Read Heat and Light for Free Online Page A

Or possibly not: his brown skin is unwrinkled, his braids more black than gray. His cheekbones are dotted with freckles that looked painted on, round as pencil erasers and nearly as large.
    The chinking gets louder, as though somewhere on the cell block, a secret operation—salt mining, the carving of festive ice sculptures—is taking place.
    â€œThanks, Hops. I appreciate it.” It’s a lesson Devlin learned long ago: the inmates respond to simple courtesy, like anyone else. And yet few of the COs bother with pleas e and thank you . The reality, which he’d been slow to understand, is that not everyone wants peace. Some guys—most, maybe—are in it for the fight.
    Ignoring his sciatica—also inherited, another gift from his father—he continues on his rounds. At the end of the row he finds the source of the noise: Charles Polley, known as Cholley, clipping his toenails. Offill, his cell mate, picks idly at a guitar.
    â€œDevlin? I thought Schrey was on today.” Offill eyes with displeasure the flying shards of toenail.
    â€œTonight. I’ll tell him you missed him.”
    Phil Schrey is a recent hire. Like most new COs he came in with a swagger, a pose the men saw through instantly. Naturally they pushed back, which only made him swing harder. It’s a common mistake, but the smart rookie figures it out eventually. Schrey is not smart.
    Cholley moves on to his left foot, a calculated hit on the big toe. A sliver of nail shoots across the room.
    Offill brushes it away. “Fuck, man. How many toes you got?”
    Devlin continues on his rounds. In the next cell Weems lies on his bunk reading a dog-eared paperback. Weems is always reading. In the afternoons he works in the prison library, and comes back with an armload of books.
    What are you reading? Devlin would ask anyone else; but Weems doesn’t welcome conversation. He is a local kid, possibly the quietest inmate Devlin has ever encountered. It’s hard to imagine him doing any of what’s in his jacket, all meth-related. More and more, Deer Run seems overrun with meth heads, skinny, wasted men with stubbed teeth like jack-o’-lanterns. Weems looks better than most of them; he looks perfectly normal. A guy you wouldn’t look at twice if he passed you on the street.
    F Block is black, white, Hispanic. Except for Weems, they are city hoodlums from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; men who’d never heard of Saxon County until the Department of Corrections sent them here. Deer Run is medium security, a designation that means nothing. Violent offenders, dope fiends, gangbangers, smash-and-grabbers: virtually anyone can land here, for virtually any reason. For no reason at all, if a judge decrees it so.
    Next door Wanda sits barefoot on her bunk, rubbing lotion into her bare feet. She wears the same prison blues as everyone else, with a few modifications: shirttails knotted above her navel, waistband rolled down to her hips. Her eyes are circled with black liner, her lips painted frosty pink.
    â€œHi, sweetheart,” she calls. It’s impossible to sneak up on her; she is gifted with superhuman hearing and eyesight.
    â€œYou heard me coming.”
    â€œHoney, I hear them all coming.” Her other superpower is the ability to make anything sound sexual. The COs find this disconcerting. Her simple presence provokes them, her languorous movements, her odd falsetto voice. Despite the bright makeup, the eyebrows plucked thin and arched into half circles, it is altogether too easy to see how she looked as a man: the clefted chin, the heavy jaw. Some—Schrey, for example—persist in calling her Juan. Still got his prick, don’t he? It’s a question Devlin can’t answer, and wouldn’t; something he’d rather not think about.
    They chat for a few minutes, the Pirates losing to Cleveland, the summery weather. It’s a basic lesson of the job, how anything can become normal.