Blood, Bones and Bullets

by Tim Curran

  Romero pulled himself up, wiping blood from his face, knowing he was in for the pain coming at an animal like Gordo without so much as a shank or a good length of lead pipe in his hands. He ducked as Gordo tried to hit him and got two more good shots in, then kneed Gordo in the jewels. Gordo grunted like a grizzly bear that had been stropped with a belt, but no more.

  He hit Romero, piledriving him to the floor.

  And before Romero could do more than wonder what day it was, Gordo picked him up and threw him eight feet through the air until he collided with the wall. When he again opened his eyes, there were half a dozen hacks in the room beating Gordo down with their sticks. As he was hauled away for his mandatory thirty days in the hole, Sergeant Warres helped Romero to his feet.

  “That big piece of shit started it,” Palmquist said.

  “Of course he did, son. He always does.” Warres held onto Romero until he could stand on his own. “That’s gotta be the most selfless act of suicide I ever did hear of, Romero. Sure as shit. Well, let’s get you to the infirmary, get you cleaned up.”

  As Romero was led away, cons pushing up to the rec room door to see what was going on, he was wondering if he had just punched his own ticket with Papa Joe or if something darker was about to punch Gordo’s.

  13

  Night.

  Administrative Segregation.

  Jorgensen pulled the duty because Houle was out on sick leave. Kid hadn’t been any good since he found what was left of Reggie Weems. Still…sixteen years and here Jorgensen was, pulling the graveyard shift down in the bleak, dripping cellars of Shaddock Valley. He wasn’t too happy about it. They had thirty Ad-Seg cells and eight of them were filled now that Tony Gordo was down there. In Jorgensen’s way of thinking, Warden Linnard should have kept Gordo down there permanently. He was a fucking animal and he rated a cage.

  Rated more than that, I had my way, Jorgensen thought.

  He sat at his little desk, a paperback western forgotten on his lap, staring down the corridor at the steel doors which sealed all the bad boys into their private, darkened hells.

  Tonight was quiet.

  Some nights the shitheads started acting up. One of them started hollering and, just like monkeys in the zoo, the rest started kicking their heels up. Jorgensen wasn’t in a good mood. If one of them started, it was going to be a real sorry day in their sorry little books.

  He put his feet up, closed his eyes.

  He knew he wouldn’t sleep because it was damp and chill down there. It had a way of getting under your skin. When he was younger and pulled Ad-Seg, he used to do sit-ups just to keep warm. Maybe he couldn’t do so many sit-ups anymore, but he was still hard and stocky. Sixteen years of working society’s trash will do that to you.

  He started thinking about goddamn Houle and getting angry…but then that led to Reggie Weems and he started feeling the chill dampness down there more than anything else. Weems. And in a locked cell yet. Just like that madness over at Brickhaven—

  Hell was that?

  He heard a thumping sound from one of the cells down the way, only the more he thought about it the more it registered in his brain as kind of a wet slapping sort of noise. Expecting trouble, he walked down there, feeling his dander rising, and a slow, rising approximation of something quite akin to fear.

  The corridor was silent.

  The cells were silent.

  Not a noise anywhere.

  Probably the pipes. They got to making funny sounds down here in the bowels of Shaddock, the steam making them contract, pop and snap. He paused before each cell and listened. Quiet. So quiet in there. Even through the iron doors he could hear a few men snoring. That was good. That was fine. Let it stay like that all night.

  But he was not reassured.

  Something wasn’t right here and sixteen years as a corrections officer had given him a real powerful gut-sense of what was good and what was bad and what was certainly not right. He stopped in front of Gordo’s cell, Number #3, even though he’d already paused and listened. It was quiet but he had a very uncanny sort of feeling that someone was standing on the other side of the door, holding their breath, doing everything they could so as not to be heard.

  Crazy, you’re thinking crazy.

  No…there was something.

  He pressed his ear to the door and he could hear a faint rustling followed by what sounded like a dripping. Like water was falling from the ceiling in there.

  A thumping noise. Then again.

  More rustling, the slap of something like a bare foot on the concrete floor, a moist gurgling sound like Gordo had just worked something snotty and phlegmy from his throat.

  The noises could have been explained by a lot of things, but to Jorgensen they were just plain unnatural. That approximation of fear was no longer approximate: it was real. It was a dark river, a rising tide and he felt it overtaking him, crawling up his spine and prickling his scalp, settling into his belly with a fluttering volume.

  Scraping sounds now…like nails scratched over the walls or maybe claws.

  Now a stealthy shifting as of sheets.

  Jorgensen knew he was losing it, sixteen years of this shit and now he was unraveling. He was losing his mind just like they always said it happened to the cons in solitary confinement. But not the guards, never the guards…

  He reached up for the bolt that would open the security port, but his hand just wouldn’t obey as something in there started thrashing and he heard a weird, unearthly wailing that cut right through him.

  And in the seamless, enshrouding blackness of his cell, Gordo began to scream in a high, tormented voice: “YAHHHH! HELP ME! HELP ME! GET IT OFFA ME! SOMEBODY GET IT THE FUCK OFFA ME—”

  Jorgensen stumbled back and fell right on his ass.

  The fear was thick and white and ungainly knotted in his belly, spreading out and coiling around his chest in thick bands. He could scarcely draw a breath. It was irrational and immense and suffocating. He was shaking and wet with perspiration. Around him, the corridor was close and cloistral and suffocating. He could feel the walls, the darkness that webbed him to the floor.

  There was nothing silent in #3 now.

  In fact, it sounded like open warfare was raging in there, but Jorgensen knew it was more along the lines of a slaughter. He sat there on his ass as the other cons started shouting and crying out from their cells. Never had he felt more helpless or hopeless, for that matter. He was shaking, his heart racing, his bladder feeling like an especially juicy melon that was about to blow.

  Inside #3, he could hear Gordo screaming, screaming maybe the way his many victims had screamed, but certainly worse…oh yes, certainly worse. But those screams were losing intensity as whatever was in there with him—Jesus, it sounded like the cell was filled with snakes, slithering snakes, brushing the walls and coiling on the floor with smooth sliding sounds—made short work of Tony Gordo, the terror of the streets and wriggling parasite #1 at Shaddock Valley. Whatever it was, it made a wailing/shrieking sort of sound that was pure animal rage somehow coupled with dire human insanity and delivered as an almost hypersonic squealing.

  Jorgensen seemed to remember that he was, in fact, a corrections officer. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie. Dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again. When he got it in his hands, his fingers were trembling and clumsy and he could not seem to thumb the button to bring up the channel.

  And it was at this time that something started slamming into that iron door with the force of a runaway train, making it tremble in its frame. Whatever it was, it hit it again and again, each time putting dents in it, an iron door two inches thick. Boom, boom, boom. It kept coming again and again like artillery shells hitting it from the other side, the dents getting larger and what was striking it sounding moister and juicier until mortar began to fall from the walls and concrete dust rose up in a cloud and blood that was bright and shockingly scarlet oozed beneath the door.

  And by then, Jorgensen was on his feet, running, shouting int
o his box with a high, girlish sort of treble that was the sound of the human mind stripped clean by absolute primal terror.

  14

  After Warden Linnard heard what happened and viewed Ad-Seg cell #3 personally, describing it to his wife as looking like “someone had opened Gordo up, fingerpainted the walls with what was inside,” he tried to put a cap on it so the rest of his shitheads didn’t hear about it. But in a maximum security prison with its extremely active grapevine, it was near on impossible. So, deciding he did not make a very effective little boy trying to plug the dike with his finger, Linnard went back to his office and drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels before he got on the phone with the DOC and got his asshole expanded three sizes.

  Just as he thought, it was everywhere by noon the next day.

  “You heard about Gordo, of course,” Aquintez said to Romero out in the yard, knowing that everybody behind those walls had.

  “Who hasn’t?”

  Still aching from his dust-up with Gordo, Romero was scanning the yard, trying to see where it was coming from, trying to spot the meat-hungry eyes zeroing in on him so he’d know which group was going to come after him. Thing was, he saw nothing. The ABs and bikers paid him no mind. The Latin gangs clustered together by the wall, ignoring him. The blacks were gathered together in little groups, involved in their own thing.

  Ain’t that something, he thought, I’m warned by Black Dog to lay low and I piss all over that warning. Papa Joe should have psychopaths of every stripe closing in on me…but I don’t see any indication of it.

  But it was more than that. You survived long enough in max, you didn’t trust your eyes so much as your guts. You got a feeling when danger was coming. It went right up your backbone…but for Romero, today of all days, it just wasn’t there.

  “Now ain’t that something?” he said out loud, not even aware of the fact.

  “What you saying, home?”

  So Romero told him what he was thinking, how he should have had lots of bad boys putting him in their sights but he wasn’t feeling anything and seeing even less.

  “They got other things to worry about, home. First Weems and now Gordo…these boys ain’t real smart, but even they’re making the connection between Palmquist and a real ugly death. He’s giving all these lifers and hardtimers bad dreams.”

  Romero knew that what was in the kid—and he was no longer believing he had imagined any of that—had been active again last night. But he hadn’t witnessed it because he’d spent the night racked out in the infirmary on sedatives after the doc stitched his face closed from the beating Gordo gave him. So no bad dreams or worse reality for him. But it had happened. He knew that. The kid had fallen asleep and then…

  Aquintez told him that he had his ears open and he wasn’t hearing anything about Papa Joe putting money out on a certain con named Romero that wasn’t playing by the rules.

  “Not yet.”

  “Like I said, people got other things to worry about right now. Besides, home, you’re a living legend in this joint. Going after Tony fucking Gordo open-handed without so much as a shank. Now that takes balls, primo balls.”

  “Or maybe just a lack of common sense, JoJo,” Romero said, fingering the bruises and bandages on his face.

  Tony Gordo was a walking piece of shit and he got flushed, that’s all there’s to it.

  He felt no pity for the man. He was a crawling worm somebody should have stepped on long ago and who does it? Palmquist. Or something inside him. Christ, it was all so buggy, headcase stuff.

  He looked around the yard again at all the disinterested cons, but the truth was, though, he wasn’t worrying so much about himself but about the fish, about goddamn Palmquist. Worried that the fear would build and some of the boys would act like the animals they were and kill the kid. That’s what worried him.

  “I don’t know what this is about, man, but I think if they just leave the kid alone, they’re gonna be okay.”

  “Right now, my friend,” Aquintez said, “it’s gonna take some real dumb motherfuckers to make a play for your boy.”

  15

  But prison life was prison life and it didn’t take long before the shit started stirring up again, smelling just as bad as any other day. Three days after Gordo died, Palmquist was put to work in the kitchen with Romero and some of the others. He did his bit all right, doing what the cook told him, stirring a cauldron of brown, greasy meat gravy with a wooden spoon that looked like a broomhandle. Cook said to stir and keep stirring it or it would lump up and the cons wouldn’t be able to keep it down.

  So Palmquist was stirring and two black guys, cellies named Heslip and Burgon, were whipping instant potatoes in a big mixer, laughing about something and Romero could tell by the way they were laughing and the way they were casting sidelong glances at Palmquist, that it wasn’t good.

  Palmquist was hearing them, just ignoring what they were saying.

  Romero dumped an industrial-size can of green beans into a boiler, tuned in on the conversation.

  “Shit, bro, ya’ll got me wrong here,” Heslip was saying, looking foolish in his white smock and hairnet. “All I say, all I say here is how I see this bitch first, ought to be me gets to grease his backside.”

  Burgon just shook his head. “You pull that sweet shit on me last time, fool, I never got a taste. No sir, that boy is mine. I’m taking my crack and you gonna step aside. You can watch you want to, but he be mine.”

  Christ, they were talking about Palmquist.

  Romero felt himself steel at the idea of it. Wasn’t none of his business, he supposed, but yet after the Gordo thing, he was making it his business. His old man always said he wasn’t the smartest one of the lot, but he was smart enough to know two things: Weems had fooled with the kid and Weems was dead. Same for Gordo. Aquintez had said it was going to take some real dumb motherfuckers to make a play for the fish now and here they were in the flesh. Two more stupid cons looking for an open grave. Maybe it was a wild leap of logic to think that something would happen to them if they persisted, but from where Romero was sitting, he didn’t think so.

  “All right, shit, you run a hard bargain,” Heslip said, pouring more powdered potatoes into the vat. “I give you two cartons Marlboro reds you gimme first dibs on that fine white shit.”

  “Fuck you say, fool? Two, motherfucker? I don’t bite on that. I get you an ounce of good smoke, you forget his ass.”

  “Shit, know a whiteboy got serious connections, get you a bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple rocks primo shit. Now what your black ass got to say on that?”

  “Shit. You throw in them two cartons, you pop that motherfucker three ways to Sunday.”

  “Ain’t gonna pop him, smoke,” Heslip said, like the idea was unthinkable to an upstanding guy like him. “Gonna sell his ass.”

  Jesus, Romero was thinking, they were bidding on the kid like this was Ebay or some shit. And wasn’t that the final, dehumanizing statement of life at Shaddock? Right in front of the kid yet. He wasn’t nothing but merchandise to them. But that’s the way Heslip and Burgon were. They were both doing life and both had absolutely nothing to lose. They made a habit of jumping on fresh meat when it waltzed its sweet ass through the gates. They would jump it and pump it, school it, then sell it to the highest bidder out in the yard. Romero had seen it done before. Had seen them do it to a young black guy named Lester Heroon, degrading him until he slit his wrists in the showers not two months back.

  Romero had to wonder, though, whether this was their idea or maybe Papa Joe had sweetened the pot for them.

  They kept at it, now abandoning the potatoes and standing on either side of Palmquist.

  “Look at this shit,” Burgon was saying. “He young and firm, got that blond hair, looking sweet and solid to me. You saying my boy here, he ain’t worth those two cartons, fool?”

  “Fuck, I say that? Just, shit, I’m squeezed. How about we run my ass some credit, then we both get what we want.”

  “What kind
of credit line you talking, nigger?”

  “Same old, same old, tit for the tat and suck shit, you up on that?”

  Palmquist stepped away from them. “Fucking homos,” he said. “Fucking nigger homos!”

  That shut them up, they came on together, were thinking how sometimes you had to break a horse before you could ride it proper.

  “Fuck you say, whitebread?” Heslip wanted to know.

  Romero went over there, not sure if he was trying to save the kid’s bacon or that of the two black degenerates. He got in-between them and Palmquist. “Fuck you boys doing, man?” he said, letting that acid fill his voice. “Who say you got a claim on his ass? He’s my cellie, bitch, you want to talk business, maybe you better come through me.”

  “Maybe we ain’t going to,” Burgon said, big and black and bristling.

  Romero pulled a razor out of his belt. “Maybe I’ll cut your balls off, make your punk here gargle with ‘em. What you got to say to that, home?”

  They were watching that razor and not saying a thing. They both knew Romero. Both knew he’d cut lots of guys, did it quick and without warning if you got on his wrong side.

  Heslip just smiled, showed lots of bad teeth. “It’s cool, Romero, it’s cool. What’s this shit? This meat belong to you? You got dibs on this shit here?”

  Romero shrugged. “Maybe I do. And maybe you ought to think about something real hard and real careful before you lay a hand on him.”

  “Yeah? What’s that, smoke?” Burgon said.

  “A con name of Weems fucked with this boy. You know Weems, don’t you? Big ass-ugly nigger looked like his mama passed him out her ass? Yeah, he played the game and you know what happened to him. Same went for a white trash meat-eater name of Tony Gordo…or you dumb spades forget that already? They say he was opened like a can of fucking beans. And in solitary. You wanna run that risk?”

  They both looked at him like he was crazy and maybe he was, but they both backed off, looked a little tense and gray around the mouth. They didn’t have much to say after that.