Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

'You understand me, Henry?' Nile asked again. 'I don't want any b.s. about you didn 't hear this part or that part. This is serious shit I'm talking here.'

'Mmm-hmm,' said Bolt, both hands on his stomach. His eyes were closed. He was concentrating to make sure he kept it down. If that balloon -that's what Ordell called the rubbers, the balloons – if that balloon broke in Bolt's gut, full of straight stuff, pure white, they couldn 't get him to emergency fast enough. He'd be dead. He wouldn't call for a doctor either. Bolt was Top Rank, bar none for his. He'd just smile. They all laughed about it. 'Fuck man, that'd be motherfuckin kickin, man. That'd be a rush. Whoo-ee.'

Whooee, thought Nile. From inside his jumpsuit, Bolt took a wad of bills, loot he 'd collected in here for the dope. Nile couldn't believe there was cash in here, but anything small enough to pass between hands – pills, razor blades, currency – made its way inside if it was useful. On a chair, there was a blue plastic bag, the delivery sleeve from a local paper one of the guards must have been reading. Nile put the bills in there and just stuffed all of it down his trousers. No one searched him on the way out.

He kept speaking the same way ten more minutes, then stepped outside to let the COs know they could take Bolt back. He was led off with his ankle irons clanking. Bolt didn't bother with even a backward look at Nile. In his cell, he'd take a box of Ex-Lax and wait.

Nile dropped dope with somebody new each week. A few whispered, 'You all right, man, you okay.' Nile represented to them by hand: B, S, D, b, 4, me. It was a quick code, sign language, concluding with his index finger jabbed like a dagger toward his heart. They were startled by that, a white guy down for his. Fuck you doin? their looks would say, and inevitably his head rang in a customary instant of shame. Question of his life. People always acted like he was strange. He wouldn't drive his car in the rain. That was one thing people thought was strange. Not that he wouldn't travel. But he thought the rain was bad for the finish. And he got all weird around strangers, not looking people in the eye, but lots of people were like that. Michael was the same. But around Core, around Bug, it was different. I got carried away, he wanted to explain to the Saints who'd give him that look. Ijust got carried away. I'm in love, he'd say. I love being in love. He thought about Bug as he came back into the jail corridor.

How this started, bringing shit into the jail, was strange – Eddgar's fault, Nile would say, though how much could you fade that way? He'd fucked up, too. He had got himself in a bad place with Hardcore, straight off. Nile knew that. Ordell was powerful. Right from the giddyap, Nile felt his strength, this vitality that reached through Core, like the force of nature that drove through a plant from root to leaf. He almost said to Eddgar half a dozen times, 'This guy, Ordell, Hardcore, he reminds me of you.'

He wrote his reports about Core each month, and somehow he started letting Hardcore tell him what to say. Sitting in Nile's cubicle down at Probation in the Central Courthouse, Core would whisper so his raspy voice would not carry beyond the rimpled plastic partitions. 'What-all you scribblin bout me?' Core would clown around, laughing, reaching for the sheet, and finally Nile let him turn it over, like what's the dif, no secrets here. Hardcore read, scratching his long evil fingernails through his scraggly goatee. 'Don't be sayin that, man, don't be gone on bout what a loose-motherfucker I is, you be worryin bout my gangbangin.'

'No, what should I say?'

'You know, bro. Be cool. Put down I got me a good job and shit.' 'What job is that, man?'

'Commu 'ty organizin.' He laughed, because Nile had mentioned Eddgar. Eddgar was already in a heat. This is an opportunity, Nile, he'd say, this is a tremendous opportunity. 'Say I'm like doin that commun 'ty organizin shit.'

He had. Oh well. When Nile went out to the IV Tower for the home visits, Ordell was always there to greet him, standing on the street, waving his arm around in huge swooping gestures, making fun of somebody, probably both of them.

'Park right here, thass good, thass good.' He saved the best spot for blocks for Nile. Hardcore put on a good show. His artillery, his musclemen were all stuffed in one black Lincoln half a block down. There was nobody around to wait on Hardcore, just a few neighborhood kids – 'shorties' – he couldn't keep away, and this skinny little smooth-skinned girl, Lovinia, who carried messages. 'Go tell Bolt, done said get wit it,' Core said to her one day.

'What's that about?' Nile asked.

'Oh, that.' Hardcore laughed. His mouth was wide and on one side he had several teeth crowned in gold. He never answered. He had the decency not to lie. Of course, each time Nile came he saw more. The guns were out, the Tec-9s and AK-47s. The pagers. Kids running and flying whenever Hardcore walked around. 'You the man,' Hardcore would tell Nile. 'You the man, you tell me when I'm bustin on folks or somethin, you say. ' 'Be done, man,'' I gone quit. This here is jus some bidness, man, got to have some bidness.'

'You oughta listen to my father. You oughta talk to him,' Nile said. Why would he say that? Especially when, most days, the last thing in the world he wanted to do himself was talk to Eddgar? Kind of swap, Nile supposed. You talk to him, then I don't have to.

Eddgar always had projects for Nile. In college, when Nile was sort of cutting up, doing ts and blues a lot and watching a shitload of MTV, Nile had his favorite job: he was a messenger. The whole shot, the whole thing, Nile loved it. He had the bike, the tights, the optic safety vests, the weak little Styrofoam crash helmet. He went around ripped half the time, with his Walkman blasting, and a walkie-talkie on his waist turned up full volume. He couldn't really hear it, but it vibrated when Jack started yelling in dispatch. That job was the tits. What Nile liked best was the way you were in the scene and not. All these characters are ricocheting off the walls, like man, where's the messenger? Jesus, where's the messenger? And you bop in there – Okay, here's the messenger, take a pill.

Eddgar hated that job. Nile could just tell Eddgar was waiting him out. He was waiting for Nile to see the job was frostbite city in the winter and stroke city in July. What jacked Eddgar was not so much that Nile was a flunky but that he liked it. Maybe that was part of why it was a great job. Then the second summer Nile was getting fucking prickly heat between his legs from the bicycle seat, and he said something about how they ought to have a union, all the messengers. Eddgar got very intense. He must have asked Nile sixty times if he talked to anybody else, until Nile spent hours wondering what kind of embolism he'd had to even say something like that out loud to Eddgar. Nile quit the job soon after that. He went back to Kindle Community College, he took social-work courses like Eddgar was always saying. It was just easier that way.

Now and then, Core would go off to do his business. He'd put his hand on Nile's shoulder. 'You cool, man. You okay. Back atcha.' Usually he left Nile on one of those broken benches behind T-4, the IV Tower, facing a sealed-off portion called The Chute, or The Shoot; nobody ever spelled it, so you never knew. It was fenced on one side and bounded by the bricks of the IV Tower on the other. This was the domain of the T-4 Rollers, Core's set. They were all kickin here, wallbanging, drinking Eight Ball, shooting dice. Nile sat and watched, with Core's blessings, but it was as if he wasn't there, some white nothing, no more noticeable than the lid from a paper cup amid the trash moldering at the buildingsides. He saw shit, though. One afternoon, late, Gorgo, a long raw-boned cavalryman, pulled his '86 Blazer with deep-dish tires right up on the walk, N.W.A. blastin through the open windows. Gorgoflew out, G-down, black T-shirt trailing, hard-leg jeans sagging. For reasons Nile could not understand, the Saints around knew he'd been rippin.