Page 9 of Fade Out
They led me through a double set of doors, a guard in front of me and one behind me. Once inside we stopped at the first room to our right. It was a room about twenty feet by twenty feet, with metal shelves against one wall. The shelves were stacked with beige uniforms. There was a metal table in the center of the room. On it was a large clear plastic bag to go with the small one I’d already filled.
“Take your clothes off and put them in this bag,” Winger said.
I kicked off my Reeboks, undid my 501s and let them drop to the floor. I stepped out of them. Then I pulled the rugby shirt I was wearing over my head. I folded the jeans and the shirt and put them in the bag.
“I can keep my gym shoes, right?”
“Yes.”
“And my underwear and socks.”
He didn’t answer me. Instead he said, “Open your mouth.”
I thought I just had. I opened it anyway.
“Lift your tongue.”
While I was dropping my jeans he’d put on a pair of latex gloves. Now he dug his latexed fingers into my hair.
“Lift your arms.”
He looked underneath when I lifted them.
“Drop your underwear and bend over.”
I knew better than say no or to mention that I’d seen something just like this in a porno. I did as I was told. Winger popped a finger up my butt. No KY. Burned like hell. Then I got to stand up and pull my underwear back on.
“That would be a lot easier if you learned a little something about foreplay.” That slipped out before I really thought about it.
Winger stopped and stared at me. “I think I said something about keeping your mouth shut.” Then he pushed a short stack of beige uniform at me. It was really just a shirt and drawstring pants. They looked a lot like medical scrubs except the shirt said DOC on the back.
Tagget had been looking over my Reeboks, probably to make sure I hadn’t gotten them at the James Bond store and wouldn’t click my heels together to have razor sharp knives pop out of the toes.
He gave them back to me. I had the pants and shirt on. They were huge and I was swimming in them. I stepped into my sneakers. Not exactly hard since the laces were in my little plastic bag, which was now inside my big plastic bag along with my clothes. Tagget took my arm and with a black permanent marker wrote the number 1025 along the inside of my forearm. I guessed that was my new identity.
After that, they handed me a stack of things to carry—towel, sheets, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste—then led me back to the hallway and further into the building. We went through two sets of locked doors. The building was old and every surface was thick with layers of paint. The current color was curdled cream. The doors we passed and the bars we walked through were all chipped and I could see that everything had once been tomato red, mint green and even sky blue.
I wondered if they’d consulted a color specialist to determine which color was most soothing to prisoners. Or did they just go to the hardware store and buy up all the paint that had been mixed by mistake? The latter seemed more likely.
Once we got to the actual cells it was darker. Only a few of the lights were on. I was in cell 1025—imagine that—on the first floor in the back corner. The door to the cell was thick metal with only a small window for the guard to look through. Winger took out an ancient-looking key and opened the door.
On one side of the room was a metal bunk bed, on the other a toilet and sink in one unit. The light in the center of the ceiling was on. Someone in the top bunk snored. Winger gave me a little push into the cell and then shut the door behind me. I set the things I’d been carrying onto the lower bunk. I sat down next to them.
I tried to think about the last time I’d slept, really slept. Saturday. The night I was supposed to have killed Rita. I would have laughed if I had the energy. Instead, I leaned over onto the thin mattress, my head landing on the bare pillow. I was asleep in seconds, not even completely in the bed.
* * *
He was all nose,not much chin and a receding hairline. His eyes were a bulging, brilliant blue and he had long, dark eyelashes. He was hanging upside down from the top bunk staring at me.
“Steven Head,” he said, when he saw that my eyes were open. “Armed robbery.”
“Nick Nowak. Falsely accused.”
“Oh me too, me too. I mean, yeah, I robbed a liquor store, but I left the gun in the car. Honestly, I was a little nervous so I totally forgot the gun and had to pretend. And now they won’t believe me ’cause they found the gun when they picked me up. The world is an unfair place, man.”
He hopped down from the upper bunk and I saw he was a short wiry little guy in boxers and a wife-beater. He went over to the toilet and took a long noisy piss. I would have tried not to pay attention, but he kept talking while he did his business.
“You go for your bond hearing yet? Fifty thousand dollars, the judge said. ’Cause of the gun. The one I left in the car. I mean, how fair is that? Yeah, I only gotta come up with five grand, but if I had five grand I probably wouldn’t have been robbing a liquor store, you know? There’s kinda this connection. When you’re broke, you gotta take some initiative.”
