“Like, solitary?” said Antonius. “I can speak on that. I just got out.”
Some of the men chuckled.
“Okay, Antonius,” said Anna. “Tell us how it was. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind.” Antonius, his arms folded, shrugged. “For me, solitary was fine. Peaceful. But yeah, some dudes can’t deal with it. It’s punishment, man. Supposed to be.”
“In the book,” said Anna, “solitude is presented as a negative thing. Many of the characters, like Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife, talk about their profound sense of loneliness.”
“Curley’s wife was a straight ho,” said Donnell.
“She’s not getting any attention from her husband,” said Anna. “She talks about her dreams of being a movie star. In fact, most of the people in the book have dreams, like George and Lennie’s dream of a farm. And the dreams are unattainable.”
“She still a trick,” said Donnell. “I knew when she said to Lennie ‘Stroke my hair,’ he was gonna break that bitch’s neck. ’Scuse me, Anna.”
“No, you’re onto something. How’d you know?”
“’Cause in the very beginning of the book, Lennie killed that mouse the same way, by pettin it too hard. Same with the puppy.”
“Exactly right,” said Anna. “John Steinbeck was telling you ahead of time what was going to happen by using a literary device called foreshadowing.”
The group grew quiet. She had gotten too professorial. The men didn’t want to be schooled or talked down to. They wanted to discuss the characters and the story.
“That’s the same way with Curley’s dog,” said Antonius, breaking the silence.
“Foreshadowing,” said Michael, looking at Anna with a smile in his eyes.
“Right,” said Antonius. “They took that dog out and shot him. But really, they did that dog a favor, since the rest of his life was gonna be misery. The same way George had to shoot Lennie in the end of the book.”
“Lennie was a re-tard,” said the man with the heavy-lidded eyes. “George couldn’t carry him no more.”
“Nah,” said Antonius. “George did that thing for Lennie because Lennie was his boy. ’Cause Curley was gonna string Lennie up and lynch his ass. Or, if Lennie did go to prison for killin that trick, he wouldn’t make it in San Quentin or wherever they’d put him out there in California, back in the old days.”
“Lennie couldn’t jail,” said Larry.
“Exactly,” said Antonius.
“You’re saying,” said Anna, “that George killed Lennie out of friendship.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what this book is about,” said Michael. “Friendship and brotherhood. Companionship. The author means to say that people together are better than they are alone.”
“Does anyone say that outright in the novel?” said Anna.
“Sure.” Michael opened his book to where he had dog-eared a page. “I marked a spot. It’s in that chapter when Crooks is talking to Lennie in Crooks’s room. Can I read it?”
“Go ahead.”
Michael squinted as he read. “ ‘A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya,” he cried, “I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.’ ”
“For a friend, though,” said Antonius, “Lennie be buggin the shit out of George.”
“‘Tell me about the rabbits, George,’” said Donnell, in his idea of Lennie’s voice.
“‘Which way did they go, George, which way did they go?’” said the heavy-lidded one, and then, when no one laughed, embarrassed, he said, “Ain’t none a’ y’all seen that old cartoon?”
“They gonna get a farm,” said Antonius, picking up on the vibe. “‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’!’”
Now many of the inmates laughed.
“All right.” Anna picked up an article that she had printed out down in the workroom. “Let me read something to you that John Steinbeck wrote himself. It might have been from his acceptance speech when he won the Pulitzer Prize, or it might be from his journals. I don’t remember which. I got it off of Wikipedia, to be honest with you. But for me it sort of speaks to this book and his worldview in general.”
“Read it,” said Michael, leaning forward.
“Okay,” said Anna, and she began. “‘In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.’”
“What if someone step to you and try to take you for bad?” said Donnell. “What you supposed to do then? Understand their ass?”
“Turn the other cheek,” said Larry. “It’s right there in the Bible.”
“An eye for an eye is in there too,” said Donnell.
“The man is saying, try to do what’s right,” said Michael. “Reach out to other people. Try.”
The conversation drifted to money and fame, as it tended to do.
“Was Steinbeck rich?” said Antonius.
“I’m sure he was,” said Anna. “His books were huge bestsellers. Many of them were made into movies and plays.”
“I bet he got mad respect too,” said Donnell.
“Not from everyone,” said Anna. “Many academics don’t really care for his work. They think it’s too simplistic and obvious.”
“You mean people could relate to it too easy.”
“Well, yes. He was what’s called a populist author. He wrote books that could be read and appreciated by the people he was writing about.”
“This book was deep,” said the soft-spoken man.
“Seriously, that was, like, the best chapter-book you ever gave us,” said Donnell.
“Thank you, Miss Anna.”
“You’re very welcome,” she said.
As they filed out of the chapel, Antonius tugged on Michael Hudson’s jumpsuit.
“Yo, Hudson.”
“What you want?”
“Got a message from our boy Phil Ornazian.”
“Yeah?”
“He said to tell you everything’s gonna be cool.”
“That’s it?”
“Short and to the point,” said Antonius. “Looks like you about to go uptown.”
Michael said nothing further to Antonius. He went on his way.
IN HIS cell that night, lying in the upper bunk, which he had taken for its better light, Michael Hudson read a Western novel that Anna had chosen for him. It was one of two full-length novels that were bound in the same book, part of a series called Elmore Leonard’s Western Roundup. This was volume 3. He had been reading with urgency, as it was almost time for lights-out. He had just finished the novel, and its last line had given him the chills. It had jacked him up to the degree that he had gone back to the first page with the intention of reading the book again.
The name of the novel was Valdez Is Coming. Michael reread its first two paragraphs:
Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and pines higher up. This is where everybody was. Not all in one place but scattered in small groups, about a dozen men in the scrub, the front line, the shooters who couldn’t just stand around. They’d fire at the shack when they felt like it, or when Mr. Tanner passed the word, they would all fire at once.
Others were up in the pines and on the road that ran along the crest of the hill, some three hundred yards from the shack across the pasture. Those watching made bets whether the man in the shack would give himself up or get shot first.