The Four Stages Of Cruelty Part 5

Wallace said, "I sent you and MacKay in there because I thought you could be nonthreatening, because I wanted to keep the situational dynamics steady, not explode them."

Implying, somehow, that the old joker and the new broad were too absurd a threat to inflame a disturbance and simultaneously that everything subsequent had been our fault. Should I have waited until I was raped? I wanted to ask. I knew he would counter that no officer (meaning no male officer) should act preemptively because of a rape threat. But I also knew that was bulls.h.i.+t. There were male COs who walked the blocks in constant fear that the big bend-over choke hold waited just around the next corner.

Wearily I insisted that my record of physical encounters with inmates was normal. That I'd never been reported before. Unlike MacKay, I wanted to add, I didn't tase Hadley in the b.a.l.l.s and give them a squeeze for good measure. I am not the kind to stomp an inmate's guts out when they don't jump fast enough. I'd never dipped my finger in CA and jammed it under someone's eyelid when he was zip-cuffed. I'd never shoved a f.u.c.kstick up someone's a.s.s in a blind dissociation cell.

Instead, I ate it all, every bit of p.i.s.sed-off righteousness, and nodded.

I worked the next three days straight, through a haze of chaos and nerve-deadening exhaustion. The only sleep I got came a few hours at a time in the old barracks on the east field, behind what used to be the warden's house but now served as administration spillover. I slammed so many sliding steel doors I could feel the vibrations in the bones of my wrist. I yelled so many orders my throat went raw. I ran enough hallways in heavy gear to qualify for a marathon. We rousted inmates and dumped cells. We emptied tiers and filled them again. We delivered meals and meds and put up with the shouts of abuse. Just when you thought the calm had returned, something new happened and the shouting and the food throwing started all over again.

"It won't settle until after Christmas," Baumard, a veteran CO, told us. Baumard had the kind of bristly gray hair that was so accustomed to being buzzed short it probably didn't know how to grow long anymore. But he was also one of those COs of rare intelligence. He had made an unG.o.dly amount of money in the stock market in the late 1990s, but had chosen-actually chosen-to keep working rather than powerboat his way off into the sunset. When it came to most matters, including financial, we listened to him like he was Warren f.u.c.king Buffet. "All those family, spousal, and girlfriend visits lined up since Thanksgiving are f.u.c.ked because of the lockdown, and it's our fault," Baumard continued. "They'll be p.i.s.sed until January."

Too weary to be irate, we sat in the CO room the afternoon of Christmas Eve loosening vests and eating stale sandwiches from a lace-lined caterer's tray. I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, but Franklin walked out waving his hand and laughing about the toxic waste dump he'd left behind, courtesy of a week eating microwave burritos. The howls of offense from those closest to the escaping odor were enough to persuade me to hold my bladder.

At least our common misery reinforced our sometimes shaky solidarity. COs came in multiple shapes and forms. We had an ex-NFL football player and a surprising number of former schoolteachers. We had roofers and firefighters and retail security guards and ex-soldiers. We had men who loved ice fis.h.i.+ng and men who voted Democrat. We had those who were always broke and others who were always flush. We had women who were single and on the d.y.k.ey side, and women who were ripe and curvy from having kids. We could be as varied and unlikely, or as predictable and stereotypical, as the inmates themselves.

"Did you know Crowley was in art therapy?" a CO named Cutler asked, a nice enough fellow who was too out of shape and go-along-with-the-flow to get much respect from me. "All of this started just because someone didn't like someone else's drawing."

No one offered any explanations for why that would be so. I said nothing, though the guilt of my inaction around Josh's comic book was a constant throb in my temples. Others, with more energy, mumbled bitter feelings. Some touchy-feely program had contributed to our endangerment. As a CO, you just knew, on a moral level, that the softness was wrong.

A CO named Droune took up the common position. He cursed the weak sister who'd bolted across the yard and prevented a killing that might have solved many problems. The logic didn't hold, but that didn't seem to matter to Droune or anyone else. "That old son of a b.i.t.c.h, Brother Mike," he said, "ought to get his art licence revoked."

Baumard then gave Droune s.h.i.+t for letting a decrepit weak sister of the religious persuasion pull such a he-man boot stomping when Droune himself was such a floppy p.u.s.s.y. I didn't like Droune; his father and grandfather had been COs, and that made him a kind of third-generation idiot royalty. Baumard riding Droune was the only thing in a week to make me grin.

My good feeling lasted until I opened my locker. I dialed the combo and tugged. The lock snapped off. When I creaked open the door, I saw a drawing taped to the inside. The rush of embarra.s.sment caught me hard-maybe my tiredness, maybe my sense that they never gave me a f.u.c.king break no matter how hard I worked to ignore it. But instead of reacting, I forced my voice into that tone of a teacher in a room full of grade school students, and said, "I suppose this delivered itself?"

Josh again. A similar drawing to the one Brother Mike had shown me. This time the female barbarian had a sword in one hand and decapitated head in the other, a snake tattoo winding around her wrist. She was s.e.xy and saucy, hip thrust in exaggerated fas.h.i.+on to one side. She wore furs on her waist, high boots, and nothing on top, those well-endowed b.r.e.a.s.t.s with dark, l.u.s.ty, and, once more, remarkably upward-pointed nipples. My distinguished colleagues gathered around.

"Amazing how those things get around," Cutler said.

"You mind if I make a few copies?" Droune asked, the twitters about to erupt.

I had no doubt they'd already xeroxed the s.h.i.+t out of it.

"Maybe blow it up, frame it, put it on the living-room wall," Franklin suggested.

Then: "Howdy, Radar," Baumard said in a loud voice. Everyone knew it was a warning, that Michael Ruddik had just walked into the room, meaning there was a rat on deck. Instantly I felt the dynamics of the school yard play out in predictable fas.h.i.+on. From being the target, I became another bystander. That didn't mean I sympathized with the new victim. Instead, I shared the group's disdain as much as I felt personal relief. On the surface, there was nothing about Ruddik to inspire any particular loathing. He was early forties, experienced, tall, athletic, even good-looking in a dark-haired, brooding kind of way. But he was widely suspected to be the resident Secret Sam, a member of the corrections staff covertly a.s.signed to investigate inmate complaints against COs. Every inst.i.tution had one or more-sometimes FBI, sometimes DEA-someone watching the watchers. Coming off my recent meeting with Keeper Wallace about my actions involving Shawn Hadley, Ruddik was the last person in the world I wanted to run into. I shoved the drawing into my locker and got out my jacket.

"Check this out," Franklin said. Ruddik ignored him.

"Oh, come on, Radar," Droune said. "Don't be such a prude. That's a work of G.o.dd.a.m.n art."

Ruddik, who hadn't said anything, merely got a pair of rubber gloves from his locker and gave Droune a mock salute. Then he left.

I was about to do the same, given the freedom to go home for that most silent of nights, watch some taped talk show, and pa.s.s out in front of the TV, when Baumard asked me if I'd work his bubble s.h.i.+ft for him so he could read his grandkids The Night Before Christmas.

9.

How could I say no? Single me. No children of my own. No brothers or sisters with cute nephews and nieces. No parent to look in on. No husband or boyfriend to fear offending. No presents to buy. I needed the cash. A bubble s.h.i.+ft was as good as a night on the couch, except you got paid for it. With all the inmates snug in their cells and a complete lockdown enforced, there would be little need to pay attention. Safe, all-seeing, and powerful, requiring no physical exertion. If you kept one ear c.o.c.ked for the radio and your partner kept his mouth shut, sweet dreams awaited.

So I said yes-before I learned that Cutler would be my s.h.i.+ft partner, a man who couldn't keep his mouth shut for more than two minutes at a stretch.

Still, when we settled in for the duty after a dinner of pizza and chicken wings ordered in special by Baumard, even Cutler seemed subdued by the night and the long s.h.i.+fts leading up to it. The floor of the bubble was raised inside, and you felt like you were floating above the ground. The caged and gla.s.sed windows ran a complete circle around and above you, giving you full vision of the main hub. At night you kept the lights dim. On the console desk you had black-and-white cameras directed at fixed spots in the hub's major access points and the corridors of each wing. The grainy screens showed concrete, stone, and steel bars, like images of s.h.i.+pwrecks in deep water.

"Wish I was home," Cutler said, letting out a yawn. "Wish I was pretty much anywhere but here."

I rogered that and tried to keep my eyes from falling shut. The chicken wings, so tasty in the moment, had made me feel bloated and drugged. Soon Cutler was sleeping, his head thrown back, his bulbous neck doing something tuba-like to the snores that bellowed forth.

Naturally, given such peace and quiet on such a blessed night, I succ.u.mbed to dark thoughts. My life at Ditmarsh had the taste if not the quality of failure. The job was a trap born of a momentous decision in my mid-thirties to enlist in the military before it was too late. But in my glorious 187 days of boots on ground in Iraq, all I did was live on a base, guard trucks, and feel grimy and sunstroked. The CO bit had not been in the plans. As soon I returned home, I looked into law enforcement, but there was nothing local going on. Then my father got sick. Despite feeling resentful about the situation that put me in, I took a job with the state corrections service to stay near at hand, and I ended up at the oldest penitentiary in the system, where none of the teachings and tactics I learned at the six-week corrections academy training course seemed to matter. The cliche of prison guard life was for real. I felt as if I too were doing time. My life outside was pared down, my belongings, my relations.h.i.+ps, my routine all simplified. In Iraq I'd thought about friends and relatives all the time, wrote letters, sent intense feelings through e-mails, pictures, jokes. After my first year at Ditmarsh I stopped working so hard at keeping people near. And n.o.body seemed to notice.

I sat and counted the reasons I wished I had said no to Baumard's s.h.i.+ft. Then I saw the sign.

In the middle of the bubble was a hatch where the floor opened up, and under it was a stone staircase going down to the armaments room below, and below that to the sealed-off dissociation holding cells we called the City. Above the door, on the wall, was an old fallout shelter sign: two yellow triangles on the bottom, one on the top within a circle. Except someone with a sense of humor had unriveted the sign from the wall and secured it upside down, like a distress signal, and scrawled the letters NOYFB beneath, like a Latin expression on some crest. NOYFB meant "none of your f.u.c.king business," and it was typical CO machismo. When I saw the mark in Crowley's comic book, I'd felt some vague recognition, but it was not until I was leaning back in my chair at the console deck and staring at the upside-down fallout shelter sign that I made the connection. Good G.o.d, I thought. How had that sign ended up in the drawing of an inmate?

It wasn't my job. None of my f.u.c.king business. And still I rose from the chair, gently, so as not to disturb Cutler, and walked over to the hatch.

Once, it had seemed like a juvenile prank, but the fallout shelter sign was ominous to me now, as though the menacing face were guarding the entrance to something wrong. The most common reason to descend the hatch stairs was to check the armaments or urinate in a corner, an unlikely act for me. We stored weapons down there along with a.s.sorted tools like fire hoses and canisters of chemical agent. Off the armaments room were four brick-sealed alcoves. Once upon a time, those alcoves were the beginnings of tunnels that led to other buildings within the complex, a means of escaping in case of dire emergency, but they were closed now, and anyone stuck in the bubble during a major disturbance would be holed up until the cavalry arrived.

Below the armaments room was the City. The old dissociation unit had cells so small and dark and inhumane that after a history of bad incidents and suicides and accidental slips, the door had been finally closed for good. I'd never been down there. The welding had taken place a few years before my time. The warden declared that sealing off the City was a gesture symbolizing the beginning of a new era. The old-timers were not happy about losing the best threat they'd ever possessed. The new dissociation range was like a stay at a Holiday Inn by comparison.

I felt gravity itself pulling me down. I would merely look, duck down quickly, and make sure the door to the City was still sealed shut. I gripped Cutler's damp shoulder until he blinked.

"Sorry," I said, guilty for stirring him. "I'm going down below. Something's not right."

He reached for his baton and rubbed his eyes to wake himself up.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "I'll be right back. I just want you to know where I've gone."

Before I descended the stairs of the hatch, I wanted someone to know where I was going.

The armaments room felt completely cut off from the world above, the bricked-up alcoves like four blinded eyes. The staircase to the City below was behind a heavy wooden door in the west wall, which was blocked by crates. A good sign, I thought as I heaved them to one side. There was a key hanging on a hook on the wall above it. Not so long ago, jailers had carried rings of such keys. The old padlock was as heavy as a cannonball. The lock opened, and I pulled the doors back.

"Everything okay?" Cutler called down. I could still see his shape in the entrance above me.

"Yes," I said. "I think it's all fine." Hoping it so.

The air that lifted up to me was mildewy and cold. I shone my flashlight on the wet walls and the narrow rounded steps. It was a steep walk down, and I had to lean back to avoid hitting my head. When I reached the bottom and came to the second door, I saw the propane canister on the ground. They just left the G.o.dd.a.m.n blowtorch right there. I felt my anxiety soar. A bar had been fitted back into place to keep the door locked from the outside.

The worst feeling in the world came over me.

"The lock's been cut," I shouted.

"What?" I heard.

Cutler did not come down. I should have turned back. This was all the evidence I needed to get the Keeper down here. But I felt laden with obligation and amped by the need to know, a desire to see what I had discovered. The door was thick and sodden. I could smell a thin odor of p.i.s.s in the cold air behind it. The sounds changed and became less m.u.f.fled as the world opened up into an expansive darkness. I heard something move, probably a rat, and stamped my foot and shouted to scare it off. The silence returned, but I could no longer believe it was an empty silence. "Crowley?" I called. My voice was deadened by the thickness of the stone. Before me was a pitch-black hallway. s.h.i.+ning my flashlight along the floor, I saw angled shapes like craggy rocks and realized that the entire hallway was cluttered with garbage. I made out broken computer terminals, upturned boxes of files, a weight-lifting bench, a metal bookshelf on its side. It was as though I'd stumbled on an abandoned warehouse or a flood-decimated building. The jutting rock created more shadows along the walls. The right wall was rough-hewn, while on the left I saw a row of doors with little s.p.a.ce between them. My breath came rapidly, and I tried not to imagine larger shapes in the darkness flitting off whenever I moved my flashlight beam away. Some of the doors were shut; others were angled out of their rooms in disordered fas.h.i.+on like a series of unmade beds. I moved an inch forward and stopped. Anything could be down there. It would be better if I checked each cell in turn.

Opening the first door and looking in, I saw that the cell inside was barely long enough for a cot. Again, the room was filled with scattered garbage-a broken riot s.h.i.+eld, an old cafeteria table. In the corner of the floor I saw a small, irregular hole with two raised stone rectangles straddling it. Rats came up through those sewer lines, I figured, probably had crept up even in the days when men slept inside. What a place to put someone. I shone my light on the walls within and saw graffiti scratched into the stone. I told myself it had been there for decades.

"Crowley?" I called again, irrationally, and part of me believed he might emerge from the darkness, blinded by the flashlight, babbling incoherently.

The second and third rooms were cluttered with garbage, too, their walls covered in more graffiti scrawls. By the time I got to the fifth room, I couldn't take my eyes off the shape ahead of me.

I wanted to run back to Cutler, to emerge from the darkness with a heavy gasp, as though I'd been underwater. But I also felt the need to see. There was nothing simple about that urge, however. It feathered into multiple threads-a desire to show myself strong and overcome the worst possible fright; an indecent, voyeuristic need that seemed almost p.o.r.nographic in its insistence; and finally, a tender horror, a grief for human plight. Down here, in the clutter, the sour illness of cruelty. Nothing could be more awful.

His heaviness weighed the door down. I talked myself calm as I reached forward and pulled the door back gently, though my self-control was thin. Then my mouth was filled with saliva, my breath came in short, rapid intakes, and I struggled to see clearly.

The body was naked, suspended from the top of the door, jutted forward as if poised in mid-flight. There was a crusted paste all over his face and neck. The cast on his broken arm was gone, the unraveled chalky cloth strewn around him. He'd used some of that cloth to make the noose. It ate into his neck like an amputee's blood-soaked bandage. His knees were bent, and he had only to straighten his legs in order to rescue himself. His toes dangled. He was much smaller than he'd seemed in real life.

"Oh, Christ," I moaned, and realized that I'd been saying it over and over. I wanted to live my whole life without ever seeing such a thing. But it was too late, and I knew the smell and sight of Crowley would smother me forever.

I backed away, stumbling over a broken chair, the panic lifting me up. I struggled to grasp onto a single clear thought, and I shone my light around, paranoid again that there might be someone else inside one of the rooms I'd skipped. It occurred to me then, with all the horror I'd ever felt, that Cutler could slip the bar through the door as easily as an executioner slips a needle into an intravenous line, and I would be lost in here, too, disappeared forever, a joke among COs for years to come. I tried to calm myself, turn my back on poor Jon Crowley, and stride down the hallway, but then I was running, stumbling, teeth rattling in my mouth.

My light poured over the walls, the drawings different to me now. He must have used his cast, the chalk from the plaster, part of me realized-or did I figure that out later? Each cell room contained its own madness, a bewildering collage of images. At the top of the stairs I saw a last word, more hastily scrawled than the others and much larger, as if Crowley had stood there before the door and sc.r.a.ped the chalk up and down, losing hope: "DIG." Was it a command or a kind of pleading? I couldn't process what it meant, but I envisioned corpses, maggot-eaten bodies, flies swarming over an open grave. I slipped as I scrambled up the wet steps, fell so hard on my s.h.i.+ns and elbow that my teeth clacked together, and crawled out of the hole and into the armaments room. Only then, when I was safely out, did I yell for Cutler.

Hours later, after the warden and the a.s.sistant wardens and all four of the keepers and half the senior COs and two Pen Squad lieutenants had been through, Wallace asked me whether I was all right. I didn't feel all right. My hands trembled slightly, and though I had moments where I considered myself extraordinarily sharp and lucid, there were dead spots, too, when my focus was utterly inert. The smell was in my nostrils, and I couldn't get the grip of the memory out of my brain. I saw the graffiti like some viral insanity infecting the stones, spreading outward, threatening to cover every brick and archway in the world above. Wallace mentioned the stain on my s.h.i.+n. I reached down and felt the pain, lifted my stuck pants, and saw the gouge out of my skin. He told me to go to the hospital ward and see to it, then go home, write my reports tomorrow.

I checked my watch. It was three in the morning. I did not want to walk through the tunnel to get to the hospital. I never wanted to walk through a tunnel again.

Outside, the sky was black. The air was sticky with cold. When I reached the hospital wing, I huddled to stop the s.h.i.+vering. It finally calmed down, and I proceeded around the corner and met eyes with the CO at the desk. He wanted to know what was going on, whether it was true they'd found Crowley. I muttered yes and pushed through the door. He asked me if I was all right, and I didn't answer.

The hallway was dim. I still had my flashlight on my belt. I pulled it out and shone it along the walls, intolerant of any pools of darkness. I could hear the breathing of those men in the utter silence. My steps echoed. I stopped before the infirmary cell where Jon Crowley had lived in endless purgatory while his busted arm healed. The steel sink and toilet. The empty cot with the single sheet. I remembered the smirk that had greeted me the last time I looked in, and the emptiness of expression in the dead face I'd seen an hour before.

I could sense Josh in the next cell, and I moved in front of his door. In that moment, all my anger toward him surged, my rage like a knife that ripped in a ragged line through the air, swinging out to hit something soft and vulnerable. His drawings of me p.i.s.sed me off. What he'd done to his girlfriend ate at my stomach. And yet, in the lottery of life and death, he was protected from harm. I didn't know how to justify such random outcomes, that some men could be dragged down into the earth and torn apart while others got watched over by guardian keepers. I shone the light into his room and caught his face where he lay on the bunk, his eyes open, as if knowing with a preternatural instinct that someone outside the door was thinking about him, the expression pathetic, anxious, wary. He had said that he and Crowley were close. Well, let him hear the truth now.

"Your friend's a wind chime," I hissed through the grate, and stumbled on, seeking out a doc.

Josh lay on the bed and wondered if he'd heard right. He knew it was news about Crowley. He heard it as a tender kind of caring, a bit of human compa.s.sion, even an overture of mutual need. He missed his friend terribly. He'd been worried and anxious since the fight in the yard, frightened that he hadn't done enough to help. Now he had some news. Crowley was a wind chime, he thought, and let the words tap lightly through his brain, contemplating their poetic mystery, wondering what they meant. The answer, when it came, was simple. All rumors of escape or relocation had to be true. Crowley was gone, free somewhere. The wind blowing him about. He was a poem. A note hanging in the air. There was nothing more peaceful than sitting outside on a porch in the warm summer evening listening to the quiet tones of a wind chime.

When he woke up an hour or so later, heart knocking, he understood the real meaning of the dream. Not free. Not released. But dangling in a breeze. A hanging man.

STAGE II.

10.

When he woke, Josh was so flattened by the endless depths of unconsciousness that he was bewildered to find himself in Ditmarsh.

Then he remembered the news about Crowley and felt sick to his stomach, wondering what it had been like for him when it happened. Had he been very afraid? Had he known what was coming? Josh had hours to think about it.

During that long morning, despite the fact that it was Christmas, no one was allowed out of his cage. Nothing got delivered. At one point the hallway pounded with panic, army boots stomping by at a hard run, a door slamming against the wall, and a voice shouting for a doctor. In between there were long, empty oceans of indifferent silence. He wished the entire Christmas season to be over. He thought about his mom and ached with emptiness. He considered the peace that might have been possible if he'd never been born.

That afternoon, he was told to distribute meal trays in the ward. It was the first time the COs had asked him to do anything. The doors got unlocked. Able-bodied and compliant, Josh moved awkwardly and hesitantly down the hallway, unaccustomed to staring into so many homes. Most of the regular long-termers were docile on bug juice. They sat on the edge of their bunks, rocking back and forth, or paced their drums waving away unseen flies. A few were eager for chatter or news, though he had nothing to offer. The one with no face needed to be fed, so Josh set up a tray on the edge of the bunk and filled a spoon. When the spoon nudged the man's mouth, he ate mechanically. Josh fed him until the mouth stopped opening, and then he wiped the warped rivulets of healed flesh clean, afraid the nubbed hands might reach up and touch him.

By the time he got to the intensive care wing, he was tired of being free of his own cage and wanted to leave the trays on the chrome table outside, but a male nurse, overworked and weary, told him to finish the job. The room was a cavern with a dingy, antiseptic chill. The walls had been plastered until the edges were smooth and then painted a dull battles.h.i.+p gray. The ceiling shot twenty feet above to where the hanging fluorescent lights gave off a weak glow. The beds were in alcoves, the entrances arched. In the first alcove he saw a patient with some kind of vacuum machine parked beside the bed, rolling with a bad motor. Next over was an old bag of bones attached to an IV. Neither of them needed food, as far as he could tell, so he moved on, rattling the cart along the stone floor. He placed a tray on one man's stomach and put a spoon in his hand. He laid trays on med tables at the next two beds, where the men were sleeping. Then he came to a bed enclosed by a cage. Inside, he saw Elgin.

Even unconscious and strapped to the hospital bed railings, Elgin scared the s.h.i.+t out of him. In Brother Mike's studio he'd worn only an unders.h.i.+rt when working, showing off his tattoo colors, birds of prey on his broad shoulders, tangled spiderwebs spiraling from each elbow, naked angels with big t.i.ts peeking out from his own pectorals. According to Crowley, Elgin's artistic work was done in service of keeping his inking skills up, in the unlikely event he was ever released and could open his own parlor. Now half of Elgin's face was covered in a kind of cheesecloth, mottled with Chiclet squares of blood. There were uncovered st.i.tches on his neck, a slashed line like a row of black flies drawn to the puckered gore. The sheet was tucked snugly below his armpits and then raised up in a tent around his waist, as if gently lifted from whatever horrifying injuries settled underneath. He was utterly helpless yet still fearsome. The cage door was closed, but there was no lock on the clasp. He could pull out of the straps, rise up, and swing the door out, and Josh would be too frightened to move.

Standing there, Josh heard a loud, reprimanding voice and looked to see who was so angry.

"What's your G.o.dd.a.m.n hurry? Some of us in here could actually eat that food."

He saw that it was Roy, sitting on a bed in the last alcove at the end of the room. The cot sagged below him. His peg leg stood against the wall, the halter at the top of the stick yellowed and stained. As Josh wheeled the cart over obediently, Roy grabbed a crutch from the floor and hauled himself off the cot.

"Just jos.h.i.+ng you, Josh," he said. "I'm glad to see a pal at a time like this."

A pal. He'd never talked at any length with Roy before, only suffered his jokes and his relentless teasing, like the new kid in school. Roy limped toward him on the crutch. He seemed diminished now without his peg leg, breathing hard.

"You thinking about Crowley?" Roy asked.

Josh said he still couldn't believe it.

"I know, I know," Roy said, and then limped forward some more. "Help me get over to the big window. I need to warm my bones in some daylight, or I'm going to die in the dark like an old house cat."

He slid underneath Roy's wing and helped him maneuver his girth across the room. Pa.s.sing Elgin's cage, Roy sneered. "You staring at that sack of beat-up s.h.i.+t made me miss Crowley more than I could stand. If G.o.d's got any spare time on his hands, he could send a nice chunky aneurysm up this f.u.c.ker's leg."

Josh agreed. Together they moved on toward the caged window and stared out. The gla.s.s was greasy with decades of exhaled breath.

"Merry f.u.c.king Christmas," Roy said.

11.

They gave me three days off after finding Crowley, and I was grateful for the break, even as I wished I had something other than the rattle and shock of the previous week to occupy my every waking thought. MacKay was still in intensive care and not seeing visitors yet, but at least his prognosis was good. I got the information by lying, telling the nurse I was his daughter calling from out of state. No one checked on me, no one called to congratulate me or tease me or hear the Crowley story firsthand, no one even called to wish me Merry Christmas, and my brain went to work on that silence, parsing it for meaning. I began to wonder if they blamed me, if they saw my industriousness as a betrayal, a finger pointing toward some other CO's guilt. When the phone finally rang on my third and final free evening, I reached for it with a high school nervousness. It took me a moment to recognize that the quiet voice on the other end belonged to Brother Mike.

"I'm sorry to bother you at home," he said.