“Hey!” John yelled into the hallway. “Where the fuck is anybody?”
“What’s wrong with Ireland?” the voice from the speaker said.
“Something’s bad wrong with his stomach,” John yelled.
“Wait,” the voice said.
We waited, sitting on one of the tables. In a couple of minutes we heard the door down the hall open. Suddenly all the guys who were lurking in their cells swarmed into the dayroom. Everybody was chattering, looking happy. Something was up.
“Chow time,” Loopy said. Loopy had taken to hanging out around John and me, telling us what was what around here.
Two prisoners, trustees dressed in new blue uniforms, pushed a food cart up to the door. They began clanging down compartmented steel food trays on a shelf that stuck through the bars. The trays had stuff in them, sloppy, weird-looking kinds of stuff. I got one and looked at it: soupy rice sloshed around in a corner of the tray, a hot dog rolled around in the main compartment, and a dollop of turnip greens sat as an island in pale green juice next to a slice of wet white bread. When they’d delivered the trays, they began to ladle out Kool-Aid into plastic coffee cups you were supposed to have. Loopy, who was sitting across the table from me, said we could wash out one of the extra ones sitting back in the corner. I passed.
I made a sandwich of the hot dog and bread and ate. The hot dog was cold and rubbery. “This is terrible,” I said to Loopy.
“Yeah,” Loopy said, chewing eagerly while he nodded. “But they bring it regular.”
After dinner Porter took me out the big door and down the hall to a phone hung on the wall. He stood about ten feet away while I made a collect call home.
Jack answered.
“Dad?”
I swallowed. Hearing my son call me that was about as much as I could take. Tears started to well in my eyes and I got mad at myself and blinked them back. I looked up to see if Porter was watching, but he wasn’t.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me, Jack. Mom around?” My question ended in such a high pitch, my voice cracked. I coughed.
“No, Dad, she went to the store. You want me to have her call you when she gets back? Where are you anyway?”
“I’m—” I had to compose myself again. “I’m in Charleston.”
“Charleston? You coming home?”
“Yes. I’m coming home in a few days. Listen, Jack. Tell Mom I’ll call back later, maybe an hour. She’ll be home in an hour?”
“Sure,” Jack said. “Wow. She’s sure going to be glad to know you’re back, Dad.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Well, okay. I’ll call back soon. See you soon, Jack.”
“Okay. Bye, Dad.”
I walked to Porter and said, “I couldn’t get who I wanted. Can I come back in an hour?”
“Sure,” Porter said. “Just let ’em know in the wing.”
“You mean that fucking screaming and yelling communications system you have?”
“Yeah. Intercom system,” Porter said indignantly.
Back at the cell, I lay on my shelf and wished I could sleep. They’d finally come for Ireland and led him off bent over double. They said they’d take him to a hospital if they had to. I wanted to sleep to escape. But I couldn’t. I’d gone beyond the point of no return, and probably I’d never be able to sleep again. I got up and found John in the dayroom. He was smoking a cigarette. “Where’d you get that?” I said.
“Loopy,” John said.
“Hey, Loopy,” I said. Loopy, who’d accepted this name without complaint, looked over at me, grinning. He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at two guys holding a long tube they’d made from rolled-up newspapers. They’d carved a two-pronged fork out of a bar of soap and fitted that on the end of their four-foot paper pole. They were now slipping it out through the bars toward the television. “Yeah?” Loopy said.
“Can I borrow a smoke?”
Loopy bent his neck side to side, a limpy, goofy gesture that didn’t mean yes or no. It meant maybe. “I dunno, I only got a couple left, Bob.”
“I’ll be getting some money, Loopy. I’ll buy you a whole pack if you give me a cigarette.”
Loopy nodded and I walked over beside him while he fished a pack of Winstons out of his shirt pocket. The guy with the paper stick fitted the soap bar over the tuner knob and twisted it. It had taken them a couple of hours to make this thing, and it was a pretty clever rig. The channel changed and everybody cheered. They flipped through the channels until they got to Love Boat, a show they all wanted to see. As the guy started pulling the stick back inside, it was suddenly yanked out of his hands.
“Got it!” Porter yelled. He swaggered into view, holding the stick. He’d been hiding up against the wall in the hallway, out of sight. “I told you, I pick what you see around here.” Porter nodded sternly and broke the paper stick over his knee and stomped the soap bar to crumbs. He turned around and switched the channel back to channel four. I never figured out why Porter cared what channel we watched or why he preferred channel four. Life is filled with mysteries like Porter.
I followed Porter along the bars as he walked down the hallway to the door. “Porter,” I said. “I’d like to make that call now.”
“You got to ask the man,” Porter said.
“The man?”
“Yeah, you got to ask them,” he said, waving at the hallway in general.
“You mean I have to yell at some people I can’t see when I can just ask you?”
“Yeah. That’s the rules.”
I stood there, hanging on to the bars, watching Porter walk through the door. This guy was serious. I yelled, “Hey! Hey, somebody. Mason wants to make a phone call!”
No answer. They never answered until you yelled for a long while. If they answered right away, then everybody’d be asking them for God knows what. I yelled two more times, louder each time.
“You just made a phone call.”
“I didn’t get who I wanted to get,” I shouted.
“That’s not my fault,” said the voice.
“Look,” I said. “Nobody in my family even knows I’m in jail. When I called before, it was my son. I want to talk to my wife.”
“What?”
I could see this nitwit, sitting in some room somewhere with a microphone in front of him, bored out of his skull, snickering at what was probably the most interesting thing that would happen to him tonight, maybe this whole week.
“Look,” I shouted, “I’m allowed to make a phone call, and I want to make it now. It’s my right.”
No answer. I was about ready to yell again when the voice said, “Okay. Wait.” I guess he got tired of the game.
I went back to the table and sat next to John. “This is fucked, John. When do we see a damn lawyer?”
“The team’s on it, Bob,” John said. “I’m sure of it. They won’t let us down.”
Right. The team. How could I have forgotten? I turned to Loopy. “Loopy. Give me a cigarette.”
Loopy shook his head. “You guys got no money,” Loopy said. “And I’ve got almost no cigarettes left.”
I stared at Loopy. “We’re going to get money, Loopy. Tonight. Didn’t you see our boat on TV? Two million dollars’ worth of pot? We’re big-time smugglers. We’re fucking rich, Loopy. Give me a fucking cigarette.”
Loopy did his side-to-side, twisting, nodding thing with his head that made you wonder if he had normal connections between his shoulders and his skull and said “I guess” and handed me his pack.