"Hello," said Laura. "I love you too. What feels weird?"
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe the weather. It feels like if we could only get a storm, everything would be okay."
"It's nice here," she said. "The last of the leaves haven't quite fallen. If we don't get a storm, you'll be able to see them when you get home."
"Five days," said Shadow.
"A hundred and twenty hours, and then you come home," she said.
"Everything okay there? Nothing wrong?"
"Everything's fine. I'm seeing Robbie tonight. We're planning your surprise welcome-home party."
"Surprise party?"
"Of course. You don't know anything about it, do you?"
"Not a thing."
"That's my husband," she said. Shadow realized that he was smiling. He had been inside for three years, but she could still make him smile.
"Love you, babes," said Shadow.
"Love you, puppy," said Laura.
Shadow put down the phone.
When they got married Laura told Shadow that she wanted a puppy, but their landlord had pointed out they weren't allowed pets under the terms of their lease. "Hey," Shadow had said, "I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet there's nothing a puppy can do I can't do!" And he picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all and began to lick her nose while she giggled and shrieked, and then he carried her to the bed.
In the food hall Sam Fetisher sidled over to Shadow and smiled, showing his old teeth. He sat down beside Shadow and began to eat his macaroni and cheese.
"We got to talk," said Sam Fetisher.
Sam Fetisher was one of the blackest men that Shadow had ever seen. He might have been sixty. He might have been eighty. Then again, Shadow had met thirty-year-old crackheads who looked older than Sam Fetisher.
"Mm?" said Shadow.
"Storm's on the way," said Sam.
"Feels like it," said Shadow. "Maybe it'll snow soon."
"Not that kind of storm. Bigger storm than that coming. I tell you, boy, you're better off in here than out on the street when the big storm comes."
"Done my time," said Shadow. "Friday, I'm gone."
Sam Fetisher stared at Shadow. "Where you from?" he asked.
"Eagle Point. Indiana."
"You're a lying fuck," said Sam Fetisher. "I mean originally. Where are your folks from?"
"Chicago," said Shadow. His mother had lived in Chicago as a girl, and she had died there, half a lifetime ago.
"Like I said. Big storm coming. Keep your head down, Shadow-boy. It's like…what do they call those things continents ride around on? Some kind of plates?"
"Tectonic plates?" Shadow hazarded.
"That's it. Tectonic plates. It's like when they go riding, when North America goes skidding into South America, you don't want to be in the middle. You dig me?"
"Not even a little."
One brown eye closed in a slow wink. "Hell, don't say I didn't warn you," said Sam Fetisher, and he spooned a trembling lump of orange Jell-O into his mouth.
"I won't."
Shadow spent the night half-awake, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to his new cellmate grunt and snore in the bunk below him. Several cells away a man whined and howled and sobbed like an animal, and from time to time someone would scream at him to shut the f**k up. Shadow tried not to hear. He let the empty minutes wash over him, lonely and slow.
Two days to go. Forty-eight hours, starting with oatmeal and prison coffee, and a guard named Wilson who tapped Shadow harder than he had to on the shoulder and said, "Shadow? This way."
Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit. The two men walked more or less side by side, feet echoing on metal and concrete.
Shadow tasted fear in the back of his throat, bitter as old coffee. The bad thing was happening…
There was a voice in the back of his head whispering that they were going to slap another year onto his sentence, drop him into solitary, cut off his hands, cut off his head. He told himself he was being stupid, but his heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest.
"I don't get you, Shadow," said Wilson, as they walked.
"What's not to get, sir?"
"You. You're too f**king quiet. Too polite. You wait like the old guys, but you're what? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight?"
"Thirty-two, sir."
"And what are you? A spic? A gypsy?"
"Not that I know of, sir. Maybe."
"Maybe you got nigger blood in you. You got nigger blood in you, Shadow?"
"Could be, sir." Shadow stood tall and looked straight ahead, and concentrated on not allowing himself to be riled by this man.
"Yeah? Well, all I know is, you f**king spook me." Wilson had sandy blond hair and a sandy blond face and a sandy blond smile. "You leaving us soon."
"Hope so, sir."
They walked through a couple of checkpoints. Wilson showed his ID each time. Up a set of stairs, and they were standing outside the prison warden's office. It had the prison warden's name-G. Patterson-on the door in black letters, and beside the door, a miniature traffic light.
The top light burned red.
Wilson pressed a button below the traffic light.
They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes. Shadow tried to tell himself that everything was all right, that on Friday morning he'd be on the plane up to Eagle Point, but he did not believe it himself.
The red light went out and the green light went on, and Wilson opened the door. They went inside.
Shadow had seen the warden a handful of times in the last three years. Once he had been showing a politician around. Once, during a lockdown, the warden had spoken to them in groups of a hundred, telling them that the prison was overcrowded, and that, since it would remain overcrowded, they had better get used to it.
Up close, Patterson looked worse. His face was oblong, with gray hair cut into a military bristle cut. He smelled of Old Spice. Behind him was a shelf of books, each with the word Prison in the title; his desk was perfectly clean, empty but for a telephone and a tear-off-the-pages Far Side calendar. He had a hearing aid in his right ear.
"Please, sit down."
Shadow sat down. Wilson stood behind him.
The warden opened a desk drawer and took out a file, placed it on his desk.
"Says here you were sentenced to six years for aggravated assault and battery. You've served three years. You were due to be released on Friday."
Were? Shadow felt his stomach lurch inside him. He wondered how much longer he was going to have to serve-another year? Two years? All three? All he said was "Yes, sir."
The warden licked his lips. "What did you say?"
"I said, 'Yes, sir.' "
"Shadow, we're going to be releasing you later this afternoon. You'll be getting out a couple of days early." Shadow nodded, and he waited for the other shoe to drop. The warden looked down at the paper on his desk. "This came from the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Eagle Point…Your wife. She died in the early hours of this morning. It was an automobile accident. I'm sorry."
Shadow nodded once more.
Wilson walked him back to his cell, not saying anything. He unlocked the cell door and let Shadow in. Then he said, "It's like one of them good news, bad news jokes, isn't it? Good news, we're letting you out early, bad news, your wife is dead." He laughed, as if it were genuinely funny.
Shadow said nothing at all.
Numbly, he packed up his possessions, gave most of them away. He left behind Low Key's Herodotus and the book of coin tricks, and, with a momentary pang, he abandoned the blank metal disks be had smuggled out of the workshop, which had served him for coins. There would be coins, real coins, on the outside. He shaved. He dressed in civilian clothes. He walked through door after door, knowing that he would never walk back through them again, feeling empty inside.
The rain had started to gust from the gray sky, a freezing rain. Pellets of ice stung Shadow's face, while the rain soaked the thin overcoat and they walked toward the yellow ex-school bus that would take them to the nearest city.
By the time they got to the bus they were soaked. Eight of them were leaving. Fifteen hundred still inside. Shadow sat on the bus and shivered until the heaters started working, wondering what he was doing, where he would go now.
Ghost images filled his head, unbidden. In his imagination he was leaving another prison, long ago.
He had been imprisoned in a lightless room for far too long: his beard was wild and his hair was a tangle. The guards had walked him down a gray stone stairway and out into a plaza filled with brightly colored things, with people and with objects. It was a market day and he was dazzled by the noise and the color, squinting at the sunlight that filled the square, smelling the salt-wet air and all the good things of the market, and on his left the sun glittered from the water…
The bus shuddered to a halt at a red light.
The wind howled about the bus, and the wipers slooshed heavily back and forth across the windshield, smearing the city into a red and yellow neon wetness. It was early afternoon, but it looked like night through the glass.
"Shit," said the man in the seat behind Shadow, rubbing the condensation from the window with his hand, staring at a wet figure hurrying down the sidewalk. "There's p**sy out there."
Shadow swallowed. It occurred to him that he had not cried yet-had in fact felt nothing at all. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing.
He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch he'd shared a cell with when he'd first been put inside, who told Shadow how he'd once got out after five years behind bars with one hundred dollars and a ticket to Seattle, where his sister lived.
Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his driver's license.
He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid as a driver's license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and damn it, who else did she think he was, if he wasn't him?
She said she'd thank him to keep his voice down.
He told her to give him a f**king boarding pass, or she was going to regret it, and that he wasn't going to be disrespected. You don't let people disrespect you in prison.
Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of an altercation.
The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job.
And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don't piss off people who work in airports.
"Are you sure it's not something like 'The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment'?" said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story.