“I guess I knew that,” he says.
He nods, I nod. “Well, good luck,” I say.
“Yo Mack,” Boston says. “Thanks.”
“You better get along now. That nosy guard’s waving you to the desk.”
“Call me sometime,” he says. “I would like to know you’re doing all right.”
“You don’t need to worry about me, tell you what.”
“Call me just the same,” he says.
“You bet.”
We both know I’ll never call.
Blue and his pals catcall as Boston goes, and then they turn to me like they haven’t eaten in a week and I’m the last chicken wing in the bucket.
The guard who always watches me is off tonight. I go to the preacher’s sermon. As she leaves, I say, “Ma’am, if you happen to have an extra Bible on you, I would be grateful.”
“Child, take mine,” she says.
I hold it close to my heart, and as I turn I slip the little hardback book into my jeans where they bag.
(The next morning, Sunday, August 2, the fifty-second day . . .)
At breakfast I ask for extra pats of butter.
“How many, baby?” says the woman who doles the food.
“Many as you can spare, ma’am. You all bake the most delicious rolls. Man can survive on bread alone, if it’s yours.”
“You’re too cute for your own good.” She loads me up.
I’m eating. Blue and his gang sit at my table, real tight on me, shoulder to shoulder. Bad shine working their eyes, open too wide. “Need somebody to hold up my pants,” Blue says.
I swing not at him but his boy. I slash across the inside of the elbow, where the blood is rich. Last night I rubbed the Bible cover on the cement floor and ground it down to a knife edge.
For just a second, Blue is stunned at the sight of so much blood, but a second is all I need. I slam his head onto the edge of the table. It makes a
bock
sound. I slam it down again, but by now I only hear the hissing.
The others are trying to snatch me, but my arms are slick with butter. They can’t stop me. I can’t stop me.
The guards are on me with the stun shield. I’m swallowing a wasp hive. A guard flattens me. “You are one greasy child.”
A bright blink of daylight whitens everything out. I’m losing myself even, in the swirl of screaming guards, howling kids, flying food, trays pounding tables, everything dimming, getting far, far away.
Maybe Céce’s right. Maybe I am smart after all. Smart about stuff like surviving anyway, for whatever that’s worth. I’m going to solitary for sure now, and I’ll be safe for a while. I wonder what the intake folks did with that peace medal Tony gave me.
(Sunday, August 2, night)
CÉCE:
The Too is dead in August. Vic gives us the night off. Ma braids, unbraids, and rebraids my hair. We’re both not watching whatever’s on TV. She’s regular Bud tonight, I’m hanging with my friend Sara Lee, I forget how many slices, but I had to unbutton my shorts. I’m washing it down with Slim-Fast. I have about a billion cans left over, because I was all about getting myself a bangin’ new body for my supposed boyfriend.
The test is in a few days. I have my study guide in my lap. I’m not looking at it. I’m not looking at anything really. I say what I’ve been thinking every few minutes since he went away: “I don’t get it. What did I do?”
Ma says what she’s been saying: nothing. She pretends she isn’t about to cry. She pretends to smile. The woman refuses to acknowledge the reality that is perfectly obvious to me and everybody else I know:
Everything.
Fucking.
Sucks
.
“Bet he calls in the next five minutes.” She’s talking about Anthony. Sunday is our one shot at contact with him. Sometimes his sergeant gives them call time, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s 9:48 p.m. Lights-out for him is 10:00 p.m. He still doesn’t know about Mack. I should write him about it. No, I shouldn’t. Writing them takes longer than speaking them, these words I don’t want to hear myself say: Mack’s gone. He brutally ended the life of another human being. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but Mack didn’t hit him just once. He kept clubbing the victim after he was dead, according to all accounts.
I’m trying to understand how he could do this, but I can’t. I say that I would have clawed Larry blind, but I wouldn’t have. If I was the one who found Boo, I would have just fainted. Am I that much of a coward?
I think so. I know myself. Yes, I’m that much of a coward.
We’re at the extremes, Mack and I. I’m forever running from conflict and he’s trapped in it. He’d warned me he could wreck someone, but I never could have pictured this. How can someone so destructive be so creative, the way he was with those dogs, with my Boo? That’s the real Mack. That’s the one I still can’t live without. I have to ask him what happened. I have to know what he was thinking. To help him not think that way anymore. I have to
talk
with him.
Carmella rubs her temples as she stares at the phone. “Working my ESP,” she says. “The phone’s gonna ring right ...
now
. No, okay, wait, right ...
now
.”
“Ma? The ESP? That’s
my
thing. You’re supposed to play the skeptic on that one. It’s the one time you’re actually negative about something. Let’s not lose that.”
The war report comes on.
“Change the channel,” Ma says.
The TV reporter interviews a friend of one of the dead soldiers, a local boy.
“Johnny was just cool, you know?”
the friend says.
“He was, like, the nicest dude I ever knew. He was just, I can’t believe he’s gone.”
The reporter interviews the dead soldier’s mother. She looks beat-up.
“Change it,” Ma says. “I’m begging.”
The woman on TV says the last time she talked to her son was months ago when he sent her a heart candy on Valentine’s Day.
“Céce Vaccuccia!” Ma says.
“Can you not give me a heart attack?”
“Change. The flippin’. Channel.”
“Are you lame all of a sudden? The remote’s in your lap.”
Her hands go to her mouth, her eyes widen. She points to the TV.
Dog food commercial.
I grab the remote and kill the TV. Ma rubs my back. She’s bawling too, except she looks pretty when she cries. “Let’s go to the shelter tomorrow,” she says. “We’ll get one that looks just like her.”
“Never.” I shake her off and head upstairs to study, but all I can think about is this: Why, when I went again Friday to visit him, did he refuse to see me?
I lie back on my bed, slip my hand into my shorts, close my eyes and remember ...
No.
It just makes it worse. This sense of absence, a fast-forming cave. I can’t believe he told me he loved me. Looked me in the eye, said it over and over. Worse, I can’t believe I never got the chance to say it back.
We never knew each other. Not really. Not deeply.
But we did. We
did
.
“Hey,” Ma says. She looks twice as drunk as she was ten minutes ago, holding on to the door frame to keep herself on her feet.
“Carmella, could you knock?”
“You gonna go visit him again?”
“Should I?”
She scratches her head. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe he’s ready now.”
“Ready for what?”
“I keep trying to . . .” She’s falling asleep on her feet.
“Ma.”
“Trying to figure out why he won’t see you. He’s ashamed? What else could it be? I mean, he’s a good boy. He wouldn’t just, you know—”
“Fuck me then forget me?”
She gulps. She fakes that smile. “He would never do that to my baby.” She slides down the door frame and dozes. “Just gonna rest here for a secuh . . .”
I help her to bed.
“Howya doin’, babe?”
“Can’t remember ever feeling more awesome, Ma.”
Heinous snoring. Chain saw on a pipe. I take off her crappy worn-out waitress shoes and study her ruined feet, ruined arches blown out after twenty-five years of serving people. My feet will be exactly like this when I’m her age.
I call Marcy, pour my heart out. “Is that all I was to him, a drill-and-ditch?”
“Céce, do you think my makeup makes my eyes look a little too close together?”
“I don’t know what happened. He was so cool, so nice, so compassionate.”
“Oh Cheech, you sweet, slightly-chubby-but-only-in-thetotally-cutest-way fool. That’s how they
all
act, in the beginning.”
“Then how are we supposed to know, you know, Marce? What should we be looking for in a man?”
“I want somebody who’s exactly like me, but with a penis.”
(The next afternoon, Monday, August 3, the fifty-third day . . .)
He’s been coming every day, the guy who used to sell drugs to Mack in the alley behind the Too. He waits for Mack for a minute, and then he goes. Today will be different. Today I’m waiting in the alley. The dude sees me, holds up.
“Hey,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything. Close up, his smiley scars are thicker than I thought.
“Dog Man’s locked up,” I say.
He nods, frowns.
“I’ll have whatever he was having.” I’m holding out a ten. Of course, as soon as he pulls a bag, I am so out of here. If I’m going to prison, it’s to visit Mack. Except I’m probably not going to visit Mack anymore.
The guy pulls a bag. I step back, but he’s too quick with the hand slap. In half a second, he’s got the ten and he’s on his way, leaving me with the bag in my hand.
Cashews, no salt. The airplane snack size the bodega down the street sells for a quarter. I rip open the bag, and guess what’s in there.
Cashews.
I follow Cashew Man. He walks fast. If he notices me, he doesn’t care I’m tailing him. He jogs into the bodega, and a minute later he’s back out with a plastic bag filled with what?
I follow him downhill to the highway. He lives beneath the overpass in a refrigerator box. He empties his bag.
Half a dozen cans of cat food. He pulls the Purina tabs, and the cats come to him on a run. Cashew Man pets the cats and laughs their names.
1. a. Mack Morse isn’t a liar.
2. b. Mack Morse told me he loves me.
3. c. Therefore, Mack Morse loves me.
(Monday, August 3, night)
MACK:
Solitary confinement is eight long by five wide. I thought that would’ve been plenty. Tiny toilet bowl, cold water sink the size of a tissue box, steel shelf for a bed. Nothing to do in here but sit and think about how stupid I am.
They have cameras. I was just taking off my T-shirt because it was hot, but they took it anyway. My socks and sneaker laces too. Put me in paper slippers. Thin plastic mattress has mesh weaved into it so you can’t rip the cover into strips.
If you do figure out a noose, you kneel on the bed, loop one end around your neck, the other around your feet.
Tighten the line against your spine and knot it. Tuck your fists into your waistband so you can’t pull them out in case you get scared and change your mind—and you will, I figure. All that’s left is you pitch yourself forward headfirst into that narrow slot of concrete between the bed and the wall.
“Lights-out,” one guard says to another. Dark so pure it’s either endless emptiness or filled with every wicked thing. Panting on the back of my neck? How many hours have passed? Or are we into days now?
In that darkness, a flicker:
She goes tiptoe to hit me with a surprise kiss. Her hands on my chest. She pulls back to look at me and smile. Her teeth aren’t perfect, and that just makes them more perfect. Crooked with a little space between the front two. Yeah.
(The next morning, Tuesday, August 4, the fifty-fourth day . . .)
The lights come on. They give me five minutes for my eyes to adjust.
The assistant warden sits outside the cell. Ex-military for sure. Straight back. He talks through the barred slot. “You’re going to kill somebody someday.”
“I already killed somebody.”
“Somebody else then,” he says.
“Maybe I will, then.”
“Big-time gangbanger, huh? Gonna get the T-drop tat, big man?”