Rhozier Brown - DC Noir 2 - The Classics

“How’s your musical career coming?”

I laughed nervously. “It just limps along.”

How could she seem so calm in a situation like this? Suddenly, the real danger I was in confronted me. The man kept his eyes on the door. It seemed he got slightly agitated and alert every time a police car passed the bar …

An awkward pause. “Would anybody like anything to eat?” I asked. No. They had eaten already. The drinks were just fine.

“I’m sorry we don’t have time, my Sister. Are you able to help?”

I clutched my bag with the money in it. I would be lying if I said that she looked good. She had lost weight and it showed in her face, which was now gaunt with strain.

Just as I was about to feel sorry for her, she said: “Life is funny, isn’t it, girl? And we ain’t even turned forty yet.” Then she laughed a little, and with a gesture hinted that we should go to the ladies’ room together.

In the john, she said: “I’m sorry we’ll have to cut this visit short, my Sister.”

“I understand,” I said, fighting back the tears.

I took out the money, all the time thinking about Eugene and imagining if the FBI burst in there right then. But nothing happened. I gave it to her. She took it and grasped my hand tightly. Then she kissed me full in the mouth, and said: “For a better world.”

“For a better world,” I replied

“Thanks. Now, when we get back to the table, you will stay with us for about three minutes. We will leave first … You understand?” Yes, I said. “After a while, you can leave. Good luck with everything, Linda.”

I did just as she said, but that was the longest five minutes of my life. The last time I saw her in person was in that awful West Side bar. But I read about her in the Paris papers and in Freedomways magazine. It is rumored that she operates a gun-running ring for African liberation movements from an office in Paris. Jennie has found her river.

About me, there isn’t much here to say. Except, perhaps, that the children must come now. We’re working on that. I look forward to playing for them. Our parents are quite proud of us. I do find myself a little nervous these days — some hovering tension lurking in the air. We’re doing well, but the pressure to keep up is great. We have a house on a quiet treelined street in Westchester. I go to club meetings once a month. I work with the church choir; and once in a while, for kicks, I get my hair done at Henri Bendel’s …

(Originally published in 1996)

Lorton, VA

Flat on his back at night when the TV and radio whispers and the coughs and sobs faded away, Lucus let his arm float up until his fingers pressed against a concrete sky and told him where he was.

What’s going on, he thought, remembering a song from another Death City son who’d been big back when Lucus had been an outside man. Now …

Grounded, man: Got to maintain. All day. All night.

Night meant the admin killed the cells’ overheads. Dudes with desk lamps had to snap them off. Unblinking walkway bulbs on the tiers cast a pale light into every cell.

Same as ever, cell lights snapped on at 7 a.m. that cold autumn morning.

From the bunk under his, Lucus heard H.L.S. whisper: “Think they’s gonna go for it today?”

Lucus said nothing.

Jackster lay on the cot an arm’s length from H.L.S.’s bunk, waiting to take his cue from the two gray men the admin had sardined him with, waiting before putting his feet on the floor and figuring on whether to take his meal card, make for breakfast. “Maybe it’s all cool,” said Jackster.

“Maybe it’s chilled.”

“They been rocking the cradle,” said H.L.S. “Put a dude to sleep with its-forgots, put steel in him when he’s dreaming. They thinks they got a beef, they got a beef, and it don’t blow away in the wind. Hard luck.”

“I know what you’re saying,” said Jackster, not backing down like a punk but not pushing like a fool. “What you gonna do, Lucus?”

Silence answered those whispers in cell 47, tier 3, Administrative Building 3, Central Facility of the Lorton Correctional Complex, which drew its residents from the streets of Washington, Death C ity, a half hour drive north on a Virginia highway.

Then from down the tier came the buzz of a cell door as officers called a D-Dude out, the tinkle of chains as they strapped him in full restraints — hands linked to a chain belt in front, ankle hobbles, a lead line and chains to the next guy in line.

D-Designate residents were linked up to be marched to and from the mess hall, the first cons for breakfast and last for dinner. Lunch got carted to them in their cells, a universally unpopular feeding system negotiated between Eighth Amendment court rulings and the administration.

When the jerks moved the D-Dudes to the mess hall, other cons were supposed to stay in their cells. Their gates might be locked, but it was easier for the guards to yell the corridors clear and march the D-Dudes past open cells as fast as the shackled men could shuffle. D-Dudes shuffled fast: In full restraints, you were a soft mark to get tore up.

Two years into his stretch, Lucus became a D-Designate after he and Marcus jumped the hospital bus guards, stole the vehicle, and damn near made it to the freeway before troopers threw up a roadblock. Lucus shot a trooper in the leg with a bus guard’s pistol. After a SWAT sharpshooter cracked Marcus’s head open, Lucus was able to press the guard’s revolver into Marcus’s dead hand, then surrender unharmed. The trooper who got shot couldn’t make a positive ID on which orange-jumpsuited convict had pulled his trigger, so dead Marcus ate that beef. Lucus only got tabbed for an escape.

That adventure added five to his forty, kept him in chains for the next seven years.

Chains tinkled past the cell. Lucus drilled his eyes into the concrete ceiling.

H.L.S. swung off his lower bunk, went to the seatless toilet, urinated.

“Man,” he said, “hard luck, my plumbin’s so creaky, can’t go but half the night without hitting porcelain and I still gots to go first thing in the a.m.!”

“I hear that,” said Lucus.

A rhythm worked its way down the tier, squeaky shoes followed by a loud clunk, moving closer: the fat Guard Rawlins unlocking the manuals on each cell door. Rawlins threw their bolt, squeaked down the line.

Jackster whispered: “What are you going to do, Lucus?”

Respectful. Wary. But pushing.

The warning Klaxon echoed through the five tiers of Building 3, then came the sledgehammer clang of all the cells unlocking electronically.

Lucus sat up.

Cell doors were slid open by their residents. Lucus didn’t need to remind his two cellmates to leave their door shut that day. To sleep warm in the seasonally cold cell, he wore his orange jumpsuit over a white T-shirt — the seven-inch shank hidden along his heart-side forearm, inside the orange sleeve, held in place by a fuzzy red wristband like the iron-pumpers sported. Two winters before, a fish with a machine-shop job thought he could wolf out Lucus with the shiv he’d made right under the jerks’ eyes. Lucus broke both the fish’s arms and one of his knees, kept the blade, and left the fish to gimp around like a billboard.

At their cell sink, H.L.S. splashed water on his face.

“I’m hungry,” said Lucus. He slid to the floor, slipped into his sneakers. Glanced to the man at the sink whose hair was white: “You hungry, Sam?”

H.L.S. — Hard Luck Sam.

“Hell yes,” he answered. “If it’s gonna keep running out, got to put more in.”