Page 35 of The River Is Waiting

I shrug. “Where did ‘she’ get that drag queen makeup from? Is that stuff listed on the commissary order sheet?”

Manny shakes his head and laughs. “After you’ve been here awhile, you get pretty good at improvising. You’d be surprised how much dye you can suck out of Starburst gummies, Jolly Ranchers, and strawberry Twizzlers. By the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but I was the one who got Jheri to stop teasing you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I say. But if Manny thinks this is going to make us buddies, he’s mistaken. By now I’ve seen some of the shitty treatment gay guys get at this place, from COs as well as other inmates. I don’t want to be associated with them any more than I want to hang out with the racist frat boys I just met. I haven’t met anyone at Yates whoisn’ta liability. I have nothing in common with any of these guys, and yet I’m one of them. I have to admit that I sometimes catch myself thinking I’m better than them—thattheydeserve to be here but I don’t. But who am I kidding? The opposite is true. How many of them caused the death of their own child?

When I get back to our cell, Pug’s there. Back early from work, he’s using a magazine to fan away the smoke from his roadkill cigarette. “What are you going to do if someday a CO walks in here and sees this haze? Smells it?” It’s the first time I’ve challenged him.

“I’ll probably throwyouunder the bus,” he says. “Claim that you were the one who was lighting up.” He says it like it’s a joke, but I know he’d do just that.

That night, when I climb up to my bunk, I smell something. Shit. My sheet is smeared with feces and there’s a turd sitting on my pillow.

By my third week, I’ve picked up on some of the slang you hear at this place. A private note wrapped up tight and thrown from one prisoner to another is a “kite” that arrives “airmail.” If you die in prison before yoursentence is up, you’ve gotten a “back-door parole.” You’ll catch “dinner and a show” when a fight breaks out in the chow hall and you watch the guards pepper-spray the brawlers. Crapping into your cell’s toilet is “feeding the warden.” It’s part gallows humor and part survival mechanism. It also serves as a kind of antidote to the bullshit euphemisms the institution loves to hide behind. Take the name of this place for instance: the Yates Correctional Institution. The only thing most of the staff is interested in “correcting” is a new inmate’s assumption that he might be something more than a worthless piece of shit with a felony conviction and an inmate number. I know I deserve to be here. But if you want to fix yourself while you’re doing time at Yates, I think you’re pretty much on your own.

The days here are bad enough, but the nights are worse. Pug snores and sometimes shouts out in his sleep and his restlessness shakes my bunk as well as his. Some nights I can’t get to sleep and other nights I can’t stay asleep because of it. Either way, I’m awake for hours, silently asking my baby boy and baby girl for forgiveness or pleading with Emily not to give up on me. As the hours crawl by, my desperation reawakens my craving for the benzos and booze that used to allow me to drift into merciful unconsciousness. Now, instead of sleep, I experience night sweats, tightness in my chest, palpitations, shallow breathing.

When I finally doze off for an hour or two, I sometimes wake up startled by disturbing dreams: my father screaming at my mother and me as we cower together on the kitchen floor; Michael Jackson laughing as I beg him to stop dangling Niko upside down over a balcony railing. One night I’m awakened by the smell of burnt toast that isn’t really there. Next thing I know, I’m lying there reliving in painful detail what happened that morning: the smoke alarm, Niko’s fascination with the ants in the driveway, Linda McNally waving her McDonald’s bag from across the street, me putting the CRV in reverse without checking the back seat. I begin to dread the sun going down. Nighttime is when the fire burns most fiercely inside my head and I’m at a loss to know how to put it out.

Toward the end of my third week here, I hear a commotion downstairson tier two—shouting and yelling, some guard on the intercom squawking, “Code Purple! Building B, first floor! Code Purple!” The emergency turns out to be an inmate’s suicide. He’s torn his sheets into strips and braided them into a makeshift rope. Then, during one of the breaks outside his cell, he tied one end of his rope to a stair railing and, at the other end, slipped the noose he’d fashioned over his head, tightened it, and jumped into the stairwell.

Returning from a commissary pickup, Manny witnesses the jump and the guy’s dying struggle. At chow that night he’s bug-eyed as he provides all the gruesome details. “This wasn’t any half-assed cry for help. He wanted out of here. He was swinging back and forth between the first and second tier, his body twitching and jerking all over the place. They called maintenance to get a ladder over here, but by the time it arrived, he’d stopped moving. I tell you, I seen a lot of dead people at wakes and shit, but not anyonedyingin front of me. By the time they cut him down, his whole head was purple like an eggplant.”

Someone at the table says the guy’s last name was Hogan and that he was doing time here for Assault One. “Found out his half brother was boning his wife and went after the mofo with a pipe wrench.”

Another guy says he can’t picture Hogan.

“Skinny white dude, thirties, horn-rimmed glasses.”

“Oh, him? He didn’t seem like the type.”

“There’s a type? Don’t think so, bro. I heard he just found out the wifey was divorcing him and suing for sole custody of their kids.”

“That’s cold, man. She must feel like shit now.”

“Probably why he did it. Give her a big fuck-you on his way out.”

Nods all around. I look down at my half-eaten meal and say nothing.

That night I wrestle again with insomnia. Emily might divorce me, and if that happens, I’ll just have to accept it. But she’d never withhold Maisie from me. That wouldn’t happen. Would it?

At chow the next night, the conversation’s about Hogan again—specifically, the removal of his corpse. Pug says, “You ever notice how theyalways do the ‘back-door paroles’ during third shift? Probably because in the daytime some reporter or politician might see another one going out in a body bag. Next thing you know, there’d be a front-page story about why these hang-ups keep happening. Nothing DOC hates more than bad publicity. Somebody ought to write a book about all the shit that goes on around here that nobody knows about.”

After that, the conversation shifts to other matters: Yankees versus Red Sox, predictions about when the next lockdown is going to be, whether or not some female CO has gotten breast implants. My mind is still on Hogan.

Maybe he was smarter than the rest of us, I think. At least he found a way out of this hellhole. The table goes silent and everyone’s looking at me, some of them with sporkfuls of food on the way to their mouths. That’s when I realize I didn’t just think it. I said it out loud.

A guy at the other end asks Manny what my name is. When he tells him, the guy says, “Well, son of a bitch, Ledbetter. I guess you ain’t a deaf-mute after all.” They all snicker and go back to eating. Everyone, that is, except Manny. He isn’t shoveling in the slop on his tray or running his mouth for once. He’s just staring at me.

A couple of minutes later, one of the guards shouts, “That’s it, gentlemen! Head ‘em up and move ‘em out!” And like a herd of obedient cattle, we all stand and walk our trays over to the garbage cans.

Manny catches up to me on the walkway heading back to B Block. I’ve been doing the math in my head: a three-year sentence minus the three weeks I’ve done leaves a hundred and fifty-three more weeks. I can’t do it. “You all right, Corby?” Manny asks. It’s the first time since I got here that someone’s called me by my first name. Without looking at him, I tell him I’m fine.

Dying would free me from my unbearable guilt. And sometimes I indulge myself by imagining that Niko is alive again in some other place unknowable to the still-living. Reunited by death, he and I will laugh and play together, run after each other. But allowing myself this fantasy is inevitably followed by intense feelings of heartache and loss.…

How will Emily react to my death? She’ll grieve, sure, but will she also feel relieved to be done with me? Free to move on? And what about Maisie? Emily’s promised that my daughter and I will stay connected through photos and drawings, but she’s said she willnotbring her here for in-person visits. If I last three years at this place, by the time I get out, she’ll be five and I’ll be a stranger. I might as well admit it: they’ll both be better off without me complicating their lives.…

Mom will take it hard, but she’s strong and has a lot of friends who’ll support her. And if my father feels any regrets, well, that will be on him to deal with. Or not. Dad’s pretty good about intellectualizing his way around difficult truths.

Over the next couple of days and nights, my flirtation with suicide becomes an obsession. Thinking about it energizes me, but then the adrenaline subsides and I crash, the prospect of my death triggering sobs I have to stifle with my pillow pressed against my face.

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