THE RETURN
“What is it suppose to be?” I whispered to Jay.
“I don’t know. It looks like…”
“I know what it looks like,” I said, cutting him off. “But why is it there?”
Jay looks at me, then said with complete seriousness, “because it’s Toe-Finger and he’s an idiot.”
It really does explain a lot, like how the relocated moron came back into my life. As you may remember, Toe-Finger left the quiet confines of our prison to journey to a facility that specializes in crazy people. Among those there, is a subset of Sex Offenders with a history of actual physical contact with their victims. For these individuals they have an intensive program to prevent further offenses. So these facilitators have seen the worst of the worst and, as the program is still running, have likely had some success.
I’d imagine the staff is patient and unflappable. So it is telling that in the two or three months he was there Toe-Finger failed the program and got kicked off the compound. In his defense, I don’t think it’s because he is super evil or dangerous. I think it just boils down to his annoying, hillbilly idiocy.
The night he returned, I was sitting at the library working during my off time on a new Non-Fiction catalog. The next thing I know my old cellmate is tapping me on the shoulder. I turn off my music and have barely taken off my headphones when he said, “Gus, Toe-Finger is back and they tried putting him in Wolf’s cube!”
“Oh…oh no,” I manage to get out in my surprise.
“Don’t worry, Wolf threw him out.”
Wolf is a strange man. He is totally Hispanic, but is friends, pretty much exclusively with the white supremacist and the hillbillies. He has no interest in family or kids as far as I can tell, but he’s the first to harass anyone with the faintest whisper of charges related to kids – justified or not. Yet he also lives and works around several known offenders and is fine with them. Overall, he’s a dick and only two cubes away from me. Putting Toe-Finger in that kind of proximity to Wolf and to myself and the other librarians would just be bad. So this one time I’m actually glad Wolf’s an asshole.
By the time I get back to the unit, Toe-Finger has been relocated downstairs, so I didn’t get a chance to personally see him.
“Wait until you see him,” one of my friends tells me eagerly. “It’s just…just…awesome.”
Which leads me to lunch the next day. I was sitting at a table with Jay and my old cellmate Sam, on our trays was a pigeon-sized chicken thigh and leg, badly mashed potatoes, bread so stale it was the texture of toast, and metallic tasting carrots. I poked at my meat, still not fully convinced the brown granules on the skin were in fact seasoning and not something that stuck to it after it was dropped on the floor. I looked up and saw him.
He still had his eight or nine teeth, which for him is likely a major accomplishment, but is now sporting Harry Carey glasses. I watched as he laughed, his bray audible even over the roar of the crowd, and then he turned around.
Since I have known him, Toe-Finger has kept his head shaved, and for the most part he still did, with one weird exception. On the back of his head, starting in the center, between his ears, is an inverted triangle of thick, curly, sculpted orange hair. It looks, quite unintentionally on his part, exactly like a woman’s pubic hair circa 1970.
“He calls it his rooster’s tail,” Jay informs me. “He wants everyone to call him Rooster.”
“Do you think he knows…?” I ask.
“I can’t imagine he doesn’t. He’s really proud of it.”
I can only shake my head.
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