Siegel, James - Derailed

He’d be waiting for me near the prison pharmacy, the note said.

He worked there.

A pharmacy job gave you shine, a student had explained to me, since it gave you access to drugs.

It also gave you access to something else, I knew. Drug manufacturers. You could call them up to find out things if you wanted to. Like maybe where a certain rare insulin was being distributed.

It probably hadn’t taken him years to track me down after all.

I walked back down the bowling alley. I followed the signs.

The pharmacy consisted of one long counter protected by steel mesh. There are prisons within prisons, I noted, an axiom also true of life. The kind of insight I might’ve pointed out in my class, if I still had one.

I continued past the pharmacy, striding down an empty hallway that veered sharply left and seemed to lead to no place in particular. But it did.

Malik had told me where he’d be waiting for me, and I’d gone and scouted it.

An alcove in the middle of the hall.

A kind of blind. In an older institution like Attica, there were lots of them, hidden little corners where the prisoners conducted business, where they sold drugs and got down on their knees. Where they evened scores. A blind. An appropriate description, except I was walking in with my eyes wide open.

I walked into the alcove where it was quiet and still and stopped.

“Hello?”

I could hear him breathing in there.

“Hello,” I whispered again.

He stepped out of the shadows.

He looked different — that’s the first thing I thought. That he looked different from the way I remembered him.

His head. It seemed smaller, reshapen, as if it had been squeezed in a vise. He had a scar running down from his forehead. That was one thing. And he had a tat on his right shoulder. A prison blue clock face without hands — doing time. And farther down on his arm a tombstone with numbers — twelve — his prison sentence.

“Surprise,” he said.

No. But that’s what I wanted him to think.

“How you doin’, Chuck?” he said. He smiled, the way he’d smiled at my front door the day he’d come to my house and put his hands on my daughter.

“Larry,” I said.

“Larry. Yeah, I’m down. That was some cool shit you pulled off—playing dead like that. Had everyone fooled, huh, Larry? ”

“Not everyone. No.”

“No, not everyone. You’re right. You shouldn’t have let my girl see your wallet, Larry. Bad move. Stupid.”

The hostess in the Crystal Night Club. Widdoes . . . what kind of name is that? she’d said.

“I thought you were dead.”

“You wish.”

Yes, I thought. I wish. But there comes a time when you have to stop wishing.

“I’ve been looking for you, Larry. Like all over. You took something of mine, you know. I want it back. So I’ve been looking for you. And I found you, too. I found you twice.”

“Twice?”

“Once in Chicago. Oh yeah . . . that’s right. Surprised by that, huh? Yeah, I knew exactly where you were. Oakdale, Illinois. Then you moved on me.”

“Yes.”

“Bennington. Right down the fucking road. How’s that for lucky?”

“That’s lucky.”

“Uh-huh. You know how I found you?”

“No.”

“Your kid. Through the drugstores. First Chicago. Then Bennington. And then the next thing I know, the very next thing I know, you’re waltzing in through the fucking front door.”

“Yes.”

“I said to myself, Here’s your twelve oh-one, nigger. Here it is on a platter.”

“Why didn’t you say hello?”

“I did. I did say hello. I got my boy to write up my hello for me.”

“Your boy? He can’t even read.”

“Not Malik. My boon. A Jew literary professor who eighty-sixed his wife. Writes all the pleas for parole here. And very cool jerk-off stuff. ‘Charley Schine Gets Fucked’ — his latest. He thinks I made it up in my head. He thinks I’m creative.”

“Yes — it was very effective.”

“I thought you might run. Seeing your life story and all.”

No, I thought. If I was going to run, I would have done it back in Oakdale. It’s what Deanna said to do — Let’s run, and I said, Okay, but if we run, we will have to keep running. For all time. So maybe we shouldn’t. So I’d taken a leave of absence and we’d come here.

“You have something of mine, Larry, ” he said.

“Some of it was mine first.”

Vasquez smiled. “You think this is a fucking negotiation? You think I’m bargaining with you? You’re fucked. It’s your role in life. Accept it. Get down on your knees and open your mouth and say please, Daddy. I want my money. ”

Someone was shouting in the pharmacy: “The doc says I need this shit, understand?”

“You’re in prison,” I said.

“So are you. You’re locked up. You’re doing time. You think you’re safe out there? Think again, motherfucker. I can turn you in—I can tell them, Here's Charley . If you’re lucky I could. ’Cause I might send someone to your house to fuck your wife instead. I might. How old’s your daughter now — ready to get stuck with something else now, huh?”

I went for him.

Reflex simply took over my body and said: Listen up — we’re going to stop this man, we’re going to shut this man up forever. We are. But when I lunged at him, when I went for his throat, his knee came up and caught me in the stomach. I went down to my knees. He stepped behind me and slipped his arm around my neck and squeezed. He whispered in my ear.

“That’s it, Charley. That’s right. Got you mad, huh? Here’s the thing. How lucky was it that you showed up in Bennington? Forty miles from here. In my own fucking backyard? And then, if that isn’t lucky enough, you walk in the goddamn door and start teaching here. How lucky is that? Is that lucky or what? Or is that like, too lucky? What do you think, Charley? You think that’s too lucky? I don’t know. You got something for me, Charley, do you?” He reached his hand down and patted my right pocket. He felt it there — the gat, the one I’d taken from the COs museum. “You got something you want to stick me with? Huh, Charley?” He took it out of my pocket — he showed it to me.

“You ought to know me better by now, Chuck. Sure I’ll meet you by the river. Sure I’ll come alone. Sure. But I met your mail boy at the river first, huh? Took his head off, huh, Charley? Who the fuck you think you’re dealing with here? You think this is punk central?” He put the knife against my throat. He pressed it against my jugular. Then he smiled and pushed me to the floor. I could smell something acrid — urine and ammonia.

I wanted to answer him now.

To tell him yes, I did know who I was dealing with. To tell him that that was why I’d waited six months in Bennington before applying for the teaching job here. Why I’d made sure he’d found me there first, living in Bennington and teaching in high school, so that it would just seem like some kind of fortunate coincidence that I’d later taken a teaching job here. In the very prison he was incarcerated in. And I wanted to tell him that’s why I’d purposely left my keys in my pocket that day I walked through the metal detector—to see if it would be possible to smuggle in a weapon. A gun. And that when I learned it wasn't possible to smuggle in a gun, how I’d started making visits to the COs lounge because I’d heard they had a kind of museum there.