The reverberation of my heels striking the tile was so loud in the long, open corridor that I didn’t hear anyone come up behind me-but I felt them. In the split moment before they struck, I knew they were there, but it wasn’t soon enough for me to spin around and defend myself.
In an instant, the lights in the hallway were off and someone grabbed my head and slung me into the plate glass window of the classroom to my left.
While one of them pressed my head to the glass, another pinned me to the block wall with his large, muscular body. Two others coming up behind me on either side grabbed my arms and held them in place against the glass.
At first, nothing happened. I was trapped, unable to move, and we all just stood there, only the sound of our breathing to break the silence. Then I heard footsteps coming down the hallway toward us, not clicking the way my street shoes had, but padding the way the rubber soles of the inmate boots did.
When the unseen figure reached us, he leaned in so close that his lips were touching my ear.
“If you’re not happy being a chaplain and want to be a cop,” he whispered, “join the fuckin’ police force.”
The voice was vaguely familiar, but shrouded in whisper as it was, I couldn’t be certain who it was.
In the back corner of the room I was facing, the red glow of the EXIT sign seemed to float in the darkness as if disembodied from time and place.
“If you go near Mr. Malcolm again, we’ll fuck you up so bad you won’t be fit to be a cop or a chaplain. Understand?”
I didn’t say anything, didn’t move or give any indication I had heard him.
“He doesn’t understand,” he whispered to the group.
The big guy with the muscular body who was pinning the bulk of my body to the wall drove a punch into my kidney so hard that my knees buckled and if they hadn’t been holding me I would have gone down.
As the pain surged through me, I saw tiny dots of light like a dark, starry night, and I felt dizzy and nauseated.
“Understand?” he asked again.
“Now I understand,” I said, trying to swallow back the acid rising up my throat.
“Good,” he said. “’Cause you’re only going to get one warning.”
The voice receded, the others following one by one, until only the body and head guys remained. Then, as the big guy pressing my mid-section to the block wall held me in place, the guy holding my head grabbed a handful of my hair, jerked my head back, and slammed it into the glass.
This time as my knees buckled there was no one to keep me from falling, so I did.
“I said I understood,” I called after them, but they neither spoke nor slowed down, and before I could say anything else, they were gone and I was lying on the cool tile floor of the hallway alone in the dark.
CHAPTER 20
“You okay?” Merrill asked.
“I’ll live,” I said.
I was back in the chapel, lying on the floor of the staff chaplain’s office, holding an ice pack to my eye with one hand and the receiver to my ear with the other.
“How many were there?” he asked.
“Coupla hundred at least,” I said.
He laughed.
It was Merrill’s day off and he had been washing his truck when I called.
From my unique vantage point on the floor, I could see things that usually went unnoticed for long periods of time-like the small chips and scratches in the ceiling tiles, the marks and proprietary scribblings of “Property of PCI Chapel” beneath the chairs and desk, and the cobwebs in the corners that fluttered like fine hair in a breeze when the central unit kicked on.
“Six, I think,” I amended.
“You let six little inmates do that to you?” he asked.
“Embarrassing, isn’t it?” I said.
“I wouldn’t let it get out.”
“Though, in my defense, there was nothing little about them,” I said.
“’Cept they brains,” he said. “Messin’ with a man of God-what were they thinkin’? ‘Touch not my anointed and do my prophets no harm’ or I a have his handsome sidekick find you and fuck you up.”
“That last part was a paraphrase, wasn’t it?” I asked. “It’s not in any of my translations.”
“Gospel according to Merrill,” he said. “Thou shalt not fuck with me nor any of my friends, lest thou havest thy ass kickithed.”
“Amen,” I said.
The melting ice shifted in the bag and clinked against the plastic of the receiver.
“What was that?” he asked.
I told him.
“And you have no idea who they were?” he asked.
“I couldn’t see anyone,” I said, “but the voice sounded a little like Abdul Muhammin.”
“Your library clerk?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “but when I got back over here, he was sitting at his desk in the library quietly doing his job, so I can’t be sure.”
“And you think the teacher sent them?”
“Well, they only made a move on me after I talked to him,” I said. “And he’s the only one they warned me off of.”
“They coulda been tryin’ to point the finger at him,” he said. “Knowing you be lookin’ at him a lot harder now.”
“That’s true,” I said. “And I’d be inclined to believe it if it didn’t give them too much credit.”
“Oh,” Anna said as she opened the door and saw me. “I didn’t think anyone was in here.”
I turned from the copier to see the woman I most enjoyed seeing in all the world, and my breath caught the way it did every time I saw her.
“Hey,” I said, heart racing, mouth dry.
“I can come back,” she said stiffly. “How long will you be?”
My stomach dropped, and in that moment I felt the pain I must have caused her. “I’m almost finished,” I said, my tone begging her not to leave.
It was later in the day, and we were inside the small copy room, which had originally been designed to be a storage closet in the inmate library. A dozen or so inmates sat around reading newspapers and magazines while others worked with the inmate law clerks on appeals, grievances, and law suits in the court-mandated law library.
“I wanted to tell you again how sorry I am,” I started.
She held up a hand. “Don’t, John,” she said. “Let’s not.”
“Not what?” I asked, my voice hoarse, even desperate. “I just want to tell you how sorry I am.”
“I already know,” she said.
“Ouch,” I said.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I know you are genuinely sorry for what happened, and that you want forgiveness, and you’ll promise never to do it again, but all that’s just part of the sick cycle.”
I nodded. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
