That afternoon he stood outside Tooms’s cell and stared at the heavy sheet hung from the inside across the bars, blocking everything within. Near a hundred degrees, Tooms had built himself an inferno rather than stare into the face of his crimes. Patch glanced back and saw Blackjack had retreated into the cool of the captain’s office.
When he started talking, he watched the other men appear, arms through the bars as the radio died. “She was brilliant in ways you can’t imagine. In ways that don’t sound real when I tell them. She took me from the dark and showed me her world. She could recite poems and stories and knew facts I thought she had made up. She knew that prairie dogs kiss, that ghost crabs growl using teeth in their stomach. She knew that koala fingerprints are so close to ours they could contaminate a crime scene.”
“I fucking told those cops it was the koala that did it,” Ricky Nelson called out, to laughter.
“She was kind. Not enough people are. The cops said I remembered too much, that some of it must have been imagined. I know her. I still know her. I miss her. I carried her with me each day of my life. You can give her back to me, Tooms. You’re in this place, where you can’t do shit. Where you’ve got nothing. But you can do this brilliant thing. It’s inside you to do it. Just tell me who she was. Tell me where she’s buried.”
Blackjack tapped his stick on the metal as Patch snapped from it.
On his way back he handed a copy of The Color Purple to Howie Goucher in cell two. He would keep it for a month, telling Patch of the glorious Celie.
A little after that the row would fall silent as Howie was led from them.