by Tim Curran
And the screams…they didn’t last long at all.
8
Of course, the prison came alive.
Sometimes you heard screams at night, guys getting shanked or raped and sometimes it was just some con losing his mind, cracking up from the solitude and the cage they kept him in and dozens of things you would never really know about. His mind would go to sauce and he’d start thrashing around, throwing himself at the walls and biting the bars and throwing his shit at anyone that got near like a monkey in a carnival pen.
Sergeant Warres was in charge of the hacks on the graveyard shift and he came up the stairs to D Block, looking pissed-off and anxious to break some skulls with the stick he was swinging at his hip. He was on his walkie-talkie, wanting to know what in the name of Jesus H. Jumping Clusterfucking Christ was going on up there. He cut some orders straight away over his box and his guards did their thing, told the cons to shut their mother-raping, cunting mouths and go to sleep or the lot of them would be thrown in the hole.
It worked and D Block got real quiet, though everyone had to know that there were only thirty Ad-Seg cells to be had. Administrative Segregation, politically correct title, was where guys went when they got out of line and sometimes even when they didn’t. It was a nasty, dark, buggy place. And if you thought you’d been alone a lot in your life, you had no conception of what real solitude was until you were locked down in the damp, crawling darkness by yourself.
But it worked and Warres came down the corridor, ignorinup g his guard’s request to turn on the big lights. Security lights were fine, he figured. They were spaced every fifty feet and dim, so that the block corridors were thick with shadows. But that didn’t bother Warres, for once the switch was thrown and those doors were shut, nobody got out of their cells…except on the late, late show.
Houle was down there. He was one of the newbies and he looked just as green as frog shit, pale and sweating and about half out of his mind. Warres passed by all those cons pressed up against the bars of their cages, bulging white eyes in black faces and shining red eyes in white faces and damn, he’d never seen them looking so scared before. All the tough-guy, hardass con bullshit had dried up like a pond.
These guys were scared shitless.
Warres got up to Houle, said, “What do you got?”
Houle could barely get a word out without gasping. “Don’t go in there, Sarge…Jesus, Weems…I think it’s Weems…he’s all ripped apart…”
The cell door was open and in his flashlight beam, Warres could see something wet and dark slicked on the bars, a puddle of it coming out under the door. He sucked in a breath and put his light in there, almost screamed himself. Weems looked like a pillow that had its stuffing scattered in every conceivable direction. His insides were on the floor, smeared on the walls, dripping from the ceiling.
His head was bobbing in the shitter, eyes wide and glistening in the flashlight beam.
Weems’ cellie, a skinny black guy everyone called Porker, was kneeling on his bed, the top bunk, holding himself and shaking, completely out of his mind. There was blood on him and bits of tissue. He was shivering and sobbing and whispering something no one else could hear.
Enough.
“All right,” Warres said. He got on his walkie-talkie. “We got an incident down here…”
9
After the scream, Romero did not get back to sleep.
He lay there like the rest of the inmates, bunched and tense and holding his breath, thinking about things that made his flesh crawl. There was electricity feeding through him, as it was probably feeding through everyone on D, like a wire had been stuck up his ass.
But Romero wasn’t like the others.
He knew things and maybe he did not know at all. He’d heard that scream just fine, long and high and sharp and cut short as if something wet had been stuffed in its owner’s mouth.
So he lay there until things began to die down and a silence that was heavy and thick lay over the prison. Around that time he heard something slither back through the bars and smelled the hot, yeasty stink of rancid fermentation. Palmquist started to moan and thrash.
Sometime later, he began to cry in his sleep.
Or maybe it was Romero himself.
10
Next day, it was all you heard about.
Didn’t matter where you were or whom you were with, the topic of conversation was always the same. The prison became a rumor mill and awful, unbelievable stories began to circulate in that close, sullen atmosphere like disease germs, infecting anyone with a set of ears. Some of the stories were darkly humorous, others like something yanked out of a horror comic or a campfire ghost story. But they kept making the rounds, from the carpentry shop to the craftshop, the mattress factory to the library and the metal shop where license plates were stamped out.
And it was funny, but all the groups and gangs that hated each other on site, mellowed incrementally, seemed to realize that they were all in the same boat together, running the same risk of sinking in the night like Reggie Weems. Sometimes, a common enemy or common fear could do wonders at a place like Shaddock Valley.
Out in the yard that afternoon, Romero was sitting with his usual bunch-Riggs and Aquintez, a few Latin gangsters and white criminals that had been around the block a long time-discussing the shit, sifting fact from fantasy whenever possible. But it all kept circling back like buzzards on the trail of roadkill: what had happened to Weems was a lot like what had happened to those cons over at Brickhaven. And that got a guy to thinking, maybe trying to make some connections where there weren’t any or where they were strung so thick they’d trip you right up.
Romero’s crew was joined by a shifty, bearded black guy in a wool hat called Beaks because of his sharp, Roman nose. Beaks was doing all-day for murdering his wife and her lover while he was on a coke binge: life without parole. Beaks was locked in the cell across the corridor from Reggie Weems, so people were listening to what he had to say.
“Heard that scream, fuck yes, shit…how could you have not heard it? Weems…motherfucker was screaming like something was tearing his balls off. Never Fight=n› did hear nothing like that before.” Beaks pulled off his cigarette, watching some cons playing a game of pick-up in the distance. “Weems, shit, ya’ll know Weems, big ape-ugly motherfucker what ate his meat raw…I thought right away, somebody was in there, got to him. Shit, but you know that motherfucker, nobody play tag with his black ass.”
“What’d you see?” Aquintez wanted to know.
“It was dark and shit over there, but I heard something, something wet and sliding…I don’t know what the fuck it was…making funny-ass sounds or something, squealing or hissing or some such shit. That’s what I hear first and I think: Shit, what the fuck going down over there? Then Weems lets go with that scream. Man, it was crazy hoodoo bullshit, way I’m remembering it.”
And that was as close as he could get to it.
In the joint, murders were common place. Guys got shanked or piped, thrown off railings or had their food laced with Decon. Now and again, you had something more creative like an electrocution or what was known as a “down-home barbecue”: gas dumped through the bars while some con was in lock-up, his cell and himself drenched with the stuff, then a match tossed in there.
But what the forensic team that went into Cell #17, Weems’ cell, found was unpleasant even for a prison killing. More than unpleasant, but vicious and psychotic and unexplainable. Houle, the hack who first found Weems, said he’d been ripped apart, mutilated, but that didn’t begin to cover it. He had been dismembered and eviscerated, his bowels strung around the cell like streamers of crepe at a kiddy party. His spinal column had actually been pulled out of his back, his head severed but not before his genitals were sheared free and shoved so far down his throat the pathologist had to open his esophagus to get them out. And that was only part of it. Besides the blood and macerated organs, some of Weems’ bones had been yanked through the skin and were riddled with teeth ma
rks.
And then there was Porker, Weems’ cellmate.
They had to take him out in a straight-jacket after he was held down and shot full of Thorazine, the entire time babbling and moaning and whimpering crazy shit about “monsters” and “things that looked like people without bones.” He was taken to the state hospital that morning for intensive psychotherapy.
“All I know for sure, man,” Beaks was saying to them, “is that something got in there, something I don’t want to be thinking about. Whatever it was and whatever the fuck it wanted, they had to take Weems’ ass out in bags and buckets, had to mop the floor to get the rest of him.”
Romero listened and didn’t say a thing.
But he was thinking plenty.
11
Romero was sitting alone in the bleachers by the football field when Aquintez showed. “Hey, home, been looking for you.”
“Lot of people seem to be looking for me.”
“That’s what I hear,” Aquintez said. “Word’s out that Black Dog warned you off of Palmquist.”
“Sure, they’re saving him for Tony Gordo. Don’t want me interfering, doing anything impractical like trying to help the kid out.”
He shared his conversation with Black Dog, though Aquintez had pretty much guessed the lay of it. That was prison life: nothing new behind those walls, just the same old games played year in and year out.
Aquintez pulled off his unfiltered cigarette, spitting out a few stray bits of tobacco. “All right, home. I want you to listen to me and hear me on this. You can’t stand up against these people. You can’t throw yourself against the might of animals like Black Dog and the bikers, the ABs and Papa Joe. They’ll fucking skin you, bro.”
“I know that, JoJo.”
“Then why we having this convo, eh?” Aquintez said. “Why am I seeing something in your eyes that looks like suicide? Why am I thinking you’re just crazy enough to try and protect that fish and forfeit your own life at the same time?”
But Romero would not and maybe could not answer that one. Maybe he didn’t know himself. All these lean, hungry years just getting by, just existing in this cage, not caring, not giving a damn, getting real slick and practiced at turning a blind eye…and now this. Now something he could not understand had been activated just south of his soul and he could not get a handle on it. It told him he had to help the fish regardless of the consequences.
It would not listen to reason.
It would not be practical.
It refused apathy at every turn.
“There’s your boy,” Aquintez said, scoping out Palmquist over by the fence, trying to fade away and blend in like a stain on a wall. “There’s your fish.”
“He ain’t mine,” Romero told him. lang="en-us" height="0" width="2em" align="justify"› Aquintez exhaled smoke through his nostrils, then he smiled. “Ah, but you’re feeling bad for him and the ugly fate awaiting him, eh? Something in you-probably that part I love and respect-wants to protect this kid, beat down any of these vermin who come after him. But you gotta be practical, my friend. Papa Joe says you’re going over, you’re going over. You stand in the way…bad, very bad. It don’t have to be Black Dog’s people or the ABs or Papa Joe’s social club, he throws the casheesh out there and every con with a shank’ll be coming after you. You can’t fight that.”
“No.”
“But you’re considering it…”
Romero did not deny that because he couldn’t. Part of him very badly wanted to stand up for Palmquist before those animals got their dirty hands all over him…but another part wanted to distance himself from the fish as much as possible. Because there was no getting around one thing much as he himself tried-Weems had fucked with the kid and now Weems was dead. Something had happened last night. Something had happened when Palmquist was sleeping and Romero could tell himself again and again that he had dreamed it, but he just didn’t believe that.
He kept thinking about what Palmquist had said about this brother of his. Crazy shit. It made no sense, yet Romero could not stop thinking about it.
My brother…Damon…he’s not like us, he’s different.
Ah, it was nonsense. Goddamn fish probably wasn’t right in the head. He’d been victimized at Brickhaven and he wasn’t in touch with reality, threading the needle in fantasy la-la land. That had to be it.
“But something got Weems,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for Aquintez to hear.
“That’s true enough, home.”
“Bodies keep turning up around Palmquist. Cons are slaughtered in locked cells. Cons that seem to be hooked up with the kid in some way.” Romero shook his head. “I’m thinking out loud like some kind of headcase.”
“You ain’t thinking nothing I’m not, bro,” Aquintez said, standing up and butting his cigarette. “Maybe the fish got something going on, eh? Maybe he got a guardian angel. Maybe Tony Gordo ought to think about that.”
Romero watched him walk away, thinking pretty much the same things. The problem was that guys like Tony Gordo did not think. They acted, they reacted. Like dumb animals. They were hungry, they ate. They were tired, they slept. You cornered them, they clawed out your eyes. And when their hormones got the best of them, they- S
“Hey, Romero,” one of the hacks said, motioning with his stick. “You got cigarette butts on the ground. Clean it up. Don’t be messing up my fucking yard.”
“Yes sir, boss,” Romero said.
12
That evening, in C-block rec room, a child molester named Neil Givens was hiding out in a darkened corner reading his Bible, trying to figure out a way to make God forgive him for violating one of his lambs.
“The way I understand it,” he said in a low voice, “is that we are brought unto this earth imperfect and therefore, we sin.”
A skinny black kid named Skiv, nodded his head without looking up from his magazine. “If you say so.”
Every day at Shaddock Valley was the same for Givens. Hour after hour, hoping, praying he would not be noticed by the other cons that came and went. Today, he had been successful. None of the usual toughs baited him, noticed him, or even insulted him. Nothing.
Like he was invisible.
Did not exist.
And that was oh-too fine with Givens. He did not deny what he had done. He lay awake most nights thinking about it in detail and if that was from guilt or simply the fact that he enjoyed gloating over his crimes in the darkness, nobody knew and Givens was not talking. He just wanted to do his time, make no trouble, and get out on the streets again…even though by the state clock that would not be for many, many years, if at all.
“Would you like to pray with me?” Givens said.
“No, I’d rather not,” Skiv told him.
Skiv was doing time for molesting several native American boys during his tenure as a reservation student teacher. Givens felt superior to him in that his victims had been female; Skiv, on the hand, thought he was worlds above Givens because at least his victims were still alive, he had not kidnapped a little girl, brutally molested her, and left her corpse in a shallow grave.
Maybe he’d scarred some little boys for life, but, hey, he hadn’t killed anybody.
They were both keeping an eye on the only other person Vdumb height="0in the room: Palmquist. Funny one. He didn’t try to fit in with the other cons nor did he try and hook up with the other losers and rapos. He stayed to himself. When you spoke to him, he barely acknowledged your presence.
Givens had tried to get him to read scripture, but Palmquist wasn’t interested in that either.
When a con named Poppy came into the room, both Givens and Skiv visibly tensed. Poppy was just a little guy with bad skin, worse teeth, and graveyard eyes that were constantly searching the yard for new fish to pop. He was the sort of con that went scampering away when guys like Romero, Black Dog, or Riggs came bearing down on him. He did not want to know pain; he only wanted to give it.
Palmquist stared off into space, unconcerned.
/>
Givens and Skiv looked at Poppy quickly, then went back to their respective literature.
Poppy liked that, thought that was funny. As if maybe they ignored him he would just go away. But he figured they knew better. “Must be rapo center in here,” he said. “We got nothing but short-eyed chi-mos as far as the eye can see. I feel like a kid in a candy store.” He smiled, revealed his yellowed teeth, giggling with a high repetitive squeaking laugh that was known to go right up spines. “Eeny-meanie-miny-mo, catch a nigger by the toe.” He got up close to Skiv, put his hand’s on the arms of Skiv’s chair, leaned in so close Skiv could smell the rank decay of his teeth. “If he hollers, let him go. My mama said to fuck the very best one and you ain’t it!”
He rasped that last bit right into Skiv’s face. Skiv dropped his magazine, badly trembling.
“I said, you ain’t it,” Poppy told him. “Go over to that candy machine. Get a couple Milky Ways, you hear?”
Skiv did but he was trembling so badly he kept dropping the money. He knew what was going on here. This is exactly what had happened to him when he first got to Shaddock Valley. It had happened to Givens more than once. Maybe it was Palmquist’s turn.
Thank God it’s not me this time, oh thank God Then Tony Gordo came into the room, filling the doorway, picking his teeth with a needle. Gordo was so big he had to stoop over to get in the door and turn himself sideways to fit through it. His head was like a cinder block, a steel gray buzzcut on top and a square jaw below, everything in-between a no-man’s land of old knife cuts, cratered scar tissue, and pockmarks sunk so deep you could fit the tip of your thumb into them. He had no neck. That block of a head sat right atop his shoulders which were nearly as wide as two men standing abreast.
He stood there in his oversized orange jumpsuit, eyes like crouching death taking in his little harem because that was exactly the way he saw things. These were his bitches and he would have them and nobody had better think of stopping him.