Джойс Оутс - Prison Noir

To present prison staff, I’ve become the compassionate, long-suffering, and totally selfless helper. I’ve gained respect among inmates as well. My cell is never checked for contraband, and I am never asked about my movements in prison. I can also request a meeting with any staff member, even the warden. Only one thing nags at me: the unintended consequence of saving the state of Michigan money. But it’s also my protection, because the state never asks questions when you save it money. It costs five times as much to keep a sick or dying prisoner than a healthy one. When costs go up, questions get asked.

Thus, I’ve become an asset to the prison system, something you should never become. In some ways I’m the ideal asset, in that I save the state money and have a parolable life sentence with deportation. So I’ll stay in prison until I get sick and then be deported to my home country to burden it with my care.

The eleventh messenger, David, was one of the three dying prisoners left at this place. Unless something changes, I’ll have to be careful with my last pick. The twelfth messenger must be the best yet. He’s the final sign and hope that Allah will release me from prison.

This morning, while jogging my five daily miles on the yard, I noticed an unusual pain in my midsection. I attributed it to runner’s stress. However, being a cautious soul, I sent a request to see the doctor.

I explained my symptom to the doctor two days ago. He ordered some blood work and noticed something odd in the results. He ordered further tests and confirmed I have pancreatic cancer, a death sentence under the private prison health care. I came to the United States from Lebanon without a family, so no one will question the state about my cost-saving death.

The ironies of Allah continue. I’m the best twelfth messenger I can send. Who’s better for this than me? I would never get the message wrong or forget it. Maybe the eleven messengers I’ve sent were too distracted by their own messages to remember mine. It’s a reasonable conclusion, but still a shock that Allah would allow me to die here when I’ve prayed for over twenty-four years to be released. It’s even more shocking than when Allah took my mother’s life while I was still in prison to teach me great loss. He needed a way to balance my crime.

It’s the obvious choice that I should be the twelfth messenger, but so unlike Allah’s past behavior. He never killed His messengers to send His own message. Allah always protected those entrusted with His message until they delivered it. Technically, I’m sending my message to Allah, so He doesn’t owe me protection. But now I need to add a new request, since being released from prison is not going to happen. So I ask for protection in the next life from the messengers I’ve sent there, and in this life from the illness that may earn me an abusive helper. Besides dying, nothing is scarier than being abused in prison.

I am truly the message in the breath of Allah.

Ryan Correctional Facility (Detroit, Michigan)

That banged-up old black tanker car got left behind.

It must have been sitting there for many years, maybe decades, passing time on a split of secondary side-track, no place else to go. Debris and weeds choked the rails, thicker brush growing up through its wheels and broken coupler.

Fuse sat cross-legged on the weedy patch of wannabe lawn in Ryan Road Facility’s big yard, just inside the pea-gravel track edged by razor-wired electric fences. Oval-walking convicts occasionally disrupted his view of the old tanker, as did the creepy crawl of a lethally armed perimeter vehicle, its skin a shiny state blue. At least you know that climbing the fence is precisely what triggers the patrol’s violent assault. Fuse’s psycho bunkie and his dawgs would crack an unsuspecting head for no other reason than the rumors they started. Like so many others in the joint, they lived the fool-rule: act stupid, put your business on front street, get yourself popped, and save face by calling the nearest body a snitch.

The daddy killdeer swooped in and challenged Fuse with a cautionary dive, then landed a dozen feet to the left and glared threats before relieving his mate at their ground nest marked by a bright orange traffic cone. Don’t step on the baby, somebody had thought to alert other prisoners, likely some nature lover who’d just as soon padlock a human skull and stab a body fifteen times before ghosting into the crowd. The prim-looking plover fed its lone chick, then settled in to keep an eye on Fuse.

Beyond the nest, that line of counterclockwisers followed the oval’s arc along the back fence, their backdrop a grassy berm blocking views of the mirror-opposite Mound Road Facility. Back-to-back job-generating prisons in the industry-pocked Eastside Detroit neighborhood must have seemed like a good idea several decades back, maybe not so much now that drugs and other contraband fence-tossings littered the yard every morning, or since a quick bolt-cutter breach proved that ten men could spurt right through and fade into the ’hood.

A train clanked and squealed its way across Ryan Road, down the spur track that ran alongside both prisons. Every day, the train delivered chemicals to a small paint factory next door to the prison, right across from the Level IV units and chow hall. Fascinated by trains as a boy, Fuse liked to sit right there most afternoons — weather and emergency counts and clear-the-yard assaults permitting — to watch the replacement of yesterday’s empty tanker with today’s full one. The whole process always seemed out of place, this glimpse of purpose and productivity in a rusty, falling-down city, industrious men commanding monstrous and mighty machines. Fuse’s bunkie couldn’t fathom the relationship between man and machine. Last night during one of his rages he destroyed their cell fan. Apparently it had been disrespecting the over-inked lunk by intentionally rattling and wheezing to interrupt another twelve-hour sleep, his rest inexplicably essential for fueling a mind that never actually shifted out of idle.

His tantrums had been escalating since two slash-and-burn shakedowns in a row convinced him a snitch must have kited about the piece of steel he’d been bragging about having handy. Hearing whispers of blame, Fuse had noticed several glares and hostile gestures.

Heavy Metal wandered over, set his guitar and battery-charged mini-amp in the weeds, then sat cross-legged and nodded with a “’Sup?” He got the “Metal” moniker for playing heavy-metal guitar — quite deftly — just as Fuse had picked up his own tag for favoring “fusion” styles during his stint on keyboard in a mishmash cover band at Adrian Regional. Wiry and muscle-bound, the long-haired metal-head claimed several names and aliases, just enough to confuse his incoming mail, though only the six digits on his door card truly meant anything to anybody who mattered.

The engine passed them and grunted as the whole train clanged its way to a stop. The engineer climbed down and joined two men walking from the rear. He studied his clipboard and the numbers on a shiny white tanker, then headed back to the engine. The other two uncoupled the tanker at both its front and rear, then switched the rails to a third side-track heading over to the paint factory pumps. The train grunted several more times as it backed in, picked up yesterday’s empty tanker, then pulled it alongside the prison fence before backing into the full tanker. It coupled with a clank and hiss, then moved forward past the switch. It backed into the factory again, this time leaving the tanker before pulling out and backing up to couple with the rest of the train. Maybe fifteen minutes total, the engineer reversed the whole assemblage across Ryan Road and faded into the ’hood. Still, that banged-up old black tanker car on the other track got left behind.