Free The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman Page B

have provided he refused to smoke them in order to avoid being addicted to a currency he would have to trade for. But seeing the dogs hurt him unexpectedly. It cut through him.
    He wondered if he would ever again hold his daughter in his arms, squeeze her tight, rock her to sleep. He told himself he would. He promised himself. What did she look like now? Did his daughter look like him? Did she look like her mother or like the combination of them that she was? Often in prison when he caught sight of his own reflection he tried to imagine different combinations of his face and that of his daughter’s mother merging into the face of a little girl. He was in the yard at Mid-Orange sweeping up over by a puddle one day in spring when he thought for a moment that he had it perfectly. There in the puddle, as he narrowed his eyes to a squint, was finally, completely still, a little girl’s face. That was probably how she looked. Had to be. He could summon up the image again if only he could find and hold a clear reflection of himself.
    ‘Three years,’ Numbers pronounced. ‘No one come no more after three years. They give up on you … like you dead. You can cross Christmas off of your calendar too. Rip it out.’
    ‘What’s that “three years” bullshit?’ Lamont asked.
    ‘I’m just saying.’
    ‘Ain’t no law say people don’t visit after three years.’
    ‘It’s a law o’ averages, Lamont.’
    ‘Well, if it’s an average then some people stop coming
before
three years up and some still coming
after
three years, right? That’s what average means.’
    ‘I guess,’ Numbers conceded before adding, ‘I ain’t never met no one here above average like that.’
    Lamont spent the first three years of his six-year sentence at Woodbourne and the last three years at Mid-Orange. Of those few who came to see him from time to time at Woodbourne, it was only his grandmother who stayed the more than three-year course and continued to visit him at Mid-Orange. She wasn’t able to come very oftenbecause of her work as a kitchen hand and the distance from Co-op City. And she was elderly and not well. His cousin Michelle visited him in Mid-Orange once.
    ‘One good thing ‘bout Mid-Orange,’ Numbers told him when they re-met at the beginning of Lamont’s time there, ‘they got four coffee shops within a five-mile radius. That’s more ‘n usual for your average medium-security country correctional facility. Increase the chances someone come visit you. Problem is … they all Dunkin’ Donuts. No one drive two hours eat that shit.’
    During the early part of Lamont’s time at Woodbourne some of the people from his neighbourhood made the trek to visit him. His old friend Michael couldn’t come because he was serving time somewhere else. Michael had been the one to get Lamont to drive his van to the liquor store for what Lamont hadn’t realised would become an armed robbery, the one for which he’d serve six years. But Michael’s younger brother, who had only ever been an acquaintance, came quite a few times in the beginning. Lamont didn’t understand why he was coming. He wasn’t an unfriendly young man but he was a good deal younger and clearly didn’t enjoy coming and, in any case, he had Michael, his own brother, to visit in another prison if he needed an excuse to visit a prison. He didn’t like making conversation for conversation’s sake much more than Lamont did but he came anyway and asked the usual questions with the usual, maybe even more than usual, discomfort.
    After a while it became clear to Lamont that Michael’s brother was coming because of Michael, possibly even on his instructions. That was the only explanation he could find. Lamont reasoned that Michael had never meant for him to become involved in the robbery. He himself had fallen under the influence of a much younger man, a reckless man with an addiction and a gun and a way of talking, a way of being, that made certain people want to be