Ten
____________
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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