The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld Page A

Bewildered, the white-haired boy quickly bundles his meager belongings—fresh shirt, socks, and paperwork. The cell door slams shut behind him while the old cellmate blinks his rheumy eyes.
    The guard walks him down the row. The cellblock grows quiet.
    The white-haired boy has no idea where he is going. Everyone else does. The whole prison knows about the Norteño bust and Risk and Conroy’s clever hands. Everyone knows how this will end.
    When the men see the white-haired boy walk past, they turn away from the bars. Some go sit on their bunks and don’t say anything. Others smile a little to themselves.
    The white-haired boy is led across the dry, empty yard to another building. The walls here are older, the stone crumbling. He realizes this is Cellblock A—what the inmates call the Hall of the Lifers. No one does time here unless he’s in for a long time.
    Deep underneath this building, the boy knows, is the dungeon of death row. The boy has never seen the death row inmates. No one in the prison ever sees them. They are trapped underground and never allowed up except for their brief trips to the Dugdemona cage, and even then they are led in chains down secret halls. The boy has heard their names—names like York and Striker and Arden—but he has no idea what they look like. They are the invisibles of the prison.
    The men in the Hall of the Lifers stand up when theyhear the hall doors slam. They come to their doors to watch the white-haired boy pass. The boy notices how big the men on this floor are, like caged gorillas. Their faces are masks. No one smiles at him or even nods. Their faces are blank.
    The guard has stopped in front of a cell. The guard looks angry. The boy doesn’t understand that the guard has been sent on this terrible mission and hates it.
    The boy looks in the cell door and sees a man with a seamed face and long tangled hair. The man is lying on his back on his cot, his long hair flowing over his flat pillow. He stares at the ceiling as if he doesn’t know the white-haired boy is there.
    The door clangs open, and the white-haired boy is pushed inside.
    Risk doesn’t rise from his cot—not at first.
    The cell coagulates with an acrid smell that the boy doesn’t know but instantly recognizes. It is the smell of terror, and it is coming from him. Something like barbed wire constricts around his heart, and it is impossible to breathe. He knows now why he is here.
    T he kites float like origami birds, like paper snowflakes, floating and then raining from the cell door. They rain like passing thoughts on the floor, drift down into snow piles at the end of the corridor. Please move me, please , they say. Please.
    There are prisons inside prisons, walls inside walls,and in this place you learn that your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows. You can step behind one wall and then another here, like a child lost in a maze—and be lost forever.
    There is no one like the lady for someone like the white-haired boy. That is the irony of prison. People like the lady are reserved for those sentenced to death. It is only when a man is sentenced to die that the faucets turn on and people start to care. The rest, like the white-haired boy, are erased.
    So many complaint kites rain out of Risk’s cell that they clog the walkway drains like rotting paper leaves. The men have to climb over the huge sodden piles on the way to mess, and they track pieces of paper that say help into the mess hall, where the wet papers roll into tubes that say please and are smeared into gray pulp on the floor on the men’s boots that say me. This is the way it is, in this enchanted place.
    I n times like these, my cell seems dark for days. The air grows thick and I have trouble breathing. I follow the walls with my fingers, searching for the place in the stones that will let me out. I want out of the darkness, out of the pain and confusion.
    Not even the books can save