Against the Wind

by J. F. Freedman

  “Come for sloppy seconds?” the head rioter snickered. “I hear all are boss studs.” He was ready for action, so hard was his member in anticipation of his first piece of female ass in ten years that the veins were pulsating.

  The women were screaming like banshees.

  “Don’t be doing her that way,” Lone Wolf said softly to the man. It was a line he liked to use, from his favorite movie, One-Eyed Jacks. Marlon Brando had used it on Ben Johnson’s sidekick in a Mexican cantina before he blew him in half for coming on to a barmaid the wrong way.

  “What the fuck you saying, dick-brain?” the man queried, turning back to the business at hand.

  Lone Wolf cold-cocked him twice with his shotgun butt, the first time in his balls, doubling him over in unexpected pain, then across his jaw, smashing it. The others stared at him, stunned.

  “Anyone else?” Lone Wolf had asked. The victim of his attack lay writhing on the floor. The others looked from him to the other bikers, who formed a phalanx around their leader.

  “It ain’t gonna happen this way,” Lone Wolf told them. “You did what you did and that’s how it had to be. But this ain’t. Now get the fuck out of here.”

  After the predators left, dragging their unconscious mate with them, and the woman had dressed and they had been calmed down, he left Dutchboy there to guard them. Then they went out into the population.

  Within three hours the prisoners had formed a council. Lone Wolf assumed the head; there was no argument. They started acting responsibly, for them. The women and guards were put off-limits. They drew up their list of grievances, and started debating about who among the authorities they’d be willing to talk to.

  THE BODIES ARE STACKED the length of the floor, piled haphazardly, arms and torsos of some on top of legs and feet of others. Heads on top of asses, vice versa. They are all naked, and the decomposition is something fierce to see. Unbelievable: I could never imagine something this horrible, let alone the idea that I’d actually be looking at it. This is where they brought them, so they’d be out of sight. They’re bloated beyond recognition. A couple of the more advanced cases have exploded, there’s flesh and cartilage and shards of bone splattered on the walls.

  I blow my lunch; everything comes up.

  “I had to show you,” Lone Wolf says. “’Cause you’re gonna have to tell them about it.”

  I force myself to look. There are seventeen of them. They are, were, all prisoners. White, Hispanic, black, young, middle-aged. The victims, the snitches. Seventeen mouths stuffed with seventeen cocks. Even the charred ones.

  “I had to show you,” Lone Wolf says.

  “I guess.”

  We go outside, shutting the door behind us. The smell permeates everything. It’ll keep me focused on the business at hand.

  We head back down the hallway to the main area.

  “Who did it?” I ask. I have to.

  Lone Wolf shakes his head.

  “It’ll never come out.”

  “It may have to,” I tell him. “You can’t kill seventeen men like that and pretend it didn’t happen, pull the rug over it. Even if they were snitches.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “They were dead and done before the rest of us were able to do anything.”

  “Truth?” I ask. “Be straight with me, man. This is no time for bullshit.”

  “Truth,” he says. “Listen, man, you think I’d of perpetrated something that stupid? After what my trial was about?”

  “Okay,” I say. “I believe you.” Whether I do or not it doesn’t matter, because I’ll find out eventually. Maybe not who the ones were that did it, but whether or not my guys were in on it. That’s all I really care about. I want to end this as soon as possible, and I want my four to come out as clean as possible.

  The three women have soaked through their clothes with their sweat. The room they’re being held in is small, windowless, no air circulation. They’re sprawled out on chairs, drugged with the heat, their shoes kicked off, the soles of their stockinged feet grimy and slick. One, slightly younger and more attractive than the other two (the one Lone Wolf stopped from being raped), has taken off her pantyhose in a futile attempt at relief. Rivers of perspiration run down their bodies from their underarms, along their ribs to below their rippled bellies. The tops of all their skirts are black with sweat—if you took their clothes off and wrung them out you’d get five pounds of salt water.

  I turn to the two inmates guarding them; overt queens, the next-best thing to a eunuch for the job. Lone Wolf is taking care of business.

  “Wait outside,” I instruct the guards. My escort goes out with them, allowing the women and me some privacy.

  “My name is Will Alexander,” I inform the women. I speak softly, conversationally. “I’ve been appointed by the governor to try and mediate in here, between the government and the prisoners.”

  “You’re the lawyer for those guys on Death Row, aren’t you?” the one who was almost raped asks.

  “That’s right.” I recognize her now, she’s a receptionist in the medical unit. Martha something.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asks. “Why isn’t the governor in here?”

  “Because they won’t talk to him, that’s why.” She’s getting on my nerves real fast.

  “Figures.” She slumps back, her legs splayed out in front of her. I’ll bet she doesn’t do that in front of any of the straight prisoners; not now, anyway. I wonder what kind of cock-tease she was before; a woman in jail, any woman, has tremendous power. Some of them abuse it. Some of them have paid for that: during the Oklahoma state prison riot a few years back one of the female guards, who used to flaunt it, tight jeans and push-up bras and the rest, was gang-raped 167 times.

  “How long are we going to be in here?” one of the other women asks. Her voice shakes.

  “I don’t know. Until we reach a settlement.”

  “God, I don’t know how much longer I can endure this,” she moans. “I don’t know, I’m about to flip out.”

  “Look,” I say, moving over next to her, “that’s the worst thing you could do.”

  “I know that,” she wails. “I’ve been indoctrinated, same as everyone else works here. But I can’t help it, I’m scared to death.”

  “I’ll do the best I can, as fast as I can,” I say. “We’re all in this together.” I pat her on the shoulder. “Hang on, okay? It’s going to work out.”

  I move away. I don’t want to get close to them, they could latch onto me like drowning men to a life-raft.

  “How are they treating you?” I ask. “Do you have enough food and water?”

  “Who can eat in this heat?” the third one volunteers. “We have water, though.”

  “Are they behaving?”

  “They were going to rape us at the beginning,” Martha says.

  “Were you? Sexually assaulted?”

  “No,” she says. “One of them was about to, they had my clothes off and he had his penis out. But they stopped him. Your men.”

  “Well,” I say, “if that’s the worst thing that’s happened to you, I think you got off pretty lucky. You could’ve had eight hundred men raping you. Some of them have AIDS.”

  They gulp, their mouths round like goldfishes.

  “You’re not in any danger now,” I assure them. “Your guards are homosexual, which means the prisoners want to make sure nothing happens to you.” I get up. “I’ve got to go up there now and get to work. I’ll come down when I can to see if you’re all right.”

  “He saved my life,” Martha says. “All our lives.”

  “That’s good to know,” I tell her. “I’m glad for you.”

  And for them. My four. Truthfully, more for them.

  The guards are more emphatic.

  “We sat there listening to them killing off the snitches,” the senior in service tells me, “and we knew we were next. And we could tell from all the screaming and how long it was taking that it wouldn’t be easy. They’d have done
us as bad as they did them, we knew it.”

  We’re in the cellblock cafeteria, where they’d been parked from the time they were pulled out of the demolished control center.

  “Those bikers saved our hides,” he continues. “No doubt in my mind about it.”

  “We owe them,” chimes in another.

  Talk about the worm turning; no wonder the prisoners selected me to be the mediator. If I hadn’t taken the job, this prison would have turned into the Alamo.

  During a break in the negotiations I ask Lone Wolf why he did it: why he took on the responsibility for trying to put things in order and for saving the hostages’ lives.

  “’Cause I didn’t want to get killed myself,” he says flatly. “Something like this gets started you don’t know how it’s gonna end up. Gets to be the third, fourth day, you’re all climbing the walls, some cat thinks you looked the wrong way at him and offs you. Shit, man, most of these cats’re nuts anyway.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I believe in organization. My organization’s got rules, we all live by ’em, we get along fine. People start breaking the rules, it all turns to shit. The thing is with most of these dipshits they ain’t never lived by any rules, which is why their sorry asses are in here and always will be. What it is, Mr. lawyer ol’ buddy, nobody else was gonna do it. They didn’t have a plan, know what I mean? You got to have a plan in life. Mine is to get out of here alive. So I did what I had to do.”

  IT’S THE USUAL repetitive list of grievances. After five thousand years of trying to figure it out—whether it’s Alcatraz or Devil’s Island or the Gulag, taking men out of society without dehumanizing them still escapes us.

  “They have got to stop feeding us this shit.”

  Food.

  “It will flat-out kill you, you eat this shit year in, year fucking out. We got to get served food decent for human beings.” Maggots had been found (more than once) in some meat that was about to be cooked: somebody in the supply chain’s making money.

  “These cells’re built too small for one person. Doubling up’s too crowded and three’s fucking impossible.” The number of rapes and fights among cell-mates had gone up fifty percent in the past year.

  “The library’s a joke. They don’t even have state lawbooks in it, let alone federal.”

  “You could be dead and you still won’t get in to see a doctor.” AIDS among the general population had skyrocketed; to the point where an AIDS ward was going to be necessary. That was one of the main grievances—keep the fucking AIDS inmates away from everyone else. In the meantime the poor bastards who tested positive were treated worse than lepers. They were completely segregated and shunned.

  (At least the epidemic had the effect of cutting needle use to virtually zero. The junkies were kicking rather than risking unsterile needles.)

  “They expect us to obey their fucking rules. They got rules, too. They gotta go by the rules like we do.” Such as a guard’s not allowed to beat a prisoner senseless because the prisoner wears a Rastaman ’do that the guard personally finds obnoxious.

  They have a list of eighty-two grievances. Two thirds of them are petty, the annoyances that bureaucracies build up over the years to fuck with people’s heads. I sign off on those right away. The others are more fundamental: better food, alleviation of over-crowding, better redress of grievances, stopping favoritism from guards and staff. Most important, to not be punished without reason because somebody with a little authority got in a fight with his wife or kids that morning.

  The bottom line: they want some dignity. They want to be treated like men, not animals. Even though they have to live in cages, they still want to be treated like men.

  Every time a prison explodes, that’s the bottom line.

  What I’d give for a cold Michelob right now. We’ve been going at it for fourteen, sixteen hours. Despite the attitude I’d copped with the governor, I don’t have a free hand. I don’t want one. It’s their prison, they have to live with it long after my graceful exit from the scene. Besides, I can’t approve things, material or jurisdictional, that can’t be delivered.

  I have an open line to the governor. He answers halfway through the first ring. We talk.

  “The food’s not a problem,” he assures me. “On the contrary. I’m going to use it as an issue to highlight corruption in the supply chain.”

  What a sweetheart—anything for his fellow man, especially if he can make brownie points with it.

  The over-crowding’s stickier.

  “The good citizens of this impoverished state vote for mandatory sentencing,” he says, his words dripping with sarcasm, “then they turn down a bond issue to build another prison to house all the criminals they want to put away.”

  It’s weird with these politicians, they can be real people but as soon as they assume public office they start talking like they’re on television, even if it’s a private conversation. It must come with the franchise. I can picture him in bed with his old lady: “I’ve been reviewing the options, darling, and examining the situation pro and con, it’s my considered opinion that we should fuck tonight.”

  “If it was designed as a one-man cell,” I tell him, “they want one man in it. Period. It’s gonna be a deal-breaker. Especially with the AIDS problem.”

  “The county jails are already filled to overflowing,” he bitches. “Given that most of them aren’t suited to handling hard-core criminals in the first place.”

  There’s a pregnant pause from his end; I can feel the decision coming over the wire.

  “So be it, then,” he exclaims. I detect a certain glee in his voice. Fuck the taxpayers, they want to have their cake and eat it, too? Well, they can’t.

  “It’s the law, so we’ll obey it. We’ll take over that abandoned Army depot west of Gallup from the Feds and use those barracks.” The bastard’s slick, I give him credit: he’s had that card up his sleeve for months, now he’s going to get to play it and look good, too. “Washington’ll be tickled, and we can put some people to work cleaning it up and staffing it. It’s going to cost money we don’t have, but c’est la vie. Even so, we’ll wind up throwing a lot of bad people back out onto the streets, but that’s tough titty. Maybe this’ll wake up the populace to voting another prison.”

  If Robertson’s in the room with the governor, which he undoubtedly is, he’s wincing, hearing that. Dumb bastard busts his chops putting the bad guys away, one phone call from me and coveys of them are flying the coop.

  “What else?” the governor asks.

  “Amnesty.”

  “There are men dead in there.”

  “Yes,” I affirm, “there are.”

  “Who were murdered by other prisoners.”

  “Correct.”

  “They can’t walk that.”

  “That’s what I’ve told them. They know it. They’re trying to cut the best deal they can. Like us.”

  “Do you know who the perps are?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer truthfully, “but they do.”

  “They’ll have to face the music. We’d burn the place down first before we granted a blanket amnesty.”

  For what it’s worth, I agree with him, but it’s not my place to say. Anyway, I don’t want him to forget that I’m an independent agent.

  “When are you going to start back up again?” he asks.

  “In the morning. We’re beat to shit.”

  “Good luck. I’m here for you, Alexander.”

  “That’s reassuring.” I hang up before he has a chance to think about whether that’s sarcasm or flattery.

  It’s night. I don’t know what time, I didn’t bring anything valuable in with me. The heat is stultifying, it’s so hot and dense with smoke I can hardly breathe. I’m sticky, wet, my clothes are a mess, my armpits and balls itch like I’ve got a terminal case of crabs. All around me, eight hundred men feel the same way.

  Normally I would leave at the end of each day and report to the governor. Tonight we’ve decided I should stay over
, because it’s close to now or never; we make a deal soon or they lay siege.

  But I can’t sleep. Too hot, too tense. I’m lying on a bunk in a cell they gave me that’s on the top floor, way off in a corner, as far from the action as you can get and still be in the building. It’s supposed to catch some breeze, they wanted me to have a little comfort, if such a thing is possible.

  There isn’t any breeze. The air hangs lifeless, like the mutilated corpses sleeping permanently four floors below.

  Outside the cells, silently prowling the tiers, inmate-guards take turns protecting me. Every few minutes, someone looks in on me. I don’t know who they are, they’re all still masked, they’ll remain so until this is over and everyone’s disarmed.

  It’s been very quiet for the past hour; a collective wind of sleep has drifted through the prison, an invisible film that’s putting things to rest, for a time. I could feel it earlier, a fog in motion, what the drugged sleep that comes to the addict must feel like. Exhaustion, physical and emotional, has set in, enveloped all in one; all the men in here are part of one chaotic organism. One string is cut and the whole thing collapses.

  One of the smart things the prisoner council did was to establish a night-time curfew. Everyone but guards in their cells at night. The prisoners were happy to accept it; it gives them a chance to replenish their energy, to try and sleep. You can’t sleep with one eye open, listening and waiting for some hyped-up crazo to slip into your space and cut out your heart.

  Somewhere in this prison someone might be sleeping, but I doubt it, unless it’s the sleep of sheer exhaustion. A man who could sleep under these circumstances would have to have no conscience, no blood in his veins. Almost everyone, I’m sure, is like me; awake, alert, trying to be calm. It’s the best you can do under these conditions.

  It’s too still; I can’t hear the footfalls of my guards.

  Cautiously, as quietly as possible, I push up from my bunk. I’m fully dressed, I’d rather stay in these encrusted clothes than take them off and then have to put them back on. I pad silently to the open door of my cell and peer out.