Red Sky: Chapter 10
“He deserved it.”
After a week, we had settled into a routine. Same table every night. Same group of inmates at that table. The different factions kept to their territory. The Lion’s group in the back. Cyclops’ to the left. Our clique remained smaller than most. I mainly kept to myself and talked with Com, Ray, and Max.
“Do you understand?” Ray continued. “If only his brother minded his own business. Stupid dingo.” Dingo was slang for a particular caste back on Earth. I'd never heard it before, but prison is full of terms I'd never heard before. All of the new inmates were 'newts,' the guards were 'robbies' because they looked like robots when their helmets were on. The paste was called 'jam'. Max called the ore 'goldie,' the area where the elevator dropped us off in the mine was the 'pit,' and so on.
“It wasn’t my fault. They kept pushin’. They followed me to the beach. I didn’t follow them. It was over. He got what he deserved. I was done with it. They weren’t there by accident. They were looking for trouble.
“I had a gun. It was an old-fashioned job. I had it like this,” Ray shoved his hand in his waistband.
“The sun was so goddamn hot. There weren’t no clouds. I was sweating like hell. When they came at me, one of ‘em had a knife. My friend was in the water. So I shot ‘em. I shot ‘em both. I don’t regret it. A man has to stand up for himself. At least they didn’t die.”
Com and Max had heard this before. They were familiar with the beats of the story so Ray focused on me.
“You telling that one again, 87,” an inmate down the table said. It was common to call everyone by their last two numbers. Sometimes this led to confusion because several inmates had the same last two numbers. It would have been better to use the last three numbers, but clarity wasn’t the point.
“Shut up. He asked me about it. He wants to know.”
I nodded, even though I hadn’t asked him about it and didn’t particularly want to know.
“You should talk to his partner,” the inmate down the table said with a sly smile. I couldn’t figure out what he was getting at.
Com turned to me. “I brought this for you.” He reached into his uniform and pulled out a slender manuscript. He set it down on the table.
I picked it up and turned the pages. It was written entirely by hand.
“This story’s been passed from inmate to inmate over the years. I decided to write it down.”
I looked at the ornate penmanship, the lines beautifully crossing over one another. It was an astonishing vision of angular poetry amidst the cold, straight lines of the prison. I hadn’t written anything without using a mindscribe since I was a child. No one wrote in their own hand anymore and now here were pages and pages of beautiful handwritten words before me.
“How did you do this?” I asked.
“There’s a rock that’s like chalk in the mine. I smuggled it to my cell. And the paper is.” He pointed to the thin paper that lined our dinner trays. “No one misses it.”
He gestured to the manuscript. “You can keep it. I have others.”
I started to slide the paper underneath my shirt. Max stopped me, “if they catch you with that, it’s the box.”
I hesitated.
Com took the paper back. “I’ll keep it for now. I don’t want to get you in trouble. My first partner told me these stories. I try to teach the newts every year."
“You two weren’t always partners?”
“No.”
“They’re partners were killed in a cave-in.” Max said.
“How did you survive?”
“We were on tunneling duty.” Ray said. “The rig collapsed when we moved it. Com and I were behind our partners and a big wall of dirt fell. We tried pullin’ ‘em back, but…” Ray stopped for a second. “We listened to ‘em dyin’ on the other side of that dirt for an hour. The guards came down and Beetleface cut our tethers and put a new one on us and said we were partners now.”
“Who’s Beetleface?”
“Oh, you haven’t met Beetleface,” Ray laughed a dark laugh. “You will. He’s right up there.” He pointed to a guard with a long rectangular face. He looked nothing like a beetle.
“Why do you call him Beetleface?”
“Because he’s like one of those little creepy things with a million little legs that will survive anything.”
“A cockroach,” I said.
“No, a beetle.”
I frowned. “I’m pretty sure that’s a cockroach.”
“He’s Beetleface,” Ray said with finality. There was to be no debate over the nickname.
“That was about a year ago,” Com said. “Ray had to move cells because of the cave-in.”
“And I liked my old cell. It was on the top floor.”
I had already figured out that every inmate was in the cell next to his partner.
Ray started in with his story again even though there wasn’t any more to tell. He circled back to the beginning, to the original fight. I noticed the look in the eyes of the inmate with the sly smile. He had been listening to our entire conversation. There was something in his look I didn’t like. A malevolence. Prison is a place where others wish you harm for no reason at all. Maybe the real world is that way as well, but most people find ways to hide such feelings. Not on the red moon. I could tell this inmate wanted to hurt me. Probably because I was a newt. Maybe because of the way I looked. I didn’t care why. I made a mental note to be careful around him in the future.
When Ray was done, I asked Com why he was on the red moon.
“I used to run Tenphetamine,” he said.
“He was the biggest Ten runner on Earth,” Ray said proudly. “He’s killed people. They just didn’t catch him. He'll probably get let out after his sentence is over here.”
“Has Max told you what he’s in for?” Com changed the subject. Ray chuckled. I realized there was a joke I didn’t understand.
Max let out a sigh. “Don’t listen to these two.”
“Max is a revolutionary.”
“What?”
“I’m in for political crimes.” Max said.
“He was a very important man back on Earth, even though none of us have heard of him.” Com said.
“Had you heard of him before?” Ray asked me.
I shook my head ‘no.’
“I was a journalist and had some incriminating files on some powerful people. They made up charges to send me here.”
“What were the charges?” I asked.
Max waved them away. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“You don’t look like the criminal type,” Ray said to me. I wondered what the criminal type looked like. “What are you here for?”
“I’m here because I fell in love with a woman,” I said. If I had been smart, I would’ve changed the subject like Com.
“Was she a prostitute?” Ray asked.
“Maybe it was the Marshal’s girl,” Com joked.
“Tell us what you really did, they don’t put you in here for falling in love with a woman.”
I looked away from them, back to the malevolent inmate with a sly smile. He was still listening to us, still looking at me with his malevolent eyes. I stared into those malevolent eyes. “They do if you murder her.”