Hard News

lurch as the wheels danced sideways like a bullfighter’s hips and they crossed the Harlem River Bridge. She waved to passengers on a Day-liner tour boat as they looked up at the bridge. No one noticed her.
    Then they were in the Bronx—passing plumbing supply houses and lumberyards and, in the distance, abandoned apartments and warehouses. Daylight showed through the upper-story windows.
    You wake up in the morning and you think
…
    Rune tried to doze. But she kept seeing the tape of Boggs’s face, broken into scan lines and each scan line a thousand pixels of red, blue and green dots.
    … Hell, I’m still here
.
    •      •      •
     
    THE WAY THEIR EYES LOOKED AT HER WAS WEIRD .
    She’d figured the prisoners would lay a lot of crap on her—catcalls or whoops of “Yo, honey,” or long slimy stares.
    But nope. They looked at her the way assembly line workers would glance at a plant visitor, someone walking timidly between tall machines, careful not to get grease on her good shoes. They looked, they ignored, they went back to mopping floors or talking to buddies and visitors or not doing much of anything.
    The warden’s office had checked her press credentials and guards had searched her bag and the camera case. She was then escorted into the visitors’ area by a tall guard—a handsome black man with a moustache that looked like it was drawn above his lip in mascara. Visitors and inmates at the state prison in Harrison were separated by thick glass partitions and talked to each other on old, heavy black telephones.
    Rune stood for a moment, watching them all. Picturing what it would be like to visit a husband in prison. So sad! Only talking to him, holding the thick receiver, reaching out and touching the glass, never feeling the weight or warmth of his skin….
    “In here, miss.”
    The guard led her into a small room. She guessed it was reserved for private meetings between lawyers and their prisoners. The guard disappeared. Rune sat at a gray table. She studied the battered bars on the window and decided that this particular metal seemed stronger than anything she’d ever seen.
    She was looking out the greasy glass when Randy Boggs entered the room.
    He was thinner than she’d expected. He looked best straight on; when he turned his head to glance at a guard his head became birdish—like a woodpecker’s. His hair was longer than in the tape she’d studied and the Dairy Queen twist was gone. It still glistened from the oil or cream he used to keep it in place. His ears were long and narrow and he had tufts of blond, wiry hair growing out of them. She observed dark eyes, darkened further by an overhang of bone, and thick eyebrows that reached toward each other. His skin wasn’t good; in his face were patches of wrinkles like cities in satellite photos. But this appeared to be a temporary unhealthiness—the kind that good food and sun and sleep can erase.
    Boggs looked at the guard and said, “Could you leave us?”
    The man answered, “No.”
    Rune said to the guard, “I don’t mind.”
    “No.”
    “Sure,” Boggs said, as cheerful as if he’d been picked for first baseman in a softball game. He sat down and said, “What for d’you want to see me, miss?”
    As she told him about receiving his letter and about the story she grew agitated. It wasn’t the surroundings; it was Boggs himself. The intensity of his calmness. Which didn’t really make sense but she thought about it and decided that was what she sensed: He was so peaceful that she felt her own pulse rising, her breath coming quickly— as if her body were behaving this natural way because his couldn’t.
    Still, she ignored her own feelings and got to work. Rune had interviewed people before. She’d put the camera in front of them, washed them in the hot light from Redhead lamps and then asked them a hundred questions. She’d gotten tongue-tied some and maybe asked the wrong questions but her talent was in getting people to open up.
    Boggs, though, took a lot of work. Even though he’d written the letter to the station he was uneasy around reporters. “Don’t think I’m not grateful.” He spoke in a soft voice; a slight southern accent licked at his words. “But I’m … Well, I don’t mean this personal, directed at you, miss, but you’re the people convicted me.”
    “How?”
    “Well, miss, you know the expression ‘media circus’? I’d never heard that before but when I read about my trial