Three

Lunch came as a surprise and a relief. The keys rattled, the heavy door opened with a ridiculously tiny squeak. Mr Nice Guy sat up, promptly bashed his skull on the ceiling, then lay back, moaning. The guard shouted at him to hurry so he grabbed the edge of his bunk and rolled shakily down the side, staggering toward the door. “Move your ass!” the guard berated. “Go Go Go!” Mr Nice Guy lunged forward. No way was he going to miss this opportunity to leave the cell.

“You sure must be tired,” James told him as they were counted and herded down the corridor. Mr Nice Guy rubbed his head. (Earlier, to make James stop talking, he’d pretended to fall asleep; then he’d actually fallen asleep, he didn’t know for how long; and when he awoke he still feigned unconsciousness while James paced from sink to door, from door to sink, mumbling. Mr Nice Guy did not twitch a muscle for fear his cellmate would start rehearsing Armageddon again.) “Today we get to go to the hall,” James explained as they marched in line. “Every other day they’ll bring lunch to our cell. You see it’s not big enough down there to feed everybody at the same time. Going to the hall is better than room service because you get to see folks.”

When they reached the dining hall there was a familiar hum of voices and click and clink of plates and utensils, and, for Mr Nice Guy, a less familiar plenitude of black men, some with big shining shaved heads which Mr Nice Guy felt an impulse to touch. But he refrained: he doubted they would like that.

“Spaghetti!” was the word that went down the line.

Mr Nice Guy planned to eat at a different table than James—surely they’d be seeing enough of each other in the cell!—but after he filled his tray James pointed and said, “Go over there, Jerry.” Reluctantly, Mr Nice Guy obeyed.

At the table men nodded greetings, but no one shook his hand. And no one said anything to James when he sat down and declared, “Blessed be this day, my friends!” Instead, they twangled spaghetti on forks and went on talking. Mr Nice Guy had the impression that James was not very popular.

In fact, just as he was about to break the ice, introduce himself all around, a man played a joke. James had closed his eyes and bowed his head to pray over his lunch, his lips making little smacks, and during this time an inmate took advantage and reached over to James’ tray and filched his coffee cake. He hid it under his big hand.

“All right—who took my cake?”

James looked round the table. No one said anything. Mr Nice Guy wasn’t sure what to do, feeling nervous yet at the same time a thrill of excitement. Taking James’ cake was a bad trick, but he didn’t want to be a squealer, either. Oh, he was in the thick of it, prison life!

“Branson, was it you?” James asked the man who took it.

“What makes you think that?” Branson replied, now lifting the cake to his lips, taking a bite, smiling at James with crumbs sticking to his moustache.

“You should not mock me,” said James, but he did not retaliate. He silently began to eat his spaghetti.

Hoping to improve the atmosphere, Mr Nice Guy cleared his throat and announced, “Fellas hey. I—I’m Jerry Renfrow.”

“James save your soul yet?” asked a thin white man near the end. He spoke with an accent and a high, bouncy inflection, the voice of a young girl. He had yellow teeth and pale, purplish lips as if he were deprived of oxygen—not merely the only other white man at the table but also the whitest man Mr Nice Guy had ever seen. His complexion was like aspirin.

“Are you English?” Mr Nice Guy asked.

The very white man sighed. “Scottish,” he corrected.

Another inmate, noisily in-sucking saucy strands of spaghetti, asked between breaths where Mr Nice Guy was from; the extremely white Scot asked why he was in; and when he answered these questions, they reacted immediately. The pale Scot laughed and clapped his hands, the spaghetti sucker guffawed and managed to say “Crazy fucker” between swallows. At this point Mr Nice Guy smiled and turned on his sunshine machine, sweeping the table, hoping to make friends.

“I figure that since I’m here I might as well make the best of my time, learn what I can, get to know people from different walks of life. Follow current events more closely, maybe teach myself a foreign language. Have you got a softball team?”

For a few seconds the table was silent. All eyes were on him. (Did I offend someone? wondered Mr Nice Guy, perplexed. How?)

“Hey Myler, come here!” called a shaved-head man, waving to another table, “I want you to hear this!”

A lanky black man in his forties approached from another table, an unlit cigarette protruding neatly from his lips. Prisoners were not allowed to smoke in the dining hall and many had already hurried from their tables into the yard. Though Mr Nice Guy didn’t know it yet, less than twenty minutes remained before he was delivered back to his cell, with no chance to walk more than four strides in any direction till his next meal. (And he’d been hoping they would have an indoor track where he could go trotting!) “What?” the new arrival said, as others made a place for him to sit down. He didn’t look at Mr Nice Guy. “Who’s the new meat?”

Mr Nice Guy noticed a red carton sticking out of the man’s front shirt pocket, with writing on the lid: “Tally-Ho.”

“You’re Manny Myler!” he said.

The lanky man now turned his eyes to Mr Nice Guy. “I know that. How do you know that?”

“The warden told me about you! Said you were the best sleight of hand man alive. Would you show me something?”

Myler eyed him, pulled the unlit cigarette out of his mouth, licked around the unfiltered end, then reinserted it between his lips. He shook his head No.

But the others at the table seconded Mr Nice Guy’s request—“Go on, Man, show us something!” till Myler relented. When he pulled out the deck James stood up, scowling, and left the table.

“People usually hate card tricks,” Myler chuckled. “They know what’s good for them.”

What followed was a performance unlike any Mr Nice Guy had ever seen. Myler didn’t do fancy cuts and shuffles like the warden. He just rested the pack on the table, divided it, upon which weird things began to happen. Queens jumped face up to the top, or reassembled beside the deck. You didn’t even have to pick a card. Watching it was both bewildering and alarming, for there was no discernible effort on Myler’s part. Aside from moving his cigarette behind his ear in order to talk more easily, he made no accommodation to circumstance and this indifference enhanced, somehow, the appearance of power.

“Believe your eyes, suckers, if you can stand it.”

What a disappointment for Mr Nice Guy when the guards interrupted and lined them up to return to the cells. Why, he’d never seen such wonders on the outside!