Page 111 of Into the Fire

“What’s the cheapest?” Evan asked.

“Dunno. Shit, lifestyle, prolly. One sausage.”

“I don’t have a sausage.”

“No shit, fish. You just walked in. Tomorrow morning you’ll get breakfast sausage.”

“I need the paper now.”

The man studied him with jaundiced eyes. Then he withdrew the folded section from beneath him and handed it off.

Evan said, “Pay you tomorrow.”

“You’d motherfuckin’ better, fish, or I’ll take it out your ass.”

Evan carried the lifestyle section to his cell. Casper was gone, but Monkey Mouth lay sprawled on his top bunk, talking at the ceiling. “—never called never called couldn’t give a damn about me rotting in here—” He paused only to suck on his last bit of ramen.

All in all, not an enviable existence.

The cell was dark, a bit of streetlamp yellow leaking through the tiny fixed window. Evan took advantage of the relative privacy. He worked his thumb into a slight tear in the wall-facing side of his mattress, enlarging it. No springs, only stuffing. He snapped his soap into thirds, extracted the staple from his heel, and sank it into one of the pieces of soap. Then he stored that hunk and one other inside the tear and firmed the mattress once again to the concrete wall.

Focusing on the newspaper, he removed the centerfold and tore it down the crease. After stashing the excess pages beneath the mattress, he brought the single sheet over to the sink atop the toilet and doused it. Then he sat cross-legged on his upper bunk, hunching so the ceiling brushed the top of his head. Starting at one corner, he rolled the page as tightly as possible, pressing all the space out of each turn. His fingertips cramped with the effort of mashing every millimeter of the damp newspaper as tightly as possible. It took a solid fifteen minutes to roll the single sheet into a long cone. Then he climbed off the top bunk, sprinkled some more water over the flimsy cone, and smoothed it again and again and again until it was a single solid stick of newsprint rather than a bunch of compressed layers.

All the while Monkey Mouth rattled on and on, snatches of phrases bumping across the contours of a terrifying inner landscape.

Casper came back in before curfew and Evan lay down on his upper bunk, placing the slender cone of newspaper between his arm and the wall so it could dry in the open air.

Casper clanked around, making plenty of noise. Then he took an endless leak, watered his dying plant—a losing battle—and kissed it good night. At last he settled into the bunk beneath Monkey Mouth, who was still motoring. “—and he made me, and I was so little, and he tasted like dirt—”

Casper kicked the bottom of Monkey Mouth’s bunk hard, causing him to bounce up so high he nearly struck the ceiling. “Shut the fuck up!”

Monkey Mouth whimpered and settled down onto his mattress facing Evan. His eyes were wide, terrified, and his lips moved as rapidly as ever. But he made no sound. He was looking at Evan but not looking at him at all.

“G’night, fish,” Casper said.

His big frame shifted around on the mattress a bit more, and then there was quiet.

In the pin-drop silence, Evan stared at the smooth ceiling above his face. Tried not to think about the men he was locked in here with. The forged steel and concrete surrounding them. The chain-link and razor wire beyond that.

He’d smuggled inside nothing but himself. He was his own Trojan horse.

He thought about Max across the city in Lincoln Heights, maybe sleeping, maybe not, but just as alone as Evan was here. That was his tether to the outside world, his purpose that would have to carry him through this hell and out to the other side.

He placed one palm on his chest, the other on his stomach. Closed his eyes. Tried to find a tranquil place inside himself, a place that looked a lot like an oak forest outside a two-story Virginia town house. Ceaselessly clear sky. Air crisp enough to sting the throat. Waving leaves and solitude and the calls of hidden birds.

He was at the brink of sleep when he sensed a stir in the air. He came fully awake just in time to spot Casper standing over his bunk, his massive fist looming.

It hammered Evan in the temple, his head flying across his makeshift pillow and smacking into the concrete wall.

46

Some Martha Stewart Shit

When Evan returned from the split second of perfect blackness, the pain was so excruciating it made no human sense. It had colors—orange and green—and it made noises—a hi-hat cymbal trilling under an insistent drumstick.

Before Evan could find his other senses, Casper’s arm slammed down onto him, the blocky hand seizing his loose-fitting shirt. The right fist was already drawn back again, set for the follow-up blow.

The next punch would kill him. With luck he might survive second-impact syndrome. But there wasn’t a name for third-impact syndrome because no one made it that far.