Thirty-Five

Majid was sure that if you waited long enough, whatever was meant to be would reveal itself. He prayed at me every time we hooked up in some mumbled words and he said he was blessing himself against me and asking Allah to save me and he said it wasn’t the right thing to do but he stayed close like a true friend and hopefully Allah forgave him because loyalty is holy and Majid said it was so. He said being with me meant he might have a garden in paradise, but I think he was my friend and maybe he didn’t like to admit it on cultural grounds.

Then I got a letter from Lefty and he said he was OK and settling in just fine. It was written in the most beautiful handwriting I ever did see. He said there was an English teacher there in the jail teaching him to use words better and his cousin was in the same jail and was looking over him and they had a good gym and mostly the people were straight and true. He said even the prison officers were mostly decent. He figured he could still be the champion of the world one day and he would train real hard and read more and turn his disappointments to his advantage. He told me he was in ‘good health’ and said ‘I hope this letter finds you well’ and that I should show fortitude, so Moby decided his English teacher must be a hundred years old at least, and Lefty sent me a concise thesaurus dictionary and a pamphlet about the visiting rules which looked much the same as Lilly’s. He said we should each learn a word a day and grammar too because he said grammars makers manners and he asked if I would be on his visitor list and no one else was and maybe I could visit in the coming long holiday. He told me I should look up Kaleidoscopic, Equidistant and Panacea, and when I wrote back I had to put them together in a sentence, but it was a trick because I looked them up and there ain’t no such sentence. He asked if I could send his bag, gloves and wraps and boxing shoes and the photo of all us boys taken in front of the house in our best number ones for the school year book. We took that photo way back and he had his copy laminated and I did what he asked and Cuban Jesus paid for the carton and got me a proper paid part-time job cleaning up and making coffee and doing jobs out back of the café, which paid real folding cash money, and Jesus gave me lots of tips about how to survive and even do well.

I even started to walk more softly and smile at adults more often and some days I even did school work and said thank you to teachers so they were shocked and told me I was welcome. I tried to use more words from my dictionary and I surprised them teachers with some of the vocabulary I used in my schoolbooks and my use of correct grammar and punctuation too, and punctuation has nothing to do with being on time. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

Mister Solomon Sesay and Coach Petey and the Cubans all offered to take me in for the holiday because they had kindness in their hearts and all I needed was permission from the headmaster and they all wrote to him making the same offer and they were true and solid friends. Everything was possible now and the ingredients of my life were mixing up nicely so my world became kaleidoscopic, and Majid and Humphrey still watched me sleep most nights and sometimes Moby did too and he ate a whole bag of broken biscuits when he did his watch and made little belching and snuffling noises all night which I liked to hear, and I would hear him sucking up the crumbs and singing to himself and I loved that noise. Food was his panacea and he was mine.