prisoners, keeplocks all, were involved in a variety of unorthodox occupations. In the cell nearest Cholly an albino Negro with zebra stripes tatted over his hairless scalp was seated on his bunk, stringing an instrument that appeared to have been fashioned from half of a giant avocado. Next to him a Red Indian, a rainbow assortment of Sharpies poking out of his bandanna in lieu of a feather headdress, was sitting on the john with his pants around his ankles, limning the margins of a large open book. Next door to him a gawky yahoo with skin like cooked oatmeal—whom Cholly identified as a notorious pedophile—was hanging pink construction paper between curved cardboard struts, turning his cell into a diorama that depicted the ribbed belly of a beast. A brother in a conical cap decorated with stars and crescents poured pearl-colored gunk into a narrow flask and watched it slide around a helical tube of the type used to force-feed cons on a hunger strike. The tube was fixed to a syringe in which the fluid concluded as a drop of liquid gold. A bearded senior in a skullcap pounded shoe leather at an iron last; a splay-nosed gang potentate put the finishing touches on a pair of wings he’d carved from a block of ice, the ice apparently manufactured in his own dunker contraption assembled from scrounged odds and ends. Of course, whatever they created was only temporary; the goon squads would invade their cells and destroy what they didn’t confiscate, a prospect that did nothing to dispel the rapt concentration with which each man bent to his craft. As spellbinding as their occupations, though, was the silence (of all but the wind) that seemed to neutralize the commotion from the other tiers, a silence so complete as to suggest it was itself a kind of contraband smuggled into the riotous big house.
Alien as it was, the atmosphere on Tier 3 impressed Cholly as a place he had experienced before, though perhaps not in his current life. Then slapping his brow, he turned around and revisited the cell where the old man, a filthy apron pulled over his work shirt and scrubs, sat laboring at his cobbler’s bench, where the scent of leather and dye supplanted the usual urine-and-stiff-socks taint of the galleries. Becoming slowly aware of his observer, the old man lifted his smoke-gray head and exclaimed with a near toothless grin, “Cholly Sidepocket, mayn schwartze!” a puff of steam escaping his lips with every syllable.
Said Cholly regretfully, “I ain’t belong to you no more.”
The rabbi stood up and approached the bars with a buoyant, loping step; stir, it seemed, had done him a world of good. He was holding the grainy upper of the brogan he’d been working on by a tongue that lolled from its leather vamp. Then pointing to the floppy topsole with the wooden mallet in his other hand, he croaked, “This is the earth, and this,” nudging the heel with a crooked pinkie, “is hashamayim, the world to come.” Then he tapped with the mallet the bottom of the topsole that dangled its row of hobnails like a yawning jaw, joining it somewhat sloppily to the ill-made upper dripping latex cement like mayonnaise between crusts of bread.
“A shiddach!” he proclaimed with pride. “A match!”
At that Cholly felt the barrel vault of his chest give way and cave in. “Ol’ man, you crazeh as evah,” he managed through a single bearlike sob. The rabbi stuck a liver-spotted fist through the bars and bumped his knuckles against the black man’s thick fingers, still wrapped around the handle of his mop. “Sprankle me, honey gee dawg,” he piped, and having wrenched from his friend a lacerated chuckle, went on to explain: “Everyone that he enters here must abandon hope. But to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope, is given to them a secret medicine. Shah,” placing a bony finger to his lips, “if they knew this, the hopers, they will feel they have been cheated.”
Back on his unit Cholly began to calculate the ways he might get himself transferred to C Block, Tier 3. He knew that the process could take time; he’d have to stay on the prowl, ride it out, maybe get up off a little info and tighten his game. But he also knew that, while you might age rapidly in the joint, and die a thousand deaths, time itself stood still. Time, so to speak, was on ice.