EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/422311-fiction-four-years-and-thoughts
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Chapter One
Bobby Sidell, dressed in orange, tried and failed to keep up with a trail of footprints in the snow. The gray-haired guard ahead of him was called Jimmy Long Legs by the old-timers, and ankle chains cut each of Bobby's footsteps a foot short.
Bobby lifted his head and gazed out of a scarf. The yard seemed like a white tablecloth spread for giants to dine upon, and the first snow of the season collected on his bushy red eyebrows. Then the flurries lifted, and Bobby saw his target: a brick-and-sandstone administrative building flanked on both sides by an artificial horizon of chain link and razor wire. As he let his stare linger over the looming mass, one of his toes connected with a buried rock, and his shuffle turned into a half-stumble. In spite of his cuffed wrists, he managed to catch himself from falling over. Something hard prodded him below the ribs. Bobby flinched.
"Relax, it's non-lethal. Technically."
Bobby knew the voice, which had a certain sinuous quality to it. When he first heard Selma do the morning count four years ago, it sounded like forcing a Porsche to go off-roading. She belonged somewhere else, on a barstool in Ward's on Western, maybe. And, some feeble echo reminded him, he belonged there, too, slinging his best lines at her in between mugs of Goose Island draft.
Selma's looks were almost as good as her voice, but Bobby kept his thoughts to himself. Prison goggles - the steroid-addled big brother of beer goggles - had earned her innumerable long stares, two marriage proposals, and one sexual assault from the fifteen hundred souls in Pontiac. As a result, she tended to treat every sentence containing a female pronoun and said to her from an inmate as a premeditation to rape, and the last thing Bobby needed was a month in the infirmary with a 12-gauge spread of bruises over his kidneys. Not with his parole hearing five minutes away, no sir.
But now that her voice had reminded him of Ward's, it reminded him of why he was supposed to be in there, which, as any of the old-timers would say, was the worst thought to have in mind right before trying to make paper.
Four years ago, Bobby's freedom had ended with two tentative knocks and a five second pause. Then, the conditions of the warrant satisfied, four members of Chicago's finest kicked down the door to his second apartment, badges hanging on their necks, pistols aimed at a red-haired Greek trying his best to feign surprise. When his Notre Dame runner got busted on the South Shore line, Bobby had emptied out his stash house - thankfully, all his inventory was on consignment from Dmitri - and spent a few nights on the couch as living bait. Once they got Bobby and found nothing, his supplier had once told him, it would be harder for the judge to authorize a second warrant.
In hindsight, the uniforms should have tipped him off. It should have been the feds, given the size he had been moving. Part of it made sense once the hometown team found a few bags stashed in a couch cushion that Bobby had never used to store anything. The rest made sense when someone else earned Dmitri's 'heartfelt trust' within the week. Then his supplier's shark-on-a-leash dropped his case and left Bobby to a public defender whose drunken incompetence eventually scared Bobby into taking a plea, while Dmitri reminded Bobby of friends on the inside who would make Bobby's sentence very short indeed if he snitched to try and lessen it.
He remembered that morning on the courthouse steps very clearly, after he had first met with the court-appointed alcoholic. With one of his last allotted phone calls, he dialed his younger brother, who, to his mild surprise, agreed to drive him to holding. In Mark's BMW, he begged his estranged womb-mate to hire him a new lawyer, but his brother had sat, still as a stone, before turning and asking him what the hell he had been up to all these years, then ordering Bobby to leave in a voice so flat it lacked even exasperation.
And then Bobby even surprised himself. For the first time in Bobby Sidell's life, something failed to make him angry. After that, through the sentencing and four years of his term, he had kept that lack of anger going.
It was with that sense of inner peace that Bobby walked into the main building. In the hall leading up to the hearing room, he passed an arsonist doing six to twelve with a huge grin on his face. Bobby slowed his shuffle.
"Hey Rufus, good news?"
"No shit, cracka'. Can't wait."
Selma jabbed Bobby again, more for show than to make a point. "Alright, let's get a move on."
Ahead of them, Jimmy Long Legs yanked open a brown metal door with a soft squeak, revealing a long table parallel to the far wall of the room for the parole board and another smaller table where several lawyers were flipping through laptops and legal files. Behind them, a row of chairs was set out for the prisoners to watch their lawyers earn their billings. Behind those, a few guards stood watch with tasers and pepper spray.
Bobby moved to sit in one of the middle-row chairs and heard Selma close the door behind him. He eyed the nine present members and recognized most of them from last year, with the exception of three: a thickly-muscled, red-faced man in a sweat-stained yellow shirt at the center of the table, a thin, balding Asian man with horn-rimmed glasses, and a portly, bob-cut Hispanic woman in black business clothes. Out of habit, Bobby memorized their namecards: H. Gerson, W. Chan, and A. Alvarez.
At the center of the table, Gerson cleared his throat and spoke. "I think we can begin. First parole request Phil Swanson. Is legal counsel present?"
A man rose from behind the lawyers' table. "Yes. Carl Loeb representing Mr. Swanson."
Gerson began reading from the papers in front of him. Next to Bobby, a short, salt-and-pepper inmate began to shake and mutter what Bobby realized was a Hail Mary. "Phil Swanson, three to six year sentence for securities fraud, first offense in the State of Illinois, wanted by the State of New York for embezzlement of corporate funds and securities fraud..."
The lawyer interrupted him. "The State of New York has waived jurisdiction, Mr. Chairman. They no longer seek Mr. Swanson in connection with that case."
Gerson shifted a few papers around. "That is correct. Very well. Mr. Swanson has served three years of his sentence. Prison record exemplary. Applied for parole on August 8th of this year." Then the chairman raised his bull neck upwards. "Remarks?"
The lawyer glanced behind him with a look that screamed 'shut up', then turned and said, "We would only again like to call the committee's attention to Mr. Swanson's exemplary behavior as a prisoner."
"Notice is taken." Gerson looked down the table at the dark-suited collection. "A quorum of this Board met in closed chambers last week. Have you reached a decision regarding Mr. Swanson's request for parole?"
The salt-and-pepper man breathed a clearly audible 'amen'.
On the long table, the Hispanic woman looked across to the chairman. "Request for parole is denied. The prisoner may re-apply in one calendar year."
There was a moment of silence. Then the salt-and-pepper man bolted upright, knocking his chair askew. "Oh, come on. You bastards! No. Please. You can't do this to me. No, no, no - "
Bobby felt, rather than heard, the crackling of a taser. As Swanson fell, one of his feet kicked Bobby in the calf. A puddle spilled out from the inmate's crotch onto the linoleum floor. Bobby tried to move his foot away, but for some strange reason, it wouldn't budge. Then he saw a pair of wires trailing out of his thigh and his nerves caught up to the electrical sensations.
Bobby's neck, chest, arms, and leg spasmed in unison, and, flopping like a fish on land, he joined Swanson on the ground, rolling his face all over the contents of the other inmate's bladder. Then he blacked out.
The next thing Bobby felt was cold water splashing across the bridge of his nose. He took a sniff - no smell of piss - and opened his eyes to Selma standing above him.
"Well, took you long enough." She was smiling in spite of herself.
He glanced down at the infirmary gown and clean sheets and the ever-present ankle-cuffs, this time chained to the bedframe. "Thank you, ma'am."
"Damn right you are. You'll need to lose some weight once you're on the outside." She walked over to a sink and mirror by a far wall, began to wash her hands and toss her hair.
"I will." Bobby grinned, then furrowed his brow. "What do you mean, on the outside? Did - "
"Yes." She turned around. Her smile had faded a little. "You leave in a week."
"Wow." Bobby sank back into the pillow. "Guess I should really thank Cameron, send him a card, maybe?"
"Naw." Selma snorted, walked towards the door. "Your lawyer didn't do jack shit, damn near wet his pants too."
"Then how'd I make the grade?"
"The chairman - when things had calmed down - he said the board had already decided to pass you along."
"Mmm." He searched for something to say. "What about that other guy?"
"Who?" Then Selma's smile returned. "Oh. Him. Tagged the bastard."
Bobby was silent for a moment. "I thought he was already tased."
"He was." Then she gave off a small laugh and oepened the door behind her. "I just had to be sure, you know?"
"I do." Bobby closed his eyes. When he opened them a half minute later, she was gone and the door was closed. He wondered why someone smart and nice like her had to be dipped, breaded, and fried in dumb and mean to make it through this place. Then he closed his eyes and drifted into the easy sleep of someone who had made the grade.
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Next part:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/461856-fiction-american-bromide-ch-12#1
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