Thrown-away Child

Then suddenly, all up and down Perry’s row of cells, rats swarming and swarming up through the lidless cell block toilet commodes. Hundreds of frantic rats, somehow rudely disturbed from the prison sewers, scuttling through the humid darkness. Fleeing something. Rats squealing, running a gauntlet of thrown shoes, broomsticks, bleach bottles, dirty underwear. Cries filling the cell block — Oh, my gawd, git — git! Rats running stupidly into walls, scrambling over bunks full of flailing arms and legs. Rat teeth tearing at anything in the way. Caged men screaming until sunrise.
     
    In his remembrances came the beginning of an answer to what he might now do with the rest of his fugitive life. Perry grabbed his whisky bottle and pulled it to his lips, the drinker’s reflexive confirmation of a decision made.
    What’s your type, boy?
    Perry set down the bottle. Then he mashed his cigarette into the damp ground. He shuddered at the foul smells that filled his hiding place—his whisky breath, the smoky stench of his clothes.
    “That’ll be just about enough,” he said aloud. He kicked at the liquor bottle. It went flying into a dark corner of the shed, glass breaking.
    “Enough,” he repeated.
    Perry Duclat was drunk, his pocket contained stolen money, he was sought by the police in connection with the murder of his Angola cell mate. In spite of all this he had a sober realization of what he was now experiencing: self-pride, of all improbable things. For a new question occurred: am I going to settle for being one of them—just another of them sorry-ass MOMS?
    A sorry-ass is a prisoner of the worst of his past. Perry could hear himself saying this now; he wished he was sitting at Shug’s and saying it, with Clete sitting next to him, alive and listening. He heard himself talking like a preacher to a church full of sorry-asses: Haven’t we done our time, sisters and brothers? Hadn’t we best now look for the way out? Way out of what, you say? Way out of being a tourist in your own life! People say you make your own luck. Now y’all know that’s fool talk, like I already say. But now I’m saying there’s something you can make, low-down as you may be. You can make your future!
    Perry laughed again, and thought, That’s close as I get to religion! Private religion, real religion—as far away from Jesus-pumping Sunday services down to the Land of Dreams Tabernacle as Zeb Tilton is from going heaven when he dies!
    He thought about his Aunt Violet going to those Sunday services. How he had argued with her about Minister Zebediah Tilton, how she had argued back. Don’t you know a woman’s got to get dolled up once in a while so she can feel like somebody? You tell me some good man want to take me someplace respectable in my good dress, and just watch how fast I quit on that church. ’Til then, sometimes I just got to go, and Zeb Tilton be damned. And Perry thought about how much his aunt enjoyed it when he would get up early on a Sunday and go to church with her, how it cost him nothing but time and an understanding of needs that had nothing to do with his own.
    He thought about whisky, then cast it out of his mind.
    He thought about that pretty girl he always saw at Zeb Tilton’s church, up there in the choir with the Praise Sayers—Sister Constance. And what was it Vi said about her living in the lane years ago?
    He thought about his late Uncle Willis, as he had every day up at Angola and every day since. He thought about the house in the lane, and the little backyard where he had been happy once.
    He thought about poor Clete. And how he died.
    No! Perry Duclat would not settle for being just another ratty sorry-ass.
    Again, Perry laughed the prison laugh, and said aloud, “Every coffin has a silver lining.”
    Then, as he looked once more through the green peach hole in the shed wall, he saw a white man walking around out there between him and the view of Toby’s coal yard shack...
    A white man wearing a baseball cap.
     

FOURTEEN

     
    “He didn’t do it, Neil. That’s God’s truth.”
    Mania’s back was to me as she said this. I was looking over her shoulder, watching Mueller sneering at me from his car. He started up the engine and peeled away, leaving plenty of rubber and resentment.
    Mama turned. She looked tired and saggy, as if she had somehow lost a lot of weight in only a few minutes.
    “But it doesn’t matter if Perry’s innocent, does it?” I asked her.
    “Likely not.”