The Street Sweeper (8 page)

The standing friend had not by any measure been desperate to sit down and when the little girl actively volunteered her seat to him he was instantly arrested by her charm, her grace, her politeness, and by the warmth of her personality. She had delivered all this with the manner of her offer and with something inside her she was too young to realise she had and certainly too young to name. After engaging her in conversation for a few minutes he asked her whether she was travelling alone. Unfazed by this question, the young girl with the braided hair tied tight with red ribbons waved her hand in the direction of the other end of the bus as if to indicate she was not travelling alone. At this the man seemed relieved.

A stop or two after this, the young girl moved towards the exit. There were two older women, somewhere in their sixties, standing with her
by the exit. They had made their way from the front of the bus. She talked freely to them and an observer of the whole scene could have been forgiven for thinking that one of these women was the little girl’s grandmother. The two women in their sixties and the young girl were among a number of passengers who got off at the next stop. Through the still open door it was possible to hear one of the women – they were in the street by then – ask the girl, ‘Are you travelling alone, dear?’

There was a story Lamont had been told in Mid-Orange about a certain cat-loving Corrections Officer who had worked there some years before Lamont’s time.

The CO had found a prisoner feeding cats that had strayed into the prison. Not only did he not write him a ticket that would have gone on the cat-feeding prisoner’s record, he also let him continue feeding the cats. Then some of the other prisoners started helping this prisoner and the CO, seeing the effect caring for the cats had on these often embittered, angry men, started bringing bags of dry cat food into the prison to help them. Then one day, when the wrong CO caught the wrong prisoner with a bag of the dry cat food, all hell broke loose and what had been tolerated till then no longer was.

After a while there were not so many cats finding their way into Mid-Orange. But somebody in authority must have noticed the effect taking care of the cats was having on those prisoners involved because, by the time Lamont had been transferred from Woodbourne to Mid-Orange, a program had been established for prisoners to care for animals. It involved dogs, not cats, and the prisoners weren’t simply feeding the dogs, they were training them. ‘Puppies Behind Bars’, the program was called. Prisoners were being taught to train dogs to be guide dogs for the blind. After September 11, some dogs were even trained for the New York Police Department and for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They were trained to sniff for explosives. Of course the dogs were not exposed to explosives in the prison but much of the training was the same as that for guide dogs. They needed to be socialised, taught how to be around people, and how to follow instructions even in situations of stress. So did the dogs.

Like many of the prisoners, Lamont had applied to work in the dog program. But hardly anybody got the chance to work in that detail. It was a feel-good story. It was even a true story. But it didn’t alter the fact that most of the programs existed in name only for the vast bulk of the Mid-Orange prison population. There just weren’t enough places in any of the programs so you put your name down and waited like you waited for everything else. If you had something to trade or to sell, or you were well connected, you received preferential treatment. The saying went, ‘It’s not who you
know
but who you
blow.’

‘Well, you gots to be anatomically gifted one way or the other,’ Numbers had explained to Lamont not long after Lamont had been transferred from Woodbourne to Mid-Orange, just as Numbers himself had been some time earlier. When Lamont sought clarification Numbers tried to explain.

‘Well now, how else a
straight
brother gonna know how to give head? There’s “trial and error”, I guess, but you don’t wanna go gettin’
that
wrong. And even “trial and error” don’t apply at the other end. Know what I’m saying?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, there’s some who so sensitive down there they tear up every second time they take a dump. These brothers frightened of roughage. But with some brothers it just slide up nice and easy like they was born already with Vaseline up there. So when the CO spreads your cheeks after a contact visit from family and such, this man can breathe easy knowing these dumb-ass lazy COs ain’t gonna go that far up inside of him. Now
that
man truly blessed. He a rich man inside; a living, breathing, walking Fort Knox. Can’t no one
learn
that. It’s a gift from God.’

Lamont was not so anatomically, or otherwise, blessed. He put his name down for the puppy program just as he did for plumbing, carpentry and horticulture. He got none of them. Like almost half the prisoners in Mid-Orange he worked as a porter keeping the prison clean, sweeping up cigarette butts and other garbage the prisoners had left. But it was the dog program he’d really wanted to be in, particularly after he’d caught sight of a handful of other prisoners in the distance walking and then grooming some Labs not much older than puppies. Privately he’d prided
himself on his capacity to limit his wants and expectations. That seemed to him the best way to survive his sentence. Whatever comfort even cigarettes might have provided he refused to smoke them in order to avoid being addicted to a currency he would have to trade for. But seeing the dogs hurt him unexpectedly. It cut through him.

He wondered if he would ever again hold his daughter in his arms, squeeze her tight, rock her to sleep. He told himself he would. He promised himself. What did she look like now? Did his daughter look like him? Did she look like her mother or like the combination of them that she was? Often in prison when he caught sight of his own reflection he tried to imagine different combinations of his face and that of his daughter’s mother merging into the face of a little girl. He was in the yard at Mid-Orange sweeping up over by a puddle one day in spring when he thought for a moment that he had it perfectly. There in the puddle, as he narrowed his eyes to a squint, was finally, completely still, a little girl’s face. That was probably how she looked. Had to be. He could summon up the image again if only he could find and hold a clear reflection of himself.

‘Three years,’ Numbers pronounced. ‘No one come no more after three years. They give up on you … like you dead. You can cross Christmas off of your calendar too. Rip it out.’

‘What’s that “three years” bullshit?’ Lamont asked.

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Ain’t no law say people don’t visit after three years.’

‘It’s a law o’ averages, Lamont.’

‘Well, if it’s an average then some people stop coming
before
three years up and some still coming
after
three years, right? That’s what average means.’

‘I guess,’ Numbers conceded before adding, ‘I ain’t never met no one here above average like that.’

Lamont spent the first three years of his six-year sentence at Woodbourne and the last three years at Mid-Orange. Of those few who came to see him from time to time at Woodbourne, it was only his grandmother who stayed the more than three-year course and continued to visit him at Mid-Orange. She wasn’t able to come very often
because of her work as a kitchen hand and the distance from Co-op City. And she was elderly and not well. His cousin Michelle visited him in Mid-Orange once.

‘One good thing ‘bout Mid-Orange,’ Numbers told him when they re-met at the beginning of Lamont’s time there, ‘they got four coffee shops within a five-mile radius. That’s more ‘n usual for your average medium-security country correctional facility. Increase the chances someone come visit you. Problem is … they all Dunkin’ Donuts. No one drive two hours eat that shit.’

During the early part of Lamont’s time at Woodbourne some of the people from his neighbourhood made the trek to visit him. His old friend Michael couldn’t come because he was serving time somewhere else. Michael had been the one to get Lamont to drive his van to the liquor store for what Lamont hadn’t realised would become an armed robbery, the one for which he’d serve six years. But Michael’s younger brother, who had only ever been an acquaintance, came quite a few times in the beginning. Lamont didn’t understand why he was coming. He wasn’t an unfriendly young man but he was a good deal younger and clearly didn’t enjoy coming and, in any case, he had Michael, his own brother, to visit in another prison if he needed an excuse to visit a prison. He didn’t like making conversation for conversation’s sake much more than Lamont did but he came anyway and asked the usual questions with the usual, maybe even more than usual, discomfort.

After a while it became clear to Lamont that Michael’s brother was coming because of Michael, possibly even on his instructions. That was the only explanation he could find. Lamont reasoned that Michael had never meant for him to become involved in the robbery. He himself had fallen under the influence of a much younger man, a reckless man with an addiction and a gun and a way of talking, a way of being, that made certain people want to be around him. The idea of robbing the liquor store was the younger man’s and he’d arrived at it only once Lamont had driven them to the liquor store. Michael said that he hadn’t known about it until he and the younger man had left Lamont in the van and gone into the store. Had Michael gone along with it? From the liquor store’s security video footage it looked as though he had. The younger man had
the gun on him. Michael hadn’t known. That’s what he said. There was hardly any interval between the younger man’s conception of the plan and its execution. He was already carrying the gun. They had Lamont’s van. It must have seemed to the younger man too good an opportunity to pass up. So, Lamont figured, Michael’s younger brother had to be visiting him for Michael. It was an attempt to make things right as much as possible for the mess he’d unintentionally got him into, given he wasn’t in a position to send him any money.

On the other hand, Lamont realised, it was also possible that Michael had set him up, that he and the younger man with the gun had planned all along to rob the liquor store without telling Lamont and then count on Lamont to drive them away. The simplicity of that hypothesis gave it a certain attractiveness. Lamont could drive and he had his own van. Not everyone in the neighbourhood had their own vehicle. This could have been why Michael had brought Lamont to meet the young gun-owner.

It was a possibility Lamont did not entertain for very long. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that Michael had tricked him, not like this. It seemed more likely to him that when the kid decided on the spur of the moment to rob the store, Michael, not wanting to court his derision and put to risk a new and untested acquaintance, had abandoned all reason, not to mention a friendship that was almost as old as he was.

Michael too had grown up in Co-op City and they had been friends since grade school. Michael’s mother had permitted him to go to Lamont’s place after school even though she knew Lamont’s grandmother would still be at work. She trusted Lamont. The two of them would grab a Hawaiian Punch or a High-C from the refrigerator and watch
Looney Tunes
, the
Electric Company
, old Tom and Jerry or Rocky and Bullwinkle, which Lamont enjoyed more than Michael. Lamont had always been more comfortable than Michael keeping his own company. Lamont’s apparent self-sufficiency was something Michael had often felt envious of without knowing that this was what he was feeling. It had only made him value Lamont’s time and attention all the more.

They had learned to ride their bikes at the same time and had ridden them together on the bike path along the Greenway all the way from Section 1 to Section 4 to the movie theatre or the Baskin-Robbins
ice-cream store. They even spent time in the pet store choosing the pets they’d have bought if either of them had been permitted to keep a pet. When they got a little older and a little braver they went further to Section 5, the newest outlying section, taking what was called ‘Killer Curve’ to get there. Michael had once lost control on ‘Killer Curve’, going over the handlebars and requiring five stitches in his chest. It was Lamont who had taken care of everything. Afraid to call Michael’s house for fear of getting him into trouble with his sometimes volatile mother and with his own grandmother still at work, he called his cousin, Michelle, from a payphone.

Although she was only two years older, her role in Lamont’s life ranged between that of a friend and that of an older sister, according to the demands of the situation. When Michelle was convinced it wasn’t a prank she said she would call an ambulance and told Lamont to stay with him. She arrived there herself on her bike before the ambulance arrived. She saw Lamont sitting beside Michael with his jacket draped across Michael’s chest. The two of them went to the ER with Michael. While Michael was getting stitches in his chest, Lamont asked Michelle how she could have thought even for a moment that his call could have been a prank. If it
had
been a prank, it would have been Michael who had put him up to it, Michelle had explained as they waited at the hospital. He was about to protest that her explanation unfairly impugned his friend’s character when he remembered a couple of instances she could use to substantiate her point if she needed to so he didn’t press it, even though, in general, Michael had never really been able to exercise much influence over him. Sometimes he had done things out of boredom that he regretted but this was hardly due to Michael’s influence. It had just been that Michael happened to have been there at the time.

It had been with Michael that Lamont had tasted the thrill of shoplifting at Cappy’s, the local stationery store. Lamont liked to read the magazines but Michael had always been more interested in the candy. Michael was the first to steal and it had been candy, Now and Laters and Hershey Bars he’d stolen. Lamont had had his head buried in a magazine and hadn’t known what Michael was doing until they’d left the store. Michael had said he had to try. No one saw a thing. It was too
easy not to at least give it a try. The candy tasted better when you took it, Michael said. They’d ridden furiously to the Pine Island playground near Building Five and eaten the candy by the swings. But it hadn’t tasted better to Lamont. On the contrary, the chocolate didn’t seem as rich. Its taste was thinner on his tongue and on the roof of his mouth. It was as though someone had taken some of the chocolate out of the chocolate, as though the chocolate had been corrupted by shame. It had never really occurred to him before that his actions could dilute what should have been a standard almost manufacturer-guaranteed reward.