He was my cellmate for three years

People get the cell part wrong.

You don't pick. That's the main thing. On television a man walks into a cell and looks the other man up and down like a decision is being made about something. There's no decision. There's a sergeant with a board on the wall and little cards in slots, and your card goes where there's an open bunk at your security level. A bunk comes open, they fill it that afternoon. Nobody asks you one question about any of it.

I did four years at Chillicothe. Went in at forty-six behind money that was never mine. I signed where I was told to sign. I knew better. I've told that part in a lot of rooms with folding chairs and bad coffee and I've got it down to about ninety seconds.

The cell runs about six foot by nine. A steel sink sitting on top of a steel toilet. Bunks bolted to the wall, and a desk you can't move because it's part of the building, and a footlocker apiece. The light's on a switch out in the range, so you sleep however they leave it, and they've got you up at four-thirty regardless.

My first year I was in with a guy named Purvis out of Lima who went to segregation in the August and never came back to the unit. I had the cell to myself eleven days and those were eleven good days. Then they brought Renner in.

He was somewhere in his forties, from out past Zanesville. Worked on farm equipment before, combines mostly. Big through the chest. Didn't say much the first couple weeks past what a man has to say. Made his bunk up tight every morning. He did crossword books out of the library and he did them in pen.

Four-thirty, I said. Standing count is four-thirty in the morning and I mean four-thirty, not around then. You get up, you stand at your door, an officer walks the range and counts bodies, and the numbers have to come out right across the whole institution before anybody eats. Then it's chow. Then work. Then in the afternoon they stand you at that door and do the whole thing again. Four years of that. And it isn't loud all night, either. On television there's men hollering back and forth down the tier the whole night long and I don't know where anybody got that from.

I had a job in the maintenance shop, and that's how I ended up with the trade I've got. The state ran a certificate through the shop, refrigeration and heating, and I sat in a classroom two mornings a week with a textbook that had another man's name written in the front of it. Passed it in my second year. Renner was on the grounds crew, out at seven with a mower and back in at two with grass down in his boots and the back of his neck burned from May on.

Now the yard is a different place from the cell. Out there you're with your car, guys from your county, whoever it is you came up with. Your cellie is not who you walk with. You might say what's up going past him. You're not standing there having a conversation. Three years that man slept four feet under me and I doubt we said ten sentences to each other outside that cell.

It started the second winter, after count, and it went on till he left. I'd come down off the top and we'd do it on his bunk and then I'd go back up. We never said a word about it. Not that next morning, not any morning. Three years of talking about his mother's roof and whether the Bengals were going to do anything that year, and not one time did either of us say anything about it.

A write-up would have put me out of the shop. My board date was eleven months off.

He paroled in the March, a year and some before me. He had the date months out, so it wasn't the way a transfer is, where they come at six in the morning and give you twenty minutes. He gave away what he had. I got a radio and a pair of shower shoes. He said take it easy, Vance. I said you too, and he went down to do his paperwork.

Four months later a letter came. A man on paper isn't supposed to be writing into an institution. It's a condition, it's printed right on his sheet, and mail gets opened and read on the way in. So he took something to send it.

It was a page and a half about nothing. He got on at a tire place. It had rained out there a week straight and the back yard was standing water. His mother's house needed a water heater and he'd put one in himself. He put down that he hoped I was all right.

It started Dear Ray. Nobody in there had called me Ray in four years.

To write out to a man on parole I'd have needed it approved, and approval means a reason written on a page that goes in a file other people read. There wasn't a reason I was going to put on a page. So I didn't. He never sent another one.

I got out the following spring. Five months in a place on Salem Avenue with a curfew and a cup twice a week, and Dale hired me off a phone call where I told him the whole thing inside the first two minutes because I wasn't going to have it come up on him later. He said be here at seven. He's still my boss, sixteen years on. Residential mostly, a little light commercial. I'm going into crawl spaces at sixty-three.

Denise and I married in oh-nine. She knows about the four years and what it was for. Amber calls on Sundays and comes at Christmas. My boy and I don't talk. I went in at two-fifty and came out at one-ninety. I'm right around two-eighty now. Grew the beard in there because you could and I never took it off.

The letter's in the closet on Denise's side, in the folder with my certificate and my discharge paperwork. It's on legal pad paper and the holes are torn out along the top where he pulled it off the pad.