Rogelio wasn’t talkative, but he was helpful, and he explained many things that day. According to him, Henry was lucky—it was clear that he wouldn’t have to work (“You’re rich, aren’t you?” Rogelio asked), though almost everyone else inside did. Rogelio repaired old plastic chairs (he shared a workshop on the roof with a few other men) and made pipes out of bent metal scraps, which he sold to the junkies. The junkies were everywhere, a miserable lineup of broken men who roamed the prison offering sex or blood or labor for a fix. Rogelio wasn’t proud of this work, but without it he wouldn’t have survived. His brother sent money only occasionally, enough to cover the cost of the cell and little else. Otherwise he was on his own.
Neither Henry nor Rogelio owned the cell where they slept. It belonged to the boss, Espejo, who made extra money on visiting days by renting it out so that men could be alone with their wives. “Those days will be difficult,” Rogelio warned. Henry would have to be outdoors all day, and in the evening the room would smell different and feel different. He’d know that someone had made love there, and the loneliness would be overwhelming.
Henry nodded, though he couldn’t understand—wouldn’t understand, in fact, until he lived through it himself. There was a lot to learn. There were inmates to steer clear of, and others whom it was dangerous to ignore. There were moments of the day when it was safe to be out, others when it was best to stay inside. The distinction depended not on the time of day but on the mood of the prison, which Henry would have to learn to read if he hoped to survive.
“How do you read it?” he asked.
Rogelio had a difficult time explaining. It involved listening for the collective murmur of the yard, watching the way certain key men—the barometers of violence in the block—were carrying themselves. Small things: Did they have their arms at their sides or crossed in front of them? How widely did they open their mouths when they talked? Could you see their teeth? Were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every last detail?
To Henry it sounded impossible. Rogelio shrugged.
“Remember that most of us here are scared, just like you. When I first came, I didn’t have a cell. If there was trouble, I had nowhere to go.”
They were sitting in a corner of the yard, beneath a dull gray winter sky. The light was thin, and there were no shadows. Henry still didn’t quite grasp how he had got here. Nowhere to go—he understood these words in a way he never could have before. He wrote letters to his sister, cheerful dispatches that didn’t reflect the gloom he felt, or the fear. His letters were performances, stylized and utterly false outtakes of prison life. In fact he was despairing: This is what it means to be trapped. To be frightened, and to be unable to share that fear with a single soul.
“You’ll get it,” Rogelio said. “It just takes time.”
The frenetic daily exchange of goods and services went on about them. Two men waited to have their hair cut, sharing the same day-old newspaper to pass the time. A pair of pants, a couple of sweaters, and T-shirts stolen from some other section of the prison were for sale, hanging on a line strung between the posts of one of the soccer goals. Three junkies slept sitting up, with their backs against the wall, shirtless in the cold. Henry saw these men and felt even colder.
“Where did you sleep back then?” he asked. “Before you had a cell.”
“Under the stairs,” Rogelio said. He laughed. “But look at me now!”
Henry did look.
His new friend had a bright smile and very large brown eyes. His skin was the color of coffee with milk, and he was muscular without being imposing. His clothes were mostly prison-scavenged, items left by departing men, appropriated by Espejo or some other strongman and then sold. Nothing fit him well, but he seemed unbothered by that. He kept his black hair very short, and wore a knit cap most of the time, pulled down low, to stay warm. These dark winter days he even slept with it on. His nose was narrow and turned slightly to the left, and he had a habit of talking softly, with a hand over his mouth, as if sharing a confidence, no matter how mundane an observation he might be making.
As if we were accomplices, Henry thought.
A few weeks later Henry saw a man being kicked to death, or nearly to death, by a mob that formed unexpectedly at the door to Block 12. He and Rogelio stood by, horrified at first, then simply frightened. Then, almost instantaneously, they accepted the logic of the attack: every victim was guilty of something. The chatter: What did he do? Who did he cross? The men watching felt safer. Less helpless. A crowd gathered around the victim, but no one moved to help him.
Visiting days weren’t so bad at first. Henry’s family and friends took turns coming to see him, the ones who could tolerate the filth, the overcrowding, the looks from the junkies. They left depleted and afraid, and most didn’t come back. The hours immediately after the visitors had gone were the most difficult of the week. It required a great collective energy to welcome so many outsiders, to put the best face on what was clearly a terrible situation. Collectors was falling apart; anyone could see that. Damp winters had eaten away at the bricks, and the walls were covered with mold. Every day new men were brought in. They were unchained and set free inside, forced to fight for a place to sleep in the already overcrowded prison. Family day, when women were allowed in, came on alternate Wednesdays and was especially brutal. By the end of the afternoon the inmates were worn out from smiling, from reassuring their wives and children and mothers that they were all right. (Fathers, as a rule, did not visit; most of Henry’s fellow inmates didn’t have fathers.) It wasn’t uncommon for there to be fights on those evenings. As long as no one was killed, it was fine, just something to relieve the tension.
Nine weeks in, Henry felt almost abandoned. On family days he was as alone as Rogelio. Espejo rented out their cell, and in the evening, as they lay on their bunks, they could still feel the warmth of those phantom bodies. Their perfumed scent. It was the only time the stench of the prison dissipated, though in some ways this other smell was worse. It reminded them of everything they were missing. Henry had been unable to persuade any of the women he used to see to visit him, and he didn’t blame them. None of these relationships had meant much to him, though at times his despair was so great that he could concentrate on any one of those women’s faces and convince himself that he’d been in love. As for Rogelio, he was far from home and hadn’t had a visitor, male or female, in months.
“Did you see her?” Henry asked one evening after the visitors had gone, and because Rogelio hadn’t, he began to describe the woman who’d made love with her husband on the lower bunk that day. She was married to an inmate named Jarol, a thief with a sharp sense of humor and arms like tense coils of rope. Henry talked about the woman’s curves, how delicious she’d looked in her dress—not tight, but tight enough. She had long black hair, doe eyes, and fingernails painted pink. She was perfect, he said, and she was: not because of her body or her face but because of the way she’d smiled at her husband, with the hungry look of a woman who wants something and is not ashamed of it. A man could live on a look like that.
Henry said, “She didn’t care who saw.”
He could hear Rogelio breathing. They were quiet for a moment.
“What would you have done to her?” Rogelio asked. His voice was very low, tentative.
This was how it began: with Henry speculating aloud about how he might spend a few minutes alone with a woman in this stifling, degrading space. He had no difficulty imagining the scene, and he could think of no good reason not to share it.
He would have torn off that dress, Henry said, and bent her against the wall, with her palms flat against that stupid map of San Jacinto. He would have pressed hard against her, teased her until she begged him to come in. From the bottom bunk, Rogelio laughed. He would have made her howl, Henry said, made her scream. Cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed. Is this why you came, woman? Tell me it is!
Already Henry was disappearing into his own words. He h
ad his eyes closed. The walls had begun to vibrate.
“What else?” Rogelio said, his voice stronger now. “Go on. What else would you do?”
When they finished, each on his own bunk that first time, both men laughed. They hadn’t touched, or even made eye contact, but somehow what they’d done was more intimate than that. For a moment the pleasure of each had belonged to the other, and now something dark and joyless had been banished.
A week later Henry gathered up his courage and went to see Espejo, the boss, to propose doing a production of The Idiot President in Block 7. Espejo was a small but well-built man whose lazy grin belied a long history of violence, a man who’d risen far enough from the streets to relax and now controlled the block through sheer force of reputation. If any inmate questioned his authority, he dispensed pointed but very persuasive doses of rage. Mostly, though, he protected his charges—there were fewer than two hundred men in the block, and after nightfall they were in constant danger of being overrun by one of the larger, more ferocious sections of the prison. Espejo directed a small army of warriors tasked with keeping those potential invaders at bay.
Henry was afraid of this man, but he reminded himself that as fellow inmates of Block 7, he and Espejo were on the same side. Espejo’s cell seemed more like a comfortable student apartment, with a squat refrigerator, a black-and-white television, and a coffeemaker plugged into a naked outlet. Espejo kept a photo of himself from his younger days framed above his bed. In the picture he was shirtless, astride a majestic white horse, riding up the steps of a swimming pool toward the camera. A few delighted women stood behind him, long-legged, bronzed, and gleaming in the bright sun. Everything was colorful, saturated with tropical light. A child—Espejo’s son, perhaps—sat on the edge of the diving board, watching the horse maneuver its way out of the water. On the boy’s face was an expression of admiration and wonder, but it was more than that: he was concentrating, watching the scene, watching his father, trying to learn.
Henry wondered what had happened to the boy. Perhaps he’d been shuttled out of the country, or died, or perhaps he was old enough by now to be living in another of the city’s prisons, in a cell much like this one. There was no way of knowing without asking directly, and that was not an option. The photo, like the lives of the men with whom Henry now lived, was both real and startlingly unreal, like a still from Espejo’s dreams.
Rogelio had warned Henry not to stare, so he didn’t.
“A play?” Espejo said when Henry told him his idea.
Henry nodded.
Espejo lay back on his bed, his shoeless feet stretched toward the playwright. “That’s what we get for taking terrorists in the block,” he said, laughing. “We don’t do theater here.”
“I’m not a terrorist,” Henry said.
A long silence followed this clarification, Espejo’s laughter replaced by a glare so intense and penetrating that Henry began to doubt himself—perhaps he was a terrorist, after all. Perhaps he always had been. That was what the authorities were accusing him of, and outside, in the real world, there were people arguing both sides of this very question. His freedom hung in the balance. His future. Henry had to look away, down at the floor of the cell, which Espejo had redone with blue and white linoleum squares, in honor of his favorite soccer club. One of Espejo’s deputies, a thick-chested brute named Aimar, coughed into his fist, and it was only this that seemed to break the tension.
“Did you write it?”
Henry nodded.
“So name a character after me,” Espejo said.
Henry began to protest.
Espejo frowned. “You think I have no culture? You think I’ve never read a book?”
“No, I . . .” Henry stopped. It was useless to continue. I’ve already ruined myself, he thought.
They were quiet for a moment.
“Go on,” Espejo said finally, waving an uninterested hand in the direction of the yard. “If you can convince these savages, I have no objection.”
Henry thanked Espejo and left—quickly, before the boss could change his mind.
Everyone wanted to be the president, because the president was the boss. Everyone wanted to be the servant, because, like them, the servant dreamed of murdering the boss. Everyone wanted to be the son, because it was the son who actually got to do the killing in the play. It was this character whose name was changed: he became Espejo.
And indeed, the project sold itself. A week of talking to other inmates, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety—some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens to comment on the action; ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most outspoken transvestite. Things were going well. Even Espejo joined in the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.
Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.
“I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. “How can I learn the script?”
Henry smiled. They were lying together on the top bunk, close, naked.
“I can teach you.”
Later he’d remember the look on Rogelio’s face, and the hope implicit in his own offer. Perhaps by saying these words, Henry was already imagining a life outside those walls.
When Rogelio didn’t respond, Henry pressed him. “Who do you want to be?”
Rogelio thought for a moment. “The servant is the one who dies?”
Henry nodded.
“How?”
“He’s stabbed in the back.”
“Well, then,” Rogelio said, “I guess that should be me.”
When the play was performed, three weeks later, Henry paid special attention to that scene. He and Rogelio had worked on the script every night, pacing in their cell, bouncing the servant’s lines back and forth until Rogelio knew them by heart, but he had insisted on practicing the death scene on his own. Out of timidity, Henry thought, but when he saw the performance he realized that he had been wrong. The entire population of Block 7 was watching: hard, fearless men who gasped at the sight of Rogelio staggering. They recognized the look of terror on his face. They’d been that man; they’d killed that man. They watched Rogelio fall in stages, first to his knees, then forward, clutching his chest, as if trying to reach through his body to the imaginary knife wound. Henry and the others, all of them held their breath, waiting, and were rewarded with a final flourish: Rogelio’s right leg twitching. Espejo was the first to stand and applaud. The play wasn’t even over.
Henry was released that November, thinner, older, after a year and a half in prison. He didn’t say to Rogelio, “I’ll wait for you.” Or, “I’ll see you on the outside.” But he thought those things, held them secret but dear, until the day, a few months later, when two of the more volatile sections of Collectors rose up to protest conditions inside. Block 7 had the misfortune of sitting between them, and when the army arrived to put down the revolt, it too was destroyed. Henry heard the news on the radio. The men who had made up the cast of The Idiot President all died in the assault, shot in the head, or killed by shrapnel, or crushed beneath falling concrete walls. More than three hundred inmates from Blocks 6, 7, and 8 were killed, and though Henry wasn’t there, part of him died that day too. He lost Rogelio, his best friend, his lover—a word he had never used, not even to himself. In the days after, he sometimes woke with the taste of Rogelio on his lips. Sometimes he woke to the image of Rogelio lying dead of a knife wound.
Henry mourned, even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth the tragedy both broke him and spared him the need ever to think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. Th
ere was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of his release and drive home, feigning optimism.
JIM ALLYN
Princess Anne
FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
HOWARD PICKED UP his blinking line. “Investigations Division, Jim Howard.”
Silence. “Hello?”
Rough breathing. He could make out a quiet beeping in the background. “Charlie?”
“Jus’ a sec,” a weak voice said. Charlie Post had been in intensive care for ten days now. Howard waited as he gathered enough strength to speak.
“Lyle Collins is coming out,” Post finally rasped. “My guy at Eddystone told me.”
Eddystone was the warehouse of choice for Northern Indiana criminal psych patients. Howard felt a cold knot forming in the pit of his stomach.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t they ever die inside?”
“Coming out late this month. The report will say he’s stable.”
“Stable?! And what do the geniuses think did that? Sloppy Joes every Thursday?”
“Stay on’m, Jim. He’s ancient history. Off the books. He’ll be flying under the radar.” Charlie Post coughed hard.
Howard was jammed up, in the middle of a limbo that involved moving his life and his work from the Northern Indiana Investigations Division of the state police to northern Michigan, where he was trying to land a position with the Major Case Unit of the Michigan State Police. He and Charlie Post went way back. Way back was where Lyle Collins was coming from.
“Stay on’m. I know you’re spread thin. Just remember that bastard won’t be able to keep it together for long. He’ll be hungry.”
“I’ll make time, Charlie.”
Howard could hear fluid bubbling in Post’s throat. “Billy Ferguson used to come over Sunday nights to play hearts with the family. Sweet kid. He and Angie were a match, you know. Rare thing. Then one fine spring day he’s just gone.” Howard could not see the hand he lifted from the bed and waved slightly. “Just gone. Angie never got over it.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Page 6