man, I’m not telling you again!” Inmates and staff were learning Melvin’s name.
I watched the sun lower through the brown windows from range 5. The volume stayed high. Inmates and guards milled around by the TV and phones: inmates in brown and white, guards in gray and black, all of us watching the clock. I willed Shrek to ring the bell.
And he did.
I ran down the steps against the flow of inmates. I was going for the count sheets. And even though we had no space, and even though everyone was sprinting, nobody knocked shoulders with me.
Then something broke above me. It sounded how a car accident sounds: big bangs with glass rain. Inmates screeched. I looked up so see that three windows on range 5 were broken. I paused, expecting to see an escape rope hanging out. But saw the bars still intact. Somebody yelled, “Can’t take the goddamn heat!”
When I made the bubble, I told Shrek what had happened.
He said, “No shit? I’m going to make them pay.” He sent me back up on a hopeless mission to find the guys who broke them. But before I left he asked me, “Want to know the secret to straight-up happiness?”
Sure.
“A blowjob.”
The doors banged shut on the ranges. Inmates locked themselves in. Something they didn’t usually do. I guessed that the guilty were nowhere near range 5 anymore—guilty for the windows, I mean—but I made it look good for Shrek and took the steps two at a time.
Up top I saw nothing except the state-issued soap used to break the glass sitting on the frames of the former windows—the bars and screens kept them out of the parking lot. Fifty feet below, little cubes of safety glass were all over the floor. Everyone was in his cell. The ranges were clear. But still banging. That was a good time in jail. For the inmates. I felt them watching me. Normal asked me through the bars, “Find anything, CO? Who did it, CO? Want some help, CO?”
I radioed Shrek, Range 5 is clear. They used bars of soap.
“Ten–four,” he radioed back.
The sun set. There was no sense rushing down. I had the count sheets. I had investigated the jail crime to the full extent of my ability. The window-breakers did me a favor anyway. Wind blew through the bars. It smelled like the Pennsylvania I used to know. It was cool and full of night. It cured the fire alarm. It smelled free and fresh and a few glass cubes fell from the frames and flashed like sparks on the way down.
In one hour I knew I’d be driving home with the windows down to try and blow the public-restroom stink off my uniform. I would take the long way, the route through the farms with their tractor-cracked roads, streaking lightning bugs, and sleeping cows. Home meant AC, even if it was only a window unit. That was straight-up luxurious. My fiancée was even there, probably grading her students’ papers and listening to classical music at the table I had just bolted together. The talk the night before: we should try for kids right away. How different it was eight miles away.
But then Shrek made threats over the loudspeaker about how he was going to keep the lights on and keep guards running the ranges until somebody owned up for the windows. He said that he was going to get maintenance to come and turn the heat on. “Bet me,” he echoed. “Bet me.”
He was faking it but had to say something—it was his block.
He delayed count fifteen minutes to be dramatic, but after the phone rang—no doubt the control center asking him for numbers—he rang the bell for at least a minute straight, until the hammer had to be red hot, and called, “Count time! Count time! Be standing! Be visible! Lights on! Count time! Count time!”
“Fuck your count!” inmates yelled.
“Fuck your lights!” inmates yelled.
I counted—all 458 inmates. We were short that night. Usually you only counted two ranges. The regular guard followed me. It was loud. The game was getting close, and the broken windows and wind energized the block. The ranges glared. Cell lights were on then, as required. I checked them off. We started at the top. Normal saluted. Melvin giggled.
We finished in ten minutes. My headache dimmed. And for the first time since clocking in, I wasn’t sweating.
No more caged rounds for me. No more doors. No more hot breath and smoke and slams.
Down in the bubble I gave Shrek the count: all.
Over the speaker he said, “You can forget about soap tomorrow.”
Sunday was soap day. Every inmate got a fresh bar.
Inmates screeched again—a bullshit technical foul was called in the last minute of the game. Shrek thought it was him who had them fired up. “That’s right, bitches,” he said to the four of us guards.
Then the inmates chanted, “Lights! Lights! Lights!” They wanted them out.
Shrek pumped his fist in rhythm with the cheer. “You break my windows? I’m leaving ’em on!”
“Fuck you! Turn up the heat!” It sounded like Normal. His voice was hoarse.
Shrek laughed and cut the lights.
The game was over.
Up in the cage I saw lights still on in some cells, figures moving, cigarettes streaking, TVs flickering blue. The wind blew through cage. The only noise was the occasional tick of falling glass. An oven cooling off.
Nobody spoke for a long minute. I sat on the counter and I took off my hat.
Shrek leaned back almost horizontal in his desk chair. The bolts creaked. “Seventeen years here,” he said. “Seventeen years, and there’s only one thing that beats final count . . .”
He looked up at the cage.
He looked at us.
He said, “. . . and that’s a blowjob.”
And I laughed. I actually did. It was funny. Anything was. Then.
The Man Factory
A MAN becomes the Man in a Pennsylvania state prison after only five weeks at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Training Academy. The academy’s an old brick children’s hospital with cherub statues on the roof and a pepper-spray chamber out back.
I walked under the cherubs with my gym bag. The duty sergeant working the desk, a young guy, about six foot five and 240 pounds of muscle, said, “S’up.”
My room came with a camouflage bedspread. The window was painted shut. Other cadets walked from the parking lot carrying duffle bags and rolling suitcases. Old oaks and green grass surrounded the building.
~
THE top Man at the academy, Lieutenant Rice, yelled into his microphone, “Welcome, Class 615!” We sat on folding chairs in the gym. Word was inmates beat him badly in a riot fifteen years earlier. Cadets whispered about razor-wire scars. He said, “The food here is better than anywhere else in the DOC. Period.”
Rice introduced the
