by stick standards, I decided to not say anything more to the new jug-head guard in front of me. I just kept shuffling slow and steady, wearing irons on my ankles that I’d gotten used to so much that I’d grown permanent calluses from them. I kept shuffling slow and kept my bearing about me as I tried to ignore the irksome clanking of the chains at midstep, because it wouldn’t do me well to raise hell about any of it.
I’d already been through eight hours of a hurry up and wait drill, first in my empty cell with a rolled-up bed, and then sitting outside the warden’s office watching the guards keeping an eye on me over top issues of Life, Field & Stream and National Geographic magazines.
An old trustee with heavy glasses on and small shoulders who seemed to have been there before time began and a man who I’d always gotten along with somewhat tolerable came in to say at long last that the head man of the Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary was busy attending to a bunch of local politicians touring the place.
All of the guards laid down their aged magazines, bored, like they’d probably done a thousand other times, and then they grabbed me up and escorted me to another waiting room. After I watched them sip on cold bottles of pop for another hour, I finally had my farewell talk with the assistant warden.
The tall shiny wooden sign sitting on top of his desk yelled that his name was Theodore Donald O’Neil, the Third. And he was young, a good bit younger than me, and I wasn’t that old. He seemed proud of himself sitting behind his long name and polished oak desk in a way a young man is until he’s really tested and finds out what’s really inside of him.
But like this old Chinese lady had come in to teach us once, I kept focusing on my breathing. I took in air slow like it was the gift of life and let my lungs fill up with the gift before letting it out, just as I’d done over and over from years of trying to let out what was about to make me explode, or eat my insides away to nothing.
The assistant warden told me to sit.
I sat.
He looked so serious, and then he grinned.
He leaned back carrying that grin and stared as hard as he could for what seemed a decent long time until his eyes started to get watery.
“If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be leaving. I’ve scanned your file and sitting here looking at you, I know you’re still a threat to society. It’s written all over your face.”
I kept staring at him because my eyes had dried up years ago when something deep down in me turned the water off, and I could now stare at anybody until I just got so bored with it that I’d decide to stare at something else. It was written all over Mr. O’Neil that he wasn’t quite yet the hard man he’d need to be in this new job, as his eyes left mine and he began talking again and fiddling with a pencil that had teeth marks on it.
“Besides not making parole several times for various violations, you’ve been involved in several serious altercations. You even managed to kill an inmate here.”
“I’m sure it’s in the file what I did and why,” I said.
“Actually, the file only has your version of what happened, being the other man is dead.”
“I had to defend myself if I wanted to keep living is the short of it.”
“Yes…you never did say why the man tried to kill you, as was your story.”
“Don’t know.”
He looked over the papers at me. “Well, we can’t ask his version of what happened, can we?”
“You could dig him up but I suspect he wouldn’t say a whole lot,” I said.
He kept looking at me for a good spell, then at the head guard before he eyed his watch. Then he turned his attention square back at me.
“The warden doesn’t have any other recourse than to let you go. I’d like to believe that you’ll begin leading a decent life, but your nature toward violence will lead you right back into incarceration, if you don’t get killed first, of course. But you’re a hard man to kill, aren’t you, Henry Cole?”
“This damned place hasn’t killed me yet.”
“This institution didn’t try to kill you, it tried to rehabilitate you. And we failed in that task. The taxpayer’s money has been wasted in that regard. You are living, breathing proof that some men cannot change their behavior, and therefore they should be restrained and kept from society that they will naturally prey on and do harm to. It’s my opinion that you should be kept here for as long as you have the capacity to continue to be a threat to others, which would be until you are either a feeble old man or until you die. But as you know, even though you still have evil in your eyes as you sit there staring at me, I lack the authority to keep you here and throw away the key, as they say. I did want you to know my feelings on the matter, however.”
I couldn’t hardly stand to be quiet anymore with that young man with not a scar on him judging me the way he was doing, but I kept trying to sit on my temper best I could. It was starting to catch my ass on fire.
“What’re your plans?”
“Don’t have any,” I lied.
“None?”
“Not a single one,” I lied again.
“What do people like you think about in here for…what was it…eight years?” he asked.
“I’ve been here a lot longer than eight years.”
“Didn’t you ever think about what you would do when you were released?”
“What do you think about in here when you’re locked up behind the same rusty bars as I am, day after day?” I asked back.
The assistant warden tried to grow another grin but it slid away.
“I can leave here whenever I want. You can’t. But to answer your question, I think about how to make sure predators like you stay here where you belong,” he said. “It’s very, very satisfying.”
He looked like he meant what he said, and I respected him more than I did when I’d first laid eyes on him, but still not much. He went back to scanning and flipping page after page of I guess what amounted to my life in prison, which amounted to all of my adult life. He stopped to read one section with a lot of care.
“You’ve been housed in protective custody most of your time here. Why?”
I didn’t say anything as he kept reading. He finally looked up.
“Why the attacks?”
“If it ain’t in there, I don’t know,” I said. “I was actually hoping you might.”
“You don’t know why inmates on two other occasions tried to kill you?”
“I didn’t even know them.”
“This is a complete waste of time.” He closed my file and threw it onto a stack of other files.
I noted mine was the thickest and an old pain shot through me in a thousand old places.
“The
