Free A Visible Darkness by Jonathon King

before. Most of the time they left him alone. They never hurt him. The one time he’d been arrested was for burglary when they found a half dozen potted plants in his cart. He’d just picked them up out of someone’s carport. He was planning to sell them but the police stopped him and said they were stolen. They took him in when he said he didn’t know where the plants came from but promised to put them back. He had no money for bail, so he spent sixty days in the county jail.
    Eddie didn’t mind jail. The food was good and after a few days they put him on a special floor the guards called the forensic unit. That’s where Eddie met the doctor. They’d had some good talks. The doc had taken care of him.
    All the guards were good to him and he did whatever they told him. One day a prisoner had broken a toilet and a work crew came to bust up the porcelain and chip out some of the concrete. They filled a huge trash can and the guards laughed when two of the workers couldn’t drag it away.
    “Eddie,” the guard called out. “Come carry this out into the hall for these gentlemen.”
    Eddie put down the mop he’d been using and walked over. He bent and gripped the sides of the can and hefted it up onto his chest and walked it to the hall while everyone stared. He’d lifted heavier things. The guards smiled and were even nicer to him.
    Another day a prisoner started screaming in his cell, crazy like, threatening to burn up his mattress with a pack of matches. He was strong and wild. The guards told him to throw the matches out but he spit at them through the bars instead. Two of them looked at each other and then the one said:
    “Eddie.”
    It was the guard that was always asking Eddie for help. “Go in there and get the matches, Eddie.”
    The guard sat at his desk and listened to the heavy thumping, the sound of bone against bars and thick muscle against concrete. Eddie came back out with the matches and put them on the desk.
    “Thank you, Eddie.”
    “Yessir,” he said. Eddie had crushed the bones of a strong man’s hands before.
    “You don’t have anything in that cart from Sue and Lou’s Restaurant, do you junk man?” The young white officer was still talking, but neither he nor his partner had gotten out of the car, and Eddie knew if they didn’t get out of the car it was going to be alright.
    “Because somebody helped themselves through the back door over there last night,” the officer said.
    Eddie knew. He’d been through that alley and saw the busted lock on the door but he had pushed on by. No need to get caught up in all that now.
    “I do not know,” Eddie said.
    “You do not know, huh?” the young officer repeated. “That might be the truest statement I’ve heard today.”
    The officers looked at each other, proud for some reason of their words. “You be cool, junk man,” said the partner as they pulled away.
    Eddie watched until the taillights disappeared and then pushed on.
    “I know lots of police,” he whispered to himself. “I talks to them all the time.”
    Eddie reached deep into his pocket and fished out the watch that he never wore on his wrist. He checked the time. Now he was late.
    He turned down Twenty-ninth and quickened his pace. The cart rattled over the rough macadam. At Sunrise Boulevard he scanned the busy street. Rush hour. Working people leaving downtown on the east side heading west to their nice homes out in the suburbs. They kept their eyes on the cars in front of them. They stopped only when the red lights held them. It was like a train moving through an ugly patch of landscape and no one on board cared about the view.
    Eddie’s eyes were on the Bromell’s Liquor Store across the street. It had been there since he was a child, sitting back off the main road, a broad parking lot on two sides. Even when they repainted the outside of the building some new yellow or purple color, the walls always seemed dingy, the dirt and grease somehow seeping back through the