Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“Don’t turn your fuckin back on me after all we meant to each other,” the man said. “We have this long relationship and you do this to me. Whas wrong with you, Daddy?”

“Look,” Horace said, turning back to the man. “I done told you I ain’t got no smokes. I ain’t got your smokes. I ain’t got my smokes. I ain’t got nobody's smokes. Why can’t you understand that?” He was aware that he was veering away from the white man's English, but he knew that his friend from Germany was probably home asleep safely in his bed. “I can’t give you what I don’t have.” Men were murdered in the D.C. jail, or so the Washington Post told him. “Can’t you understand what I’m sayin?” His back stayed as close to the bars as he could manage. Who was this Irene, he thought, and what had she done to steal into a man's dreams that way?

“So, Daddy, it's gonna be like that, huh?” the man said, raising his head and pushing the foot of the upper-bunk man out of the way so he could see Horace better. He took his hand out of his crotch and pointed at Horace. “You gon pull a Peter-and-Jesus thing on me and deny you ever knew me, huh? Thas your plan, Daddy?” He lowered his head back to the black-and-white-striped pillow. “I’ve seen some low-down dirty shit in my day, but you the lowest. After our long relationship and everything.”

“I never met you in my life,” Horace said, grabbing the bars behind him with both hands, hoping, again, for relief.

“I won’t forget this, and you know how long my memory is. First, you don’t bring me my smokes, like you know you should. Then you deny all that we had. Don’t go to sleep in here, Daddy, thas all I gotta say.”

He thought of Reilly Johnson, a man he had worked with in the Pentagon. Reilly considered himself something of a photographer. He had taken the picture of Horace with the Secretary of Defense. What would the bail be? Would Reilly be at home to receive his call on a Sunday morning? Would they give him bail? The policemen who pulled him from his bed had tsk-tsked in his face. “Sellin drugs and corruptin young people like that?” “I didn’t know nothin about that, Officer. Please.” “Tsk. Tsk. An old man like you.”

“The world ain’t big enough for you to hide from my righteous wrath, Daddy. And you know how righteous I can be when I get started. The world ain’t big enough, so you know this jail ain’t big enough.”

Horace turned back to the bars. Was something in the back as painful as something in the stomach? He touched his face. Rarely, even in the lost months with Catrina, had he failed to shave each morning. A man's capable demeanor started with a shave each morning, his sergeant in boot camp had told him a thousand years ago.

The man down the way began calling for Irene again. Irene, Horace called in his mind. Irene, are you out there? No one told the man to be quiet. It was about seven and the whole building was waking up and the man calling Irene was not the loudest sound in the world anymore.

“Daddy, you got my smokes? Could use my smokes right about now.”

Horace, unable to stand anymore, slowly sank to the floor. There he found some relief. The more he sat, the more he began to play over the arrest. He had had money in his pocket when he took off his pants the night before, but there was no money when they booked him. And where had Catrina and Elaine been when the police marched him out of the apartment and down to the paddy wagon, with the Sunset's female security guard standing behind her desk with an “Oh, yes, I told you so” look? Where had they been? He had not seen them. He stretched out his legs and they touched the feet of the sleeping man on the floor. The man roused. “Love don’t mean shit anymore,” the man on the lower bunk said.

It was loud enough to wake the man on the floor all the way, and that man sat up and covered his chest with his blanket and looked at Horace, blinking and blinking and getting a clearer picture of Horace the more he blinked.

Reilly did not come for him until the middle of Monday afternoon. Somebody opened the cell door and at first Horace thought the policeman was coming to get one of his cellmates.

“Homer Parkins,” the man with the keys said. The doors were supposed to open electronically, but that system had not worked in a long time.

“Thas me,” Horace said and got to his feet. As he and the man with the keys walked past the other cells, someone said to Horace, “Hey, Pops, you ain’t too old to learn to suck dick.” “Keep moving,” the man with the keys said. “Pops, I’ll give you a lesson when you come back.”

As they poured his things out of a large manila envelope, the two guards behind the desk whispered and laughed. “Everything there?” one of them asked Horace. “Yes.” “Well, good,” the guard said. “I guess we’ll be seein you on your next trip here.” “Oh, leave that old man alone. He's somebody's grandfather.” “When they start that old,” the first man said, “it gets in their system and they can’t stop. Ain’t that right, Pops?”

He and Reilly did not say very much after Reilly said he had been surprised to hear from Horace and that he had wondered what had happened to him since Loneese died. Horace said he was eternally grateful to Reilly for bailing him out and that it was all a mistake as well as a long story that he would soon share with him. At Sunset, Reilly offered to take him out for a meal, but Horace said he would have to take a rain check. “Rain check?” Reilly said, smiling. “I didn’t think they said that anymore.”

The key to the apartment worked the way it always had, but something was blocking the door, and he had to force it open. Inside, he found destruction everywhere. On top of the clothes and the mementos of his life, strewn across the table and the couch and the floor were hundreds and hundreds of broken records. He took three steps into the room and began to cry. He turned around and around, hoping for something that would tell him it was not as bad as his eyes first reported. But there was little hope-the salt and pepper shakers had not been touched, the curtains cov- ering the glass door were intact. There was not much beyond that for him to cling to.

He thought immediately of Catrina and Elaine. What had he done to deserve this? Had he not always shown them a good and kind heart? He covered his eyes, but that seemed only to produce more tears, and when he lowered his hands the room danced before him through the tears. To steady himself, he put both hands on the table, which was covered in instant coffee and sugar. He brushed broken glass off the chair nearest him and sat down. He had not gotten it all off, and he felt what was left through his pants and underwear.

He tried to look around but got no farther than the picture with the Secretary of Defense. It had two cracks in it, one running north to south and the other going northwest to southeast. The photograph was tilting, too, and something told him that if he could straighten the picture it all might not be so bad. He reached out a hand, still crying, but he could not move from the chair.

He stayed as he was through the afternoon and late into the evening, not once moving from the chair, though the tears did stop around five o’clock. Night came and he still did not move. My name is Horace Perkins, he thought just as the sun set. My name is Horace Perkins and I worked many a year at the Pentagon. The apartment became dark, but he did not have it in him to turn on the lights.

The knocking had been going on for more than ten minutes when he finally heard it. He got up, stumbling over debris, and opened the door. Elaine stood there with Darnell, Jr., in her arms.

“Horace, you O.K.? I been comin by. I been worried about you, Horace.”