Thrown-away Child

changing places on occasion.”
    Cletus was quiet, then said, “Yeah, I do know that.” He meant he understood about the shifty nature of bad versus good. He had been momentarily dazed by incomprehensible and inconsequential, these being book words.
    “People say you make your own luck,” Perry went on. “Like it’s something always there for you—same as water under the ground if you dig through the dirt
    long enough. Water’s always water. Lady Luck, though, she’s nothing but a rumor.”
    On the day they met at Shug’s, Perry was a lucky man by the dim lights of some people. He was flush with a twenty-dollar bill, recently stolen from his Aunt Violet’s purse. Thievery offered Perry no real satisfaction. It always made him sick when he had to steal something, and more often than not stealing drove him to drink. Which was why he was at Shug’s the day Clete happened by. Perry sported for beer, the least he could do for a cellie recently freed.
    Although likewise a thief, Perry was not nearly so outgoing about it as Cletus. Perry had never taken anything directly from a person, for instance, as he wished no dangerous confrontation; he was a burglar, not a robber. He carried a knife, but had neither intent nor occasion to use it as a weapon. Perry had never touched a gun in his life, whereas Clete had just been sprung after eight years of an armed robbery stretch.
    The cellies were as different in physical appearance as they were in criminal temperament.
    Cletus Tyler was short and thickset at the neck and waist. His skin was dark like an African’s. His nose and forehead were broad and his eyes were too small for his face, like a pig’s eyes. Cletus’s profile was bashed-in flat, as if someone had hit him in the face with a shovel.
    Perry Duclat, on the other hand, was tall and slender. He had his mother’s bright complexion and straight features, and his mother’s hair—black and Wavy, with red tones. He generally wore a peaceful expression, like his mother’s. Perry had not taken after his father, Toby Jones, a coal yard worker over in Algiers who had long ago disowned him. Cletus, who a d not the slightest idea who his father was, looked more like a son of Toby’s than Perry ever would.
    “How long you think they going to let us stay on the outside?” Cletus asked Perry.
    “What makes you think I’m going back to the trap for a third time?” Perry answered, annoyed by the question.
    “Seems the natural way of things these days for a black man.” Cletus shrugged. “No decent jobs. Even the army turnin’ down niggers ’less they Colin Powell-type niggers.”
    “So you expect to go back, Clete?”
    “Can’t say no, can’t say yes.”
    “That’s just pitiful.”
    “What?”
    “You got no expectations, Clete.”
    “Who you think you is?”
    A good question, Perry thought. Like Cletus, Perry had no money and no employment prospects for the short or long term. Like Cletus, he was pushing fifty ¡ and had a prison record. Like Cletus, he was living j with and stealing from family, and knew that something had to give. And then where would he go?
    Cletus drained his glass of beer, and slyly laughed at Perry, the same way Perry laughed at Miss Hassie in her kitchen window. Then the humor went out of Cletus’s pig eyes, replaced by the kind of edge that distinguishes a robber from a burglar.
    “You the same as me,” Cletus said coldly. “Ain’t neither one of us pre-homeless niggers got one lick of a promise, ’less you want to call Angola the promised land.”
    “Hell no.”
    Cletus laughed again. It was a sullen laugh now, a more hopeless sound than anything Perry had ever heard, including late at night up at Angola when the cell blocks moaned. But then came something even darker.
    “They got them a plan for us,” Cletus said. He moved close. Perry heard a shudder in Cletus’s voice. “Oh my gawd in heaven, they sure got them a plan.”
    Perry bought another round of drinks and with it a change of subject. Cletus seemed as anxious for the change as Perry. And so they spoke the rest of that afternoon of absent friends and beautiful women and missed opportunities and lost youth.
    That was a month ago.
    Between then and now, the cellies had seen each other maybe half a dozen times, in the street or at Shug’s. On only two of these occasions had they spoken, though. The first time was at Shug’s.
    “I don’t want to chance it,” Perry said.
    “Your overseer snap the whip,