entrance, his stomach knotted with indecision. There was no safety line here. He looked at his watch, then his gauges, struggling to calculate his remaining air time as Walter’s light faded down the inky shaft. He had maybe ten-minutes before he had to turn around. He felt the fist of fear grip his chest. He had to decide: follow Walter, or turn around. Forcefully, he chose to follow him. Whatever else, he could not leave his partner. Entering the narrow passageway, Earl felt his hand slam into the rocks framing the opening, knocking his lamp from his grasp. Instinctively he backed out. The light was falling, down into the dark pit, its beam lazily swinging from side-to-side. Earl immediately dove, kicking his fins violently, chasing the light downward. His heart raced as he surged downward, arms outstretched. The receding light seemed pitifully small against the infinite blackness. Down he swam, kicking harder, straining every fiber. His heart pounded and he pulled hard on the regulator, using valuable air. Slowly, inexorably, he gained on the light. It was there, just beyond his reach. With a final explosive kick he closed in and his fingers brushed the glowing lens. Then, with a terrifying swiftness, the light winked out and an utter darkness enveloped him like a black velvet mask.

Earl immediately turned, halting his descent. He was alone, suspended in total, absolute darkness, aware only of the importunate rasping as he violently sucked air from his regulator. Resolutely, he forcefully suppressed the panic and fear rising up within him. He had to think clearly. He concentrated on his breathing, focusing intently on each labored breath until his respiration slowed to an even, measured pace. A deep peacefulness came over him and his mind cleared. He knew what he had to do.

Calmly, he unfastened his emergency light from his belt and turned it on, relieved to see the narrow beam arc through the darkness. Checking his watch and gauges, Earl knew he had to get out fast. Adjusting his buoyancy compensator, he floated upward, revolving slowly, playing his light across the grotto. He briefly wondered where Walter was. Surely he would streak into the cavern at any moment, flashing his signature grin. All Earl saw was the interminable blackness.

Wracking his memory, he desperately searched for the tunnel they came in through. The air came harder now. Slowly he drifted upward, his light probing the rock wall. Finally, Earl stopped, steadying himself with his flippers. On impulse, he struck out across the chasm, kicking powerfully, gliding across the open expanse toward the opposite side. When the rock wall emerged from the darkness he quickly flashed his light from left to right, then up and down. There, in the shadows, a darker void. Earl propelled himself forward with growing hope. A profound relief flooded him as his light illuminated a white nylon cord. Grabbing the line, he felt the knots: two knots, then one knot. Yes! Earl looked back across the vast canyon one last time, but saw nothing. Earl swam through the tunnel, forcing himself to remain calm and control his breathing, while his light bounced off the walls ahead. Sooner than he thought possible, he shot out into the first, smaller chamber, the stone cathedral ringed with strange rock formations. Earl floated, trying to orient himself. He had hoped to rendezvous with some of the other divers here, but he was alone. He recalled that there were four separate passageways radiating from the cavern, including the one leading out. That left three tunnels, beside the one he had just emerged from. He furiously tried to recall his movements upon first entering the chamber. Should he go left or right? The air came harder and he strained at his mouthpiece. Earl went to his right, flashing the light ahead. Almost immediately he came upon a narrow opening. Grasping the line, he felt one knot, then two. Earl froze, uncertain now, mentally arguing with himself. He struggled to think clearly. One knot, then two. This was not the way out. Or was it? Was it the other way around? He desperately wanted to enter the tunnel, to follow the rope to the sweet, fresh air above. No. He backed out and continued around the chamber, light probing the rocky wall. Then, just when he was ready to give up and go the other way, he saw a yawning black hole. Desperately seizing the white line, he felt two knots, followed by one. This was it. Earl pulled himself into the tunnel, clawing, kicking faster, his heart racing. Suddenly the passageway turned downward, and as he made the turn a beautiful, limpid light flowed upward. Yes! Earl shot out of the cave, into the light-filled spring, racing up, up, up. Ignoring the safety decompression, he burst through the surface, ripping his mask off and pulling in deep lungfuls of air. Gasping, sputtering, he felt an electric sense of relief. He was alive!

The other divers were sprawled on the shore, drinking beer and roasting hot dogs. There was no Walter.

“Hey, kiddo, are you OK?” one of them asked. When the divers saw Earl’s expression they all stood up. “Where is Walter?” the one diver asked.

“Yeah, I’m OK,” Earl said, pulling himself from the water. “We got separated. I lost my damn light.” Earl paused, catching his breath. “He should be coming up right behind me,” he added.

The men crowded around the water, nervously eyeing their watches, while Earl explained what had happened. After five-minutes of uneasiness Chuck, Walter’s best friend, announced decisively, “I’m going down. Steve, you come with me. Darryl, you call the hospital if we are not back in ten-minutes.” Even as he spoke, Chuck was strapping on a fresh air tank. Earl stood by helplessly, silently praying that Walter would surface, laughing at their unnecessary concern.

The two divers disappeared into the spring, their flippers flashing in the sunlight. The minutes slowly ticked by and Earl’s sense of dread mounted. Walter should have surfaced by now. After ten more minutes Earl felt sick to his stomach, the anxiety paralyzing him. Twenty-minutes later an ambulance arrived. The other divers spoke with the driver in hushed tones, ignoring Earl. Then, at the thirty-five-minute mark, the water exploded in a cascade of flashing water. Divers surfacing! Earl stared, but there were only two heads. Chuck pulled his facemask up, looking directly at Earl, then shook his head grimly. Earl’s heart sank. His knees buckled and he sank to the ground, where he put his face to his knees and cried.

It was late that evening when Walter’s body was recovered. They found him in a narrow side tunnel, possibly a victim of silt out, facing in the wrong direction, a hideous, contorted expression on his face, his diving knife inexplicably locked in his hand in a death grip. The other divers avoided Earl but he felt their accusatory stares on his back like an insistent murmured current.

******* *******

Earl Voorhees settled himself on his hard prison bunk, a man at ease with himself, yet never satisfied with the narrow dimensions of his life. His tired mind framed difficult questions about the freedom within his grasp. He sensed the beginning of a journey whose value would best be measured by the baggage dropped off along the way. And yet, he knew, having made it his friend, pain was all that kept him alive.

That night Earl dreamed he was seven again. He was up early to greet the summer sunrise lining the horizon with a swath of Renoir Pink. He was stalking that big, silver mosquito-control plane, with its bright orange stripes, zooming low across Miami in its summer ritual, navigating its precise grid pattern, trailing its pungent cloud of kerosene-based insecticide. Closer and closer it would come with each pass while little Earl calculated the exact one that would bring the thundering plane over his house. Waiting in delicious anticipation, Earl would crouch in ambush, muscles tense, ears straining to hear that distinctive roar, grasping his carefully selected rock. Then, with an earth-shattering howl, the plane would zoom overhead, flying so low Earl could count the rivets across the shiny aluminum skin and clearly see the pilot’s face. Then, with all his might, Earl would spring up and hurl his stone at the shiny underbelly. Always, the rock fell short, and always, the pilot smiled down in amusement. One day, Earl believed, he would hit that plane and something magical would occur. Now, in his dream, the plane was there, overhead, so near Earl felt he could reach up and touch it. Little Earl reared back and threw his rock, and it sailed up, up, up, further than ever before, until it struck the shiny metal belly. Earl threw his hands up in victory and the pilot looked down, smiling, making an “OK” sign with his hand. At that moment, Earl recognized that the pilot was Walter, grinning at him as he flew by. Then, without warning, the plane exploded and crashed to the ground in a burning heap. And little Earl fell to his knees and cried.

Bill Van Poyck and beautiful Lisa

↧

The Mad Dog a Mighty Messenger

June 15, 2017, 12:57 pm

≫ Next: Mad Man

≪ Previous: The Struggle

By Reinaldo Dennes

The first time I met a skinhead was about eight years ago. Tattoos decorated his body. AK-47s. Skulls. Swastikas, and this is just on his bald head. The rest of his body was graffiti, bad trips, demons of hell, even of his Fuhrer Hitler. "What's your name?" I asked him.

"Cujo,"

Why I was drawn to him was clear to my soul and heart, but my mind rejected all he stood tor. The state of Texas, in all its wisdom, has death row inmates change cells every six months. Consequently I was only able to talk with Cujo a few times before we changed cells. I would talk and show my artwork as a way to get closer to a mad dog.

During his short time on death row Cujo had created a name for himself; he was greatly feared as a man who would stab you in a heartbeat. He hated everyone who did not look like him. And he did not discriminate between officers and inmates, mail room or Commissary workers. All would bleed. So most stayed away from him, but I sought out his company and asked if l could go outside on the recreation yards at the same time he did. Death row inmates in Texas must recreate alone, but two recreation cages are side-by-side so we can talk to the person in the neighboring cage. This is the only time death row men can talk directly to each other. All other talking is through cell walls. Religion and spiritual references were taboo topics for Cujo. He would mock and spit on Christians or Jews alike. black or white. His cup was filled with bitter hate. Cujo continued in his rage, cutting a few and stabbing others, which always resulted in a trip to the hole. So on and off, Cujo was sent to the lowest level. F-Pod, where he was deprived of all privileges. To others a dungeon, but maybe to him it was home.

Cujo broke all kinds of records for discipline -- TDCJ had to re-write the books on him. The rules state that after three months of good behavior on F-Pod, inmates are returned to the normal level. Who knows how Cujo managed to behave for three months to make his way back to level l. Maybe the desire to enjoy a breath of fresh air or a trip to commissary or a visit or two. Soon Cujo would cut again and return to the isolation where he was further tormented, deprived of all human necessities: clothes, heat, property, hygiene. It became so bad that it was best if he was kept away from everyone else so one whole pod was emptied out and devoted to the mad dog. For many months he was 'shook down` every hour on the hour. His body searched as well as his cell, 24 hours a day. When he started to sleep, time for shakedown. This went on for 30 days. Then it was reduced to every four hours. For 30 more days. Then every six hours. Then every l2. Then once a day. While all this is happening his meals consisted of compressed food loaf. With who knows what added surprise was included. For six months and then… the beat goes on. Recreation allowed only one hour a day outside. by himself. For no one liked him. Best to stay away from mad dogs.

But the light soon began to penetrate his darkness and Cujo started to reflect on his life. Finally, his soul asked if there is a God and if there is, why let his life end up this way. He remembered when he was around six years old he asked his atheist father about God and was punished for asking. He asked God to reveal him the real truth. This prepared his mind to receive a little more. God answered this lost but greatly beloved son.

Productivity on death row? These past 21 years have been for me very productive, slowly progressing inward on my spiritual journey to the Father. Chris is covered with tattoos and I'm clean skinned- his hate is my love, and his war is my peace. We are opposite sides of the same coin, both sons of God. I became aware that all violence and hate are done in total ignorance of the divine spirit within us all. To be in the will of God is to be in harmony with all, in peace and love.

I have no major cases, nor have I been in trouble of any kind here. Bless the ways of God. Every six months we are moved to a different cell pod. A, B. C. D or F, and every three months a major lockdown is bestowed upon us and everyone is thoroughly searched, cell included. The captain comes to me holding a piece of rusted metal and says. "Dennes, what is this?"

"I don't know what that is," I say.

Hidden for who knows how many years in my cell, it has the potential of being sharpened into a weapon. "Regardless of your clean record, if it's in your cell it's yours." Go to jail. Don‘t collect any property. Straight to the dungeon. First time for me, and if I have to go again I will. For I know there was another reason I was sent there. I was thinking about Mad Dog.

I went with a smile. I arrived on F pod, Level III, a place where the air seems thicker and smells of depression and evil. I walked into 77 cell and my neighbor in 76 was Cuio. We talked every day through the back wall and went outside an hour a day together. Slowly. Cujo opened up and talked about his life. Mostly he talked about his childhood, how at age 10 he committed his first violent act. A kid had stolen his bicycle. From then he grew both in rage and violence. Every time something was done to him he paid it back twice and then some. Eventually he was sent to juvenile detention where the violence against him continued and he learned how to protect himself from inmates and guards. Turned loose in the world he fell further down the slippery path of evil and hate.

An honor to know a prisoner? I was privileged to know Chris's life story so I can reveal the essence of his conversion experience. Chris was reborn to know the will and ways of God, once he repented with all his heart and recognized how lost he was in the darkness. God saw that small but bright light in his soul, and forgave Chris. He gave him an incredible amount of love to fill the great void in his heart. For whom much is forgiven much love is felt. Chris started to love everyone and would give anything he had to any and all. But I have gotten a little ahead of myself. On the rec yard one day, Chris asked me about God. I shared with him my experience with the Urantia Book. Chris had read The Bible and didn‘t believe in a god of war, one who condemned him to hell. I explained that this book would answer all his questions and millions of others he will ask.

One day while Cujo sat in the hole wearing only a paper gown, nothing to write with, nothing to read, no mattress, no blanket, or anything at all, a guard tossed him a book that had been left in another cell. Desperate for something to do, for anything to keep from going crazy, Cujo began reading this book.

Can death row convert to life row? The change that had already started grew even more, securing his soul, anchoring him to the Father forever. He became a mighty messenger and shared his testimony with everyone. At last count he had sent 24 books to those he talked to, whether here or out around the world. After he read the Urantia Book his life was never the same. He forever knew that he was a son of God. Now the test of his faith began, just because he was born again doesn't mean all those he hurt would forget and forgive him. He had hurt everyone from guards to inmates to mail room workers to commissary workers. Maybe a few unknown others. It was their turn to pay back.

The officers would deny him recreation, meals, showers, mail. The guards ignored him and when he asked where his food tray was or if he could shower they would say, "You verbally refused (recreation, showers. food) He would say. "'That‘s OK." The mailroom many times lost his mail. That's OK." Commissary. After many years of not being able to go, the first few times he filled out his list they claimed, "We didn't receive it, sorry.""That‘s OK." After a while he would make another list and if he paid for sneakers they would give him shower slides. If he requested a radio they gave him a fan. He never again cursed anyone, all he would say is, "It‘s OK." Finally everyone got tired of prodding him and getting no results so eventually they left him in peace. After a few years of testing he passed all tests and became an honorable inmate with almost all liberties restored.

Love and light from a 6 x 9 prison cell? People all over the world were drawn to Chris`s

light. Each asked about his conversion and received or purchased a copy of this life changing book. Chris wanted to reach his lost son and the last time I talked with my brother he was writing a 50 page letter to his son. But he understood that when someone is not ready to listen he will never hear. Chris believed that we all will be given a chance to fully believe or reject even after death. For who really can be destroyed for not understanding in this world.

Christopher Wilkins

Peace on death`s row? Christopher Chubasco Wilkins #999533 was executed by the state of Texas on January 11. 2017. Chris already has risen in the next world and will guide me into a higher awareness, as I guided him in this world. Truly he is a mighty messenger and continues to be one.

“My thoughts are my only demons; my demons are my only thoughts.” CCW

Reinaldo Dennes 999248
Polunsky Unit
3782 FM 350 South
Livingston, TX 77351

Click here to view the art of Reinaldo Dennes

↧

Mad Man

June 22, 2017, 2:28 pm

≫ Next: Dear Blue Skies

≪ Previous: The Mad Dog a Mighty Messenger

By Jeremiah Bourgeois

Life has been far more stressful than I’d realized as I move towards the possibility of parole. After recently having what appear to be several psychosomatic seizures over a three-day period and then being pumped with anti-anxiety medication during an overnight stay in the prison infirmary—I feel great. Better than I can remember having felt in, well, as long as I can remember.

My face felt funny for days after I left the medical floor and I feared the worst. It just didn't feel right. I thought parts of it were numb or droopy. But whenever I rubbed it, sensation was there. And when I looked in the mirror nothing appeared out of the ordinary.

Finally I figured out what was amiss.

My face was less tense.

Apparently, tranquility is so foreign to me that I found it alarming.

As for those seizures, if my suspicions are correct I am in need of some serious therapy. I dare not speculate what it could mean if the cause is something else entirely.

Curiously, memories of things that I've written about in Minutes Before Six (such as my friend being raped following our arrival in the penitentiary, and the weeks during which guards starved me in segregation to satisfy their quest for vengeance) kept coming to me suddenly, and as I tried to stifle my emotional reactions to those long ago events the seizures would strike.

I quickly learned to let some of my emotions out to prevent being overwhelmed at such moments.

Adaptation at its finest. Survival of the fittest. Only the wise endure.

So, I'm now allowing myself to feel the emotions when necessary, painful as it is for me. Nonetheless, I seriously doubt that I'm processing the experiences in a manner that will enable me to put them behind me. Oh well, it's working for now and that's the best outcome I believe can be achieved under the circumstances.

I've spent some time reflecting and recognize that I had built an emotional wall in order to survive a Life Without Parole. My potential freedom is now producing cracks in the psychological barrier that, until recently, has served me so well. I cannot imagine what it will be like to be free and truly feel things.

Joy.

Love.

Grief.

Fear.

All these emotions have been muted by a lifetime of confinement.

Anger is the only feeling that I have been able to fully express. Anger is the emotion that has shaped my destiny.

Without it I am nothing.

Without it where would I be?

To run away from home at the age of 13 and be able to survive alone on the streets took plenty of anger, believe me.

To endure after being sentenced to die in prison at the age of 14 took even more anger—trust me.

And no one will convince me that the commission of these crimes foreclosed my right to be angry.

While I was not angered by the punishment imposed by the court—for I was guilty and deserved to be punished—I have long been angered by what imprisonment has dealt me.

I was angered when stories were bandied about that I was gang raped when I arrived in the penitentiary.

I was angered when I heard how amused some people were when they heard those rumors about me being forced into sodomy.

I was angered by the looks of disdain and contempt on the faces of correctional officers when they saw my fifteen-year-old frame in the general population of the penitentiary.

I was angered when people would joke about my supposed virginity as if anything about my situation was funny.

I was angered when administrators would talk down to me—taking advantage of my ignorance and lack of education—and offering nothing to cure my deficiencies.

I was angered when I found how ready prisoners were to try to take advantage of me.

I was angered when I came to perceive the predatory nature of those who surrounded me.

I was angered when I saw terrible things inflicted upon those who were seen as prey because of their vulnerability.

So many reasons to be angry.

It is a powerful emotion.

It can drive you to destroy yourself or others. It led me to do terrible things.

It can also be a force that enables you to achieve what others believed was impossible—for someone like me.

Or anyone trapped in the penitentiary.

There is no doubt in my mind that most people expected me to be nothing but a convict, chasing booty or drugs or caught up in some other sort of prison fuckery.

I proved all those sons-a-bitches wrong. All because I was angry at what they believed would be my destiny.

No longer do administrators attempt to talk down to me. They know full well I am anything but ignorant or uneducated.

But there is still disdain and contempt in their eyes when they look upon me, for the correctional mindset all too often perceives a prisoner’s intellect as arrogance.

It makes me angry.

But this anger fuels me. It motivates me to continue living above the expectations that such people have for those in the penitentiary.

I wish every prisoner in America would become as angry as me.

That they would allow its combustible nature to propel their rehabilitation and forge a new destiny.

Jeremiah Bourgeois #708897
Stafford Creek Corrections Center
191 Constantine Way
Aberdeen WA 98520

↧

Dear Blue Skies

June 29, 2017, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: No Mercy For Dogs Chapter 21

≪ Previous: Mad Man

By Chris Dankovich

Dear Jennifer Wherever You Are,

I don't know if you remember me, or the day we met. It was over three years ago, but I find myself thinking more and more about it as the days languish. Who would have thought that one moment could influence so many more?

Do you remember the day? I remember every second of it. You walked into the room with a shallow stride equal parts vulnerable and strong. You looked beautiful, if it's not too forward for me to say. Your medium-length light hair pulled back tightly. Not a strand loose from the ponytail, the way most girls leave it and don't care. No, there was nothing sloppy about you. Your stylish dress looked tailor-made for you, and showed just the right amount of skin (hey, I couldn't not look). You had an air of confidence about you, and while I don't know if that was real, the calmness you projected was (and made a difference to me). Faked strength can still be an actual strength.

You walked in the room and looked right over at me, the only other person there. You smiled at me - that smile! - the kind that says, "I'm so glad someone's here,""I hope I'm not bothering you,""I'm so sorry" and, "Hi." That‘s how you initiated our conversation, though your first actual word was ”Hey." I said "Hey" back, with a hint of a smile myself. You sat closer to me than you seemed to have originally planned to.

You were right there, but the my ability to talk to a pretty girl didn't present itself -- I couldn't bring myself to speak anything more than that monosyllable acknowledging your existence. So I was extremely fortunate that you took up the burden of 'breaking the ice.' Most women don't: I don't know why you did. But you did. You made a joke about the nice weather we were having, and we both looked up at the graying white ceiling simultaneously. You made this cute smile that became more relaxed and natural after I started laughing. I once heard there's no humor in Heaven - it‘s how we minimize Hell (that sounds like something a psychiatrist or a guy at AA would say).

I said that I’d heard it was going to be partly sunny with a chance of rain. You asked what I thought the chances of rain were. I said it depends on where you're standing. "What about where you're sittin'?" you asked. I asked if you meant where I was sitting, or where you were. You nodded your head towards me.

“There's a high chance of storms, but I see some blue sky right now." Only then did I notice your blue eyes, halfway closed while you were smiling.

You leaned forward and held your palms up, as if you wanted me to read them. "What about my forecast?" you asked. I scooted down the bench until I was only about a foot away. I asked where you were from. You gave me the name of a town, not a large one, a short distance away. I looked down at your hands again: they weren't shaking or clenched tight. I looked over your body, your composure, as my eyes made their way back to your face. Anxiety showed through your confidence, but never once had I seen any apprehension, nor sadness. In angst you looked down at your hands, squeezing them shut. I lightly brushed your arm with my hand, and your eyes instantly locked with mine. I saw the span of life in your eyes. I saw an angel in your eyes. And you must have seen something in mine. You stared into them, never breaking contact, never expecting a word. Looking at the stars in the night sky, from only a foot away. It was both exciting and unbearable, the power of its meaning. I placed my hand on your arm again, this time leaving it there, lest your eyes cause tears to spring from mine. Your pupils dilated and you snapped back into the moment the force of your spirit sending a shiver through your body and mine.

I pulled my hand away, sure that I had caused you discomfort. But your stare broke from mine and followed my hand. I watched you place your hand on mine, feeling its warmth radiate through my body. The room was cold, but I started to sweat. I felt the caress of a fireplace fire after having come in from the snow. I looked back at your face, at its contours, the smooth surface and gentle curves. I longed for you to look at me and was disappointed when you did, for it interrupted the rare opportunity to look at such beauty unobserved. I spoke, trying to break the magnitude of the moment, for I worried that it may disintegrate us both if I didn't. "Your forecast - maybe a few scattered clouds. Sunny skies all day though."

That was when you leaned over and kissed me. I had no idea that it was coming. I could have fallen into your lips, refreshingly cool and comfortingly hot at the same time. Like a backyard pool in summertime. Like tears at a reunion of loved ones.

They came to get you a year, a month, a day, an hour, a minute, a moment later. You broke from me slowly as if you knew they were coming, the sensation of your closeness to me never dying, simply fading. They called your name when they opened the door, and you stood up slowly, making sure (that was intentional, wasn't it?) to brush against me as you did. You looked back at me when you were halfway there, and wished me good luck. You wished me good luck. Growing up I believed that a woman seeks comfort in a man's strength, but here you were, comforting me. I watched you walk away, longing, pleading with fate not to let you go. And when my momentary pleas went unanswered, I said the only thing which came to my mind to say as you walked away for what might be forever. "Blue skies," I called out, part plea, part promise, fully wishing. "Blue skies," you responded.

Did blue skies follow you? I cannot stop thinking about that kiss, especially over the past few months. I can still feel it. Something borne not out of desire, but emotion. That need for contact - you had found mine. It is something I will never forget. Something somehow more pure, sacred. I find myself dreaming about it. I find myself thinking about blue skies, wishing for them. The walls are starting to close in on me. Sometimes I'm not even sure anything else exists other than this small, small world. But then I think of you. Are you still there? Or have you transformed into an angel? If so, will you come watch over me? I could sure use some blue skies. It's been raining for a long time, and I'm worried the sun has set; behind the clouds. You taught me how to be strong for so long. These three years I have emulated your composure. My role model. My guardian angel. You could show me if the sun is still there. If it will rise again. If there will be a tomorrow. What's my forecast, blue skies? Are you still out there? I don't know where to write, so I'm sending this everywhere. I am still right here. It's still raining where I am, and the wind's blowing harder and harder. I can barely breath. The walls are getting closer and closer. They're whispering to me. Dear Blue Skies, are you there? If some sunshine doesn't find a sliver of sky to peek through soon, I'm going to catch my death out in this cold.

Sincerely,

Johnny I'm Right Here

Chris Dankovich 595904

Thumb Correctional Facility

3225 John Conley Drive

Lapeer, MI 48446

↧

No Mercy For Dogs Chapter 21

July 6, 2017, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: S#!t Happens

≪ Previous: Dear Blue Skies

By Thomas Bartlett Whitaker

To read Chapter 20, click here

There's nothing like an ending to reveal the incompleteness of things. The Hammer sent me into the shadow of the mountain to disappear, but when I think back over the course of my life, my months there stand out to me like a beacon, an immense barricade that divides the two halves of my existence. What came before often seems to me to belong to someone else, as if I were reading the memories of a character in a book. When I tried to discuss this with someone a few years ago, I couldn't figure out how to explain this, because nothing immense happened, certainly no catharsis or epiphany that I can recall. I'm tempted to simply say that I matured at a rapid rate there, that I was a child becoming a man, or, somewhat more poetically, that I had been blind but was now starting to see. These are the things we say when we don't really have any idea what we are talking about, when we need to gloss over events that are far too subterranean for easy explanations. I think, on some level, the difference seems to spin on the axle of my relationship towards pain, fear, and the gradual evaporation of my expectations for what life was supposed to be about. On some level, prior to my time there in the forest, I had believed my life to be some sort of story worth reading; that, in the end, things would somehow come out right. I couldn't have put it into words at the time, but it was there in the cabin that I first started to realize that there wasn't going to be any agnorisis or character arc that would ultimately open the book of Meaning for me, that I was not a character in a story and that there were likely never any happy endings. The emptiness of the skies began to trouble me less, and suffering became something that didn’t need to be feared quite so much. Since it seemed that this was to be my lot, I resolved that one of my new tasks had to be the development of a character worthy of this suffering. I remembered the words of my hallucinogenic alter ego about pain, and started to wonder what life would be like if I attempted to apply this as a truth, rather than some sort of witty maxim that I tossed out at parties.

Silence invaded me. I stood outside at night and watched the skies, allowing the wind to rip my comfort to shreds. I traced the keloid braille of the bullet wound on my arm and let my thoughts skim about the periphery of the things I had once believed I understood. Grief makes you a stranger to yourself, and I was frightened by how little I seemed to understand about my own actions. It seemed to me then that I understood nothing about the world or my place in it, that any such claims were doomed by a sort of Icaran vanity to fall an d and break on the cold surface of these mountains. We’re all of us just lost little fools, I said aloud one night, and the wind seemed to agree with me.

There are times now when startle awake from months or years trapped in the fever-dream of ideology or belief and I can't do anything but shake my head at my hopeless heart, still crawling about for a Reason for it all. In these moments, I often feel I was at the pinnacle of my wisdom there on the mountain. There was less confusion, somehow. Everything fit in its place because everything was fundamentally without value- things just were. Why was masturbation.

In the mornings I played the lumberjack, felling Douglass-fir and pinion pine. I strung rabbit snares, more for the experience than out of any real hope for protein. In the afternoons I roved, pathless on all of the paths I found winding through that mad wasteland, hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers through ravine and gulley. Reckless days of reckoning were headed my way and for the first time I completely accepted this fact. I won't say that I welcomed them - that would come later, when I would start to dream my way out of the abyss. But I knew this suffering was in my future. I could feel it as sure as the rain falling from the leaves.

It wasn't long before I found the Chivero's homestead. I came across it late one evening, a small, wandering, random sort of cottage surrounded by a series of immense pens and barns. For a moment I interrogated my sanity, because I was certain that I had passed through this section of the ravine before. I sat and looked down on the compound as the sun hid itself behind an elaborate geometric mandala of peaks. At one point I saw Juan move from a low-lying barn to an enclosure, lugging a heavy pail of something. Several small girls of indeterminate age left the main habitation a few minutes later, and busied themselves with myriad domestic tasks that were foreign to me, before finally seeking their father out. I watched them play around with a small pack of dogs, and suddenly it struck me how creepy my actions were. I didn't want Juan to know I was there, so I settled back against the stone, feeling the cold seep through my sweaters. A fire in the dwelling soon became the most visible point in the world, slowly converting the mustard curtain hanging over a window into a glowing, irradiated shade of Van Gogh yellow. Juan and the girls returned home. I waited fifteen minutes and left.

It rained too heavily the next day for me to venture out. The whole world shifted to gray when I opened the door to stand in the wet soil. I felt a sudden desire for something that I couldn't name...beauty, perhaps? Can a person desire beauty as one would something to drink? It's the closest thing I can come to naming; whatever it was, I fiended for it and then instantly felt ashamed for this need. “What is the quest for beauty if not another form of greed?" I said aloud, and received no answer. Everything felt weirdly liminal, transient - perfect. I closed the door behind me.

The rain slackened the next day and completely tapered off by the afternoon. I took a short stroll and was shocked to find that one of my snares had been tripped. A small gray hare of perhaps five pounds lay in its grip, its neck clearly snapped. I felt yet another strange confluence of contradictory emotions as I dropped to my knees and reached out to touch it. It was winter-thin and dirty. I had no idea how it had survived in such a frigid climate. It seemed somehow obscene that it should outlast fox and owl only to die at my hands. I felt my eyes tearing as I picked it up and released its body from the trap. I began carrying it back to the cabin before turning and returning to the snare. I broke this into pieces and then spent half an hour moving from snare to snare, destroying each.

I had no idea how to dress a rabbit. I still don't, and I made a total mess of it. I found myself apologizing to it for being such an awful carnivore. A gory two hours later found me staring at a disturbingly small pile of edible meat. I couldn't believe how little there had been. I had more or less lost my appetite, but I felt like I had to eat what I had killed, or its death would have been completely pointless. I remembered Bilbo Baggins having made rabbit stew in The Hobbit, so that is what I did. Afterwards, there were little globules of fat smeared along the blade of the knife that I had used. They were surprisingly stubborn when I tried to wipe them away. I think it would be good for our species if everyone had to clean such a blade at least once in their lives. It...does something to you.

January slid into February on sheets of ice, sleet, and snow. Juan paid me a visit at least twice a week, and we continued our ritual of mezcal and very little chitchat. He had his own way of inconnmnicating that might have confused me or even irritated me once, but as the silence settled into my bones more and more, I felt less impressed than ever with words. Juan was essentially indifferent to all of the negative events that befall human beings during the normal course of existence. I couldn't figure out for the longest time how he could be so immune to anger or a sense of unfairness, and when I tried to talk to him about this he just shrugged. I'm not sure he even understood the question. Life was hard. It was all he had ever known; all he had ever heard about, so feeling a sense of u fairness was simply foreign to him. In his silence he seemed to be saying that fairness is just what we call it when we get what we want, unfairness what we complain about when we don't.

After the third or fourth visit he began to demand use of "la maquina." He had arrived the time before while I was listening to my iPod, and initially thought the little white things stuck in my ears to be ear protection. He gave me a skeptical look when I put one in his ear and then jumped straight up when the song started playing. I couldn't believe it, but he swore this was the first time he'd ever known of the existence of ear buds. It took me awhile to find anything he liked. For a guy living without music, he was awfully picky. Heavy metal was definitely not to his taste- ditto with jazz, classical, and anything EDM. He tolerated the blues, giving me the universally understood hand signal for "so-so." The best I could do for him was some Spanish pop by Enrique Bunbury and a few mariachi songs that I had loaded in an attempt to figure out how to play them with Cynthia. These latter he adored. I explained to him about the limited battery, so each time he showed up we would listen to four songs. I swear the man floated when he heard something he enjoyed, his smile wide and his eyes closed.

If there was one subject that turned him loquacious it was his animals. He had names for every last sheep and goat. Juan had a rather pronounced overbite I'd not noticed it before, because it was most noticeable when he spoke sentences longer than a few words. It sort of made him look like he was chewing on his diction and finding it less than tasty. It made him look a little like one of the dogs that accompanied him on his rounds, a mangy, tired-looking thing that stared about mournfully. I nearly choked on laughter the first time I reached down to scratch him behind the ears, because he closed his eyes in the exact same way as Juan did when he was lost in harmonic rapture. I had the strangest feeling that if I poked the dog on the shoulder, Juan would rub his own. Juan taught me more than I ever needed or wanted to know about sheep. Like, for instance, that they snore.

“Que tonterias me dices," I scoffed, passing him the bottle. "Eso es completamente absurdo."

"No, no, you will see. I show you. You come to my place, we can eat. Only my wife is louder."

His offer surprised me. It initially crossed my mind that inviting random narcos home for dinner was probably not a particularly intelligent or successful survival strategy. Later, I decided that in this messed up fiscal climate, that is probably exactly what it was. I thought that he might feel insulted if I said no, but I wasn't sure that I really wanted to go. I had the idea that witnessing the poverty of his existence was going to wound me, and I felt like perhaps it would be better for the both of us if our lives remained separate. In the end his face seemed so eager that I couldn't say no, on the condition that I was allowed to send some grub with him. He initially resisted this, but I was able to sway him by staring at him directly and telling him that he was going to take some food with him. He caved instantly, and I got a small taste of what it must be like to live in Ge1o's world. I invited him into the cabin and let him load up one of the mesh bags with items that caught his eye. I was way ahead of my 80-day plan on food conservation, so I wasn't worried about the loss, and it made me feel slightly less contaminated for having used a power I detested.

He waved both hands in front of him frantically when I handed him an unopened bottle of booze. "The wife," he sighed. "Me gusta dar un beso a la botella de vez en cuando, pero mi mujer se lo opone.” I shrugged and put the bottle on the table.

"It's here when you want it."

He told me he'd be back the next day and we could walk to his place together. I didn't tell him I already knew how to get there.

The next morning I braved the icy stream of well water that passed for a shower and tried to scrub the dirt and sweat off my skin. My beard had grown to fairly epic proportions by this point. It itched like an army of tiny insects was doing calisthenics up and down my face, but even so I still wished I had brought a mirror so I could see what I looked like as a woodsman. At night I could get a poor reflected image off of the surface of the windows, but it wasn't very satisfactory. In those fire lit half visions, it always looked like some sort of small woodland critter had my throat locked in a death grip, which I hoped wasn't accurate but probably was. As the day wore on, I began to dread more and more the trip to Juan's. When I was younger, my father would take Christmas presents to the children of some of the employees of Bartlett Masonry, the construction company that my maternal grandfather started. I always felt very uncomfortable witnessing the dynamics of these events. The families were obviously grateful, but I always wondered if behind their smiles they didn't hate us just a little, there in our Sunday best, deigning to grace their poverty with our benevolence. Did the fathers wonder why they weren't paid more, if we apparently had so much in excess that we could bring toys? What did the children think? Did they wonder why they had to share a bedroom with multiple siblings, when I had my own? Did they know that I always had a jacket in winter and food on the table? Were they able to see the limited nature of their horizons, when mine were so expansive? Did they sit awake at nights and wonder about why there should be so much inequality in a country supposedly blessed by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity that claimed to favor the poor and meek? I certainly did, so I'm certain they did, as well. I've never known how to explain to people the deep, lingering sense of unworthiness that is at the core of my self, why I've always wanted to hug people like Juan and whisper to them that it was okay to hate me for blessings unearned, that I hated myself for them, too. I remember in 10th grade history the disgust and condescension displayed by my peers when we discussed the two revolutions that took place in 1917 in Russia. The rage of the peasants, the violence showed to the gentry and the surviving Romanovs - none of it shocked me at all. I recall looking around at my spoiled, well-fed, attractively dressed classmates in wonder: what don't you understand, I asked? The reasons behind their behavior are obvious. We'd have done exactly the same, in their shoes.

If Juan felt anything abnormal as he added me to his herd that afternoon, he was hiding it well. He looked at my satchel curiously for a moment and then turned to whistle at the goats. I'd always been curious about how exactly shepherds directed the movements of their flocks. As far as I could tell, there wasn't much to it. The goats either knew this particular circuit so well that they needed no guidance, or they were so well trained that they wouldn't allow themselves to stray more than 70 or 80 feet from Juan. It was curious how they managed to stay constantly mobile while still managing to strip what greenery they could find off of branch and bush. The only time they seemed to increase their pace was when we neared Juan's homestead.

Everything looked different up close. What had seemed haphazard from the ridge made slightly more sense at this level. A pack of seven or eight dogs greeted us as he opened a wooden gate and directed the herd towards an alveolate series of pens. Everything was handmade here. Absolutely nothing looked like it had been purchased at a Home Depot or a Lowe's. It struck me that Juan probably hadn't ever seen such a place - perhaps he couldn't even dream of a building that large. Trailing sadness came respect. Somehow this man had survived - no, flourished - in a cold world ruled by colder narco-minds. I couldn't help but pity him, yet it was probably also true that I had more to learn from Juan than he did from me.

After leading his flock into a final enclosure, Juan checked some wooden containers to see if there was sufficient feed. A few dozen goats in nearby stalls stuck their heads out to watch us. After finishing his tasks, Juan led me deeper into one of the barns. He showed me one of his sheep that had been somehow wounded on one of its back legs. It hobbled over to Juan and nuzzled its head into his thigh.

"What attacked this?" I asked.

"Un perro."

“Not one of yours, I'm assuming."

"No, one of the wild ones. It was very lucky that it happened right in front of me."

"You managed to chase it off?" I asked, running my hand over the neck of the sheep.

He turned to smile at me. "No. I killed it."

"No mercy for dogs," I smiled back, repeating the expression I had learned from the Hammer's goons.

“Asi es, gavacho. Still, she almost died from the freezing."

I didn't understand what he meant by this, and it took him a moment to understand that wherever I came from, it was a place without sheep.

"When a wolf or dog attacks a sheep, usually they only have to wound it to make it...quit."

I searched my memory for the Spanish term for "shock" but couldn't come up with it. "It just stops moving?"

"Si, it just gives up."

"People are like that too, sometimes."

"Si," he added sadly, before giving the sheep a last pat and turning to leave.

The main house in the compound was a collection of add-ons. What I took to be the original structure was constructed of cinderblock. Like many of the homes in rural Mexico, you could see the terminal ends of rebar sticking up from the roof like dozens of antennas. Several ipsilateral extensions made of what was either dilapidated adobe or recent wattle and daub stretched out from this, one ending in a large storage container, like you see on cargo vessels. It was dented and a bit rusted, and I couldn't help but remark that there must be one hell of a story on how that came to rest way out here in the middle of Nowheresville, Mexico. Juan smiled at me again in response. A long transverse covered wooden porch completed the estate, and opened onto the front door. On the left side of this stood a wooden series of shelves mostly covered by a blue tarp. Several wires crawled out of the top of this and ran up onto the roof. Juan noticed my gaze and pulled back the edge of the covering.

Inside sat roughly a dozen car batteries, wired in parallel. I stepped back from the porch and walked around the side of the house until I could see the edges of at least two small solar panels. Panels, I noted, that looked exactly like the ones I had seen on the country homes of the narcos in and around Cerralvo. I met Juan back on the porch. He gave me a small, proud smile as I pointed at his set-up.

"You dog," I laughed.

"Como?"

"I bet there's some rich pendejo down the road somewhere that can't figure out why he's always a few watts short."

The stare he gave me was pure confusion, and I reviewed the words I had used in Spanish, searching for the error. Juan finally just shook his head, looking slightly injured. It came to me as he was turning to open the door: he didn't steal the panels. More likely, they were a gift from whatever narco-lord owned the land. I tried to imagine how an honest man would feel if such a criminal came bearing gifts. What could you say? You have children, a wife, and no power. They have AK-47s and grenade launchers and a tainted present you'd better take and act damned happy about, lest you end up fertilizing the dirt beneath your feet. And Juan probably thought I was one of them. This wasn't dinner between friends. It was a serf begging his lord to think well of him. I cursed under my breath as I crossed the threshold.

Whatever political maneuvering Juan was attempting to juggle with me, his wife wasn't having any of it. I never knew her name. When Juan introduced me to her, I had just been led into their kitchen, and he simply referred to her as “mi mujer." Whatever her name was, she was an alchemist of sneers. She graced me with one that seemed to say, "So this is the bastard that's caused all of this ruckus." It only deepened when I bowed slightly to her. She harrumphed and turned back to the same sort of fireplace/oven combo that I had back at the cabin. I was instantly reminded of the Hammer's wife, Esperanza, and figured that the two of them would probably get along well. If I couldn't come up with anything else, I figured I could get both husbands a copy of Uxoricide for Dummies for Christmas the following year. If Juan noticed her complete deficit of manners he said nothing. Probably knew better. A group of three girls peered in at me from behind a curtain that led to what looked to be a bedroom, and Juan introduced them. The eldest was probably 14 or 15, the youngest 8 or 9. This last had immense eyes like a child in a Keane painting, and with these she scanned me sagaciously. Juan was obviously very proud of them. They were excused and then I understood that they would not be eating with us. Juan led me to the table and I sat, looking around in an attempt to cover up my unease.

The true level of this family's disconnection from the modern world came into focus as I collected the details. You can usually glean a wealth of easy data from the constellation of small knick-knacks that a family chooses to display in common areas, but there just wasn't anything here in the way of unnecessary material. There were no photographs on the walls, no books on any shelves. The only apparent deviation from the drab design scheme was a six-year-old wall calendar from a tortilleria that featured a drawing of la Virgin de Guadalupe. A small homemade whatnot stood in one corner, but the only item gracing its surface was Juan's thermos. The light fixture hanging above the table consisted of three naked bulbs that drooped down, looking like ripe fruits made of light. I glanced over at Juan's wife, my eyes roving over her cookware. Everything appeared as if it had been welded in someone's backyard. She was wearing a long, nutmeg-colored woolen dress that could have been homemade, though not knowing much about the art of knitting I wasn't certain. My god, I thought: how did the girls attend school? Were they destined to live and die in these ravines? Had Juan done the same? No wonder the unnamed virago hated my guts: this was a rough life, and whoever I was, I represented the sort imbalance that could doom them all. What would I have been like if I had grown up in this place? Would I have been aware of the names of the planets? The existence of Shakespeare or of a place called Japan? It struck me that perhaps Juan didn't speak much because he didn't have much to speak about. That was probably an unfair thought, but I still wonder about the richness of his mental life, all these years later. The memory of him always gets under my skin and pulses, like a splinter. I can't help but also wonder if there are people out there so full of ideas and knowledge that they are to me now as I was to Juan then.

The wife was not to dine with us either, apparently. I don't actually know what to call the soup she prepared for us. It was sort of like menudo, only with goat meat. She served it with blue tortillas. My eyebrow must have risen when I saw these because the wife snorted at me, her whole demeanor seeming to broadcast that she'd personally seen Jesus die.

The tortillas nagged at me. I had known of the existence of such things, but I'd never seen them before in either Cerralvo or Monterrey. I waited until we finished our repast and were stirring our coffee before I broached the subject.

"Juan, where are we?"

He gave me one of his innocent smiles. "Why, in my kitchen, Conrad."

If it had been anyone else, I'd have thought he was being a wiseass. I shook my head. “No, no. I mean, where are we, like on a map? You know maps?"

"Ah," he nodded. “Esperate aqui." He stood and pulled to one side the curtain that separated the kitchen from one of the attached rooms. I heard him open what sounded like a heavy chest. He returned with a small collection of worn papers. I had hoped for roadmaps, but instead what I got looked like graded elevation charts, like something used by civil engineers to build train tracks or roads. The first appeared to be too hyperlocal for my purposes. It did show a series of what looked like county roads that I tried to trace, one of which ran into a larger thoroughfare near the top left corner that was labeled "45" in pen. Close to one of these smaller roads was a red circle. I looked a question at Juan. "That's Villa Bermejillo. It's where I take the animals to be sold." I turned to the next map, but it was also far too local to help me. The next was broader, and included a portion of the border with the United States.

"Where are we one this one?" I asked. He leaned over and shrugged. I took the first out and laid it next to the third. Highway 45 made a slight but oddly shaped dip to the west at one point not terribly distant from our portion of the mountains, and I tried to locate it on the larger map. I finally found it about 25 kilometers south of Hidalgo del Parral, near Villa Ocampo. Fuck me, I thought. I'm in Chihuahua.

“Estamos en el estado Chihuahua, Juan? O Durango?" He just shrugged again, clearly letting me know we could be in Singapore for all he cared. I took my satchel off the back of my chair, where I had hung it when I was showed to the table. From it I removed my notebook and some pens. Juan seemed very interested in these pens, so I handed several to him as gifts. His eyes lit up and he bowed his head graciously. I spent about 20 minutes making a map that I thought might help me if I had to hike my way back to Cerralvo. Nuevo leon wasn‘t even on this map, but I knew that Gomez Palacio on the eastern edge of the page wasn't too far from Torreon - which was almost exactly due west from Monterrey. I estimated that I was close to 500 kilometers from Cerralvo, or thereabouts. A long distance to ride one's thumb, but all I really had to do was get to a larger town that had a bus depot. I thought about asking Juan if Hidalgo del Parral had such a building, but then thought better of it. The man didn't know what state he lived in. I might as well ask him if there was liquid water on Wolf 1061c.

I looked up to find Juan still smiling at me. What he must be thinking of me, I couldn't imagine. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't envy his simplicity. I don't know if he'd have chosen it, given the option to know more about the world. The weight of all of the billions of problems I couldn't solve pressed on me, and I reached into my satchel again. Juan's smile broadened as I removed my iPod. I reached in again and pulled out the charging plug.

"I don't know if you have the outlet for this; if not, I'm sure you can figure out how to make one." I handed the device over to him. "You remember how to scroll through the menu to find the stuff you like? I already changed the language to espanol." He simply stared at me. I don't think he understood what I was saying. "It's a gift, Juan. Un regalo." He looked down at it and then up at me again. His smile faltered. Something battled behind his downward eyes tor a time. Finally, he looked up at me and smiled again. The lights hanging above us glittered off of something desperate and disappointed in those orbs, something no smile could ever conceal. "I'm sorry it's not more, Juan. What were you hoping for? Equipment of some sort? A truck?"

He waved my comments off and set the iPod down on the table, picking up his cup of coffee with his other hand. "No, no, I say we are doing well. The patron has already been very kind."

Bingo, I thought. 'Whatever you were hoping for," I said, standing. "You should ask for, the next time you see him. I'm no one, do you understand?"

“Un soldado?" he asked, innocently.

"Something like that, sure." I think he wanted to believe me, or, perhaps more accurately, his desperate circumstances spawned a hope that badly needed him to believe me. I thanked him again for dinner and left. The walk back to the cabin was blessedly cold. I felt the light breeze run across and through me, and it felt as if it were carrying pieces of me away. By the time I had made it back to my abode, I had made a few resolutions vis-a-vis my owners, decisions I didn't think they would like very much.

My last few weeks at the cabin were some of the calmest of my life. I wasn't completely at peace; I still stood aghast at the past works of my hands, still unable to piece together how I had descended so deeply into madness back in Texas. But in terms of my immediate problems, I felt completely unburdened

My health had noticeably improved. By mid-February all of the bruises on my chest and abdomen had faded away, and from what I could tell from my reflection in the cataracted glass, so had the wounds on my face. My hikes increased in length, and I began jogging for long portions of the trail. I'm not going to say I felt good, exactly, but I felt strong and as clear-headed as I had in many years. I felt like a page had been turned.

Juan didn't come around anymore. This saddened me, but what could I do? I wasn't in any position to help him beyond the occasional nip of mezcal. I thought about leaving the remaining bottles out in the open along paths I knew he used, but that seemed kind of pathetic. If he wanted a drink, he would have to stop by and say hello.

The morning my peace and heartfelt resolutions ended was pretty much like the 60-something days that had come before. I was roughly a mile from the cabin when I first heard the sound. I wasn't exactly sure what it was that I had detected, but after thousands of hours haunting these trails, I knew it was something out of place. I paused, waiting. Just when I had started thinking that my ears were playing tricks on me, I heard it again, closer: the sound of tires rolling over small rocks. I thought rapidly. There were only a few dirt roads that wound their way through these woods, and one of them was a few hundred meters to my left. That one I had followed for miles on numerous occasions, as it was the one that Abelardo had used when he deposited me here back in December. That connection had me sprinting back towards the cabin. I arrived at a small overlook in time to see a metallic gray SUV pause at the cutoff to the escondrijo. The driver was obviously trying to decide which direction to take. After a few moments, whoever they were continued going straight. I almost ran down the ravine in an attempt to get their attention, but a small internal voice demanded that I pause and think for a moment. The SUV continued to creep down the road, and I wondered if I was watching my ride out of here vanish for good.

But why was it creeping? And why wouldn't Gelo send Abelardo, who knew exactly how to find me? If it wasn't Gelo's people, who might they have sent? It surely wasn't the Hammer's people, I realized suddenly. The SUV was a Land Rover, not the big one, but still very expensive and very ostentatious. The Hammer didn't do flashy, he abhorred attracting attention the way the small mice in the cabin did. Someone else, then. Maybe not friendly. In any case, they would come back, whoever they were, because that road ended after several kilometers at an abandoned homestead. It was happening too fast, I thought, as I watched the vehicle disappear in the distance. Bottom line, I reasoned, was that they would be back, and I couldn't just sit here. I started running down the path towards the cabin.

It wasn't so much a planned act, but I instantly went for the pistol as soon as I barged through the door. In case this was my way out, I had to be here, but I didn't have to be here unarmed. I exited the cabin, closed the door, then ran back inside and lit a fire. I wanted whoever that was to think I was inside, unaware of their approach. I exited again and hid myself in a copse of pines. Anyone approaching the front door would have to put his back to me. All of that free time, and I'd never once contemplated a hostile approach. I raged at myself for having been so dense, then forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. Whatever this was, it would be easier to deal with if I wasn't flirting with Condition Black.

Within fifteen minutes I was hearing the tires again. I flattened myself against a thick trunk and watched as the vehicle pulled up and stopped, roughly 60 feet from the shack. The driver simply sat there for a moment, then turned the engine off. I held my breath as the door opened and someone stepped out. It caught again when I saw who had come for me.

When I had last seen Chespy, he was driving a 3-series BMW, wearing a suit, and bringing me my first very-clearly-not-fake Mexican ID card. Aside from a pair of rock star blue ostrich boots, he had looked about what you would get if you'd shot a Brunello Cucinelli advert in the middle of a war zone. He'd lost the suit, replacing it with some designer selvage jeans and an artfully worn reddish-brown leather jacket. He paused to survey the cabin before opening the fly of his pants and releasing a steaming jet of urine. If this was his version of a sneak attack, I remember thinking, it needed work. He stomped his foot a few times and then buttoned up his jeans. I gripped the handle of the pistol as he approached the door. If he was going to produce a weapon, it would have to be soon.

He was nearly at the entrance when he did a very curious thing. His hand was raised to knock on the door when he froze, his eyes aimed downwards towards what looked from a distance to be the point where the cabin's foundation met the earth. My skin started to crawl as he angled it down and then to the right. I had just enough time to think, "Shit, he's looking at my footprints" before he swiveled around to stare back in my direction, finding me almost instantly. His teeth shoaled in the midst of his broad face and he waved comically. There didn't seem to be any point in hiding, so I left the copse slowly, walking with the pistol hanging at my side.

"Mother fucking Grizzly Adams," he quipped, his left hand stroking his own facial hair. His right, I noted, continued to hang loosely at his side. "Talk about going native. You planning on shooting me, guedo?"

"I haven't decided yet."

He laughed. That's one thing I learned from Chespy that is still incredibly useful to me today on occasion: there's nothing that unnerves a human predator more than someone who genuinely finds their display of arbitrary power humorous. He was still chuckling when he raised a finger. "One, if Don Rogelio had wanted to kill you, he'd have just shot you in the face in Cerralvo. It's not like they haven't done it before. Two," he continued, lifting another finger. "If he had wanted to erase you, no way they would have called me to do it. I'm way too fucking expensive, and the politics, wooo!" He rolled his eyes at this, waving his hand in a "forget about it" gesture. "Three, if they had wanted you dead and were concerned about you being a threat, they‘d have sent a five man team that assaulted this place at 3am with tactical shit that your SWAT cops can only dream about." He paused for a moment, letting the smile dissolve from his face. "Four: I'm telling you this straight, this ain't hubris. I wanted to shoot you, I could have my juguete out and a bullet in your head before you made up your mind to do anything about it."

I thought about what he'd said, and realized all of it was probably true. "Awfully sure of yourself, tio."

He shrugged. "The confidence that comes from not giving a damn. Can we get the fuck out of here? I'm freezing my balls off."

I placed the pistol behind my back and into my waistband. "I'll need a few minutes to pack. Nobody called to tell me my residence here was at an end."

"By your leave, sir," he bowed and waved a hand towards the door. It didn't take long tor me to load what was mine into my pack. I wrote a note to the Chivero that he could have anything and everything inside the cabin, and then wrapped this in two plastic sacks. I grabbed one of the bottles of mezcal and took the note to the stump of the tree where I had first met Juan. He would find it or he wouldn't. Chespy gave me a curious look but I ignored him. I didn't feel I owed him an explanation. I started straightening the place but Chespy impatiently grabbed my pack with one hand and my arm by the other. He mumbled something about "campesinos" as he marched me outside. I took the pack from him and loaded it in the back of the Rover.

Stepping into the vehicle, I removed the pistol from my waist and slid it between the door and the seat as I settled into the glove-soft charcoal leather seats. Chespy gave the cabin one last glance and climbed in next to me.

"You have nice taste in cars," I admitted to him.

"Oh? Can't take credit for this one. The next time I see Pablo I'll tell him you approved. Course, that would require me to dig him up first."

I didn't say anything because...well, what the hell does one say to that?

He smacked my shoulder and guffawed loudly. "My God, you are no fucking fun. The car's mine, relax. You can have it in a few months when I get tired of it."

"Uh, thanks. I think."

"You haven't seen the best part. Atende. One," he said, pointing down at his seat. "Pressure sensor built into the seat. Two, all the doors are closed. Three, rear defroster," he said, placing the key in the ignition and then flipping the switch for the defroster. "Four, XM station 81." He leaned forward and engaged the radio, turning the dial until it synced up with that particular station. He then reached into his jacket and removed his wallet. Taking out what appeared to be a regular credit card, he continued. "Five, both front windows, while six..." he paused, lifting the toggles for the passenger and driver's windows while simultaneously waving the card over the portion of the console just above the radio. I heard a click and an entire section of the dashboard lifted up slightly. Chespy leaned forward and lifted this up. Inside was a contraband well of perhaps 8 by 18 by 10 inches. I was impressed.

I'd seen a few traps during my time in Mexico, but never one that obviously utilized relays. It seemed a little overkill to require six input circuits to be completed, but what did I know? The first two - the seats and the doors- were obviously designed to foil a highway inspection, because those would almost always be conducted with the doors open and without anyone sitting in the driver's seat. I was willing to bet that the radio station was an emergency trigger: if Chespy had been forced to open the compartment, setting it on, say, station 91 might have allowed the sequence to move forward while at the same time sending an emergency phone call with GPS coordinates attached. I was still contemplating this when I noticed that Chespy was staring at me. I met his gaze finally, shrugging.

"Mine has 9 relays. Six is kind of amateurish."

His grin erupted again. "Cabron, I've seen your bicycle. It doesn't even have 9 gears."

I couldn't help but smile back at him. "Witty banter isn't a whole lot of fun when your opponent is practically omniscient."

His smile downshifted slightly, and his eyes turned thoughtful. Finally he nodded slightly. "There it is."

"There what is?" I asked suspiciously.

In response he merely turned the key in the ignition. "Time to go. Put that shooter away, unless you want to explain to half a dozen military checkpoints why you happen to be immune from about 50 laws."

I placed the pistol in the trap and watched how Chespy locked it back in place. I turned to watch the cabin disappear as we stalked our way down dirt roads for twenty minutes before arriving at a two-lane asphalt road. Unlike on the trip out, where I was still coming down from a week's worth of oxycontin, I paid attention to the route. It actually wasn't quite as remote as I had envisioned, and within half an hour or so we began to see occasional cinderblock homes along the roadway.

It's hard to sit next to someone like Chespy and not ask questions, but I sensed that whatever answers he gave me would come attached to a fairly hefty price tag. Who chooses to live like this? I badly wanted to know. Maybe the answer was as simple as a wave towards the index of poverty that clenched itself all around us, hardscrabble lives devoid of voice or autonomy. I didn't think that would be his story, though. I never did find out exactly who he worked for, or what his actual job title was. Later on the way back to Cerralvo, he mentioned he picked me up only because he was on the way back to Monterrey from Los Mochis, and the cabin wasn‘t too much of a detour. When I looked this up a few weeks later, I found out that Los Mochis was deep in the heart of Sinaloa Cartel territory. If the Hammer was head of an independent trafficking group that paid taxes to the Gulf Cartel, and if Chespy was somehow connected to whoever Gelo's bosses were, that put him squarely in the GC/Zeta camp, the most vicious enemies of Sinaloa. Was he an emissary, then? He seemed a poor diplomat, unless the only rules of decorum one cared about were those of the tiger. I suppose el Chapo's people must have respected his brutality, and maybe even liked his quick and ready laugh. Still, I wish I had spoken to him more when I had the chance. One does not generally come into contact with genuine cartel assassins very often.

We reached the first military checkpoint within 90 minutes. The layout of this was more complex than the one outside of Cerralvo. A soldier with an automatic weapon waved us towards the right, where a corporal waited with a clipboard and radio. This latter had almost reached the Rover when another man called out to him. The corporal looked annoyed but he apparently obeyed because he slunk away. The soldier that replaced him was a sergeant. Chespy apparently knew him, because their conversation was both amicable and familiar. Nothing much was said, just mere pleasantries, but embedded within the phatic nonsense must have been something of value because the two certainly laughed more than was reasonable. Two minutes later we were back on the road.

"What?" Chespy asked, after glancing my way.

I didn't know quite how to put it, so I just blurted it out. "It's too easy. These checkpoints are completely pointless."

"Yeah, sure, if the actual purpose was to stop people like us. But that's not what they are about. The people need spectacle. They need their symbols of state power. And you Americans need to see this shit, so that all that Merida Initiative money can get trucked down here, all nicely wrapped up so we can steal it."

I turned slightly so I could better watch his face. "I get the power of propaganda. I understand how governments need to...I don't know, justify their political power with reasons. But it's not real power, and it's very obviously not real power. I saw that the first time I passed through one of those. Nobody could be fooled by any of this."

"You honestly think we give a fuck if they are fooled? Their function is to obey. They can think whatever they want, so long as they do what they are told," He paused. "Seriously, the fuck's up with all of this fake incomprehension? You know you understand it. I don't need to explain what hegemony is all about to you, of all people. Gelo may not know why you are down here, but we’ve known from almost the first day. I knew the first time we met."

He must have seen a micro-expression of alarm ghost across my face because he smiled. "Sugar Land?" These two words arrived like cluster munitions and I sunk back into the seat. "You think we care? We don't. We're like Jesus. We forgive sinners. So long as they are vicious and our sinners."

"You have a heart of gold."

"Yep. I keep the fucker in a box under my bed. Actually, it also belonged to Pablo."

I laughed. The gods help me, but I actually laughed.

We drove several hours on Highway 40D, and the Rover parted the various veils of security like a thermal lance. Evening approached us as we entered Monterrey. I was familiar enough with the layout to follow our progress on a mental map of the city, so when Chespy finally pulled up to an ultramodern glass condominium building, I knew I was only a few blocks away from the Macroplaza. Chespy put the SUV in park and turned in my direction. I followed his gaze to the building, the surface of which was bending the reflected image of the surrounding neighborhood in funhouse ways.

"4F," he said finally, handing over a magnetic key card.

I contemplated these words while I looked out the window. "What's in 4F?"

"Your future for the next few weeks. Maybe longer. Tal vez el sendero obscuro, si lo puedes alcanzar." He placed the card down on the central console.

"The shaded way?" I translated out loud.

He shrugged. "Things need names. That one's en vogue. It will be called something else if the inmates ever manage to take over the asylum."

"Maybe I prefer to stay in the sun? You know, vitamin D, chicks in bikinis. Sunny stuff like that."

His laugh was like the immense vacuum of space. "It‘s cute that you think have options. I told you when we first met that we can do anything. You shouldn't forget that."

"Hard to forget a thing like that," I said, continuing to sit there, not wanting to look at him. "The shaded way. That has a sort of ancient, mystery cult ring to it. Kind of religious, no? Like something out of Milton, maybe."

"There it is again," he said softly, and if I didn't know better, his tone was approving. "Never read him, though the Padres certainly tried to force that shit down my throat often enough."

That made me turn back towards him. I scanned the lines of his face, trying to guess his age. "Let me guess: one of Loyola's boys?"

He grinned. "'Give me the child until he's twelve, I'll give you the man.' What mierda. Didn't work so well on me, did it?"

"I don't know. The Jesuits had their share of psychopaths. You probably fit in better than you think. Or maybe you should have paid more attention to them when they tried to shove all of that in you. Milton and Dante seem surprisingly appropriate for this place sometimes." I paused, thinking. Almost without meaning to, I began to recite words I hadn't thought about in years.

"'I toiled out my uncouth passage, forced to ride the untractable abyss, plunged in the womb of unoriginal night and chaos wild.‘"

"You don't say," he did say. "I guess I'm the 'untractable abyss.' Kind of like the sound of that. Kid?"

I looked at him. "Yeah."

"You think I don't know what a pivot or stalling tactic looks like? Now get out of the fucking car before I toss you out."

I got out of the fucking car. Fast.

No sooner had I grabbed my pack out of the backseat and closed the door he was off, tires squelching their goodbye. I stood there for a few minutes, trying to decide which of my options was the least awful. Finally I turned and moved to the entrance of the building. I could see a nicely appointed foyer through the glass, everything very crisp and full of right angles. The reader on the door accepted the card, and a little green light blinked its approval. I tried not to look at my reflection in the glass as I placed my palm on the stainless steel handle and pushed open the door. Tried not to pretend those first few steps didn't feel like a descent.

To be continued...

Thomas Whitaker 999522
Polunsky Unit
3872 FM 350 South
Livingston, TX 77351

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↧

S#!t Happens

July 13, 2017, 1:04 pm

≫ Next: Dreaming of Oxen Chapter Two

≪ Previous: No Mercy For Dogs Chapter 21

By Michael Lidel

Flying. That's what riding the bus felt like. Sailing over the cars and the people below the rise of the bus windows gave me power. I rode the clouds in my mind toward the sun, unafraid that my wings might melt. The possibilities were endless, the horizons of hope vivid in the theater of my mind. My mother's reaction gave me the sense that things just might be all right, and yet, I couldn't shake the feeling that trouble was imminent. I couldn't put my finger on it, so I figured I'd take full advantage of my momentary reprieve from the drama at home and having to live up to my mother's expectation that I be excellent in at least one thing as long as it was speaking, reading, and writing what she called "proper English". With my fifty-cent all day bus pass in hand, and the few dollars I'd pilfered from my mother's purse, I was off to explore the world, and the bus was my spaceship.

l sat in back because the kids in my neighborhood said that was where all the fun happened. On this particular Tuesday, nothing much was afoot. There was the normal assortment of oddballs - the crazy guy wearing a WWII pilot hat calling to his invisible friend to come back, the old lady with one knee-high stocking rolled loosely around her ankle, and me. The intrepid space hero looking for his next adventure.

Being on my own again was fun. I was the middle child in an extremely large family, and time alone came at a premium. l don't mean the kind of alone that came from being the runt of the litter, or the kind derived from being left out of something because somehow you got lost in the shuffle of bodies that filled the household. I mean the kind of alone that allowed you to be yourself, free and comfortable. I used this time to catch my breath, and to see what I could see.

More times than not, my curiosity led to an ass whipping. My mother was a general at corporal punishment. I had no filter or governor when it came to, as my mother put it, putting my nose where it didn't belong, or as I choose to call it, my investigative proclivities. I was as likely to conduct an experiment in the back yard that might or might not get me killed as I was to explore trash I was supposed to empty, looking for a bit of hidden treasure. Such activities invariably lead to one of my mother's commands to "Go out there, and get me a switch! And it better not be one of those little ones, either!"

There were so many things to see in the world. People on the bus, for example. I imagined everybody had thoughts orbiting around their heads like little word bubbles in the funny pages. You could tell by the tilt of their heads or hunch of their shoulders. From my vantage point, I imagined their sadness or excitement or their anger. Even the advertisements overhead showed me things. One mentioned that “a few good men" were needed in something called the Marine Corps. Another was concerned with the planning of parenthood, and still another advertised that a cigarette should taste good. It was all so interesting to me.

I was most interested in spending a little time at the Seattle Center. I wanted to see the Space Needle, my favorite structure in the city. It reminded me of an alien craft settling onto terra firma for the first time. I wasn't allowed to board the ship, mainly because I was a runt unaccompanied by a parent, but also because I never had enough money to justify the trip. The powers that be frowned on little black boys riding the structure up and down for the mere fun of it.

The "7 Rainier" took me from the Rainier Vista projects to its 3rd Avenue stop downtown where I'd transfer to the "Queen Anne" which would drop me off at the gate of the Center. I spent a lot of this time staring out of one window or another, watching the people and buildings rushing by like so many stars lost behind the Starship Enterprise as it blasted up to warp factor five. I'd sometimes catch a glimpse of a friend, venturing a wave and a smile before leaving him behind as I headed out into the universe.

The landscape and architecture always caught my attention; the buildings especially. Like kaleidoscopic mountains changing height, shape and color with every passing second. The sensation was breathtaking and disconcerting; the rise and fall sometimes created a seasick feeling that was exhilarating. I could tell by the change in architecture as we moved north that the bus was getting closer to the Seattle Center. Skyscrapers and departments stores turned into industrial sprawl aspiring toward a gentrified presence. The streets, though busy, were less crowded, giving the illusion they'd be rolled up when the clock struck a certain hour. Each time I passed this section of the city I felt a little less alive because it had nothingness written all over it.

Thankfully, the triple domes of the Science Fair raised their majestic faces, greeting my entrance into the land of possibilities. All the negatives chasing humanity in Seattle were left outside the gates of this magic place.

The air was filled with the scents of cotton candy, popcorn, hotdogs, and caramel cross matched with the perfumes of summer, all conspiring to kidnap the senses for a moment's fun under the sun. I entered and moved through the crowd, living its pleasures vicariously, knowing I could only afford a small portion of it myself. I bumped the hips of mothers shepherding children toward concession stands, brushed past boyfriends anxious to impress their girlfriends at one of the many arcade games in hopes of winning a prize they could exchange for a kiss later.

I stopped at a hotdog vendor's stand, taking in the scent of mustard, meat and ketchup. The vendor, a fat, sweaty-looking character with a stain-spattered apron, looked down at me across the counter top with an eyebrow raised quizzically.

“Ya want l should give ya the 'two for fifty cent' special?" he asked.

"Sure!" I exclaimed.

The thought of a deal that would let me keep money in my pocket made me smile, but my earlier sense of impending doom returned, looming forward. I thought about it for a second or two, and then accepted his offering after placing the two quarters in his sweaty palm.

"Enjoy" he said, turning toward his next customer.

I dispatched the hotdogs quickly, as was the habit I'd learned trying to survive around my brothers and sisters, not caring in the least that ketchup and mustard created a collage of stains my messiness had masterminded. Hotdogs with all the trimmings were a treat for me given that condiments were a luxury back then. The meat was a bit gamy, but l ignored it as I licked mustard off my fingers, and then proceeded to wipe my face with the sleeve of my shirt.

With my stomach partially satisfied, I went in search of an affordable diversion. I liked the bumper cars and shooting the air rifles, but stayed away from the scary rides like the Wild Mouse, a roller coaster ride that jerked and dipped every which way. I settled on the Moon Walk, a bouncy house ride constructed out of a rubber and nylon tubing filled with air creating a trampoline-like platform.

A long line of kids waited with their parents, sometimes hanging out in groups of two or three. I walked between them, approaching the booth to buy my ticket. I tasted hotdog residue at the back of my throat. A bit of a rumble created strange warmth in my belly; a sensation quickly forgotten in my expanding enthusiasm.

Finally, I was allowed to enter. The interior of the ride was spacious, exhilarating, and frightening. Kids jostled each other as they bounced helter skelter over the expanse of the cloud-like ride. I crawled in and tried to stand on my feet, but was defeated by my lack of balance. I tried again and stood wobbly legged, lifting one and then the other until I gained my equilibrium. The noise level – screams, laughter, squeaky rubber, increased my excitement, sending energy surging through my limbs. I bounced on my heels, six or seven inches high and then a foot or two. The thrill of momentary flight was electric, so I tried to bounce higher and higher. No one minded landing on their butts because of the soft material catching their landings. I enjoyed myself immensely until my belly began to bubble, causing me to clench the muscles against the pressure building up. A familiar sense of foreboding flashed across my mind. The sensation expanded inside me, roiling like the tumult caused by a pot of boiling water. I surreptitiously released a small cloud of methane into the air of the bouncy house, hoping no one would notice I was the culprit. Releasing gas didn't affect the bubbling in my guts. In fact, it made things worse. I panicked because the muscles of my nether region refused to contract. Doom was imminent.

I tried to move myself toward the exit, but I was tossed to and fro by the momentum of the other kids jostling about. l was bounced first in one direction and then in the other in my haste to depart. My haste was for naught. In the midst of all those kids, my bowels evacuated. What was inside flowed outside. There was no fanfare, no trumpets, and no "timber!" It was simply there, on the insides of my legs, sliding into my socks - last night's dinner, this morning's breakfast propelled by those damnable special hotdogs.

I hurriedly left the ride, and the laughter of the children behind, trailing a most foul odor. Surrounded by strangers, I left with the thought that I had to make it all the way across town in order to get home. The entire crowd gave me a wide berth. I slunk toward the Center's exits, my crab-like gait attracting more unwanted attention. A group of older kids noticed the smell surrounding me, calling out insults l gave little attention to in my rush to get past them. My sole focus was to get home. I was mortified. l tried to shrink into myself but I couldn't hide from the embarrassment, and the eyes following my every step. Of course more people looked around, wondering where the unpleasant aroma was coming from.

The "Queen Anne" arrived on its return trip downtown and began boarding people. Most of the people were constituents of that part of the city – white, well dressed, middle class people. I slipped in at the rear of the line, quickly showed my pass to the bus driver, and then made my way to the back of the bus. No sooner had we gotten under way than complaints started about the smell.

"Wow! What is that smell?!"

I looked up toward the driver wondering what his reaction would be. Of course, I hadn't been identified yet, but it was just a matter of time.

"Does somebody's baby need to be changed?"

The smell was so aggressive that a number of the passengers began to gag.

“That just nasty!"

I sat quietly, looking around with the rest of the passengers, pretending innocence.

Before long, people moved, one or two at a time, toward the front of the bus, opening windows as they went. I knew I couldn't move because the smell would follow me, so I sat silently, embarrassed. When we were three or four blocks from our destination, the bus driver pulled over, shifted into neutral, and sat there for a moment. My thoughts raced, knowing he'd soon be headed in my direction. He was a large man who filled the seat he was sitting in. Would he be sympathetic and concerned, or would he be unprofessional and disgusted, ready to belittle me when he discovered I was the culprit. My throat tightened, and I could feel water beginning to cloud my vision as tears burned. The driver got up and walked toward my solitary perch.

"Listen kid." he said. "You gotta get offa the bus. I can't have that stink botherin' the other people."

Grabbing my elbow, he escorted me, like a condemned serial killer on his last day, to the front of the bus, and then unceremoniously booted me off. As soon as my feet landed on the sidewalk, I heard applause erupt inside the bus.

Poop was smashed across my backside from having sat in it for so long, and I was still only halfway into my journey home. It was easier to navigate the downtown streets without attracting too much attention because of the scarcity of pedestrians as I crab-walked across 3rd Avenue. I walked across the street, waited for the bus driver to finish his cigarette, and then repeated the same trip on the "7 Rainier" with the same results as on the "Queen Anne". This time, however, most of the people were from my neighborhood – Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American people. Their comments, especially those of my contemporaries, were aimed at me instead of around me.

"Boy, ain't Eloise taught you no better than that?" inquired a lady who apparently knew our family.

"Dooky pants! Dooky butt!" yelled a little Korean boy sitting between parents who didn't bother to admonish him.

"Lord, hamerey! That boy's guts is rotten!" exclaimed an old lady grasping her shopping bags.

No one on this bus demanded the bus driver kick me off the bus. I was their entertainment, free entertainment, never mind the smell. Like a Triple Crown contender, they rode me for all I was worth until at last, I decided I was close enough to walk the rest of the way home.

I left the bus to the sound of, "Oooo. Lord! Thank God", "Don't go! Sit back down. You stinky little rodent!", "Let that boy go somewhere so he can change his diapers!" Laughter followed me and I dared not look back. When the bus passed by, like spectators passing a gruesome accident, the passengers’ faces stared, glared, and laughed out the windows at me. Sending me on my way under a cloud of ridicule.

I walked the last few blocks up the hill to my house, passing a few of my friends who immediately turned their noses up when the fragrance of my messiness hit them.

"Damn, runt, what happened to you?"

"He shit his pants! Can't you smell it?"

I moved passed with my head lowered, veering around to the side of the house where I stripped naked on a patch of grass. I looked to make sure no one was watching out of the windows, and then turned the water hose on myself. Using the cold torrent of water, shivering like a puppy pooping a peach pit until I was relatively free of the grime. Then, I bent to the task of digging a hole near some bushes that guarded the boundary of our house and the one next door. I was not about to take those filthy clothes into the house, risking annihilation from my mother for defiling her air with my stench. Instead, l chose to bury them. After they were buried under freshly layered dirt, I thought l could still smell them.

I entered the house through a side window, walked over to a pile of clothes waiting to go into the washing machine, and picked a shirt and a pair of pants to put on. The door opened to expose a beam of light back dropping my mother's presence.

"Boy, what are you doing in this musty old room?" she asked, coming into the room to stand next to me.

"Nothing" l said.

"Nothing my ass." she said. "You're in here up to something."

When she noticed what I was wearing, she said. "Those are not the clothes I sent you out of this house with. Where are they and what happened to them?"

The ghost of a scent caught her attention, causing her to scrunch her nose in distaste.

"What did you do, boy, shit on yourself?"

"Yes. ma'am." l said after some deliberation.

"Well,” she said. "Shit happens."

She hesitated, her brow furrowing as if a thought had just occurred to her.

"Oh, by the way." she said. "We need to talk."

She turned and left me alone.

Michael Lidel 603414 (pictured with his beautiful wife)
WSRU
P.O. Box 777
Monroe, WA 98272-0777

↧

Dreaming of Oxen Chapter Two

July 20, 2017, 9:27 am

≫ Next: Timmy

≪ Previous: S#!t Happens

By Burl N. Corbett

To read Chapter One, click here

The Three G's

In many respects, it was still the Fifties in Little Italy. And that version of the Fifties wasn't a hell of a lot different than the Forties or even the Thirties, which except for the clothing styles and the music, could have passed for the nineteenth century. And that was OK with most of the residents, capiche? It was an insular society that, conversely, conducted much of its business on the streets. The presence of the Mafia was everywhere, but troubled no one; in fact, the blocks between Houston and Canal, the Bowery and Broadway, were the safest areas in the city. Romantic couples and voracious potheads with the late-night munchies could stroll without fear of mugging from the West Village to Chinatown, judiciously detouring to the opposite side of the street when they passed the Ravenite "Social" Club where beefy cats sporting bespoke suits and day-or-night sunglasses lurked menacingly. In a dangerous city, Little Italy was an unlikely oasis of safety. Plus, the food was great.

At the corner of Houston Street ("House-ton, not youse-ton!" Sam had corrected Sean the previous year), they waited for the light. Minuteman shapeup was on the other side of the busy four–lane highway, a crude image of a musket-toting Revolutionary War soldier painted on its front window. Underneath the caricature was the stencilled announcement, "Temporary Employment--We Pay Daily'“Sam regarded the sign and shook his head in disapproval. "Working as a human wheelbarrow isn't a hip way of making bread, man. You gotta, like, latch on to an easier gig."

Sean had been raised on a farm and thought the jobs he had worked at were fairly easy. Mostly, he shovelled piles of broken-up plaster and cement block dividing walls into steel carts, rolled them to a freight elevator, pushed them out to the sidewalk where they were dumped on the street and then reshovelled into a dump truck. When that was filled, he and the other workers filled the next one. On some jobs there was only one truck, and when it was full, Sean and the other laborers lay on their backs on top of the load, watching with a thrill the tall spires of the city scratching the deep blue back of the universe.

The hiring agency paid minimum wage and provided a dollar carfare up front for a bus or subway ride to the job site--twenty cents each way, with sixty cents left over for lunch. Workers were paid by check at the end of the day and tax deductions were taken out, although Sean hadn't received at the end of the previous year a W-2 form to file with his tax return. The checks could be cashed at a local bar for the price of a drink, presumably to cover the expense of the cashing privilege. The real reason, of course, was to tempt the worker--often a down-at-his-heels booze fighter--into drinking up his pay check at the bar, which was in cahoots with if not actually owned by Minuteman. It was a classic Big Apple hustle in which the cost of labor was ingeniously recycled in a closed system and returned to the employer two-fold: Once in the profit earned by the difference between the minimum wage paid out and the near union rates charged to the demolition companies; and twice in the hyper-inflated price of a bottle of Rheingold bought by the worker. It was a smart scam, Sean had to admit, but the second part of the equation didn't balance in his instance--one beer was plenty for him.

"Aw, it ain't bad. I get to see the city," Sean offered as an excuse.

Sam shook his head and frowned. They travelled all over the city anyway in Sean's '50 Chevy that he had brought with him in March after wintering with his parents in Pennsylvania and working at a box factory to earn travelling money.

"Well, if you dig it, then I guess it's OK," Sam grudgingly allowed. "But it isn't cool. You're working for the system. You gotta make the system work for you, like Billy does."

Billy! Sean thought. Who'd want to be like him?

They crossed Houston against the light, sidestepping traffic, and entered the beating heart of Little Italy with its corner bars and pasta restaurants and small groceries with outside fruit stands. Sean loved the old world ambience, the screaming kids underfoot, the traffic creeping slower than he walked. He thought of Billy's solitary existence in an illegal storefront on East Second Street between Avenues B and C, denned up in a beastly hovel on a godforsaken block on which a hundred thousand dreams had briefly flickered and perished.

Sam zapped across the street to examine a discarded dresser on the curb, but he hadn't forgotten Billy, not for a minute. "Dig it, man, Billy collects a welfare check every two weeks and the city pays his rent and utilities. Plus, he gets food stamps he sells for drugs or extra bread. Wow, man, now that's the kind of gig you gotta land! Then you'll have time to live, instead of slaving for a living." He assayed the pulls with a practiced eye, and then used a dime to unscrew them. "Outta sight, man! Hand cast brass! They just don't make shit like this anymore!"

As Sam harvested his treasure, and the locals watched warily, Sean considered Billy's made-in-the-shade life. Billy had once been on the "set" with many of the original Beats, but was now reduced to a burned out relic. Unlike Ginsburg or Kerouac, he had never known nor deserved any fame. Like William Burroughs, Billy had once had a junk habit--now "controlled" by methadone--and was gay; no great drawback among the hipsters, but hardly a ticket to success in the pre-Stonewall days. He lived sans shower, tub, or even electric, in a candle-lit hoorah's nest crammed and cluttered with the random detritus of his wasted life. Balding and sallow, he hunched amidst his dubious possessions, drawing pen and ink silhouettes of winter-bare trees conjured to life by his morbid imagination. One would be more likely to encounter a raccoon or an owl at a Sunday morning be-in at Tompkins Square Park than to witness him sketching plein-air on a sunny afternoon. Darkness seemed his friend.

Billy was friendly enough and always seemed glad to get company, but the gloomy ambience of his hovel and his frequent uncomfortable silences made conversation difficult. After exchanging a few laconic pleasantries, most visitors couldn't leave quickly enough. Once when Sean closed Billy's door, he saw Billy's eyes close, too, as if he were going into suspended animation until the next visitor came knocking, bearing news from a faraway land where the hobgoblin of salvation that Jack and Neal had chased ragged across the continent and never caught was waiting patiently just for him.

Sam unscrewed the last of the brass pulls and put them in his pocket. He had no conceivable use for them, or a likely buyer. They would join the existing accumulation of rubbish in his loft, a farrago of useless knickknacks, curios, odds and ends of oddball oddities, and just plain out-and-out junk he had scavenged from every alley and abandoned building in lower Manhattan. In Sam's entire loft, a space maybe twenty feet wide and thirty-five feet long, there were no dressers, cabinets, or closets, not even a table. There was a toilet and shower in the rear, and two sheetless double beds, separated by a ratty blanket hanging from the ceiling. Dirty clothes lay where they fell, or were tossed on a pile near the toilet. Periodically, when he ran out of clean or semi-clean clothes, Sam threw them in a navy surplus duffle bag, grabbed his guitar, and schlepped over to the Second Avenue all-night laundromat. But there weren’t many clothes to start, because he never wore underpants or even socks most of the year. And since he rarely worked, his tee shirts and dungarees took quite a while to reach the must-wash stage. What the hell, he reasoned; society considered him a filthy beatnik, so why fight it?

The door pulls, saved because they were old and made from brass (the opposite of "new" and "plastic") would be carelessly tossed under the bed or placed on his archetypal beatnik bookshelf made from planks and bricks "appropriated" from a job site. Eventually they'd end up on the floor where they'd be stepped on, cursed at, and kicked against the wall to swell the mounting scree of rubbish and forgotten pack rat treasures dragged home by the head pack rat, Sam, the undisputed pooh-bah of urban gleaners. Despite the clutter, however, there was nary a cockroach and only an occasional mouse. Neither Sam nor the Bonners cooked or even brought home take-out. They ate at seedy diners and cheap Chinese restaurants off the tourist track. Actually, they ate damn little--there were no fat beatniks.

Sam delivered an in-depth exposition on the differences between brass and bronze as they walked, expounding upon the ratios of copper and tin that each required. Before Sam could drag him into a copper mine, they arrived at Canal Street, the cross town artery between the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge. Chinatown began at Canal Street, and except for the tourists it was as exotic as Shanghai and as crime free as Little Italy. It was ruled by the "Tong," who preferred anonymity--no macho posturing outside "social clubs" for them.

The various businesses along Canal were a capitalistic interface between cultures, New York City in the raw. Not only did everything have a price, it was negotiable. Jaywalking on Canal was tantamount to Russian roulette, so they waited for the light and crossed safely with the herd. With an alert eye for bargains, they nosed in and out of the numerous second, third, and fourth-hand junk shops that were strung along Canal like cheap beads in a tawdry necklace. They worked the shops methodically, quickly scanning the stacks of hardback books for first edition novels by famous authors. Sam rooted through crates of machinery parts, hankering to discover the lost sprocket of satori or perhaps the skeleton key to the secrets of the pyramids, all the while scoping out the clothing racks for any cute hippie chicks seeking sartorial enlightenment in one of Granny's old cocktail dresses. But they had no luck; they kept bringing in dry holes; no bonanza today--so sorry!--and were ready to hit their favorite dim sum shop for a coffee and a few tau shu baos when Sean hit paydirt.

"Hey, check this out! The perfect dope stash!" He held up a round wooden canister with a matching lid. It resembled a fat, pine lipstick case.

Sam opened it, closed it, and counted how many were in the box. He asked the old Jewish owner watching them carefully from his stool how much they cost.

"A quarter apiece," he replied.

There were sixteen containers in the box, and Sam examined each one, frowning when he spotted imaginary defects. "Some of these are cracked," he bluffed.

The man shrugged. "Don't buy them, then," he advised.

"A quarter's too much," Sam decided. "I’ll give you two bucks for the lot."

With a sigh, the man got off his stool and shuffled over to the bin. Counting the tubes, he mentally weighed the canisters against an imaginary poke of gold. "Three bucks, and I might make enough for carfare home."

Sam stifled a laugh. A twenty-cent subway token would take you to the outermost borders of the city, beyond which the maps warned of monsters. The owner probably lived in the second-floor apartment and gouged his other tenants sufficiently to provide a comfortable living. The junk store was nothing more than an old man's hobby, a distraction that kept his mind off his impending demise.

"Two-fifty, and I'll even take the bad ones, too," Sam pronounced, giving the old coot one of his penetrating stares.

"Oy vey!" he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "Two-seventy-five, and that's final! Another step closer to the poorhouse I go!"

They pooled their change and handed it over. The old man counted it out, muttering in Yiddish, and handed them a crumpled paper bag. "Bag them yourselves," he said. "Me, I'm mourning my loss."

On the way home, Sean asked Sam why he'd bought so many.

Sam grinned. "How many would you have bought?"

"I don't know. One for me and maybe a couple for you and Mark."

"See? That proves my point! You're not thinking like a hipster yet. I would've bought fifty, if he had that many and I had the bread." He smiled at the thought and gave Sean a huge wink.

"Ah, I dig it now! You're going to resell them!"

"Fucking aye, man! We'll slap a coat of stain on them and sell them to the headshops for a buck-fifty and make ten bucks apiece. That's what I mean by making your living the hip way."

"I dunno," Sean said, doubtfully, "shouldn't we lay some on our friends for free?"

Sam shook his Harpo Marx-coiffed head in slow disbelief. "No, NO, NO, man! That's the hippie way, not the hip way! First, you make a good score, and then you lay a few on your friends. In fact, after we unload these, we’ll try to find some more and up the price, see what the market will bear. That's what they call 'hip capitalism'."

"Shit!" Sean protested. "That's no different than what the squares do."

Sam laughed at Sean's naiveté. "You gotta stop believing that horseshit you read in The East Village Other, man. The difference is that the squares spend their profits on paying rent and car insurance and color TV's. Hipsters spend theirs on grass and guitars and other groovy shit—the Three G's, man!" He chuckled at his wit. "Hey, dig it, man! I just coined a phrase!"

Sean laughed, and they continued home. At the hardware store at the corner of the Bowery and Bleecker, Sean bought a half-pint can of walnut stain with almost his last thirty-nine cents and Sam shoplifted a small paintbrush. Back at Sam's loft, the radio was still playing "The Ballad of the Green Berets," so they listened instead to a Top 40 station while they stained brown the outsides of the "pocket stashes," as hip entrepreneur Sam had labelled their "hot" commodity. The rest of the day and evening they watched the stain dry while smoking up some dynamite Panama Red that one of Sam's come-an-go chicks had foolishly left behind. Around nine or ten, as Mozart's Piano Concerto #21 played on the classical station, they passed out. Sean had to get up early for the 6 a.m. shape-up at Minutemen's, but Sam could sleep in--he only worked hip hours.

To be continued...

Burl N. Corbett HZ6518
SCI Albion
10745 Route 18
Albion, PA 16475-0002

Born 6/9/47 in Reading, PA. Raised on a 123-acre sheep farm only three crow miles from John Updike´s famous sandstone farmhouse of “Pigeon Feathers,” The Centaur, and Of the Farm. Graduated from Daniel Boone High School in 1965. Ran away to Greenwich Village to become a beatnik in 1966 with only a Martin guitar and the clothes on my back. Lived among the counterculture for 3 years, returning disillusioned to PA for good in 1968. Worked on a mink farm; poured steel in a foundry; chased the sun as a cross-country pipeliner; drove the big rigs, baby!; picked tomatoes with migrant workers; tended bar on the old skid row Bowery; worked as a reporter, columnist, and photographer for two Southeastern Pennsylvania newspapers; drove beer truck (hic!); was a “HEY, CULLIGAN MAN!”; learned how to plaster, stucco, and lay stone; published both fiction and nonfiction in several nationally distributed magazines and literary quarterlies; got married and raised four children; got divorced and fell into the bottle; and came to prison at the age of 60 with no previous criminal offenses other than a 25 year-old DUI. The “crime”? Self-defense in my own house without financial means to hire a decent lawyer. Since becoming the “guest” of the state in 2007, I have won four PEN Prison Writing Awards (two first and two honorable mentions); the first and only prize of $500 in the 2013 Eaton Literary Agency short fiction contest; written a children/young adult book, Coon Tales, recently published by Xlibris; a novel of the 1967 “Summer of Love,” Dreaming of Oxen; a magic realism novel, A Redneck Ragnorak, and many short stories and memoirs. My first novel, A Haven from Violence, is available at Xlibris.com or Amazon.com.

Authors note: Dreaming of Oxen is a 52-chapter, 556-page tour de force in search of a literary agent or an independent publisher willing to disregard my present circumstances and focus instead upon my art.

↧

Timmy

July 27, 2017, 12:21 pm

≫ Next: Single No More

≪ Previous: Dreaming of Oxen Chapter Two

By Arthur Longworth

Timmy`s a mess. If he were free, you`d call him developmentally-disabled and allot him a certain amount of consideration. But he`s not free, so no one does.

Timmy lives in front of the guards, in a cell no one wants because of where it`s located - the point from which guards administer the cellblock, a half dozen feet or less from Timmy 24-7. I’m not sure that Timmy even notices them. He`s in the cell by himself, which is all that he cares about because it means that he doesn`t have to clean. And. believe me, he doesn`t. I know because guards won`t search the cell. They fill out cell search paperwork as though they do, but they don’t. I heard one guard tell another, "I don`t care if the superintendent orders it. I ain`t goin` in there."

Timmy looks 13, although he`s 37. His childlike facial features and narrow, underdeveloped shoulders sit atop a midsection swollen with a thick roll of jelly-like fat. He`s frail, racked with a palsied trembling expressed most pronouncedly in his truncated hands. The shaking, I think, is induced by the handful of psychotropics he gets every day at Med-line. He smells like milk long past its expiration date, and it`s no wonder because no one here has ever seen him shower. When his hair becomes too long and matted for guards to ignore, they escort him to the barber who shaves his head. His arm is scarred, the muscle shriveled and the skin disfigured as if it were burned.

When Timmy leaves his cell, one of his pant legs is nearly always caught in his sock. His

prison-issue canvas belt is twisted around his waist and he`s missed at least one belt loop. In violation of prison standards, his dirty oversized t-shirt is untucked. He doesn`t care for the uncompromisingly cliquish atmosphere of the chowhall, so every evening there`s the comedy of him hunched over his tray, bolting down his food and hurrying off in the odd, disjointed shuffling manner in which he perambulates. On sunny days, he goes to the Yard with a clear plastic cup of freeze-dried coffee mixed so strong it`s stained the plastic dark. He sits down in the center of the Yard, away from everyone, unmoving, staring at nothing, unbothered by everything happening around him. The same spot on the Yard every time. When there`s a number of sunny days in a row, the grass becomes tamped down where he sits. He stays there until a guard`s voice crackles over the p.a. system, so loud and distorted it`s scarcely intelligible, ordering us back to our cells for count.

I don`t go near Timmy, nor let him near me. Nothing personal. It`s just that no matter how settled in routine or predictable a prisoner like Timmy seems, he`s not predictable. He might collapse into convulsions next to me - like Thomas did. Or begin babbling and lash out in a fit at imaginary figures in the corridor- like Lurch. In case you can`t tell, I`ve seen it before. Anyone who`s spent any amount of time in prison has. Sometimes l catch myself watching Timmy, both fascinated at how he has come to navigate this environment and appalled that he`s here. This isn`t a medical or mental health facility: it`s a prison. Real prison things happen here. When the Surenos and Nortenos went at it a couple months ago, Timmy walked right through the middle of them. When the tower guard opened fire. Timmy didn`t even know that he was supposed to lay belly-down on the ground. But that doesn`t happen all the time; Timmy`s okay most of the time if any circumstance in prison can be described as okay: "okay" only meaning that he is able to get by.

Occasionally, other prisoners try to make a mark of Timmy. Someone will talk him out of his dinner for a week for a shot of coffee. Or charge him ten stamped envelopes for a peanut butter sandwich when he`s hungry. I cut those deals off. I don`t tell you that because l think I deserve credit. Because I don`t. It isn`t difficult. In fact, it usually only entails letting the person know that I know. "You must be a hell of a hustler outside prison if you gotta’ come in here and do this." Other prisoners aren`t really the worst part of prison for Timmy though. Certainly not what`s the most harmful.

This is Timmy’s second trip to prison. And the consentient belief among prisoners here is that he burned down a halfway house. It`s a part of the lore that`s risen around him that even I bought into until I found out otherwise. Because it`s easier to believe the state would send someone like Timmy to prison for lighting a fire than for forgery, which is the unconscionable reason why he`s really here.

Timmy was sent to prison the first time on a drug charge, about ten years ago, when all the prisons in this state were overrun with people in on those kind of charges. The first time I saw him, he was buried in a stifling cell at the far end of one of the seemingly endless tiers in the Hole at the state penitentiary. The tiers are divided into chain-link segments that resemble the dog runs in a kennel. Each cell is a tiny, windowless compartment sealed with an unyielding steel door. I was locked away in Timmy`s segment, sweating it out two sealed compartments down from him, when he fell apart.

Timmy was in the Hole because the prisoners in the cell that prison administrators assigned him to had beaten him up. They didn`t want to live with him. And who can blame them? In the general population of that prison, the state shoves four prisoners into the constricted cells designed to hold two. We have to find a way to exist, literally, on top of each other; it`s too close of quarters for someone who doesn`t wash himself. Timmy spent every day silently rocking back and forth sealed inside that eell in the Hole, not making a noise. Until the day he began to kick the cell door, so loud and insistently that l felt the concussion in my cell, the reverberation passing through the concrete and steel, invading my flesh, crowding out any possibility of ignoring it. "What the fuck is wrong with you?! Shut your ass up!"

Timmy finally did shut up. He was unconscious and covered in blood when guards in latex gloves pulled him from the cell. l realized when I saw his swollen, misshapen head that he hadn`t been kicking the cell door but, rather, ramming himself head first into it. I learned later that Timmy`s arm was so eaten up by staph (MRSA: the particularly virulent. prison-type of staph) that he almost lost it. That`s why his arm looks the way it does now. Nothing about Timmy`s experience in the Hole was okay - "not okay" meaning that it was too much for him, he was not able to deal with it.

I suppose that`s why Timmy`s in my thoughts now. You see, word is that guards took him to the Hole today while I was at work. For arguing. You can`t argue with the guards here, especially not the ones on swing shift. Everyone knows that. Everyone except, of course, Timmy.

Arthur Longworth #299180

Monroe Correctional Complex - WSR

P.O. Box 777

Monroe, WA 98272

Arthur Longworth is a five-time national PEN award winner whose essays have been published by The Marshall Project, VICE News, and YES! Magazine. He is also the author of ZEK: An American Prison Story (Gabalfa Press, 2016), a work of creative nonfiction that lays bare the experience of mass incarceration from the inside. For more info., go to: ArthurLongworth.com

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↧

Single No More

August 3, 2017, 4:43 pm

≫ Next: Abolish Long-Term Solitary Confinement: It's a Threat to the Public

≪ Previous: Timmy

By Mwandishi Mitchell

At times in life we are all tested and sometimes expected to make changes however terrible they may seem to be. Recently I've had such a test, and it's up to you to decide whether or not I made the correct decision.

I've spent the last fourteen years incarcerated for a crime I didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That, in itself, is something I have to deal with daily and quite frankly--it drives me damn near to chronic depression! There was only one thing that had kept me from going out of my mother-bleeping mind--single cell status.

In 2007, after four years of lock-up, I came to the realization that I no longer had the patience to live in a bathroom with another individual. So I came up with a way to have the institution at Graterford give me a single cell. Basically, I told them that I was assaulting my cellmates in an inappropriate way while they slept. You get the idea without me spelling it out, right? Well, it worked. Man, if you could've seen my fist pump when I came out of that office and they told me they were giving me a single cell! I got one over on you bastards! So, for the past ten years I've ridden that wave, the brilliant creation of my superb illustrious imagination. Playing the state for the suckers that they are--and man did it feel good!

For those who have been following my essays, you know I was transferred from Graterford to Houtzdale in 2014. I've been staying relatively low-key here, minding my own business, staying misconduct free (no misconducts in two years) and basically just studying Arabic and memorizing Qur'an. However, as is the case with life, when things are going smooth the evil one will come and throw a monkey-wrench into your situation!

In February I was called into Counselor McIntosh's office for my annual review. She is used to having the inmates flock around her like moths to a flame. On the other hand, I've never spoken to the woman since I moved onto the unit about eight months ago.

"This is your annual review, Mr. Mitchell," Mcintosh says.

"Already?" I reply, still shocked that another year has passed so fast.

"Yes, there‘s a new policy being implemented where we‘re reviewing single cell status Z Codes every year. Could you tell me why you should have a single cell?"

Really? Oh, you're gonna love this--eat your heart out, kiddo!"Well, I don't know how to say this, but I was given a single cell because I have the bizarre fetish of ejaculating into the faces of my cellmates while they’re sleeping.”

She tries to act like what I said has no effect on her--but her eyes say something different. The eyes never lie.

"I see, was this ever documented?"

I shrug. "As far as I can tell, it should be in my file. Graterford did the paperwork."

"Alright then, Mr. Mitchell. This will conclude the annual review,“ she says, shuffling paperwork in front of her.

Do call on me again next year, gnat brain!"Thank you very kindly, ma‘am. Am I permitted to leave now?"

"Yes, here is your review sheet," she says, passing me a single sheet of paper.

This time a mental fist-pump instead of a physical one, since I knew I wouldn't be bothered by these people here at Houtzdale asking me anything else about my single cell. But I underestimated the mind of the gnat. They would be prepared to test my "compulsion" even to the extent of causing severe legal liability to the state.

Three or four weeks later I was summoned again into the same office. She was there--but this time there was also a unit manager, a superior to check me out. The unit manager asked me the same mundane questions about the single cell. I relayed to him what I’d told his subordinate. It seemed they were trying to put up resistance, so I informed them that if they give me a cellmate I would assault them. The particular way I assault them, mind you!

"You know we can issue you a misconduct for threatening another person," she said.

I know this is bait. Thrown out there to see if I’ll back down. Gauge my reaction to the threat of a write up. True to form, I was unwavering. "I guess you'll have to do what you have to do--and I‘ll do what I have to do."

With that, the "meeting" was concluded and I went back to my cell. Later that night I received a misconduct for threatening another person and was scheduled to see the hearing examiner within the next seven days. I mean, what else could I do? Obviously, they were backing me into a corner and I had no choice but to stand my ground. I had to keep my sanity--and by that I mean my single cell.

Two days after the misconduct I was called to the security office where I was grilled by the captain and lieutenant about my "assaults" at Graterford and whether or not charges had ever been filed against me. I was made to jump through a few more hoops before I was told I could return to my cell. I could feel that these people were truly concerned about my keeping a single cell. How kind of them, I hadn‘t imagined they cared about me so much!

The next day, I had my hearing with the examiner. For him, the misconduct was almost laughable. Even the C.O.s who were in the room knew that the write-up was a load of crap. Fortunately, the hearing examiner saw through the attempt of the unit manager and counselor to get me thrown into the RHU (hole) for threatening an "imaginary" cellmate.

"Mr. Mitchell, you've been honest with me in relating your version of events concerning this misconduct. Usually, I give people hole time for threatening—but you haven't been in any trouble so I'm going to give you twenty days cell restriction," he says.

Another mental fist-pump. "Thank you, sir. As you can see I've pretty much been on my best behavior."

“Keep it that way," he says finally, as the computer two-way screen in front of me goes black. Leaving me there with two C.O.s.

"That's bullsh**t!" one of them says.

"Mitchell, I'd appeal that if I were you. Obviously, you have a psychological compulsive disorder and you shouldn't be punished for being sick," says the other.

My thespian talents are being wasted here at Houtzdale. I should be in

Hollywood.

As it turns out, cell restriction isn't such a bad deal. You are allowed to keep your privileges to some extent: use of your tablet, phone, television--but you're not permitted out of your cell after 10:00 am, unless you're going to chow, commissary or to your religious service. I was cool with that. Hell, I stayed in my cell most of the time anyway. That was the end of the drama with the single cell. They'll definitely leave me alone, now! Or so I thought.

After about twelve days into cell restriction, , I was summoned again to the unit managers office. I was thinking, what the hell is going on now with these idiots?

"What can I do for you?" I ask, upon entering the office.

"Yes, have a seat Mr. Mitchell. Your vote sheet came back about your single cell. It's been determined that your Z Code is being withdrawn."

Utter devastation. Heart immediately drops into stomach.

"But I'm a sick man! I'm afraid I’ll act out on my urges if I'm given a cellmate," I say desperately. Not a threat so much as a plea.

"Then the individual will be able to file assault charges on you with the state police," he says, straight-faced.

The taste of defeat. Of course, I thought about devising a plan with anyone they put in my cell to exact revenge. I made copies of the misconduct that said I would assault anyone they put in my cell and sent the copies to family members. The cellmate would say I assaulted them having copies of a misconduct report that said I would do as much. He would provide them to one of the many attorneys who‘d be willing to jump on this un-losable lawsuit. The only catch would be that they'd probably lock me down in the hole forever and I'd be charged with that kind of assault and convicted. The conviction would only increase the likelihood of the winning the suit.

The cellmate would break me off a small portion of the settlement he'd receive from the state. If I went through with that plan, there'd be no way the institution could finagle itself out of their liability.

Instead, I went into more in depth contemplation. I weighed the pros and cons of the scenario and decided it wasn't worth the effort. So, how would I work to my advantage what’d happened with the snatching of my single cell? Like they say, there's a reason for everything.

When I was sent here from Graterford three years ago I had no idea my codefendant was being housed in this institution. I knew he had been housed at SCI Greensburg, but unbeknownst to me he had been transferred here to Houtzdale. You wouldn‘t believe how happy I was when I found out he was here! I hadn't seen him since we were wrongly and unjustly convicted--and I welcomed the chance for us to do a whole lot of catching up. During this time together we‘ve been able to work on our case and contact various innocence projects. Although, the innocence project endeavors have been futile thus far. I'm at the point of giving up and facing the fact that I'm going to die in prison for something I didn't do.

I figured that if they were going to force me into a cell with someone, then damn, it ought to be him and not anyone else. This was the "proposal" that I came up with and relayed to the unit manager. Maybe he saw a glimpse of a future liability issue. In any event, he accommodated my request and I moved into a cell with my codefendant the next day.

There is a lot I must adjust to after living in a cell by myself for so long. I have to get used to someone being in my space, and vice versa. However, there isn't a better person I'd rather go through this re-acclimation with. Better to do it with a friend and someone I knew on the streets than with a total stranger. Still, it's a hard process--but at least I'm comfortable.

I should've known that the powers be would test my resolve. In the end, I've chalked it up as a win. We're not always going to get what we want in life, but the divine most high will make sure we get what we need. What I needed was to be in a cell with my codefendant. That was a blessing in and of itself. I don't know where this journey will end, but I'm trying to make the path as pleasurable and smooth as possible.

Until next time friends, or my next crisis, that is.

Mwandishi Mitchell GB6474

SCI Houtzdale

P.O.Box 1000

Houtzdale, PA 16698-1000

Mwandishi Mitchell is an innocent man serving time at the State Correctional Institution of Houtzdale. After serving ten years of his wrongful conviction, Mwandishi realized he had a talent in creative writing. Besides pursuing his writing career, he continues to fight in court reverently in pursuit of overturning his wrongful conviction. A published author, Mwandishi has two books, The Prodigal Son and The Prodigal Son 2, which can be downloaded and read for free at www.prisonsfoundations.org

Mwandishi’s writing can be found here and his poetry here.

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Abolish Long-Term Solitary Confinement: It's a Threat to the Public

August 10, 2017, 4:54 pm

≫ Next: Dark Magic

≪ Previous: Single No More

By Joseph Dole

I have a very intimate understanding of the effects of long-term isolation on a person´s mental and physical health. An entire decade of my life was spent involuntarily entombed in isolation at the notorious Tamms Supermax Prison in southern Illinois.

Serving a sentence of life-without-parole, I was sent to Tamms for knocking out an assistant warden in yet another Illinois prison where humans are simply warehoused without any programs, with few jobs, and where we were constantly disrespected and dehumanized by staff and administrators alike. In retaliation for that assault, I was likewise assaulted while in handcuffs by several staff members who broke my nose and did other damage, prior to shipping me off to Tamms.

Tamms was allegedly opened as a sort of “shock-treatment” for violent inmates and gang leaders. If the inmate behaved he was supposed to be transferred out after a year. This never occurred, though. The reality was that, once opened, the IDOC administration abused their power and used Tamms to mete out retaliation. Not just against staff-assaulters either, it included jailhouse lawyers and many of the mentally ill whom the administration wished to lock in a closet somewhere.

In the ten years I was there, I never received a single legitimate disciplinary infraction. Nonetheless, I was denied transfer out of Tamms 39 times. Upon arrival, and for the next 7 or 8 years, I was repeatedly, and gleefully, told that I would never be released from indeterminate disciplinary segregation, would never get out of Tamms, and would, in fact, die alone of old age in that concrete box. I was 26 at the time. To get their point across, I was forced to send out all property not allowed at Tamms, because I was assured I would never see another prison where I could possess it.

While at Tamms, I not only studied all of the available literature on solitary confinement, but also observed how isolation affected both myself and the inmates around me, as well as those who partook in isolating us.

For nearly the first three years, I was denied a television or radio. Thus, I spent every waking hour reading, writing, cleaning, or working out in order to try to maintain my sanity. Nevertheless, by year five, I was experiencing auditory hallucinations (thinking I heard someone calling my name), extreme anxiety, erratic heart palpitations, and severe bouts of depression. All of which are direct consequences of long-term solitary confinement, and which would get increasingly worse as the years wore on.

Luckily, those were the extent of the mental and physical repercussions of being isolated for so long. Well, that is, if you don´t count the atrophy of my eyesight, hearing, social skills, and a number of my relationships with family members and friends. I say luckily, because it could have been much worse.

I went to Tamms bloody, but without any mental illness, so I was able to withstand its effects for longer than those who arrived mentally ill. Had I been bipolar, schizophrenic, or even illiterate, who knows what would have happened? Imagine being trapped behind a steel door for years on end with no television or radio, unable to read or write, with no one to teach you and absolutely nothing to do. (For many, this is a daily reality).

I may have ended up cutting or biting off chunks of my skin like many did while I was there. Or, I may have killed myself or attempted to, like so many others I know. Or, it may have been another inmate watching CO Bundgren carry off my severed penis, instead of the other way around. Who knows? Fortunately for me, none of that happened to me, I survived intact. Many others don´t.

I know that many Americans feel that I got what I deserved. (We Americans have perfected both being sanctimonious and deliberately indifferent to the plight of others). While I can agree that I deserved to be punished for my actions, at a certain point (after my nose was broken in my opinion) the isolation ceased being about punishment or even “institutional security”, and just became a sadistic display of an abuse of power.

The public may not care for my well-being, nor that of the 100,000 Americans who are currently being held in a long-term isolation, but they should. Through their indifference, the public is directly responsible for the torture of their fellow citizens, the deterioration of their mental health, and all of the suicides that occur in isolation units (which account for one-half to two-thirds of all prison suicides).

Moreover, they are responsible for the effects these facilities have on the people who work there, as well as the threat these places pose to society at large.

People who work in isolation units are severely affected by their work brutalizing people on a daily basis. Not only do they have higher rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse as a result, but their average life expectancy rate is 20 years less than the average citizen. They become accustomed to being above the law and able to abuse people at will, and then bring that attitude home to their family and community.

Control units and super-maxes are also extremely expensive, siphoning limited resources away from things that actually protect society, like rehabilitation programs, police and fire departments, and schools (better educated people are also more law-abiding). Then there´s the additional court costs of all the lawsuits isolation units generate.

These places make people so irrationally angry that it is the height of folly to continue operating them, and even more so to then release people straight to the streets from them. No example of this is more demonstrative of that than Evan Ebel. He was a mentally ill man who was sentenced to 8 years in prison in Colorado for carjacking, and ended up spending the entire 8 years in solitary confinement. His mental health steadily deteriorated the entire time.

Prior to release, Ebel filed a grievance asking, “Do you have any obligation to the public to re-acclimate me, the dangerous inmate, to being around other human beings prior to release, and if not, why?” The arbitrary written response he received was that a grievance was not the appropriate place to discuss policy.

Within two months of being released straight to the streets, Ebel would kill a pizza delivery man after having him read a statement condemning solitary confinement; wear the man´s uniform to the home of the Director of the Colorado Department of Corrections whom he would shoot to death; and then get into two shootouts with police before dying of gunshot wounds.

This did not surprise me at all when I read about it. I witnessed countless people grow angrier and angrier, year after year, due to being arbitrarily isolated and brutalized. In the 8 years total that I´ve spent in general population around thousands of different men, I´ve never witnessed anyone become a Muslim extremist. However, in the decade I spent in Tamms around just a few hundred men, I listened as many did so, and then listened to them expound on their hatred of America and the West in rants that would last for days.

Solitary confinement units are incubators of hate. Which is completely understandable. Treat people inhumanely long enough, and not only will they cease to view you as humane, but some may want to return the favor.

The good news is that many people are finally, belatedly, starting to realize all of this. In January of this year alone, both Indiana and California settled lawsuits by promising to severely curb their use of long-term isolation, and President Obama ordered the Bureau of Prisons to do so as well.

Control units and super-max prisons are the most widely abused “tool” in correction departments across the country. While the above-mentioned reforms are welcome, they will barely put a dent in the number of people being abused in solitary confinement around the country, including Guantanamo Bay.

Tamms wasn´t closed quickly enough to save hundreds of us from years of torture and its ill effects. Nor did Colorado reform its use of solitary confinement in time to save the community from being victimized by Evan Ebel. For everyone´s sake, let´s hope more states choose to accelerate reforms instead of fight them.

Joseph Dole K84446
Stateville Corrections Center
P.O. Box 112
Joliet, IL 60434

Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Joseph Dole moved to Illinois when he was 8 years old. In 2000, at the age of 22, Mr. Dole was wrongly convicted of a gang-related double-murder and sentenced to life-in-prison. He continues to fight that conviction. Since incarcerated, Mr. Dole has authored two books, A Costly American Hatred and Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat. In addition, his essays have appeared in numerous anthologies as well as Truthout, The Journal of Ethical Urban Living, and The Columbia Journal, where he tied for first-place in the winter 2017 writing contest. Check out more of his work on his Facebook page or contact him directly at the address above.

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Dark Magic

August 17, 2017, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: Why the Butterflies Must Die

≪ Previous: Abolish Long-Term Solitary Confinement: It's a Threat to the Public

By John Sexton

William Butler Yeats said that “…the world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” I doubt the Irish wordsmith was thinking about someone’s perception from Death Row “growing sharper” or the “magical things” being of the sinister and ominous. But that line has invaded my consciousness today. Using the languages of Death Row, I repeat the line that echoed down my wing from cell to cell, then shouted into the vents along the back walls of the cells so it could be spread to the condemned on other floors “they took Catfish.”

About two o’clock in the afternoon, two officers came to the front of my neighbor’s cell and muttered a few unintelligible words to him. In a few minutes his hands were chained behind his back, his ankles shackled together and he was led away down the hall. They weren’t the normal, unshaven, overweight, uninspired wing guards, clad in dirty gray-brown pseudo-military uniforms that I constantly see, but better postured, brighter-eyed officers in black pants with the shiny shoes, starched white shirts with epaulets, shiny baubles and even polished brass name tags wrapped them in an air of authority.

Usually I only see “white shirts” when some tour group comes to Death Row to see how excessively well Florida treats its morituri. Yesterday they led away my friend. The anchor on the five o’clock news confirmed what had been speculated. “Mark Asay was scheduled to be executed at Florida State Prison on August 22. It will be the first execution in the State since January 2016, when the State’s death penalty, sentencing scheme was ruled unconstitutional. It will be the 20th execution during Rick Scott’s term as governor. And now, Melissia has the locations where you can see Independence Day fireworks tomorrow night…” without a chance of expression or inflection (that however, is the subject for a future essay).

Mark "Catfish" Asay

Getting back to Yeats, the dark magic that has been patiently waiting for my perception to be honed seems to be that real humans are being exterminated just down the hall from me. Since I have been at Florida State Prison, fourteen men have had poison injected into their bodies about 100 feet away from me, but until yesterday my perception of that fact had been lacking. Executions were somewhat surreal. I have made a point to know the names of those killed by the Governor’s Death Squad since I came to Death Row. While I have a general sense of humanity with regard to the names I have learned, they are still mostly just names. More than just a collection of upper and lowercase letters. But I didn’t know them, so the connection was not unlike when I read the names from a war memorial. I know they were human beings with thoughts and feelings, friends and families, but my reaction was more ephemeral than efficacious, often fading soon after moving away from the list.

I had been on Death Row but two weeks and everything was still new, foreign, and, if I admit it, a little frightening when, on January 7, 2014, the State murdered Thomas Knight. The day itself was tenebrous. There is a set of atmospheric conditions that sometimes combine to create a great deal of condensation on the fifty year old concrete of this poorly ventilated, barely heated, building. Coupled with the overcast sky, the dripping walls and puddled floors, the cells here seem cave-like. That morning the overall mood was more subdued than the day before. Inmates spoke in muted tones and there was none of the usual banter between them. At the time, my cell was quite close to the area where the guards spend most of their time and their conversation was easily overheard. The day before Thomas’s execution, I was taken aback when I heard the three wing guards laughing and boasting about how they could save the taxpayers a lot of money by using their hunting rifles to execute the condemned. The next day when I first saw the same three guards, I was overcome by their hypocrisy. They wore their dress uniforms with starched button-down collars (the usual uniform is faded and unshapely golf shirts) with a tie. Two of the guards wore gold tie tacks shaped like handcuffs, the third’s tie was pinned with a tiny M.K. assault rifle. They stood straighter, but for the most part kept their eyes lowered and spoke in hushed tones instead of their normal screaming.

Thomas Knight

They maintained the masquerade until about 6:20 p.m. – the execution was at 6:00 – when the ties were cast off, collars opened and their usual demeanor returned. Twice that day I asked guards for the name of the man they were killing. I was never given his name. But once a guard said, “Just someone who deserved it a long time ago. You know, someone like you.”

The execution pen of Governor Scott was busy that year as he used to end the lives of Carlos Chavez, Paul Howell, Robert Henry, Robert Hendrix, John Henry, Eddie Davis, Chadwick Banks, then in January of 2015, Johnny Kormondy. After a ten-month legal battle over what was the constitutionally acceptable way to poison people, Jerry Correll was murdered in October. Oscar Bolin was the first, and only person, executed who I have met. Our conversation had been very limited, but for me, he was a real person, not just a name or a memorial. Oscar was killed in January 2016. The Death Chamber has remained unused since then.

Carlos Chavez

Paul Howell

Robert Henry

Robert Hendrix

John Henry

Eddie Davis

Chadwick Banks

Johnny Kormondy

Jerry Correll

Oscar Bolin

As for Mark “Catfish” Asay, I know him. We talked a lot. I know some of the things he likes and dislikes, know the music he listens to and sings along with – usually badly, but with enthusiasm. I have held and been impressed by the extremely detailed automobile models he makes from paper using repurposed oatmeal as glue.

No, he has not yet been executed and there is still time for legal wrangling to obtain a stay of execution, but that is unlikely. Mark has written to several judges to express his wishes that no more motions or appeals be filed on his behalf, so it is unlikely that I will see him again. They are going to kill my friend.

Petition to save Mark Asay

Click here to read more about Mark Asay's case

John Sexton #421898

Florida State Prison

P.O. Box 800

Raiford, Florida 32083

↧

Why the Butterflies Must Die

August 24, 2017, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: A Fostered Neglect Part II

≪ Previous: Dark Magic

By Michael Lambrix

June 2017

Whenever the cold walls of my solitary cell begin to close in around me, I try to get my head out of this place by throwing in my ear buds and listening to my little MP3 player. There, on “Playlist One”, I have a host of songs from way back that allow me to mentally escape to a better time. I lay back on my bunk and close my eyes and try to control my breathing. I take in a long, deep breath and hold it, then slowly breathe out through my nose.

It has taken years of practice to perfect my form of meditation. It’s one of the very few “privileges” of being in solitary confinement on Florida’s “death row” – where I’ve been for about 34-years. Had I been sentenced to “life”, and sent to general prison population, I would not be able to exercise the selective metempsychosis I employ to escape reality.

I’m showing my age but am by no means ashamed to embrace it. The odds have long been stacked against me living this long when everyone around me is dying. The music I find refuge in tends to be easy-listening, the soft-rock of the mid- to late-seventies; with a few of my favorite Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi songs (Heaven, Please Forgive Me, and Amen) thrown in for good measure.

Although I tend to put the player on “random play,” the very first song is always Paul McCartney’s Yesterday. In my world, there is no promise of tomorrow and the only good memories are of way back when I had a life.

The words of the song begin to whisper softly in my ears:

“Yesterday, when all my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay,
Oh, I believe in yesterday…”.

I find myself relaxing, slowly breathing in and out. I push myself to imagine my long-ago past; to find something that will make my heart and soul smile, despite the misery my life has become.

Today my means of escaping the thoughts dragging me down has failed me. Sometimes the pervasive nature of reality is unwilling to be shut-out, and determined to beat you down – and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

I thought I was doing pretty good, lying there with my light out (check out my previously posted, award-winning essay, Hello Darkness) and earbuds in; scrolling through the depressingly short-list of memories I cherish the most. As if reaching into an imaginary file, I pulled one out from back when, as a child, I would spend the early-summer days at the family ranch – which is now part of the Port Reyes National Seashore.

Back then, it was called “The Diamond T Ranch” (the “T” stood for my uncle’s last name: Turney). The family would often camp just below a bluff on the banks of the middle lake of three that fed into Tomales Bay: a large estuary separating the island from the Marin County mainland. At night, we would all gather around a campfire, while our father played his well-worn guitar. Many of his favorite songs are now scattered throughout my own playlist. I still smile when Burl Ives is singing “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly” randomly comes up. He would sing along with it, we children would laugh and sing along with him; but it was usually followed by the more tragic melody of Down in the Valley.

That’s the thing about the innocence of a child. For all the times I heard my father sing Down in the Valley, it wasn’t until I found myself on death row that I realized it is about a guy missing his lost love as he awaits his imminent execution at the Birmingham Jail. He’s looking out his solitary window, and down in the valley below, is where he wants to escape to.

As I lay there on my bunk, I channeled my memories towards a particular early-summer morning at the ranch. The sun was barely up, the smell of a new day hanging heavy in the air. My brothers and I were tasked with scavenging the area for bits of dried wood, which – more often than not – was just a convenient excuse for exploring the rolling hills and shrub-choked canyons. Yet we always came back with armfuls of broken branches and whatever else we could find.

There’s something about sitting on an old log, by a campfire in the early-morning hours –the smell of fried potatoes and onions, with a bunch of bacon thrown in for good measure -- it sticks in my memory. Digging into the recesses of those days, my eyes closed and breathing relaxed, I can almost smell the air as if I was there once again. Not only the bacon and potatoes, but the salty aroma of the nearby ocean, as it sweeps by on a gentle breeze.

Breakfast passed, and we each obediently did our own dishes – throwing scraps of bread to the nearest menacing seagulls, as they quickly multiplied, just as we ran out of the scraps to feed them. As we knelt by the shore of the lake washing our plates, they’d dive much faster and closer, demanding more food, until, finally, we would run off, laughing.

Not far off – no more than a hundred-yards from the campsite - the bluff rose sharply to the height of a tall tree. We children would compete to climb up its nearly vertical banks. The first one to reach the top would scream in victory, the rest following until all of us stood at the meadow stretching westward towards the Pacific Ocean. Then, as if by telepathic agreement, once the last one had reached the top, we’d scatter across the meadow in search of whatever we could find. The boys went after the large, locust-type grasshoppers that almost magically sprung up in front of us as we moved through the scrub-grass, only to disappear again just as we thought we’d caught one. Our sisters would collect an assortment of wildflowers. I can remember how I quickly gave up on the grasshoppers and, instead, committed myself to collecting ladybugs and butterflies. They made my younger sisters smile and, even as a child, that always made me smile.

One particular day, armed with an old plastic bread-bag, I set-off to collect as many as I could, since the following day was my younger sister’s birthday. I had nothing to give her, and I wanted to give her as many ladybugs and butterflies as I could find.

For hours and hours, I searched amongst the wildflowers. I gave chase to each and every butterfly – only to have most fly far beyond my reach. But, by the grace of God, I caught a few of the delicate creatures and, oh so carefully, tucked each into that bread-bag. As the morning gave-way to midday, it became too hot, and I grew tired; but, looking into my plastic bag, I knew I had enough.

Returning to camp, I sought a place to hide my stash of heavenly creatures. Somewhere to protect them from any fate that might befall them until the next day. I remember how happy I felt thinking how happy my sister would be when I gave her this gift the next morning.

Wandering up the dirt road that led along the banks of the lake, I made my way to the old dairy barn and ventured inside. It was late-afternoon, the summer sun scorching the ground outside - I entered the dimly lit interior. It was cool, inviting me to take my time in finding the perfect hiding spot. Finally, I decided upon hanging the bag from a lower rafter just inside one of the vacant stalls. I shut the broken wooden door, feeling that would keep them safe until I could retrieve them again the next morning.

Making my way back to camp, I kept my secret to myself. The late afternoon gave way to evening, and, once again, our large family gathered around the campfire. We roasted hotdogs, and indulged in the obligatory ritual of holding marshmallows impaled on a sharpened stick to the flames until each blackened, then burst into flames. Only then did they become worthy of eating. Once the flame was blown out, we’d allow them a moment to cool off, and pop them into our mouths, biting down on the crunchy, charbroiled crust, the molten lava-cream within sticking to the roofs of our mouths. Each of us, in turn, would jump to our feet in an exaggerated dance of fictitious pain while the rest laughed. As this played out, and the fire died down –dad continued to strum his guitar, just a little softer as the night passed. One by one, we would stagger off, exhausted towards our sleeping bags – and sleep like only a child could.

Our parents and the younger children slept in the small travel trailer, but my two older brothers and I made our bunks in an old, canvas, military-style tent, not far away. On that night, as on many others, I pulled my air mattress and sleeping bag just outside the tent, and laid down so that I could watch the stars above in the open night-sky. I was always hoping to see a shooting star – even just one – that I, and I alone, could wish on. On the rare occasion I caught a fleeting glimpse of such a star in the heavens above I would faithfully close my eyes, as tightly as I could, and whisper my wish –not quite so loudly that others might hear.

Beneath the night-sky, in the cool of the night, I laid there for hours, unable to sleep, listening to the sounds: a nearby owl; a coyote on the other side of one of the hills; the frogs; and more in that wondrous symphony. And, in all of that, I fell asleep.

Early the next morning I awoke before the sun came up. Dad was already up, making a fire – no matter how early we got up, he was always up before us. Making an extra effort to be as quiet as I could, I quickly rolled up my sleeping bag and set it down next to the tent. I reached inside to retrieve my jeans and shoes, then, ducking around the backside of the tent, I discarded my pajamas and got dressed for the day. I then moseyed over to the campfire and sat down.

Dad had planned to go fishing and, although I never cared too much for it myself, I liked to tag along; just to share that time with him. It wasn’t about the fish we might catch, or, how every time that little red plastic bobber was pulled under at the bite of a fish, dad would jump like a child, convinced it was going to be the “biggest yet.” From time to time he would hook a decent steelhead trout, one that would put up a hard fight. In those moments my dad was at his best, projecting an infectious joy, coming alive in a way seldom seen.

But that particular morning I didn’t want to go. I was glad to see that my older brothers were up, and willing to join dad. They took off, down the little path along the shore, until they reached the leveled-off spot a few hundred feet away from the camp. I could hear the excitement in their softly spoken promises of catching that big fish, all while they baited their hooks with those slimy little balls of fish eggs that the trout loved so much.

With the sun creeping over the low-lying hills to the east, I ate a bowl of cold cereal, then snuck away. I was anxious to retrieve my little plastic bag. I wanted to be the first to give my sister a present.

Making my way up the dirt road with our cocker spaniel named “Quest” (after one of our favorite cartoon characters “Johnny Quest”) I passed the ancient wood-frame house where the Indian caretaker lived. I waved at him as he peeked out the door. I continued on, until I reached the barn. Once there, I pulled open the heavy plank door, just wide enough to enter the cool darkness. Then I went straight to the stall where I had left my collection of creatures.

Careful not to rip the bag, I reached up and struggled with the string. I untied it, took possession of my treasure, then went back outside, where I could see them in the light.

I stepped into the sun and looked in the bag, and stood in silent shock. All the little butterflies I had spent the previous day collecting were now lying motionless at the bottom of the bag. All of them were dead. But the ladybugs seemed alright…

I didn’t understand how this could be. At first I thought I must have killed them by forgetting to poke holes in the bag, so they could breath. But if I had poked holes, then the little ladybugs would have gotten away, and I couldn’t risk that.

I sat down against the wall of the barn and stared at the bag, trying to figure out what could have happened. Why did the butterflies die, but the ladybugs were just fine? If they had run out of air, then all of them would have died, not just the butterflies...

As I sat there trying to solve this great mystery, the old Indian man snuck up on me. Leaning against the barn with one arm, so he wouldn’t fall, he looked down at me and asked what I had. Without hesitation, I told him the whole story of how I had spent the previous day collecting all the butterflies and ladybugs I could find – since they were my little sister’s favorites -- and I wanted to give them to her for her birthday. I told him how I had put them up where they would be safe, in the barn – only to find all the butterflies dead. By the time I got to the end of my story, I was crying, as only a little boy could.

The old Indian man laughed as if I had told him the funniest story he ever heard. He laughed so hard that he began to cough; a deep cough that came from long years of smoking cheap tobacco. Finally, he settled down and stared at me in silence for the longest time. He coughed again, a little softer, and then he spoke. As he did, he laughed again, and then he said, “Boy, don’t you know that them ladybugs are killers?”

Then, lowering his old, broken body down beside me, he patiently began to explain how the more beautiful God’s creatures are, the more deadly they could be. Those little ladybugs, he said, pretty though they might be, spend their whole life killing other bugs, feeding off them. The butterflies never stood a chance.

Of course, I didn’t believe a word he said. It didn’t make any sense. The butterflies were beautiful, yet they didn’t kill anything. He laughed again, shakinghis head, and speculated that maybe it was because the butterflies had to crawl – as caterpillars – before God gave them wings; while the ladybugs never did. I nodded my head, since it seemed to kind of make sense. I ripped open the plastic bag and shook it out. As the butterflies’ bodies fell to the ground, the little swarm of ladybugs flew away.

I stood and bid the old guy goodbye. I began to walk back to our camp, sad that I now had nothing to give my little sister. I certainly couldn’t give her a bag of killer ladybugs. She, too, was as beautiful as the butterflies – I couldn’t have the ladybugs hurting her as well.

I stayed away from everybody else the rest of that morning, until around lunch, when we were all called to camp. The folding table was set out with a big pink birthday cake, and we all gathered around and sang Happy Birthday. A few presents, wrapped in pretty paper, were passed to my sister. She ripped them open, to get to what was within. And, although I don’t remember what they were, she was happy...

Years passed, and I never gave any more thought to those butterflies – and I never collected another one again. Growing older, I realized what the old Indian man had said was true – that, too often, the most beautiful of God’s creatures are the deadliest. I came to accept this truth, so it came as no surprise when I learned that one of the world’s deadliest animals –which can kill a man – is a little, brightly colored “poison dart frog,” found in the Amazon Basin. Its toxin is so lethal that native tribes use it in blowguns to kill prey.

Somehow, all of this came to me as I lay on my bunk today, trying to get my head out of this place. I’d sought my refuge from reality, pulling up happy memories and, of those early-summer days at the family ranch, and I dug up the tragedy of that particular day. The butterflies that died so long ago… for no reason, save my childish ignorance.

I thought about those butterflies, and wondered if, maybe, I was a butterfly too, waiting for the wings that would allow me to fly free. God knows that I’ve done my share of crawling to get where I am today.

That got me thinking about ladybugs in my own life – they are the ones among whom fate has cast me. Although outwardly attractive, beneath a superficial veneer natural born killers that prey upon the butterflies around us.

With my ear buds still in, my MP3 player now playing another old – and almost forgotten – song that makes me smile (When I Need You by Leo Sayer); I get up from my bunk and take two shortsteps to where my little plastic mirror is taped to the steel-frame of my cell door. I look at myself – not so much the image of who I am, but something deeper within.

Long moments pass, and I continue to look deeper. The Eagles song, Peaceful Easy Feeling, comes on; and the man in the mirror smiles back at me. The smile fades. Decades of solitary confinement and the condemnation of death stare into the emptiness of are my eyes.

I lie back down, and play my favorite song – Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks. I change it from random play, to repeat, and, let it play again. With my eyes closed, the sad words of a man who knows that death is at his door, playing over and over again…

“…We had joy,
We had fun,
We had seasons in the sun…”

My thoughts turn the darkness of familiar depression descending upon me, and I no longer possess the will to fight.

“Goodbye, Papa, please pray for me,
I was the black sheep of the family.
You tried to teach me right from wrong.
Too much wine and too much song,
wonder how I got along”

Again and again that song plays, and I become one with it.

Any time now, they could come and get me. For the past 19 months I’ve been under an active “death warrant.” Not so long ago, I came close to being executed (please read, Execution Day – Involuntary Witness to State Sanctioned Murder). It’s been a month since the Florida Supreme Court formally lifted my stay of execution.

No matter how much I try to escape my own reality, my thoughts now return to it. Each time, I can feel myself being dragged down even further into a depressive abyss – and, each time, it takes on a different form. Yet, no matter the variation; no matter the escape found in a long-lost memory, one that brings an elusive smile to my otherwise empty face; the image fades away as soon as I feel what those butterflies must have felt, those ladybugs swarming down. Then, my smile turns perverse, as I realize a fundamental truth: we’re all butterflies, and only in death can we truly hope to fly free.

…And that’s why butterflies must die.

Michael Lambrix 482053

Florida State Prison

P.O. Box 800

Raiford, FL 32026

↧

A Fostered Neglect Part II

August 31, 2017, 5:46 pm

≫ Next: The Magic Lantern Chapter Three

≪ Previous: Why the Butterflies Must Die

By Jedidiah Murphy

My initial goal when I started this project was to shed some light on Foster Care, in the state of Texas and throughout the country. Having been a part of it myself and having my daughter illegally subjected to 13 years of it as the result of a war fought on her behalf, I started this with two perspectives. One of my own and one of my daughter’s. Because of what she has been through and the fact that she wants to put all of this behind her, the scope of my article has to change somewhat. I love my daughter far beyond anything else and I would never take a freedom she wishes against. So with that in mind, I will write this in general with facts of our case throughout. I will limit the private information on her but still remain on topic about the lawsuit and the fight for her by so many.

Anytime that I refer to my daughter I will use “my daughter”, and anytime I refer to the woman that fought so long on her behalf I will use “Angel.” My focus is on the case and not the people involved. I could write BOOKS about the woman, whom I love and who fought so strong and hard for me and the girl who will forever be her daughter, but that is for another day. People like her don't come along and when they do you have to wonder what you did right in this world to be blessed with someone like this in your corner. I have reflected on my life and cannot understand how I would come to be loved by someone like her. It is a strange thing about men... in matters of war and business we can be giants, wise to a fault. In matters of the heart we tend to be like children. Women are a different matter; they see the child in a man for what it is. She knew me from day one, all the broken pieces she just calmly put back into place as if setting a table. Before I knew what happened she did for me what I thought impossible. One can say that blood is thicker than water, and redemption larger than death, that effort is greater than deed. Within every bad person is a good person crying to get out, a beautiful self beneath the flaws in need of some help. She knew that. I didn't.

Some people act in extraordinary ways to alleviate the suffering of others, with whom they otherwise have no ties. A normal human response is to be disturbed by the very fact of suffering. Our strongest feelings of empathy may be aroused by those closest to us, but we are still moved by the stories of misery from complete strangers. Much of the suffering could be prevented or alleviated but to accomplish this, people would have to risk their own sense of comfort and THAT is not what many will do. It is one thing to witness suffering from a distance and wish to change it. It's another to open yourself up to that same pain by risking YOUR own peace to change it. My wife fell instantly in love with my daughter, as if she was already hers. She was not with her so she simply decided to go get her. It became a war that lasted until she aged out at 18. In the end we won but what was stolen cannot be replaced or repaired so there are no winners really.

After I came to prison my daughter stayed with her biological mother. I would write home and send her what little I could to show her that I loved her. The disconnect is undeniable though and what happens in so many cases is that we inmates find out about events long after the fact. I first learned about my daughter being in the custody of CPS from a member of my adoptive family. All I knew was that she had been there for about 90 days. When I heard that I relived my whole past, strange and sudden. I felt an animal terror growing in me. Even the most commonplace, innocent details bore the imprint of my past, chilling me to the bone. I labored under the weight of that same past, of wounds received or imagined, of irreparable mistakes, of the irredeemability of time. Struggling against it, to hide my face and my fear did no good. All I wanted at that point was to extract her from that painful place, to wipe the slate clean so she‘d be able to begin new things. My thoughts flew round and round, set off on insane tangents, caught in the jerking rhythm of catastrophe. I wasn‘t sure of anything anymore and nothing at all made sense. All I knew was I had to change it and NOW.

Initially I had my full parental rights because I had never harmed my daughter. So I was contacted by her caseworker, a great woman. My goal in this article is not to demonize people. It is not to demonize CPS. I read some comments posted after the first part by a former worker and that is what they thought I was doing. Sometimes the facts are ugly and hearing them laid bare by someone in the way that I do must be hard for someone who prides themselves in working with an agency tasked with child welfare. Good people can be part of a bad system though. Her caseworker kept in constant contact with me and I exchanged who knows how many letters with her. My adoptive family could not take her but had some friends that wanted to foster her and her little sister. The little sister was not mine but my daughter was her sole caretaker since she was born. So the baby thought my daughter was her mother. She had to assume the role of a parent at five years old and worry about the baby choking and try to protect her in a dope haven. The case worker told me that she would carry her on her hip like a 20 year old and had no concept anymore of what it meant to be a child. That breaks my heart to write. They tested her IQ and she was off the charts. I knew she would be because she learned her letters with me during bath time with magnet letters stuck to the side. I would ask her for specific ones and then she would ask me for one in return. I would feign not knowing which one it was and choose the wrong one only to have my baby girl waggle her finger and tell me NOPE. So for them to tell me that she was on a different level than most kids was not at all surprising. IQ scores are not the silver lining people think that they are. Gifted children are often forced apart from their friends because people push them to study and not play like regular children. They are treated different and expectations are laid at their feet without regard for their feelings. Many are often troubled and silently suffocate under the demands of people too caught up to see anything but their own plans for a child who just wants to be a kid. So I was not all that excited about her IQ. I know what it brings to the table and would not want that for any child of mine.

When my adoptive family told me about the friends that wanted both children I was excited because they lived right across the street from them and my daughter loved my adoptive family beyond measure. If they could not take her that at least she would be close by and have the comfort of seeing people she knew and loved. I worked with CPS to have her placed there and as part of that deal I agreed to sign away my parental rights to expedite the adoption process. I cannot convey the pain that went into that decision but I knew I had to give all I had left in order to make sure she would not be subjected to the life that haunted me then to this day. So I was sent the paperwork and signed it. I kept every page of that agreement other than the page with the signature because I could not stand for it to be sent back after reading it. I wanted to destroy it and I did. She was put there only to be mistreated and abused, poisoning any relationship I would ever have with my adoptive family. I don’t blame them for the abuse but they could have taken her themselves and did not and THAT led to the abuse. They gave me the names of the people who would abuse my daughter and that cannot be repaired between us. I love and I miss them but if my little girl is not good enough for them to fight for, then I am better off alone. I've been that way most of my life anyway even when others were around.

My daughter was placed in home after home and because I had no parental rights anymore I could not help her. I wrote to CPS repeatedly and they refused to work with me at all anymore. Her caseworker was no longer a part of her case and in losing her we both lost something we needed. CPS’s stance at that point toward me was that I had given up my rights and had no claim on information regarding my daughter’s welfare. No matter what I wrote, they refused to respond with anything more than that. I used to lie in bed at night and think of the stars. They always made me feel sleepy but now I worried that if I slept, that I would be throwing away what little time I had left to help my baby. There is much more to life than merely waiting for death to happen. For life to have a meaning, there must be a purpose. For most of us purpose revolves around love and marriage and children who will carry on after us. For others it is an ideal, a dream if you like. To me, death is preferable to betrayal of a child. So I set about trying to claw something back for my daughter from the ruin of my plans and dreams that lay smoking at my feet. The pebble starts the landslide and I was intent on kicking at every pebble. I am not strong. I never was. I have failed everyone that ever trusted me. My whole life has been a failure - my death MUST achieve something. That is all that I could think about. Changing SOMETHING for the better instead of leaving it ruined in my hands. I told everyone about her. I tried everything to get help. I was naive thinking that someone would just get her and take care of her. I assumed people would love her the way that I did. As time went by I wondered if I would live long enough to help her. Angel became a hero to the both of us. I had been alone fighting for my daughter for roughly four years. I was writing all over the country trying to find out information and hoping someone would step up. I received a letter from a production company wanting to do a interview, the staff would decide based on an attached questionnaire. I wrote on a separate page that I would do anything that they asked if they would give me some time at the end of the interview to talk to my daughter and then send the tape where I wanted because it may be the only chance I get to talk to my little girl. The staff took my letter to the owner of the studio and told her that they chose me. They sent 100 letters and because I wrote about my baby girl...they wanted me. I did not write for effect. I wrote because I was losing time and getting nowhere and I seriously did not think I would live long enough for her to HEAR me tell her what she means to me and this way and she would be able to SEE me saying it. I wanted that more than anything, for me and for her. This beautiful little girl...the one that I would sing with. The one for whom I learned how to French braid so I could do her hair. The one that brought me her dolls so I could blowdry their hair the way that I did hers because she did not want them to get sick. The one that would stand by my side of the bed at night if she got scared and wait for me to wake up so she could get in bed with me. This girl who gave me butterfly kisses with her eyelashes and had such a tight grip on my heart that I forgot it belonged to me too. I wanted this for her because at least it would be SOMETHING.

The owner contacted me and our story began there. Over the course of a year or so she and I fell in love. After almost nine years we still are. When I told her about my daughter the way I told everyone she started looking into things without my knowing about it. I was telling her about my daughter out of habit. I thought that the more I talked about her the closer I was to changing her future. A year into this she told me that wanted to foster my daughter and I cannot tell you what I felt because it was so big. She went through the certification to become a Therapeutic Foster Parent, which means that she could get the most troubled of all kids. That way the State could not say that she was unqualified. She went through home inspections and a criminal background check. She jumped through every hoop Texas held up in front of her and was approved for contact. She is the owner of her own company. She was raised in a mill house with her grandmother. She was not born of money and worked her whole life to be where she is. She sewed upholstery for years and worked her way into owning her own side business doing window dressings and custom sewing. She got out of that and got into antiques. Got outta that and into television and made TV shows for the East Coast for years. She has been working her whole life to be successful. She owns her own commercial real estate company and has never had a criminal charge in her life. Never had a drop of alcohol or smoked a cigarette. She has been the keynote speaker at national conferences for women a number of times. The very definition of a good person. My daughter bonded with her right away. Angel took her young girl with her. They took her gifts and clothes and things she had not had in years. They had the time of their lives. Over the next few months they made plans for her to go spend the holidays with Angel. During this time I noticed they started copying my incoming mail. They would write "one copy" in pencil on the envelopes and erase them but not good enough so that I could not see it. I contacted my lawyer about it and they had no subpoena to copy my mail. The only time they do that is when you're under investigation. Shortly after that Angel received a call from a CPS employee informing her that they knew that she and I were in an "inappropriate" relationship and they were shutting off all contact with OUR daughter. A friend from Dallas told me the news. I was bustling from the land of hope, shattering in panic, and doing my best to rein in my deepest fears and screams. Closed my eyes...no longer wanting to see or hear anything. My life has amounted to a life of shards: Some shiny, others clouded but each and every one SHATTERED.

I cried over the loss of hope. Angel had told them that she came to see me. That was never a secret. They never asked about our relationship. She was given access to our daughter because she asked to speak in open court during a hearing. She told the judge that she would take her and all the things that came with it. That she would love her forever and just wanted to get the chance. The states position was that she was unadoptable. Her own lawyer told the court that she should be institutionalized. Our legal team was shocked. This judge sided with Angel because she wanted so much for this girl to come live with her. So CPS started their campaign to find a flaw they could cite. I became that flaw. They cancelled all contact and proceedings saying that she lied about our relationship. That was in itself a lie. Had we wanted to hide it we could have. Angel was contacted and she in turn got a legal team to fight for our girl. We hired one of the most noted family law firms in the state. When they would show up in these little East Texas courtrooms, the state would state their case and before our legal team could say a word, the judges would ASK CPS what they wanted done and do it. We would get no say and had no right at all to a fair hearing. CPS works with a group of judges and they become allies. They help finance their election and they do their bidding. These are not hollow accusations. These are hard facts. We had some of the best lawyers in the business and they could not believe what they were seeing. It was corrupt and the loser was a young girl who had done nothing at all aside from being caught in a war over her life. We hired several firms to work with us and eventually took the case to Children's Rights Inc. in NYC.

Once they came on board and saw all the abuses of power and how we were being shut out of a legal proceeding they set about investigating the situation. A "friend of a friend" was appointed to see our daughter and have regular contact because we filed a lawsuit against the state, we cited ten cases where the state had allowed kids to languish in State custody when they could have been someplace else or allowed them to be harmed repeatedly without doing anything at all to stop it. On January 16, 2013...a reporter for the AP named Carson Denton wrote an article about the suit and Angel herself. The following is from the article:

Sitting in the Children's Rights offices in NYC, Marcia Robinson Lowry said, "The only redress these children have is unfortunately when our organization goes to court and says judge, look what‘s happening to these children. It’s unconscionable and you know what else? It's also unconstitutional.

A witness (Angel) in the pending lawsuit spoke with Children's Right's earlier today She says, "Someone has to take a stand for these children. Something has to be done for “our' children. Someone has to give "our" children a name, a face, a voice and that someone is me. I just need a lot more people to come forward and help me fight for our children. Something has to be done. It has to stop. How can we expect "our" children to grow up under these conditions? If they survive, how can we expect them to go out into the world and make a life for themselves when all they know is violence and more violence, pain and more pain, fear and more fear? The very people that the State of Texas has put in charge to protect "our" children are the very ones that caused some of the the most harm. Something has to be done and I will fight this fight for as long as it takes. I don't care who knows who I am. I'm not going to cower down to anyone: Least of all to people who abuse children while working under the roof of Texas CPS. They know who they are. Let them be charged and held accountable for their actions. Each and every one of them. The state claims to protect these children. Show it to me. For every child the state can show me they protected. I'll show you 99 children, they haven’t protected. Children they have allowed to be abused, to be overmedicated, to be neglected, to be institutionalized without cause. Show me the caseworkers, the attorney ad litems, the foster parents, the residential treatment facilities and their employees that have caused harm to these children. All kinds of harm. Beatings, rapes, mental abuse; it goes on and on. How in Gods name will a child ever trust again when the very people who were put in their lives to protect them have violated them over and over again? Any and all forms of abuse will be brought to light. Shine the light on them and watch them (the abusers) scramble like they have been doing from the day this lawsuit was filed. It‘s that old philosophy, you can run but you can't hide. I pray this lawsuit shows each and every one of them for what they are and I hope and pray this lawsuit saves other children from living the hell the plaintiffs of this lawsuit have lived.

Child abuse has to stop. The people associated with Texas CPS have to be held accountable. Why are they above the law? How can you be an innocent child's attorney ad litem for years and never meet the child, never even speak to the child? How can you foster a child, give her your word you'll adopt her and then adopt her sister and throw her away? One might ask how those people sleep at night. I don't have the answers but I do know their sleep has been interrupted from the moment this lawsuit was filed. That alone should tell you something. God bless the plaintiffs of this case as well as the other thousands of unprotected children in care of Texas CPS.

I've spoken with Van Zandt Co, CPS employees, attorneys, foster parents, etc. over the past 5 years and all to no avail. We cannot wait any longer for a system that has already failed so many people. It's just not practical. These children are being hurt now, so we need to go and help them now. I encourage anyone who reads this to take a stand. Be it in Texas or the state you live in, take one step towards helping an abused child. If everyone will just take one step, just imagine the possibilities.

When asked by Children's Rights Inc. if she‘s suffered any repercussions since the lawsuit was filed the witness spoke. "Yes but it wont stop me. I've even had an attorney ad litem for a child (our daughter), that I have fought to protect send me a threatening letter. The attorney ad litem herself called it a warning letter. She threatened me with incarceration if I ever contacted her client again. Her CLIENT!! That would be funny if it weren‘t so sad. She had never met the child. She had never spoken to the child by phone or via letter. The child had no idea who she was. This child did not know that she had a lawyer. The attorney ad litem contacted the child after the lawsuit was filed. How convenient? Maybe, maybe not. It would make one ask; “why now?"

When asked by Children's Rights if she‘s referring to any of the children named in the lawsuit, she responded, "Yes I am. A.M. (our daughter) has suffered at the hands of CPS since the day they picked her up along with her two siblings. They lied to her repeatedly about letting the children remain together. They lied to her and told her she would be adopted. They overmedicated her for years. They institutionalized her in an attempt to cover up abuses she suffered they did nothing at all about. They have placed her in more than 14 homes/facilities. Their reasoning when brought before a judge was and I quote, "She's aggressive, uncontrollable, vicious". "When I stood in a Texas courtroom and heard what A.M.'s ad litem said to the judge, I pleaded with the judge to let me speak. I was not party to the case but the judge out of the kindness in her heart allowed me to speak. I basically told her that I would take A.M. along with all the issues CPS claimed she had. I offered to take her into my home, foster her for the 6 month period required by Texas Law before adoption placement can take place and then adopt her. No strings attached. I let the judge know I would take care of all A.M's needs. I am a licensed Therapeutic Foster Parent. I meet all the criteria and then some. Where is A.M and why has she not been adopted? Why? That is the question that has to be answered for A.M. as well as for the other 10 plaintiffs in this lawsuit.

With tears flowing, she softly whispered, "I will never give up. I will bring A.M. home where she belongs and I will continue to fight for the wellbeing of children.

Every child deserves a loving home.

Stephen Dixon, Attorney for Children's Rights Inc after hearing her final statement responded, "Her statement comes as no shock to me. She‘s the one person I've met in all my years at this that means every word she speaks. If we had a mold of the perfect mother, it would be her. No doubt, it would be her. When she said, "Every child deserves a loving home" she spoke straight from the heart. She's an "Angel" in a world full of demons but as she's told me many, many times’, "the good will outweigh the bad every time.” ‘I believe".

When Marcia Robinson Lowry, founder of New York Children's Rights Organization disconnected the phone, she turned to all in the room and said, "I wish each of you had the opportunity to meet the woman on the phone. She walks soft, speaks soft but she fights with the strength of a gladiator. She never gives up. She never backs down. Where she gets her strength from, I'll never know”. Stephen Dixon summed it up best. "She believes. She once told me, you only need to have the faith as small as a mustard seed and that faith will move mountains.

I dare anyone reading this to search your heart for that tiny mustard seed of faith. Yes, she believes.

I included this article about Angel because it shows that it is not just my love for her that causes me to laud what a great woman she truly is. People who meet her ONCE see that. She is someone that will pull out all stops and put so much of herself on the line for a complete stranger, NOT so that people will talk about her or think highly of her, because hardly anyone knows anything she has ever done. She just cannot allow a system to roll over so many lives without someone paying for it.

Having spent years myself trying to expose the State mechanisms of fear, violence and neglect, the last thing I want to see is another victim of those elements. We need accountability - even though, in confronting such painful aspects of human experience, we are necessarily pushed beyond our comfort zone. It does not take the effort of the powerful to bring change to something as big as CPS. It takes diligence and dedication and the willingness to stand and face a machine. The ultimate bully in charge of children in need of understanding and comfort. The very formula for failure and abuse masked as a savior and saint.

I remember the parting from my parents/grandparents and the long, cold journey that followed it, a devastating effect on a boy of five. The memories are jagged, so for years I pushed them away. I was never at ease among boys my own age and I could not adapt to the changes around me within my new placements. It became a permanent DISplacement. It's as if I became aquatic...unable to surface to the world above again. I could see it but I could never be part of it again. Once I loved life and the sun was a golden joy. But joy is often short lived. I looked inside myself and asked: Why? Why is hate so much stronger than love? Why does strength and violence count for more than morality and kindness? There are no real answers to these questions. So for the sake of sanity I had to change my perceptions. Once I was a lamb, playing in a green field. Then the wolves came. Once you have seen that...it is hard to want to be a lamb. Children adapt and learn to lash out before something gets too close. It is not that they are violent by nature...but by necessity and as a result of treatment or the lack of it provided by the people tasked with their care. And what happens when we react on autopilot? Punishment. A vicious cycle if there ever was one.

Often claims that the most effective measures are in place, it was simply a matter of giving them the time to take effect. Perfectly stated from the cool comforts of their rank and office, yet difficult and tragic for those children, who according to US District Judge Janis Graham Jack, “languish in a system where rape, abuse, psychotropic medication and instability are the norm."

For two to three decades they’ve tried to make a bad design successful, while ignoring the damage done to the children who were abused and neglected, then expect these kids to come out of it all as productive adults, which makes me question the sanity of anyone claiming the system is in any way salvageable. CPS quotes statistics to evidence improvement. What is an acceptable statistic for children allowed to be raped, abused and over medicated? How can an organization claiming to be righteous allow these crimes? These efforts are as useless as their reforms, since they serve only to produce more victims and more excuses. CPS, with the present methods, is a breeding ground for mental illness. When these children go back to civilian life, oftentimes you'll find yourself with a considerable problem on your hands. On society's hands.

We filed suit because these crimes will not change on their own. My daughter was shipped from place to place and denied a home life with a loving family because I am on Death Row. Their intent is to punish me until I am dead but they punished her. They said my relationship was "inappropriate" with Angel. Someone vetted and flawless became unworthy of a child they deemed "unadoptable". They tried repeatedly to have the suit dismissed or denied class certification because they knew if it made it to court they would have no defense against us. They lost time and again so they tried to get extension after extension until the Judge forced their hand. Our attorneys were flying in from all over but they could not make it to Corpus Christi. That was what the Judge finally asked them about. Angel hoped for a resolution that would bring our daughter home but years had passed since we’d initially filed the lawsuit and nothing had changed for us. No contact. This time, the state said, because we were party to a lawsuit. THESE are the advocates for child welfare. The people we pay to protect children fought to HOLD a girl in a violent detached life, spending untold hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to deny her a place to live available the entire time. Out of spite. They faced a Judge about what they have allowed to happen, not just to our daughter but thousands of children they are in charge of. My Angel set a pebble in motion that started a landslide under their feet AND upon their heads.

People who survive this form of childhood try their best to convince themselves that everything will be fine. Sadly I did not manage to convince myself. In the street I felt as if I were walking on glass that was ready at any instant to shatter beneath my feet. Living required a sustained effort and attention to things, which exhausted me. I kept seeing myself this way... an external gaze, this critical camera. How could I utter an authentic word, make an authentic gesture? Everything I did became a show of myself, just a reflection and a poor one, that did not impress me or fool me at all. No one could pull me out of myself or make me forget myself just a little. It seemed to me the inevitable end of an old story that pursued me relentlessly: the story of my lack of real family bonds, destroying any trace of love for life. I had never felt so alone. In the midst of those I was shipped around to, I felt powerless and ashamed; their world remained closed to people like me, and they knew how to get that point across . So I abandoned hope and myself. I wanted to be left alone but that was impossible. I was scraping my soul on the world as on broken glass: I kept deliberately swallowing razors. then being surprised when they cut them out my guts. This is not about ME or my daughter...this is about a system that creates thousands of people like us every year. These are LIVES...and our aim was to give them a voice again. You know why it's so common for kids who go through a system like this to shy away from a camera? Because their self image is so tainted and stained, they don't want you to take a picture of it. Because the photographic process lies about how ugly they feel themselves to be. So ugly that they shouldn't produce a pretty picture ever. Orphans define their lives in two parts; before and after the death of normal when their whole world changed forever.

Children who spend years languishing within the system only to age out or be adopted late tend to react in similar ways. Most run away from their new home only to change their minds, sabotage relationships just when they seem to be flourishing, embark on journeys of discovery that turn out to lead nowhere. They often seem to be fleeing something but rarely know what that something is. They throw away keepsakes, fail to stay in touch and leave their loved ones worried without realizing it. People who don't understand tend to judge, referencing their own prejudice. That idea of the "unadoptable" or "bad seed" pervades our culture like any other acceptable bigotry. The idea that a person might be born bad, a lost cause, or better off dead - was something Angel and I have railed against for all sorts of reasons.

We had naively thought that major decisions were made on the basis of correctness and rationality. But many other factors were involved, conflicts of bureaucratic precedence, special interest and not surprisingly personal ambition. The so-called solution seemed distorted, even warped. Raising the budget at CPS without any real sense of what to do with the money is not a solution to the problem...its allocation becomes moot and ridiculous. There might have been a plan, but it didn't happen and in the end, the only thing that counts is what IS, and not what could have been.

When I was young I had a precise idea about the world. About what should be and what actually was. About my own place in it. But I had forgotten, or rather l did not yet know the force of time, or the weight of adult responsibilities put on the shoulders of a child and how such fatigue has no end. I was tempted to talk more openly about this: but I was afraid of shocking people, of offending them. So what blocked the words in my throat when, in a fit of fatigue and sadness, they began to rise up? FEAR...not from the reaction but by simply laying myself bare. Sometimes it's better to prefer fear and emptiness than to show people your weakness. I met someone here who was adopted tell me that he did the exact same things that I did. He was surprised. I have talked to several adopted people and I noticed that MOST of us believed and felt similarly. So I lay myself bare today, the way I never would have earlier in life, for those kids who think as I did and silently suffer wishing someone would SEE and HEAR them cry for help without saying much of anything.

Texas CPS is much like TDC, a closed system that polices itself. Should a child suffer injury, they are handled by an employee or a contract employee for 99% of the time. Ones treated elsewhere we hear about from time to time and reports are made yet the national media or state media seldom ever covers it the story. A year or so ago the public and the Govt. was up in arms about MUMPS at Disneyland. How many of those infected died? None. You could not watch the news without hearing something about the outbreak of the mumps virus and the need for vaccination. While this was being reported around the clock how many children were killed from neglect or abused by the people we pay to protect them? Where was the reporting on that?

The powers that be want everyone to stay calm. Whatever happens, stay quiet, impassive, like windows of a burnt out church, like the little old man on the park benches with their canes and their memories, or the faces of these drowned children just below the surface of society, never to be saved. Imagine your child is trapped in a burning house and someone tells you to "stay calm." If your child were being abused, raped, and neglected by people who repeatedly say they are making changes, yet after 20+ years the culture remains the same...would you stay calm? Understand this...the agony of the devoured is ALWAYS far greater than the pleasure of the devourer. Of course they tell you to stay calm. The real danger here is the inaction of men and women who believe the rhetoric. I had a childhood and then came my war. I was still the same kid until CPS created new problems for me. Eventually those horrors transformed me. When I cried out at night, no one answered. One thing leads to another and here I am. If this would not have happened to me as a child I would not have made the same mistakes. I too wanted to live a good and useful life, to be a man among men. But my hopes and dreams were smashed, betrayed, and this evil entered my life because I was trusted to the services of CPS. None of it can be made whole again, ever. I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the rotational cohesion of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension. But after all the words, it stays the same. They sugarcoat unpleasant truths for self-interest and self-preservation. Inattention creates indifference, or disrespect. Try explaining the incomprehensible to the indifferent.

During the disposition of the lawsuit, CPS went to plan B, which amounted to bluster and warnings. Their position was that should this lawsuit go forward and they lose, that the disruption will cause more children to be displaced and injured. They shift the blame from themselves to the Judge, using experts bought and paid. Some of their "experts" are little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles don't work. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they don't understand, and worshipping at the shrines of Freud and Klein and old astrologers, doing their very best to sound like practitioners of science. It is a fact that they put children with normal everyday issues on medication. Psychiatrists, hired to prescribe meds for children so the state can control them. Do you know how many medical trials there are for psychotropic medications on children under the age of 18? NONE. Yet they experiment with children that belong to someone else... They would not place their own children on those medications but their clients are unwanted or neglected. Einstein said: "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them". How can a machine correct itself without a complete rebuilding? The State spent so much of their time fighting to have this case tossed that they were unprepared for the trial itself. Our lawyers destroyed theirs and the trial was a walk in the park. Their tactics are to have cases thrown out on procedural defaults, long before they reach the courtroom. Because they have unlimited budgets and lawyers they usually win. This time their opponents had an unlimited budget and lawyers. Their mistake was in underestimating Angel and me. Had they given us our daughter, they could have saved the money it cost them to fight us and the MANY MANY millions these reforms will cost an agency complaining their budget, is too tight. One child. People who have studied t the lawsuit do not know why it was filed. They don't know about Angel and myself. They don't know our daughter and what was done to punish her for the sins of her father. How two people put it all on the line to bring to light what was being done to her and so many others.

Our daughter was hurt by the state. Our baby girl. I felt helpless. Her situation dragged at me and drew me into a tight and final darkness. No air, no light, no breath, no whisper of waking spirit, a grave inside a grave. Fear burned my brain like a white hot blade. I could see nothing but the twisting flames that destroyed my dreams for her. She is still beautiful and we love her to no end. But the change was deeper than people can easily see in the expression of her eyes, in her gestures, the way she moves. Where before she was young and burning, a wild bird beating her wings against the wires of her cage, now she broods, wings clipped, graven, a creature of the ground. Still the same person, but suppressed and hidden so as not expose herself to injury anymore. My life repeated though her, my nightmare visited upon our baby.

At times I question my life, my part as it were, the value, if any, I left in my wake. Some will say I did as well as I could, others that I wasted my chances. Everyone has a version, a kind of dreaming distortion of the truth. I recall a series of feelings and pictures, a kind of bright and silent dream through which I moved like a spirit, weightless and bodiless, borne up by the air. The pictures, though vivid, are diminished into distance, a world that no longer included me. And then the nightmare sense of grief that comes when I wake again to feel the loss I’ve forgotten in my sleep. One misfortune or misstep seems to breed another and so it was for me. There was a time of darkness - the first I had suffered, when I was half broken with weariness, the weight of losses coming one after the other. The world had turned sour, and my luck was dead. I was a man alone in an empty cell, contented enough, but listening to sounds beyond the shut door. Waiting with half a hope for someone to help, for God, though knowing in my heart of hearts that he would not. BUT HE DID.

My daughter and I survived all of this because of one woman. The same one that the lawyers at Children's Rights Inc. spoke of. The first time I saw her, I felt the shock of it right through my body. My mind was working, where it had no right to be working at all. My whole body tightened and thrilled at the sight of her. She sat before me and my voice strangled in my throat. Her hair was raven black, eyes green like precious flowers before they open. HI felt my blood jerk. Between myself and Angel is a bond stronger than any, the best matched pair. We are the same person. We are part of each other as are night and daylight, dark and dawn, sun and shadow. When we are together we lay at the edge of life where opposites make new beings, not of the flesh, but of the spirit. She was waiting for me. I saw her through the window, a small solitary figure, yet so strong and beautiful. I was unable to decipher the emotion this beautiful, patient woman stirred in me. More than love and gratitude, more than the very real need to cry. It seemed she had always been there, waiting for me to realize who she was and find her. I can never fully explain the complexity of my passion. HERE was home. HERE was my missing piece. Throughout it all she fought for a girl to whom she wanted to give a beautiful life to more than anything. She never stopped fighting, never gave in to the threats and the warnings, and risked an incredible sum for a child the state said was not worth anything. She proved that even the mighty CPS can be beaten when the truth is your weapon and love your warrior.

All of these things happened because, regardless of my being in prison and restricted as I am, I did not stop trying. Angel stood with me, setting all of this in motion, and we supported one another through wins and losses. My partner. My best friend. My rock. My wife. We're a family. We may not be what people think a family is, but there has never been a greater love. Why should man expect his prayers for mercy to be heard by what's above him when he shows no mercy for what is below? We should do more for children in these situations. It does not take millions. It takes opening yourself to someone not born of you. Life is short. Anyone can make a difference if they provide comfort to a child with none at all. Thank you for reading this, giving me a chance to explain the situation for so many lost and afraid. I am fortunate to be able to explain it but YOU are the ones capable of changing it. Never let good enough be good enough when it comes to a child's life. Best wishes.

If you're reading this Babygirl, we love you. Always have...always will.

Update: There are far more cracks in the Foster Care System and CPS than many people think. My life, and that of my daughter, are in no way unique; she and I both went through the same system and both were harmed in many of the same ways. For me to have dealt with my challenge in the early-80’s, and then my daughter to have dealt with the SAME situation in the early-2000’s, is a travesty. Given the funding they have, and the responsibility they are tasked with… there is no choice but to from calling it what it truly is: A FAILURE.

Our story highlighted the way they FIGHT to hold children for no rational reason at all; and how, by doing that, they forced us to file a lawsuit that will cost this State hundreds of millions of dollars by the time they implement all of the changes ordered by the judge – having LOST to us. Yet, though we beat the State of Texas, there are no winners in the end. Those kids cannot unlive the sorrow, nor erase the memories that they should never have. They harmed our daughter. They harm many of the kids they are supposed to protect. Those are simple facts. My goal in this was not to demonize anyone. If, after reading the facts and researching these things yourself, you come to another conclusion, then so be it. I won’t argue with anyone. I cannot speak for everyone. Our daughter went into the system when she was five-years old and aged-out on her birthday thirteen-years later. Even though we battled for her and, in the end, won, they won the war of attrition by stalling things until she aged out. These people, who we as a society trust our children to, did everything they could to ensure she aged out of the system, rather than go to the people who loved her all along. Judge Janis Graham Jack, from Corpus Christi, ruled in our favor. She even went beyond that and assigned “Special Masters” to oversee the changes she mandated to Texas CPS as a result of the facts of this case. (See https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-legislature/2016/11/29/texas-spent-7-million-fighting-foster-care-suit-meters-running).

According to TSN News, the State of Texas has spent over seven million dollars on this matter thus far; and they were debating filing another appeal to the 5th Circuit Court, which would have cost even more. Seven million tax dollars WASTED because they would not let a child go to a loving home. That is the fact that caused this whole situation: One girl. Our daughter.

Since she was released, there have been some ups and downs, and they can be expected to last for some time. I had many of the same ones, for many years. Ultimately, I ended up here; but we will do everything to ensure that is not the case with her. Where I was lost and without people, she will always have us. She and I have a difficult road to face with one another, and I cannot say what will or will not happen regarding that. We did not do what we did so that she would respect us, or worship us. We did it because we love her. No stipulations at all. There are trust issues, and I don’t think anyone could ever really understand how deep some of those scars are. It takes TIME. Maybe I will see things mended, or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. What I know is this: Love is the rarest of gifts; one that is seldom found even ONCE in a lifetime. Most relationships start off as physical attraction or commonality of interests, but TRUE love goes far deeper than that. It is an unexplainable connection of the heart, one that endures triumph and tragedy, pain and suffering, obstacles and loss. It is something that is either present or missing. There is no “almost,” no “in between,” no “most of the time.” It is the unexplainable reason some marriages, entered into after a one-week courtship, can last a lifetime. Its absence is why “perfect” marriages can fall apart. It cannot be quantified or explained by science, religion, or philosophy. It cannot be advised on by friends or marriage counsellors who cannot take their own advice. There are no rules, no “how-to” books, no guaranteed methods of success. It is not defined by vows, rings, promises, or tomorrows. It simply is a miracle. One that too few are blessed to experience. And I know, as I am one of those who were blessed. So is our daughter. I think about her all the time and I will forever. I am not alone in that. I am one member of this family, and we all feel the same way. All we can do as parents is love, and do our best to protect our children. And if we fail, we never stop trying to make that failure right. I hope someday it will be.

This link provides a good summary of the class action, the legal proceedings to-date, and the recommendations of the appointed Special Masters.

Jedidiah Murphy 999392
Polunsky Unit
3872 FM 350 South
Livingston, TX 77351

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The Magic Lantern Chapter Three

September 7, 2017, 2:43 pm

≫ Next: The Arena

≪ Previous: A Fostered Neglect Part II

By Anthony Engles

To read Chapter Two, click here

Kimba

Ground shaking heavy-metal, the smell of gasoline fumes and spilled beer mixed with the coppery taste of blood. Then, the nauseating stimuli swirled together in a noxious cloud and disseminated into the retreating dreamscape of Kimba's mind.

He lay still with his eyes closed. His consciousness pushed the visual and auditory images back into the dismal recesses until there was nothing but a shadow of melancholia left on his spirit. He woke with this shadow each morning and carried it with him throughout the day until he returned to his subconscious purgatory each night. Kimba opened his eyes and blinked once. He stepped directly from a nightmare into a dream, this new surreal reality that was his. Even after five full months, he still struggled with the transition back into the land of the wakeful living after so many years of waking in the land of the walking dead. Before he rose each day, Kimba took stock of what was real and what was not, who he was and who he would never be. He carefully catalogued and compartmentalized the simple components of which his belief structure was constructed. This prevented moments of hesitation or confusion as he moved tentatively through each day that bombarded him with choices and information. His new reality was a world both hostile and foreign, a brightly colored place where he felt in constant danger of being swept away by a colossal wave of ambiguity.

He sat up in bed - a full-sized mattress and box spring that lay directly on the floor of a spacious living room. He swung his feet out and took a moment to observe the strange sensation of carpeting on the soles of his bare feet. Wearing only a pair of black sweat-pants cut off below the knees, he slowly stood, made the bed, and went to the enormous bank of windows that overlooked the valley to the south. His 38 year-old joints popped and creaked like those of a boxer past his prime; they seemed to take a moment to warm up to the idea of forward locomotion.

Kimba stood in the remodeled loft of the oldest building in Vermilion, a now defunct theater called the Magic Lantern. A heavy early-morning fog obscured the valley and winding Snake River - his view limited to the empty two-acre gravel parking lot below. He looked out the wall of windows - each piece of glass a square foot in size, set in a steel frame 8 feet tall and half the width of a full sized movie screen. The window had been installed over a hundred years ago to allow natural light into the attic - a space with roughly the same area as the stage below. In those days, according to his father, the attic had been used to store props and costumes for the numerous set changes always involved in the production of operas or plays. The attic had been remodeled completely and turned into living quarters before Kimba's father went to Vietnam in 1967. Kimba had just turned 2.

Kimba went to the bathroom and used the toilet. He still marveled at the comforts of a normal bathroom - a plastic seat that lifted or the ability to adjust the temperature of the sink or shower water with two separate knobs. While he washed his hands, Kimba wondered how long it would take for the novelty to wear off and for him to feel as though he had at last rejoined western civilization.

Kimba returned to the living room and went to the only other piece of furniture besides the bed - a forty year-old Magnavox stereo, one of the last models to be made out of real wood. Some of the fifty or so albums stacked next to it had sat and gathered dust for over twenty years. Others that had belonged to his long-dead mother had been abandoned for much longer. He thumbed through the stack-past the Scorpions and Judas Priest - and on a whim, selected Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, one of his mother's favorites. For five months now, Kimba had been trying to flush himself out of a long, deep groove that separated him from the rest of the world. He set the stylus on the vinyl and the sound of classical horns and strings filled the loft. Kimba frowned and let the music wash over him.

Kimba went to the small kitchenette and drank two 16 ounce glasses of water. Then, standing barefoot on the linoleum, he swept his mid-back-length black hair into a ponytail and got on the floor. He extended his body face down with hands apart at shoulder width. With his back straight, he looked forward, inhaled through his nose then lowered his chest to within an inch of the floor. He exhaled through his mouth and pushed himself back up into the starting position to complete one push-up. He performed 29 more repetitions exactly like the first, slowly and methodically, always mindful of his form. Finished, he got up and walked the circumference of the living room - an activity that took 65 seconds, having timed it several times with his watch. Back at his starting point - the floor of the kitchenette - he did 30 more push-ups like the first set. By the time Kimba had taken nine trips around the living room, he had done 300 push-ups in about the time it takes to make a pot of coffee - the same time it took to do 300 push-ups several mornings of the week for the past two decades.

Kimba opened the refrigerator. An astonishing assortment of choices awaited him - all micro-choices to be made that stemmed from a master selection that he had created at the grocery store two days before. When he looked in the fridge he saw himself at the store, saw people staring open-mouthed at him as though his spaceship had just landed in the Safeway parking lot. Women instinctively held their children closer to them when he walked by, and men regarded him with both apprehension and outright contempt.

Once, several weeks ago, a man in his early twenties wearing a cheap suit bumped into him in the canned goods aisle. The man and a similarly dressed colleague had been walking without watching where they were going. The two were prosecutors or frugal defense attorneys that had just come from the courthouse and were holding an animated discussion about a case - a case too important to warrant more than a sideways glance of annoyance in Kimba's direction.

Kimba was not a violent man, but for a time, he had been conditioned to react violently to those who challenged his honor or personal space. The latter had clearly been violated, but Kimba had learned to temper his explosive out-of-body experiences and was able to confront adversity with the resolute calm of a Japanese tea gardener. The expression on the lawyer's face told Kimba

that he had been the one standing in the wrong place, a spot in front of the Del Monte pineapple chunks. Instead of grabbing one of the cans and crushing the man's skull with it, Kimba implemented a shade-tree variety Zen technique he had formulated himself; he fastened himself to the moment - the abstract unit of time and reality that existed in his own psyche and centered himself there. His higher brain remained occupied while his knuckle-dragging lower brain slumbered. He remained suspended there until the external event that took place in real time passed, and the rude attorney was gone. Kimba was highly vulnerable during these episodes, but could find no other means to move about in this world where he was nothing more than an exotic animal that stood outside the realm of common courtesy.

For Kimba, public places were littered with social landmines. Many of the subtleties involved in the human interaction that he carefully studied left him scratching his head. In his world, name-calling was serious business. Each word had a specific connotation designed to illicit an exact response - a form of tribal test to establish pecking orders and to keep the pool of alpha-males from being tainted by weaker types. To watch a young woman call her boyfriend a bitch loudly in the laundromat had initially caused Kimba to wince while he waited for lightning to strike, only to feel like a member of another species when the boyfriend grabbed her by the waist and began to tickle her while she shrieked with laughter.

This broad expanse of acceptable ways to express thoughts and opinions were not completely foreign to Kimba; he had been one of these people once, long ago. He would learn how to fold harsh words into lighthearted banter again and to understand the complex nuances involved in flirting with the girl at the checkout counter. He would even learn how to smile when a disrespectful punk bumped into him without a word of apology - a punk who in Kimba's world would be sodomized both orally and anally his first day there, then perhaps forced to wear a dress and make-up made out of M&Ms for the rest of his miserable stay.

Kimba settled on a couple of good slugs off a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. He savored the mildly tart liquid as it flowed over his taste buds, noting how different parts of his tongue detected the sweet and sour elements separately. He put the bottle back then returned to the wide-open space of the loft. He consulted the watch that lay on an old wooden produce box turned upside down that served as an expedient nightstand. Also on the box sat a half-burned candle that he read with at night, a well-worn copy of Shantaram, and an ancient American Indian bracelet made of badly tarnished silver and studded with turquoise. Once he noted the time, Kimba lay on the carpet and performed ten sets of 100 crunches with a 60 second break in between each set.

Kimba harbored no resentment towards the citizens of Vermilion that treated him with open antipathy; only he knew who he was now, the good he was capable of, and his ability to become a well balanced, functioning member of this town. It was also only he who knew the open, festering wound in his soul that never healed and oozed into his restful sleep, poisoning his dreams almost every night. That punishment eclipsed any that could ever be imposed by a Superior Court Judge or an over-zealous Department of Corrections employee. The people of Vermilion remembered only that he had taken the lives of innocent victims - including those of women and children - leaving pieces of their dismembered corpses lying around like the unwanted parts of the animal tossed onto the floor of the butcher shop.

It had taken the furtive glances and wide open-stares of these people directed at him for Kimba to finally understand the isolation his father had felt for the remainder of his life after returning home from Vietnam. Kimba recalled those times when his father would drink himself into a sloppy stupor while he ran the projectors - sometimes too drunk to change the reels. At other times he would lapse into somber moods for days at a time, perhaps beating Kimba or his mother senseless, or with luck, completely ignoring them both. His mother would say that these periods of depression were caused by chemicals used in Vietnam to kill vegetation that had left his father sterile - a frank admission to a ten-year old boy, but perhaps the only explanation simple enough for a boy that age bewildered by his father to understand. Still, Agent Orange had not caused the social disease that was more threatening to the locals than the hopeless drunk who was running the old theater into the ground - they had come to look at him as though he were a predator that mingled among them, like grazing zebras that kept a wary eye on a well-fed lion snoozing in the shade nearby.

Once Kimba had finished with his workout, he put on some expensive but well broken-in running shoes, a T-shirt and a gray pull-over sweatshirt. He placed his keys, cash and cell-phone into a fanny-pack and carried it in his hand. He had tried to wear it in the traditional way, but it felt cumbersome and foreign to him, like a useless appendage. He barely knew how to use the phone and it seldom rang, but Kimba knew this was an integral part of being a modern-day citizen in the new millennium.

Kimba left the loft from a heavy steel fire door that had been recently installed for security. He trotted down a flight of enclosed steps and paused at the bottom. The scene still surprised him upon seeing it every morning; the theater was gone. Seats had been torn up and replaced with a dance floor with a full bar and lounge on the north end of the auditorium-sized space. Each morning Kimba stood here in the gloom and reflected upon the relative simplicity of those days gone past with his own brand of nostalgia - a bittersweet amalgam of his father's capricious, violent outbursts combined in a bizarre collage of bits and pieces of movies burned into his brain. He had watched and listened to them over and over, night after night. When he had arrived at the theater five months ago after a 22 year absence, only one area of the building remained that even provided a clue that movies had ever been shown here at all. The small concrete projection room located behind the balcony seating above where the bar and lounge had been added during the last remodel completed in September of 1998. Kimba had gone up there only once, feeling a mild, detached sentimentality upon seeing that the place was now used to store banquet tables and other restaurant equipment. The movie screen that once taken up the entire south wall of the huge auditorium was long gone, having been sold or stolen during the theater's period of vacancy after the death of his father. Kimba's skills as a projectionist or 38 year-old usher would not be needed at the Magic Lantern anytime soon.

Kimba cut back and moved southward through a dark hallway towards the rear exit. According to his father, this part of the building had once been the top of a stone wall that surrounded an area dug into the earth to store munitions. The building had been the original armory when Fort Vermilion was built, completed in October of 1848. General Gerald Vermilion had selected this spot for the fort because it overlooked a section of the Snake River that settlers breaking away from the Oregon Trail had chosen to cross. The current on the west side of the bend ran slow, the river shallow and wide. Because immigrants would sometimes spend a few days here to rest and water their animals before continuing west, local Nez Perce and Cayuse indians - already restless and hostile - turned this part of the river into one of their most productive ambush points. After several surviving members of the immigrant parties limped into Seattle relating first hand accounts of gruesome scalpings, the brutal rape and even murder of their people, the Army tasked General Vermilion with selecting a spot to build the fort. The Whitman Massacre on November 29th, 1847, helped cut through typical government red-tape like a hunting knife honed to a razors edge.

Out in the parking lot, Kimba set off in a slow jog along the east wall of the building, across the empty front parking lot, and onto a sleepy, early Saturday morning Main Street. He glanced at the Bank of America sign across the street; it was 7:21 and 47°.

The morning sun appeared only in brief glimpses at first as it burned slowly but steadily through stubborn fog. Kimba jogged west on Main along the tiny family-owned shops - still dark and uninhabited beyond the plate-glass windows. He cut diagonally across the empty street, past the courthouse - perhaps Vermilion's most modern building with new brick, bronze window frames and tinted glass - and rounded the three-way stop where Main, Dora and Highway 469 intersected. The sidewalk curved to the right, then ended abruptly and turned into a gravel strip that ran north along the highway. With the end of the sidewalk came the end of the town, a jagged edge of broken concrete separated Vermilion from vast wilderness - the terrain on both sides of the highway instantly transformed into dense forest.

Within one mile of Kimba's starting point behind the Magic Lantern, his body settled into a familiar rhythm. His heart, muscles, lungs and joints now all operated together as a single entity; only his mind remained detached from the cohesive unit, free to roam at will. Sometimes he ran along a sandy beach. Waves with mist and foam blowing off their tips would crash to the shore, then return to the sea with a long, serpentine hiss. On some days, the same beach would have been taken over by women that languished on over-sized beach towels and wore French-cut bikinis - like a section of coastline over-run with California seals. At other times Kimba traversed fragrant vineyards during the heat of summer, smelling the sweet aroma of grapes while the air shimmered above the fields of vines laden with the tiny, ripened fruit. When he was especially focused, he was able to replay old movies almost scene-for-scene, including dialogue, or rebuild an automatic transmission down to the last minute ball-bearing with the smell of solvent and burnt Dextron II transmission fluid in his nose.

The sun now made a full showing, only patches of fog in deep valleys and ravines remained. Kimba left the highway and increasing morning traffic and took his normal route - a pothole riddled gravel road called Lariat. He followed the road as it made a wide arc to the left until a glint of metal caught his eye. A small group of mobile homes and a single brown house appeared as the road curved back to the east, all clustered together and huddled around a dead lawn scattered with loose garbage. Normally on Kimba's early morning sojourns through this area, signs of life were scarce, but today there was a flurry of

activity.

The brown house had been vacant since Kimba's return to Vermilion, but today people were moving in. A white chevy Tahoe gleamed next to an older maroon Honda Accord - both vehicles parked well to the side to make way for the full-sized green and yellow Mayflower moving van parked along the front edge of the lawn. The van had parked next to the giant juniper tree, bullying it‘s stout lower branches roughly to the side. Two men barely awake had a long, polished oaken dresser between them and shuffled down the ramp behind the truck. A third man stood by, watching. The man on the ground was in his early forties, with brown hair cropped short, and a graying goatee that made him look a man that refused to accept the fate that they both shared; were getting old. Without conscious effort, Kimba quickly sized up the man as a physical opponent. He noted the thickness of his neck and powerful shoulders, but also how they lacked definition; he had at one time been a man who maintained a certain level of physical fitness, then one day - for whatever reason - had thrown the towel.

The man picked up Kimba's movement when he came into his peripheral vision. He turned and fixed him with icy-blue eyes which allowed another piece of the puzzle to slip into place; the man was a cop. There was no mistaking the certain brand of contempt that law enforcement people from every sector held for Kimba and his kind; he looked away quickly, an instinctive reaction to prevent himself from being recognized before he could become the recognizer should the man prove to be an enemy from the past.

Kimba trotted past the van, the man with the goatee and the sleepy movers. He was five or six steps away from being out of view when an attractive woman in her late thirties stepped out through the sliding-glass door and onto the porch.

"Honey, could you come in here, please?" she said to the man with the goatee. "I think we should move the entertainment center to the other wall."

The woman wore an oversized T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. Her shoulder-length, dishwater-blonde hair had deep dark roots and was pulled up behind her head in a loose ponytail. Her eyes were big and dark behind simple gold-rimmed glasses that sat on a delicate nose generously sprinkled with freckles - her skin pale and unblemished, but cheeks flushed with exertion.

Kimba replayed the woman‘s voice over and over in his mind. He tried to access the unique lilt filed somewhere in his vault of memory. Just as he slipped past the front of the house, the woman crossed her arms loosely in front of her, and leaned forward slightly as she awaited a response from the man with the goatee - a mild idiosyncrasy that revealed her identity to Kimba just as he stepped out of view - a recollection so sudden and powerful, it caused a brief anomaly in his step. He was now well past the house, and sure the woman had not seen him, but his body betrayed him; despite his efforts to control his reaction, Kimba's heart began to pound furiously and his mouth dried up. Emotions that he had not experienced in years welled up and eddied in his mind. He struggled to complete the ritualistic beginnings of his morning, since his entire existence was comprised of small, well-plotted events throughout the day that were linked to each other in logical succession. The breakdown of just one of these events threatened to throw him into complete and total chaos.

Anthony Engles 832039
Coyote Ridge Corrections Center
P.O. Box 769
Connell, WA 99326

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