III
“Branford!”
The guard at my cell door is a large man but he kneels in a baseball catcher’s squat so that he can holler through the tray opening, which is about half his height.
“Yes?”
“Pack it up. You’re bailed out.”
I am apprehensive. I have heard this phrase used in here to signify the end of an inmate’s time in solitary confinement, so my first assumption is that he means I am bailed out of protective custody and into the general population.
“Where are you putting me?”
If my next stop is going to integrate me with all the guys who have been heckling me for the past four days, I might prefer to stay in solitary. Not that I expect to be given a choice.
“What did I say, Branford? You’re bailed out! You understand English? You’re outta here!”
“Out of prison?”
“Jesus, you’re a quick bastard, aren’t you, Branford?”
I am momentarily stunned. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to wear? Where am I supposed to go?
“Who bailed me out?”
“Fuck if I know. Don’t ask so many questions. We’ll take you over to B-Control and you can ask them.”
I am fearful but a bit giddy as well. After another few seconds of looking around my cell I realize there are no decisions to make because I have nothing. I am clean, having taken several birdbaths at my little three-in-one sink-bubbler-commode unit since I was inspired to jog and work up a sweat by the unwanted proximity of Christopher Reardon yesterday. I have only the prison clothes I am wearing plus an identical set that is still drying out in the cell window after I washed them with warm tap water and a bar of state soap in my wastebasket last night. I am not going to bring damp prison clothes with me wherever I am going, so I simply clear them from the window and, along with my bar of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, and half a roll of toilet paper, toss them into the wastebasket.
I offer my wrists to the guard through the opening in the heavy cell door so that he can handcuff me again as he and his colleagues have done for me for each “movement” to the Big Yard or the showers, but he turns instead to the Unit Sergeant’s desk and calls out “Open Three.” The cell door opens and I stand in the doorway unfettered.
“Come on, Branford, you’re not going to get a written invitation.”
Another cop, this one with a lapel pin that identifies him as a member of the Inner Perimeter Security or IPS team, escorts me from Protective Custody to the Property and Intake Room and then over to B-Control. At Property they swap out my prison clothes for the clothes I was wearing when I was arrested Thursday evening. My “street clothes.” They are handed to me in a brown paper bag and they are pretty rumpled, but I am happy to have them back. I am led to a wire mesh cage to change my clothes in full view of any staff that happen to be passing through.
Who’s bailing me out? Will somebody be waiting for me? Diana and the kids? Crocker Talbot or somebody from the Transcript? Wade Gannon in his Beemer SUV? Have they all come to their senses and realized how ridiculous it is even to entertain these accusations that have been made against me? I am hopeful but cautious.
My only frames of reference for what might happen to me next come from books and movies. Dostoyevsky’s blindfolded reprieve from the firing squad seems a bit over the top, but there is Nicholas Cage’s release in Con Air, or the scene where Morgan Freeman gets out of Shawshank, or the opening of The Blues Brothers when Elwood retrieves Jake. There are a couple of memorable short stories by Faulkner and O. Henry.
Maybe it is Amy waiting for me. I doubt she could raise the bail money, but if she did it would be a wonderful thing. And a dangerous thing. I am not at all sure what kind of choices I would make in that situation. I have always resisted the notion that one’s morality should be situational, but I also have to grant that the last few days have shaken me badly. There has been such a turning of the tables in my life that it is almost as if all the main characters – myself included – have changed our roles. All my life up to this point, even as I have strived to be forgiving and understanding about the moral relativism of others, I have been steadfast about resisting the idea that my own moral compass should be at all dependent on where I am standing. But it has been easier to adhere to such rigor when I had some notion of where I was standing.
Could Wade Gannon or his ponytailed gopher have managed to get my bail amount reduced or extinguished? Only, I suspect, if he and Diana had somehow been persuaded of my essential innocence. Persuaded that I had been framed. Persuaded of the truth. I imagine a somewhat tense meeting between Amy Tuckerman and Diana, where Amy tries to persuade Diana to take me back – why would Amy do that? – by presenting the evidence gathered in her off-hours investigation on my behalf. It is a plausible imagining, but I do not find it very convincing.
As my IPS escort leads me into the MCI Concord front lobby, I see there is nobody waiting for me except for the correctional officer who is working the front desk.
“Here’s Branford,” says my escort. “Got anything for him?”
The C.O. hands me an official looking document that instructs me to report to a probation officer in a building near the old East Cambridge courthouse within 48 hours since I am still, after all, awaiting trial.
“Just make sure you see probation tomorrow, Branford, so we don’t have to look at your sorry ass again until you get sentenced.”
“I’ll be there. Can you tell me why I am being released?”
“What, you don’t want to go home?”
“I want to go, believe me. I’m just curious if someone put up my bail, or what.”
“Says right here, Branford.”
He hands me another document, a pink copy from a thermal carbon set, and points to a line where it has been scribbled in longhand, “Bail Posted Anonymously.”
“I’ve got something else for you from the same place your bail money came from, if you want to take a look.”
“Sure.”
He hands me a plain white business envelope with my name typed in simple upper-case letters on its face. I open the envelope carefully, still in the C.O.’s presence. Inside are five crisp twenty-dollar bills and yet another official looking document. This one does not come from the state.
At the head of the page I see the name and logo of one of the nicer hotels in the area, the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. It is a room confirmation for this evening. A non-smoking suite has been reserved in my name, and, rather remarkably, it has been paid in full with my credit card, on the same workhorse VISA account that came up online last Thursday afternoon as being maxed out.
“Trusting soul,” says the C.O., nodding toward the envelope.
“Why’s that?” I am sure that he still thinks I am a skinner or a pervert or whatever it is that people think after they read what has been written about me in the Herald, but now that I am free to go, with American folding money in my pocket, we are probably a tiny bit closer to being on an equal footing in his mind.
“Anybody who would pass an envelope full of cash to a state employee and expect it to get passed on.”
I eye him, looking for subtext. Is he expecting a tip? How am I to be sure he hasn’t already removed a “gratuity”?
As if he understands my thoughts, he spreads out the palms of both hands to show me that he wants nothing.
“You are free to go, Mr. Branford.”
I look out the lobby door at the twilight outside and cars circling the rotary within view. Free to go.
I remember one Sunday afternoon when Rachel was almost three and Mary Kate and I took her on a Sunday drive out Route 2 past Concord to pick out a nice fat pumpkin at one of the roadside farm stands out that way. On the way back home we came to this same West Concord rotary next to the state prison and saw a man standing by the side of the road hitchhiking. He stood almost directly in front of the prison’s main entrance, like a poster boy for friendly escaped or released convicts, his arm and thumb stretched out hopefully. He wore blue jeans and a blue denim shirt with sneakers and the most endearing smile, which, it soon became obvious, made quite an impression on Rachel.
“What’s he doing?” asked our ever-inquisitive little girl.
“He’s trying to get a ride in somebody’s car,” Mary Kate answered neutrally, just passing on the information.
“Okay, then, we can pick him up,” ruled Rachel.
“Well, maybe not,” I interjected.
“Daddy, don’t be so mean! Share and share alike! That man needs a ride! We have a car! Pick him up!”
“Honeybunch, we’re sorry, but we can’t pick him up,” said Mary Kate.
“Why not? Why not? Why not? I want to give the nice man a ride in this car this minute!”
“It’s not always safe to ride in a car with somebody you don’t know,” I said.
“Well, Silly, we can meet him, and then we will know him.”
“But if he’s not nice, then we really don’t want to know him,” I reasoned.
“Mean, mean jumping bean!” reasoned back Rachel. “Daddy, I’m a little surprised at you, you know. If you have a car and somebody else wants to play with it or drive it or ride in it, you should share it with others, because after all, it is only your good luck that you even have a car in the first place.”
I’m not sure exactly what else was said, but I do remember that eventually Mary Kate and I broke into laughter because there seemed no way out of this conversation in which everything any adult had ever said to Rachel was being woven back together to trap us in a Utopian world where every hitch-hiker and ex-con was our new best friend. I believe that we were finally forced to resort to ice cream to help us negotiate a segue.
In any case, my memory of the experience reminds me now that there is not much of a future in my standing in front of the prison trying to hitchhike into Harvard Square so I can spend the night in a luxury hotel suite.
“Any idea how I can get a cab from here?”
“Pay phone right over there. Number’s on the wall.”
“Can you change a twenty for me?”
“Probably.”
I hand him one of the crisp twenties from my pocket. He reaches into his pocket for some change and counts out four quarters for me.
“I’ll have to owe you the rest,” he says.
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