Drust had hard features. He was a hard man. He came from a hard family, from a hard place. The youngest of 5 brothers, Drust was used to having things hard. He’d fought for everything in life, from the last potato on the plate to the rights for any hand-me-down that infrequently became available. He was a taker. He had to be. Taking meant surviving in Drust’s world. His dad worked six, twelve hour days a week in a coal mine in some forgotten part of the landscape. A coal mine that produced black soot which seemed to make its way in to every part of Drust‘s life. By the time he was 16 he had reached six feet. His frame was long and sinewy and his jaw was rock solid. His features were angular, like most of those with eastern European lineage. He didn’t talk much. There wasn’t much worth saying. His coal mining town in West Virginia spit him out when he was 17 years old.
Few people find their calling in life, the perfect job. Drust found his though, correctional officer. It was a fancy way to dress up the words prison guard. It was supposed to make the job description sound less generic and more important. Some do-gooder, bureaucrat that’d never stepped foot in a prison must’ve come up with it after a pointless meeting or meaningless luncheon. Call it what you want, the job was still the same and that suited Drust just fine. He was a taker, a survivor in a prison full of takers and survivors. There was a fine line between those he watched and him. Some twist of fate or luck put him on the side of the line that got to go home after twelve hours of slamming hardened steel doors and listening to the ramblings of inmates trying to bring meaning to their lives by griping and complaining about how they’d been fucked by their attorney, the judge, their wife or the man. For Drust, home could’ve been either place, his one bedroom apartment off the main highway of “Nowheresville” or cell #223 in C block. It’s why he did his job well, if that’s what you call being feared enough by both colleagues and inmates alike to be left alone. He wasn’t feared by what he did or said, but by the perception of what might happen if forced to do or say something. He had a coldness, a hardness. His cold way was as intimidating as any smack with a belly club ever could be. Most figured Drust would just a soon kill you than bother with you if it came right down to it. They might’ve been right. After all, every day that passed, the line separating an apartment and a cell got finer and finer and the difference between being in one or the other got smaller.
Leon Bissel had served 25 years of his 25 to life sentence. Leon had been convicted of second degree murder for allegedly killing his 12 year old son, James. A widower, Leon’s only family was his son James. He lost his wife to cancer 7 years before the incident. His trial lasted 4 and half days and the jury was out for 49 minutes before bringing back the verdict. They must’ve felt bad for Leon, that’s why they didn’t go for the first degree charge that the ambitious d.a. was angling for. They realized Leon got railroaded a bit and that his half-ass, over worked public defender barely had time to learn Leon’s name, let alone familiarize himself with the case. They must’ve recognized the fact that the prosecutors case was full of holes and based on circumstantial evidence and that any one of the pimps or drug dealers that live in Leon’s building could’ve, and probably, committed the crime. But hey, that wasn’t their problem, ol’ Leon was a poor black man from the wrong part of town and had he not committed this crime, he’d surely done something in the past that was worth 25 years of his life. Far be it from them to buck the legal process. If the legal system’s fucked up, let the legal system fix it. Let some bureaucrat that creates fancy names for mundane jobs figure it out. Or maybe, they just felt bad for Leon because the only thing they saw of him during that short four and half day show was a slumped over man who cried pitifully, never once taking his face from his tear soaked hands. He cried like a man that had lost a loved one, not like a man that killed one. Shit, what difference did it make, prison or not, the poor man was lost to the world of pity anyhow.
Leon never really stopped crying. Eventually the tears dried up, but the sadness never left Leon’s eyes. Eyes that reflected the sadness of a broken hearted soul. You don’t find sad eyes in prison, emptiness for the most part, a lot of evil eyes that seem to project the fury that they’ve seen, but sad, not hardly. Drust noticed that about Leon. Hardened to the never ending flow of bullshit that masses in prison, somehow Leon’s sad eyes subtly found their way into Drust’s thoughts. It never really mattered much to Drust and he never gave it much thought beyond the fact that it was the only real emotion he’d allow himself to recognize in life. As far as Drust was concerned, Leon didn’t belong in this place. There was no room for pity or sadness here. He was out of place, an imperfection in a place that was perfectly hard. It’s probably why most of the cons left Leon alone. It’s why Leon did most of his time alone, routinely and quietly.
Because of his good behavior, Leon had long ago earned the right to become a trustee. It allowed him to participate on work details that took him out of the confines of the barbed wire, concrete painted corridors and the sites of the sharp shooter perched on their massive guard towers. These work details were usually groups of 5 to 7 trustees. They would perform manual labor for the State. Most times it was workin’ a shovel or collecting trash along the highway. One guard was all that was needed to oversee these details and the duty was rotated weekly. Drust was up to watch today’s detail. Recent heavy rains had eroded away some shallow, old graves in the Potters Field and it was up to the trustees to rebury the coffins that had become exposed. The Potters Field is where they laid inmates to rest who had no families or had families that had long forgotten their existence. This would be Leon’s last detail. Ironically, he’d spend one of his last days as a con in the company of inmates that never left prison. Leon had made parole and would be released within a few days. Drust was reminded of that fact when he went to Leon’s cell to shackle him for the days trip. When he opened the heavy cell door he found Leon sitting on his cot in his bleak gray cell, with a postcard in his hands. There he sat, staring at a picture of a vacant stretch of beach along the shoreline somewhere. There Leon sat, staring with his sad eyes at that picture, all yellow and tattered. By the looks of it, Drust figured ol’ Leon must’ve had it in his possession for years. Probably took it out every night and every morning and got lost in it, a momentary break from the sadness. Poor bastard was just making getting released even worse. No way in hell a man like Leon would make it past the cheap half- way house located just four miles from where they were standing, let alone to some vacant stretch of shore. Leon, like most parolees, was broke and would have to scrape for every dime just to afford a dingy one bedroom like Durst’s.
The detail arrived at the graveyard in mid morning. What needed to be done was plain to see and Drust wasn’t much on management anyway, so the men went to work. The job was a bit gruesome but still beat a day inside. Drust stood by quietly with his shotgun and coldly watched the men dig new graves and lower the old rotting coffins into them. The last grave was that of a jewel thief named Paul Jardin. Like most those that had been at the prison for any length of time, Drust remembered this con’s name more for the way he died then anything else. Jardin never made it through the gates of the prison. He tried his luck with an escape attempt that involved his jumping through a kicked out window of the bus that was transporting him and 25 other new inmates. His luck ran short when he was shot by two prison guards that escorted the bus. Leon and another con finished digging Jardin’s new grave and prepared to lower the coffin into the hole with two old hemp ropes. When Leon lifted one end of the box to make room for the other con to fish the first rope underneath it, the rotten box came splitting apart. Jardin’s corpse landed at Leon’s feet. While the other trustees made for cover, as if Jardin was going to rise from the dead like some Zombie, Leon froze and stared at the decomposing body.
Drust saw the treasure at the same time Leon did. No one else saw it. They were too busy running for cover. But Drust’s and Leon’s eyes captured it at the same time. A nondescript pouch, much like what a school boy would keep his marbles, had dropped from what was left of Jardin’s jacket. It lay there next to Jardin’s body. The cord meant to keep it closed had loosened either from the fall or from the years of laying in repose with its keeper. There was no mistaking the brilliant sparkle that emanated from the pouch. Even with the little sunlight that made its way through the broken overcast, the inside of the pouch shined white and brilliant. And there they stood, Leon and Drust, frozen. It’s said that a man’s entire life passes before his eyes in the instant before his death. At this moment, Drust’s life passed before his. It had been a life of few breaks, a life where nothing came easy, a life of only existing, a hard life…not much of a life at all. And there it was, those dozen or so tiny rocks that had been forgotten and written off as an insurance loss, could change his hard life forever. No more taking, no more living to survive, no more cons, or concrete corridors, no more barbed wire or lonely one room slums. A cleansing. There it was, the answer, hope and so simple. So easy.
The moment seemed to last hours when only seconds actually had passed. Drust took his eyes from the pouch to where Leon was standing. But what he saw was not Leon. It couldn’t be Leon. Those were not Leon’s eyes. They were the eyes of a man that had hope, not the sad eyes that Drust had seen day after day, week after week, year after year. Hope like that of Drust’s. And there they both stood. In that singular moment Leon and Drust were the same man, the same soul. Neither one more or less deserving of the answer that laid in the lose dirt before them. Both men knew that the moment to act was fleeting. Leon found himself moving his hand slowly and methodically toward the pouch, as if at such speed, his movement would not be detected. He continued until he felt the satchel in the grip of his dirt covered hand. He moved his hand back as slowly and methodically. Drust stood and watched. And as quickly as his life had passed before his eyes, now did Leon’s life. Drust realized that every diamond ever mined would never change his own life. His life was set for him the moment he cried his first tear and gasped his first breath of soot filled air. He was born to a hard life and nothing would change that. But Leon, he was different. His life wasn’t meant to be spent hard. His life wasn’t meant to be spent in the confines of a cell crying for lost love. His life wasn’t meant to be spent in a half way house occupied by hard ex cons. Those rocks didn’t belong to Drust any more than they belonged to Jardin. They belonged to Leon. It wasn’t as much about compassion as it was about setting things right. It was about balance. Leon never belonged in the life prison brought him. He didn’t fit in the world of empty and angry eyes. He belonged on some shoreline, gazing at the distant horizon that would slowly but surely drain the sadness from his soul. That is what is right.
Drust loaded the detail back into the van and returned them to their cells. No words about the incident were ever exchanged between Leon and Drust. In fact, in the four days that came and went before Leon’s departure, Drust never even saw Leon again. Drust put Leon and the incident out of his mind to shelter himself from a lifetime of what if’s and shoud haves.
One day, about a year after Leon’s release. Drust received a piece of mail, a yellow tattered post card with a picture of some vacant shoreline. It carried the postmark of a town in Georgia and simply read, “Thank you. Leon”.
Many people think that a guardian angel is with you for a lifetime and wears a perfect untarnished halo. Sometimes a guardian angel is with you for a moment and wears a halo that is scratched and bent and all covered with soot.
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