Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
On Saturday afternoon, Solomon’s waiting outside my cell. Through the tray trap, he calls in, “Library time!” Suddenly, he’s Mr. Prompt.
A few minutes later, we’re in the main building, climbing the stairs to the third floor. “What did you do anyway?” he asks. I know what he wants to know, but I don’t respond. Make him say it, which he does. “What are you in prison for?”
“Yeah, look. That’s one of the unspoken rules around here. You don’t ask another inmate shit like that. Guys talk around here and everyone’s charges are public record anyway. But it’s not cool to confront someone face-to-face about what he’s doing time for.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I guess it’s the trust thing. At this place, you don’t want to volunteer too much about yourself because it could be used against you. And I guess because… if you’ve done something you’re ashamed of, it’s painful to have to verbalize it.”
“Oh. Did you kill someone? Is that it?”
Jesus Christ! Did he not just fucking hear me?
I start taking stairs two at a time. Put some space between me and this annoying little shit.
Once I’ve shown him where the library is, I’m going to keep my distance.
At the top of the stairs, I take a left and he follows me down the corridor. “Hey, wait up,” he says. I walk faster.
The library is in chaos: empty metal bookshelves huddled together in the middle of the large room, books stacked all over the floor.
Lester Wiggins is the only constant; he’s sitting in his wheelchair by the window, reading as usual with his index finger and his moving lips.
I don’t see Mrs. Millman, but her right-hand man, Javier, is up on a stepladder repainting the side wall.
“Library’s closed!” he calls, not bothering to look over his shoulder.
“You can check books out, but you can’t stay. ”
I tell Solomon to have a quick look around. Then I walk over to Javier. “Hey, Picasso. What would you call that color? Caterpillar-gut green?”
Javi turns around, chuckling. “Hey there, hombre. How’s it goin’?”
“It’s going.” Like most of the guys here, I’ve gotten good at saying something that says nothing. “How about you?”
“No complaints,” he says. He comes down from the stepladder and walks toward me. We do the bro greeting: half handshake, half chest bump. “We ain’t seen you at the Sunday meeting last couple of weeks. Why’s that?”
“No good excuse,” I tell him. “But I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Gonna hold you to that. It’s like they say, man. Meeting makers make it.”
As we catch up a little, I scan the room, looking for Mrs. Millman. “Where’s the Queen Mother?” I ask.
Her head pops up from behind the circulation desk. “The Queen Mother’s over here on her hands and knees, trying to pry dried gum off the linoleum with a single-edge razor blade,” she says. “Oh, hi, Corby. I didn’t realize that was you. What have you been up to?”
“Just livin’ the dream,” I tell her. “This place get hit by a tornado or something?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” she says. “Give me a hand, will you?” She’s not exactly a featherweight, but I manage to pull her up onto her feet. She tosses the razor blade she’s been using onto the counter and pulls me in for a hug.
“Wow, initiating physical contact with an inmate? That’s the kind of infraction that could land you in seg.”
She gives me a “pfft” and surveys her pulled-apart domain.
“We got a memo that there was going to be an extended lockdown this week—no movement around the compound for five to seven days. So I said to myself, rather than just sitting around here twiddling my thumbs, I’ll do some housecleaning.
Freshen things up. Rearrange the shelves, weed out the collection, take down those old posters and have Javier repaint the walls. ”
“I just hope you put those posters back,” I tell her. “Because having Yoda, Weird Al, and the Dukes of Hazzard encourage convicted felons to read is truly inspirational.”
“Such a wise guy,” she says. “And for the record, that Dukes of Hazzard poster wasn’t for you guys. It was for me. Luke and Bo could squeeze into tight jeans like nobody’s business.”
I laugh. “Your husband know you’ve got a thing for those two?”
“What Howie doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she says.
“Anyway, right after I had pulled everything apart in here, they sent out a second memo about the lockdown being postponed because of the lieutenant governor’s visit.
When the VIP entourage came through with Warden Rickerby, I could see she wasn’t happy with the condition of this place, but tough titty.
I’ve outlasted eight other wardens and I’ll probably wave goodbye to her before very long, too. ”
It’s amazing, really: Mrs. Millman’s ability to stay upbeat.
I see she’s wearing a cheap-looking wig now, but her color’s come back and so has her energy.
Cancer hasn’t defeated her and neither has the system.
Last time I was here, she was in the middle of a dustup with Deputy Warden Zabrowski.
He wanted her to take down the Buddhist prayer flags she’d tacked up behind the circulation desk, but those flags are still up there.
Solomon appears out of nowhere. Ignoring Mrs. Millman, he tells me he can’t find it. Mrs. M introduces herself and asks what he’s looking for.
“ Heretics of Dune ,” he says.
“Frank Herbert? We have a few of them in that series, but I’m not sure about that one.
You see those big hardcover books on the floor beneath the back window—the law books?
Our science fiction and fantasy collections are stacked just to the left of them.
You can go look there if you’d like or if you’d rather—”
Without waiting for her to finish, he makes a beeline toward where she’s directed him. “Friend of yours, Corby? How old is he, anyway?” Mrs. M asks.
“Eighteen, but he looks and acts a lot younger. And he’s my assignment, not my friend.”
“Oh?”
“We’re both on the grounds crew and I’m supposed to watch out for him. Make sure he does his work and that nobody antagonizes him. His name’s Solomon.”
She repeats the name and her eyes widen as it dawns on her.
“Is he the one who… the dogs?” When I nod, she winces.
Mrs. M and her husband foster greyhounds that travel up here from Florida.
“Well, no matter what he did, he’s still a kid,” she says.
“Why in the world would they put him at Yates?” She shakes her head.
Says he’s lucky he has me looking out for him.
“Only on the work crew,” I tell her.
“And at the library, apparently.”
“Yeah, well, this visit is a one-off.”
“Uh-huh.” Why’s she smiling?
When Solomon returns to the desk with a couple of books, Mrs. M asks him whether he found what he was looking for. “Nah. You’ve only got Dune, Dune Messiah , and Children of Dune . You should order Heretics of Dune .”
She hands him paper and pencil and says he should write down the title—that her budget for the year’s been spent, but sometimes she sees things at yard sales or buys them used at the Book Barn.
“Looks like you’ve found a few things to check out, though.
What have you got there? Ah, a George R.
R. Martin and Eragon . Did you know that the author started writing Eragon when he was only—”
“Fifteen. Yeah, I know. I already read it. They made a movie of it, but it sucked. The book’s better.” When she asks him whether he’s already read the George Martin book, too, he says yes.
Turning to me, Mrs. M says she heard some good news yesterday: DOC has finally okayed the library’s request for a computer.
“It’s a repurposed IBM Aptiva, they told me, and it comes with a keyboard, a mouse, and one of those old dot-matrix printers.
Javier says that, technology-wise, it’s an antique from the 1990s.
But at least it will have word processing, so you fellas won’t have to submit your court letters in longhand. ”
I tell her I already know the answer to this question, but any chance there will be internet access? She laughs and says I’m right, I already know the answer.
“Does it have games?” Solomon asks. I’m pretty sure he has no idea how primitive computer games were back in the day.
Mrs. M tells him she might be able to install a few games—“the old standbys like solitaire and… what’s the one my sons always used to play on our first computer?
The object was to aim a bouncing ball at a brick wall and destroy the rows of bricks until—”
I blurt it out. “ Breakout !”
“Oh, yes. Breakout . I played it myself a few times, but I was terrible at it.”
Solomon says, “Yeah, but I mean good games like Sniper Elite or Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance or Mortal Kombat: Armageddon .”
“I don’t think those would pass inspection around here, my friend,” she says.
“And the amount of storage space those games would need would probably make that poor old IBM Aptiva explode,” I joke. Solomon doesn’t seem to think this is funny.
Mrs. M puts Solomon in the system, checks out his books, and places a Milky Way mini on the top one. I tell her I’m going to say hello to Lester before we take off. But when I go over there, his book’s fallen to the floor and he’s asleep. His breath is whistling in and out.