Hard News (Rune 3)

It was then that Courtney sized up what was happening. "Rune?" she asked uncertainly.

Johnson took her by the hand and led her down the corridor.

Courtney started to cry.

Rune started to cry.

Johnson remained dry-eyed. "Come on, honey."

Courtney looked back once and called, "Zoo!"

"We'll go to the zoo, I promise."

Rune left the ugly slab of a building, feeling an intense freedom.

And feeling too the weight of a guilt that matched her own 102 pounds ounce for ounce. But that was okay. She had a story to do.

SPRING IN PRISON IS LIKE SPRING IN THE CITY. WEAK, ALmost unnoticeable. You only sense it because of the air. You smell it, you taste it, you feel an extra portion of warmth. It flirts with you once or twice, then that's it. Back to work, or back to the prison yard. Crocuses can't break through concrete.

Randy Boggs was waiting for Severn Washington in the prison gym when the smell of spring hit him. And, damn, it made him feel bad. He'd never been to college. School for him meant high school and this battered prison gym reminded him a lot of the one at Washington Irving High where, twenty years earlier, he'd have been working out on the parallel bars or struggling to do an iron cross on the rings, and, bang, there would be that smell in the air that meant they'd soon be out of school and he'd have summer ahead of him--along with a couple of weeks' pure freedom before the job at the Kresge warehouse.

Damn, what a smell spring has....

He thought about a dozen memories released by that smell. Girls' small boobs and hot grass and the chain-saw rumble of a 350 Chevy engine. And beer. Man, he loved beer. Now as much as then, though he knew there was no taste like the taste of beer when you were a teenager.

Randy Boggs squinted across the gym and could see the loping figure of Severn Washington, two

hundred thirty pounds' worth, a broad face in between a scalp of tight cornrows and a neck thick as Boggs's thigh.

Washington had laughed and told Boggs not long after they met that he'd never had a white friend in all of his forty-three years. He'd missed Nam because of his eyesight and always stayed pretty close to home, which in his family's case had been a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street, where there were not many whites at all, let alone any that he'd befriend.

That's why Washington had been uncomfortable when, one day in the yard, Boggs began talking to him, just bullshitting in that soft, shy voice he had. At first, Washington later told him, he had thought Boggs wanted to be his maytag, his loverboy, then Washington decided Boggs was just another white-ass crazy, maybe methed or angel-dusted out. But when Boggs kept it up, talking away, funny, making more sense than most people Inside, Washington and Boggs became friends.

Boggs told him that he'd been through Raleigh and Durham a bunch of times and learned that Washington's family had come from North Carolina, though he'd never been there. Washington wanted to hear all about the state and Boggs was glad to tell him. From there, they talked about Sylvia's, Harlem, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington (no relation), Class D felonies, beer, traveling around, hitchhiking....

But there was another foundation for the friendship between the two.

One day Washington had sought Boggs out in the yard and said, "Know why you come up and talked to me?"

"Nope, Severn, I sure don't. Why was that?"

"Allah."

"What's that again?" Boggs asked.

The huge man explained that Allah had come to Washington in a dream and told him it was his job to befriend Boggs and eventually convert him.

He told all this to Boggs, who felt himself blushing and said, "Damn, if that's not the craziest thing I ever heard."

"No, man, that's the way it is. Your ass's safe. Me and Allah gonna watch out for you." Which Boggs thought was even crazier, the Allah part at least, but perfectly fine with him.

From the start, though, Washington's job wasn't easy. Boggs was animal feed in Harrison prison. Scrawny, shy, quiet, a loner. He didn't deal, he didn't fuck, he didn't side. Instantly unpopular. The sort that ends up "accidentally" dead--like not paying attention and driving a 3/4-inch drill press bit through his neck then bleeding to death before somebody notices the blood.

Or the sort that does it himself. They may take your belt away from you but if you want to get dead in prison you can get yourself dead, no problem.

But Severn Washington did his job. And when it became clear that Boggs was under the wing of one of the most devout Muslims in all of Harrison (who also happened to be one of the largest) when that news made the rounds of the cell blocks, Randy Boggs was left pretty much alone.

"Pretty much," however, didn't mean "completely."