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“You lucky Ray Ray don’t drive this run,” Lenny the Lookout said. He was a skinny white guy with dirty blond hair and skin something like an albino crocodile hide.
“Why’s that?”
“ ’Cause you busted his ass more than any other cop. He told me that you could never get on this bus.”
“And?”
“I won’t tell if you won’t. That’ll be seventeen-fifty.”
“You goin’ ta see ya wife?” a plump black woman with a beautiful face asked me. She had the window seat and I the aisle.
“A friend of a friend. He can’t be seen up there and so I deliver the message.”
“Conjugal visit?”
“I don’t think my friend would appreciate that.”
“He don’t have to know,” the brown-faced Aphrodite explained. “I mean if her man can’t come up and give her what she needs he should be happy he got a friend that’a do that for him.”
“If he could be happy about that, then he wouldn’t be in so much trouble that he can’t be seen.”
“He don’t have to know,” she said again.
“Leonard Pillar,” I said, extending a hand.
“Zenobia Price,” she replied, accepting the proffered hand. “I been up to see my sister’s husband in Ossining five times. She in jail for the same robbery up here.”
“What would you do if your man came up to service your sister?”
She thought a moment and then grinned. The gap-toothed smile reminded me that the letter from Minnesota had re-sexualized me.
“I’d cut off his dick, take Athena’s kids, and move to Lake Tahoe—the Nevada side, where I could deal cards for a livin’.”
Before we got off the bus Zenobia gave me her phone number and I gave her one that might seem like it was connected to me.
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was a group of old brick buildings separated from the world by high wire fences and enough razor wire to protect Fort Knox.
I let Zenobia enter before me because I didn’t want her to hear my real name. I lied about who I was going to see and my name because I wanted to linger someplace with Zenobia Price. I wanted to smell her sweat, but I knew that I had to hold back some or soon I’d be in some deconsecrated crypt, stacked with strangers and eaten by rats.
“Name?” the front-gate lookout asked. Even though she was sitting, I could see that she was tall; her skin, white like aged ivory. The sentry did not smile within the confines of the prison, but she didn’t seem dour.
“Joe Oliver.”
“Inmate you’re coming to see including her number and the number we gave allowing your visit.”
“Lauren Bachnell.”
The officer, who had not been looking at me, raised her head.
“There is no inmate here with that name.”
“Not an inmate,” I said. “The assistant warden.”
“And who are you?”
“I already told you that.”
The sentry was confused. The words I gave her didn’t have a corollary in her rule book.
