The Importance of a Piece of Paper: Stories by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Author:Jimmy Santiago Baca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2004-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Enemies

Chancla, Boogey, and Bomber had one thing in common—they all wanted to kill each other. None of them had had a visit in the four and a half years they had been down in the dungeon. They had no wives, no children, they didn’t know where their parents were, and they hadn’t seen their brothers and sisters in years. They could die tomorrow and no one would grieve them, no one would miss them, no one would even know they had lived and been on earth.

Even the prison administration had forgotten them. There were only two people who had them on their radar: the old brittle-boned tier guard who seemed on the verge of crumbling when he slowly rose from his chair in the corner to unlock their cells—once a week to give them a shower and once a week for an hour of exercise in the cage behind the dungeon—and the obese chow guard who carted in their meals—three times a day, sliding their pewter trays under the cell bars and returning an hour later to pick the trays off the landing floor where they had settled after the three convicts hurled them against the wall.

They were like three warriors from three warring clans stranded on an island who had long ago given up hope of ever rejoining their tribes or being rescued. It had been four and a half years since they had worn clothes. They rose and ate and slept and paced their cells in their boxer shorts. This was their world, day in, day out, and it never varied. Minutes crept by monotonously, and the three convicts would stare at the bars, amused by the rats racing by to snatch away morsels of the crusty leftovers stuck to the wall; by the spiders weaving cobweb after cobweb in the protective mesh screen covering the old ceiling lightbulbs. For at least one hour a day the men would stand clutching the bars of the cell, looking out on the tier, pushing their mouths into the space between the bars, and growling how they were going to kill each other.

When the warden first sent them down to the dungeon, Boogey was in the Black X gang and had already been in prison for eight years. He was twenty-nine years old, out of Georgia, and angled like a plow blade. He looked like Mike Tyson—square jaw, beady dark eyes set wide apart, shoulders brawny as a draft horse harnessed in a quarry pit. He lived with a constant craving to crush his granite cell to dust, and the fact that he could not do it caused his fury to course down from his red-clay heart through his blood vessels, intestines, and stomach. It simmered through his features and his gestures glimmered dangerously with rage in the sweltering dungeon.

Bomber was a skinhead and an expert at making bombs. The other two were constantly goading him, speculating that a bomb must have gone off in his mouth because his teeth were worse than rusty railroad spikes.

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