“How often do they do this?”
“Every three hours.”
“Even at night?”
“Yep. That’s why you’ll see guys sleeping at all hours of the day and night in here. You have to grab sleep when you can get it, because you’ll never sleep more than three hours at any one time.”
“What happens if I’m tired and don’t hear them announce the count?”
“Luckily I’m here to wake you up. If they have to come in and wake you themselves they won’t be very gentle about it.”
A jailer came by and examined their wrist bands, looked at the incheck cards on the outside of the glass, and moved on.
Mike dropped his wrist and returned to his bunk.
“You might want to relax. Being so tense in here ain’t gonna help you any. It’ll just eat at you and make your time drag slower.
“There’s only one way to make time go faster, and that’s to sleep. Sleep as much as you can, or get lost in your Bible if you’ve a mind to. I’ve got a few paperback books over there you can read too if you want.”
“How’d you get those in here? Isn’t that contraband?”
“No. Contraband is stuff you’re not supposed to have. Those are okay. The jailhouse preacher delivers these each morning on a rolling cart. Says it’s to keep our morale up. I told him there ain’t no morale in here. No hope, either. Nothing but time and misery.”
Chapter 34
Twenty minutes later the same voice came over the speaker again.
“Chow.”
Whoever was manning the microphone was a man of few words.
Suddenly the electronic door lock on the cell door clicked loudly. The door was unlocked.
“Come on,” Mike said. “Stick close to me and I’ll try my best to keep you from getting pummeled.”
Tony followed his cellie through the door and along the tier to a staircase, which took them to the ground floor of the cellblock below.
Tony was immediately the target of all eyes. Some seemed openly hostile. Most were indifferent.
In a world where life was merely a series of mundane and repetitive tasks and events, even something as simple as an unfamiliar face was fascinating.
Along the way, Mike kept them engaged in an almost non-stop banter.
Interrupting someone in the midst of a conversation was, oddly enough, a violation of basic jailhouse etiquette.
As long as Mike was talking, nobody else would bother them.
Eventually he had to come up for air, though, and another inmate yelled from across the pod, “Hey Mike! Who’s the new meat?”
Mike called back, “He’s Tony. He’s cool. I ran with him on the outside.”
It wasn’t true. But Mike’s vouching for him seemed to satisfy the curious inmate, who went back to examining his food tray for insects and lost all further interest in Tony.
The pair stood in line with sixty other men, and filed past a large wheeled cart covered with food trays. The trays were made from molded plastic, each about two inches thick. The thickness of the trays allowed the food wells to be recessed. They could therefore be filled with food and then be stacked without disturbing or soiling the food.
Or whatever the stuff was.
“I know it looks like vomit,” Mike said. “But rest assured it doesn’t taste quite that good.”
The common area was furnished with stainless steel tables, four feet square, which were bolted to the concrete floor.
On each side of the table was a round stool, also stainless steel, and also bolted to the floor.
In an orderly fashion, each inmate filled the next available stool before starting a new table.
“Always make sure you like the person in front of you in line. And the person behind you too. ‘Cause you’re guaranteed to have to sit next to at least one of them.”
Tony’s head was swimming. He hadn’t even taken his first bite of jailhouse food, and he had all kinds of new advice and rules to have to navigate his way through.
Mike introduced Tony to the other two men at the table.
“This is Eddie and Mark.”
Tony gave the men the traditional man nod, which acknowledged they existed but not much more.
Eddie returned the nod.
Mark never took his eyes off his tray, muttering with disgust, “Oh, man… not again!”
He reached into one of the tray’s food wells and pulled a dead maggot from a concoction Tony wasn’t sure was soggy hash browns or burned oatmeal.
Mike chuckled.
“Hey, at least it’s dead this time.”
He turned to Tony and said, “Eat the eggs, even if you don’t eat anything else. The eggs are powdered. All they do is add water and heat them up. It’s almost impossible to screw up.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
Tony looked around the room and noticed it was segregated. Whites sat with whites, blacks sat with blacks, Hispanics sat with Hispanics.
The only exception was a couple of inmates who had to sit in the last available seat at a particular table, and who were the odd man out.
In those cases, they were pretty much ignored.
“If you ever have to fill the bitch seat, just keep your head down and don’t say nothing,” Mike said. “Understand you’re not welcome there at their table. Don’t talk to them, don’t look at them, just eat your chow and return your tray.”
“How come?”
“How come what?” Eddie demanded.
“How come the races don’t mix?”
“Man, what are you, some kind of troublemaker? They don’t mix ‘cause they don’t. That’s all there is to it. Don’t need no more than that.”
Mike stepped in to smooth Eddie’s ruffled feathers.
“Man, take it easy on him. He’s a first timer. He don’t know any better. He’s got a lot to learn.”
“Well, he better learn it damn quick. He sits at the wrong table and says something like that there’s gonna be hell to pay for all of us.”
“Sorry,” Tony said.
Even as he said it, he saw Mike wince just a bit.
Then he remembered Mike’s admonition before they left their cell: “Don’t ever apologize for anything, even if you’re wrong. If you accidentally step on somebody’s foot, just suck it up and take the beating you got coming to you. But don’t ever apologize. It’ll make you appear weak, and the beating will be twice as hard and twice as long.”
Tony felt as though whatever he did it was going to be wrong.
He decided the safest way to survive his first jailhouse meal was to zip his mouth and say nothing else.
And to be ultra careful not to step on anybody’s foot.
Chapter 35
In the afternoon the mysterious voice came over the ceiling’s loudspeaker.
“Carson.”
That was it. No explanation, no anything other than Tony’s last name.
Tony correctly assumed this time it wasn’t God calling out to him.
Then the cell door opened.
Tony looked to Mike for guidance. “Now what in hell do I do?”
The hacks want to see you. Go downstairs to the hack shack and report. But don’t go over the red line. If you go over the red line they’ll jack you up.”
He went to the doorway and peered out. Every other cell door was still shut tight, on the tier as well as the lower level.
He felt odd when he walked out. Almost like he was in the midst of a prison break. Several other inmates stood at their doors and watched him through the glass. He knew from peering through his own cell window that standing at one’s door, watching everything going on in the cell block, was something many inmates spent hours doing.
He supposed it was as good a way as any to pass the time.
He walked gingerly down the steps, not quite shaking the feeling that at any moment he’d be ordered to freeze, to lie on the floor, and asked why in hell he was out of his cell.
But none of that happened.
&nbs
p; He went to the raised platform Mike called the “hack shack,” careful to stay behind the red line.
A bored jailer looked up from his desk.
“You Carson?”
“Yes, sir.”
The jailer stood up and said, “Hold out your wrist.”
Tony held up his wrist band, and the jailer used a hand-held bar code reader to register that the inmate named Anthony Carson was out of his cell.
“Go down the hall to the clinic. Stay to the right and keep your right shoulder no more than six inches from the wall. If any members of the staff approach you, stop and face the wall until they pass. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir. But… where’s the clinic?”
“Follow the signs, dummy. Straight down the hall until you get to the door that says ‘clinic’ over it.”
“Yes sir.”
“And don’t drag your feet. You’re in the system as in transit. Two minutes from now you’ll be reported as missing if they don’t scan you in. Get moving.”
“Yes sir.”
Tony walked to the cell block door and waited a few seconds before the jailer pushed a button to unlock the door electronically. He pushed the door and walked through it and into a long corridor painted in a hideous light gray color.
Oddly enough, he didn’t remember coming down the corridor the previous night after he went through booking.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, though. The previous night was such a blur.
At the end of the hallway he stood in front of a locked door. Through the glass he saw the first person he’d seen since incheck who didn’t wear a uniform of some kind.
This man wore a plain brown suit. More Walmart rack than Martinson Brothers. Still, quality or not, it was much nicer than the duds Tony was wearing at the present time.
The man reached beneath his desk, a buzzer sounded next to the doorway, and Tony pushed it open.
“Are you Offender Carson?”
He’d been called that by several members of the staff since he was booked. He didn’t particularly like the term. Especially since he knew he’d committed no offenses other than reporting his wife missing.
Still, he wasn’t in any position to argue.
“Yes, sir.”
“Wrist.”
Tony held up his wrist band and the man in the cheap suit scanned it, using a scanner exactly like the jailer had used on him two minutes before.
“You just made it. Next time walk a little faster.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sit down.”
He did.
Tony sat there, looking around the tiny room, while the man across the desk leafed through a manila folder.
Tony started to ask why he was there, and the man shushed him by putting a finger to his own lips.
Then he went back to reading.
“Now then. You told my colleagues at incheck you were looking for ways to harm yourself. Specifically how are you planning to do that, and to what degree?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not a hard question.
“You told someone in booking you were planning to harm yourself. I want to know how, so we make sure you don’t have the means. We’ve already taken away your shoes and your belt, so you can’t hang yourself. You’ve been searched to ensure you have nothing sharp, so you can’t stab yourself. You have no glasses, so you can’t eat broken glass. I need to make sure we haven’t missed anything.
“So again, tell me exactly how you intend to harm myself.
“I don’t intend to harm myself. I was joking. I didn’t think it would blow up into such drama.”
“I see.”
The doctor wrote something in his notes.
“Now then… tell me to what degree you were planning to harm yourself.”
“I just told you. I wasn’t planning to harm myself. I just said that.”
“I heard you. Now you hear me. I want to know to what degree you were planning to harm yourself. Was your intent to kill yourself? Did you intend to maim yourself? Just injure yourself enough to go to the infirmary, perhaps? Maybe you were hoping we’d prescribe some good drugs for you so your stay with us would go by a bit faster?”
“I have no plans to harm myself.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“I was under a lot of stress. I called the police to report my wife missing and all of a sudden they brought me to jail on a trumped up charge. I still don’t know whether my wife is alive or dead or where in the hell she is, and nobody here seems to care about that. She could be lying in a ditch somewhere in need of medical care and you people don’t give a damn. All you want to do is lock me up for no reason and ask me stupid questions over and over and over again as though my answers are going to change.”
He wrote something else down.
“I see. And that… the fact that you were under great stress… that’s the reason you decided to harm yourself?”
Tony wanted to go across the desk and strangle the “doctor,” but was smart enough not to do so.
“Look, doctor, or whatever you are… I have no intention of harming or killing myself. I had no intention of doing so last night when I told your staff that, and I still have no intention of doing it now. I’m sorry I said it. I wish like hell I hadn’t. I don’t want to hurt anybody. All I want to do is get out of here so I can find my wife.”
The doctor eyed him for a long time. Tony couldn’t tell whether his words were finally sinking in, or whether the shrink was trying to read his mind.
Finally he said, “So. You were under a lot of stress last night because your wife is missing and you’re worried about her?”
“Exactly! Thank you for finally understanding!”
“And that’s why you decided to kill yourself? To relieve your pain?”
Chapter 36
Mike was dozing on his bunk when the door unlocked and woke him up.
Tony shuffled in looking like a condemned man on his way for a date with “Old Sparky.”
“What happened?”
“He told me he was going to keep me for the full seventy two hours. That maybe I’d learn a lesson from it. That maybe I’d learn his time has value. And that he has better things to do than to waste his time on somebody like me because I want to play games and make stupid comments during booking.
“Then he told me that maybe I should give it some further thoughts. That maybe I should follow through with my threats. Then I’d be just another piece of meat on a slab, and I wouldn’t be able to cause him any more problems.”
“Nice. What a creep. Did you tell him your wife was missing and might be in danger?”
“Yes. He said he didn’t believe me. And that even if I was telling the truth, he didn’t care. That it was my problem to deal with, not his. He said his problem was that I’d wasted too much of his time already. And that I wasn’t wasting any more. He told me to get the hell out of his office.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“I swear, Mike. It’s the first time in my life I felt the urge to kill somebody. I wanted to climb over that desk and strangle him with my bare hands. Just to squeeze the life out of him, merely for the joy of doing it.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Jail does that to you, man. And prison is so much worse. It takes people who are good but who have a problem. Say drug abuse, for example. They’re hooked on dope, but otherwise they’re good people. If they could be broken of their habit, they’d go back to being a contributing member of society.
“But this environment changes them. Instead of teaching them to get off the drugs it teaches them how to be better at hiding it. How to be a better thief, so they can buy more of it. How to seek vengeance against those who would take the drugs away from them.
“Mostly it makes them mean. They go to jail a normal person with a problem, and come out hardened and mean and hating the world. Their families no longer want anything to do with them. They can’t find work because they’re branded a convicted felon. Soc
iety has pretty much thrown them away, so they return to the only people who will accept them. The dealers who sold them the poison to begin with and other addicts. Because dealers and addicts will accept anybody.”
It was obvious Mike was talking from personal experience.
He, or someone close to him, was one of those wasted souls society no longer thought worth its time. A throwaway human being.
But Tony couldn’t dwell on society’s problems. Nor of Mike’s. He had his own issues to deal with.
He also had forty two more hours in this walled hell, worrying about his wife and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
The forty two hours, it turned out, went by relatively smoothly. Mostly because Tony, having not slept at all the night he was arrested, and not at all the following night from worry, was totally exhausted.
When he was finally able to sleep he slept in small doses, having to get up and stand at the door every three hours for mandatory head count.
He also had to get up and go to chow three times a day, although he only ate enough to sustain himself.
The slop they served alone was enough to convince him he never wanted to spend another night in jail.
When he wasn’t at chow or doing counts he was mostly sleeping.
And every con knows the secret to doing time without going insane is to sleep away as many hours as one can.
Oh, it wasn’t a restful sleep. He still tossed and turned and worried and wept.
And he dreamed.
Mostly of Hannah, and where she might be. What her captors might be doing to her. What she might be doing to try to get away.
By now there was no doubt in his mind she’d been kidnapped by the government.
They hadn’t argued. There had been a couple of times in their relationship when she might have walked out on him because of the stupid things he’d said or done.
But the past few days, when they’d been together non-stop twenty four seven working on their data project they’d gotten along famously.
She’d had absolutely no reason to be angry with him. No reason to leave him.
No reason to even get out and take a walk, for that matter.
No, if she’d left the motel room of her own volition, she’d have returned to find Tony and the car gone. She’d have noticed the computer towers gone as well, and would have known something bad had happened. She’d have called the cops, just as he had, and the cops would have told her he’d been arrested.
The Yellowstone Event: Book 1: Fire in the Sky Page 11