Resurrection Express Read Online Free PDF

one—probably in a computer firm. It has to be approved by theboard. Phase three is community service, two hundred hours. She says they let me off lightly.
    Christ. Eight bucks an hour.
    Good thing this is just a dog-and-pony show.
    I play the part and tell her that I won’t even be able to afford a cheap room on that kind of money. She says it’s no problem because I’ll be boarding at a halfway house on the north side for the whole six months. No curfew, but I’m not allowed to have a cell phone. After six months in the toy store, I’m free to design websites and get my own apartment. Random visits from my probation officer, which will be someone else by then. Counseling three times a week. Five years later, I’ll be free.
    I’m back on the inside, only it looks like the real world now.
    I walk out of the office and my football player bodyguard stands up and puts down his magazine. “How did it go?”
    “Still a prisoner.”
    “Yeah, well, not for long.”
    •  •  •
    T hey cut me loose at the halfway house and I’m on my own. At least that’s what it will look like. Washington tells me there will be eyes on me at all times. My new employer wants to look after her investment, but it also has to look legit. Go through the motions. Obey the rules. If anyone messes with me, I’m covered.
    Three days. This will be tricky.
    At the car, my father kisses my cheek and tells me to hang in there. He finally looks me right in the eye. I can tell he’s almost crying.
    “You are the hero, son. You’re the hero of my life. You’re a better man than I’ll ever be. Always remember that.”
    •  •  •
    T he night comes and I have a hard time sleeping.
    I’m sharing a room with three other people in a house that looks like an old daycare center and smells like one, too. No television, no Internet. They served a pretty good dinner, meat loaf and mashed potatoes, better than anything on the inside, but not as good as Threadgill’s. I still can’t sleep. Not because of all the snoring and mumbling going on in the bunks next to me. In prison you learn to pass out through any kind of noise, with one eye open.
    Toni’s keeping me awake.
    She always did.
    She was twelve when I met her. That was when Dad was in prison for the second time, his longest stretch. I met her in the institution where they sent me to live as a ward in the care of the state. She was like me, her parents criminals, her childhood gone, her mother less than a fragment, like mine. In a toilet full of perverts and hateful scumbags masquerading as human beings, she was the only ray of light. She was the one who taught me the importance of language and communication. She taught me that cursing and swearing was for the ignorant and the angry. She taught me how to read. I was thirteen then. The first book I understood was a book she read to me. I can’t remember what it was about now.
    Is that funny? Probably not.
    I was a late bloomer, but I caught up fast. The hardest part was learning not to swear. You can become less ignorant, I told her, but the anger never leaves you—not when you’re like I was back then. Not when your world is filled with dirt and disappointment from day one. She said that was no excuse. She said anyone can beat their programming—it’s what makes us different from animals. I was able to purge the word “fuck” pretty much from my vocabulary. Toni had a zero-tolerance policy for that one. But the rest of it . . .
    . . . well, shit, man.
    Pretty soon, my mind was filled to bursting. Toni insisted on the classics first. Hawthorne and Poe. Descartes and Mark Twain. She said to memorize what these men wrote about and never mind the exact words. Told me to retain the images, the feelings, the philosophies —the worldviews that would shape my adult perspective. These were the geniuses who knew everything there was to know about the unredeemed soul of man, in any century, and the way that technology is constantly