They were sitting in the cell one night, half an hour before lockdown, playing take-no-prisoners chess for five-dollar chits (Tierwater already owed his cellmate something like three hundred and twenty dollars at that point) and sharing the last of a pack of Camels (a nasty habit, sure, but what else were you going to do in prison?). There were the usual sounds, the jabbering, the cursing, the rucking up of clots of phlegm, the persistent tuh-tuh of sunflower seeds spat into a fist or a cup. The usual smells too, the body reek of caged animals, of vomit, urine and disinfectant, cut by the sweet cherry perfume of pipe tobacco or the scent of beer nuts or a freshly cracked bag of salt — and — vinegar potato chips. From the radio that hung from the bars in the exact spot where the reception was best came the low thump of bass and the high breathy wheeze of Maclovio Pulchris rendering the ineluctable lyrics of his latest hit: I want you, I want you, I want you, / Ooo, baby, 000, baby, 000!
"Christ, I hate that shit," Sandman said, maneuvering his bishop in for the kill-he still had better than half his pieces on the board; Tierwater was down to his king, an embattled queen and two pawns. "Every time he opens his mouth he sounds like he's pissing down his leg."
"I don't know," Tierwater said, "I kind of like it." Sandman gave him a look of incredulity-what he liked to call his "tomcat-sniffing-a-new-asshole look" — but he let it drop right there. He had the most malleable face Tierwater had ever seen, and he used it to his advantage, acting, always acting, but ready to underscore any performance with a ready brutal violence that was no act at all. When Tierwater first met him, Sandman was thirty-two, his face tanned from the yard, with a pair of casual blue eyes and a beard so carefully clipped it was like a shadow tracing the line of his jaw and underscoring the thrust of his chin. He was handsome, as handsome as the kind of actor who specializes in the role of the wisecracking world-beater and gets paid for it, and he used his looks to his advantage. People instinctively liked him. And he used their prejudices-no bad guy could look like that, they thought, certainly no con — and turned them upside down. "I spent years looking into the mirror," he'd told Tierwater, "till I got every look down, from 'don't fuck with me' to 'holy reverend taking the collection' to 'would you please put the money in the paper sack before I remove your flicking face.'"
"The lyrics might be a little weak," Tierwater admitted, "but with Pulchris it's the beat, that's what it's all about."
Sandman waved a hand in extenuation, then swooped in on the board to replace Tierwater's queen with a black rook that seemed to come out of nowhere. "Hah, got her, the bitch!"
"Shit. I didn't even see it."
"Ready to concede? And by the way, speaking of bitches, how's your ex doing?" He leaned forward to collect the pieces. "I mean, I saw you all tangled up with her there this afternoon, and you didn't look too happy-"
"What about your own bitch of an ex-wife?" Tierwater just sat there, trading grins with him. Andrea was a subject he didn't want to talk about. Or think about. It was like thinking about water when you're out on the desert, or pizza when you're in South Dakota.
"I ever tell you I've been married five times?" Sandman was leaning forward, grinning, the heavy muscles of his upper arms bunched under the thin fabric of his T-shirt. "Five times, and I'm only still a child yet. But the first one, Candy, Candy Martinez, she was my high-school sweetheart? — She was the worst. Soon as I went up the first time, she turned around and flicked everybody I ever knew, as if it was an assignment or something — I mean, my brother, my best bud, the guy across the street, even the shop teacher, for shit's sake, and he must've been forty, at least, with like those gorilla hands with the black hairs all over them-"
Tierwater pushed himself up off the bunk, took two paces right, two paces left — the cell was fifty-one square feet, total, so it was no parade ground. He just needed to shake out his legs, that was all. "Thanks, Sandman," he said, working up his best mock-sincere voice, "thanks for sharing that with me. I feel a lot better now."
Prison. Tierwater endured it, and there's not much more to be said about it. Every day he regretted going out there with that torch, but the regret made him harder, and he would have done it again without thinking twice about it-only, of course, as in all fantasies and theoretical models, he wouldn't get caught this time. He wound up serving the better part of his sentence, a block of good days (good-behavior days, that is, two days' credit for every day served in state) subtracted from his record because of an unfortunate incident with two child-sized members of a Vietnamese gang in the prison mess hall, and then he went back to Lompoc, minimum security again, because he wasn't going anywhere with six months left to serve.
And who visited him there? Sierra, sometimes, though it was a real haul for her on the Greyhound bus, and Andrea too, of course, though every time he pressed his lips to hers and felt her tongue in his mouth he knew it was wrong, knew it was over, knew she'd already written him off and was just playing out the game like a good sport. That hurt him. That put the knife in him and twisted it too. And who else visited, right in the middle of that stunned and stuporous time when he walked and talked and thought like a zombie and wondered how he'd ever gone from his father's boy in a clean house in a nice development surrounded by trees and flowers and all the good things of life to this? Who else?
Sandman, that's who. Geoffrey R. Sandman, in a suit and tie and looking like a lawyer or a brain surgeon. "How the hell are you, Ty?" He wanted to know while the guards edged from one foot to the other. "Anything you need, you just tell me."
And then came the day, OA vu, Andrea waiting for him in the parking lot, the little bag of his belongings, goodbye, Lompoc. He'd served out his sentence, and they unlocked the cage and let him go. Not in time to see his daughter cock the mortarboard down low over one gray, seriously committed eye and accept her degree, cum laude, in environmental science, but that was the way it was when you did the stupid things, the things that put you in their power, the things you swore you would never do again. That was what every prisoner told himself-I'll never do it again — but Tierwater didn't believe it. Not for a minute. He knew now, with every yearning, hating, bitter and terminally bored fiber of his being, why prison didn't reform anybody. Penitentiary. What a joke. The only thing you were penitent for was getting caught. And the more time you did, the more you wanted to strike back at the sons of bitches and make them wince, make them hurt the way you did. That was rehabilitation for you.