At a quarter to five he joins the last bunch of inmates headed for breakfast. They file down the tier stairs to the ground floor and then turn onto a broad corridor, staying inside the one-way lane defined by a yellow line about three feet from the wall on their right. In a similar lane on the other side of the corridor the inmate traffic moves in the opposite direction. Only prison staff and inmates in their custody are allowed in the corridor’s wide central zone. After passing through connecting wings, the line of men arrives at the dining hall. It is now a little more than half full, droning low with conversations. Inmates are permitted to talk at meals but not to dawdle over them. Guards patrol the aisles between the long rows of tables, and the entire room is overseen by a guard on an elevated catwalk. Moving down the serving line, Axel sees Cacho seated at the end of a table near the far wall and occupied by only three other cons. He takes his tray over there and sits across from him.
“My man,” Cacho says. His eyes are bright with excited anticipation. He is built much like Axel, lean and of medium height, but under his black, close-cropped hair his face is still a boy’s, smoothly brown and yet to grow a whisker, flawed only by a pair of scars—a purple wither at the top of one ear and a shiny pink smudge at the corner of his chin. He has confessed to Axel that the pearly perfection of his teeth is the result of superior dental reconstruction occasioned a few years ago, like the chin scar, by a bottle hard-swung into his mouth.
He checks out Axel’s breakfast and says, “Smart choice, the oatmeal. The powdered eggs usually taste like old rubber, right? Today they taste like old burnt rubber.”
Axel trades a blank glance with one of the three cons seated at the table, mestizos yakking low in Spanish of Guatemalan intonations. About two thirds of the inmates at Zanco are Latinos, most of them Mexes, the rest primarily Central Americans of one kind or another, and Spanish is the prevalent language in the unit. Even half of the COs are Latin.
Having grown up in a bilingual family in a bilingual town, Axel speaks Spanish with exceptional fluency, but he has kept his knowledge of it a secret from everyone on the inside. Always better if they think you don’t know what’s being said. He has kept the secret even from Cacho. To retain his own competence with the language over the years, he has made a daily practice of speaking it to himself during his afternoon runs in the exercise yard, holding imaginary conversations requiring a complexity of ideas and denotations and a full range of grammatical inflections.
Cacho picks up a sausage link and bites off half of it. He scowls as he chews and drops the rest of the sausage back in the tray. He takes a slow look at the Guatemalans, then leans toward Axel and points down at his tray and whispers, “No more hog slop, old-timer. Not after today.”
Axel spoons up some oatmeal. Tell him, he thinks.
Cacho looks about with studied indifference, checking for passing guards.
Axel shakes his head. The oatmeal is glutinous on his tongue.
Laughing and gibing, the Guatemalans get up and leave.
“Gonna rain,” Cacho says. “Heard a coupla COs saying. Probly real hard, they said, on account of some big-ass storm from the California Gulf or something. Rain be nothing but a great big help. Harder for them to see us, no? On the ground, from a chopper. Rain’s a sign that God loves us and is smiling on us.”
Tell him.
Cacho looks at his congealing food with distaste. “First thing I’m gonna have for breakfast back in the world? Chorizo con huevos.” He spreads his thumb and forefinger. “With a stack of tortillas this high. Christ, I’ve missed that! Been nine months, man!”
Tell him!
Cacho taps his fingertips lightly along the table edge as if playing a piano and very softly and with the barest lip movement sings “La Valentina,” a popular song dating to the Mexican Revolution. Axel is familiar with the song and its outlook of ready fatalism. It’s a small wonder to him that although the kid is well aware he can die anytime he cannot conceive that he might someday be old. Can any kid? He couldn’t when he was young.
Not that he’s old now. You can’t call forty-five young, but damn if it’s old, no matter the kid’s always calling him “viejo” or “old-timer.” Even in another eleven years he won’t really be that old…. Oh man, cut the shit! he thinks. The problem with playing it safe for the next eleven years is that no matter how safe he plays it there’s no telling what might happen. He could get shanked in the heart, get his throat cut. Could trip on the stairs and break his neck. Could get cancer and die. He could fuck up royal and get more time added anyway. It happened once, could happen again.
And what if in those eleven years something happens to her again? What if next time she’s not so lucky as she was in Mexico City last winter? What if Charlie can’t help her next time? There’s no knowing about next time, or even about goddamn tomorrow. All we ever have is right now—that’s the plain and simple duh of it.
He’s been bullshitting himself that more time is the worst that can happen. The worst that can happen is to just roll over and accept at least another eleven years of the same dead now he’s been stuck in since the day they turned the key on him. Another eleven years of waiting for the chance to see her and during which time who-knows-what might happen to prevent it for good. Yeah, he can get killed trying this thing, and yeah, if he gets caught he’ll be in for longer than another eleven. But if he says no to this and it ends up he doesn’t get to see her anyway, he’ll feel like a cowardly fool all the way to his last breath. If the thing goes to hell, it goes to hell, and if he gets killed, fuck it, no more troubles. And if he gets caught and catches more time, well, he’ll just have to chew on that bitter bone when it happens…. If it happens. Because goddamnit, if can go the other way, too, and that’s—
“Earth to Ax … Earth to Ax, over,” Cacho says, holding a fist to his mouth like a microphone. He grins and turns the hand palm-up and says, “Where’d you go, old bro?”
“Was remembering this café in San Benito. Made the best eggs with chorizo I ever had.”
Cacho smiles and pretends to strum a guitar and repeats a line of the “Valentina” song. “Si me han de matar mañana, que me maten de una vez.”
Axel smiles at the line’s audacious self-drama, translating it in his head—”If they’re going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill me here and now.”
“You two! Out! Move!”
They’d failed to notice the floor guard coming down the aisle. “Fist-face,” the cons call him, for his chronic aspect of anger.
“Move your asses!”
They hasten to comply. Fist-face is one of those COs who’ll write you up quick for so much as a smirk. Get you stripped of work privilege, restricted to your cell.
They take their trays across the room and slide them into the pass-through window to the kitchen. As they exit the hall, the PA crackles and announces the end of the breakfast period and orders all inmates back to the cells for head count.