12

Monday was the appointment.

Early.

An armed prison guard named Denny Piercey was his escort.

Clarence called Denny “sir.” He made sure to be extra compliant and overly cooperative. He thanked Denny over and over again for his effort.

And when the time was right, Clarence began to cry.

He stared out the window through the wire grate, knowing that the guard could see him in the rearview mirror.

He remembered being a kid in Alaska and how a logging truck had lost its brakes and plowed into the front of David’s Candy Shop.

Clarence was eight years old. When he’d walked down Main Street, he saw other kids coming toward him. They were all stuffing their faces with candy.

Little Clarence ran as fast as he could down the hill to the accident, and when he got there, he heard the news. With the front of his store destroyed, David Dewey had given away all his shop’s candy.

And Clarence was too late.

He’d missed the biggest freebie in the little town’s history.

The incident didn’t just put a lump in Clarence’s throat; it broke his tiny, already twisted spirit.

And now, dozens of years later, it could still make him weep. Without a sound he managed to get tears to spill from his muddy eyes and tumble down his pale cheeks.

When they reached the city of Merced, it was even better than he’d imagined.

The area outside the two large medical office buildings was hectic. The parking lot was full, and there was a rack right in front that was packed with bikes.

Clarence did his best to make it seem that he looked at nothing as he was escorted from the van.

But he saw it all.

Once they were inside the medical center, Clarence asked if he could use the bathroom.

The corrections officer looked at Clarence and his tear-stained face, his ill-fitting fake leg, and decided to remove the handcuffs. He didn’t want to unzip the guy’s pants.

Clarence was over-the-top grateful as he disappeared inside the stall to relieve himself. He did his business quickly and made a point of carefully washing his hands with lots of soap and hot water, not rinsing them completely so that the sweet, clean smell would linger.

Upstairs, with the handcuffs back in place, the two men sat together in the doctor’s waiting room.

There was an aquarium lining one wall in the office. As Clarence stared at the brightly colored fish he suddenly saw them being plucked off a tropical reef.

Now they were prisoners.

And like him, the fish had done nothing wrong. Clarence got tears in his eyes for the second time in one day.

But these ones were real.

When it was his turn to go in, the prisoner spoke softly to the doctor about the phantom pain, about the ill-fitting replacement leg, and in a special touch, he told the physician that his fish in the waiting room were an inspiration—they were so free in their movement.

Clarence had spent hours before the visit rubbing his prosthetic leg back and forth, wearing the skin down to a raw stump. He now behaved like an absolute gentleman, thanking everyone who came within three feet of him.

And all the while, he was taking in the details.

This doctor, the expert, was on the second floor.

And the bathroom for the patients was at the end of the hall.

When the examination was over, Clarence complained about his sour stomach. He was escorted again into the bathroom, and corrections officer Denny Piercey waited on the other side of the stall door.

Clarence undid his prison-issue work pants and silently removed the doubled plastic bag that was tucked deep in his underwear. Inside the bag was the decomposing dead mouse.

Clarence quietly pulled apart the zip-lock and held the bag, now open, against the stall door. On the other side, the prison guard got a sudden whiff of the putrid smell of death.

He stepped back, exhaling. “I’m going to wait outside while you do your business.”

Behind the door Clarence smiled. “Sorry about that, sir. I’ve got all kinds of trouble with my digestion.”

Clarence heard the door shut, and in an instant he was out of the stall and the dead mouse was floating in the toilet bowl. The plastic bags was shoved back into his prison underwear as he went to the window.

It was large but covered by a security grate. Clarence removed a dime and two pennies from his left sock. Lady Luck was on his side. The dime fit into the slot of the screws that held the metal bracket that supported the grate.

Moving quickly but not hurrying, because hurrying led to mistakes, Clarence loosened all four screws on the grate.

But he didn’t pull it down. He left it there, hanging now by a thread. Literally.

And then he went to the stall, hit the flushing mechanism with his foot, and proceeded to the door.

Clarence smiled as he limped, in real pain, out to the hallway. He had always taken pride in the fact that he had a rattlesnake tattoo swirling down his leg. But his amputation had sliced the reptile in two.

Now his mind only had one thought: they could cut off the tail of a snake, but it could still coil.