Dave Delano had good reason to remember Benford Halls. They had both been sentenced in the same Miami courthouse on the same day, exactly five years before. That Dave should have served the full term -- since 1987, parole for federal prisoners had been more or less eliminated -- didn't seem so bad when he compared it with waiting around for five years to be put to death in front of some movie actor. If that didn't rank as cruel and unusual, then Torquemada must have been one of the world's great humanitarians.
The second thing that happened was that Dave received an airmail letter. It was from Russia and written in the unmistakably clear hand and cryptic style of Einstein Gergiev. Gergiev had been released from Homestead some six months before Dave, after serving eight years on a racketeering charge. Released and then deported as an undesirable alien.
Undesirable he may have been, but it was mostly down to Gergiev that Dave had used his time inside so well. It had been Gergiev who had persuaded the younger man that he had a real flair for foreign languages and that the peculiarities of the federal penal system would give him the opportunity for study and self-improvement people with liberty could only dream about. Just a few months before an amendment to the 1994 Crime Bill had banned federal grants to prisoners for post-secondary education, Dave had obtained a diploma in Russian. He had always had good Spanish. Growing up on Miami's South Beach, it might as well have been Cuba for all the good English did you. And on a fine day when he had a tan to complement his dark hair and brown eyes, Dave could just about pass for one of the marielitos who helped make Miami the sometime crime capital of America. Dave's potential as a Russian scholar might have come from the fact he was the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant who had fled the Soviet Union after the war. His father's real name was Delanotov, which he had changed to Delano upon arrival in America, choosing the middle name of the previous American president in order to enhance his future prospects, such as they were. When he wasn't drunk, he spent the next thirty years installing air-conditioning systems in luxury yachts. Out of love and gratitude for his adopted country and hatred of the one he had left behind, Dave's father never again spoke his own native language.
Dave looked at the postmark and shook his head. It was four weeks since it had been sent. Another day and it would have missed him.
'Fuckin' Aeroflot,' he muttered before carefully reading the letter, written in Russian. Prices, crime and the incompetence of government -- things did not sound so very different from what was happening at home. Dave read the letter several times, making certain of some of the more difficult words with the aid of a Russian dictionary. Speaking Russian was a lot easier than reading it. The Cyrillic alphabet was a whole different ball-game to the western writing system. For a start there were six more letters than English used.
By the time the guard came to escort Dave to freedom he had memorized the letter's contents and flushed the pieces down the toilet under the eyes of his cellmate, Angel, who had been lying silently on the top bunk. It was always tough when the guy you roomed with got his freedom. His departure brought home the fact that you were still in prison. Equally troublesome was the prospect of a new cellmate. Suppose he was queer?
'Man gets a letter and gets hisself released all on the same day,' grumbled Angel. 'Somehow it don't seem fair.'
Dave picked up the cardboard carton containing his books, notebooks, correspondence, art reproductions and photographs, tucked it under one well-muscled arm and then tugged at the Uncle Sam beard that helped to disguise his boyish face.
'OK man, I'm outta here.'
Angel, a tall Hispanic with a gold tooth, descended, embraced Dave fondly, and tried not to cry. Tamargo, the truck-sized guard, loitered patiently on the landing outside the cell door.
'I left you everything that was in the cabinet. All my shit. Candy, vitamins, cigarettes. Smoke 'em soon, though.' Dave laughed. 'Smoke 'em or trade 'em. They'll be turning this into a No Smoking prison like everywhere else, and they won't be worth shit.'
'Thanks man. 'Predate it.'
'You take care of yourself. You'll be out in no time.'
'Yeah. Right.'
Without another word Dave turned and followed Tamargo along the ground-floor tier, shouting his goodbyes to the other prisoners and trying not to look too damn pleased with himself. He felt vaguely nauseous, the same feeling he used to have when he'd been about to sit a test, or face a courtroom. But it was nothing to what Benford Halls must have felt. Dave shivered.
'Fuck that,' he muttered.
'Say something?' returned Tamargo.
'No, sir.'
They exited the two-tier modern building and, crossing the neat lawn, Dave realized that this was the first time he had ever been allowed to walk on the grass. It was in the small things that freedom was to be discovered.
In the laundry and supply building he submitted meekly to the last indignity the system had to inflict upon him: the strip search. It was a palindrome of the way he had entered the system. He took off his prison clothes and bending over spread the cheeks of his buttocks so that one of the other guards who were waiting there for him could inspect his ass. Then they returned his own clothes and he started to get dressed in the sports coat, shirt and pants he had worn to the last day of his trial. To his surprise, the coat was too small and the pants were too big.
'Wish I had a dollar for every time I seen that happen,' guffawed the man searching the box containing Dave's personals. He glanced around at his equally amused colleagues. 'Spend five years pumping iron like you was Arnie fuckin' Schwarzenegger and then you wonder why your clothes don't fit.'
Dave gave himself up to their amusement.
'Look at these pants,' he grinned, holding the waistband away from his stomach. 'I must have lost twenty pounds. You know, you could market this place as a fat farm.
The Homestead Plan diet. Safe serious weight loss through lifestyle change. Personalized care from corrective professionals.'
'You're lucky you did your time here, Slicker,' said one guard. 'In Arizona they'd have had you in a chain gang. You'd have lost a heck of a lot more weight out there.'
The guard searching Dave's personals riffled through the pages of a book and then regarded its cover with mild distaste.
'What is this shit, anyway?' he grumbled.
'Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky,' said Dave. 'Russia's greatest writer. In my opinion.'
'You some kind of communist, or something?'
Dave thought it over for a second.
'Well, I believe in the redistribution of wealth,' he said. 'Just about everyone in here believes in that, don't they?'
'Chain gangs aren't the answer,' said Tamargo. 'Nor anything else that keeps a man in shape. Prison shouldn't make guys who are comin' out more of a threat to lawabiding citizens than when they went in. You ask me, when guys come in here, we should give 'em all lots of fatty food. Cheeseburgers, ice-cream, Coca-Cola, French fries, much as they want, whenever they want. No exercise and plenty of TV. Phil Gramm wants the system to stop turning out hardened criminals, then that's the way to do it. Plenty of fuckin' junk food and easy chairs. That way when these fuckers eventually hit the streets they're regular couch potatoes like the rest of us, instead of muscle-bound bad-asses.'
Dave straightened his tie as best he could on a shirt collar that he could no longer button and grinned affably at Tamargo and his cushion-sized stomach.
'You're an enlightened man,' he said. 'At least you would be if you could get on the Homestead Plan.'