Page 81 of The River Is Waiting

When she reaches over and kisses my cheek, I mockingly remind her that staff-inmate contact is against the rules. She says she doesn’t think she’d have lasted six months here if she didn’t break rules.

“Which is why you’re a badass,” I tell her. She grins and says she’ll take that as a compliment.

As I walk back to B Block, I get a little choked up by the faith she’s just shown me. The challenge of that blank wall begins to excite me and ideas for the mural are already spinning by the time I’m back in the building and climbing the stairs. Colorful, she says. Tropical birds in a rainforest? Monarch butterflies against a blue sky winging their way back to Mexico? She says she’d like it to be uplifting. A sky filled with hot-air balloons would be upliftingandcolorful. Okay then. Problem solved.… Except how would that be different from the kind of art she’d buy at Home Goods? And more important, why would hot-air balloons speak to the guys in this place?

Sports heroes? I imagine it like theSgt. Pepperalbum cover. Jordan, Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, and Babe Ruth in the front row. Behind them Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Jim Brown, and Larry Bird. But what about Clemente, Gretzky, Tiger, Serena? And what about Olympic athletes? Carl Lewis, Usain Bolt, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Would anyone besides me know my sentimental favorite, Steve Prefontaine? Nah, I can just hear everyone bitching about who I included and who got left out. And I’d probably have trouble getting all those likenesses right.That’s supposed to be Magic Johnson?Nope. Way too complicated.

How about something historic? Maybe a battle scene between the Wequonnocs and the Connecticut colonists? Uh-uh. Nothing uplifting about war.… Historic moments in the Civil Rights movement? MLK, John Lewis, and the freedom fighters at the Pettus Bridge? I’d love to stick it to the white supremacists around here, including some of the COs, but I don’t want it to come back at me or land in Mrs. Millman’s lap.… Famous American writers?… Rock stars and rappers?… The Apollo 11 moon landing?That’s one small step for a man…

I spend most of the rest of the day thinking up ideas that seem promising, then scrapping them. By lights-out, I still haven’t come up with anything I want to go with, but it dawns on me that I’ve been so engaged by this project, I’ve barely given a thought to those two a-holes who are out to get me and what they might pull next.

The next day, same thing. Ideas keep sparking in my head, but nothing catches fire. By day three, I have a sketchbook filled with notes and drawings that turn into dead ends. I’ll give it another day or two. If I still can’t come up with anything that excites me, I’ll throw in the towel.

On the fifth day of driving myself nuts, I start thinking about mythology. I open up that book I grabbed from the library when they were throwing shit out and thumb through those color plates by the masters. I flip past Bruegel the Elder’sLandscape with the Fall of Icarus, then pause and turn back to it.

I study the painting’s composition—the unconventional choicesBruegel made. The farmer in the foreground plowing a patch of land is the most prominent figure. His size and his bright red shirt grab the viewer’s attention before anything else. Yet, he’s insignificant to the Icarus story. So are the shepherd minding his flock, the man fishing at the water’s edge, and the sailors aboard the cargo ship on the pale green sea. These ordinary people going about their day’s work are oblivious or indifferent to Icarus’s headfirst crash into the Aegean and what I imagine came next: his flailing and fighting against a watery death. Again, I wonder why the artist chose to make the story’s doomed hero the least significant figure in the composition—render him as a small detail rather than the central figure. What’s Bruegel saying? The Icarus myth is usually understood as a cautionary tale against the recklessness of youth. But maybe that lowly shepherd one tier down from the farmer provides a subtle clue about the artist’s intent. He stares up at the sky, his attention focused on something the viewer doesn’t see. Could he be staring at Icarus’s father, Daedalus, who invented the makeshift wings that led to his and his son’s escape from prison but also the son’s fatal fall? Is the painting about Daedalus’s fate: having to bear witness to his son’s untimely death while he remains alive and aloft himself? Having to outlive his boy, suffering with the knowledge that he’s the unintentional orchestrator of his demise?

I tear the color plate ofLandscape with the Fall of Icarusfrom the mythology book, walk it over to the library, and run my idea past Mrs. Millman. “So clarify something for me, Corby,” she says. “Does this mean you’ve decided to paint the mural?” I tell her it must because it’s all I’ve been able to think about for days now. She applauds my answer. Then she takes the Bruegel print from me and studies it. “I know this painting,” she says. “It’s in a museum in Brussels. I saw it when my husband and I were traveling in Europe. So you’re envisioning a landscape painting then. Any place in particular?”

“Yeah,thisplace. The land, not the prison. You ever see that ledge on the other side of the river?”

She nods. Mentions the inmate who tried to escape by scaling that ledge, but lost his footing and died from the fall.

“I was thinking about that guy. But what if he had made it to the top, then turned around and looked down at the view. The woods, the fields, the river, but not these ugly buildings and the ugly stuff that goes on here?”

“So you want to show what the property looked like before they built Yates?”

“Or after they tear it down. Or both.”

She looks confused. “Well, work up some drawings that we can show the deputy warden,” she says. “He’ll need to sign off on what you’re planning.”

“Do you think that will be a problem?”

She looks at me intently. “Nothing too controversial or he’ll take the easy way out and say no. And think about what you’ll say if he asks why you’ve omitted the institution.”

“Okay. Got it.”

Back in our cell, I draw a rough layout of the composition on paper. Make a tentative list of who and what I might want to place in this past-and-future landscape: Lester Wiggins on the riverbank reading a book, Wequonnoc people hunting and tending to their crops before the white settlers arrived, a deer and her fawn grazing in a meadow, a blue heron flying up from the river. I’ve borrowed a set of colored pencils from Mrs. M, so I add blue sky, green vegetation, brown for the river. If Zabrowski asks where the buildings are, I’ll make up some bullshit answer. Try to talk over his head so that, hopefully, he won’t be able to come up with any reason to object.

Four days after I submit my design, I’m called to the library. The deputy warden is there and so is Warden Rickerby. Mrs. Millman tells them how excited she is that, pending their approval, the library will soon display original inmate-generated art. Then she knocks me for a loop. “Mr. Ledbetter and I have discussed the importance of making sure the mural makes no political statements that some could find offensive. Now, of course it’s his right to exercise his freedom of speech through his art, but he’s agreed to eliminate the Pride flag and the phrase ‘End Police Violence’ from the mural. To his credit, he was happy to comply.”

What? I never even thought to include those things, but I’m following Mrs. M’s lead. “Good,” Zabrowski says. “We don’t want to promote any ofthatstuff.”

Mrs. Millman asks whether either of them has any questions for the artist. “I do,” Zabrowski says. “If this is supposed to be Yates CI property, where are the buildings?”

“Well, I suppose you’ve heard about the space-time continuum,” I say. “The three dimensions of space—length, width, and height—plus time, the fourth dimension? Physics 101, right?” The warden looks hesitantly at her deputy and nods. Zabrowski nods back. “So if you’ve studied Einstein’s theory of relativity, you probably remember that he thought time travel might be possible, okay? That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Assuming it would be possible to travel both back to the pastandforward into the future, my intention is to illustrate that there was a time when the buildings here hadn’t yet existed and there will most likely be a time in the distant future when they no longer exist. Get it?”

There’s a long five seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Brilliant!” Warden Rickerby suddenly declares. Zabrowski nods in agreement. When Mrs. M asks whether we can assume my design has their approval, the warden says, “Absolutely! And maybe when the mural is finished, we can get the press to do a story on it. It would be nice to get somepositivepublicity for a change.” With that, she claims she and her deputy have another meeting to get to and they exit the library as quickly as possible.

“You jolted me for a minute, Mrs. M, when you started talking about Pride flags and ‘End police violence.’ What was that about?”

“It’s an old trick I learned from my community service days back in the seventies. When you’re negotiating with the opposition, you start off by making a concession, real or imagined. It puts them at ease so that they think you’re being totally reasonable. But what about you? The space-time continuum? Einstein’s theory of relativity?” She chuckles. “How in the world did you come up with that stuff?”

“There’s a new guy on our tier,” I tell her. “A physics professor who’shere for embezzling from his college. I just asked him if he thought time travel could be a thing and let him ramble. I didn’t really understand much of what I was saying just now, but I think they bought it.”

“Oh, they definitely did. They think it’s a big secret that they’re dumb as rocks, the two of them. Don’t quote me.” I tell her my lips are sealed. “Now then,” she says. “When I got up this morning, Howie was already downstairs in the kitchen baking cookies. Could I interest you in a snickerdoodle?”

I’m feeling pretty lifted when I head back to B Block. The design’s been approved and I’m brainstorming all kinds of ideas about the mural. But halfway to our building, I see two shadows approaching from behind. “No big surprise. That kid was more fucked-up than a soup sandwich.” I recognize the voice; it’s Piccardy. “Hey, Ledbetter. You hear the news about your little buddy?”

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