“They fell out,” he says innocently, but inside he boils, imagining the keeplock who nailed him stomping and crushing his spectacles with glee.
“Where did you lose them? A block? I’ll call down there,” she says. She turns to use the phone. Moses likes watching her do this. Loves the concern he hears in her voice when she says, “Hi, Jack. Moses thinks he lost his glasses. Would you take a look and let me know if they’re there? He spent a year saving up for them and they’ve just arrived.” She turns to Moses who’s been staring at her back. “He’s going to look. Did you hear them fall? Wait…” She holds a finger up. “You do. Thank you.” Then she listens to the CO on the other end of the line, thanks him again and hangs up.
“He said you were hurt today.”
Moses sticks his hand in his pocket and touches her hair. “Just some angry keeplock. It was nothing.”
“Is that where he got you?” she asks. “There’s a mark.”
Moses puts his hand on his face and suddenly feels for himself, though he gets leveled running into someone or something just about every week. Seeing Lila’s reaction to the truth of this place makes him pity himself. He hangs his head. This is better than asking about her garden.
She comes over to take a closer look and stands nearer to him than she normally does. She inspects the mark on his face and puts her cool fingers to it. He can smell the sweet smell of her hand soap. He can see the red blotch on her face where she was squeezing the pimple. He thinks he can detect the raw smell of her blood. He wants to touch her. “Do you want me to call the infirmary?” she asks.
“No.” Moses pulls away.
There are factors that determine whether or not he gets to go to work, like fights and assaults on the guards, and decisions among the guards to keep everyone on their toes by disrupting mail delivery for a few days so the men are reminded that they are no longer citizens, not in here. On these days, Moses isn’t called to work. A trip to the infirmary is a sure way to blow this out of proportion. Sometimes the biggest assaults go ignored and the smallest, like this, can cause disastrous interruptions. The decisions of the guards are random; it’s best to keep a low profile.
“If you say so. It’s going to get blue.”
“Did he say he has the glasses?”
“Yes. He has them in the OIC office. You can go get them when you’re done here. Jenkin is the officer in charge. But I forgot the good news! Wilthauser will read your paper. The catch is you must have it ready for me to bring to him next Wednesday; it’s the last day of class. He’s going to read it when he grades the rest of the papers, and he’ll grade it based on the same criteria he uses for the rest of us. No special treatment.”
Moses claps his hands together. “Hot dog!” he says. “That’s good news. Hot dog!”
“I knew you’d be happy. Go get your glasses and get to work. Remember, you can’t just summarize. You have to prove why or how something happens in the story through analysis of literary devices or character development, so remember this while you’re reading. I’m doing a Freudian reading of the work,” she says proudly. “I’m glad for you, Moses. You’re a smart man. You deserve to feel like one.”
Lila turns away and Moses sees a beautiful ringlet, a single strand of sun, clinging to the back of her fleece. He reaches forward and hooks his finger through it. As she walks, it unravels itself from the fleece and wraps itself tightly around his finger.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jenkin asks when Moses forgets who he is and barges into the office. Jenkin is sitting with his feet up on the desk, looking at the porno keeplock forty-three was reading before he clocked Moses. At first Moses thinks it was confiscated, but then he sees his glasses on the table dangerously close to the CO’s feet. “These yours?” Jenkin asks.
He knows they’re his.
The CO uncrosses his feet and uses one to gently slip the glasses to the floor. They land lens down under the tilted-up leg of Jenkin’s chair. “Go ahead. Get ‘em,” Jenkin says, pretending not to pay attention to Moses. Pretending to look at the porno. Moses bends down on one knee and reaches for them. “Mucha caliente puta, cuarenta y tres!” Jenkin yells to the keeplock. The keeplock yells something back fast and cackles. Moses reaches his hand to the glasses, but Jenkin lets the chair drop and Moses pulls his hand out of the way. Jenkin stops just shy of the glasses and leans back again, casually. Moses wants to take the leg of that chair and flip Jenkin over. But he doesn’t. He can do this. He can suffer the humiliation of this ignorant bastard for the thrill of proving himself to Lila, to a professor. He’s imagined the praise the professor will shower on his work. He’s imagined the lecture he’ll give to his students about the best paper in the class being written not by them, despite all their advantages, but by an unexpected talent discovered by Lila Hathaway. He thinks of this as he reaches for the glasses and Jenkin lets the leg drop. Moses gets his hand over the glasses in time and the leg grinds into the top of it. Jenkin bends over, “Don’t cause any trouble around here again,” and lets the chair up.
Moses takes the glasses and puts them on. They are bent and loose. His knee is stiff from kneeling and he has to put his good hand on the floor to steady himself because the other hand feels like it might be dead.
“Get the hell out of here,” Jenkin says, opening the magazine. Moses makes his way to the stairs outside of the OIC office where he waits for Jenkin to come and unlock the gate for him. Jenkin stays where he is. He sexy whistles real loud; forty-three yells something in Spanish and all the keeplocks come to the bars. The one closest to Moses spits on Moses over and over again. A loogie lands on his prominent left cheekbone.
From Administration there are exactly seven locked doors Moses must approach and await a guard to let him through. If there are other guards, employees or civilians passing through, he must stop exactly where he is, step aside, back against the wall, eyes averted, and wait until the passageway is cleared. Once cleared, the guard can let him pass and lock the door behind him. Upon entering B block there are several doors in a row. He must wait for the first to be unlocked, then step through, wait for the guard to lock the door behind him, step aside while he unlocks the next door, step through only a few feet, and, once again, await the guard as he locks the door behind him. It is a laborious commute replete with a lot of waiting around, and when he’s had a long day, like today, he feels the burden of his incarceration.
To finally enter the open gallery of the ground floor of B block is like pulling off a stop-and-go highway into neighborhoods of suburban residential quiet. But instead of green everywhere, it is a concrete landscape. The calm is not typical. He lives in special quarters where the inmates are mostly older, mostly quiet, mostly peaceful. This is where they bring tours of college criminal justice students, local dignitaries, state DOC officials, and others the prison administration wants to impress. The only thugs are Collin, Georgy, and Don, but they are here because it is a privilege to live here and they are afforded ill-begotten amenities all the time. Moses ignores the loud television and the men milling around. He is exhausted from delivering letters, sore on the temple from forty-three, covered in spit and desperately in need of a piss. But before he reaches his cell, he hears the distinctly lazy voice of Sergeant Ed Cavanaugh coming from within.
“I’m quite sure Gina is still alive and nothing has happened to her, Jorge. She’s living in New York City and working for the Evening News with Arthur Fairchild. Jorge, you know this. You watch the show in the evenings just like Sid and me. We watch him almost every evening and we always look for Gina’s name at the end of the program. Besides, I’m sure Shell would have told me if something had happened to Gina.” Moses watches Ed bob and duck as he talks to avoid the flutter of wings.
Sergeant Ed Cavanaugh is either mean or