Lights Out

Why look’st thou so?”-With my cross-bow

I shot the ALBATROSS.

No explanation, unless you count the small-print text in the left-hand margin-“The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen”-and Eddie didn’t consider it much of an explanation, didn’t even know if the small print was part of the poem or added later by someone else. No explanation. In one verse everything’s cool with the bird, in the next the guy plugs it. Why? Eddie had been through it a thousand times, without getting any closer to the answer. That didn’t mean much. Eddie knew there must be plenty he didn’t understand about “The Ancient Mariner.” For example, it had only recently struck him that there might be a reason the mariner stopped only one of the three wedding guests, instead of telling the story to all of them. Maybe the wedding guest wasn’t saying, “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” but, “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” So Eddie wasn’t sure he even understood the first verse.

Just shot the albatross. Why? Because he was jealous it could fly? Because he wanted to suffer? Because he was afraid of sailing fast? Or just because it was possible to do? None of those answers felt right. It occurred to him that the shooting was melodramatic. Maybe the whole goddamn thing was melodramatic. The reviewer would have panned Coleridge too, if he’d been alive at the time.

Eddie looked up. Willie Boggs and his guards were gone. Another man sat at the long table, alone. He was reading Business Week. This, Eddie realized, was his first close look at the state’s most famous inmate. El Rojo, they called him. His face had been on the cover of Time magazine the week they’d caught him. The face reminded Eddie of a picture he’d seen in one of the books, a picture of a Spanish king, Charles the Something. He had red hair, translucent skin, a long nose, a long chin, long delicate fingers with long manicured nails. The only difference was that, as one of the founders of the Medellin cartel, he had probably been richer than all the kings of Spain put together. Maybe he still was. El Rojo shook his head at something he read and turned the page.

Eddie closed his eyes. True, he hadn’t been sleeping lately, but he’d been sleeping for almost fifteen solid years before that. He couldn’t be tired. But he kept his eyes shut anyway. Everyone said he had to make plans. He tried to picture himself in the future, outside. All he saw was the red lining of his eyelids. “Her lips were red, her looks were free, her locks were yellow as gold.” The specter LIFE-IN-DEATH. Was it important that she was a woman? Woman, in fact, with a capital W. Why?

“Arsewipe. Hey. I’m talkin’ to you. Arsewipe.”

Eddie opened his eyes. Standing over him was an inmate Eddie had never seen before. He was big. Prof called Eddie “big guy,” but Eddie wasn’t really big. When he’d come in, at nineteen, he’d been six one and weighed about one seventy. In fifteen years he’d added twenty pounds, mostly muscle, but he wasn’t big, not compared to the man calling him arsewipe. This man must have weighed three hundred pounds; not svelte, but not fat either. He had a slack, heavy face, long greasy hair, a long greasy beard, a few teeth, and a half-healed hole in his upper lip where a ring must have fit-jewelry was forbidden. It was like waking to a nightmare. Eddie closed his eyes. It wasn’t the first time.

“Hey. Arsewipe.” Eddie felt a kick on the sole of his right foot. A hard kick. He opened his eyes.

“I’m talkin’ to you. You’re in my chair.”

“Guess again,” Eddie said, conscious as he spoke of El Rojo’s gaze.

“Huh?” the big man said. He thought for a moment, mouth open. Eddie noticed that the big man was wearing a ring after all-a gold one stuck in the fleshy tip of his tongue. He gave Eddie another kick.

“You’re new,” Eddie said.

The big man’s forehead creased. “I’m new here. I’m not new to the scene, you fuckin’ fuckhead. I did four fuckin’ years in fuckin’ Q, man. And I always had a favorite fuckin’ chair in the fuckin’ library at fuckin’ Q. See? So get up. Unless you want me to tear your fuckin’ head off.” And he kicked again, this time with a windup. Eddie winced; he couldn’t help himself.

“You’re not giving me much choice,” he said.

“Move, faggot.”

Eddie rose. The big man, a head taller, took him by the shoulder and gave him a push to help him on his way. Eddie let himself be pushed, but at the same time he pivoted and stuck his hand into the middle of that slack face, stuck it right into the fleshy wet maw, sliding his index finger through that stupid tongue ring. The big man’s hands went up then, but he was much too slow. Eddie had curled his finger around the tongue ring; now he yanked.

First there was a ripping sound and the ring came free in Eddie’s hand. Then the big man spouted blood. The pain hadn’t quite hit him when Eddie caught one of his massive wrists in both hands, spun behind the broad back and jerked the wrist up as high as it would go. Something snapped in the big lump of shoulder; muffled by all the muscle, it sounded no louder than a breaking wishbone on Thanksgiving. The big man bellowed and fell forward on the table, not far from El Rojo. Did El Rojo move away at all, or simply sit there? That was the kind of detail Eddie couldn’t remember later.

The big man was moaning and writhing when C.O.s came bursting in. Eddie was sitting in his chair.

“What the fuck?” said one of the C.O.s.

“Melodrama happens in real life,” Eddie explained.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

El Rojo spoke. “The senor bit his tongue,” he said. “You know how that … what is the English word? Smarts? That doesn’t sound right.”

The C.O. opened his mouth, as though to say something. Then he closed it. They took the big man away. He left a pool of blood on the table. El Rojo noticed that it had spread to one corner of Business Week and seeped through the pages. He pushed the magazine away with distaste.

“Thanks,” Eddie said.

“Don’t mention it.” El Rojo examined something in his hand: the tongue ring. Eddie couldn’t remember how he’d gotten it. El Rojo slipped it into his shirt pocket and looked at Eddie. He had liquid amber eyes, like pools of maple syrup. “Melodrama happens in real life?” he said.

Eddie shrugged.

El Rojo smiled at him. He had the whitest smile Eddie had seen in fifteen years, marred by a missing canine. “Smoke?” he said, as though they were sitting in a quiet club somewhere.

“I’m trying to quit.” Quitting wasn’t easy inside, where cigarettes were money and the American Lung Association had no influence.

“For when you are released?” asked El Rojo. His voice too reminded Eddie of maple syrup; smooth like some old black-and-white screen star’s, one with a trace of accent.

Eddie made that connection, but he said: “How’d you know I was getting out?”

El Rojo answered with a question. “You’re the one they call Nails?”

“Yeah.”

“Everybody knows you. Or almost everybody,” he added, glancing at the pool of blood. Then he laughed. There was nothing cultured about his laughter. It sounded more like the utterance of a crow than of some black- and-white smoothie.

El Rojo shook two cigarettes out of a pack. “How can one more hurt you?” he asked. One of Eddie’s rules for life inside was to take nothing from anyone, and he was in El Rojo’s debt already, but he took the cigarette. What the hell. He was getting out. El Rojo lit a match, offered the flame to Eddie, then sucked at it himself. They exhaled two smoke clouds that became one in the air. “My name is Angel,” said El Rojo, giving it the Spanish pronunciation.

“It is?”

El Rojo showed his beautiful teeth. “Angel Cruz,” he said. “Cruz Rojo, you see. Kind of a joke.”

“Because you supply the medicine.”

El Rojo laughed his cawing laugh. “That’s part of it,” he said. “You’ve got brains. I like that.” He held out his hand. Eddie took it, felt the long, slightly damp fingers wrap around the back of his palm. Those fingers reminded him of something in “The Mariner,” but he couldn’t think what. He drew deeply on the cigarette. Cigarettes helped you think.

“See?” said El Rojo. “What’s one more?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, blowing another cloud of smoke. “I’m getting out.”