Cage Keeper And Other Stories

The Cage Keeper For Mac 1 It's midnight in December, an hour past lights out, and I'm walking the hall of the women's wing. I open the doors fast so the hinges don't squeak and I run the beam of my flashlight over the beds. I try not to shine it in anybody's face while they're sleeping but sometimes I have to if their hair is in the way or something. They don't like that. Emma, this black woman from the projects of east Denver, she's mean; once I shined the light in her eyes and she threw her clock radio at me, yelled something like, "Get that damn light outta my face." I had to put her on restriction and cancel four of her weekend furloughs for that. Emma has ten kids and I guess I'm supposed to feel sorry for her when she can't get back to Denver to see them after throwing a radio at me. Fact is, I'm not too popular around here anyway. Leon is, though. Leon's black and he lifts weights down at a gym near the university here in Boulder. His father's a realtor like mine, so he didn't grow up poor. And he doesn't let any of the black inmates come across with their "Hey, brother" malarkey either. Usually, when they start a sentence like that with him, they're trying to butter him up for some favor or another and Leon knows it. But he just puts his finger to their chest lightly and says, "Don't be giving me no brother shit, Clay. Now go wash down the mess hall walls." But he is more popular than I am. Not that I'm very worried about it, because I'm not. Like my older brother, Mark, the House Director, said to us in a meeting once: "If the inmates like you too much, then you're not doing your job properly." Leon does his job; it's just that he looks at these people differently than I do. We talked about this over a couple beers at The Rhino once after our four p.m. to one a.m. shift. He said that it's probably because he's black that he roots for the underdog. Me. I don't look at it that way; I don't believe that all convicted adult felons are underdogs. Plus, I have always felt for the person who just had their car stolen, or was mugged or raped or even killed. Those are the ones I feel sorry for. And I guess even though Leon and I approach our jobs in pretty much the same way, which is rule enforcer first, someone to talk to second, the inmates must pick up on this philosophical difference somehow. It's amazing how they can do that. Like the last time we came out of a staff meeting after having just decided to initiate a surprise room-to-room search for contraband. When we got upstairs most everybody was in their rooms organizing things, cleaning up, and I'm sure, tossing an item or two out the window into the alley. Leon says somebody had to have listened in on us, though if they're caught doing that they could lose their privileges for a month, but I don't think so. I'm beginning to think they can just pick up on these things; the way certain kinds of animals can smell a human a long way off in the distance, they feel us coming with our contraband-evidence bags, our Scotch tape, and red ball-point pens. I finish checking the west end of the women's wing, close the door to Paulina's room, then mark a check beside her name on my clipboard. I walk down the hall and with the red plastic end of my flashlight, I knock once on Maggie Nickerson's door. I go in then shine the light down at the base of her bed. Her old face is sunk into the soft part of the pillow and her blue sleeping cap is pulled tightly over her scalp. There is gray in the auburn hair at her temples. When I first started working here, I thought she was a cleaning lady or something. I didn't know then that all the inmates did the cleaning themselves. Every time I saw her she had a mop or a broom or a dustcloth in her hand. Around the first or second week of November I asked her how a young single guy like me was going to cook a turkey by himself. She didn't say anything at the time, jusDubus, Andre, III is the author of 'Cage Keeper And Other Stories' with ISBN 9780375727740 and ISBN 0375727744.