Glass Cell Read Online Free PDF Page A

Carter’s heart floated up in his chest, and he slowly turned around, so that the guard who leaned against the wall on his right would not assume he had come to stare.
    “Santoz!” called the guard by the prisoners’ entrance door.
    “Here!” A man trotted forward.
    “Colligan!”
    Sullen, indifferent, vaguely envious faces watched as men in white shirts detached themselves from the sluggish mass in the corridor and came alive, hurrying to the visiting-room door with their passes.
    “Carter!”
    The guard took his pass, scribbled on it, and motioned him through. Carter went down the dimly lighted stairway. It led to a long room divided by a glass wall with a shallow, table-high shelf and straight chairs on either side of it. Nearly all the chairs were taken. The visitors had their entrance at the other end of the room and on the other side of the barrier. There were four armed guards, one in each corner of the room. Carter kept his eyes on the visitors’ door as he walked, looking for Hazel.
    Then she came in, and he moved forward, still looking at her, toward a free chair which was on the other side of the barrier, pointed to it, and managed to find an empty chair for himself. Hazel wore her blue tweed coat with a bright scarf tucked in at her neck. To Carter, the colors she wore seemed spectacularly brilliant and beautiful, like flowers or birds’ plumage. Her red lips smiled, though her eyes were tense. She looked at his hands.
    Carter pushed his underlip out, smiled and shrugged. “They don’t hurt— You’re looking wonderful.” He tried to speak loudly and distinctly, because of the glass.
    “What do they say is the matter with them? Did they say anything else?” Hazel asked.
    “Nothing else.” Carter swallowed and glanced at the clock. He sat on the edge of the hard chair. Before he knew it, the twenty minutes would be gone, and he was already wasting precious seconds in silence—except that he was seeing her. “How is Timmy?”
    “Timmy’s all right. He’s fine.” Hazel moistened her lips. “You’ve lost some weight.”
    “Not much.”
    “Mr. Magran said he would come today to see you.”
    Her voice reminded him of clear, cool water. He had not heard a woman’s voice in six weeks. “It’s wonderful to see you.” Carter was annoyed by the voice of the man on his left, who was talking to a man in a dark suit on Hazel’s right, perhaps the inmate’s lawyer. The inmate was saying in a loud, annoyed voice: “I dunno, I just dunno. Why d’y’ keep askin’ me that?” The inmate’s voice was louder to Carter than Hazel’s.
    “Did you get a statement yet from the doctor?” she asked.
    His thumbs pulsed more quickly. His forehead was cool with sweat. “He—he has to take more X-rays. He can’t say what’s the matter yet. Not entirely.”
    “Then it’s worse than you told me, isn’t it?”
    “I just don’t know, honey. It’s the joints—” Tell me the names of the guards who did it , Hazel had written in one of her letters. It’s absolutely illegal in this day and age . The word “illegal” was strange, in view of some of the things he had seen in the prison. What about the old man in A-block whose false teeth had broken in half and who couldn’t get them fixed and couldn’t eat anything now but soup? Was that a legal way to treat a man in jail? Carter felt he was choking, as if he might burst into tears. I only want to put my head in her lap, he thought, and he sat up straighter. “I’ll get the statement from Cassini as soon as I can.”
    “David can use it, you know,” Hazel said earnestly.
    “David? I thought Magran wanted it.”
    “David said he’d take it to the Governor in person. David’s a lawyer, too, you know. He’d take it sooner than Magran. Right away.”
    “Who’s handling my case, Sullivan or Magran?” Carter said quickly. His hands rested on the table like a boxer’s. The thumbs pulsed as if blood were going to come shooting out the tips of