A Hope in the Unseen (9 page)

“Late, hun,” she says, ushering him out with another kiss and begins to nose her car back into the flow of traffic, bound for her computer programming job at the Department of Justice.

“I’ll phone you a little later today,” Cedric calls after her. He pats the Toyota’s trunk as he skirts around it, then heads into the barbershop to officially begin his day.

It took a little while to set up—to get the system down—but now things are running pretty smoothly. “Like a Rolex watch,” he says out loud, and then thinks to add, “sold off the street.” He nods a hello to R.J., the shop’s owner, who’s half asleep, sunk in a barber’s chair.

Cedric slips on his black rayon barber’s smock, pulls a small, black dayminder book from his jeans pocket, and surveys today’s appointments. It’s going to be mighty busy, about thirty customers coming. He walks to the pay phone at the rear of the narrow, four-chair shop and calls a man he talks to almost every morning to order his heroin.

Cedric does cut hair as well, averaging between five and eight heads a day. He’s quite good at it and takes pride in his work, whether it’s taking payment and a tip from a customer here or an unauthorized pack of cigarettes from a cleanly shorn prison guard down at Lorton. But over the months he has waded into easy money through his greater talent. Not simply selling drugs, which he’s been doing since he was fourteen, but precisely managing needs (of his heroin customers, just like his women) and not giving a morsel more than is required. Cedric’s particular prowess is at always making sure his margins are good.

With an hour to kill before his supplier arrives, he sits on the barbershop’s concrete front stoop, sipping a carton of orange juice from the convenience mart next door. He tilts his face upward to get the most from the warmth of a pale morning sun and feels a sense of well-being wash over him.

The last eight years inside Lorton may have blunted parts of him—some of his cockiness, for sure, and the rage that led him into so many fights during his first long prison stay, six hard years for a bank robbery he flubbed at age eighteen. If it counts for anything, what he’s really learned during his present term is how to
do time
shrewdly. Mostly, that means thinking things through, five or six steps ahead, before edging in any direction. It means sizing people up, carefully, though at a distance, before deciding how—or whether—to deal with them. It means keeping one’s own counsel and staying clear of messy situations. Cedric
thinks, as he crushes the empty Tropicana container, that he’s always had a natural acumen for these sorts of calculations.

He looks down at his watch, almost 9
A.M.
, and thinks about what they’re all doing right now at Lorton, the sorry-ass bastards. But the place is fading further behind him with each day, and the thought quickly passes.

Soon, a middle-aged black man in a polo shirt and alligator boots arrives with thirty palm-sized plastic bags. An hour after that, a middle-aged black man in a dark-blue business suit with a Department of Corrections badge arrives to make sure Cedric is at work. Both men are on their daily rounds, with lots of people to check on and little time to dawdle. Cedric greets each of them with a sort of arm’s length charm. He understands what they’re after and artfully fills the bill, allowing his day—and theirs—to waft forward uneventfully. By late afternoon, six heads have been cut and twenty-nine heroin customers have been in and out. The accounting is straightforward—haircuts and dime bags each cost $10. His cash from the barbering, $60, is folded into a money clip for deposit late tonight in his Lorton escrow account. It’s a rule: everything an inmate earns goes into the prison account, so their work/release doesn’t leave them flush with cash that could juice up Lorton’s black market for almost any good or service. Cedric Gilliam, the barber, sticks by that rule faithfully. He puts the money clip in his hip pocket.

As the afternoon fades, the man in alligator boots strolls by for his cut. Sixty percent of the thirty bags, $180, is handed over, and Cedric pockets the remaining cash, tying it in a tight bundle with a rubber band. Business concluded, he slips into the phone-booth-sized bathroom next to the pay phone with a bag he bought for himself. Breaking out a stub of plastic straw, he snorts down the powder.

He leans his hands on the toilet tank, eyes squeezed tight, and feels warmth flowing toward his extremities, like a river washing into cavities he didn’t know were there until the instant they fill. After some time, he’s not sure how long, he finds himself squinting at the harsh lightbulb, and he bumps out through the half-hinged door, uncertain, suddenly, of his footing. He leans against the phone to recover his balance. The hit of heroin is plenty to smooth him out, to compel his
whole being into an exhale but—he hopes—not more than enough. Anyone who wrestles with compulsion knows that though self-control is an unwelcome friend, it may be the only friend. And soon Cedric welcomes it, happy to feel centered and potent again, ready to manage things anew. He picks up the receiver to dial up Leona but pauses momentarily to consider calling Sherene, a woman he met late last year and has seen a few times. He decides Sherene can wait (he needs to set up some romance with her more thoughtfully) and that he and Leona should catch an early dinner and then have some precious private time at her apartment. After that, she has to drive him to the pickup point near Union Station. He needs to be there by 7:30 for the return migration of the Bluebird.

All goes neatly, tidily, the way he likes it. On the bus back, he leans across the aisle in the rear to huddle with two other prisoners. They are also working as barbers, so their receipts should all match. Barbershops in certain sections of D.C. are well-known fronts for drug dealing, so they all have to be careful. With Cedric’s guidance, they are. Inside the trailer near the prison parking lot, the strip search goes fine—he spent his heroin profits on Leona, as usual, dinner and a little gift, so he doesn’t have try to smuggle cash with his ass cylinder. While he’s slipping clumsily back into his jeans, he has a momentary concern about appearing high. But he reminds himself that he foiled urine tests by the prisoner intake unit plenty of times, and his worry passes quickly. He could gulp down eight glasses of water (that did the trick once) or finagle a switch of urine with another inmate. If they want to test, let the bastards go ahead.

But they don’t. Cedric—who knows some of the guards from junior high and one even from his days thirty years ago in youth detention—is certain that they’re no geniuses. Lorton has its own peculiar hierarchy, where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows that pulling off a successful hustle is what the best people do.

As he strolls across the wide concrete courtyard on the way to cell block three, taking his sweet time and taking in the moonlight, Cedric Gilliam feels complete—muscles and limbs exercised, wits challenged, every part of him pressed into service. The heroin high is pretty much
gone, but he doesn’t feel depressed, inasmuch as he has a lot going down and he’s got to be keeping it all together.

After breakfast the next morning, refreshed from a sound sleep, he notices that the guard at the parking lot checkpoint is looking at him cockeyed.

“What?” Cedric ventures, feeling a hint of discomfort.

“You’re not going anywhere today, Gilliam,” says the wide-bodied guard, a black guy about his age. He’s all smug, arms folded, Cedric thinks, in his dollhouse booth and folding chair.

“Hell you talking about?” Gilliam says, his voice wavering as he glances out toward the Bluebird’s headlights.

“They pulled your work card. Something about you earning more money than you turn in every day. You’re supposed to check with the program officer this afternoon. He’ll lay it all out.”

So, after lunch, Cedric checks it out. “There’s been a lot more traffic in and out of the barbershop than just six or seven customers a day,” the program officer explains, eventually looking up from a file on his desk. Their eyes lock, and then Cedric’s break away first, looking down. There’s no need to say any more. Work/release canceled, indefinitely.

Cedric leaves the covey of administrative offices, wanders absently back to the cell block, flops onto his cot, and falls in and out of sleep for several hours. Lying awake in the late afternoon, eyes closed so people will think he’s asleep and leave him the hell alone, he feels an awful, familiar restlessness clouding over him. He thinks about what he’d be doing right now on the outside—working out his day’s receipts, joking with R.J., and getting ready to see Leona or maybe that Sherene. It’s excruciating to think about all that, and his mind searches frantically for replacements, for decisions to make, issues to parse. Maybe now would be a good time to sign up for that class he was thinking of taking early last year, an environmental science thing at the prison library. He’s already got two bachelor’s degrees: one in business from the 1970s and another one, in urban affairs, he picked up in 1992. It gave him something to do during the early stretch of the long, dull years. Maybe he’ll get a third degree, in environmental science. But the
notion dissolves swiftly. It might have been an okay idea last year, but it seems impossibly bland now that he’s been outside, living full tilt, for all these months. And what’s the point anyway, he broods. No one’s going to hire a drug dealer and armed robber who has spent nearly half his life locked up. Get real. He could have a hundred degrees.

He sits up and checks his watch. It’s dinnertime, but he has no appetite, and besides, everyone at the mess will want to know what happened. He gazes across the quiet cell block, at the forty-four beds spaced evenly between green metal stand-up lockers along cinder block walls. No one’s around, thank goodness. He considers strategies to persuade a guard he knows to give him access to a phone. He should call Leona, who’ll be worried about what happened, or R.J., who’ll be curious but won’t give a damn. He fusses over what to do, back and forth—call Leona or not call—until inertia catches up with him and his mind turns in on itself.

Thinking about phone calls is what starts it. That phone in the prison library, the best phone around. A guard whose hair he cuts can get him in there sometimes so he doesn’t have to wait in line at the outside pay phone with a pocket full of quarters. It’s a free phone for local calls, and D.C. is local, so you can talk as long as you want. Which is why he planned it all so carefully one night last year—just a month before he heard the good news about work/release—meticulously arranging matters to get to that library phone to call Lavar.

He starts to chew on it, nice and slow, so the important details each present themselves in sequence, like they’ve been tagged and numbered. Oh yes, he went into the library with hopes for a good call, the kind of conversation a father ought to have with his son. And why not? Things back then weren’t going so bad, he reflects. He and Lavar had exchanged a few calls and two letters over the spring.

He pauses from the recollection for a moment, sits up, pillow propped against the cinder blocks, and gathers himself. Replaying moments from the “outside,” Cedric knows, is what inmates do; they prep and dissect them endlessly, for fresh, hidden meanings. It can drive you mad. He keeps on anyway, though, feeling pathetic but unable to stop, sort of, he thinks, like those poor strung-out bastards who mess with
their needle tracks, trying to recapture the sensations from each tiny pinprick.

And then he’s back at it, remembering how that evening’s phone call started just like he had hoped. Barbara didn’t pick up, that was the first break. That woman paralyzes him, and he held his breath as it rang once, then twice. Lavar picked it up and they just started chatting, real casual, like ol’ poppa was just checking in, calling home from some extended business trip or whatever. So, how you doing? How’s school? Any girlfriends yet? God, it felt good, easy and good. And it feels good thinking about it now, which is part of the point, he thinks, as he canopies his eyes with a heavy hand. You can almost go back.

He’s inside it now, easing the memory forward toward a cliff he’s been over before, and he feels his stomach tighten. The problems started when he found himself running out of things to say after half an hour and ended up rooting through a bare cupboard of shared references, anything to keep the connection going. He recalls the regrettable words and how he didn’t want to say them even as he did. “Hey, Lavar, remember how you talked back to my mother over the Kings Dominion amusement park thing? You shouldn’t have been disrespecting your grandmother like that. Telling her to shut up.” It was an ancient matter. Lavar couldn’t have been more than ten when he told Maggie to shut up and get off the phone because he was anxious for her to take him to the amusement park and she was gabbing away. It was an old nothing.

But it had been eating at Cedric Sr. for a long time. And once it spilled out, it seeped down into everything, all the explosive matter under the surface.

Oh, but that Lavar was ready. He shot right back, didn’t lose a second, starting out with, “What are you saying?! You’ve been disrespecting your mother every day of your life by being in jail. You’ve been disrespecting her since you started getting into trouble when you was fourteen. Don’t tell me about disrespect.”

Absolutely, that boy’s got a quick tongue, Cedric Sr. stews as he rolls the lines over in his head a few times. Disrespect, that’s at the heart of it. That’s why the boy had to be told not to “fuckin’ talk that way” to his father, or he’d get his “mouth smacked.”

But the thing is, he didn’t back down. Cedric Sr. thought he would. If they were face-to-face, he would have. No doubt there. He’d be hiding. But maybe because it was over the phone, Lavar just kept coming back at him, shouting about not telling “me what to do or not to do, like you’ve been around for me. I’m not some child anymore for you to raise. Those days are over and you missed ’em!”

That boy knows how to hit and hit low, Cedric ruminates, and he thinks over some things he might have responded with, clever things, instead of just blowing up, shouting like a madman, right there in the library, for Lavar to “just shut the fuck up!” Yelling, “I’m still your father. You talk to your grandmother that way again, I’ll beat the shit out of you. I’ll blow your fucking brains out!”