Sweeter Life Read Free

and poetry and philosophy—they all seemed to her a kind of madness, the kind of dizzying distraction that could only lead to trouble. She felt that people had lost their way in a multitude of reflections, when all they needed was to embrace the true and unequivocal love of Jesus Christ our Saviour.
    A BONE-WHITE SKY , a high, roaring mountain-bound wind that, inside the wall, they could hear but not feel; out on the court, someone bouncing a ball,
shoop, shoop, shoop
, regular as clockwork; around the yard the syncopated barks and wheezes of massed manhood, the here-and-there commotion of simple roughhouse. A vamp is all, everyone waiting for the note, that single soulful wail that would call them in—a blue note if ever there was one.
    And when it came, when the siren sounded, they stopped—grey-suited, grey of face, some of them with grey hair, as if they had inhaled too much dust from this place and were, by degrees, turning to stone—then made their way across the loose gravel of the exercise yard. No one spoke; no one laughed. Some were edgy as blades; some polished to an alabaster sheen. For most of them, it was the saddest part of the day.
    A stone archway connected the yard to the main quadrangle. There in the darker shadows, where three weeks before someone had been stabbed todeath, Hank watched his man pause a moment to tie his boot, Golden Reynolds acting like he didn’t have a care in the world. The others passed by without notice, but Hank angled across the archway until he and Goldie stood facing each other. They jostled a moment, like passing strangers on a busy downtown street, and only the most observant bystander would have noticed Hank pressing fifty dollars into Goldie’s palm, receiving in return a small portable radio in black leather, about the size of a Bible, which he tucked under his shirt.
    “Batteries?” Hank asked.
    And Goldie, a loose-limbed kid as slick as a whip, looked off into the distance and said, “Everything’s cool.”
    Without another word, Hank continued threading his way inside the cold stone fortress, up granite ramps that had been rutted by the footfall of misery, down dank corridors and up three flights of metal stairs to his cell. His heart raced like a getaway car. He was asking for trouble. No music allowed outside of specified hours, and certainly no music allowed in the cells. Nappy Whitlock got himself ten days in solitary for the same thing.
    Much later, after lights out, Hank worked up the nerve to take his new possession out of hiding. He crouched on the floor between the toilet and his bed. He uncoiled a thin black wire, at the end of which was a small plastic nub that he nestled in his ear. Then he turned on the radio and extended the long chrome antenna, tilting it this way and that. But all he got was static, un-differentiated mostly, here and there thickening into larger clumps of noise. The stone, he figured. Nothing could penetrate it. Fifty bucks shot to hell.
    He tucked the radio inside his mattress where no one would find it. Then he rolled onto the bed and buried his face beneath his pillow. It was the racket he couldn’t stand. And the light. After all this time it still bothered him. He’d been a country boy once. He knew quiet. He knew darkness. He knew open ground and arching sky, and it was nothing like this. So after an hour or so of tossing and turning, he walked to his cell door and pressed his face against the metal bars. They felt cool against his skin. He could hear the guards playing gin on the second level. Closer at hand, Nelson Green’s whispered prayers for salvation were punctuated by the moans of Moe Fletcher, their primitive duet sung against a ceaselesschorus of coughing and crying and the babble of sleep-talk.
    The main cellblock was a perfect square, four storeys high, with twenty cells on each side, on each level. Each cell faced a narrow walkway the guards patrolled, a waist-high railing for safety, and beyond that a vast