Stephen Dixon - Garbage

Cells are locked up right after the late evening news, we’re given a doughnut and apple juice snack, our light’s turned off though there’s still the glow from the common room lamps and TV the guards continue to watch, the men in the cell talk in the dark about the movie they’d just seen.

“I liked it because it was real.”

“Real how? When you shoot someone there’s supposed to be holes and blood.”

“Maybe there was but on the small screen compared to a theater’s you couldn’t see them and also the color was bad.”

“What makes you say the movie wasn’t especially made for TV?”

“Excuse me, fellas,” I say.

“Because I saw it in its uncut version a year ago.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“And I don’t believe you don’t believe me.”

“Listen, you weasel.”

“Excuse me. I don’t mean to cut into your conversation, so anyone wants to tell me to shut up, go ahead. But as long as I’m here, and you want to know anything more about me I’m a barowner of a cheap place called Mitchell’s on East 5th Street, but any of you know anything about a garbage company called Stovin’s on D and Sand?”

“No.”

“No.”

“No, why?” the man below me says.

“You know them?”

“No, what I got with garbage? I’m curious and just talking like the other two — what else we to do?”

I make it brief about what’s happened to me the last few weeks and ask if they’ve heard of anything like that happening downtown and they all say no and then just generally in town and they say no and then what any of them would do if he was me.

“Seems like two dudes just hustling you and your apartment fire wasn’t connected or they overfanned it to a mistake,” one of the men across from me says. “Don’t bother them again and they’ll go away.”

“Never give someone advice that could cost him his life,” the man above him says.

“Why, he’ll come back to haunt me?”

“His brothers might, weasel.”

“What I’d do,” the man below me says, “is lease for a cheap fee your bar for a year and take a southern vacation but tell your friends you went north, because you’ll get yourself killed resisting back to them like that.”

“But you never heard of them or the two men, Turner or Pete? Just by your voice you sounded like you might. And it’s all right if you did, as I won’t mention where I met you or your name. I just want to know what they think they have to do to me before they stop.”

“I said no, go to sleep.”

“Goodnight,” the other two say.

“Night, fellas.” I fall asleep and am dreaming of getting into our old car in the neighborhood I lived in with my folks years ago. They’re what they look like and in the same clothes as in my photos I lost of them in the fire and I’m the same size, age and face I’m now but act much younger, so I guess I’m supposed to be in this dream about eleven or twelve which is when we had that car, when all four doors slam closed and my head flashes white, car my father puts the ignition key in explodes, dream suddenly ends and I feel tremendous pain in my brains and hands and legs, white breaks apart into stars and dashes and dots like a universe starting up and then I have to puke, I’m screaming and awake and want to bawl like a kid the pain in my head’s so great, but I just go out and next when I’m awake the cell’s lit and someone’s sticking needles in my arm and another’s sucking out something from my mouth and nose with a hose and next when I’m awake I’m on a stretcher zipping through an empty hall except for some police and a couple of rough-looking men in cuffs and I first think it’s another dream because my head and sight’s so indistinct and then I see and think it clear. I’m wet with sweat all over it feels, pissed or shit in my pants because something like that stinks and seems to be me and my lips are sticky and I got blood on my stretcher and chest.

“No problem, you’ll be okay,” someone says, man walking next to me it is with his clipboard clapping the wall and I say yes.

“You can hear?”

“Hear, yes.”

“Guy’s got great recovery,” the bearer in front of us says and I say yes. “Good pair of ears too.”

I reach up to feel where it is that still hurts so much in the head but the man next to me says “Put it down, don’t touch, I’m warning you, Fleet. That’s a clean dressing the doc put on and I’m responsible, so I’ll slap your hand right off your wrist.”

I drop my hand if I ever got it up and again go out.

“You can’t have me anymore, Mr. Fleet,” a woman says.

“Wha?”

“I said I’m afraid you can’t have me anymore. Want me to speak louder? You see, to put it in plain layman’s language, the criminal court, in the person of the judge of such, appointed me as your lawyer because of your own inexplicit and, to me personally, rather witless self-destructive reasons why you didn’t need one, but now I have to unappoint myself because there’s no longer a criminal case. We just received corroboration from the D.A. that the man you beat up dropped charges against you — Forgive me, but we were talking about this before, don’t you remember?”

“Huh?”

“You certain you’re even conscious now?”

“Let me see.”

Eyes open all the way. Light from the outside’s in the room. Cages on the windows padlocked. Smell of public school cafeteria food. I’m asleep under white sheets in a men’s ward or was. Now I’m up. My mind sort of, not my neck or back. And it’s snowing again or never stopped. And birds, I hear birds, but it’s this whistler in the next bed like a whole flock of them and most of the pain’s gone in my head.

“I don’t want to disturb you if you still want to doze.”

“No, I want to stay up. Why my here?”

“I already told you.”

“Why my here?”

“Well, your face is more alert. Has to be a good sign, particularly with all the painkiller they put in. You’re healthy and perky again or thereabouts — congrats. I’m Janie Pershcolt, remember? We just had a long involved conversation about your life and bad breaks of late, but all the time you weren’t even awake? How can that be? Anyway, I’m your court-appointed etcetera, not that I’m available to you now, etcetera — and you won’t flake out on me again?”

“Try not to.”

“Hungry? Want food, Mr. Fleet? Mr. Fleet, are you there? Food. Pudding. Potatoes, munch munch, and buttered bread. You should be starved after two days of just tubes. They’re giving out the trays now and before you said you didn’t.”

“Still don’t. Stomach.”

“You’re not nauseous. If you are, be a friend as I’ve been to you and forewarn so I can step aside? Anyway, as I told you previously, the reason you’re here is you were hit on the head with a pipe two nights ago or with some comparably solid instrument and possibly thrown off your bed, remember that?”

“Not talking about or happening it.”

“Why would, assuming he did, and looks like to me, one of your fellow cellmates do that or any combination of the three? In your sleep conversation you said you only dreamed getting bonked.”

“Looks like to me? Combination three?”

“Forgive me, but are you accusing all three prisoners of participating in the attack?”

“The guard?”

“The guard too or alone? Which, if either, and what’s your basis for stating that?” “Let me think.”

“That’s a pretty wild charge, Mr. Fleet. Earthshaking anytime the lawbreaker’s the law. I’m not a prosecuting attorney or your lawyer anymore, but because my field is criminal jurisprudence and the penal system and so forth, I would like to know.”