Crystal Eaters

by Shane Jones

  “I’m saying I’m sorry why aren’t you stopping please why aren’t you stopping?”

  Dad grabbed his hand and dragged him to the center of the room, the belt a blur, difficult for Pants to predict where the next hit would strike. The buckle landed in his palm and produced a rectangular welt.

  “Enough,” said Mom.

  Dad kept going. The belt discovered new skin to plant bruises. But Pants wasn’t trying to run away anymore. He was holding on to his father because he thought being close enough would make him stop. It appeared that he was trying to hug him, to get so close that the beating would have to stop and the only option would be an embrace. But it didn’t work because Dad couldn’t stop himself, everything emotional pouring through his swinging arm, his limbs buzzing with blood, everything coming out and onto his screaming son crumpled around his thighs, arms loosening with each strike down.

  After Dad drove off in the truck Mom told her son to take off his shirt. She inspected his body. She was too shy to tell him to take his underwear off, but she never would have made it. His back was divided thirteen times in thirteen places. Stomach puffy and red, and in one area, split and bubbling crystal puss. All doors were shut now. Smelled like dead dogs, but mostly shit because his sweat had warmed the underwear that didn’t fall out. Mom just stared at his heaving and bloodied back, the back that had once unfolded out of her. She sat on the couch. She couldn’t stop thinking about his birth, the exact moment of it, and she connected it to this moment. He walked over and pulled her hands from her face.

  “How many did I lose?”

  She always told him a bedtime story about the sun leaving the sky because it had to visit the other side of the world and that night she told it to him in extended form, detailing villagers who ate light, rode crystal-armored horses, fought city workers in misty green mountains, until he fell asleep and she walked from the room, leaving him to the images, his recovery dreams. Mom stopped herself from feelings when Dad came home. They didn’t talk. She lay in bed pretending to be asleep and hoping he wouldn’t smell the underwear in the garbage.

  The next morning his body was swollen. When he stood, his left hip slipped from the socket before finding its new place a quarter inch left. Both ankles were loose. It hurt to put clothes on. He was scared to breath, and when he did, deciding on a big inhale to see just how bad it could be, the air flowed over something sharp.

  Days later in the mine he found black crystals during a strong rainstorm and odd day of extreme heat, and desperate to heal, willing to try anything, he accepted a double-dog-dare from Bob T. and ate three chunks. He brainstormed ideas on count when his brain unfolded and folded and unfolded again, the feeling of black crystal in his body a new machine to revisit. He had no anger toward Dad, only fear, and thought of giving him, not Mom, a black crystal as a gift, an apology for being the type of kid who embarrassed his parents, who deserved to be punished for the way he was, what he did.

  The pain from the punishment has stayed. He moves in ways so he doesn’t feel it. For example, he knows not to lean too hard on his left hip. He forgets at moments, like playing basketball, when he drives the baseline and tries for a lay-up he’s too far under to make. He takes a step under, to the far side of the rim, and his hip makes a loud pop, turning the guard’s hamburger-head in the window. He launches three-pointers that force him to land hard on the heels of his feet. His foot throbs numbers.

  He can’t hit a shot. Everything bricks. When the ball gets trapped between rim and backboard the guard with the hamburger-head who has a belly like a bag of trash comes in and knocks it free by jumping with his club, his keys jangling and pants sagging. He grabs the ball and continues shooting, trying to hit the simplest of shots and misses each one.

  With every missed shot his body hurts and he can smell his shit coming in through the vents in waves, crashing into the fans above who spin the shit and flatten-out the shit. Guards crowding by the window crawl over each other and laugh as he misses. He stands two feet from the hoop and raises the ball with one hand. Push. And miss. A muffled yell from a guard against bulletproof glass says, “Gotta be kidding me!”

  It’s my fault for hiding my underwear and it’s my fault she’s sick.

  The steel white doors unlock and open, meaning the hour is up. He has one shot left. Flick the wrist. Swish.

  Pants says, “I’m a winner,” with his arms raised, ponytail a dog’s tail, the ball rolling to a stop at the colored, padded wall. He thinks of Mom and the previous health meeting when he discussed the rape in the mine and how it dug up sadness, frustration, odd attraction, things no boy should witness or have to process. How he felt guilty for doing nothing. But now he has another chance. He will escape. He will see her again. He will find a way to add and make things better. He stops jumping, a sharp pain connecting his foot to his lower back.

  When the guard with the hamburger-head puts a hand on his left shoulder Pants falls to his knees and grabs the guard’s hand which goes limp. The guard reaches for his baton at his belt. The shit comes down from the ceiling and Pants vomits blue slush into his right hand and the guard says to him they need more crystal. Pants tells him to stop, there’s little left, who are you, who is anyone.

  A village myth says the sun will rage war on the earth. This is not a myth. Another village myth says the city will move into the village and crush it, that the city is alive, that it’s a creature who eats the small. This too is not a myth. A third village myth says the black crystals are reaching up and pulling on the sun’s flames, but no one knows for sure if that’s true or not. Could just be a myth.

  18

  Ricky and Bobby T. take turns shoving each other into the fence. The chain-linked metal absorbs their bodies before springing them back. Coating half the sky, the sun. There’s a theory that if you put a frog in water and raise the temperature half degree by half degree the frog won’t notice, that the frog will stay in the water and die in the water. The Brothers walk and Ricky and Bobby T. continue shoving each other.

  “You know what I hate,” says Ricky. “Frogs.”

  “So?” says Bobby T.

  Z. tells them to be quiet and they nod. He’s trying not to act nervous, but this is the big day, this is the beginning of becoming remembered forever and his legs are shaking.

  They total seven men dressed in khaki pants and powder-blue shirts. Z. is the exception. He wears black pants and a cream-colored button down. A dogtooth-shaped whistle on a string dangles around his neck. Green fabric torn from his grandfather’s robe is tied around his left wrist.

  “This is it,” he says. “No turning back now.”

  Ricky moves the knife. With the help of Bobby T. they open the fence.

  They stand at the bottom of the cliff. At the top is The Bend. Before they climb, everyone but Z. removes handcuffs from their pockets. Z. locks their wrists behind their backs. All eyes sting with sweat.

  The sun boils clouds.

  The sky bleached.

  They follow Z. up the cliff. They fall and slide and claw and become covered in dirt, just how they planned. They climb with their heads down, blinking from the raining dirt. Ricky is a bit dramatic and falls several times on purpose, flopping back down the cliff with his legs outstretched. Dirt fills their shoes and dirt pours down their backs and dirt becomes stuck in their sweat. They find levels of harder dirt they use as stairs and they climb to the top. A few city gawkers holding binoculars step back and mumble. A young girl holds a phone into the sky and moves her thumb up and down against the screen. A man with a face like a horse says they look funny. He tries to say more but chokes on the candy he’s eating. His wife slaps his back and he walks away, head down, one arm raised, swallowing.

  They walk in a single file line with Z. leading and the sun following. After a half mile through the outskirts of the city, the Brothers looking into the streets and seeing things like dogs dressed in leather jackets, big suits on little men, hairy neck = gold chain, twenty types of bottled wate
r, electronic shirts, traffic lights somersaulting green-yellow-red, neon signs, everything electric and somehow not powered by yellow crystals, everything big and ugly and loud, the intricate brickwork of the prison comes into focus.

  “Everyone okay?” says Z.

  If there was a problem someone would speak because the plan said so.

  Z. walks painfully tall. He tells himself that he’s in control because he’s the kind of person who is never in control. He doesn’t perspire much, but the heat pulsates against his ears. His heart beats scary fast so he relaxes with conscious rhythmic breathing (Pants wrote that city people do yoga and detailed something called Prana). He tells himself everything will be okay. The jailbreak in reverse will be his greatest accomplishment because it has to be.

  “Good,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  They prepare their facial expressions as they reach the prison.

  A glass booth shouldered by gates and barbed wire is the first encounter. Behind the gates and glass booth is a paved road to the prison entrance. There’s a door, ADMINISTRATION, with two guards standing at either side. The guards are dressed like the guard inside the glass booth Z. makes eye contact with – perfectly pressed blue pants and crisp tucked-in blue shirts.

  A drain in the glass booth, face level, holds a metal net that distorts his voice when he speaks into it, “Good morning. Reporting.”

  “What?” says the guard, a short man with blue eyes, head shaved and wrinkled with fat. There’s a motorized fan clipped in the corner of the booth on full blast. It appears to do little to cool. He’s the sweatiest person Z. has ever seen.

  “Reporting,” he repeats, the last few letters, the “ing,” an embarrassing high pitch, Z. not totally positive if what he was told to say by Pants is right.

  “Reporting?” says the guard who draws his gun from the holster. “Reporting what?”

  Z. wonders if what he was told, what he remembered from the letters, has become scrambled in his head and he’s getting it all wrong. But that’s impossible. He’s spent endless hours memorizing the plan nailed to his bedroom wall, highlighted with red pen.

  “Exchange inmates from Willows Bay,” he says looking at the Brothers. “Standard set here. Shouldn’t take long. You believe this heat? The sun. Heck, I remember when I’d stand at The Bend and watch the turquoise sky and don’t think we’ll ever see that again. Nah, all different now.”

  “Right,” says the guard.

  His gun is halfway drawn. Z. looks like the typical transfer guard with necklace whistle and cream-colored shirt. There’s a weird piece of green fabric at his wrist but that’s nothing too strange because transfer guards are an odd bunch and there’s such a high turnaround for the job. And the exchange inmates all have the facial expressions of men with nothing to do but think about what they are recently found guilty of. The guard studies them. Nods Z. up and down.

  “They say we’re not coming?” says Z. “Typical.”

  “I get mad,” says the guard.

  The Brothers, minus Z., take turns looking at the sky, their boots, everyone making tough-guy faces.

  Just trust and follow the plan – Pants.

  Inside the glass booth is a computer. The guard’s fingers graze the letters QWERTY, his eyes narrowed and mean at Z. before he slaps the gun back into his holster. The noise makes Z. flinch and prepare to absorb a bullet. Then the guard says, “Ah, I’m messing with YOU. You need a blood transfusion? Look white. GOT YOU. Got you real good. Oh man did I get you good.”

  “R-r-r-reporting,” repeats Z. This was never mentioned. “I’m just… reporting like I’m s-s-s-supposed to. Reporting.”

  The guard bounces inside the booth drum-slapping the walls. Then he starts patting his pockets. He’s incredibly short – his height barely increases when he stands from the swivel stool and Z. notices a rectangular clip on his breast pocket engraved with his name, Karl.

  “I do this all the time, newbie,” says Karl. “Getting people is what I do.” With a pen he pulls from his pants pocket he writes a single | in a notebook filled with pages of |.

  Z.’s shoulders drop. He remembers his breathing. The air is disgusting. He composes himself back into character, remembers something Pants said in a previous letter and he laughs, shakes his head, slaps the glass twice and says, “Fucker, you did. Now open up before these boys die of heat stroke.”

  “Heat wave gonna kill us all,” says Karl jingling a ring of keys. “But nobody wants to listen to me. Man, did I get you guys. Might be the best get I’ve ever gotten. Hold on.”

  Z. and the handcuffed Brothers mingling behind him stay on script. Some stand looking at their feet hiding their smiles, others are puffed-chest and tight-jawed. Ricky, on the verge of fake crying, rubs the side of his face against his shoulder. Karl comes out of his booth and a buzzer goes off. He nods at Ricky and says to Z., “Always one in the bunch, huh.”

  “Yeah,” says Z. “It’s the guys who can shut themselves off who survive.”

  “You know the drill,” says Karl.

  The notes, the guidelines, the advice from the letters, are working. Even Z. is kind of surprised when they get access into the prison. Bobby T. smiles as the gates open to ringing bells and then he stops smiling when Z. gives him a real mean look. The bells sound like the days of worship when the mine workers announced green and red crystal finds. Bobby T. was a child running to the mine with dozens of kids, pushing and swerving around each other, never tripping. He held a big green one up to the sun and it looked like water.

  The wind blows their shirts into fat suits. Bobby T., as instructed to do at various times, spits, and the saliva wraps around his cheek. He attempts to slap the spit from his beard but forgets the handcuffs and the hot metal digs into his wrists. He rolls a shoulder and the saliva comes off on his shirt in a solid leash.

  “Pick up the pace,” says Karl.

  They follow, trying not to stare at Karl’s height. Z. thinks about saying some city-speak, maybe ask him if there’s ever been a population increase of midgets.

  Splitting the guards, they walk through the open door and into an office where three women in white blouses with blond hair sit behind a marble counter. The women look up at the group entering with the rush of humid air. Before the door shuts one of the women gets a good look at the sky and her eyes widen. When the door shuts, her expression goes right back to before, a numb forever-lost look. Gray and blue cubicles cram the room, phones ring, and the tops of people’s heads float above padded walls.

  Z. takes a deep breath. “We made it,” he says and immediately feels judged, scared, for saying out loud what he meant to think.

  “No, you didn’t,” says a woman in white, searching with her hands over the empty desk. “We don’t have a report for new inmates, or a transfer, or an exchange, or any paperwork at all.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Toby,” says another woman. “Looks like we have ourselves a problem.”

  Z. doesn’t have a wrap for this situation because he was told by Pants that once inside there would definitely be paperwork and the Brothers would be moved into the appropriate cells. He wonders how many midgets live in the city and why they exist. He hears someone slam a phone down followed by the phone crashing against a wall. A man in a charcoal suit with spiked hair runs from one end of the room to the other waving a folder. The women in white smile at Karl whose cheeks are full of air as his blue eyes wobble. Half his head is above the counter. His body is shaking. One of the women leans over, rolls her eyes, and pokes his right cheek. His face farts.

  “BAHAHAHAHA,” says Karl, collapsing to the floor. “I get you again, and again, and again,” he says, emphasizing each again with a mock windmill punch on the carpet. When he stands, he marks another | in his book. “Shit,” he exhales. “I’m on fire.”

  “Sorry,” says the woman sitting in the middle. “Little Karl is that kind of person. We agree, on occasion, to play along. Besides, it’s all in good fun. Nobody gets hurt.”

>   “What kind of person is he?” asks Z., smiling, maybe flirting with the woman because her face appears backlit by the sun. He’s heard about this before via a city television commercial – lipstick, eye shadow, mascara, and bronzer. She makes him smile like a dope, yes, fun fun. Or maybe he smiles because smiling, he was told by Pants, makes city people give you what you want.

  “An asshole,” says the woman to the right. “That’s what kind of person he is.”

  “Go in and I’ll pass this upstairs and these guys here will be set and good to go and they can move on with their lives and –” says the woman in the middle, saying the words so familiar they kind of bleed together, a script she’s said ten thousand times before. She trails off and her face is expressionless, dimming. “What was I saying?”

  “Had my fun for the day,” says Little Karl. “Jug will finish the transfer up. Nice meeting you.” Little Karl walks out the door, says, “See ya later, fellas,” to the guards, waves his book at them, and re-enters the glass booth with the computer and corner fan which he holds his hand near to see if it’s working.

  “Seriously,” repeats the woman, “What was I talking about? Toby?”

  The Brothers move from the administrative office and through a seven-foot-high security turnstile and into the second floor of the prison – a place of blue metal, skylights, concrete floors, everything built in hard steel lines. People are yelling and hitting things made out of metal onto things made of metal and there are shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows. The prison is huge but it feels small and cramped to the Brothers, every hallway and turn is like navigating a closet in extreme heat with no ventilation.

  “This way.”

  Following Jugba Marzan, inmates size up the Brothers as they walk a kind of open hallway with cells on the right side, a net on the left side. Below the net, and a good fifty feet down, an open concrete center with patrolling guards, more cells. Z. looks back and shrugs. The light in the prison fades with passing clouds. Jug walks in slow motion. His khaki pants are worn high, his backside large and lumbering and dimpled with sweat.