The Easy Part
“Ten years in the custody of the Department of Corrections.”
Isaiah didn’t move.
Nobody cried behind him.
Nobody screamed his name.
Nobody begged the judge for mercy.
Isaiah stood beside his attorney and stared straight ahead.
Nineteen years old.
Ten years.
He’d be almost thirty when he came home.
If he came home.
The prosecutor had spent the morning telling the court what happened.
Four young men.
One car.
A rival gang member standing outside.
Shots fired from the vehicle.
The target survived.
And identified them.
Isaiah wasn’t the shooter.
Didn’t matter.
He had been in the car.
He pleaded not guilty.
The jury found him guilty.
And from the moment police put him in handcuffs until right now, Isaiah hadn’t given them shit.
No names.
No explanations.
No attempt to make his part smaller by making somebody else’s bigger.
His attorney had told him there was one final opportunity.
Say you’re sorry.
Say you’re nineteen.
Say you never intended for anybody to get hurt.
Say something that gives the judge a reason to see a kid standing here instead of another gang member.
Isaiah hadn’t decided whether he would.
The judge looked down at him.
“Mr. Price, is there anything you’d like to say before you’re remanded?”
Isaiah glanced over his shoulder.
His mother was sitting in the second row.
She wasn’t crying.
She wasn’t even looking at him.
She was looking down at her phone.
Her boyfriend sat beside her.
The same man who had put holes in their walls.
The same man who had called Isaiah everything except his name.
The same man his mother had chosen every single time Isaiah forced her to choose.
The boyfriend leaned toward her and whispered something.
She smiled.
Smiled.
Isaiah was being sentenced to ten years, and his mother was smiling at something that motherfucker said.
Beside him, his attorney touched his arm.
“Isaiah.”
Isaiah turned back toward the judge.
Whatever he had considered saying disappeared.
“No, sir.”
The judge studied him.
“Nothing?”
“No, sir.”
“Very well.”
The judge imposed the remainder of the sentence.
Isaiah barely heard it.
A deputy approached him.
“Let’s go.”
Isaiah turned around one last time.
This time his mother was looking at him.
Their eyes met.
For half a second, something inside Isaiah waited.
Stand up.
Say something.
Tell me you love me.
Act like I’m your son.
She didn’t.
Her boyfriend whispered something else into her ear.
Isaiah looked at him.
The man stared back.
Then gave Isaiah the smallest shake of his head.
Like:
Dumbass.
Isaiah’s jaw tightened.
The deputy spoke behind him.
“Move.”
The deputy took his arm.
Isaiah walked toward the door.
Then his mother finally spoke.
“Isaiah.”
He stopped.
There it was.
He turned.
His mother frowned at him.
“You better not call me asking for money all the time.”
The courtroom disappeared.
For a second, Isaiah couldn’t hear anything.
Ten years.
And that was what she had to say.
Her boyfriend looked away, hiding a smile.
Isaiah stared at his mother.
Then nodded once.
“Ah-ight .”
His mother’s expression shifted.
“Isaiah—”
He turned away.
The deputy took him toward the door.
“Let’s go.”
Isaiah walked through it.
He didn’t look back.
And this time his eyes didn’t fill with tears.
Something else happened instead.
Something small inside him shut off.
Three mornings later, somebody kicked Isaiah’s bunk.
“Get up. You’re going to state.”
Isaiah opened his eyes.
There was no mother to miss.
No girlfriend waiting faithfully.
No home he couldn’t imagine living without.
Just ten years.
An hour later, his county clothes were gone.
They gave him thin disposable clothes that felt like paper.
Then came the chains.
Wrists.
Waist.
Ankles.
Twenty men shuffled toward the transport bus.
The doors opened.
Isaiah climbed aboard.
And almost gagged.
Feet and ass.
That’s what state prison smelled like.
Feet.
Ass.
Sweat.
Stale breath.
Twenty men who had been locked in holding cells and chained together before sunrise.
A transport officer barked from behind them.
“Keep moving!”
Isaiah dropped into a seat.
The chain around his waist pulled when he tried to get comfortable.
Across the aisle, a man was already asleep.
Isaiah stared at him.
How the fuck could anybody sleep?
The doors closed.
The bus moved.
Isaiah looked through the reinforced glass.
A gas station passed.
A woman stood beside an SUV looking at her phone.
A father held a little boy’s hand outside a convenience store.
Isaiah watched them longer than anything else.
The little boy pulled toward the store.
His father pulled him back toward the car.
The boy said something.
The father laughed.
Then they were gone.
Isaiah looked down at his chains.
Ten years suddenly wasn’t a number.
Ten Christmases.
Ten summers.
Ten birthdays.
Twenty.
Twenty-one.
Twenty-two—
“Don’t.”
Isaiah looked across the aisle.
The man who’d been sleeping had his eyes open now.
“What?”
“Count.”
Isaiah stared at him.
The older prisoner closed his eyes again.
“You’ll lose your fucking mind.”
Isaiah didn’t respond.
He just looked out the window again.
The bus moved through flat nothing.
Fields.
An overpass.
A storage facility with a broken sign.
Isaiah watched the other men the way he used to watch new people on his block.
Who sat still.
Who kept looking around.
Who already knew somebody.
The man across the aisle hadn’t moved again.
Not sleeping now.
Just still.
The kind of still that doesn’t come from being calm.
It comes from having nothing left to protect.
Two rows back, somebody was crying.
Quiet.
The kind of crying you do when you’re trying not to.
Nobody looked at him.
There was a younger kid near the front.
Couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
He kept bouncing his knee.
Looking at the officers.
Looking at the door.
Like he was still calculating something.
Isaiah recognized it.
He had done the same thing in holding.
Took him two days to understand there was nothing to calculate.
The bus slowed.
Turned.
A facility appeared behind a chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
Wide.
Low.
Gray in the way that wasn’t a color.
Just the absence of one.
A prisoner somewhere behind Isaiah muttered, “Welcome to hell.”
Nobody laughed.
The bus stopped.
The officers moved them off fast.
Through a corridor.
Into a large room with fluorescent lights that hummed.
Concrete floors.
Concrete walls.
The smell had changed.
Not feet and ass anymore.
Bleach and something underneath the bleach.
There were officers everywhere.
None of them looked at the men the way cops usually did.
No hostility.
No interest.
They moved like people processing inventory.
Because that’s what this was.
A man with a clipboard called out a number.
Then another.
Then another.
Isaiah found out his.
It was not his name.
An officer pointed toward the wall.
“Line up against the wall.”
They did.
The same officer gave the next command.
“Everything off.”
Nobody moved for a second.
His voice sharpened.
“Everything. Now. Let’s go.”
Isaiah started with his shirt.
The man with the clipboard hadn’t looked up.
One of the officers near the door was writing something.
Another was talking to a woman in a different uniform.
They were talking about food.
Somebody’s birthday.
Isaiah stepped out of his shoes.
Pants.
Socks.
The floor was cold.
Not cold like weather.
Cold like it had never been warm.
Cold like it didn’t know what warm was.
He stood there under lights that didn’t soften anything.
Didn’t miss anything.
He had a scar on his left hip from a knife fight at fourteen.
Stretch marks from a growth spurt at sixteen.
A birthmark below his right shoulder blade.
These were his.
Private.
Now they were inventory.
The processing officer finally looked at him.
“Arms up.”
Isaiah raised them.
“Turn.”
He turned.
He was nineteen years old.
He had street pride.
He had never let anybody take anything from him without bleeding for it first.
And there was nothing to fight.
Nobody was being cruel.
Nobody was even looking at him that hard.
That was the thing.
That was the thing that was going to stay with him.
They weren’t trying to break him.
They just didn’t see him.
The officer continued the search.
“Squat.”
Isaiah squatted.
“Cough.”
He coughed.
“Move.”
Isaiah moved.
They handed him clothes.
Thin.
Rough.
Not his size.
He put them on.
He was a number now.
The court had taken his time.
This room had taken the last thing.
He hadn’t known it was the last thing until it was already gone.
A deputy walked him through another corridor.
Gray walls.
Overhead lights every fifteen feet.
Then it happened.
Fast.
Practiced.
Four men stepped from a doorway on the left.
They moved on a fifth man.
Black.
Mid-thirties.
He never saw them coming.
It was over in four seconds.
Maybe five.
The man went down.
He didn’t try to get up.
The blood came quickly.
Dark on concrete.
The four men were already moving away.
Not running.
Walking.
Like they had somewhere to be.
Like they had just finished something they had started much earlier.
A calm voice came from Isaiah’s right.
“Don’t look.”
Isaiah turned toward it.
An older Black man was nearby.
He hadn’t raised his voice.
Hadn’t moved toward the man on the floor.
His was the voice of somebody for whom a corridor did not become a different place just because something had happened in it.
Isaiah looked anyway.
The man on the floor wasn’t moving.
The four men had already turned a corner.
The deputy ahead had stopped walking.
Just standing.
Back to all of it.
Not running for help.
Not reaching for anything.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody ran.
The corridor was almost quiet except for the hum of the lights.
Isaiah stood there.
Blood spreading slowly on the concrete.
This was the first day.
The courtroom had been the easy part.
The deputy turned toward him.
“Keep moving.”
Isaiah looked at the officer.
Then back at the man on the floor.
The deputy’s voice came harder this time.
“Move.”
Isaiah did.
The older man who had warned him was already walking ahead.
Isaiah watched his back.
He didn’t know his name.
The man didn’t look around again.
At the end of the corridor, another steel door opened.
Isaiah followed him through.
Behind them, someone finally started shouting.
