-The faint soul demurs-
~1~
Late autumn leaves that had drifted in from the surrounding hills would occasionally come to life, stir crablike and scrape across the concrete surface of the prison yard.
Attorney Bud Schultz entered the main gate along with a small number of visitors. He had come early at 8:30 A.M., just after prisoners' roll call, so that he wouldn't have to wait long to see his client, Ben None.
The fat attorney had slack lips and drooping eyelids that hinted at relaxed morals, a paunch over his belt where his grey suit jacket hung open. His narrow-brimmed hat was slanted back from his forehead.
After passing through several gates with the rest, he was given the once over with a metal detector after he placed his keys, pen, watch, lighter, loose change and a pack of cigarettes in a lock box. He was allowed to keep his belt. He presented his attorney registration card and photo ID, then was waved on through to the visitors' unit for prisoners held in segregation. This was a grey room. On one side was a bank of cubicles enclosing bullet proof glass that separated the prisoners from the visitors. Black phones clung like leeches from the wall in each one.
Overhead, long fluorescent tubes created a harsh clinical tone. The green linoleum floor had a worn path toward the center and was scuffed to a grayish-white in each cubicle.
Shultz took a seat in #3. The prisoners had not come in yet. He placed his soft hands on the desk-like shelf at the base of the window and waited. He had never met Ben None before, and he wonder what such a man would look like. He had been told that None had spent almost ten years in segregation, locked in an eight by six foot windowless cell furnished with only a steel sink-toilet combo and a steel bunk bolted to the wall with a thin foam mattress. Shultz shuddered to think how filthy segregation cells were since they were never cleaned. Unheated in the winter, boiling hot in the summer. A grimace tightened the loose fat of his face as he recalled hearing how rats and mice ran freely over concrete floors that were often awash with feces that ran off from plugged toilets. No man could stay completely sane in such an environment. Suicide was a frequent avenue of escape.
Troublemakers--those who flaunted their hatred of authority and those who fomented rebellion--wound up in isolation or segregation. Others, however, who represented no real threat to the prison system wound up in segregation merely as a demonstration by prison authorities that they held the power of life and death in their hands without any restraints. Since segregation was not considered punishment, a prisoner's petition for a 602, a redress of grievances, would always go unanswered.
Shultz smiled. Prison was a microcosm of the world. The good, the bad, and the ugly were all subject to the vagaries of existence. The only ones who survived in segregation were the ubermen. Those rare beings who somehow drew strength from adversity.
Schultz knew little of Ben None, but he knew None had survived ten years, there bouts, in conditions guaranteed to destroy the strongest of men. Whether he was still sane or not was the question. That was Schultz's mission: to find out. A mission that would have been more proper for a psychiatrist or a psychologists. But then, they were not as easy to come by as a sleazy lawyer with a short memory who would do anything for a buck and not ask questions.
Schultz glanced at his wrist, then remembered he wasn't wearing his watch. He was hungry. He'd skipped breakfast in order to be early. His stomach was growling for bacon and eggs, a stack of hot, buttery pancakes and a steaming cup of coffee followed with a smoke.
It shouldn't take long with None, he thought. Then he could scoot his butt down the hill to that nice little family restaurant in the valley that he'd noticed coming up.
A door opened on the prisoners' side of the glass. Orange coveralls were escorted in by muscular guards. All were wearing a 4 piece. The third prisoner, a man of medium height and build with tired cobalt blue eyes in a refined chiseled face, took a seat across from Shultz.
It was a once handsome face that was now drained and haggard; the jaw covered in a light stubble; the blond hair on his head long and unruly. Shultz stared at the hands resting on the shelf across from him. They were long and slender, the hands of an artist.
In his thirty some years of lawyering, Shultz had known all the various criminal low lifes. You couldn't always tell what a man was from his looks. Monstrous looking men could be choirboys, and fair-haired choirboys could be monsters. The greenish-blue eyes of Ben None held something of the latter. It was subtle, but Shultz had seen it before. Something dark behind the light. An indefinable quality that proclaimed this is a man you don't fuck with. It would be missed by most people, but Shultz had seen it before. It belonged to those who had not joined the human race. Those who would never follow any will but their own.
Shultz rubbed his nose, then picked up the phone. It is easy to decide who is insane in the loony sense. They don't matter. But those who are different from us, those who do not believe as we do, they are the really dangerous ones. Dangerous because they are not insane.
"Ben None?"
The weary head nodded. His expression unexpectant.
"I'm Bud Schultz, an attorney. I've been appointed to tell you that you will be coming up for a parole hearing in two weeks."
None's eyes lowered for a moment, then he looked up, the face coldly somber, immutable. "How's that? I haven't served even a third of my sentence."
"Doesn't matter. Somebody with a lot of pull wants you out. It's all being arranged . . . anonymously. I don't even know who." Shultz took an envelope from the inside pocket of his coat and waved it at the guard stationed nearby. Then looked back at None. "He'll make you a photo copy of the papers inside. I'm told people sometimes lace paper with acid." He sighed. "Any how, the answers to the questions they'll ask you at the hearing are in here. Memorize them. Any questions?"
"Should I tell them I've found Jesus?"
Shultz stood up and buttoned his coat. "Oh, do. They love that."
~2~
There was a widescreen TV on the wall with a camera on top. On either side were some kind of four foot tall plastic jungle-like plants with large drooping leaves. Facing the screen was a metal folding chair. None hobbled into the hearing room hindered by a 4-piece: handcuffs, waist chains and leg irons followed by two hefty guards and the Case Commissioner.
He sat down in the chair.
The screen was on showing the state seal. Fifteen minutes late the screen fluttered revealing a man and a woman, roughly in their thirties, sitting behind a polished wood table. The man had a meaty, milk-fed face and wore gold framed glasses. Bald on top, hair combed over. The woman also wore gold-framed glasses fitted to a long schnoz. The mouth was small, the lips thin, the chin pointed. The faces of both had the prim constipated expression of the highly moral.
The man placed his hands together on top of the table next to a manila file and smiled perfunctorily. "Hello, Ben. I'm Jim Biglow and my associate is Mary Davenport. We are your Hearing Examiners on the staff of the Parole Commission. What we decide based on your testimony will determine whether or not you will be granted parole."
He paused to withdraw some papers from the file.
"Ben, according to our records you claimed justifiable homicide at your trial in the deaths of three men in a bar room altercation. Is that still your contention?"
"No, sir, Mr. Biglow, sir. It certainly isn't. I was a young hot head who couldn't control his temper. I have had many sobering years to reflect on my misdeed and can only express my greatest heartfelt sorrow for what I did. I can only stress that I am no longer that young foolish hot head. I have matured and in my maturity acquired wisdom and patience. As the good book says, 'A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control."
