Siegel, James - Derailed

I tried to get over there, but I had to worm my way to them, because my hands were tied behind my back. I had to move in sections. I was trying to help Sam. Because something bad was going to happen now. I could see that.

For one thing, Lucinda had managed to get her hand out of his mouth. Finally. For another, she was raising the gun in her left hand and beginning to bring it down on Sam’s head. Sam’s mouth was bloody, her blood and his seemingly mixed together, as Lucinda brought the gun down on his face again. Then again and again.

“Please,” Sam said, “please, I’m a father. . . . I have three children, ” as the gun smashed into his cheekbone. As it smashed into his nose. Hoping, I guess, that this might give her pause, might make her stop hitting him. But it only seemed to make her madder. Sam kept pleading, “Three children . . . please . . . a father, ” but Lucinda kept hitting him. Harder and harder—I could hear the sound of metal hitting bone. As if he were saying, Hit me, and she was just going ahead and obliging him.

I’d managed to get eight inches, ten inches, a foot closer to them, when I finally realized it didn’t matter.

Not now.

Sam was dead.

Vasquez and Dexter walked back into the room.

Dexter was carrying two garbage bags — the large, industrial-strength kind, big enough for an entire lawn of leaves. Or a couple of bodies.

Maybe that’s why when they saw Sam was dead, when Vasquez kicked him softly with his shoe and actually confirmed this, no one seemed particularly upset about it.

“He bit me,” was all Lucinda said, and Vasquez nodded.

Then Vasquez picked up a pillow and said to me: “Time to go to sleep.”

Vasquez has a gun, but he can’t take the chance of someone hearing it.

They were going to suffocate me.

I’d been doing something while Lucinda killed Sam. While she’d gotten up and gone into the bathroom to wash the blood off her hands. While Sam lay there without breathing. I’d remembered something. Dexter had come in and picked up my gun, and then he’d given the gun to Lucinda when they went out.

Which still left one other gun.

Vasquez’s gun. Where was it?

Under the bed. Where it had come to rest when I’d knocked it out of Vasquez’s hand.

Maybe five feet away from me. That’s all.

They were going to suffocate me.

I’d begun to inch my way over to it.

Something else. I’d begun to test the quality of the knot that Dexter had tied with my belt. It wasn’t meant to be used as a rope; it wasn’t supple enough to make a good knot. There was some give there.

They were going to suffocate me.

By the time Vasquez and Dexter reentered the room, I’d opened a tiny hole in the knot. I’d moved myself to within two feet of Vasquez’s gun.

Close enough to reach it. If I could get my hands out in time.

“Bedtime,” Vasquez said.

Your life does not flash in front of your eyes.

I would like to tell you that now.

That’s what they say happens to you when you face your own death, but it’s not true. Not for me — my entire life did not play itself out before my eyes. Just one small part of it.

When I was seven years old and at the beach.

I’d been playing in the surf and not paying attention, and a rogue wave had come along and knocked me under. By the time they pulled me from the water, I was purple, cyanotic, and — if not for the ministrations of a first-year lifeguard — dead. From that day on, I was forever scared of drowning. From that day on, when I had dreams about dying, it was always that way. With no air in my lungs.

That’s the part of my life I saw now.

Before Vasquez placed the white pillow down over my mouth, I managed to gulp in one deep breath.

There was a game we used to play as a kid. It was called No Breathing. A game I played with nearly maniacal devotion after that incident at the beach — as if I knew it just might save me one day.

I used to be able to do three minutes. Maybe even four.

Go.

The pillow smelled of sweat and dust. I began to work my hands back and forth against the knot in the belt.

I pushed outward with both wrists. Then relaxed. Then pushed. Then relaxed.

It was like a painful isometric. Vasquez had all his weight pressing down on me. It was hard to move my hands.

I kept my wrists pushing, though. Even though the belt was cutting into my skin like a dull blade.

It was slow going. I heard someone pacing a few feet from me. The bed squeaked. Lucinda cleared her throat. Someone turned on the radio.

My hands were going nowhere. I kept pushing and pushing, but it was like pushing against a locked door. Like running in quicksand. I was pushing, but nothing was giving. My chest was starting to ache. My arm sockets felt as if they were being pulled apart. They were screaming at me.

No, they screeched. Not on your life. Not possible. Forget it. Stop!

My lungs were on fire now. I couldn’t feel my hands.

Then the belt began to give.

Just a little.

Just loose enough to get a little piece of my hand through.

I pushed with all my strength. Then again and again.

My wrists were bleeding. I kept pushing.

I got my hands halfway through. Both hands were sweating. The sweat and blood was helping them slide through the belt. That was good, that was wonderful. I kept pushing.

My hands were three-quarters out. I needed to push just a little bit more, just a little bit. It was my knuckles, though.

They were a problem. Please.

I gave one last push — one last push for everything. For everything I needed to make it back to. For Anna. For Deanna.

Now.

I pushed and pushed and pushed . . .

One hand came free.

I’m dying.

My left hand, the arm closest to the bed.

It’s black. I can’t see. I’m dying.

I heard Vasquez say, “Huh.”

I heard Dexter say, “Watch out.”

I frantically felt for the gun under the box spring. My lungs were bursting. I slid my hands this way and that way under the bed. Where was it?

I felt the gun. I got my fingers around it.

What’s this? What’s happening?

I brought it out from under the bed.

And at that very moment, at that very instant in time when I might’ve turned the tide, I died.

ATTICA

Fat Tommy was right.

They’d sent me notification in the mail.

“Dear Mr. Widdoes: This is to inform you that State budget constraints will no longer allow for an adult education program in State prisons. Classes will end on the first of next month. A formal notice of termination will follow.”

This meant I had two classes left.

Just two.

The COs kept their distance from me now, as if I had a communicable disease. Was it possible state layoffs were contagious? When I slipped into the COs lounge for coffee, they gave me a wide berth — wider even than before, when it was simply my job that had rubbed them the wrong way. Now it was my lack of one.

I sipped my coffee alone, over in the corner of the room known as the museum.

The museum had been so dubbed by a long-ago correction officer whose name no one remembered. It was a loosely arranged collection of prison-confiscated weapons. Bangers, shanks, gats, and burners — what the cons call knives. Forged from bedsprings, hollowed-out pens, smuggled-in screwdrivers — whatever the prisoners can get their hands on. But there were also crude guns — ingenious things put together with odds and ends from the machine shop, capable of putting a reasonable facsimile of a bullet into a man at close range.