Free Power in the Blood by Michael Lister Page B

was hoping that without an officer present, Jacobson would sing me a song. He did. Unfortunately, it was one I had heard before.
    “Fuck you, motherfucker,” he said in response to my first question, which was “How are you doing?”
    From the last cell of the corridor to my right, I could hear Inmate Starn yelling, “CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN, COME HERE. COME HERE, CHAPLAIN.”
    He did that every time I came to confinement. It was Wednesday, and I had already seen him twice that week.
    It didn’t look like Jacobson was going to cooperate. Perhaps I had spoken too soon about the overabundance of information I was going to uncover during this investigation.
    Crouching down on the bare cement floor of the confinement hall, I smelled the same smell I always did down there—sleep. The stale air was thick with smells of drool, perspiration, and halitosis. The cell was one of twenty along a long corridor. There was an officer seated at the end of the hall, a round black man with virtually no hair. Another officer, a tall slender man with strawberry blond hair and pink cheeks, was crouched down by a food slot about five cells down from me.
    “Is there nothing I can help you with?” I asked. “Nothing you would like to talk about?” Behind me, the gray block wall was lined with empty milk cartons, wads of crumpled napkins, and various other items of trash the inmates had tossed out of their cells.
    “Fuck you, motherfucker.”
    “From what I hear, you would, but I’m not interested,” I said, deciding to change my approach. A few cells down, an inmate yelled, “DON’T TALK TO THE CHAPLAIN LIKE THAT, YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH!”
    If Jacobson heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it. “I ain’t no punk,” he said, his eyes seeming to take on a demonic glow in the dark cell.
    He may or may not have been a punk, but he certainly did not look like one. His shaved head, pale white skin, sparse beard, and puke-green tattoos made him look like a neo-Nazi serial killer.
    “What are you then?” I asked. Somewhere in another corridor a steel door slammed. The noise bounced off the concrete walls and floors and reverberated through confinement. It was, perhaps, the most depressing sound I had ever heard. Another inmate, from a cell to my left this time, said, “We’re locked in now, boys.” Someone else said, “Yeah, and so is the chaplain.”
    “I’m Satan, man,” Jacobson hissed.
    “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said.
    “Don’t be so hard on Satan,” the inmate to my left said and started laughing.
    “Did you come to cast me out, Holy Man?” Jacobson asked in such a way as to doubt my ability to do so.
    “Actually, I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do for you and maybe ask you a few questions.”
    “There’s nothing you could do for me. I’m well taken care of. What you really mean is, there’s something I can do for you. You need something I have.”
    “CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN,” Starn continued to call.
    “Which is what?”
    “Secrets.”
    The officers’ radios sounded at the same time, and because of their distance apart and the cement surroundings, every word was doubled. It sounded like the digital delay that many recording artists overused during the late eighties.
    “What makes you think I want to know your secrets?” I asked.
    “Believe me, you do. I see evil. I hear evil. I see and hear that which is done in darkness,” he said. His eyes were wide and wild, and he hissed his words, placing about fifteen s’s on the end of darkness. He was a bad actor doing Manson.
    I felt something moist on the back of my hand. It was a small dot of water. I looked up. Above me, hanging from the ceiling, there were two bare galvanized pipes running the length of the hallway. I saw condensation around the joint of one of them directly above me. For a moment, I lost my train of thought, forgetting what he had said. Then I remembered—he knew things that were done in the dark.
    “What sort of