Prison Junk

When Fairley told me what he had done, I got sick. With the phone falling from my ear, I gagged and bucked and thought I'd puke right on the dining room floor. It took me a few seconds to get myself together. Get the acid out of my mouth. Get the phone back to my ear. The wave rolled over me and I started putting two and two together. It wasn't Saturday morning, between ten and ten-thirty, Fairley's usual time calling collect from prison.

I should have known something was up as soon as the phone rang. Sunday at nine. At night. He was way off. He was out. Way out. As in Out. As in Broke Out. I didn't even want him calling me when he was holed up. I didn't even want to be connected to him by a phone call. And now. Now they'd trace him through me. I was the weak link here, not including the big rotting weak link inside Fairley's moth-eaten brain. Breaking out, from Durand? With two months left on your state nickel? That homemade prison junk had finally chewed away the wrong part of his brain. Rat poison will do that.

My mind was drowning in possibilities, and I swear I saw myself in leg irons, which they do still use up at Durand. I saw them, on one of the rare occasions I visited Fairley there. A guy was being forced down the hall, hobbled by ancient, historical metal cuffs around his ankles. I looked back around to the glass, the glass with the machined perforations, and waited for Fairley to make his grand entrance. A door slammed somewhere at the end of a nameless corridor and I felt it in my spine. It rippled through me like a shockwave, and I knew this was definitely the last time I was ever visiting Fairley again. Last time I was visiting anyone on the inside.

I didn't want to be talking to him right then. I thought about just hanging up. But who knew what he'd do to me then? He knew where I was. And he knew people who could find me no matter where I went or how I changed. All I knew was he was somewhere between Durand and here, and he said he wasn't alone.