Put a Lid on It Read Free

two rooms, the first a fairly big rectangle with two long library tables and some chairs, the walls lined with bookcases, the shelves full of fairly recent fiction and non-fiction, hardcover and paperback. There were no stacks, just the wall shelves, because stacks would give you a place to hide, exchange contraband, shiv an associate. That first room was where Meehan went, twice, to see what they had that might be of interest. Both times, he checked something out, only to realize he'd already read it.
    The room beyond the normal library was the law library, which was smaller, with a wall-mounted shelf containing four electric typewriters on one side and a counter with a volunteer lawyer behind it on the other. Every typewriter always had an inmate banging away, with every range from two fingers to nine, while two or three behind him waited their turn. Behind the lawyer, out of sight back there, was another room—or maybe rooms—full of law books. The volunteer lawyer was there to answer questions, discuss situations, go back to find the relevant law books, Virgil the inmate through the narrow byways of the law.
    This is where the inmates came to work on their cases. That's what they called it, they were working on their cases. Stick around in there long enough, you could come out with a pretty good grounding in tort law, which some of them did. But, since they were mostly assholes, it rarely helped. Still, working on their cases kept them out of trouble and made the volunteer lawyer—young, idealistic, from some seventh-rate diploma mill—feel useful in life.
    Meehan didn't work on his case. He knew what his case was, and he knew working on it wouldn't make it any prettier. And he'd given up on the reading section of the library, as being too skimpy for his needs. So he was one of the few residents of 9 South present in his cell when the two guards came along, with that usual expression on their face—it's only the vow I made to the Blessed Virgin Mary keeps me from kicking your nose out the back of your head—and one of them said, “Meehan?”
    “That's me,” Meehan agreed.
    “Pack your shit,” the guard said. The other guard was there mostly, Meehan figured, to make sure the first guard kept his vow.
    Meehan said, “Pack? Whadaya mean?”
    “It means what you leave behind you leave behind,” the guard told him. “What you take with you is still yours. Do it now, Meehan.”
    There wasn't much. He had a cheap blue nylon ditty bag, his toilet kit, socks and T-shirts and shorts, a couple shirts and pants he didn't put any wear on in here because everybody was in brown or orange jumpsuits (his was brown), the notebook he didn't write in—ten thousand rules—a couple paperbacks that were personal property (
Under the Volcano
and
Lord Jim
, neither of which he could get into, which was why they were still with him, and which he figured was his fault, not the writers'), and a pair of simple black laceless deck shoes for when he had an exercise turn in the yard on the roof, shoes generally called winos because that's who wears them.
    Packing these worldly goods, Meehan said, “I'm packing. Okay if I know where I'm going?”
    “Otisville,” the guard said. He didn't care.
    Otisville. Meehan made a face, but didn't say anything. What would he expect from these guys, sympathy?
    Otisville was another more rural federal detention center in this state. Since the criminal justice system around New York City always gets such a heavy workout, the MCC here frequently overflowed, like a cesspool, and then some of the contents had to be drained off to Otisville, one hundred miles upstate in the Shawangunk Mountains, the middle of boonie nowhere. A Department of Corrections bus, which looked like a schoolbus except it was dark blue and had mesh cages over all the windows, ran up to Otisville every evening, back down every morning, four hours out of your day on the bus. Except not until his trial; for now, they'd just ship him