The Five Year Plan (1998)

'Wish I had a dollar for every time I seen that happen,' guffawed the man searching the box containing Dave's personals. He glanced around at his equally amused colleagues. 'Spend five years pumping iron like you was Arnie fuckin' Schwarzenegger and then you wonder why your clothes don't fit.'

Dave gave himself up to their amusement.

'Look at these pants,' he grinned, holding the waistband away from his stomach. 'I must have lost twenty pounds. You know, you could market this place as a fat farm.

The Homestead Plan diet. Safe serious weight loss through lifestyle change. Personalized care from corrective professionals.'

'You're lucky you did your time here, Slicker,' said one guard. 'In Arizona they'd have had you in a chain gang. You'd have lost a heck of a lot more weight out there.'

The guard searching Dave's personals riffled through the pages of a book and then regarded its cover with mild distaste.

'What is this shit, anyway?' he grumbled.

'Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky,' said Dave. 'Russia's greatest writer. In my opinion.'

'You some kind of communist, or something?'

Dave thought it over for a second.

'Well, I believe in the redistribution of wealth,' he said. 'Just about everyone in here believes in that, don't they?'

'Chain gangs aren't the answer,' said Tamargo. 'Nor anything else that keeps a man in shape. Prison shouldn't make guys who are comin' out more of a threat to lawabiding citizens than when they went in. You ask me, when guys come in here, we should give 'em all lots of fatty food. Cheeseburgers, ice-cream, Coca-Cola, French fries, much as they want, whenever they want. No exercise and plenty of TV. Phil Gramm wants the system to stop turning out hardened criminals, then that's the way to do it. Plenty of fuckin' junk food and easy chairs. That way when these fuckers eventually hit the streets they're regular couch potatoes like the rest of us, instead of muscle-bound bad-asses.'

Dave straightened his tie as best he could on a shirt collar that he could no longer button and grinned affably at Tamargo and his cushion-sized stomach.

'You're an enlightened man,' he said. 'At least you would be if you could get on the Homestead Plan.'

'Not even out yet and you're talkin' like a wiseguy,' observed Tamargo. 'Your mission, should you decide to accept it, Slicker, is to stay the fuck out of trouble and this place. Got that?'

'Is that your rehabilitation speech?'

'Yeah.'

'Your lawyer's here,' said the guard who had asked him if he was a communist. "Magine that. Wants to give you a ride back into the city. Must be your witty conversation, Slicker.'

'You've noticed it too, huh?'

The guard waved him toward a door.

'See ya, Commie.'

Dave shrugged. Now that he had thought about it some more, communism just seemed like a different kind of theft, that was all. And what was happening to the whole corrections system, to people like Benford Halls, made him realize that the government didn't really give a shit about releasing human beings from prisons. All it cared about was the next election. He remembered a scene in his favorite movie, The Third Man. Orson Welles's famous cuckoo clock speech. The one where Harry Lime meets his old friend Holly Martins on the Ferris wheel. Dave had seen the movie so many times he could remember the speech word for word.

'These days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people and the proletariat and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plans and so have I.'

He took a last look around and nodded.

'Come on,' urged Tamargo. 'I want to get out of here too, y'know? I'm going off duty now. I got some plans.'

'So have I,' said Dave. 'So have I.'

Chapter THREE

'So what's the plan?'

'The plan?'

'Your schedule for the first day of the rest of your life?'

Dave was sitting in Jimmy Figaro's seven-series BMW appreciating all the leather and woodwork and thinking that it looked and felt like a small Rolls-Royce. Not that he had ever been in a Rolls. But this was what he imagined when he thought of one. Adjusting his seat electronically, he glanced through the tinted window as they drove away from Homestead onto Highway 1. There wasn't much to look at. Just broad fertile fields where, for a few dollars, you could 'pick your own' crop of whatever was growing out there -- peas, tomatoes, corn, strawberries, they had all kinds of shit. Only Dave had a different kind of crop in mind.

'I dunno, Jimmy. I mean, you're driving the car. And what a car it is.'

'Like it?'

'You got room service on this?' said Dave, inspecting the phone in the armrest. 'And I've never seen a car with a TV in front.'

'Trip computer. Only picks up TV when the engine is off.'

'What about the Feds? Does it pick them up too?'

Figaro grinned.

'You've been reading the New Yorker.'

'I read all kinds of shit these days.'