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Saturday, February 16, 2019

At Light's Edge - Chapter 10: Hide & Seek


Ten
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Hide & Seek


“What’s ya doin’?” Joey asked Renie.
“Countin’ cracks all around our cell. How long is this lockdown gonna last, anyway? We can’t even go to work now. Only cleaning and food guys are out.”
“It’ll pass. And don’t touch that crack over the window.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t ok, that’s all. I got business up there.”
After taking time to breathe a long sigh of understanding, “Oh,” Renie looked up over the window toward the crack.
“And don’t look up there or anywhere if the cops come to do a search of our crib. Just focus on the cell door and across the tier. Some of these guards are good at readin’ mannerisms.”
“Ok, thanks for the tip, not the tip of a shank, though.”
“You’re funny, Renie, funny.”
The second tier porter slipped a small paper kite under their cell door. Renie picked it up and opened it. It informed that Billy Watkins, one of seventeen inmates stabbed over the past couple of weeks, was ok. New Warden - Clean was written at the bottom and dead center it contained a capitol letter L with a line through it followed by a number 4.
“What’s it say?” inquired Joey. “Read it.”
Looking the kite over again, Renie read its contents to his celly. “What’s this letter L thing about?”
Smiling, Joey replied, “Looks like lockdown is over at four this afternoon. Maybe we can make the chow hall again and I can get up from this bunk.”
During lockdown all inmates’ hot meals were suspended in favor of sack lunches delivered three times per day.
“I hope so. A guy can only eat so many bologna sandwiches, apples and dried up cookies.”
“We got to shine up this crib,” Joey said, sitting up quickly.
“What?”
“Our home, that new warden comin’ is called Mr. Clean. I read he’s a real hardnosed type a dude. Terrance Clean is his actual name. Looks like our inmate sympathizer of a warden, Latoya Jacks, is outta here. We’ll get more order in this prison now. Watch the door.”
“For?”
Joey looked perturbed, but said, “For cops, that’s what. I gotta do somethin’.”
While Renie peered through the slit window, Joey removed a shoestring from his shoe. He had carefully laced two strings into his shoe in the event he ever needed an extra one. Joey then used the palm of his hand to mix some paste made from water and concrete dust he collected earlier from under the unit’s staircase. After climbing up on Renie’s top bunk, he carefully fed the string into the crack over the window. Using the paste, Joey covered the string until nothing showed.
“How’s that look from over there?”
Renie replied, “Do more on the edges, you know, wall to wall. It’s a painting thing. If you paint wall to wall nobody can see any difference. But,” Renie took a long look through the door’s window again, “if you do somethin’ in only the middle it’ll show up.”
“Good tip, thanks.”
Once Joey finished sealing the crack the two youths cleaned their cell to a shine.
“Not too sure where to stash this,” Joey held up his tattoo gun. “I been doin’ a little bit of a side business.”
Joey’s tack gun consisted of a pen barrel, small motor, piece of guitar string, wires connected to a battery, all held together with black electrical tape and a spot of solder here and there.
“Cool,” commented Renie.
All common hiding areas are well known to staff and inmates alike so coming up with a safe place challenged the two boys. Eventually they decided to take their chances placing it under a false layer made of cardboard in the bottom of their small garbage can. Joey put a layer of apple cores and dirty toilet paper on top of the cardboard along with some other garbage. The two boys hoped their scheme would deter a thorough investigation of the can’s contents.
“Hope for the best, I guess,” Joey said. “In the really old prisons the windows open, so if you hang stuff outside with no fingerprints and all that you can pretty much say the stuff ain’t yours. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”
Renie asked Joey if he had heard anything about the Indian dying. Joey informed him that the guy was poisoned somehow, “That’s probably why we’re getting’ a new warden.”
Renie shuddered, “Poisoned? That’s cold.”
“Stiff and cold, like the Indian, or should I say Wiseguy.”
The two discussed their lives in the new prison, the violence, jobs, and their unpredictable futures.
Joey stated, “We gotta use three hundred and sixty degrees of pure knowledge if we are ever gonna get outta this place.”
“Three hundred and sixty degrees of pure knowledge; what’s that?”
Joey thought for a moment, “You know, the full range of our minds.”
“Ok,” Renie smiled. “Where’d you here that concept?”
“Some dude in a youth home a while back. He said it, I liked it.”
Renie blurted out one loud, “Ha.”
Joey added, “That youth home was for emotionally troubled criminal teens. We made up our own school, a sort of college. We had one Jesus freak kid there for about a week, but he got shipped out to a foster home. He wasn’t really supposed to be there and he sure wished he never was by the time we got through with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t like to talk about it now. It sorta hurts and makes me angry. I felt on top of the world at the time, but once I was alone and thinkin’, I started feelin’ guilty and all that. We shouldn’t have….” Joey’s verbal memories faded away.
Once sack lunches arrived J-Wing came alive again.
Joey commented, “This reminds me of an airplane flight I was on when I was little, boring as all get out, but they filled all the dead time with drinks, lunch and a film. What else ya gonna do on a long plane flight?”
“Fly the plane?”
“I wish. Joey opened his sack and said, “Look, bologna, somebody loves me.”
“I got a chicken breast,” boasted Renie.
Before realizing the joke, Joey exclaimed, “Hey, what… I get it, ha, ha.”
Renie was a bit apprehensive, but inquired of Joey, “You never talk about your mom and dad much.”
“Nope, they were just losers.” Joey took a large bite of his sandwich before continuing, “Mom had her own business, out on the streets if ya know what I mean. Dad used me for a punchin’ bag a lot, at least until he left. Mom got busted soon after that and I went the foster home and youth home circuit.”
“Sorry, man.”
“Ain’t no thing.”
Renie pondered a simple statement a priest told him once, Some people are overcome by life and others overcome life. Those words were all too true. He wondered why two kids could go through the same set of circumstances and take two totally different life paths. Maybe it was the crowded loneliness of the big city; maybe the immense empty boringness of rural living; maybe it was the person’s own responses to everything. Maybes, maybes, maybes, he lamented. I bet the Bible has some answers in it somewhere.
Renie climbed up to his bunk to read and to wait for four o’clock to roll around. He turned to the last Bible book, Revelations 12:11, he flipped the thin pages, And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.


Next Chapter: Blood In


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