I have feelings for you you know its hard to say — Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.
Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.
Love
Wm Houston Jr
Tell Burris hell still be my brother
“I’ve been informed that, contrary to your request, you cannot be moved any closer to the television on A-wing,” Fredericks told him. “The TV is for men serving sentences. You haven’t been classified, you’re violent, etcetera etcetera. No TV.”
“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “Don’t make no never-mind to me. In the joint I’ll get enough TV to where it makes me sick.”
Fredericks held Bill Houston’s communication in the palm of his hand. “I’ll try and get this delivered. But I think you should know Jamie’s in the hospital.”
“What happened? She all right, or what?” Fredericks had brought him Camels, and he lit one casually. He didn’t want his true concerns identified by these people.
“She’s in the hospital,” Fredericks said. “I don’t know the details. She had a nervous breakdown of some kind.”
“Got a little frazzled, hey?”
Fredericks looked at him curiously until Houston said, “What about the kids?”
“I don’t know about the kids. I didn’t know there were any kids. I presume any kids would be taken care of.”
“Okay. Anyway,” he said, shoving the ashtray across the table toward Fredericks. “How’s James?” But Fredericks didn’t smoke.
“James is recuperating nicely. He’s doing just fine. And I think we’re going to get your trials separated after all, because Dwight Snow’s got some slick counsel with pull. He’s off on his own.”
“Off on his own?”
“He’s getting a change of venue. Separate trial in another county. He’s in a good position — no record, and he was in possession of an unfired weapon.”
“Bastard held off till I had to go in,” Bill Houston said.
“I did not hear you say that.”
“I got nothing to hide.” One he’d learned from Jamie.
“Anyway, James’s gun had been fired, but he claims he just hadn’t cleaned it and just hadn’t loaded it fully.”
“That’s true. I don’t remember him firing no rounds.”
“They may try you together, but they’re beginning to see how it could get messy. And Burris I can definitely separate — his position is already more clearly defined than Dwight Snow’s.”
Bill Houston said, “I don’t understand any of this. Just bring me comic books and cigarets. I give up.”
“Well, I’m talking strategy. And that strategy is designed to keep you alive. I wanted you all tried separately, but I don’t know now. We may want you and James to go in together. I really can’t pretend to have anything figured out till I get the prosecution to loosen up a little. The thing is,” he said, and stopped Bill Houston’s hand from fidgeting, covering it with his own, “everybody’s being very weird over at the DA’s. I’m just starting to suspect that whatever they want, our policy should be to want the opposite. No cooperation.”
Bill Houston stripped the paper from his cigaret butt. Both men observed the small movements of his thick fingers raptly, until he’d added its tobacco to the contents of his county-issued plastic bag of makings and dusted the last few grains from his fingertips. “Couldn’t you try again? I mean, you know, to get them to move me down closer to where the TV is at?”
Fredericks swept the ashtray and his briefcase from the table with a deft violent movement of his arm; the two guards — the same two who went everywhere with Houston outside his cell — came to attention, but did not draw near.
The expression on the lawyer’s face said nothing about how he might be feeling. His tone of voice was identical to the tone he always took with the defendant. “You’re miserable, William. You’re the complete twenty-five cent desert crook. You’re without any sense of personal responsibility, even for your own life. But I’m going to save your ass.”
“Hey, this intimidation shit — you don’t scare me.”
“That’s good,” the lawyer said, “because when your lungs turn red, I wouldn’t want you to be scared. I wouldn’t want you to be scared when your soul goes up the pipe.”
Bill Houston sat with his feet out and crossed, staring at his boots, and said it one more time out of a thousand. In his cell he said it silently to the walls, and in his sleep he cried it out loud and woke the others in neighboring chambers: “I killed him.”
She was greatly aware of the wide thirsty grounds of the place surrounding these slow interiors, but nothing of that outer world was available to the sight of inmates because the windows were so high. Their ties cast crisscross shadows along the floor this morning, so that as Jamie entered carrying newly issued toilet articles, her feet, in disposable paper slippers, passed through quadrangles of light.
Along opposite sides of the ward ran two rows of eight beds each, most wearing comfortable green or red plaid bedspreads. Lamp fixtures encased in wire mesh disrupted the walls of pale yellow, which were bare except for a small sign near the door that said:
TODAY IS
tues june 4
YOUR DAY
A couple of elderly women sat on a bed playing with cards and a board full of pegs, and another old woman with a leathery face walked up and down between the rows. These and the few others present wore wrinkled cotton gowns identical to Jamie’s. On the bare mattress of the bed the nurse pointed her to, there were two women seated side by side like passengers. They looked all right to Jamie, but they were smaller than your regular women, and one of them had a face caked white with make-up and made horrible by a thick smear of crimson lipstick — she looked like a voodoo doll — and as Jamie approached, the other one began making sounds no human should have been capable of. The doll-lady nodded and said, “She means the President.” The other kept making awful noises and the doll-lady said, “Too fast, Allie — slow down!” To Jamie she said, “The Department of Money, she means.”
Now Jamie saw that the woman held to the folds of skin around her throat one of those mechanical buzz-boxes for people without a voice. The matter being discussed excited her tremendously, and she gestured even with the hand that held the box, waving it around unawares so that it spewed noise inconsequentially. Her friend said, “That’s The Times We Live In. The Times We Live In, she’s saying.”
“Excuse me,” Jamie offered, “you got your fat ass on my bed.”
The nurse came out of the bath-and-shower room at the end of the row of beds, carrying a stack of bedding for Jamie. “Alice, is this your bed? Is this Bridget’s bed? Bridget — is this your bed?”
Alice placed the voice-box against her throat and said, “Fungyoo.”
“Alice,” the nurse said. She seemed about to smile.
“Zlud.”
“She means Slut,” her companion said to Jamie.
“Off the bed, please.” Throwing the bedding down beside them on the mattress, the nurse made shooing motions with her two hands.
The women got up simultaneously. “Nurses do it with all the doctors,” the doll-faced woman explained to Jamie.
“Nuns do it with priests,” Jamie agreed.
The two went one direction, and the nurse went the other, but she paused at the door two beds away. “You can have all the milk you want.”