Bird-Self Accumulated. Don Judson
in a sprawling pond behind her home, police detectives called to the scene discover a child’s head sunk in a bag of stones.
Around me, the weather has turned drizzly and hot. Sometimes with a small polished mirror held outside my bars, I watch the hall. I’m waiting. And I wait and nothing changes. There is only silence or an unbroken noise. The silence is a prayer. Of surrender. To this, I whisper, to this and other devotions.
I don’t know.
What is there to tell here in security lockdown I eat breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Do some push-ups. Like a holy man of days I jack my dick testifying to the bars the walls and ceiling. Then wait for mail call, medical rounds—for the nurse or med-tech who will pretend not to hear at all if I speak; and for the fat guard delivering letters cell by cell, calling out our names. . . . He is more direct, but crazy as well, warning me every day that no one can expect to return from prayer alive.
My mother again writes that she is frightened. She puts more locks on her door.
I wish that I could help.
But there is no message from here, there is nothing.
Although maybe I should tell her this: embrace, like the many heads of one snake, your fear. And: walk out to meet it.
I’m not sure, I don’t believe I should say anything at all: but listen, around me the weather has turned. It has turned the walls to sweat like crack like wine like sick. They sweat roaches, and they sweat my life unreal. Please, calls Boo-Boo every afternoon, Mother of God allow me to die.
Go ahead.
Listen.
Hey dude, you don’t have to ask permission. Just do it, alright? Do yourself and shut the fuck up.
But of course he doesn’t. Instead takes a piece of straightrazor to Morris Boyle. Oh God, is what the Boyle yells.
Oh Jesus shit, he says.
There is a road around the prison and in the summer dust will cover it by noon and on the day I was taken to lockdown I watched the Sergeant and a co-1 come down this road, which was already hot and dusty and settled itself behind them as they walked. I had been doing sit-ups. Three sets, then rest for five minutes. From where I sat I could watch along the fence line for a quarter mile to a point at which the ground climbed and the road turned and went out of sight, the trees across from it stunted, the sky low and hot and punching down into the road. Then the Sergeant and Mr. Mays came down past the trees and onto the compound. Tampa Fats, acting as a spook for a poker game, warned the players. But the cops walked past Fats and the game and up to me.
The room where I was taken was small and tight and without air. There were three of us in the room: myself, the Colonel, and an investigating Lieutenant.
“Now, we’d look a little foolish, wouldn’t we,” the Colonel said, “knowing what we do, and letting you back on the compound?”
Behind the Colonel’s desk was a Coca-Cola machine. Its lights had been busted out, and over the door someone had hung a picture of a woman with holes where her face was supposed to be. Above it, on the wall, a deer head and two photographs were hung. The first, of men in army uniforms. Four guards whose faces were blurred indistinct posed together in the second. Between them they held a bowling trophy. A banner across the bottom of this picture read: Department of Corrections. Four Rivers, C.I., 1986. Near the Coca-Cola machine there was also a coatrack and a fan. That was all there was in the room. The fan did not appear to be working. It was very hot.
“The facts are, son—” the Colonel said, “and here’s number two, the first being we have every reason to believe the contract on your life . . . you see? But the second being that the man who has come forward—and here I’m just thinking of you, son—the man dealt with no more than a go-between, and this is where the problem lies and where you can get out of the problem . . . it being to tell us who the perpetrator or perpetrators of the contract are. This is what you can straighten out right now.”
Everyone was being very pleasant. When I’d first been brought into the office the Lieutenant had looked up at me from where he sat on a corner of the Colonel’s desk and asked if I would like the handcuffs off. “Well now,” the Colonel told me, “seems we got us a little problem and some confusion both.” The Colonel appeared to be about sixty years old and was thin and tall and formal in a southern manner which made him seem very pleased to be having this conversation. But he was not at all happy. “A five hundred dollar contract,” the Colonel said. It was as if we were all friends. And now they would have me locked down twenty-four hours a day under administrative confinement until I could be shipped because I was white and because I had people and possibly a good lawyer and if they let me back onto the compound I was going to be killed and that could cause them trouble. So of course everything was decided and there was no reason for anyone to be unhappy, except me, who did not count, and the Colonel perhaps, who did, and who had already been inconvenienced by this bit of paper work and because of that wanted names and would not be pleased if he did not get them.
“A five-hundred-dollar contract,” the Lieutenant repeated.
Through a window which had recently been cut into the wall of the office and left unfinished I could see the road the Sergeant had walked down a short while before, and beyond that a field of cut stumps. Ten or twelve prisoners were in the field. Several of them worked, pulling stumps from the ground, while the rest stood waiting beneath a stand of cottonwoods which had peeled and were rotting in the sun. The men who waited held picks and shovels in their hands and looked down and did not appear to speak to one another. Only once had I found trouble while in this prison. The first day in a nontransit dorm, I was sitting on my bunk, just unpacked, but with three shirts and my sunglasses still lying on top of an upturned box when a big jitterbug called Cocoa and three of his running partners came up to me. “Hey man,” Cocoa said, “them ours,” pointing to my sunglasses. I’d seen Cocoa around before. One morning, turning a corner behind the education building, I’d come upon a group of inmates watching a robbery. It was Cocoa, who had an old man down on the ground and was kicking him, working his legs, laying all his frame into every kick. Everybody just stood around and watched. “Easy now, cracker,” Cocoa told me that day in the dorm, “real easy.” One of the homeboys Cocoa had brought with him wore a gold tooth and touched a spot on his lip just above it and then adjusted the brim of his cap so that it sat sideways on his head. Underneath the hat was a red bandanna.
“Them me, cracker,” Cocoa said again and then slowly reached down and took the sunglasses.
“Alright,” the homeboy said, laughing softly.
That night after supper I had sat on some bleachers by the baseball field until I saw Cocoa go into the dorm alone. I waited a minute and then walked to a blind spot between the dorms and the fence and dug around a large rock, pulling it from the ground. Underneath was an eighteen inch long piece of re-bar I’d stolen from the machine shop and buried a few days before. Holding the pipe through a hole cut into my pants pocket I went to the dorm and found Cocoa sitting on one of the toilets in the large shower room at the back of the build-ing where, at that time of day and if I was quick, there was little chance of anyone coming in on us. The toilets were separated from each other only by small brick partitions, chest high, and left open at the front, and I walked up on him before he knew I was there and began without a word to swing the re-bar. The first time Cocoa was hit he screamed and his eyes rolled back into his head. After that he only made small wet sounds and was probably mostly unconscious, although once it seemed he was trying to get an arm up to protect his face. There was blood everywhere. “Whose sunglasses are these?” I kept asking Cocoa.
Later, I cut the name tags from my clothes and pitched them and the pipe into a laundry cot. I had never been more frightened in my life. But this, now, would have nothing to do with Cocoa and it would be much worse. I knew that immediately. On the streets I’d robbed cocaine dealers. Now they’d found me and had contacts in this camp and there was nothing to be done. It occurred to me for some reason then that what I was looking at—the road, now empty, and the clean line of fence, both somehow unreal against the sky, and behind them the sky, immediate, as if someone had painted it on a white sheet