The Time Does You

Watching Alvin Nichols amble from one section of the North Facility Library to the other on his gimpy, seventy something year old legs, I could see the pain in his eyes as he approached me.
He stopped at the office door.
“How are the legs, Alvin?”
“What legs, ” he laughed. He didn’t continue through the hallway, past the office half door, and turn left up the stairs to the law library where he worked as a legal clerk, helping other inmates with their writs and other legal problems, an old jail house lawyer, working for forty cents an hour.
He stopped at the office door and said: ” Byrd got rolled up!”
“What happened?”
“He got in a fight with his cellie. He told me he wasn’t getting along with him, but it really surprised me.”
The North Yard then was mostly lifers with level one points. People who hadn’t had a beef or a write up for years, mostly middle aged guys or older, guys with twenty years or more behind bars. This was home; most of them weren’t ever going home, so Mr. Byrd nutting up surprised me.
Now, if he’d thrown himself off of the third tier of his housing unit, or O.D.’d, that was another matter.
Mr. Byrd and I were born on the same day. I’d noticed the fact when I’d had him fill out a standardized form. Then he’d told me: “I’m moving in with my son!”
“Bummer,” I said.
“I met him here. Didn’t know he existed until I met him here.”
“What a trip! ” I said.
“A long weird one!” said Byrd, taking off his sun glasses and running his fingers across his eyes. He had the look of a man being consumed by rage. Then he put his sunglasses back on and the placid, god fearing man who carried a Bible around with him was back.
“Byrd was born on the same day as your friend Miles Davis, ” I told Nichols.
“That explains it! ” said Nichols.
A sax man, once in a while, on the yard, you’d hear Byrd play alone. At odd times, after a rain, after an incident, out of the blue, he’d play his haunting melodies.
Standing at the office door, his associate, Fatim Nash told me: ” He tried to sock his cellie up with a coupe of batteries in his sock. His cellie took it away from him and beat him down!”
“Man oh man, ” I said.
“This is going to screw up his parole. He’ll never get out of here!”
Nash and I watched Swift, the absolutely black clerk, the two Mexican clerks, Leos and Joker Rodriguez, old gang bangers, and Lopez , the Filipino, and an old white guy, Scott, a former school administrator, wash the floor. Lopez, the youngest of the group had been down since he was nineteen. The word was that he’d been in the car. That was twenty years ago.
After they’d stripped the old wax off the floor, re waxed the floor, cleaned the outside wall of the building and washed the windows, Leos and Lopez took turns working the floor over with a big electric buffer. The floor shone like the Warden’s office.
Nash asked me:”What did you think of Byrd?”
“Another piece of the mystery, ” I told him. “Like you and me.”