Into the Fire(89)
He sat with his back against the wall, palms pressed to his skull, trying to fight down the throbbing. He imagined his brain inside, swelling, creaking the junction points of the plates.
“You should go,” Monkey Mouth said. “To the infirmary with Casper. It’s no good getting hit in the head like that.”
But the last thing Evan could afford was for anyone to take a closer look at him and see that he wasn’t Paytsar Hovsepian.
Which meant he had to muscle through the pain. Or die here on the cell floor.
Right now it felt like it could go either way.
* * *
A half hour later, an electronic bleat announced breakfast, sounding like an air horn going off between Evan’s temples. It took him a solid thirty seconds to stand. By the time he did, Monkey Mouth was gone.
Evan took Casper’s beloved plant from the Styrofoam cup, shook the clod of damp soil into the toilet, and flushed it. Then he tilted the miniature fern back into the cup, slid it to the other edge of the sill to absorb the direct morning sunlight, and staggered out.
Downstairs he joined the herd of inmates assembly-belting toward the metal picnic tables. His balance was terrible, tilting him into an inmate beside him and earning him a violent shove in return. But he kept his feet.
He scanned the mob of faces all around, searching for Bedrosov, but his blurry vision made it near impossible. The pod leaders circulated carts among the tables, serving the prisoners a few sad items each.
Evan took a seat at a table with other seeming outsiders, including the gray-haired inmate who’d sold him the newspaper section, and hunkered down over his tray. Powdered eggs, biscuit, three breakfast sausages. To repay his debt, he gave one sausage to the older inmate, who received it with an appreciative grunt. Then Evan arranged the food neatly, aligning the sausages so they were parallel. Set the rubber spork on the left edge of his plate. Unfolded his napkin and rested it in his lap.
The old guy across from him watched his preparations with wry amusement. “Nice picnic, fish. That’s some Martha Stewart shit.”
Evan heard the words as if underwater. When he looked down at his tray, his vision doubled, a spork doppelg?nger springing into existence. He tried to stare it back into one utensil but failed, so he reached somewhere between the two images and came up with the actual object. He pressed the flimsy spork against his tray, but it had too much give to be useful as a weapon, so he set it back down.
With great effort he picked up his head and scanned the bay for Bedrosov. He didn’t see him, but he did pick out Teardrop at a table on the far side of the staircase. Evan figured Bedrosov was sitting on the other side of the same table, just out of sight.
“What you looking for?” the guy across from him asked.
“I want a tattoo,” Evan said, concentrating hard to get the words out cleanly. “Commemorate my time in here.”
At this the other inmates chuckled.
“Anyone in here do that?”
“Shit, Cedric over there’s a ink slinger,” the gray-haired man said, chinning at an obese inmate two tables along. “But not no more since the screws took his kit in the shakedown. He got no more needles, no more spoon to mix the ink with toothpaste, no more lace to soak that shit up. So for the meanwhile you’re stuck with your baby-smooth Martha Stewart skin.”
Cedric sat with his legs spread to accommodate the dip of his belly. He’d already wolfed down his breakfast and looked to be jonesing for a smoke, rolling his fingertips against one another, sucking on the end of his spork.
Evan ate his eggs first and then the remaining sausages.
He folded the biscuit in his napkin and pocketed it.
When the alarm blared for them to return their trays to the carts, Evan stood up, lost his balance, and plopped back down onto his seat. No one paid any mind. His next attempt was more successful. Firming his equilibrium, he stared over at Teardrop’s table once more. The ring of Armenian Power lieutenants parted, and Evan caught his first glimpse of Bedrosov.
He’d gained weight on the inside, his cheeks shiny, a curtain of fat hanging from his jawline. He looked like a bloated politician, sure-footed and entitled, as if he already knew the deck was stacked and just had to wait for the game to play out.
In the jostle to the cells, he and Evan locked eyes across the bay.
Bedrosov’s core of protectors carried him off, and Evan watched him vanish into the swirl of dark blue prison wear.
* * *
Back in his cell, Evan lay flat on his bunk until he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit. Once the pain had receded a notch below all-encompassing, he removed the cone of newspaper from where he’d hidden it beneath his sheet. Though it had hardened as it dried, it was brittle enough to break if he tapped it against the wall.
While Monkey Mouth spoke to the ceiling in one endless unbroken sentence, Evan retrieved another sheet of newspaper from beneath his mattress and repeated the process, first wetting it, and then wrapping it around the fragile initial cone as tightly and meticulously as possible. He was careful to keep his exposed pinkie away from the paper to avoid leaving a print.
If all went well, his little craft project would wind up as evidence.
When he finished, he rested it in the gap between the side of his mattress and the wall. Then he rested, worn out from the level of concentration. Every half hour he would repeat the process until he’d built the cone up painstakingly, one sheet at a time.