CHAPTER TWO
Present day
Gray walls. Steel bars. Locked door. No handle. Least not on my side. A stainless steel toilet. Half a roll of paper. One picture. Concrete floors. One window. Eight feet by eight feet.
My life in sixty-four square feet.
Any sound echoed, dancing around like a pinball, finally finding an exit through an open window or unlocked door. Above me, daylight crept over the sill. Some mornings, the mourning doves would sit outside in the yard and call to each other. I couldn’t see them, but their calls reached me.
I folded my hands behind my head and let the pictures return. During the day, I could push them aside. Busy myself. But here, in the quiet before dawn, not so much. So this morning—like every morning—they returned. Single file. An endless parade. They were once clear. Technicolor. Even IMAX. Over time, they faded, became stained, and the edges curled up. Turned sepia. Despite their condition, they are what I have. I thumbed through each one.
The first was always Audrey. Various pictures of her. Most often the picture from the last night: the way her dress draped across her shoulders. The flickering candle. The sparkle of Central Park stretched out before us. The silver dove reflecting in the base of her neck. Her forehead pressed against mine. Soon the smells returned. New clothes. Audrey’s perfume. Then the faint taste of raspberries. The champagne burn going down my throat. The horns of taxis on Broadway below. The feel and weight of a pen in my hand. The sight of my own signature. The hotel. Her wearing my pajamas.
The discomfort of my ankle returned me to my bunk. I studied it. They had installed my black anklet yesterday and then attempted to warn me of people’s reactions. Said that guys like me were often surprised that something so inanimate can evoke such a hate-filled response. Visceral, even. Pragmatically, it weighs a few ounces and allows them to track me and my movements within three feet. Twenty-four/seven. Emotionally, it’s the second-heaviest thing I’ve ever carried.
In twelve years here, more than four thousand three hundred days, I’d learned a simple truth: there’s a difference between a dream coming true and a dream lived out. Prison holds your body while your memories come and go as they like—sifting through the bars like water.
In here, the tortured remember. The lucky forget.
The sound of Gage’s steps closed the picture book in my mind. In a few seconds, he appeared on the other side. A strange dichotomy—freedom separated by an inch plus a million miles. The ball looked small in his pawlike hands. He tossed it into the air. It spiraled, rose, reached its summit, and fell again, where he quickly grabbed it and launched it again. I climbed off my bed, prompting Frank, in the glass control room at the end of the block, to punch a button and unlock my door. He did, it swung open, and, following Gage’s nod, I walked out into the common area of the ward. Cell block D. Wiregrass Correctional Penitentiary—though few here were penitent.
The common area is four stories high, open in the middle, and rectangular. A stairwell stood behind each of us. Twenty-five yards separated us. He smirked and tossed me the ball.
Before prison guard, Gage was a receiver of note. I remember watching him on TV. Rose Bowl MVP. Following college, he had been drafted and then injured during the second year of his career, re-signed by a few teams, hung around a few years, made a few appearances, but it never stuck. Five years after entering the league, having gambled away most of his money, tired of hoping and unable to surgically fix the shredded knee, he landed this job—complete with a steady paycheck and benefits. Had he snorted his guaranteed money up his nose, he’d have been disqualified from getting this job. On the other hand, while gambling broke him just as quickly, it didn’t disqualify him. In fact, it ingratiated him with the other guards, who lived vicariously through his stories of Vegas, Atlantic City, and one storied week in Monaco. When we first met Gage smiled, but it did little to hide the resident sadness. Taking the kid out of the game was one thing. Taking the football out of the kid was another.
A pressure cooker without a vent is not a pressure cooker. It’s a bomb.
Ball in hand, Gage stared at me across the open area. “How long we been doing this?” He knew the answer but asked anyway.
“Couple of years.”
“Seven years, ten months, and fourteen days.” He shrugged. “Give or take.”
“Fifteen.”
I caught the ball, dropped to my knees, and threw. Throwing from the knees is a drill for QBs. It forces a better throwing motion—coming over the top. And, in all honesty, it makes it easier on Gage’s early-onset arthritic hands ’cause I can’t throw it quite as hard. I loaded and fired it across the short distance between us. “It was a Tuesday.”
“Seems like a long time.”
It had been. “A lifetime.”
We tossed the ball back and forth, working up a sweat. After a few minutes, the ball started whistling through the air. Like any good receiver, he caught the ball, tucked and covered it, then threw it back. “Where will you go?”
“Home.”
“You sure you want to put yourself through that?”
I made no response.
“I thought you said it’d been sold on the courthouse steps.”
“I did.”
“Where will you stay?”
“I’ll find something.”
He paused. “She worth it?”
A pause. I pointed at his bum knee. “If a team called you, any team, and said, ‘Hey, we’d like you to come try out.’ How long would it take you to get on a plane?”
He mimicked the Heisman pose again. “About that long.”
I nodded. He understood.
When two boys, or men, play catch, a rhythm can develop. Something like a pulse—catch, throw, release, catch… It doesn’t happen all the time, but with Gage and me, it happened most of the time. And it was my therapy. I released the ball, flinging sweat from my forehead and fingers. The ball shot from my hand and struck his palms, stinging his skin. He shook his head. “You remember throwing that hard in college?”
He chuckled. Some of the others were awake, the whites of their eyes showing through the bars. “Not if you’ve been listening to talk radio the last couple of weeks. A few of the coaches have expressed interest in evaluating you. Several players have done it.”
I lifted my pants leg, revealing the black anklet.
Silence followed as the ball arced between us. Our time was almost up. He glanced at the door, the window, and the distance to the fence. “One time?”
I shook my head.
He shrugged. “For me?”
I knew the cameras were recording.
Gage trotted over to the door that led out into the yard. He pressed a button to lower an automatic window above the door that served as a ventilation draw. The window was eighteen inches square, hung twelve feet off the ground, and funneled cooler air to the cells. No screen and no bars, it led out into the yard, which was surrounded in double rows of fifteen-feet-tall, electrically-charged fence, all of which was covered in multiple rows of concertina wire. It also allowed a man with a football an uninterrupted throw to the corner of the exercise yard, fifty-nine yards away—provided the thrower could thread the needle of the foot-and-a-half-square window, which hung at the halfway mark. Not much room for error. He tossed me the ball and then jogged through two doors that electronically unlocked and then locked and into the far corner of the yard. By this time, the other inmates were awake and staring through the bars of their cells. A couple were making odds, taking bets. The pass required precision and meant that the ball never rose above twelve feet off the ground. In football terms, that’s called “throwing on a frozen rope.” It also required the thrower to release the ball at about 600 rpm—roughly the same spin rate as an air wrench used by NASCAR teams when they spin the lug nuts off race cars in the pit.
Gage waved, signaling all clear. I had to look through the two windows of the two doors, so his outline was distorted. Blurred. I turned the ball in my hand, my fingers reading the laces, measured my target, dropped three steps, and fired the ball at Gage. The ball left my fingers, whistling in a tight spiral. It cleared the window, spun through the air, and crossed the outside yard, striking his hands an inch or two left of the imaginary bull’s-eye I’d placed on his forehead. He caught and held it still, in place. His silent reminder to those watching that “that just happened.” He trotted back, waiting for Frank to unlock, open, close, and lock each door.
He handed me the ball, shaking his head. “You know there might be one, maybe two guys in the entire league right now who can make that pass. Maybe only a couple ever.”
I shrugged.
I stepped inside my cell and turned. I wasn’t allowed to extend my hand, and he knew that. In return, he handed me the ball along with a Sharpie. In all this time, he’d never asked. Over the years, the sweat and oil from our hands had darkened the ball. I signed it and handed it back. He turned it in his hands. He glanced over his shoulder at the window, then the corner of the yard, then back at me. “I’ll keep it—someplace safe.”
“You should hide it.” I waved my hand across the interior cameras that filmed our morning sessions. “Along with everything else.”
He stepped outside, whispered into his microphone. The door swung shut and locked. Him on one side. Me on the other. He glanced at his watch. “Don’t get too comfortable in there. Couple of folks will be along shortly to finish paperwork on you.”
I glanced around my cell. “I haven’t been comfortable since I walked in here.”
He smiled, then turned and began walking away. “Take care, Rocket.”
My voice stopped him. “Gage?”
“Thank you.”
He glanced to his left at the inner courtyard, then at the eighteen-inch-square window above the door that led into the yard. He shook his head, mumbled to himself, and then his steps faded away as he tossed the ball into the air.