Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
Manny’s up on his bunk, looking so sorry for me, I feel like punching him in the head. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“I heard you were in seg. How you doing?”
“I’m great, Manny. Just great.” How the fuck does he think I’m doing? “What else have you heard?”
“That when they said you weren’t getting out, you flipped out and assaulted an officer. Why wouldn’t they discharge you?”
I have to look away from his pity. “Dirty urine.”
“You?” He shakes his head. “That’s bullshit.”
It’s not, but let him think whatever the fuck he wants to.
Why didn’t you tell him? There are other kinds of medications.
This is on you. The truth fills me with such self-loathing that I grab the one chair in our cell and whack it, hard as I can, against the locked door.
Do it again and again and again until the plastic cracks down the middle.
Manny’s down from his bunk, pulling at me and shouting for me to stop it.
“You just got out of seg! If they hear this racket down at the desk, they could come down here and haul your ass back there!” When I throw the chair against the wall, it ricochets back at me, clipping my left ear.
Manny puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me to calm down.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I warn him. Pulling away, I grab the wastebasket and hurl it at the back window, sending crap all over the place.
Spotting the empty storage box under my bunk, I yank it out and kick it so hard that I twist my ankle, screaming out in pain. Manny stands there and says nothing.
As soon as my adrenaline spike subsides and my breathing slows down, the exhaustion kicks back in. I flop face-first onto my sour-smelling, sheetless mattress and fall asleep.…
When I open my eyes again and lift my head, I ask Manny how long I was out. “A few hours,” he says. “You were flailing around at first and arguing with someone, but it came out like gibberish. I figured you might be cold so I covered you up. You calmed down after that.”
“Thanks. Isn’t this the blanket your sister sent you?”
“Well, Amazon sent it, but she ordered it. Yeah, last Christmas.”
I notice that the shit I’d strewn all over the floor is back in the wastebasket and the cracked chair is upright. I apologize about the tantrum and for wrecking the chair.
“Three days in the hole when you thought you were getting out of here? No wonder you went nuts.”
Pitching that fit wasn’t about being in seg; it was about how my self-sabotage has landed me back here with him for who knows how long. But let him assume what he wants. I stand, fold his blanket, and put it back on his bunk.
“Thanks for the loan,” I tell him. “Sorry about the chair.”
“That’s okay. You can still sit on it if you’re careful, Corbs. Leans to the side a little but it should be okay for a while. Hey, did you hear about Anselmo and Piccardy?”
I tell him I heard they got fired but I don’t know the details.
“They were being investigated for months by a CO from another facility who was working undercover.”
“No shit. I’m surprised the dep warden didn’t intervene and save his nephew’s ass like before.”
“I heard he tried to, but the warden wasn’t having it.
The mole had uncovered too much of their shit: physical abuse, psychological abuse.
They’d target the weak ones and threaten them with what would happen if they said anything.
Like when they found out you’d complained about Piccardy pepper-spraying those turkeys.
They gave you a hard time, too, but you got off easy. ”
I flash back to what happened in that storage room.
You enjoy that, Ledbetter? You want some more?
… Better not make threats you can’t prove, baby killer.
You see anyone who can back up your bullshit?
And what happened because of that assault and the threats they made if I were to say anything.
Benzodiazepines aren’t magic, but they can help to take the edge off, and the effect kicks in pretty quickly. …
“They got hit with sexual harassment charges, too,” Manny says. “Making comments to the female guards about their sex lives, posting dick pics inside one woman’s locker.” When I ask him whether anyone knows who the mole was, he says, “Yeah. It was Goolsby.”
“Seriously? Man, he had me fooled. Fooled those two dumb fucks, too. They treated him like he was their newbie-in-training.”
“I heard Goolsby wasn’t even his real name. They transferred him the hell out of here as soon as he blew the whistle in case there was retaliation. You know what happens to snitches at this place.”
“Yeah, but I have the feeling there was no love lost between them and most of the other guards.” And from now on, try to remember who’s in charge around here and who isn’t.
“I tell you one thing, though. If those two get convicted and end up having to do time, I hope they send them here. They’ll get what’s coming to them, compliments of all the guys they’ve fucked with in one way or another. I’d join that team myself.”
I get up and hobble over to the toilet to take a leak.
My ankle’s aching and swollen from when I was kicking my storage box.
Manny notices and gets me a couple of Tylenol from his stash.
I tell him I lucked out when it comes to cellmates and it makes him smile.
“Fuck, yeah,” he says. He opens his mouth to say something else, then closes it again.
I tell him to spit it out, whatever it is.
“No, I’m just really sorry about what happened to you, Corbs. ”
“It didn’t happen to me. I made it happen. When they told me I wasn’t getting out, I shouldn’t have started swinging.”
“Yeah, well, don’t beat yourself up too much. Half the guys here would have reacted the same way if they had the rug pulled out from under them like you did.”
“But how many would have broken a CO’s nose?”
“Well, there’s that,” he says.
“I just wish I knew how my family’s going to react when I try to explain what happened.
” Pointing to our back window, I tell him I saw them standing in the snowy lot, waiting for me.
“I don’t know if someone went out in the cold to tell them I wasn’t getting released or if they finally just gave up and left. ”
“They? I thought just your mom was picking you up. Who else was there?”
“Emily and our daughter. I guess they planned it as a surprise.”
“Oh Jesus, Corby,” he says. He goes to the back window and looks out, shaking his head.
Then he pivots. “Hey, before I forget, I got something of yours.” He opens his storage box, rummages around in there, and takes out a piece of paper folded up like a packet.
“I didn’t know if you meant to take these when you packed your stuff.
They were both under your bunk. I figured I wasn’t going to see you anytime soon, but I didn’t want to just throw them out. ”
When I unfold the paper, my river stone falls out. He’d wrapped it in the other thing I’d left behind: the printout of that poem Mrs. M gave me—the one about the Bruegel painting that had triggered my idea for my mural. I don’t care about the poem, but I thank him for not tossing out the stone.
“No problem,” he says. “I figured from the way you were always holding it that it meant something to you.”
I wrap my hand around the stone and squeeze.
“Means hope,” I tell him. “Back when I was on the grounds crew? I left my post one time and snuck down to the river out back. I used to listen to it on nights when it got quiet in here, but I wanted to see it, too. Watch it flow past this place. And before I snuck back, I pulled this little stone out of the water as a keepsake or whatever—a promise that one day I’d move past this place, too. ”
As he looks at me and listens, I can see that something’s just dawned on him. “Hey, wait a minute,” he says. “You know how, in your mural, you painted some of us floating down the river? Was that supposed to be like an escape or something?”
“More like a liberation,” I tell him. “I set you guys free.”
From the corridor, CO Kratt calls us to supper chow.
My stomach’s growling, but I can’t handle going over there, being glared at by the guards and getting the third degree from whoever’s at my table.
Not to mention having to choke down the prison slop I thought I was done with.
Meanwhile, that other Corby is probably sitting down to a steak right now, medium rare, with sauteed mushrooms and my mom’s scalloped potatoes.
I need to call her tonight to let her know I haven’t had a full-blown relapse if that’s what she thinks.
I also want her to know that I’m owning up to my mistake.
Mistakes , plural. Letting that doc prescribe me Klonopin and throwing that punch.
Poor Mom. This has got to be hard on her.
And Emily, too. I wonder how she explained it to Maisie when I was a no-show.
I need to assure her that even though I let my guard down about the benzos, I’m committed to my recovery and plan on keeping that commitment when I’m finally out of here.
When Manny gets back from eating, he asks whether I mind him turning on the TV so he can catch the news. “Have you heard about that virus that’s going around?”
“The one in China? I heard something about it last week, but it’s not like you can watch TV in seg. Why? What’s going on?”
“It’s spreading and it’s killing people,” he says. “A thousand deaths worldwide and now there’s a big breakout in Italy and another one on some cruise ship.”
“But nothing here in the States, right?”
“Wrong. There are fifteen confirmed cases, mostly out on the West Coast.”
The TV’s all staticky, but when Manny fiddles with the coat hanger antenna, a press conference comes into focus. Some old guy in a lab coat is at the podium. Trump, Pence, and several sober-looking expert types are standing behind him. I ask Manny to turn up the volume.