SIX
I was woken up by bright lights coming on. The prison had no windows. Day and night were created by electricity. At seven o’clock the building was suddenly flooded with light. No dawn or soft twilight. Just circuit-breakers thrown shut at seven.
The bright light did not make the cell look any better. The front wall was bars. Half would open outward on a hinge to form the door. The two stacked beds occupied just about half the width and most of the length. On the back wall were a steel sink and a steel toilet pan. The walls were masonry. Part poured concrete and part old bricks. All thickly covered with paint. The walls looked massively thick. Like a dungeon. Above my head was a low concrete ceiling. The cell didn’t feel like a room bounded by walls, floor, ceiling. It felt like a solid block of masonry with a tiny living space grudgingly burrowed in.
Outside, the restless night mutter was replaced by the clatter of daytime. Everything was metal, brick, concrete. Noises were amplified and echoed
around. It sounded like hell. Through the bars I could see nothing. Opposite our cell was a blank wall. Lying in bed I didn’t have the angle to see down the row. I threw off the cover and found my shoes. Put them on and laced them up. Lay down again. Hubble was sitting on the bottom bunk. His tan boat shoes were planted on the concrete floor. I wondered if he’d sat like that all night or if he’d slept.
Next person I saw was a cleaner. He moved into view outside our bars. This was a very old guy with a broom. An old black man with a fringe of snowwhite hair. Bent up with age. Fragile like a wizened old bird. His orange prison uniform was washed almost white. He must have been eighty. Must have been inside for sixty years. Maybe stole a chicken in the Depression. Still paying his debt to society.
He stabbed the broom randomly over the corridor. His spine forced his face parallel to the floor. He rolled his head like a swimmer to see from side to side. He caught sight of Hubble and me and stopped. Rested on his broom and shook his head. Gave a kind of reflective chuckle. Shook his head again. He was chuckling away. An appreciative, delighted chuckle. Like at long last, after all these years, he’d been granted the sight of a fabled thing. Like a unicorn or a mermaid. He kept trying to speak, raising his hand as if his point was going to require emphasis. But every time, he’d start up with the chuckling again and need to clutch the broom. I didn’t hurry him. I could wait. I had all weekend. He had the rest of his life.
`Well, yes indeed,’ he grinned. He had no teeth. `Well, yes indeed.’
I looked over at him.
`Well, yes what, Granddad?’ I grinned back.
He was cackling away. This was going to take a while.
`Yes indeed,’ he said. Now he had the chuckling under control. `I’ve been in this joint since God’s dog was a puppy, yes sir. Since Adam was a young boy. But here’s something I ain’t never seen. No sir, not in all those years.’
`What ain’t you never seen, old man?’ I asked him.
`Well,’ he said, `I been here all these years, and I ain’t never seen anybody in that cell wearing clothes like yours, man.’
`You don’t like my clothes?’ I said. Surprised.
`I didn’t say that, no sir, I didn’t say I don’t like your clothes,’ he said. `I like your clothes just fine. A very fine set of clothes, yes sir, yes indeed, very fine.’
`So what’s the story?’ I asked.
The old guy was cackling away to himself.
`The quality of the clothes ain’t the issue,’ he said. `No sir, that ain’t the issue at all. It’s the fact you’re wearing them, man, like not wearing the orange uniform. I never saw that before, and like I say, man, I been here since the earth cooled, since the dinosaurs said enough is enough. Now I seen everything, I really have, yes sir.’