“Seriously,” repeats the woman, “What was I talking about? Toby?”
The Brothers move from the administrative office and through a seven-foot-high security turnstile and into the second floor of the prison — a place of blue metal, skylights, concrete floors, everything built in hard steel lines. People are yelling and hitting things made out of metal onto things made of metal and there are shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows. The prison is huge but it feels small and cramped to the Brothers, every hallway and turn is like navigating a closet in extreme heat with no ventilation.
“This way.”
Following Jugba Marzan, inmates size up the Brothers as they walk a kind of open hallway with cells on the right side, a net on the left side. Below the net, and a good fifty feet down, an open concrete center with patrolling guards, more cells. Z. looks back and shrugs. The light in the prison fades with passing clouds. Jug walks in slow motion. His khaki pants are worn high, his backside large and lumbering and dimpled with sweat.
A man with a square head with hair like a bed of needles takes a plank of wood, a section of his bedframe, and thrusts it between the bars, stabbing Ricky in the shoulder who falls into the net attached between the ceiling and the metal railing. When the net tears, two guards catch him and pull him back. Inmates cheer.
The Brothers forget everything they’ve learned. This wasn’t supposed to happen, maybe it’s another game by Karl, but no, this is different, this is pure violence, and Z. rescans all the letters, and the plan, the red underlines all over his bedroom walls and comes up with nothing.
Z., breaking out in a full body sweat, overwhelmed with what he’s gotten himself into, the prison a place of terror, nothing like the pamphlet leads one to believe, taps Jug on the shoulder and says the paper specifies what inmates he’s taking.
“I know,” says Jug.
“McDonovan,” says Z. standing on his toes, aiming his words over Jug’s shoulder. “The Sky Father Gang.”
“I’m a counselor, well, a supervisor, so I understand people. We have these health meetings. I’ve learned things. I know what you’re telling me. Hey, I get it.”
Z. looks behind him and everyone is gone except Bobby T. who is on his knees and surrounded by guards holding batons high. One of the guards is wearing a giant gold cross and telling Bobby T. to pray, instructing him how to properly bend forward, where to place his hands on the floor which the guard guides with little kicks. Bobby T. keeps pulling his hands back toward himself because he’s being kicked. One baton moves.
“Jailbreak in reverse,” says Jug.
“What?” says Z.
“Amazing.”
Z. is covered in sweat and his clothes feel heavy, like they are pulling him to the ground. His legs are sore with the panic settling into his flesh. He wipes his forehead with the torn piece of green robe tied to his wrist and his hair is soaked. He pulls the sleeve of his shirt back over the piece of green fabric. He’s not sure what to say. He’s not sure what to do. What would The Sky Father Gang do. What would his grandfather do. What would anyone who doesn’t want to die do.
“Karl put you up to this? Keeps getting us.” Then village Z. coming out, the man who once jumped from a table in the street to a moving truck’s hood: “I’m leaving.”
“No joke,” Jug says, who opens an empty cell.
Z. considers running. Guards approach from either end of the hallway. More inmates cheering and bells going off and guards telling inmates to be quiet because there’s nothing to see. Sharpened spoons flung from cells. When Z. gets a good look of the prison from where he stands all he sees are dark boxes with bars, stacked side by side and on top of each other. A guard is picking up the spoons as more spoons are thrown.
“Come in,” says Jug. “I need to ask you a favor. You don’t know it now, but this will work out for the best, for both of us.”
Inside the cell Jug appears fatter. His face is doughy and his neck is red from shaving. He has the general appearance of a man once in good shape and in control of his life, in Younger Years, but is now someone uncomfortable with the body he’s in. He moves as if he doesn’t fully understand it. He hates the size of his shirts. When he showers, he stares not at the size of his dick, but his stomach.
“Black crystal,” says Jug, sitting down on the cot. “We’re addicted.”
“My job is to bring them in,” says Z., going back on script, still trying to pull off the impossible. He knows a black crystal doesn’t exist, so what Jug says about it doesn’t register. He moves back and forth from terror to strength and back again.
“You guys acting like kids, smearing shit on your faces to mess with others, putting a table in the middle of the road, I mean.”
“What?”
A guard locks the door. The clang raises Z.’s shoulders.
“Basketball accident,” says Jug wincing, reaching for his ankle to tie his shoe. “We have a court here. Half a court. Was going in hard when Little Karl, who will be happy to know can mark up his book when I’m done here, decides to take a charge. I sort of pulled back,” Jug leans backward with his right arm swan shaped, “and pulled off this beauty of a one-hand floater. That didn’t stop my body from toppling over into Little Karl. Damn, it hurt. Never felt pain like that before, like my whole body was shook-up inside. I didn’t make the shot.”
Z. backs up against the cell bars, cold. He’s four feet from where Jug sits but it feels like inches. He breaths in the prison and listens to the ugly sounds from within it.
“I,” says Z. “T-t-t-this place —”
Sweat and urine and men kept in vomit-filled boxes they decorated but are never cleaned have been molded in the heat for weeks. The prison isn’t like Z. was told. The prison isn’t like how it’s promoted to everyone outside it. The prison is a place worse than any part of the village. And since the heat wave was noticeable, since the black crystal has been depleting and getting scary low, things have only gotten worse.
“When it gets hot in here, right at peak late afternoon heat, it smells like a pig farted through a cigarette,” says Jug. “Is that an image or what?” Jug smiles way longer than anyone should smile after saying something so disgusting and then gets serious, smoothing the chest of his shirt, the professional version of himself coming on. “And every few months a group not totally unlike yourselves tries to rescue someone. Usually over-eager city folk with some messed up relative the system got wrong, should have been placed in Willows Bay, right. But everyone likes it here. Okay, not everyone, I see the way you’re looking at me, but why leave something that takes care of you? For example, you could have the worst mom in the world who brings home retards, but she feeds you chicken and buys you jeans and washes your bedsheets, and you forget how she yells and screams and drinks too much and makes the retards breakfast in the morning while they sit slumped, but not you, you don’t say a word because you have it easy with a mom like that, you’re taken care of and you don’t leave it.”
Z. senses bodies behind him. He’s lean and muscular, sure, a little belly on him, and he’s always prided himself that he can take care of himself in a fight, but now, he’s terrified.
“There’s been a mistake,” he says. “You said something about black crystal.”
“It’s tricky to reseal an envelope and not have the receiver be suspicious. What you do is use steam from an iron,” says Jug, and he runs an imaginary iron over his thigh.
Through the bars a hairy hand massages the back of his neck and Z. tries to walk forward and the hand squeezes. A hush of male voices blends with the concrete echoes and metallic sounds of the prison. Z. imagines crawling through the crystal mine dirt as a child, licking it, then getting yelled at by Mom, her hand gripping his neck.