October of that second year, I received my M.A. The elaborate certificate, on heavy cream-colored bond replete with Gothic lettering and Latin, came rolled in a tube such as the ones in which other inmates received the Barbarella, Harley-Davidson and R. Crumb posters taped to the walls of their cells. University regents wished to inquire, an attached letter read, as to whether I would be continuing my education at their facility. Forever a quick study, having now survived inside and in addition found my way through thickets of university regulations, I felt as though I’d turned myself into some kind of facility veteran, slippery enough to slalom around raindrops, savvy enough to ride the system’s thermals. Better the facility you know. You bet I will be, I told university regents.
If every year April comes down the hill like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers, then October steps up to the plate glum and serious-never more than that one.
Lifting a pound or two of prison clothes off the counter, I’d picked up a ton of grief with them. That I’d been a cop was not supposed to get out. But guards knew, which meant everyone knew, and every one of them, inmates and guards alike, had good reason to despise the various shipwrecks that had cast them up here. They weren’t able to slit society’s neck or shove the handle of a plumber’s helper up Warden Petit’s rear end, but there I was. From the first, starting out small and escalating the way violence always does, I’d met with confrontations on the yard, at mealtime, in the showers, at workshop. Two months and half a dozen scrambles in, I received a rare invitation from Warden Petit himself-I hadn’t been able to back off fast enough, and guards, looking away, had given me time to break the guy’s jaw before moving in-who wanted to tell me how proud he was of the way I was handling myself.
“Thank you, Warden.”
“Tremendous pressures on you out there. I appreciate that, you know. I see it. They never let up on a man, do they?” A triangular patch of hair had been left behind on his forehead as the rest withdrew. He made a show of consulting papers on the desk before him. “Like a cup of coffee?”
“No.”
“Scotch?” His eyes came back up to mine. I’d been given a folding chair designed, apparently, for maximal discomfort. Reminded me of the bunk and toilet in my cell.
“You’re dripping blood on my floor.” He keyed the intercom. “Get Levison in here,” he said, then to me: “Don’t worry,” as he smiled. “We’re used to it. And it’s not really my floor, is it?”
Petit was like those guys who as hospital administrators a decade or so later would start calling themselves CEOs, wanting to live just a little large. He wore a light gray suit that made him resemble nothing so much as a block of cement with a head balanced atop. The head kept nodding and bobbing about like it wasn’t placed well and might topple off any minute. Hope springs eternal.
“Absolutely not mine. It’s the taxpayers’ floor.”
His personal floors, I had no doubt, would be scoured clean. By inmates or trustees if not by his own scab-kneed wife.
“You’d best get on down there. Medic’s waiting for you at the infirmary.”
I was almost through the door when he said: “Turner?”
I stopped.
“You’re on good road. What, two months more? Don’t let ’em skid you out. Do it easy.”
“Do my best.”
As I left, Levison, seventy-plus if he was a day, shuffled past me carrying bucket and mop. Squirt bottles and rags hung on his pants like artillery.
Next morning, this guy steps up to me in the shower. I see him coming, the shank held down along his leg, see the fix in his eyes. At the last moment I shove out my hand and swing the heel up hard. The shank, a sharpened spoon, pierces his chin, pins his tongue. He opens his mouth trying to talk and I see the tongue flailing about in there, only the tip able to move as he slides down the shower wall.
Was that enough? Did I have to kill him? I don’t know. At the time it seemed I’d been left no choice. Another homily, another of the commandments we live by, says once a man steps up to you, you have to put him down.
Neither did the courts feel they had much choice. In their hands my three-year sentence blossomed to twenty-five.
Chapter Nineteen
“I served eight more years, got another degree, in psychology; a master’s again, and began thinking maybe I could make some kind of life out of that. What else did I have to build on? By the time early release came around, I knew I wanted to work as a therapist. I set up in Memphis, made the rounds of school social workers, doctor’s offices, community centers and so on to introduce myself and leave business cards, started picking up clients. Slowly at first, and anybody who walked in. But I had some kind of real feel, an instinct, for the acutely troubled ones-those at the edge of violence. Within a year that’s mostly who I was seeing.”
Sheriff Bates was nigh the perfect listener. His eyes had never left me as he leaned back in his chair, making himself comfortable, wordlessly inviting me to go on. Then he propped it up: “You found work you were good at. Damn few of us are ever lucky enough to do that.”
“I know; believe me. Knew it then.”
“But you quit.”
“After six years, yes.”
He waited.
“I’m not sure I can explain.” Where’s a movie-of-the-week plot when you need one?
A mockingbird lit on the sill and peered in at us, chiding.
“That the one Don Lee took to feeding?” Bates asked.
Daughter June nodded.
“And you wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
In what was apparently a longtime private joke, she batted eyelashes at him.
“Time when that girl was eleven, twelve, every week she’d show up after school with some kind of orphan or another. A kitten, puppy, a hatchling she claimed fell out of a tree, not much to it but a skull, feet and hungry mouth. Once, a baby rabbit-they say once those have the stench of human on them, parents seek them out and kill them.
“You’d best go ahead and feed the thing,” he said after a moment, “else we’ll never hear the end of it.” Then to me: “You’ve done some hard wading against the current.”
“Off and on.”
“More on than off, from the sound of things. Work like what you ended up doing, that has to be like police work, demands a lot of you. And the better you are at it, the more it takes.”
“True enough. Just being on the job, on the streets, not anything in particular that happened, made a difference. Changed me, damaged me: the point could be argued. All those years tramping around in other people’s heads was a kind of repeat.”
“Not to mention prison.”
We watched June, outside, scatter birdseed on the sill and back away from it as the mockingbird returned. Glancing up at us, she waved.
“One day ostensibly like all others, sitting there with my morning coffee and appointment book, I looked out the window and realized the floors were gone. They’d just dropped out from under me, they were gone. I knew I no longer trusted anyone or anything. That I could see around, through and behind every motive-my own no less than everyone else’s.”
“So you decided to be alone.”
“I’m not sure it was a conscious decision. How much of what’s most important in our lives ever is?”
June came in and pulled her purse from an open desk drawer, saying she had to pick up Mandy at school, she’d drop her off and be right back.
“That time already, is it?” Bates said. And I, once she was gone, that I hadn’t known June had a child.