But Gabe didn’t get mad. He just said, “Any time after dinner, and as for how long, that’s up to you. We’d like to think you’d take into consideration your fellow parolees and keep your phone calls to a reasonable time, especially if there are men waiting in line behind you.”
“That’s a damn regular phone,” said Kurt, without raising his hand. “Don’t we get cellphones?”
“Raise your hand, next time, please,” said Gabe. “Cellphone service is a bit spotty out here, hence the landline. But at the end of two weeks, if you’ve stuck with the program, you will receive an older model phone with six months prepaid service, courtesy of Wyoming Correctional’s release support committee. At the end of the summer, we’ll add another six months worth of prepaid service. How does that sound?”
Kurt seemed satisfied with this and settled into silence.
Gabe talked about when mealtimes were, how they were having tacos that night, how a bell would ring to call them to the mess tent. What the staff currently consisted of: two cooks and them, and that there’d be more parolees and team leads arriving in two weeks.
“We will have weekly group counseling sessions on Saturday afternoons, which we encourage you to go to, and individual counseling if you need it. Movie nights will be held in the mess tent on an as-needed or as-requested basis. And here are your shower tokens.”
Gabe reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out four baggies, each with a name on it. Each baggie seemed to have a bunch of wooden disks and Blaze, for the life of him, couldn’t figure out what they were, and he was usually very quick on the uptake.
“Sorry your baggie has the wrong name on it,” said Gabe, smiling slightly as he handed Blaze his little baggie. “I can get a Sharpie and change that right quick.”
Not smiling back, not even slightly, Blaze took the baggie and looked at the contents, rumpling the baggie in his fingers to look at the wooden disks more closely. They were simple and thin, rough-hewn, with a black stamp of what looked like a shower head spouting six delicate streams of water.
“What are these?” asked Blaze. He raised his hand quickly. “What are these, sir?”
“It’s just Gabe,” said Gabe. “They’re shower tokens for the next two weeks. We encourage you to take daily showers. Two weeks from now, we’ll give you fourteen more tokens, but if you need more than that, just ask.”
That didn’t make any sense. Blaze looked at his fellow parolees and they all looked at him and seemed to be mentally shrugging. They could all do math. One token equaled one shower, sure. But theif you need morepart was throwing all of them, except nobody wanted to question the boss man.
Except Tom, who, apparently, had brass balls, and was raising his hand slowly, like a brown snake.
“Yes, Tom.”
“How long are we allowed to shower?”
“Well, that’s up to you, but again, you might take into consideration your fellow parolee and whether your indulging in an hour-long shower might leave him short of enough hot water for his shower. Do you see?”
Pulling his lips tight against his teeth, Tom shook his head, and didn’t seem willing to put himself in front of the line for questions any longer, a feeling for which Blaze did not blame him, not one little bit.
“But for how long?” asked Blaze, raising his hand at the same time, which seemed to be enough courtesy for Gabe, who shrugged.
“How long is enough?” he asked. “Some days twenty minutes is fine and other days an hour is not long enough. One token equals a thirty minute shower.”
“Thirtyminutes?” barked Kurt, obviously too overwrought at the idea that they might even consider showering for that long because he did not raise his hand. “You’re fucking kidding me.Thirtyminutes?”
At Wyoming Correctional, the limit on showers was five minutes, maximum, enough time to wash your head, your pits, your junk, and then rinse off. The idea of standing beneath a warm spray for twenty or even thirty whole minutes was like a bit of heaven and just as impossible to reach.
Prison showers were short and dangerous, as well as lukewarm, so maybe Gabe was spinning a tale to keep them docile. Or maybe nobody on the inside had dreamed about hot showers as much as Blaze had.
“The tokens are just so that we can monitor how much hot water gets used, on average. We only have propane to heat the water at present, though we hope to install solar soon and be a bit more off-grid.” Gabe’s brow furrowed as he looked at them each, one by one. “The tokens are just to help us keep track, you see. There are no restrictions on how many tokens you get, so you can shower morning and evening if you like.”
So. Okay. Blaze’s confusion had just been added to. He stood up and without raising his hand, said, “So you’re telling me that not only can we take a half hour shower every day, we can taketwoof them, if we wanted to?”
He squinted hard at Gabe, feeling like he was talking from inside of an echo chamber of sorts, where each utterance, his or Gabe’s, went through a confusion blender before being received by the other guy.
“That’s what I’m saying. We just want to keep track, hence the tokens. That’ll help us calculate how many showers get taken each day, which will let us know how much more propane for hot water we need to order and have delivered.”
It could not be as simple as that; it simply could not be. Or maybe the surface generosity and sense of abundance was just that, a glossy cover-up for the shitstorm of abuse that was to follow.
Chapter4
Blaze
As Gabe led them out of the mess tent and into the lushness of the undergrowth once more, he was going over the rules, or guidelines, as he called them. Lights out was at ten, lunch was at noon, dinner was at five-thirty, and so on. Do the work assigned to you. Ask questions if you don’t understand. No guns, no drugs, no smoking. No fighting. And if you leave the valley without permission during the first two weeks, you will be considered AWOL and your parole will have to be handled some other way.
