James Burke - Half of Paradise

“Are you Broussard?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where is that list of resident parolees the parole board sent us?” he said to the officer in uniform.

Avery felt everything go weak and sick inside him.

“It’s in my desk. What do you want it for?”

“I thought I saw this guy’s name on it,” the man with the handkerchief said.

The officer in uniform took the list out of his desk drawer and looked through the names.

“Broussard, Avery. On parole for two years,” he read. His blunt red face looked at Avery. “Let’s go upstairs, son.”

“Is that where the jail is? Am I going into the drunk tank?”

“You shouldn’t have broke parole.”

“It’s the drunk tank and then back to the pen. Is that it?”

The man with the handkerchief blew his nose loudly.

“You want me to take him up?” he said.

“No. I’ll take him.”

“A girl is going to be here in a little while. Can I see her when she comes?” Avery said.

“You’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Visitors are only allowed in the afternoon.”

They went out the side door of the room into another hallway and rode upstairs in the elevator. The officer slid back the elevator door and they entered the third floor of the building which served as the jail. The corridor ran in a rectangle around the building, and there were four rows of cells facing the outside walls. There were dim ceiling lights along the corridor that were protected by wire screens. Avery could hear the men in the cells snoring or talking in low voices. There was a sound like a man retching, and someone coughed and cleared his throat of phlegm and spat through the bars on the floor. The officer unlocked one of the cells, and Avery walked into the darkened room, with the three iron bunks fixed to the wall and the obscene words burned on the ceiling with matches and the tobacco spittle and cigarette butts on the floor. A man with some torn newspaper in his hand was relieving himself on the toilet. Another man slept in one of the bunks with his back turned towards them and a striped pillow without a case over his head. The officer clanged the door shut behind Avery and went back down in the elevator.

The man who had been on the toilet stood up and buttoned his trousers. He was rawboned and tall, and his hair was gray and his face pallid. One of the straps of his undershirt was frayed almost in two. He walked barefoot across the concrete floor of the cell and sat on his bunk.

“You got any cigarettes?” he said.

Avery looked out the bars across the corridor through the window. He could see the night glow of the city and hear the sound of the automobiles below.

“Hey, you got any cigarettes?” the man said.

Avery threw him the package of Virginia Extra. The man took out one of the very thin yellow-brown wheat-straw papers and poured the tobacco neatly and rolled it into a cylinder between his thumb and fingers.

“You in on a stew-bum?” he said.

“Parole violation.”

“What have you got left?”

“Two years.”

“Hell, I got ten to fifteen facing me. I’m really fucked.”

I’ll probably go back on the same gang, Avery thought. We’ll cut cane and clear fields of stumps and dig irrigation canals, and Evans will be there with his sunburnt face and sunglasses and khaki uniform and pistol, and we’ll line up for mess and roll call and somebody will get time in detention for talking in line, and on Sunday we’ll clean the barracks and Evans will make inspection, and on Monday we’ll start all over again. He thought of the homosexuals who always made advances to the new men in camp, and the sound of the man in the next bunk masturbating in his sleep, and the phlegmy hacking cough of Daddy Claxton, and the inevitable talk about women and sadism and escape, and the story everyone told about the convict who had tried to climb over the barbed wire on top of the fence and how he had been caught in the lights and the guards had cut him to pieces with the shotguns and everyone was made to come out and see it after it was over.

“Bang on the door for the hack,” the man said. “I got the cruds. There ain’t no more newspaper.”

“Shut up, will you,” the man who had been sleeping in the bunk said.

“I got to shit. I ain’t got no more paper.”

“You kept me awake all night.”

“I told you I got the cruds. It ain’t my fault.”

“Do it through the bars. They’ll bring you some paper.”

Avery closed his eyes and tried to think of Suzanne and the past months. He tried to think of her dressed in the big white Sunday hat and the white dress with the transparent lavender material on her shoulders, and of the times they had been in bed together; but he couldn’t keep the thought of her in his mind, and nothing seemed real to him except the jail and returning to the work camp. He listened to the men arguing in the dark.