Chapter 2-2
1368 Words
After dinner, Guard Gauthier walked by Joe’s cell and slowed down, looking in at him. Gauthier seemed to want to say something, but couldn’t manage it.
“What happened to your lip?” Joe asked. He’d noticed Gauthier’s lip was swollen and that he had a blueish mark under his eye. The guards were always getting drunk in the evenings, brawling and fighting like mad dogs. Warden Cooke rarely intervened. He was too busy counting bills.
“Non, c’est rien,” Gauthier said. He liked to speak French to Joe. And Joe felt like a traitor for not speaking back to Gauthier in his mother tongue, but it was bad enough having a name like Vega in here. He didn’t need the other guards to know he was half French too. “Juste une p’tite affaire hier,’’ Gauthier added. Just a little thing yesterday.
“What does Williams look like?” Joe winked at him.
Gauthier laughed. “Worse.’’
Joe smiled back at him and waited for Gauthier to say what he needed to say. Gauthier had grown up in the old neighborhood. His sister had often helped Joe’s mother with her washing. Gauthier knew he could have been sitting in Joe’s place.
“Listen, Vega,” he finally said, in his broken English, “the kid, Dubois, you have to be very careful with him, tu comprends?”
“He slipped and fell.”
“Yes, okay.” Gauthier rubbed his chin. “What I’m saying is, he’s not to be touched.” He leaned in very close to the bars and signaled for Joe to come closer.
Joe rose and met him near the gate. They stood face to face, watching each other through the bars.
“He’s under protection.” Gauthier nervously glanced around the tier. “We have orders from Cooke. He’s not to be touched. Okay?”
“His father is pulling some strings in here, I see.”
“No, I don’t think it’s his father.”
Joe didn’t know how much Gauthier really knew, so he kept his mouth shut about the Vascali brothers. He sat down again and looked up at Gauthier. “Can’t you put him in another cell? François, can’t you do me this one favor? I don’t want him in here with me. I don’t like the guy.”
“No, Vega. I can’t help you with that. He’s too…you understand?” Gauthier bent his wrist and puckered his lips. “You know?”
Everyone knew it then. Everyone knew Dubois was a deviant. And he was in Joe’s cell. “Why do I get him?”
“Because you’re intelligent.” Gauthier walked away. “And don’t forget to write Marguerite my letter!”
Joe sat there, fuming for a long time. But he had work to do. Orders were piling up fast. Mila, Patricia, Lucille, Brenda, Marie. He took their pictures out and settled in to write.
Soon, he was on fire, words coming out of him like bullets, but his pencil was broken and might not last another letter. When Buck came ambling by later, with a cart full of books, he’d ask him for another.
For now, he needed to blow off some steam.
Joe stood and stretched his legs. He reached up and grabbed the iron beam traversing the cell’s ceiling. He pulled himself up and held on for fifteen seconds, then relaxed. He pulled himself up again and relaxed. After ten minutes, he started to sweat and licked it off his lips. Warm sweat was something rare in here. Joe stripped himself of his sweater and shirt, and went at it again. He could do this for another hour. Up and down. Up and then down. Later, when he was done with working his arms out, he’d swing his feet over the bar and hang there upside down, with his hands folded behind his head, lifting himself up from the waist, crunching his abdomen muscles until they burned. The rest of his body, he worked out there, swinging the ax. He’d been fit when he’d walked into this place, three years ago, but now, he was a machine.
Joe felt like a machine too. All hollow inside.
Grunting, he let go of the bar and started throwing punches through the air.
He heard the key turning and stopped, winded and spent.
Dubois was being led back into the cell. “Your wife is here,” Williams said, shoving Dubois inside.
Joe was catching his breath. “Do you smell that, Dubois? Smells like rotten pig in here.”
“Careful,” Williams said, backing up to the gate. “Or I’ll write a letter to that w***e who shat you out and tell her you were found dead in the woods.”
Joe lunged at him.
“No, no, no!” Dubois cried, jumping in front of him. “No, Joe, don’t. He’s not worth it.” He tried to make Joe look at him, but all Joe could see, was Williams’s ugly face staring back at him from over Dubois’s shoulder.
“You wanna piece of me?” Williams screamed. “Tell you what, any day, any night, you call my name, and I’ll come over here, in this cell right here, and man to man―”
“No, you mean man to pig,” Dubois corrected the guard with a clever smirk.
“Shut up, you little cocksucker.”
Dubois remained untouched by the insult, and Joe decided he was right about Williams. He wasn’t going back to the hole for him. Joe wiped his brow with the back of his hand and stood back, cooling down.
Williams was obliviously relieved. “You two enjoy your afternoon,” he said, locking them in.
“Enfant de chienne!” Dubois screamed when Williams had gone. Son of a b***h. He paced up and down. “God, I hate him! I hate him!’’
“Calm down.’’
But Dubois leaned back on the wall, knocking his head on it over and over again. “I hate this place. I hate this place―”
“Stop it. Stop it right now―”
“No!” Dubois yelled, and shoved Joe in the chest.
Surprised, Joe stumbled back a few inches, but quickly grabbed Dubois’s shoulders, lifting him up and off the ground.
“Wait, wait, Joe, wait!’’ Dubois was struggling to get out of his hands. “I’m sorry, don’t hurt me, Joe, wait—’’
“Shut up.’’
“Please, put me down. Just put me down.”
Joe stared at him, still holding him off the ground, and then threw Dubois on his cot.
Dubois scrambled back to the wall, hugging his knees. He watched him with wild eyes. “What are you? Kong, the eighth wonder of the world?’’
“You touch me again,” Joe said, his voice hard as steel. “I’ll kill you.”
“Yes, I know.’’ Dubois looked away at the bars.
Joe was wired now. He couldn’t sit. Couldn’t stand. Couldn’t take this cell. He hadn’t felt like this in so long. He’d been doing fine before Dubois had shown up. He’d had everything under control. Now he was stuck here. Stuck here with this little bourgeois man who thought he could put his hands on him. Williams was right. Dubois was a little cocksucker. That was exactly what he was.
Joe was going to explode with anger. But there was no use in doing that. He stood by the bars, resting his forehead to the cool iron.
“Joe―”
“Shut up. Don’t talk to me.”
“I’m sorry if I made you so angry.”
“I said shut up.”
“Yes, all right then. I won’t say another word.”
Joe thought of his mother, and of the gold chain she’d kept in her underwear drawer. The one his father had given her. The chain she’d never wanted to sell, no matter how hard times had gotten. That guy had tried to steal it from her that day. The bastard had had it in his hand when Joe had walked into the house and he’d gone crazy then. Jumped on the guy. Hit him over and over again. Joe wished he could go back in time and do that day over.
That had been the day that had changed his life forever. He’d been arrested for assault.
“You struck me very hard before,” Dubois said. “Gave me quite a bump on my head. Doctor Fisher says I could have suffered permanent brain damage, but thank you anyway.”
He refused to look at Dubois.
“He’s a very decent man, that Fisher. You know, he was an upstanding doctor in Montreal five years ago. His two sons are studying medicine at McGill University. Of course, I’m sure he must have done something quite despicable and of bad taste to be sent here, in the middle of nowhere―”
“No one here is innocent, Dubois. Not even you.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“I know all I need to know. All I care to know.”
“Is that so?”
But Joe didn’t answer him. He was calmer now. Too calm. Lethargy rolled over him like a sickness and he fought to keep his eyes open. He blinked a few times, and watched the hall.
“The scars on your back, they look like wings. Did anyone ever tell you? Won’t you look at me?”
“What for? I already know what you look like.”
“Hm, and what do I look like?”
The words jumped out of his mouth. “Like a cocksucker.”
Joe heard the pause in Dubois’s breathing and wished Dubois wouldn’t have made him say that. He wished he would have just kept quiet like he’d asked him to.
- Writer
