Chapter Thirty-Two #3
Back in our cell, I draw a rough layout of the composition on paper.
Make a tentative list of who and what I might want to place in this past-and-future landscape: Lester Wiggins on the riverbank reading a book, Wequonnoc people hunting and tending to their crops before the white settlers arrived, a deer and her fawn grazing in a meadow, a blue heron flying up from the river.
I’ve borrowed a set of colored pencils from Mrs. M, so I add blue sky, green vegetation, brown for the river.
If Zabrowski asks where the buildings are, I’ll make up some bullshit answer.
Try to talk over his head so that, hopefully, he won’t be able to come up with any reason to object.
Four days after I submit my design, I’m called to the library.
The deputy warden is there and so is Warden Rickerby.
Mrs. Millman tells them how excited she is that, pending their approval, the library will soon display original inmate-generated art.
Then she knocks me for a loop. “Mr. Ledbetter and I have discussed the importance of making sure the mural makes no political statements that some could find offensive. Now, of course it’s his right to exercise his freedom of speech through his art, but he’s agreed to eliminate the Pride flag and the phrase ‘End Police Violence’ from the mural. To his credit, he was happy to comply.”
What? I never even thought to include those things, but I’m following Mrs. M’s lead. “Good,” Zabrowski says. “We don’t want to promote any of that stuff.”
Mrs. Millman asks whether either of them has any questions for the artist. “I do,” Zabrowski says. “If this is supposed to be Yates CI property, where are the buildings?”
“Well, I suppose you’ve heard about the space-time continuum,” I say.
“The three dimensions of space—length, width, and height—plus time, the fourth dimension? Physics 101, right?” The warden looks hesitantly at her deputy and nods.
Zabrowski nods back. “So if you’ve studied Einstein’s theory of relativity, you probably remember that he thought time travel might be possible, okay?
That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Assuming it would be possible to travel both back to the past and forward into the future, my intention is to illustrate that there was a time when the buildings here hadn’t yet existed and there will most likely be a time in the distant future when they no longer exist. Get it? ”
There’s a long five seconds of uncomfortable silence.
“Brilliant!” Warden Rickerby suddenly declares.
Zabrowski nods in agreement. When Mrs. M asks whether we can assume my design has their approval, the warden says, “Absolutely! And maybe when the mural is finished, we can get the press to do a story on it. It would be nice to get some positive publicity for a change.” With that, she claims she and her deputy have another meeting to get to and they exit the library as quickly as possible.
“You jolted me for a minute, Mrs. M, when you started talking about Pride flags and ‘End police violence.’ What was that about?”
“It’s an old trick I learned from my community service days back in the seventies.
When you’re negotiating with the opposition, you start off by making a concession, real or imagined.
It puts them at ease so that they think you’re being totally reasonable.
But what about you? The space-time continuum?
Einstein’s theory of relativity?” She chuckles.
“How in the world did you come up with that stuff?”
“There’s a new guy on our tier,” I tell her. “A physics professor who’s here for embezzling from his college. I just asked him if he thought time travel could be a thing and let him ramble. I didn’t really understand much of what I was saying just now, but I think they bought it.”
“Oh, they definitely did. They think it’s a big secret that they’re dumb as rocks, the two of them.
Don’t quote me.” I tell her my lips are sealed.
“Now then,” she says. “When I got up this morning, Howie was already downstairs in the kitchen baking cookies. Could I interest you in a snickerdoodle?”
I’m feeling pretty lifted when I head back to B Block.
The design’s been approved and I’m brainstorming all kinds of ideas about the mural.
But halfway to our building, I see two shadows approaching from behind.
“No big surprise. That kid was more fucked-up than a soup sandwich.” I recognize the voice; it’s Piccardy.
“Hey, Ledbetter. You hear the news about your little buddy?”
I keep walking; I’m not taking the bait.
“He hung himself.”
I turn and face him. Them. The two of them. “Solomon?”
“Bingo!” Piccardy says. “You gonna be the next hang-up?” They’re both smiling. I ask them where they heard this.
“Where’d we hear this, Officer Anselmo?” Piccardy asks. “Do you remember?”
“Can’t say that I do, Officer Piccardy. We heard it somewhere, though.”
“Yeah, somewhere. What a shame, huh? RIP Psycho Boy.”
They stop once they’ve delivered the message, but I keep walking. I’m short of breath, choked up and fighting tears. That poor kid never had a chance.
Counselor Jackson’s coming out of the building as I enter.
“Corby? You look upset,” she says. “Are you all right?” I ask her whether she’s heard about Solomon.
When she shakes her head, I tell her what I’ve just heard.
“Oh my God,” she says. She turns around and reenters the building with me.
“I have the number of the facility where he’s been in my office.
Let me see if I can find out what happened.
Who told you about this?” When I say it was Anselmo and Piccardy, she gives me a skeptical look and tells me to check in on my tier. She’ll let me know what she finds out.
I do what she says. Back in our cell, I’m relieved to find myself alone. I sit on my bunk, put my head down, and sob. Ten minutes later, I’m called up to the control desk. Jackson’s standing there, waiting. “False alarm,” she says. “It didn’t happen.”
I stare at her for several seconds, floored by the depth of their cruelty.
Then I wipe my eyes, thank her, and walk back down the corridor.
Those sick fucks have the upper hand for now, but I’ve got less than a year to go in here.
Maybe after I get out, I can find a way to blow the whistle.
Expose the kind of shit they’ve been pulling.
That would wipe the smiles off their faces.
With the mural project approved, I get to work in earnest. First, I superimpose a grid over the drawing I showed them, figuring it will be less overwhelming for me to think in terms of smaller squares than the mural’s overall expanse.
Mrs. Millman provides me with a stack of printer paper so that I can draw detailed studies of the humans and animals I want to include in the painting.
From there, I move on to the library’s blank wall and take a deep breath.
The wall is eight feet high and fifty-six feet wide.
It takes me a couple of hours to re-create the grid.
After that, I begin penciling in the details in each square.
That takes the rest of the week. I’m nervous just thinking about it, but on Monday, I’ll begin committing color to the wall.
When Emily accepts my call on Friday evening, I spend most of our ten minutes describing what the mural’s going to look like when it’s finished.
“You sound so upbeat,” she says. “I’m happy for you, Corby.
” When I ask her what her weekend plans are, she says just the usual chores.
“Oh, and I have company coming for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Oh yeah? What are you making?”
She says she’ll keep it simple: chicken parmesan, salad, garlic bread. “And I’ll probably pick up cannoli at Romano’s for dessert.”
“God, that sounds so good. Who’s coming over? Evan?”
“Yes. And Amber.”
“The one who teaches with you? Got jilted at the altar?”
“It didn’t exactly happen that way, but yes. I told Evan he should ask her out and so far, so good. This will be their third date.”
Does her voice sound a little sad or am I just imagining it does? I tell myself not to say it, but then I do. “You know, for a while, I wondered if you and Evan might be…”
There’s a pause on her end. Then she says, “Well, to tell you the truth, it was headed that way. But it wasn’t going to work, so…”
“So you fixed Amber up with him instead. Wow, that was nice of you.” I put my hand over the receiver so that my sigh of relief won’t be audible. “So what about Maisie? Is she going over to your mother’s?”
“No, she’s going to your mother’s,” Emily says. “Vicki’s taking her to see Frozen Two . Then Maisie’s sleeping over and they’re going to breakfast in the morning.”
“Nice,” I say. “Mom must be thrilled.”
Securus gives us the one-minute warning. “Well, good luck with your mural, Corby,” Emily says.
“And good luck with your dinner party. I wish I was having chicken parmesan and cannoli tomorrow. Put some in the freezer, will you? I’ll eat it after I get out.” She doesn’t respond. “It was a joke, Em. Okay, love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says. It sounds like she means it, but I tell myself not to read too much into it.
Walking back to our cell, I can’t help but wonder what “it was headed that way” means.
Were they sleeping together? Had they talked about him moving in?
And who pulled the plug, him or her? I know better than to ever ask these things.
I have to let it go. I’m just relieved that, whatever might have been happening, it’s not happening anymore.
Amber hasn’t been teaching that long, so she’s probably still in her twenties.
So good for you, Evan. You’re finally interested in someone your own age.
Mrs. Millman’s scavenger hunt for supplies has yielded a bonanza of paints, brushes, thinner, and other materials.
On Monday morning, I take a deep breath, squeeze an inch of acrylic paint out of a tube of cerulean, combine it with matte gel medium, and dip my brush into the mixture. I start with the sky.
Thirty-one days later, another month of my sentence has been served and the mural is finished.
Like the plowman in Bruegel’s painting, I’m in the foreground, wearing a red shirt and standing at the top of the steep rock ledge on the opposite side of the Wequonnoc river.
My back is to the viewer as I gaze at the scene below.
Yates prison no longer exists; I’ve banished the buildings and the security fencing that contains us.
The land has returned to its natural state of woods, fields, and streams that feed into the tea-colored river.
Cedars and sycamores, maples and elms grow in abundance.
In the crotch of a ginkgo tree at the river’s edge, a great blue heron tends to her nestlings as her mate flies toward them, a fish in his beak.
A mother turkey crosses an open field, her brood following behind her.
They’re unaware they’re being stalked by a pair of predators—two copperheads ready to pounce.
In my mural, a number of people have come to the river and its banks.
On one side, Lester Wiggins sits on a rock, fishing, perhaps about to catch that prize-winning rainbow trout.
On the opposite side, three Wequonnoc women till the soil as a hunter from their tribe emerges from the woods, carrying the bow he’s used to kill the young deer draped around his shoulders.
Mrs. Millman and Dr. Patel, both barefoot, wade into the water.
Dr. Patel holds up the bottom of her sari so that it won’t get wet.
Mrs. M waves to the men floating downriver on inner tubes.
Manny is one of them, Javier’s another, Angel’s a third.
Farther down from them, three young men skip stones that bounce along the river’s surface.
One boy wears a fedora, the other a hoodie.
Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin are alive again, two friends having fun.
The third boy is Solomon, no longer a loner but a buddy of theirs, too.
Near those three but farther back, Emily and Maisie stand on a path that travels alongside the Wequonnoc.
They gaze across the river and up, looking at me, seeing that I’m free but on the other side, atop the unscalable ledge.
And on the far-right side of the mural, as insignificantly placed as Icarus in the Bruegel painting, Niko, my butterfly boy, stands alone, an easy-to-miss figure with chrysalis-green skin.
From the top of his head, just-hatched monarchs rise to join the others in a kaleidoscope journeying south, a hundred orange and black wings against a cloudless blue sky.