The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Read Online Free PDF

you were in so many fights,” I said.
    “Judge Beam didn’t feel good about my sentence but she knew that Cruickshank wouldn’t let it go so she told the warden to put me on this unit.”
    “So you haven’t escaped?”
    “Never said I did. I just wondered what you would’a done if I had. Come on, gentlemen, let’s get back to work.”
    Tempest was the last one out of the door. Before following them down the hall he turned and asked, “Could you send us down some coffee and doughnuts sometimes, brother? You know somethin’ like that is a godsend for wretches like us.”
    “I’ll bring it myself,” I said.
    And I have been doing so every morning for the past six weeks.

The Saint Under Pressure
    I arrived at the doughnut shop at 7:15 a.m. as usual and purchased seven coffees—three black, one with sugar, one with milk, and two with milk and sugar. I also picked out an assortment of twenty-one doughnuts for the work release crew cleaning up litter along the pathways of Central Park: six convicts and one state guard, Andrew Welch, who watched over them.
    When I arrived at the work site balancing the cartons of coffee and pastries, the workmen put down their rakes and canvas sacks to help me unload.
    “Mornin’, Joshua,” Andrew said. He lifted his coffee and took a sip as in a toast.
    The other men, including Tempest, greeted me and took up positions on park benches where they could enjoy the repast before wandering through the fake wilderness looking for discarded beer cans, used condoms, and scraps of paper.
    “Where’s Pinky?” I asked Tempest when I noticed the youngest of the work release prisoners hadn’t shown up for his food.
    “He met him a hippie girl yesterday. She had what they call an illegal substance and no underwears. Damn,” Tempest shook his head. “A man can only take so much temptation you know, Angel.”
    “They sent him back to prison?”
    “On the first bus this mornin’. Five-oh-two a.m.”
    “He gave up his freedom for a few moments of pleasure?”
    “That’s all life is, Angel.”
    “What?”
    “A few moments of pleasure. Damn, man. Don’t you get it? Most the time we workin’ or sleepin’, getting’ sick or gettin’ ovah sumpin’, too young to begin with and then too old before you know it. You meet the woman’a your dreams say
come hither
with one hand and
hold up
with the other. An’ between all that you get a few minutes every now and then that’s pure bliss. A woman look in your eyes like she mean it, a child with your face look up at you an’ reach for your fingers.
    “That hippie girl flashed that smile at Pinky an’ he knew this was his one chance for pleasure in maybe the next seven years. He had to go for that.”
    “But couldn’t he satisfy himself with his labor?” I asked, feeling younger than my mortal charge.
    “Pickin’ up condoms when he ain’t even been near a woman in three years? Throwin’ away beer cans when he ain’t had a real drink in the same time? Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain’t feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin’ for the post office because music don’t pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don’t love you. That’s why the prisons full’a poor people. Rich man don’t have to commit no crime. And even if he does, all they do is pass a law sayin’ that ain’t no crime no more.”
    While Tempest was orating, an elderly white man in an orange jumpsuit was walking toward us from behind a stand of stunted pines. He was past seventy with an uncertain gait. His white hair was thin and unkempt. His hands were huge. In his left he carried a yellow straw broom and in his right there was a white plastic bucket.
    “Hey, mister,” he said to me.
    “Yes?”
    “That food for all’a us?” He gestured at the coffee and boxes of pastry set up on a nearby bench.
    “Yes. Yes of course.”
    “Angel,”