Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

Tooms was older and quieter. He had stringy hair and stringy limbs, and something foul lived behind his eyes that you didn’t want to look at. As the sun set on their first night, he sat on his top bunk, legs dangling over the edge, and every now and then Joe found Tooms’s blank stare turned in his direction, and it was all he could do to meet it and then casually move off it.

Joe slept on one of the low bunks, across from Oliver. He had the worst mattress and the bunk sagged, and his sheet was coarse and moth-eaten and smelled like wet fur. He dozed fitfully but he never slept.

In the morning, Norman approached him in the yard. Both of his eyes were black and his nose looked to be broken and Joe was about to ask him about it when Norman scowled, bit down on his lower lip, and punched Joe in the neck. Joe two-stepped to his right and ignored the sting and thought of asking why, but he didn’t have enough time. Norman came for him, both arms awkwardly raised. If Norman avoided his head and started punching his body, Joe was done. His ribs weren’t healed; sitting up in the morning still hurt so much he saw stars. He shuffled, his heels scrabbling the dirt. High above them, the guards in their watchtowers watched the river to the west or the ocean to the east. Norman drilled a punch into the other side of his neck and Joe raised his foot and brought it down on Norman’s kneecap.

Norman fell onto his back, his right leg at an awkward angle. He rolled in the dirt, then used his elbow to try to stand. When Joe stomped the knee a second time, half the yard heard Norman’s leg break. The sound that left his mouth wasn’t quite a scream. It was something softer and deeper, a huffing noise, something a dog would make after it crawled under a house to die.

Norman lay in the dirt and his arms fell to his sides, and the tears leaked from his eyes into his ears. Joe knew he could help Norman up, now that he was no danger, but that would be seen as weakness. He walked away. He walked across the yard, already sweltering at 9 A.M., and felt the eyes on him, more than he could count, everyone looking, deciding what the next test would be, how long they’d toy with the mouse before they took a real swipe with their claws.

Norman was nothing. Norman was a warm-up. And if anyone here got a sense of how badly Joe’s ribs were damaged—it hurt to fucking breathe at the moment; it hurt to walk—there’d be nothing but bones left by morning.

Joe had seen Oliver and Eugene over by the west wall, but now he watched their backs melt into a crowd. They wanted no part of him until they saw how this played out. So now he was walking toward a group of men he didn’t know. If he stopped suddenly and looked around, he’d look foolish. And foolish in here was the same thing as weak.

He reached the group of men and the far side of the yard, by the wall, but they walked away too.

It went that way all day—no one would talk to him. Whatever he had, no one wanted to catch it.

He returned that night to an empty cell. His mattress—the lumpy one—lay on the floor. The other mattresses were gone. The bunks had been removed. Everything had been removed except the mattress, the scratchy sheet, and the shit bucket. Joe looked back at Mr. Hammond as he locked the door behind him.

“Where’d everyone else go?”

“They went,” Mr. Hammond said and walked down the tier.

For the second night in a row, Joe lay in the hot room and barely slept. It wasn’t just his ribs and it wasn’t simply fear—the reek of the prison was matched only by the reek of the factories outside. There was a small window at the top of the cell, ten feet up. Maybe the thought behind placing it there had been to give the prisoner a merciful taste of the outside world. But now it was just a conduit for the factory smoke, for the stench of textiles and burning coal. In the heat of the cell, as vermin scuttled along the walls and men groaned in the night, Joe could not fathom how he could survive five days here, never mind five years. He’d lost Emma, he’d lost his freedom, and now he could feel his soul beginning to flicker and wane. What they were taking from him was all he had.

The next day, more of the same. And the day after that. Anyone he approached walked away from him. Anyone he made eye contact with looked away. But he could feel them watching as soon as his gaze moved on. It was all they did, every man in the prison—they watched him.

Waiting.

“For what?” he said at lights-out as Mr. Hammond turned the key in the cell door. “What are they waiting for?”

Mr. Hammond stared through the bars at him with his lightless eyes.

“The thing is,” Joe said, “I’m happy to straighten things out with whoever I offended. If I did, in fact, offend somebody. Because if I did, I didn’t do so knowingly. So I’m willing to—”

“You’re in the mouth of it,” Mr. Hammond said. He looked up at the tiers arrayed above and behind him. “It decides to roll you around on its tongue. Or it bites down real hardlike, grind its teeth into you. Or it lets you climb over them teeth and jump out. But it decides. Not you.” Mr. Hammond swung his enormous ring of keys in a circle before hooking them to his belt. “You wait.”

“For how long?” Joe asked.

“Till it says so.” Mr. Hammond walked up the tier.

The boy who came for him next was just that, a boy. Trembling and jump-eyed and no less dangerous for it. Joe was walking to the Saturday shower when the kid dislodged himself from the line about ten men up and walked down toward Joe.

Joe knew from the moment the kid left the line that he was coming for him, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. The kid wore his striped prison pants and coat and carried his towel and soap bar like the rest of them, but he also had a potato peeler in his right hand, its edges sharpened by a whetstone.

Joe stepped to meet the kid and the kid acted like he was moving on, but then he dropped his towel and soap, planted his foot, and swung his arm at Joe’s head. Joe feinted to his right and the kid must have anticipated that because he went to his left and sank the potato peeler into Joe’s inner thigh. Joe didn’t have time to register the pain before he heard the kid pull it back out. It was the sound that enraged him. It sounded like fish parts sucked into a drain. His flesh, his blood, his meat hung off the edges of the weapon.

On his next pass, the kid lunged for Joe’s abdomen or groin: Joe couldn’t tell in all the ragged breathing and left-right, right-left scrabbling. He stepped inside the kid’s arms and gripped the back of his head and pulled it to his chest. The kid stabbed him again, this time in the hip, but it was a feeble stab with no momentum behind it. Still hurt worse than a dog bite. When the kid pulled his arm back to get a better thrust, Joe ran him backward until he cracked the kid’s head against the granite wall.