by Peter Farris
When he woke, his muscles ached. Pain shot across the middle of his back, under his breastbone and down across both thighs. He had to urinate. After he asked a couple times Hummingbird untied him. She went with him into the bathroom and as before watched him. Only this time with a covetous smile.
There were hours of interrupted sleep where Charlie grew disoriented. Could have been day or night. For reasons unknown to him Hicklin put a hood over his head. Charlie remembered screaming. Then he felt Hummingbird’s hands on his shoulders, her cotton-drawl whispers, offering promises and favors. He shook violently, knowing he wanted to kill her. He wanted to kill them both.
Her laughter haunted him. As did Hicklin’s silence.
Charlie dreamed of rockets slicing through the sky. Tools and parts spread across a blanket, a salmon-tinted sunset, a breeze … he worked heartily, attaching a tapered swept fin to a Bulldog FS-500. When he looked off into the distance he saw dark figures shimmer before the dream turned over and he was now back at the bank … during those lulls when the lobby was empty. He would pass the time entering customer account numbers. On the computer in a flash were several months’ worth of check card purchases and withdrawals. He thought of it as financial voyeurism, knowing what people spent their money on. Sex videos and bar tabs and motel rooms and gas and fast food. The patterns and pathologies of people amused Charlie, as though he were spying on an alien race.
A species contrary to his own.
His mind became like a movie screen—his best and only company—complete with reel changes, jump cuts, dissolves. The bank lobby again. Charlie faced a line that never shrank, yet there was his mother, like a stranger, patiently waiting. He greeted her, but there was something different about Lucy Colquitt. Her eye! She never left the house without her glass eye! She presented a check for Charlie to cash. He scanned it once, twice, but his equipment would not read the magnetic ink of the check’s MICR line. He looked across the teller window at his mother, into a small half-moon socket that was her left eye, accompanied by a look of indifference. And across the lobby, a hooded figure appeared and raised his weapon.
* * *
The bedroom was silent and dark. Charlie’s head and neck ached. Just opening his eyes induced nausea. But something had moved on the floor. At first he thought it was a toy car rolling by his foot, a big black toy car with six legs. When his vision cleared he realized the object was in fact a wood beetle. Oily and sleek-looking in the sparse light, it took a few cautious steps, the beetle’s antennae slanting toward Charlie as if it meant to lend him an ear.
The insect made it to the wall and started to climb, then fell. Dull black wing covers fluttered. It righted itself and met the wall again. This time the beetle climbed higher before falling again.
A tenacious insect, the beetle kept this up for a good twenty minutes. Charlie watched, wiggling his own toes and fingers, wincing from a pulled muscle in his lower back. He felt as if we were rooting for the beetle at a ball game, as though the beetle’s success would somehow translate to his own. And the bug was steadily improving. Two, three, then five feet up the wall. The ceiling within reach.
Then the beetle seemed to hesitate, those wings fluttering again, but it dropped to the floor, landing with a small thud. Charlie extended his leg. Nudged the insect with a big toe. It couldn’t even right itself with his help.
He stared for a long time, watching the legs quiver and bend. He finally kicked it away with a foot, out of sight, the bug crackling across the floor like a peanut shell.
* * *
“Charlie Colquitt … but they call you Coma.”
Charlie opened his eyes at the sound of Hicklin’s voice. He looked around the cottage, figuring it for day three, maybe day four. Easier to lose track of time than he’d thought possible. Hummingbird sat on the couch in a daze, absently scratching her forearms.
Hicklin reached into the cooler and retrieved a beer. Empty cans were stacked in pairs atop the coffee table. Charlie wriggled, finding the ropes looser than before. He managed to raise a hand and rub his chin, feeling patches of stubble, a tender bruise that ran the length of one side of his jaw. He sucked his teeth. They felt mossy, complementing the rotten taste in his mouth.
It hadn’t sounded like a question, but Charlie nodded anyway. He watched Hicklin drop a cigarette in an empty can. It hissed when it hit the bottom.
“It’s a great nickname,” Hicklin continued. “Nicknames all I know. They sum you up better than any tax return or driver’s license or C file. Course I called it like I saw it inside ’less I knowed ’em, meaning you was either a nigger, a wetback or a bitch. Funny I never had me no nickname inside. One celly called me Chef on account I was a pretty good buck master.”
Charlie’s face dimmed with confusion.
“Made alcohol in prison,” Hicklin explained. “Gate time round my cut could get like happy hour. Wasn’t no Pabst, but my moonshine did the trick.”
Hicklin raised the beer as if to propose a toast, better times replaying behind his eyes.
“You want a beer, Charlie?” he said after a moment.
“No.”
“Ever had one?” he asked, holding a can out for Charlie.
Charlie shook his head at first. He was thirsty, though. The can of beer looked ice-cold, water dripping from the sides. He finally reached out and took it.
“Got any water?” Charlie said.
“They’s water in that beer you’re holding.”
Charlie opened the beer and looked over at Hummingbird, remembering her visit from the night before, the way she put her hands on him. Tonight her eyes were glazed, the pupils as big as buttons. Wherever she was, Charlie hoped she stayed there.
He took a sip, the beer tasting sudsy and peculiar. But it was cold and that’s all that mattered. He took another sip—and another—before holding the can against his aching jaw. He looked across the room at Hicklin, as if seeing him clearly for the first time. He focused on a greenish-black swastika tattooed on Hicklin’s chest.
“You’re a Nazi?” Charlie said.
“Thank you.”
It was the only thing Hicklin thought to say.
* * *
The boy—Hicklin could think of him in no other terms—had been a curious hostage. Hicklin had considered ways of disposing of Charlie since arriving at the safe house. But something had kept him from doing the kid in. Hicklin wanted more from Charlie. He needed more.
* * *
“So you hate black people?” Charlie said after a minute of silence.
“You done had a heart check, huh? No, son. I hate niggers,” Hicklin said sharply.
Charlie flinched at the word. The N-Word. He’d heard his mother use it all his life but had never grown accustomed to it. Hicklin finished his beer and lit a cigarette. An odd, satisfied look on his face.
“You know what a nigger is, Coma?” he said.
“An African-American person?” Charlie answered. The beer can in his hand was almost empty. His head had begun to swim.
Hicklin laughed loudly, political correctness not a popular concept inside the Georgia penal system.
Hummingbird giggled, too. She sat Indian-style, chewing on a fingernail. Hicklin gave her a look. She took her finger out of her mouth, repentant as a scolded child.
He said, “A nigger is anyone who acts like a fool. A loud, obnoxious fool. I respected many Negroes and Hispanics. A man stands tall and walks hard and I’ll respect him.”
“But n-nobody has a choice,” Charlie said, stammering, trying to inflect a challenging tone. “To be born white. Why hate people because they’re different?”
Hicklin rose and stretched, fetched another beer from the cooler. He began to pace, tiger-walking as if the cottage were a cage. The muscles in Hicklin’s forearms and shoulders seemed to pop and writhe with every movement. Charlie watched him, noticing Hicklin’s tattoos in greater detail, a few so intricate they seemed like a picture show on flesh, a righteous hatred in the details. He found
Hicklin’s gait strange. The man walked with a swagger, guarded, like a lion stalking the fringes of a pride area.
Hicklin turned on the radio, tuning to a country station. Country Gold out of Chattanooga. Charlie felt something cold over his shoulder, looked up at Hicklin offering him another beer, a peculiar grin on his face. Charlie took the beer without a word.
Hicklin sat down and opened his own, taking three gulps. He reached for the pack of cigarettes, hustled one out and lit it. There were more than twenty butts mashed in the ashtray, God knew how many more floating in the empties.
As if following a cue Hummingbird produced her glass pipe. After smoking her movements became manic, involuntary. Her eyes slapped back and forth. She seemed to be chewing on an imaginary meal.
Charlie tried to ignore her, instead taking a bigger sip of beer, the taste growing on him. The pain in his lower back lessened, as had the soreness along his jaw. His mind felt like water in an ice-cube tray.
“You asked me why I hate people because they’re different?” Hicklin said, easing back into the recliner.
“Uh-huh.”
“Because I can.”
His reply was defiant, more protest than explanation. He drank the rest of the beer, pouring it down his throat. He knew Charlie was right about not having a choice. About how arbitrary one’s race was. And Hicklin didn’t have an answer for him. Just a blind faith in his superiority.
And Charlie held his beer with both hands, as if afraid that someone would take it from him. Hicklin leveled his eyes on Charlie then, studying the boy’s body, idly thinking of ways to improve it with exercise. He rolled an unlit cigarette between his fingers to loosen the tobacco. Then he coughed and spit a saucer of mucus onto the floor.
When Charlie met his gaze he saw a mischievous grin and fought to keep from smiling himself.
* * *
Later that evening Charlie found himself thoroughly drunk. Hummingbird had retreated to one of the bedrooms, a compulsive laughter heard through the walls the only reminder she was still in the cottage at all. Country Gold had gone off the air, replaced with a classic rock station from Greenville. Thin Lizzy’s “Ballad of a Hard Man.”
Hicklin popped the tabs on two more beers and stumbled over to Charlie, kicking several empty cans across the floor as he did so.
“I’ll wager we got time for one more ’fore you pass out?”
He held out the can, as if to coax Charlie out of the chair.
“Come on, son. Come and get it.”
Charlie felt as if he’d been nailed to the floor. He got to his feet warily, like an old man attempting a steep flight of stairs. Rising with a wobble, he took a perilous first step.
“Get over here. Walk, goddammit!” Hicklin said, waving the can of beer at Charlie like dangling a carrot before a horse.
And Charlie walked, listing to port, his shoulders sagging. He almost fell but caught himself, barely, a drunken chuckle his only sound.
“Stand up and walk straight. Be a man, Charlie!”
Charlie lunged for the beer but grasped nothing but air. His knees buckled and he almost went down again.
“Don’t go down on your knees, son! You go down on your knees, reckon what I’ll do to you?” Hicklin barked.
Just then Charlie shook his head and righted himself. He stood reasonably straight and walked toward Hicklin again, making a couple passes at the beer. Satisfied, Hicklin let Charlie have his prize. He smiled, holding the beer with both hands against his chest, swaying a little.
“Charlie Colquitt. Damn if I don’t think you got the makin’s,” Hicklin said, saluting Charlie with his own can, followed by a long, slow sip. “I knew a woman named Colquitt once,” he added, almost absentmindedly. “Had a glass eye that didn’t fit right…”
“Glass eye?” Charlie said with a slur, his eyes twinkling with vague recognition.
“Once I fucked her so hard, damn thing popped out a her head!”
Hicklin’s drunken laughter filled the cottage. Loud and from the belly. Charlie laughed, too. At first with hysterical and blind enthusiasm, but some underlying truth gave him pause, and the laughter slowly emptied from him like the air from a balloon.
Cold steel and gun metal grey.
Nightmares, another night has turned to day.
SEVEN
They walked the catwalks down to the first tier. Wolfen eyes peered out from behind bars. They heard the fleshy sounds of a man masturbating. They did not stop. Some men called out. Shouted warnings to the other inmates that echoed around the cell block. The tactical team knew they were closely watched by the prisoners. Almost anything they said could be lip-read or intuited. They kept quiet.
Four abreast now. The tactical team worked their way down a long corridor, the walls of which resembled the hull of a sunken vessel. They wore flak jackets and gloves and green cargo pants. The lead officer spoke into a walkie clipped above his collarbone. The last gate opened with a clank and the men entered the Secure Housing Unit.
* * *
The kite swung from one inmate’s hands to another. They timed the movements of the guards, watching the camera and counting. The cutovers were known like the rising and setting of the sun. Going fishing, they called it.
The line dropped down from one floor of the SHU to the next before it was gathered up, sucked under the door and repositioned. Correctional officers appeared and disappeared behind the acrylic detention windows. With the kite folded, an inmate counted in his head and then flicked the line through the space under the door, arcing it around the column to the adjacent cell. He felt a tug and let the line go. The kite disappeared under the door. The inmate knew he would be rewarded. A skilled messenger always was.
* * *
The convict took the message and read it. He was going to flush it down the toilet but sensed something and tight-rolled the slip of paper. He pulled down his boxer shorts and pushed it up inside his rectum as far as it would go.
The tac team was at the window.
“Do me a solid and take off the shades,” the lead officer said.
He raised his arms in a mock stretch and complied, tucking his sunglasses in a soft case. Then they told him to cuff up. He turned in a circle, his back to the door, and when the latch popped he found the metal tray of the service slot with his palms. His hands dangled for a moment.
Two pairs of cold metal handcuffs clamped around his wrists. Another pair for his ankles. They told him to walk forward and turn around. When the door opened he stepped out of his cell in his state-issued slippers. They patted him down and made him squat. A shiv or shank would have punctured internal organs. But he was smarter than that. He expected them to inspect his anus, but they didn’t.
He stood aside while they tossed his cell.
Two officers remained with him, watching him with respect. Everyone knew who he was. What he was capable of. The convict thought briefly about attacking them both but decided against it. He had names and addresses. He knew that the guard to his left had a mother in a rest home and a sister in Colorado Springs.
Plenty of weapons at his disposal despite the shackles. Teeth, forehead, knees and feet. He just was not in the mood.
The lead officer flipped through photos and letters. Shined an ultraviolet light through greeting cards and notebook paper. He studied the script, the tight lines of ink, the spacing. The words were clear, the meaning ambiguous.
If only these supercops knew the code, the convict thought. But us poor white trash just a little too smart for ’em.
The lead officer reached for a stack of books, flipping through one entitled Discipline and Punish and another called Look Homeward, Angel. Nothing unusual revealed itself. The other guards ran their gloved hands along edges in the cell but found nothing. One officer reached down into the toilet. Another tapped against the wall and bed frame with the end of his Maglite.
The convict did not talk nor did his expression ever change. The lead officer told him he was taking the letters. The co
nvict nodded. He wished the officer good luck. The guards uncuffed him and locked the door.
The convict stood at the small acrylic square that served as the lone window of his cell, watching the tac team ascend a staircase on the opposite side of the SHU. He ran a forefinger and thumb along his bristly mustache and thought of the kite and its meaning.
Later. He fingered the slip of paper from his anus. Studied it. He felt a sharp pang of betrayal, of bloodlust. He read it again.
H. jumped the score.
?
The prisoner looked around his cell. At the beige walls, his cot and rumpled belongings. A calendar on the wall marked the month and day. Just one of many for him. Time was his currency, the days his most prized possession.
He’d read all the philosophies and musings concerning time, its stagnant flow, all meaninglessness.
Don’t leave me now, brother.
Time was nothing but a mark he hoped to manipulate, work the angles on. Because he would be remembered for the will he exerted and not the years it took to do it.
The universe did not decay without company, brother.
They all looked up to him. One of a select few who ran the whole fucking show.
And disrespect was not tolerated.
It was Monday. Nothing surprised him. But the unannounced visit from the prison’s tactical team gave him pause. Something was up.
He recalled the thunderstorms and humidity. Clouds boiling over with phosphorescent flashes of light. The smell of grass in late Spring. Running water. The ample shade of a white oak. The land belonged to his foster father, the man responsible for the helplessness that defined his youth. Bent over the chair like that. Such a young man, too. His insides swelling. Those hands on his shoulders, calloused and powerful. The pivotal point in his life when it all went bad and he found his calling.