A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (46 page)

*  *  *

“Don’t you sleep?” I asked the CO whose eyes were watching me when I raised my head from making the Isha night prayer.

“I’m doing a double-triple,” she said. I didn’t say nothing back. “I’m saving up. My son goes to an expensive private prep school in upstate New York. You probably never heard of it,” she said proudly.

“You’re probably right. I never did,” I answered.

“I am right. It’s you who is wrong,” she said strangely. “My son does love me even though I’m a corrections officer who works in a place like Rikers Island.”

“What’s love?” I asked her nonchalantly.

She looked at me like it was a trick question. “For men and for women it’s different,” I explained to her. “A woman who loves comforts and serves. A man who loves protects and provides,” I said, moving up closer to the slot. She was thinking about it. I could tell. “You are here unprotected,” I told her and watched the thought move in her eyes. “You said your son is my age. Then he knows where you are, doesn’t provide for you, but waits for you to work a double-triple in a dangerous place surrounded by dangerous men and then hand the money over to him, right or wrong?” She sucked her teeth hard and walked away.

“Get off his nuts and come get on mine!” an inmate shouted from the next cell over. He was the new body that replaced the dead body they had already removed.

Many nights came and went. Every night she worked, she came and stood on the other side of my locked cell door, speaking to me as quietly as anyone could speak in a space where you could not whisper and be heard unless your lips were pressed to an ear. So everyone yelled. I mostly listened to her private thoughts and experiences, in a space where there is no privacy. She talked the most, like her soul was vomiting, and I’d tell her the truth as I saw it about serious, everyday general topics and issues that she had spoken about. I never confided anything personal in her, or revealed anything to her about my case, background, or future. I never touched her or even flirted with her; still she came. She had no husband, she had told me casually, like it wasn’t nothing. “Don’t have one, don’t need one,” were her exact words. “Everything my son needs, I get it for him. He doesn’t need his father either, just like I don’t need no husband,” she said passionately.

“His father is a real motherfucker, and he’s a CO right up here
on the Island making good money. But he’s married already—that was the problem,” she confessed.

On another night she admitted, “Yeah, I spoiled my son because I feel guilty that he was conceived in jail.” Then she said with a slow, fierce force, “But if I don’t do anything else right, I swear, I’ll keep my son out of prison no matter what.” She paused. Inside of her pause was only silence. Then she said without a smile and without any trace of laughter, “Now that’s love!” She was confirming it aloud to herself, while days later, she was still trying to prove their mother-son love to me. I knew, however, that spoiling your son and loving your son are two different things.

For me as a young man who is a son and a husband, a woman protecting a man who fails to make a serious effort to protect her does not define love. She was protecting her son, financing her son, spoiling and serving her son. She admitted that he doesn’t work and that she doesn’t want him to work. Without him making a strong push, building a business or working a few jobs, whether she tells him to or not to, he is not a man to me, because he is sucking his mother’s blood, absorbing all of her energy, eating up her time on Earth, stressing and strangling her emotions while allowing her to work for him in a place where she is jeopardizing and endangering her health and her self.

I understand that most mothers in the USA have to work, and that most African-American women have no husbands. It does matter, though, where they work and what they do, and whether or not they are safe. She was confusing love with guilt, I thought. She was punishing herself for her choices and deeds, and working herself into danger and death to reverse them. She was choked up by the guilt of having allowed a married co-worker to fuck her in a closet or in an empty cell, or atop or beneath a desk, or in a prison parking lot, on the ground or in a parked vehicle.

She would never understand that in my culture her son is a grown man. In America he’s known as a “teenager,” a man whose physique is that of a grown-up, who has already experienced
puberty and has the ability to shoot and spill his seeds and bring forth life. In America, a teenage man is nothing but a burden, an overgrown child, a dependent, and sometimes even a parasite. This is the opposite of love.

“Say something,” she asked me forcefully.

“Is that an order?” I asked her solemnly. She sucked her teeth.

“What could you possibly know about real love? I saw your paperwork. I saw how you requested no visitations from anyone. What is that about? What? You only love your lawyer? She’s the only one allowed to see you besides the officers and the rest of the inmates?” She walked away cocky, like she had dropped a bomb on me.

I knew her regular work schedule minus the occasional double or triple shifts she would pull by working or trading off hours with her co-workers. I also knew that she would return to my cell the following night. She’d roll the book cart around and offer me books, encouraging me towards studying for my GED. She would hand me SAT study guides with complicated vocabulary words to learn and mathematics problems to solve. She would bring me gifts I did not ask for like extra towels, washcloths, and new socks or underwear, peanut butter or fruit, or a chicken breast sandwich. More than that she would tell me how things really go down at Rikers, not just in the box, but in the population or protective custody and in the hospital and on the yard. She wanted me to know how to stay alive, and just how nasty the “nastiest niggas” are. She wanted me to not trust anybody . . . except, of course, her. I listened ’cause I got common sense enough to learn and decipher.

I could tell that the older woman had developed a love for me even though I’m regarded as just a teenager. She talked to me like a woman talks to a man. She respected me like a woman respects a man after listening to his words and observing his conduct and actions. She looked at me like a woman looks at a man. She confided in me the most intimate of things, like a woman confides in her
man. She lusted after me, like how a woman lusts after a man. Naturally, and instinctively, she even served me, like a woman serves a man whom her heart and her eyes and her mind have realized is not a child, is not her son, is not a dependent, a burden, or a parasite, in my case, despite being a prisoner.

22. THE EAGLE

She walked in bringing a breeze, the scent of summer, and a piece of the skylight. It was either that, or my mind had multiplied and magnified every tiny little thing after being in the box for fifty days, so far. She entered the meeting room, which was reserved for consultations between inmates and their attorneys.

Her green eyes pierced through the dim, stale air and lit up. She looked at me as though I was the light and as if she had just walked out of darkness. With her back to the guard who had escorted me from my cell to the meeting room, she smiled. I would have showed her my genuine gratitude by allowing my natural smile to reveal itself, but the guard was facing me and I was facing him. We both had to maintain the profile of the jailer and the jailed.

He left.

She skipped the greetings of “Peace,” or “Shalom,” or “Hello,” or “Hi,” or even “How are you doing?” Instead, she looked at me, placed her pocketbook and briefcase on the table, and then murmured, “Troublemaker.” From her tone, I could tell that she didn’t mean it.

“Thank you,” I said to her.

“I haven’t given you anything for you to thank me for as of yet,” she said, reminding me of her sharpness.

“For wearing those heels,” I said, glancing beneath the table
at her Charles David pumps. “The heels beat the Birkenstocks,” I added, and my smile broke through naturally.

“Your smile is misleading,” she said. “It suggests to me that Rikers has been kind to you. My brain knows that’s next to impossible, highly unlikely . . . and you just came from the box, not the beach. So wipe that beautiful smile off of your face.”

“Yeah, I been in the box. But you chose to wear the dress and the heels. Did you expect me not to notice?”

“Today is my day off and I have a date
after
my meeting with you,” she said.

“I must be your date since you always seem to come to see me when it’s your ‘free time.’ Free time is reserved for what you want to do, not for what you have to do,” I said. She smiled and swiftly and calmly spit her clever reply.

“The fact that you haven’t grown a beard in fifty days confirms that you are in fact an adolescent, in which case I will refrain from engaging with you in a conversation about my date, my dress and my heels, or about your glowing skin and awesome physique.” She had silenced me.

Finally she sat down. She wasn’t wearing her black crocheted bracelet over her deep scar. Instead, she wore a silk ribbon, which she tied over the scar like a wrist ascot. The ribbon matched her summer dress nicely.

“Did anyone give you a hard time coming in here?” I asked her curiously.

“They know me here, and they know better,” she said confidently. “And I should be directing that question at you.”

“I’m chilling,” I said.

“ ‘Get me out of here.’ That’s supposed to be your line,” she told me with a great seriousness, as her feminine eyes conducted a soul search on me, the opposite of the intrusive strip search that the guards enforced. After a pause, she searched her Donna Karan handbag and pulled out a folded document. She unfolded it and
smoothed it out like it was a tablecloth. It was the IOU I had written out, promising to pay her for each expense that I generated as she worked on my behalf. I looked down on it, seeing that she had added some expenses and written in her own notes, and even added an additional sheet of paper to make space for more details. I was cool with it. I felt certain about repaying my debt.

“Good news, bad news, choices, and options. Which would you like to hear first?” she asked me.

“The worst first,” I said.

“They found the murder weapon.”

“What murder weapon?” I asked on purpose. She cracked a half smile.

“The nine-millimeter that killed Lance Polite.” I didn’t react. She waited, her eyes making note of my nonchalance. “It cleared, no fingerprints,” she said, watching and waiting for me to celebrate the results. I remained still and solid.

“The autopsy results confirmed that the cause of death was the six bullets discharged into his mouth. It also indicates that Mr. Polite was stabbed in his right eye.” She paused. I had the face of a listener, not a speaker. So I listened.

“The stabber and the shooter, I believe, are two different persons,” she said. Her eyes revealed that she was becoming disappointed by my silence. “So maybe I have been giving the wrong person credit for defending the cat that was choked to death and avenging a murderous animal abuser?” She said it like it was a question and an accusation both at the same time.

“I see one thing changed,” I said, cutting short the intensity that was building up in her and purposely ignoring all of the other issues and questions she raised in order to focus on the one thing that I knew touched her heart and for her meant the most. “You are now definite that the one who was murdered is also the same one who abused and murdered the cat,” I observed aloud.

“He did, one hundred percent. Forensics identified cat hairs on
the clothing of Lance Polite and he even had the poor animal’s guts beneath his fingernails,” she said bitterly.

“Crazy.” That was my sincere one-word response.

“Maybe the stabber and the shooter are friends, relatives, or lovers who were offended by Polite. They were avenging the death of the cat and protecting each other and the neighborhood children from ‘Lance the Predator,’ ” she said, seemingly with great thought and seriousness. “Our ASPCA investigator had his interns post flyers trying to locate the cat’s owner. That was some free help that I thought and hoped would uncover some other useful evidence. I wanted it to perhaps lead us to locate the one who had the motive to murder Lance Polite. But no one came forward. No one called in. It’s a very tough neighborhood, that area.”

I didn’t say anything, just listened. I thought it was crazy that she thought someone murdered that fool over the feline. No matter what she said to provoke me to feel or say something, I wouldn’t. My strategy included timing and the skillful use of silence. Besides, I was certain that she was still thrilled that the serial abuser of animals and children was dead.

“Look,” she said, leaning forward, her energy suddenly shifting. “I’ve had lunch and dinner meetings with some men, real schmucks and altercockers who I would never in my life get close enough to spit on, if it weren’t for defending you. You ought to confide in me. I’m your attorney. We’re on the same team. I have a professional obligation and requirement to keep whatever you tell me in strict confidence. I’ve been working tirelessly for you and you’ve been working against me.”

“How?” I asked calmly as I noted that again she was using words I had never heard. Last meeting she had said
fercockle
, now
schmuck
and
altercocker.
I had long ago looked up fercockle in the dictionary I got off the library cart, but the word wasn’t listed.

“At your arraignment, you were charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, inciting a riot, and assaulting a police officer.
On your behalf, I entered a plea of not guilty on all charges. I believed you,” she said.

“I know. I received the paperwork. Thank you,” I said sincerely.

“So you know that your bail was denied just as you wanted?”

“Yes, I know. It was not what I wanted. It was what I expected,” I clarified. “The police were using those minor charges to hold me, while they organized some major charges to sink me. So, I knew no matter what, they had no plans of releasing me.”