From the Chrysalis (16 page)

Pulling off the shirt he’d worn for the last three days, he lay on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Men were settling in for the night, but he didn’t hear them. When the prison bell chimed 9:00, he was deaf to that, too.
 

What good was the past? People didn’t learn from their mistakes. Take the administration. Hell, take the Joint’s architecture. Although the Auburn model had been questioned and minor changes made to electricity and plumbing, the grand entryway, with its triumphal arch, a cross-shaped cell block big enough to hold six hundred men and a huge workshop, had defied renovation. Maybe if they blew it up …

 
Something clattered, sounding like a metal key dropping on a concrete floor. He sat up and listened, but when nothing more happened, he laid back down again.
 

Liza had once asked if the workshop, which had been transformed by local businessmen into a series of small factories which manufactured furniture, metal goods, shoes and other leather products on slave labour wages, gave prisoners much incentive to reform. She had read about it in the newspaper. She was always reading something, the little nosy parker. Through all her questions, she’d forced him to start looking at the prison through different eyes.

Well, maybe,
he’d hedged.
 

You sound awfully skeptical,
she’d written back.
What about psychological counselling or rehabilitative programs then?
To help people change.

Oh, c’mon. How would that look? All those undeserved luxuries, my dear.

The administrative facilities and the library were housed in the front wing of the main cruciform, and the prisoners were lodged in the rear wings with a domed rotunda linking the four pavilions. They called the area under the domed rotunda,
surprise surprise,
the Dome.
 

Twice daily, inmates trooped through an uncovered exercise yard, heading to a workshop in the rear. They spent the remaining fifteen or sixteen hours in oversized pigeon coops on five tiers. The cells were eight feet by six feet by ten feet. Within the cell was a single bed suspended from a chain on the wall, a small two drawer dresser cum desk, a folding chair and a lidless, rusty toilet, fully exposed. A bit tight.
 

He had almost dozed off when Grumpy started banging on their shared wall. Jesus Christ, if it wasn’t the bell ringing sixteen times a day, it was some cellmate telling him the time. Grumpy wanted him to know that courtesy of Administration, the Joint’s nightly curtain call was about to begin. A minute passed, then two.
 

“Here it comes,” Grumpy warned him, but even so, the scream was so gut-wrenching his toes curled. The rest of the Joint got silent. It always did.
 

They were hurting somebody worse than usual. Christ, he hoped it was over soon. “Hey, Grumpy,” he shouted above the noise, “What did they say was wrong with that kid? You know, the one in the Yard?”

“I dunno. Some kind of fracture.”

Oh, yeah, a spiral fracture. Not good.
Do your own trip. Don’t get involved
, he repeated to himself.
 

At last the screaming stopped and Grumpy started to snore. People from all over the prison complained about his night time noise, but it was no use. Dace was too wound up to sleep anyway. The guards wouldn’t be making rounds for another hour or so. Maybe he’d do some push-ups on the floor.
 

Everybody was on edge lately. A couple of the guards were okay, but even they had started acting like jerks. The Joint had been in partial lockdown for the past six months, all in preparation for the big move to the new Supermax, just out of town.
 

In lieu of counting push-ups, Dace listed the Supermax’s deficiencies, from the inmate’s point of view. No windows, just lights and a minimal staff. A lot of electronic surveillance, though. It sounded like a battery chicken farm, for Chrissakes.

Parole conditions had also gotten tougher, which probably explained why guys were a little more tense than usual. Exercise usually relaxed him, but even after Dace had been doing push-ups for about five minutes, he still felt like banging his head on the floor. So he did more. Besides having a beef about electronic surveillance and a reduction in parole opportunities, the problem was most prisoners just didn’t like change. Even if sheer boredom got them in the end.

Maybe if they’d had some preparation. Yeah, right. That would have required
planning
, a time costing measure they couldn’t afford. The Deputy Warden’s post had been vacant for months; the Warden didn’t have the staff. Reducing paroles, collapsing work programmes and curtailing classes had eliminated some of the work, but slashing the inmate athletic program was too much.
 

Dace hated thinking about this stuff, but he couldn’t help it. Even some of the front-line guards had objected when they’d cut out sports. The ones still here, that is, and most of them were new. Experienced guards had already been transferred to the new Supermax. Inadequately trained to deal with anxious and competitive men with a variety of complaints and grievances, the remaining guards were even less equipped to warehouse men who now had both the inclination and the unexpended energy to experience guilt and express regret.

And bitch. And whine. Just last night the men in Dace’s shift had carped about missing a boxing match. Then the Warden got on the P.A. system and threatened to dam both prison visits and incoming mail while the custodial staff stood around wondering what the hell would happen next.
 

Deprived of mentally engaging activities, most convicts slept all the time, with a couple of exceptions. Dace was one, and he suspected Sandy McAllister, resident loudmouth, was another. Which was pretty fucking sad. But while old Loony Tunes did God knows what, Dace was busy writing letters to Liza, his father and, God help him, the
Maitland Spectator
. He couldn’t do anything else. He was too close to getting out.
 

Sometimes he jotted down notes for a book. Liza thought that was a wonderful idea. Well, she would. She pointed out he
could
have written a book, all the letters he’d sent. Not to mention he had
all sorts of ideas and loads of time
. He shook his head, snorting at the thought. Surely she knew he wrote by the light in the hall, in between the floor screw’s rounds. Well, of course she did, because in her last postscript she’d told him to get more sleep.
 

Lots of time to sleep in eternity,
he scribbled back. Just that much. The next day he sent her a couple of poems and a little skit. She must have gotten about six letters in one day. Anything to avoid the truth. No use in scaring her. Besides, what could she do?
 

He wanted to write more letters to the
Spectator
’s right-wing editor, knee-jerk fascist that he was, or better still to the
Globe and Mail,
but uncensored kites were expensive to smuggle out. Of all the people he wrote, only Liza could be counted on to reply. On the rare occasion he ran out of subject matter, he read.

If the prison doctor knew, he would have slipped some sleeping pills into his grub. Not just because inmates were more tractable when they were comatose, but because he’d done much worse. Everybody knew that the croaker was in cahoots with the shrink. Both men loved to prescribe drugs, especially experimental ones. Right now they were involved in a double blind experiment involving Lysergic acid diethylamide, otherwise known as acid, or LSD.

Dace tapped the shrink for Valium every chance he got, practicing the one good thing he learned in both the Boy Scouts and in prison: be prepared. Doing that made him think about the suicide bombers in World War II. You never knew. In between push-ups, he inched forward on his stomach to check his stash, taped behind his toilet. Good, he thought, counting twenty-six little white pills into his right hand.
 

His body felt a little stiff. Christ, he wasn’t even in his mid-twenties and he felt like an old man. He got up to brush his teeth and left the water on until he thought he heard some scuffling.

It could be rats. The dirty little devils had made quite a ruckus the last time they swarmed. No, his nerves were just bad. Not enough sleep. Better go to bed.
 

Looking at the grey army blanket on his cot was enough to make him forget about the noise and think about sex. It had been so long he had almost forgotten how. For a moment, he saw a girl lying there, curled into the wall. She was naked, her feet tangled in his sheet, but a little too still.

His neighbour Grumpy must have been on the same wavelength. He often was. “Hey, man,” he whispered, hoarse like a man waking up from a dream. “I’ve got a stash of real good shit if you give me your little schoolgirl cousin’s address. When’s she coming again? I’d give my eye teeth to spank her ass.”
 

She’s coming tomorrow,
Dace thought,
but there’s no way she’s seeing you.
 

Springing from the bed, he took one step and kicked their shared wall. “Jesus, you’re such a dickhead. Shut the fuck up or I’ll bust through this wall and shut it for you,” he spat. Dace was normally a man of few words, but he would have said more, except he heard another scuffling sound. “Wait. Can you hear that? What the hell’s going on?”
 

“Ah, take it easy, it’s nothing, man, nothing. I don’t hear nothing. Nothing ever happens here.”

Grumpy hadn’t had a visitor for years. The guys got more visitors when they first came in—old schoolmates, old girlfriends, curiosity seekers—but it got harder and harder to look straight people in the eye. Besides, most visitors didn’t come back. They hated the place, all the little indignities even visitors weren’t spared. And Grumpy hadn’t been good company at first.
Admissions fog
, the goddamn quack had said.

“Oh, shit happens all right,” Dace said, not surprised when he didn’t get an answer. Grumpy had a habit of conking out the moment he finished talking.
 

Across the Dome, Cell Block C was still lit. The last shift should have been back from the recreational area twenty minutes before, but they weren’t. Maybe the guards were having a hard time corralling everybody. He stuck his head between his bars and listened. The noise was more muffled now. Somebody was running. Aw, Jeez, maybe some dumb con was running around to avoid lockup. It happened all the time.
 

“Grumpy?” he inquired, but all he got was another snore.
 

More running across an upper tier, or maybe it was the roof.
 

It’s nothing
,
he told himself, lacing his fingers together and stretching out his arms. His muscles were a little tight. No wonder; his tendons were shrivelling.

He had a feeling he was in for a bad night, but he got back into bed anyway. Bad nights happened when the moon was full, but they also happened when it waned. Inmates jabbered to themselves or screamed until daylight. Or they just hooted and hollered until the guards screamed back. They didn’t need a reason. It passed the time.
 

Bunching up his pillow and putting it over his head helped until the noise percolated through. Although it bothered him, he wasn’t concerned. As a teenager in the Big House, as a fish in a huge toxic tank, he’d memorized the sounds of men going crazy, of men dying, and of the penitentiary’s howling winds, often misinterpreted by newcomers as ghostly wails. Christ, men could be fools. True, one of the pipes made a weird noise, but it was more like an air raid siren. The only ghosts in the Pen were the ones people brought with them or summoned during their vigils for the dead.

Dace had tried to live by three maxims ever since he’d arrived: do your own time, mind your own business, don’t turn a deaf ear to a friend in need.
 

Strong loyalties to his peer group,
he’d read upside down on an officer’s report more than once.
 

A typical con,
another wag had penned in a margin.
 

Well, what did they know? What did anybody know about him? Reaching under the blanket, he found a surefire way to get some sleep. As long as nothing else happened, he’d sleep for a while.