Half an hour after the post breakfast head count, Axel arrives at the maintenance annex, where the work crews are mustering in the hallway. He joins the other three trusties waiting at the office door. The head maintenance officer, Mason, a lanky man with a fiery red pompadour, looks up from the papers on his desk and beckons the trusties into the room. He hands each one a printout of his crew’s job list for the day. Axel looks at the last venue on his list and sees that it’s the infirmary. As planned. He and Mason exchange a blank look.
Mason is one of the inside men. He’s a longtime CO of good standing who has worked at a number of Texas units and has now been at Zanco for eight years. The word on him is that he has a gambling habit and has been married and divorced three times, the most recent split within the past year. It’s said that he has on occasion sold a con an inside favor, always in a manner too sly to risk implicating himself. Axel hasn’t known a convict who claimed to have personally done business with him, but he’s long had a hunch Mason could be bought, and he had told Cacho so.
The trusties go into the storeroom, where under the eye of the supply officer they each load a utility cart with the equipment and supplies his crew will need for their morning labors. The mandatory forms are filled out and signed and the crews disperse to their assignments. Besides himself and Cacho, there are three other men in Axel’s crew—an Okie kid doing four years for auto theft, a Mexican from Hermosillo doing fifteen for manslaughter, and a sixty-year-old Negro, as he insists on being called—he will bristle if called “black” and come at you swinging if referred to as “African-American”—who’s been under a life sentence for murder since the age of eighteen.
Their first job is at the corrections officers’ dining hall. They inspect a coffee urn reported to be malfunctioning, determine that it is, and a crewman loads it on the cart and takes it away to the maintenance shop. They sweep and mop the dining room floor, then run the buffer over it. They wash the windows, clean the hall bathroom, change the gasket on a leaky sink tap. They refill the paper towel dispensers and restock the bathroom shelves with towels, soap, toilet paper. They lug out the garbage cans and empty them in one of the Dumpsters that stand in long rows in full view of the tower guards.
All the while they’re at work, Axel can’t help thinking that this could be his last day alive. An alternate possibility, that he could be both alive and at large by tonight, seems more unreal to him by the hour. After so many years of caged regimentation in which nothing really changes except for your aging flesh, he finds it hard to visualize himself in the outside world and engaged with its countless and constant choices, its incessant changes. At the same time—and for the first time in more than two decades—he does not know where, if he’s still alive, he will be tomorrow, what he will be wearing, what he might choose to eat, what he might see, whom he might talk to who’s never been inside a prison. Such uncertainty about his immediate future charges him with a vibrant excitement he hasn’t known for so long it seems an alien sensation.