Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

His mother had gone through the cycle of borrowing money to bail him out when he had argued that he could not properly prepare his defense if he were forced to await trial in jail. Then he had missed his court date. For this, she lost her car.

When asked about her son, she said she had lost hope in him. You don’t lose hope, she qualified. But it’s easy to do. Why is he in jail? Basically, he’s a thief. Drugs and alcohol are a big part of it. I’ve had my battles too — I don’t know anyone who hasn’t — but I never got mixed up in drugs. No, I don’t feel they should be legal. I don’t think that’s the answer. We’ve done the counseling, the rehab thing. It’s a heartbreaker. But you don’t give up. He’s got to find himself.

He popped open the bottom of his deodorant and put his finger in the space where he stashed his ball of foil. The ball of foil had been unrolled and rolled back up again many times. When it was unrolled, you could see it contained a chip of what looked like the wing of a cockroach. His cellie had a needle — a tiny tube like the ink tube from a ballpoint pen with a needle on the end. They dropped the blankets over the bars after lockdown and cooked up and got high.

When he was high, Jimmy sat nodding with his eyes shut, his marked-up white arms extended, folds of fat across his white belly. His cellie, shaved head gray, bulbous and helmet-like above his tan face, sat slumped forward, his state sneakers at odd angles to his legs. Speaking with his eyes closed, his cellie said:

This time a year, we used to slaughter a half dozen hogs and ever-body would come for miles. They come on bikes, trucks, ever which way. We had us a kinda moonshine a man couldn’t drink. I had me nigger braids in them days. My teeth was gone be all gold all across here…

Jimmy said, I was the biggest rocker…

What’s that?

Rock ‘n’ roll rocker… I play guitar.

My cousin plays anything you give him.

We used to go out to Nassau… where all the cool people went. There was like twenty girls there. They all used to listen to me rock.

Even high, they did not smile. Jimmy had not smiled for a year. The closest thing to smiling was a kind of short-term tolerance granted to the person talking to you. Then he lay down and covered himself with his sheet and lay like a sack of laundry.

When I get released, he mumbled, I’m gonna learn how to play for real.

When you was trippin, his cellie subsequently remarked (with an air of innocence), you was sayin you was gonna learn how to play guitar.

I know how to play, Jimmy said.

The Aryans were bikers, and choosing his moment, Jimmy let it be known that he had been a biker too. Not a biker, but he had ridden bikes in Bay Shore. He’d done stunts with them, wheelies, putting them up on the front wheel — little-ass rice rockets. One time his bike had flipped over and landed on him and everybody thought he was dead. It hurt like hell, but he’d stood up and walked it off and they were all amazed. Oh yeah, come to think of it, he had been a real biker now that you mention it. He’d ridden a Harley, one of those badass choppers with the long neck in front, him just leaned back like this, shades on, gloves on, cruising down the highway. No, he hadn’t been in any chapter or nothing. He’d been a lone wolf. He had gone to, let’s see, to Virginia Beach, if he remembered. He’d been out to Vegas, where the chicks went crazy for a guy on a bike. He’d been to this other place — he had a picture of it at home in a drawer — a green field, a barbecue somewhere he couldn’t remember, but he could remember the good time he’d had, the freedom and the honor and the good music and what it had all meant to him.

The mob’s communications went through the mail in code, on the inside of greeting cards, in ghost writing that showed up under laser light between the words I Love You. Their people on the outside took a piece of cloth and sandwiched black tar heroin into it and ironed it until it was paper-thin. They took two identical greeting cards and split the paper with a razor and reassembled them to form a single card with the contraband inside. The thin translucent brown sliver was worth eight hundred dollars inside the prison.

His birthday came and went in a rainy season, when the staff manned the perimeter of the vast yard wearing camouflage Gortex and the inmates tramped through the mud, doing dips and chin-ups in yellow foul weather gear. He didn’t receive the card his mother had sent until three months later, after it had been opened by the prison staff and scanned beneath a laser. It contained nothing but a picture of a cake and candles. There was no money. Money’s tight right now — XO Mom.

On their way to chow, they strolled by a cell with wadded bloody towels on the concrete floor. Correctional staff in bloody rubber gloves were lifting up a man who looked like yellow plastic. Crusted and streaked blood on his shaved head, stab holes with rubber tubes such as you would siphon gasoline coming out, like shark bites. He had been murdered with a sword.

A shame about you-know-who, they said when they were eating.

Some days he slept for up to twenty hours, but when he opened his eyes, it was still the same calendar day, the same bus station bathroom light was still flickering in his cell, and he was still hammered by the same sound of the place, the distant slamming and calling, the same disappointed sound of the place.

Another intercepted letter read as follows:

You can’t sink my Zen man if you thought cannon stood acclaimed Crusader modus warrior in the great pine cabin broadsword.

After attempting to decode it without success, the prison’s gang intelligence unit sent it to the cryptography division at Quantico.

The most notorious convict in the structure was a reader. Jimmy met him while they were being held in adjacent freestanding cages inside an octagonal glassed-in bay. He had tattoos up his neck like a green turtleneck. He read Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Machiavelli, Miyamoto Musashi, von Clausewitz. I am a warrior, a knight. I study the bushido code. He had 333 years. You can love the game, but the game loves no one. He described being acquitted of the charge he had believed would send him to prison for life and then convicted for a second murder he had committed in the county jail while awaiting the first trial.

You have to laugh at the way that goes, the legend said — a five-foot-eight man in reading glasses.

I went up behind him, threw a rear naked stranglehold on him, put him to sleep. Snapped his neck. When you snap a neck, you feel the bone pop right here against your chest. Pop, just like that. I pulled out my piece and hit him up. Stuck him in the throat, heart, liver. Ran his gears. Hit him twenty-five times. He started gasping and shaking. I got a pipe and smashed his head until his skull broke. Blood everywhere.

Something else we did, which started the myth you may have heard. Completely untrue. What it was, we were hungry after the work. I made a stove with a piece of a towel rolled up tight. We called that a bomb. I lit the bomb and we cooked grilled cheese sandwiches on his body using him as a stand. The story got around the system. Rumor had it we ate his heart. A complete fabrication.

We had some way-out devils in the structure. All my life, I gave everything I had to be a hitter. Loyalty was my code. When I learned the mob put me in the hat, it shattered me. After the commitment, the work I had put in, the holes I put in enemies? Here I am betrayed. But I ain’t no coward, no. Despite my terror, fine, I said, I’ll stay on the tier. They were gonna nail me sooner or later anyway. So eventually they did. I got sliced down my face. Ran back to my cell, stuffed it full of coffee, a vasoconstrictor. I didn’t run to the infirmary or I would have been placed in protective custody. It took me three weeks and two days, but I finally got the guy who sliced me. Offered him a cigarette, said how about a truce? When he went to take it, I got him in the heart. Laters for him.