Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

We filled out white cards with black lettering on them, too.

It was a lot like the information we’d had to give out at the police station, but a little more elaborate, and at the police station we’d only had to give it once, verbally, not write it down ourselves endlessly.

Somewhere along the line we were searched for dangerous weapons. Between us, the closest thing to a dangerous weapon was Wheat’s Volkswagen key.

And then we were taken into a locker room and told to strip. “But isn’t that why we’re in here?” asked Wheat.

“Ummm,” the correctional officer said.

All along we’d had the same correctional officer with us, a guy in his thirties with five o’clock shadow (and it was only mid-morning, remember) and eyes as blue as Paul Newman’s (or Robert Redford’s). He was very remote. Not nasty, just distant. Every now and then Wheaty would ask him a question and the correctional officer would say, “Ummm.” No matter what the question. What time is it? Ummm. What year was this jail built? Ummm. How long you been at this job? Ummm.

Wheaty, naturally, did not notice that the correctional officer wasn’t really answering. Wheat assumed he and the correctional officer were having a conversation.

And now Wheat looked at the correctional officer’s uniform, which consisted of pale blue shirt with shiny badge, dark blue tie, dark blue trousers, no gun. And Wheat said, “Do we get uniforms?”

Remember we were standing there naked at the time.

“Ummm,” the correctional officer said.

And kind of kicked at our clothes, which were neatly piled on the floor at our feet.

So we put our clothes back on.

I would have preferred having a uniform, frankly, and I know Wheat was very disappointed about not getting one. He said so. “What’s the use of being in jail if you don’t get a striped suit?” (He said this to me, later, having learned his lesson, finally, about talking with Ummm.)

Both of us were wearing nicer, less comfortable clothes than we normally chose to wear. We had dressed up for our court appearance, very clean-cut college boy short sleeve shirts and pressed slacks. We looked like a couple of models in a Sears catalog, not DeKalb County Jail’s latest cons.

And then something remarkable happened.

Wheaty asked a question and the correctional officer actually answered. Made a sentence.

Wheaty asked, “What happens now?”

And the correctional officer said, “Now I lock you up.”

“Ummm,” I said.

Remember how I mentioned the jail, from the outside, looked like any big old brick building, an old school house maybe, the major difference being bars on the windows? The same was true of the inside. It was very similar to the junior high I went to in the seventh grade, same creaky floors, same grim pastel plaster walls. By grim pastel I mean all those nauseating institutional grays and greens society reserves for its criminals and school children. Of course the junior high I’d attended had been condemned and torn down six years ago, while DeKalb County was taking the more patient route and waiting for the jail to fall down under its own steam.

We were taken to a place called the Bull Pen, which in no way reminded me of my old junior high. This was the real thing: a large oblong room enclosed by heavy iron bars, bars stretching from floor to ceiling. Around the Bull Pen, which was about twenty feet wide and seventy feet long, was a catwalk, and around the catwalk were more iron bars, on three sides anyway: the back wall was just that, the back wall of the jail itself.

We were given individual cells within the Bull Pen. There were only six such cells, five of which were filled, now that we were there. The six cells were all in a row, and took up about a fourth of the Bull Pen. The rest was an open area (although there was a shower and a sink and all the necessary toilet facilities at one end) and in that open area were three large metal tables, which were sort of like picnic tables, although this wasn’t my idea of a picnic.

But then it wasn’t my idea of a jail, either. On the way over I had envisioned a drunk tank, the sort you see in the movies, a huge cage where scrufty, bearded derelicts lurk, looking for somebody clean to throw up on: a filthy pit with the toilet out in the open and with no seat on it, and no place to sleep but on the bug-infested floor. Instead, I found myself inside a dormitory of sorts, despite the iron bars and cement floor; a clean, orderly-looking place where two men sat at a picnic type table and played cards, while another sat nearby watching television (which was up high, beyond the bars, out in the catwalk area), all of them very ordinary looking guys, wearing street clothes. All in all, it was much better than I had expected, especially considering the rundown condition of the jail itself.

Still, it was nothing to write home about, and I was getting irritated at Wheat, who was walking around the Bull Pen with a grin on his face, looking the place over with the tickled expression of a new home buyer.

I went to my cell. It was, like all the other cells, pretty good size, and had a double bunk; had two people been required to make use of this cell, which was the intent of its design, it would have been cramped. For a single person, it was almost roomy.

Privacy was another nice feature. Blank metal walls were on three sides, the “front door” of the cell being bars and looking out on the area with the picnic tables. So I had privacy when I wanted it, and company when I wanted it. Who could ask for anything more, other than to be able to walk out of there.

Wheat stuck his head in my cell, said, “Anybody home?” and came in and sat on the lower bunk. “This is really far out, isn’t it?” He was glowing.

“Far out?” I said. “Far out? Look around you. See this light bulb in the wall here? Notice the wire mesh around it? That’s so we don’t take the bulb out and break it and use it to kill somebody. Do you notice anything funny about your shoes? That’s right: they took our shoe laces away from us. Our belts, too. That’s so we don’t hang ourselves. Did you notice we’re surrounded by not one, but two, count ’em folks, two rows of iron bars. Wheat. Haven’t you noticed? We’re in jail!”

“Well,” Wheaty said, getting up off the bunk. “I don’t see why you have to be in a bad mood about it.”

I just looked at him.

He said, “I’m going out and meet the guys. Want to come?”

Meet the guys?

The guys?

You mean those four criminals out there?

“Okay,” I said.

The guy watching television was named Peabody. He was a little pot-bellied man who wore wire-rimmed glasses and was around thirty-five years old. He wore a short-sleeve blue Banlon golfer’s shirt and brown slacks. His hair was dark and receding. He looked more like an accountant than a criminal. We asked him what he did for a living. He told us he was an accountant. He told us we looked more like college students than criminals. We told him we only looked like criminals when we had our clothes off. He didn’t seem to catch that. He was watching a soap opera he’d been following since he entered jail twenty-seven days before and told us, out of the corner of his mouth, that as soon as his stories were over (he followed various soap operas till four o’clock in the afternoon) he would get better acquainted with us. I could not imagine what he could be in for, unless he had embezzled or something else of a clerically criminal nature, but the county jail didn’t seem a likely home for an embezzler.

“He’s in for beating the crap out of his wife’s boyfriend,” Elam said.

Elam was one of the two guys playing cards. He was a friendly, self-confident guy with a wide, quick smile that seemed to me a bit sinister, at first anyway; later on, when I got used to him, it was just a smile. He was dark: dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes, dark personality. He scared me a little, though he wasn’t a big, thug sort of person. Not that he was short or skinny or anything, it’s just with a guy like Wheaty around nobody else seems big, outside of maybe a palm tree. The scary thing about Elam were those eyes of his: they were kind of large, kind of pop-eyed looking, probably due to some sort of thyroid condition, though I never asked.