Sanctuary Read Free

doing either hard time or smooth time. Danny had done neither. He was doing his time. Nothing more, nothing less.
    They said that in prison it’s better to fight and gain respect than to run and lose your dignity. They said that steering clear of trouble has a price. That the fight picks you—you don’t pick the fight.
    All true, of course, but Danny didn’t care about the injustice inflicted upon him and didn’t try to change the convict code that administered it. He took his abuse in stride, like a concrete wall, without retaliating and without suffering more than one shallow wound from a shank in his side. Compared to the physical and mental wounds he’d suffered in the Bosnian War, the abuse at Ironwood had been wholly tolerable.
    The suffering of other inmates preyed upon by the hustlers and gangbangers who ran the prison, however, had been much more difficult to stomach.
    And even more, his separation from the one person he loved more than his own freedom tore through his heart like a strand of barbed wire. In so many ways, Renee was his life. Concrete walls stood between them, but they lived together as one in his mind. Her voice whispered in his ears without end.
    If something bothered Renee, it bothered Danny. If bedbugs were overtaking her world, they were consuming his. If she preferred grapefruit over oranges, he wanted two of them, no matter how bitter they tasted. If she wondered why the world was upside down, so did he, always with a gentle reply and a nudge toward a less fretful analysis, but he could never simply dismiss her concerns. They were her truth.
    She could not know how desperately he missed her, how her safety and happiness consumed him, how deep the sorrow of their separation ran through him. If she knew the full extent of his concern for her, she would only suffer more than she already did, because Renee loved him more than she knew how to love herself.
    She paced through his heart every waking moment, occupied with inconsequential concerns that meant nothing to him except that they were hers. The rest of him was doing time in a society called prison, hidden away from the rest of the world. A totally self-contained culture, as alien as Mars to those who lived on the outside; a universe unto itself with a whole different set of rules and values. As members of this subculture, inmates became a new kind of creature. But what kind?
    Ninety percent of all those incarcerated would reenter society, as they should. If all those incarcerated were kept behind bars, a full half of America’s population would be in prison. The real question was, in what condition would a person released from prison emerge? Would he be a properly punished and reformed person ready to tackle life’s challenges while following the rules, or an embittered, hardened person armed with new, more violent survival skills?
    The puppies, as Danny sometimes thought of those called newbies, worried him the most. You could slap a puppy for jumping up on your leg and peeing on your foot in their exuberance to experience life, much like you could slap an eighteen-year-old for possession of pot. But put the puppy in a cage with raging bulldogs for a few years and they would come out far less playful and far more apt to bite.
    In the American prison system, the weak were often forced to become strong to survive the preying wolves, too often becoming wolves themselves. Nonviolent offenders often learned violence; young prisoners who had been caught on the wrong side of their pursuit of pleasure often learned that aggression and anger were required to survive. Some called the American prison system a monster factory, an environment that far too often fractured those who entered it.
    At Ironwood, Danny had expected nothing because little was offered. He’d learned to live in a quiet place deep in his mind, compromised only by the intense suffering of others whom he was powerless to help. Unlike most prison puppies, Danny had embraced his