He saw his baton on the concrete. He had told himself for 11 years that he was doing a job. The cell had a different teaching. In the single hour, he was permitted outside each day. He was walked to a small interior recreation area where a television mounted on the wall ran news and entertainment in rotation.
On a Wednesday afternoon 6 weeks after his arrival, a young corrections officer early 20s broad-shouldered with the particular unhurried authority of someone who does not need to perform power because it simply belongs to him in this building. Directed Puit to the cleaning supply room to collect a mop and bucket for his assigned corridor shift. "You're on tiles 3 through six today," the officer said, not looking up from his clipboard. "Mop closet is at the end of the hall." He handed Puit the sheet without ceremony, without recognition, without any of the accommodation that Puit had for 11 years experienced as the natural texture of institutional life. Puit took the sheet.
He collected the mop. He worked tiles 3 through six in the long echoing corridor with the slow mechanical rhythm of someone with no particular relationship to the task and 9 years to complete it. At the far end of the corridor through a reinforced window looking into the common area, the wall-mounted television was running a local news segment. Puit recognized the Garland City Hall conference room on the screen. He recognized the man seated at the head of the table in a gray suit addressing the assembled members of the newly formed independent civilian oversight commission with the particular unhurried authority of a man who has decided this is the work he intends to do and intends to do it well.
Raymond Doss speaking about accountability structures independent review protocols citizen reporting channels that did not route through the same department they were reporting on. Puit stood at the corridor window and watched for 20 seconds before the officer at the other end of the hall called out that he needed to keep moving. He kept moving. He thought about the three complainants. Their names were in his memory now in a way they had not been before.
Not as cases he had managed, not as files that had been reviewed and closed, but as three specific people who had encountered him. In the way you encounter something that damages you, who had attempted to use the available mechanism for addressing that damage, and who had been told that their experience was insufficient for action. He thought about them in his cell at night, and the thinking had a quality he didn't have precise vocabulary for. Not guilt exactly, not remorse in the way the word is usually deployed, but a recognition that was colder and more permanent than either. The recognition of what he had actually done and what it had actually cost the people he had done it to.
9 years is a very long time. He had a great deal of it still to go.
The first Saturday morning in late April arrived with a quality of light that is not quite the same as the light of any other season cleaner and more direct, carrying the particular promise of warmth without yet delivering the weight of summer heat. Raymond was in his driveway at 8:15. He wore the same paint splattered work pants that had survived three garage renovation projects and a grass staining incident and one ill-fated attempt at hardwood floor refinishing and which having now also survived a confrontation with a police officer. A termination hearing a felony trial and the nine months that followed all of them had achieved a kind of threadbare mythology. His Howard University shirt was on its last structural year.