Framed: Ten Years Stolen

Chapter 4

You do not visit a prison. You apply to visit one, weeks ahead, in writing, and then you stand in a room that smells of floor wax and wait to find out whether your name made the list.

Mine had. I stood at the visitors' check-in at Stateville with my driver's license in my hand — a free man's plastic, six days old — and the man behind the glass ran me through the machine of the place: stamp, point, nod. I knew every step before he took it. I had spent ten years learning how to be processed, and the knowledge had not left my body just because the state had left my file.

Frank Delgado was already at the table when they brought me in. No glass in the low-risk room, just a bolted table and a guard by the wall working hard at being furniture. Frank is sixty-one now. He went in for his second stretch when I was in high school, armed robbery, and in ten years of my knowing him he has never once claimed he didn't do it. I did it, is the whole speech. Saves everybody paperwork.

He taught me the yard in my first month — who to owe, who never to owe — and he taught me to play chess badly and lose at it gracefully, which he said was the same lesson with a board under it.

He looked me over: the free clothes, the haircut that hadn't grown out yet.

"You didn't come here for a visit," he said. "You come to collect."

"There's a difference. You're the one who taught it to me."

"Eddie Marsh." He said it flat. "That's what you come for."

"Start at the beginning, Frank. Who was he?"

"Evidence clerk, county courthouse. Worked your trial from inside the property room before he ever wore a number himself." Frank folded his hands on the table. "Then he come inside — your seventh year, it was. Theft. Property room irregularities, they called it, which is a rich phrase when you think about where he worked."

"What kind of man?"

"A cataloging man. The kind can't sleep if a number's out of order. Kept his area squared away, wouldn't owe nobody nothing, drove the gamblers up the wall. Whatever he carried in with him, he carried every day. Two years he was with us, maybe three."

"What was he carrying?"

"A number." Frank's voice dropped, out of old habit; the guard by the wall didn't look up. "Eddie said what damned you wasn't testimony. Testimony comes and goes, he said. What damned you was a number in a logbook that he moved with his own hand, because a prosecutor's investigator told him to. And afterward he memorized it, in case anybody ever asked. Nobody ever asked."

"Whose number?"

"The catalog number on your interrogation tapes. The masters. They come over from the county and Eddie logged them in. Two years later he logged them out, once, on a signature he was told not to read. He never saw them come back. He watched for it every day he was inside. Every day, Caleb. Man watched that logbook like it owed him money."

"Why you, Frank? Why tell you?"

"He made me learn the last four digits. Made me. I got no memory for birthdays, my own kid's, nothing, and this man drilled four numbers into me like I was a filing cabinet. Said if anything ever happened to him, the number had to live in somebody who'd outlasted the place." Frank turned his coffee in its paper cup, a quarter turn and back. "Well. I outlasted the place."

"Frank." I kept my voice at the level of the table. "Eddie Marsh got out last spring. I read the release lists. He was in the free world a year before I was."

Frank looked at me for a while.

"Eddie Marsh hanged himself in his cell the night before his release," he said. "The night before. Papers all signed. Date circled on the little calendar he kept. His sister sent a suit for him to walk out in — a suit, Caleb, tags still on it. Afterward the property office told her his effects had been misplaced. Every paper the man owned, his letters, his mother's Bible with the catalog numbers of half your case written in the back in pencil — misplaced. Like a set of keys."

The guard shifted his weight. Visiting time has a shape, and we were at the edge of it.

"Men don't hang themselves the night before they walk," I said.

"No," Frank said. "They don't. Two stretches I done, and I never heard of it once. Somebody made sure Eddie never carried that logbook out the gate, same as somebody made sure his papers never carried it neither."

He unfolded one hand and held it up, palm toward me, at the height of the table. On the palm, in faded ballpoint he had re-inked over and over against this day, were four digits.

"Zero seven three one," he said. "That's what I was given to keep. I'm too old to spend it and you're the only man alive who's owed it. Spend it better than they spent Eddie."

They walked him back toward the cellblock, and at the door he stopped — the guards allowed it; an old man stopping is a thing the room permits — and looked at me once more.

"You walk out the front today, Caleb," he said. "Notice it when you do. Eddie never got to."

Then he went, without turning. Frank Delgado has never once watched a man leave a room he could not leave himself.

On the bus back to Kane County I sat in the back, where you can see the whole vehicle, and I put the day in order: a suit with the tags still on, and a man's whole paper life misplaced like a set of keys.

Men don't hang themselves the night before they walk. Somebody who knew what Eddie Marsh knew had needed him not to walk, and that somebody had reached inside the walls, the property office and the release list as easily as you or I reach into a mailbox.

I took out my release folder, and in pencil, in the margin of the state's apology, I wrote four digits.

0731.