The stench in this place, the way the walls start to pinch at his insides.
It’s never left him. He’s spent the last ten years right here, on lockdown.
Isn’t that the law he’s lived by?
Keep your mouth shut, speak only when spoken to.
And what good did it do him? The silence?
The freedom he marched for, a lifetime ago.
The speeches he made. The dreams he had.
What good was any of it, really? If he can’t get free in his own mind?
So he can eat at a lunch counter.
Drink warm water from a fountain.
And he can vote.
So what now?
Jay is not a praying man, not really. But some moments in a man’s life beg for a little magic, a faith beyond what the eyes can see. The morning his verdict came down, he prayed, alone, in a cell smaller than this one. They kept the lights on twenty-four hours a day. The cell was drenched in white light and hot, not a comforting shadow in sight. He got on his knees next to the bed, elbows on a mattress so thin it looked like somebody had laid a cracker across the springs. He closed his eyes and he tried to picture God the way other people did:
As a father.
One who might watch out for him, lay a comforting hand.
He carried that picture in his head and into the courtroom that day. And he made a bargain with God.
And standing now in a urine-stained corner of this jail cell, where he paid a toll of six cigarettes to be left in peace, he strikes a new bargain with himself. There is a way out of here, he knows, out of this prison in his mind. It requires only the courage to speak.
It’s nearly two hours before he’s allowed to make a phone call. To Bernie, of course. She’s still out to her parents’ place in Fifth Ward, waiting on word from him, still up at nearly one o’clock in the morning. She answers the phone in a low whisper, then, hear ing his voice, curses him repeatedly, softly, so her daddy won’t hear. When he tells her where he is, the gist of what has hap pened, his wife lets out a jagged little gasp that breaks his heart. The pay phone to his ear, Jay can hear Bernie shuffling around her parents’ house in the dark, looking for her purse and shoes. He tells her to stay put. He passed a sobriety test at the station, and there are, as of yet, no charges being filed against him.
He’s remained remarkably calm, considering.
He’s kept to himself, tried to keep his mind clear. There have been four fights, two of which drew the attention
of the guards, but not to the degree that they were willing to open the cage and break up the commotion themselves. Instead, they yelled threats from the safe side of the bars, tapping their clubs against the hard metal and chipping black paint onto the dirty floor. Two of the fights were territorial. Somebody sat in somebody’s spot, or maybe it was somebody looked at somebody wrong. The other two fights were about some girl named Thelma who stays over on the north side. Of the nine men locked in the small cell, two of them apparently knew each other on the out side, and both laid a strong claim to this little gal who, it sounded like, is still in high school. Jay has stayed out of all of it. Except for the two minutes the guards let him out to make his phone call, he’s done his time in one solitary corner, in a tiny sliver of space down in front, by the bars.
At two thirty, they start calling the first of the men out of the cell. One by one, the news comes down the hallway. Some body’s mama or sister or girlfriend managed to pull together bail money, dipping into next month’s rent. Each time the guards call an inmate’s name, the man in question stands righteously and gives the rest of them the finger, a final salute before the cage opens, just for him.
By a quarter after three, there are only three men left in the cell: one of Thelma’s beaus, Jay, and an older black man, in his late sixties, wearing a soiled undershirt and high-water black pants with white socks. He’s having a one-sided argument with himself about how he knows his gal ain’t gon’ leave him in here, that she’ll bail him out, if only so she can get a ride to work the next morning. He goes on and on, complaining about the fact that she don’t cook him baked chicken no more, always sending him for McDonald’s . . . until finally, Thelma’s boyfriend asks the old man, rather politely, to please shut the fuck up.
It’s a little after four o’clock when the guards call for Jay. He hasn’t seen the two cops who arrested him. He’s had almost no communication with anyone, in fact. When Jay asks the guard what, if anything, he’s been charged with, he gets a grunt for a reply and is marched to another room down the hall. Processing, it turns out.
Where his jacket, watch, and wallet are returned to him. His belt and tie.
And he’s told that he’s free to go.
He’s slow to move, and the clerk, a chubby girl in her twen ties, ponytail cocked to one side, asks Jay if he’s gon’ need a goddamned escort out of the building. “You can go, you know,” she says. When Jay asks her about his vehicle, she only shrugs.
He walks out of the police station about an hour or so before dawn, hungry and tired, his feet blistered and burning through the soles of his dress shoes. He stands briefly at the foot of the cement steps, the same spot where he left Elise Linsey so many nights ago, and he wishes for the hundredth time that he’d lis tened to his wife that night, that he’d gotten out of the car and gone at least to the door of the police station, told the truth as he knew it.
This time of night, the sky is somewhere between black and blue, the dying night as tender as a bruise. The air is moist and mercifully mild. Jay starts walking to the east, cutting through his city. He walks along the railroad tracks that run just to the north of downtown, chasing the sun, it seems, and its early morn ing peek into the sky, the predawn scene of peach and violet, the wispy streaks of white clouds, thin as a whisper, a secret.
He walks east until he hits Main Street and the bridge over Buffalo Bayou.
The Buick is still parked by the side of the road. At the sight of it, Jay breaks into a weary, lopsided trot. He lays his cheek across the dewy roof of the car. He is bone tired, but deeply grateful. The keys are still in the ignition, the doors unlocked.
