After Gate twenty, after the steel tunnel they passed through wordlessly, after the glass control booth with its computer-era panel of dials and switches and gauges, after the strip search, after the lecture, after the V-notch was cut into each boot-heel and the boots were returned to him, doors slid apart and slid shut, and he walked naked past cells accompanied by a single CB-6 guard in khaki, through the shouted conversations of men made invisible to one another by barriers. Each green door they passed was solid rather than barred, with a small window up high and left of its center. Here and there an irrelevant face peered out.
His things were on his bunk. To see that they’d been carried here and now awaited him made him feel special; they didn’t provide this service for the usual run of prisoners. He inspected his new belongings for defects: a pair of yellow leather work shoes shoes — how had they guessed his size? was it on record? — two blue cotton work shirts, two pairs of jeans — way too large, and he was glad they didn’t know everything about him — four pairs of white underwear, four white teeshirts, eight white socks, two white handkerchiefs, two white towels. Handkerchiefs. When had they started giving handkerchiefs? he lay on his bunk with a teeshirt thrown over his groin and listened to the talk around him — talk of women, drugs, money, and cars. Bill Houston wasn’t one to keep silent in these areas, but he couldn’t find an opening when he couldn’t see anybody’s face. And it was different, too, that in the pauses between remarks, you couldn’t say whether the conversation was over or not. Somebody might be about to speak or fallen fast asleep, and you couldn’t tell. It was like talking on the telephone, but no one ever said “Hello,” or “Goodbye.”
He was where he’d been heading for a long time. He was unconscious before they turned the lights out.
The sun was just high enough to get over the east wall. The small exercise yard of CB-6, which had been primarily in shadow, now showed a bright slash of glare in its westernmost corner. There were only seven or eight men out, and a couple of guards. Bill Houston recognized H. C. Sandover across the court, bending over something on the ground in the company of two other men.
Because the guard nearest them seemed edgy, watching a clump of murderers in which any plot imaginable might now be taking shape, Bill Houston stayed where he was, in the sun. In his third day here, he was still getting used to the high-resolution planes and angles. Something about the black of shadow, the tan of desert buildings, and the brutal whiteness of the light made Bill Houston think of Spanish missions, of Mexico, of things that were definite and clear. There was that quality to this place — light and silence; things that lasted slowly.
The guard was nearer the three prisoners now, almost among them, and they were all sharing a joke.
Bill Houston went over, and H.C. squinted up at him, taking his attention from a large toad he was fooling with. His blond hair had grown shoulder-length and grey. He wore small round glasses tinted bright blue, and a red bandana tied pirate-style over his scalp, almost like a hat, though hats were forbidden. “Got us a news service going here, Billy!” he said.
The guard said, “That frog isn’t about to go nowhere, friends.”
“What do you think, Billy?” H.C. said. “He had to get in, hadn’t he? My whole philosophy of life is hanging on this. I believe in a reality behind circumstantial evidence. If he knows a way in, he knows a way out.” H.C. turned the toad over, still squatting, something like a toad himself, on the ground. “Circumstantial evidence is what got me here.” The toad was bigger than a man’s fist and must have weighed half a pound. “We can attach a message for your Mom, Billy,” H.C. said, standing up, and he was as tall as Bill Houston. Somehow the other two men had disappeared. The guard had taken up a stance some few feet away.
“Mom was real anxious for me to say Hi.”
“It’s been almost six years since I’ve seen the woman, Billy. Over half a decade.”
“Just the same,” Bill Houston said.
“That’s one twentieth of a century. Do I have to tell you that people get kind of blurry?”
“How come you never write her?”
“I don’t need to write her. She writes me.”
“I don’t mean nothing by it.” Bill Houston was trying to make peace. “I’m just, you know—”
“—just relaying the greeting whereby she puts a little guilt-ride down on my list for the day, right? Some things get blurry, Billy, and some things get real sharp, real clear.” Bill Houston could feel a heat greater than the day’s coming off his stepfather. They’d never shared much more than a dwelling, but now he wanted to say something about how much he’d always resented this man. Before he could find any words, H.C. said, “God, you stink.”
“What?”
“You make me sick just like poison. I smell cyanide gas all over you, Billy.”
“The last person to call me Billy was you.”
“I’m gone.” As if with great purpose, H.C. moved across the court to the weights area, where he gazed down upon a long-haired Indian who lay on his back on the bench in the sun, pressing nearly two hundred pounds above his face. When the Indian began to struggle and the weights to waver, H.C. put one finger under the bar and helped him to raise it the last go. Bill Houston wished, if somebody had to be murdered by him, it could have been H.C. You still got the fastest mouth in six states. You made my mother kiss your ass. He sensed, standing here in the court with the heat climbing over the walls as morning became noon, how all the circumstances had tangled themselves around his head and made him blind; how things were so confused he’d never even begun to think about them, never been able to see how, in general, his life made him feel terrible, and his mother’s life, and all the people he knew. But now it was plain to him, because suddenly he had a vision of everybody in this prison yard rising up out of the husk of himself, out of his life, and floating away. And what remained was trash.
Oh man, it must be a hundred and twenty degrees in this place. He could feel the heat against his eardrums, and behind his eyes. He shook his head to clear it, but things were already unbearably sharp and clear.
Just as she thought of hospitals as places of permanent death, Mrs. Houston was accustomed to equate the Phoenix Sky Harbor with blackness and tragedy — with the tearing apart of families, with the movement of stunned hearts through twisted worlds, with the last sight of the faces of people who would never return. And the Sky Harbor was like that now, nightmarish and alien — the plane to take Miranda and Baby Ellen away would leave at 3:45 AM — but it was also physically very different from the old Sky Harbor, which had been more like a bus station than a center of international flight. In the new Sky Harbor there were three separate terminals, and a huge multi-level parking lot that nobody would ever have found their way through but for the paths of green paint drawn across the shiny concrete, and arrows and signs that swore these many paths led to various elevators that would carry them to innumerable airlines; so that deciphering these messages and following these arrows and abandoning herself to this strange journey through incomprehensible structures with Miranda and the baby and Stevie and Jeanine began, for Mrs. Houston, to take on spiritual overtones.