Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

I know, I tell him. I know. But there are forces here in the dark I don’t recognize, their attractions great mysteries. I don’t know what I should awaken and what should stay hidden. Help me, Faraday. Give me a spark .

“Hah!” laughs my father. “Electricity doesn’t reach down here.”

But then the door opens, and the light bleeds through my eyes quickly, shuttering them closed.

“Son of a bitch!” I hear someone shout. “Who the hell approved this without an order?”

There is no answer.

“Martin!” the voice shouts. “Come on out of there!”

I have my back to one of the walls, my legs angled out in front, just a foot from the hole that is my toilet. The lids of my eyes allow themselves to lift into a slit, and I see the warden himself is here to save me. I tell my feet to move toward my body, to prepare for standing. Come, I tell them. We will gather this body into a small thing and push it up the length of this wall. My feet are slow to respond, and before my knees have fully bent, the warden shouts, “Jesus, pull him out of there.”

Hands are under my shoulders, and I do everything to force my mouth into speech, but they are pulling before the words can come, and the sound that escapes me is black and wet.

The guards put hands on their clubs, and the motion makes the noise louder and louder until it finally breaks into the sound of an actual word.

“Please.”

I am a coward.

“Please,” I say again, my voice thick. I cradle my right arm like the dead thing it is. “No clubs.”

The guards look to the warden.

The warden looks to me. “Watch him close. Now come on out into the corridor, Martin.”

I pull myself forward into the brilliant light. I know it’s dim, the bulbs dampened and covered, but it’s a cloudless sky to me, sun on water. I breathe it in.

“That’s it,” the warden says. “Now, it stinks like hell in here. Do you think you can let these gentlemen lead you to my office without making any more of those damn noises?”

“Yes, sir.”

I don’t know if it is good to have my voice back.

I should tell the warden that the stink will follow us, my clothes and skin thick with the contents of that hole.

We’re able to get to the administration building through hallways and doors, never stepping outside, though I want a breath of air more than I want anything. I want the dirt of the yard under my feet.

I’m ashamed to enter the diamond-shaped lobby.

The guards from solitary accompany us to the warden’s door, then he excuses them.

“Are you sure, sir?” one asks.

The warden doesn’t answer, and I follow him into his office. The man’s desk is wide and clean. The lamp on it has a green-glass shade, and the windows let in a heap of light. My eyes can’t take it all in.

The warden leans against his desk, pulls a cigarette from a box, lights it. “Show me your shoulder, Martin.”

“Sir?”

“I’m giving you an order, and you are to follow it. Show me your shoulder.”

I set to unbuttoning my shirt, a slow endeavor. I have to shake my left arm loose before I can pull the sleeve from my right. The shirt is stiff in places, smeared and filthy. My undershirt stretches tight against the spot.

The warden smokes. “That one, too.”

It’s an impossible task.

“So long as you have one working arm, you can get a shirt over your head, Martin.”

This isn’t true. But I tell the warden my shoulder is fine. “It just needs a day or two.”

“You don’t think you’ll need to shed that shirt before then? You’re ripe, Martin. Worst-smelling man I’ve ever let into this room. Now pull your damn shirt off or I’ll do it for you.”

I take a breath and grab on to the fabric at the back of my neck, pulling it as quick as I can over my head. The right side of my body howls, ribs to pit to neck, then back down my arm to the pointed brown tips of my fingers.

“Good Jesus.” The warden tucks the cigarette in his lips and leans in close to inspect. The smoke tastes good. “That’s a hell of a shoulder, Martin.” He’s smiling. “Guard or inmate?”

“Corner. Corner of the cell house.”

He keeps smiling. “Brick doesn’t leave a mark like that. Have you gotten a look at it?”

“No.”

He opens the closet to a length of mirror on the inside of the door. “All yours.”

I can see his suits hanging inside, a few changes of shoes, a pair of work boots, a coat. A tan cowboy hat sits on the shelf overhead, and a couple of red and blue ties hang on hooks set into the wall.

I haven’t looked myself in the eye for some time, and it’s my face that scares me the most when I find it in the mirror. The time in solitary has given me a stubbly beard that does nothing to cover the bones jutting out of my face every place they can. The skin around my eyes is dark, and the eyes themselves seem to be sinking, as though I’ve slept every night with stones on them. My hair is rough and oily and strung with filth. The scar on my stomach stands raised against the skin, red still, and then, there is my shoulder — a great, contorted mass of purple and blue and red. The mark of Beau’s club stands out clearly, a deep rut in the line of my body, deeply purpled with spiderwebs of burst blood vessels. The whole shoulder is shiny, the skin stretched tight over the pooling of liquids. It’s a great blister, and I’m taken with the desire to slice it open and watch it drain here on the warden’s floor.

“Guard or inmate?”

“Inmate. I won’t name him.”

The warden crushes out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk. “I can make you tell me the truth, Martin. You have plenty of privileges I can revoke.”

“I’ll lose more than privileges if I tell.”

He smiles again, then chuckles. “See, this is why you’ve gotten so far in here, Martin — you understand the place.” He rubs at his jaw and looks out the windows. “I know it wasn’t another inmate. Looks to me like a club did that, and I’ll assume the guard of mine that took it upon himself had good reason. You want to tell me different?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. Let’s walk you on over to the infirmary. Doc will tell me when we can expect you back to work.”

“Yes, sir.”

I reach for my shirts.

“Best keep those off.”

I ball them up in my left hand and let the warden lead me out of his office, through the lobby, down the corridor to the cell house, and then into the yard. It’s hard to walk, my feet refusing to lift off the ground. The office folks stare. The guards stare. Outside in the yard, the men stare. My arm dangles. The sun is hot on my exposed skin. The warden is using me as an example, I’m just not certain of what. Maybe it’s credit he wants. If the men think he’s done this to me — one of his trustees — then he must be willing to do any sort of horror to them. I might be walking through here shirtless for the guards, a warning to keep their hands off me, or it could just as easily be an invitation to do the same, to make more of these marks.

The chapel is past the infirmary, and I am glad I don’t have to face Chaplain. He has words for every occasion, and I am in no state to hear them.

Nurse Hannah is there to greet us. “My goodness. What’s happened this time?”

“Got attacked, sure enough,” the warden says. “And a misunderstanding got him a stint in solitary. I’d like him fully evaluated.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then,” the warden says. “Get yourself healed, Martin.”

Hannah leads me back through the room of beds. I count four men, then five, a sixth toward the end. They all look sick, ravaged by some great disease.

“It’s disappointing to see you back so soon,” Hannah says, and I agree.