The local lockup is just as Clay imagines it. There are big cells with two sparse bunk beds on either wall and there are toilets at the end of each of the beds. He and Ivan wear orange jumpsuits, all their possessions had been confiscated, and they are separated in the line of new arrivals as they march single file between guards. They are put into different cells, but they can easily see and hear one another because they are on opposite sides of the hall. Ivan shares his cell with another latinx man and two black men, and Clay’s cellmates are all white men. One is passed out on the bottom bunk and he wears street clothes. Clay can smell a cloud of booze that fills the side of the cell where the man sleeps. The other men stare at him, obviously claiming their beds away from the stink. Clay leans against the bars at the front of the cell and he watches Ivan on the bottom bunk with his head in his hands.
The man in the bed above Ivan hops off and stands in front of him. Clay’s grip on the bars tightens and he resists the urge to rip the whole thing apart.
Suddenly Clay feels a tap on his shoulder and he turns quickly, growling as he does.
“What!” Clay says roughly, and the man in front of him jumps.
“I was just gonna offer to switch beds with you.” The man is scared but he tries to be nice. Clay realizes that the man is old enough to be his father and he feels bad. “I know that man smell bad, he just here ’til he sober up, but you in a jumpsuit like me. I was just offering.”
“I didn’t mean to yell,” Clay says. “I’m just jumpy in here, you know. I appreciate it man.”
They smile and shake and Clay gets to know the man who introduces himself as Huey. Clay is surprised that the two of them get along and soon he gets to know the other cellmate who is conscious. The older man, Huey, had been arrested for driving drunk and resisting arrest; the younger had damaged public property.
“I know I shouldn’t have been drinking,” Huey says as the three talk, “but you bust your ass like I do just to keep a roof over your head, give my wife some dignity you know, you need something to relax with. And that officer was a ass to me, he was. Agitating me while I was already in a state. But I don’t have to tell a fella like you, right? Black man know how the police is. But I serve my time. My wife baking pies trying to raise money for the light bill, but I serve my time.”
“I’m a artist,” the younger man explains and he introduces himself as James. “I ain’t never sold nothing, but I like to paint, been doin it all my life. I think it’s wrong people don’t care about the Earth, you see the trash all over the place, don’t nobody recycle, and they drive those oversized cars. Anyway, I got fed up about a week back and I painted a mural, the mayor pissing on the Earth on the side of the city hall building. I even signed my name, I wasn’t ashamed of it. But it landed me in here.”
The men seem to be very sympathetic and considering his own situation, Clay wonders if everyone in the jail was the result of overzealous policing. Or maybe Jamar had influenced the police to lock up people who skirted the edges of public nuisance laws.
It was possible, too, that these men were telling sad stories to make themselves feel better for the bad things they had done and chosen to leave out of their recollections.
Clay wishes he could talk to Ivan, he could help him sort through this strange, new experience.
Ivan is hearing similar stories in his cell. One man was cited for Jaywalking and his charge escalated as he argued with police on the scene; he was eventually arrested and jailed for resisting and threatening a police officer. Another was pulled over for what the officer described as an illegal U-turn, and then he was arrested for child endangerment because his children were in the car with him at the time.
When Ivan and Clay have their meal together, they sit across from one another and try to keep their conversation between themselves.
“This isn’t at all what I was expecting jail to be like,” Ivan says. “I’m pretty sure I’ve made some friends. And the guards are so attentive. One made sure I had a change of socks for tomorrow.”
“Yeah, it’s weird. The more I talk to people, the more I wonder if Jamar is playing some game. He got us arrested,” Clay looks around at the peaceful cafeteria filled with sad men doing what they are told and just trying to survive their punishment, “what if he put all these people in here, too? Just to mess with us.”
“Would he do that, can he?” Ivan asks skeptically. It would take a preternatural ability to pull that off and Clay hadn’t mentioned one in their previous encounters.
“You saw him talk to those cops before he arrested us. He close with the police, but he ain’t never been a puppeteer before. And that judge we saw, she was practically reciting that newspaper article. I’m just saying, it seem like he capable of something, and these men I been talking to don’t belong here.” By the time he finishes his sentence, Clay is convinced of Jamar’s intervention and he takes deep breaths to control his anger.
Ivan stares at Clay and he is suddenly stern. “Don’t you get any bad ideas. Think about what you said earlier, you have to think before you react in anger. What if you wrong? I can feel what you’re thinking, and what if you’re wrong? What if we bust them out and they were just lying to us? What if we put bad men on the street?”
“I know,” Clay says. “I won’t be stupid. I guess I was just looking for a noble reason to get us out of here. I’ll cool it. It’s thirty days. We can do this.”
Days pass and Ivan and Clay settle into the routine of the jail. The few days feel like a few weeks though, and Ivan notices Clay’s patience waning. It’s the confines of the cell that agitate him; he misses his backyard and his house. And it doesn’t help that all of the prisoners seem to be the nicest people either of them have met in a long time.
“I could run right through the walls,” Clay says during their free time outside, “then through that fence. You could cover us from gunfire. And we can go to the news and tell the story, tell everybody’s story…”
“Stop, Clay,” Ivan says, “you’re going stir crazy. Just take some deep breaths.” He sits Clay down and rubs his shoulders. “Just close your eyes and imagine the backyard.”
Just as he says it, they both hear a scream in their minds and they see the same vision of Alia’s face in a terrible agony, and it brings them to their knees. When they recover, they sit next to one another with panic on their faces.
“That was Alia, I think she needs us,” Ivan says, shaking away disorientation.
“Find her, now!” Clay says sternly. “We’re getting out of here.”
Ivan leads Clay in an all out assault on the building where Ivan had managed to find Alia. He struggled to find her the way she had taught him, by first accessing the mental plane of existence and the park that Alia had created. Her shout had left the park ransacked, like it was a force that had ripped up trees and tossed benches. Just being in the park gives Ivan a connection Alia’s mind, though, and he searches for the source in the physical world. She is a state away in Georgia, and Ivan has to strain the part of himself that let’s him feel the energies of the Earth and sift through them for just the right one.
When he finds her, he and Clay leave the yard of the jail in a flash and it isn’t long before their absence is noticed and their pictures appear on the news as escaped prisoners.
Jamar is gleeful when he sees it. He is playing hide and seek with his son, and while he searches the living room for him, Jamar hears the emergency alert about the escaped prisoners.
“Uttu has done her part, I see.” Jamar laughs, and soon his son enters the room and laughs along with him. “Why you come out? I didn’t find you.”
“You was having fun without me,” the boy says and they both laugh together on the floor.
When his mother, Laura, is home, Jamar kisses them both and then leaves the house. He finds his sister, the girl, standing on the sidewalk in front of Clay’s house, and he crosses to stand next to her.
“Let’s burn this shit down,” the girl says while she plays with a lighter. “Why these faggot niggas ain’t dead yet?”
“That’s your problem little sister,” Jamar says, “you think too small. These niggas the criminals, not us. We fine, upstanding members of this community. We don’t do shit like arson. We wouldn’t want to piss off convicted criminals that just broke out of jail.”
“You been talking like a bitch for a little bit now, but I can’t talk shit about your plan. You got them faggots on the run. But what you gonna do now?”
“I’m gonna keep up the heat. They was crying over the local paper shitting on them, they gone lose it when they see what happens now. These niggas thought they was heroes, but everybody gone see what they is now.”
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