Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“What thing?”

“If it’s a frame it’s airtight. From the video to the girl’s testimony, they’ve got you as a predator. You were pulling her by the hair, for chrissakes.”

“She asked me to,” I said, realizing what those words would sound like in front of a jury.

“No audio on the tape. It looks like she was begging you to stop.”

I wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words.

“But it’s not that that’s the problem,” Gladstone said. “The problem is you got powerful enemies who can reach in here and snuff you out.”

“I need a cigarette,” I replied.

My only friend in the world lit a Marlboro, stood up from his chair, and placed it between my lips. I took in a deep draw, held it, and then blew the smoke from my nostrils.

The smoke felt wonderful in my lungs. I nodded and inhaled again.

I will never forget the chill in that room.

“You got to be cool, Joe,” my dispatcher said. “Don’t be talking about a frame in here, or to your lawyer. I’ll look into this and I’ll talk to the chief of Ds too. I got a contact in his office. I know a couple of people here too. They’re going to take you out of gen pop and put you in solitary confinement. At least that way you’ll be safe until I can work some magic.”

It’s a terrible fall when you find yourself grateful to be put in segregation.

“What about Monica?” I asked. “Can you get her in here to see me?”

“She don’t wanna see you, King. The detective on the case, Jocelyn Bryor, showed her the tape.”

My gratitude for getting solitary didn’t last long. The room was dim and small. I had a cot, a hard-edged aluminum toilet, and two and a half paces of floor space. I could touch the metal ceiling by raising my hand six inches above my head. The food sometimes turned my stomach. But because they fed me only once a day I was always ravenous. The fare was reconstituted potatoes and corned beef jerky, boiled green beans and, once a week, a cube of Jell-O.

I wasn’t alone because of the roaches, spiders, and bedbugs. I wasn’t alone because the dozens of men around me, also in isolation, spent hours hollering and crying, sometimes singing and pounding out rhythmic exercises.

One man, who somehow knew my name, would often regale me with insults and threats.

“I’m gonna fuck you in the ass, and when I get outta here I’m’a do the same to your wife an’ little girl.”

I never gave him the satisfaction of a response. Instead I found an iron strut that had somehow come loose from the concrete floor. I worried that little crosspiece until finally, after eight meals, I got it free.

Nine inches of rusted iron with a handle torn from my threadbare blanket. Somebody was going to die behind that shard of Rikers; hopefully it would be the man who threatened my family.

Never, not once, did they take me from that cell. In there I craved a newspaper or a book... and a light to read by. Bunged up in solitary confinement, I fell in love with the written word. I wanted novels and articles, handwritten letters, and computer screens filled with the knowledge of the ages.

During those weeks I accomplished a heretofore impossible feat: I gave up smoking. I had no cigarettes and the withdrawal symptoms just blended in with the rest of my suffering.

The other prisoners’ complaints became background noise like elevator music or a song you’d heard so often but never knew the words.

I clutched my cell-made blackjack at all times. Somebody was going to die by my hand — after two weeks it didn’t much matter who.

I had eaten eighty-three nauseating meals when, while I was asleep, four riot-geared officers came into my cell and shackled me. I fumbled my blackjack because the sudden light from outside my crypt-like cell blinded and disoriented me.

I yelled at my captors, demanding they tell me where they were taking me, but no one answered. Now and then someone hit me, but those were just love taps compared to what they could have done.

They deposited me in a pretty big room, attaching my bonds to steel eyes that were anchored to the floor. I sat at the butt end of a long table. The fluorescent light burned my eyes and gave me a headache. I wondered if someone was going to come in there and kill me. I knew that this was still America and that people who worked for the law did not execute without the will of the courts, but I was no longer sure of that knowledge. They might execute me because they knew I had become an unrepentant murderer behind their prison walls.

“Mr. Oliver,” a woman said.

I looked in the direction the voice came from and was amazed to see that she had made it into the room without my notice. Behind her stood a hale black man uniformed in a blue that was new to me. I hadn’t heard them come in. Sounds had taken on new meanings in my head, and I couldn’t be sure of what I heard.

I yelled a word at her that I had never used before, or since. The man in the blue suit rushed forward and slapped me... pretty hard.

I strained every muscle trying to break my restraints, but prison chains are designed to be greater than human sinew.

“Mr. Oliver,” the woman said again.

She was fair-skinned, tall, and slender, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pants suit that was muted navy. She wore glasses. The lenses glittered, obscuring her eyes.

“What?”

“I am Underwarden Nichols and I am here to inform you that you are being released.”

“What?”

“As soon as Lieutenant Shale and I leave, the men that brought you here will remove your bonds, take you to a place where you can shower and shave, and then give you clothes and some money. From there on your life is your own.”

“What about — what about the charges?”

“They’ve been dropped.”

“What about my wife, my life?”

“I know nothing about your personal dealings, Mr. Oliver, only that you are to be released.”

I saw my face for the first time in months in the polished steel mirror next to the small shower where I cleaned up. Shaving revealed the vicious gaping scar down the right side of my face. They didn’t always offer stitches at Rikers.

When I got off the bus at the Port Authority on Forty-Second Street I stopped and looked around, realizing how hollow the word freedom really was.

“Are you thinking about prison again, Daddy?”

She was standing at the door to my office. Five nine and black like the Spanish Madonna, she had my eyes. Though worried about my state of mind, she still smiled. Aja wasn’t a somber adolescent. She was an ex-cheerleader and science student, pretty enough not to need a regular boyfriend and helpful enough that other teenage girls with boyfriends knew she was the better catch.

Her black skirt was too short and the coral blouse too revealing, but I was so grateful to have her in my life again that I picked my battles with great care.

Monica, my ex-wife, spent years trying to keep us apart. She took me to court to try to get a judgment against my ever seeing Aja-Denise and then sued me for failing to pay child support when she had drained my accounts and I didn’t have two nickels to my name.

It wasn’t until she was fourteen that Aja forced her mother to let her stay with me on a regular basis. And now that she was seventeen she said that either she worked in my office or she’d tell any judge who would listen that Monica’s new husband, Coleman Tesserat, would walk in on her when she was in the shower.

“What?” I said to my child.

“When you look out the window like that you’re almost always thinking about jail.”

“They broke me in there, darling.”

“You don’t look broke to me.” It was something I said to her one morning when she was a little girl trying to get out of going to school.