Free The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld Page B

wake-up call.
    The guards watch from their towers. The sky wheels above them.
    T he guard Conroy has deliberately guileless eyes. Watching him cross the yard, you might think, What an ordinary-looking man. From the slope of his belly over his service holster to the dust on his black dress shoes,there is nothing to distinguish him—until he turns his cold blue eyes on you. And then you think, Ordinary men can be more dangerous than any other.
    Conroy works intelligence, which tells you enough. He wanders the yard, looking for the tallest trees. He knows them all by sight. Conroy likes the tall trees. He likes to stand in their shadows. It makes him feel powerful.
    The tallest tree on the yard is a shot caller called Risk.
    Risk has spent his time on the weight pile—so much that he looks like a steer on steroids. He has a tangle of long brown hair and a face scarred from fighting. He fell for opening up a drug mule with an X-Acto knife and then rummaging around his stomach for the balloons the mule had swallowed. This normally wouldn’t get much attention, but in his case, the drug mule was his own five-year-old son. Apparently, by the time Risk was done, his boy looked like a piece of pink and white meat.
    You would think a guy like Risk would be a pariah on the yard. But that is not the way it is inside. As much as I love books, I have never read one that tells what it is really like in a prison. In the books, the baby killers and rapists are hated inside prisons. That is not the truth. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what you did on the outside. If you like to take it by force, if you want to beef up on the pile, you, too, can grow taller than the tallest tree in the forest. You can be the worst baby killer or rapist and still beat and rape your way into power inside.
    What matters in prison is not who you are but whatyou want to become. This is the place of true imagination.
    Cronies surround Risk. They are all huge guys grown into monsters on the weight pile and the extra food that comes with being shot callers. They have little kitchens in their cells, complete with battery-operated camp stoves. They dine in their cells on meals that would be unthinkable for the rest of us—gourmet concoctions made of the food sold in the prison commissary, where a candy bar costs five dollars. They cook packets of Top Ramen and mix them with huge chunks of cheese and cans of chili—chili with real meat—and they top these meals with real coffee and cream and sugar. The hot, delicious smells drift from their cell windows to drive the rest of the prisoners mad.
    The shot callers are our kings. From their halls comes a constant supply of shanks, a regular prison industry where Risk will loan a blade for fifty dollars if he approves the death. They supply endless dime bags of heroin to the prison addicts, the tiny blobs of black tar wrapped in the crinkled wrappers from the candies left by the church women who come to pray and sob through their hands at the plight of these poor men—as a result, the heroin sold in here has been nicknamed starlight candy. The treasured few kits are kept in their cells, to be loaned for a steep price unless you are one of Risk’s crew, and then you get to use the blood-spotted, dull syringe at no cost. They make fortunes out of selling pruno, the homemade alcohol grown in plastic bags and fed with bags ofsugar, and for weeks their cell rows erupt with raucous, drunken laughter. They know that having too much money on their books is dangerous, so through corrupt guards, they send thousands of dollars in drug money to wives and girlfriends on the outside. All of this made possible because the guards don’t turn their cells.
    Conroy walks across the yard, the dust rising from his dress shoes and the medals on his regulation shirt gleaming. He comes up to Risk and slaps his shoulder. They walk off together, heads bowed. The whole yard sees the intelligence guard and the