Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

the middle-aged, paunchy guard asked me. He had grayish skin but still would have been called white. His eyes were pale with no discernible color. Deciphering his age would have required an algebraic equation that depended upon the variables of
smoking
and
liquor consumption
.
    “I’m here to see Rufus Tyler,” I said.
    Those misty eyes doubted me.
    “Name?” he asked.
    “Ezekiel Rawlins.”
    He took a clipboard from the desk in his little booth and read with the help of an unsteady finger.
    “No E. Rawlins on the list.”
    “I was told that you were expecting me,” I lied.
    “Who said that?”
    “His lawyer.”
    “Hey,” the guard said. “Don’t I know you?”
    “Not that I remember.”
    “You were an inmate up at Chino five, six years ago.”
    “Not I,” I said, trying to keep the fear from coming out in my words.
    I had not been incarcerated at Chino, or any other prison, but I was afraid of what that minimum-wage white man could make out of fancy or spite. In my fears (if not in reality) I believed that he could have me dragged from that car and put me in a cell belowground for no reason except his faulty or fabricated recollections.
    “What’s the lawyer’s name?” the guard asked, just that quickly losing interest in his own imagination.
    “Sweet,” I said, “Milo Sweet.”
    Milo
had
been a lawyer, and his name sounded like some shyster in a storefront promising accident victims that they could retire for life on a broken leg or paper cut.
    “I don’t have it here,” the guard said, “but you could follow this path up to the main building. Maybe they got an update or something in Records.”
    —
    The asphalt lane leading to the main building was a city block in length. The ways in and out were divided by a row of especially tall lemon bushes. Three prisoners, identified by their pink overalls, were tending the fruit trees.
    I could have been driving up to the administration building of a small college.
    I parked my car unchallenged and approached the front doors, which were at least locked. Peering through the wire-laced, possibly bulletproof glass, I waved at a tan white man sitting behind a small metal desk. He saw me but didn’t respond so I tapped on the glass with a silver quarter.
    The guard took this as an affront and jumped to his feet. He raced toward the door I stood at and yanked it open.
    “Who the hell are you?” he challenged.
    He was a skinny man, what some people might call an ectomorph. The waist of his pants was no more than twenty-eight inches and still loose. His belt was secured by its last eye, and the gun belt he wore over that seemed about to fall around his hips and knees to the floor.
    For all his apparent frailty the white man with the tan skin was quite aggressive, jutting at me like a Jack Russell terrier harrying a lion.
    “They sent me from the front gate,” I said, half answering the question. “I’m here to see Rufus Tyler.”
    Charcoal Joe’s given name had had no impact on the front gate, but the Barney Fife inner guard got a canny look on his mug when I mentioned the name.
    “Who are you?” he asked again.
    I told him.
    “You have some kind of documentation?”
    “You mean like a driver’s license?”
    “Hell no. I mean something telling us that you’re here to see the prisoner.”
    “Mr. Tyler’s lawyer didn’t tell me that I needed it.”
    “I don’t have any record of you,” the angry man said.
    “I don’t wanna be rude, sir, but you haven’t checked.”
    Easy in Wonderland, that’s who I was. I had driven down the rabbit hole and found myself in a world where the rules were cracked and cockeyed. The thin-framed guard took my words as some kind of incantation. His anger disappeared and he shrugged.
    “Behind me and down the hall to your left,” he said, “second door on the right.”
    Without further engagement I followed the directions to a dark wood door with an opaque glass window dominating its upper half. Stenciled on