dead and you’re somehow the prime suspect. Fuck.
Sikes wrote something else in his manilla folder and he looked at it for a long time. The back of my neck was hot. My legs were cramping. I wanted to go back to sleep and wake up and start all over again. This time I’d get sodomized and wait for a lawyer.
Sikes closed the folder and pushed it to the middle of the table. Then he got up and left without saying anything. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to open it and read what he’d been writing or if they’d be mad at me if I did, so I just sat there and tried to think of a way out.
He came back in and sat down. I had aged years in his absence. I’d done my time already and was up for parole. I’d been a model prisoner. I was reformed. Why didn’t they just let me go?
“You got anything else you’d like to tell me?” he said.
“No.”
He looked at me hard.
“You got any family around here?”
“No.”
“You got anybody you can call?”
“Not really,” I said.
“You got anybody who gives a shit one way or the other what happens to you?”
“That’s not a very nice question to ask somebody.”
We looked at each other, and I thought for a second he knew that I was right.
Chapter 5
I had planned to skip my Tuesday with the landlord’s wife. I was still embarrassed about the bullshit Leaf Man story, even though I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t be and that really I was just there for some rent-subsidized sex so who cared either way. I was not very convincing.
So I went, but only on the condition that I would trick her into telling me something about herself, something guarded and personal, which I would then use to humiliate her in a seemingly innocent and unintentional way. Then we’d be even, and we could go back to being silent and normal again.
But when I got there I didn’t follow through. Because pride is stupid. And because she never gave me a chance to. I don’t think I would have though, even if she did. We just had our sex and then she told me to go. Still, it felt like we had reestablished something, if it felt like anything at all.
The Tuesday after that we were lying beside each other, not touching like we always did, and I was waiting for her to tell me to leave. I was staring up at the ceiling fan and imagining I was stuck in a Tennessee Williams play, although I wasn’t sure which one. The only one I could ever remember was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , because of Elizabeth Taylor, but I hoped that wasn’t it. I didn’t want to ever have to call another man Big Daddy.
The fan was spinning and as the shadows passed over the white ceiling I let my eyes unfocus until all of it looked like a universe being born or a planet unraveling, some creation or catastrophe depending on which way gravity was going and at what end you were standing. So instead of Elizabeth Taylor I thought about stars and how little I knew about them, and how if I was an explorer and I had to sail a boat across the ocean without radar or a talking electronic compass I’d be fucked because the only constellations I knew were the Big and Little Dipper and I always got them confused. And even though I’d probably never have to sail that boat I still wished I knew more about stars and other things. And I wished I could remember lying on the grass in my backyard as a kid with my hands locked behind my head, looking up at the night sky and dreaming. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t something I’d ever done. It would have been a nice memory though. Maybe it would have helped me somehow. If I was ever in jungle combat and I was captured and tortured I could look back on it and remember that innocence and all the things that seemed possible then, and I’d know why we were here fighting and dying in this godforsaken country. It was for the children. It always is. And that knowledge would have comforted me, though it would not have been enough to dim the searing pain as the electrodes sparked on my
Sikes wrote something else in his manilla folder and he looked at it for a long time. The back of my neck was hot. My legs were cramping. I wanted to go back to sleep and wake up and start all over again. This time I’d get sodomized and wait for a lawyer.
Sikes closed the folder and pushed it to the middle of the table. Then he got up and left without saying anything. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to open it and read what he’d been writing or if they’d be mad at me if I did, so I just sat there and tried to think of a way out.
He came back in and sat down. I had aged years in his absence. I’d done my time already and was up for parole. I’d been a model prisoner. I was reformed. Why didn’t they just let me go?
“You got anything else you’d like to tell me?” he said.
“No.”
He looked at me hard.
“You got any family around here?”
“No.”
“You got anybody you can call?”
“Not really,” I said.
“You got anybody who gives a shit one way or the other what happens to you?”
“That’s not a very nice question to ask somebody.”
We looked at each other, and I thought for a second he knew that I was right.
Chapter 5
I had planned to skip my Tuesday with the landlord’s wife. I was still embarrassed about the bullshit Leaf Man story, even though I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t be and that really I was just there for some rent-subsidized sex so who cared either way. I was not very convincing.
So I went, but only on the condition that I would trick her into telling me something about herself, something guarded and personal, which I would then use to humiliate her in a seemingly innocent and unintentional way. Then we’d be even, and we could go back to being silent and normal again.
But when I got there I didn’t follow through. Because pride is stupid. And because she never gave me a chance to. I don’t think I would have though, even if she did. We just had our sex and then she told me to go. Still, it felt like we had reestablished something, if it felt like anything at all.
The Tuesday after that we were lying beside each other, not touching like we always did, and I was waiting for her to tell me to leave. I was staring up at the ceiling fan and imagining I was stuck in a Tennessee Williams play, although I wasn’t sure which one. The only one I could ever remember was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , because of Elizabeth Taylor, but I hoped that wasn’t it. I didn’t want to ever have to call another man Big Daddy.
The fan was spinning and as the shadows passed over the white ceiling I let my eyes unfocus until all of it looked like a universe being born or a planet unraveling, some creation or catastrophe depending on which way gravity was going and at what end you were standing. So instead of Elizabeth Taylor I thought about stars and how little I knew about them, and how if I was an explorer and I had to sail a boat across the ocean without radar or a talking electronic compass I’d be fucked because the only constellations I knew were the Big and Little Dipper and I always got them confused. And even though I’d probably never have to sail that boat I still wished I knew more about stars and other things. And I wished I could remember lying on the grass in my backyard as a kid with my hands locked behind my head, looking up at the night sky and dreaming. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t something I’d ever done. It would have been a nice memory though. Maybe it would have helped me somehow. If I was ever in jungle combat and I was captured and tortured I could look back on it and remember that innocence and all the things that seemed possible then, and I’d know why we were here fighting and dying in this godforsaken country. It was for the children. It always is. And that knowledge would have comforted me, though it would not have been enough to dim the searing pain as the electrodes sparked on my
Similar Books
