This Life
Page 23
“Police even gettin’ laws passed: Blue Lives Matter. High-profile PR campaigns to rebrand how we look at and judge what they do. It’s ugly, they say. But, they are fighting crime, and these people are guilty! Well, I’m saying I’m guilty as hell, and my life matters, too!”
Applause. And encouragement.
“I mean there’s a science to this shit!” Chris decides he’ll stand in the moment. “Alchemy, they call it. How do you turn base life into livin’ golden? More importantly, if I manage to somehow infuse my life with meaning, with worth, some type of contribution, on whatever level—I’m not sayin’ that makes what I’ve done any less wrong!”
Silence. He stops. Stares at them. Wide eyed and sincere.
“I’m sayin’ if I’m livin’, I’m changing. And, if that change is for the better, then that ‘better’ matters.”
Applause. They agree.
“I’m sayin’ that, individually, if you, or you, or you, do what you need to do to be better, then the same laws that identify your ‘bad’ should also acknowledge your ‘better.’ Mayne, from the shoulder. Daily, I work hard as a mu’fucka to be the best me I can be. And, I don’t need nobody to tell me that this life matters!”
She kicks his prison cot.
He wakes up groggily. She leans over him, her face only inches away from his own. He can still hardly hear her for the fans blowing, but he recognizes her voice immediately.
“Are you go’n get up? You were asleep when I came in before.”
“What time—?” Rise is a free man, now. Strange waking thought. Even after all this time, he misses his brother. Must be the speech he made earlier. The outside visitors.
He sits up in his cot. Rubs his eyes. Stares out of the dormitory’s glass façade into the bleak, black early morning sky. I wonder where he’s at. What he’s doing…
He put his feet to the floor. Slips on some dark gray jogging pants, slides into his shower shoes. Grabs a towel, a toothbrush, and toothpaste, and heads for the shower area.
Come a cool breeze
Blow my lows away
She’s been working this compound long enough to know that any given moment he could be picked up and swung to another spot on the prison farm. If he were caught up like that it could be years before she would be close enough to touch him again. She wants to touch him now. She’s grappling with the urge. They’ve touched before. That was all good.
At present, she sits at the security desk in the front of the dorm. The fan buzzes steadily beside her, faces the rows of sleeping convicts in their prison cots. Chris comes shuffling back out of the shower. He raises the towel to his face, wipes away the tap water.
When he clears the serving counter and steps around the fan, he comes to crouch down beside her chair.
“What’s happening with you, sergeant?” he says casually. “It looks like you’ve developed feelings for an inmate. Watch it … you violatin’, now.”
“Boy, shut up!”
“Cynthia tell you what I asked her?”
“What, to teach you how to talk to girls?” Veronica smiles. “Or, ah, help you remember?”
“Don’t make it sound like that,” he grumbles self-consciously.
“You don’t need her for that,” she mumbles. Insistent. “You know how to talk.”
“You ever notice that most prisoners don’t look directly at you? And, eye to eye signals an intimate or honest exchange?”
“It’s because y’all always bracing for rejection. Even you, sometimes,” she says. “Cynthia told me you came back in from your callout and went straight to sleep—”
“I had a long day,” he growls. Still a bit groggy. “I was hoping you would be close, tonight.”
Veronica figures she doesn’t need to say anything to that. She’s here. She realizes that’s enough. Instead, she reaches out and places her hand on the crown of his head. Scratches the nape of his neck.
“You better always have my back,” Chris complains.
“I see and don’t see. At the same time, I see without seeing,” is her cryptic response. As she looks over the rest of the prisoners in the dormitory, absently continuing to scratch his neck, she adds, “We’ll see us together, you’ll see me happy, and I’ll see you through.”
He nods. Yawns.
He stands up to leave. Walks to his cot without looking back. Lays down and pulls the covers over his head. Not really tired. Just restless.
In his frustration, he begins to roll over, but feels the crinkle of folded paper in the front pocket of his jogging pants. One of the few actual letters he’s gotten from Rise.
He pulls it out, unfolds it, and gives his eyes a moment to focus in the dim light beneath the covers.
It’s a poem.
We stood I and I
Two men beneath the sun
Free minds in a captive land
Conscious.
He spit when he spoke—
And a spray of his spittle
Did touch my lips
I’m overcome by
My sense of awareness
He gave me truth.
Rise
Have you any passion inside left
For this rugged ride
Your proof of purchase ain’t an issue
Perfect your walk,
Be your…
Wages of labor recompensed
From this system of servitude
That you’ve been toiling under
Trigger my journey over.
Chris refolds the paper. Balls it up in his left hand. Rolls over and crosses his arms underneath his pillow.
He lies there a moment.
Awake.
Thinking. A burning behind his eyes.
He looks through the wall of windows again, the yard full of prisoners. They stand. Some with their state blue shirts opened and blowing in the wind, revealing stained white t-shirts. About four, five homies bob their heads to the music blaring from a Super Radio.
Minutes pass and he sees C-Boy walking toward the ledge of his dormitory. Close to the windows now. When C-Boy spots him, an aggravated grimace scribbles the contours of his walnut-colored features. He motions for Chris to get up. Mouths the words, “Come here.”
Chris steps over to one of the screened sections and winds the crank so that a square of tiered glass panels swing up to make an opening in part of the façade. He thinks of the guard’s eyes. Her smiling eyes. Through the opened window he can hear the sound of the radio and then C-Boy’s voice. “Man, how long you was go’n leave us waitin’?”
Another day. The sun scarcely rising above the treeline, beyond the barbed wire fences. The same sky that makes a canvas for the prison yard.
Perfect your walk, be your…
He needs to get dressed, now.
Rise.
~To Chris~
I won’t forget. I’ll never let anyone else forget.
Haha! JaCrystal’s just like you!
Life goes on..
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Quntos KunQuest was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1976. Since 1996, he has been incarcerated at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, Louisiana. He is a musician, rapper, visual artist, and novelist.