Jungle Rules

by Charles W. Henderson

  “About the same time that some of the rioters set the hooches on fire, we saw Fryer and Wilson push their way into the circle around Turner and Brookman, and they started breaking up the fight. Fryer jumped on Anderson, and it looked like he hurt him pretty good because he backed right off our guards. Then Wilson and Fryer took our men inside the block.”

  “HOW IT FEEL! Motherfucker!” James Harris ranted as he walked down the line of cells now containing the four guards, the deputy warden, and the watch commander. He carried Gunny MacMillan’s baseball bat on his shoulder and strutted, feeling charged on a handful of little white pills that he took when he and Randy Carnegie broke open the dispensary substation in the cell block, going after the supply of psychodrugs kept there. “How it feel, now you’s lookin’ out from that side of them cage doors? Huh, motherfuckers? Newspaper and TV gonna be here and show the black man in charge. Show him standin’ up for his rights and shit.”

  “Shut up,” Michael Fryer yelled from inside the cage with Iron Balls and Bad John curled on the floor in a back corner and Paul Fletcher lying on the bunk, drifting in and out of consciousness. The incarcerated sergeant sat next to the lance corporal and spoke to him in a low voice. “Try to stay awake, man. You need to keep your eyes open and don’t let yourself go to sleep. We gonna get you some help soon as we can.”

  James Harris peered through the steel front of the cell.

  “I ain’t hit him that hard,” Mau Mau said, trying to rationalize the injured Marine into a better state of condition. “Just smacked him upside the head a little bit with gunny’s bat. He too big a motherfucker to take down any other way, you know.”

  Michael Fryer looked out at Harris and shook his head. Then he walked to the cage door and spoke in a quiet voice.

  “You know, this man will probably die tonight if he doesn’t get over to Charlie Med pretty soon,” the sergeant said, locking eyes with Mau Mau. “Let these guards go, so they can carry Lance Corporal Fletcher out and get him some help. Hostages ain’t doing a thing for you, and this man die, you’re looking at first-degree murder. I hear the feds still hang people for the death penalty. Pretty nasty way to go. Maybe they cut you a break, though, and shoot your sorry ass with a firing squad.”

  Fryer walked back to the bunk, and sat again with Fletcher, holding his hand and checking his eyes. The injured Marine could say nothing, and his pupils had dilated and wandered in two different directions, uncoordinated and unseeing.

  “Fletch, you hear me okay, give me a blink,” Fryer said, watching the man’s eyelids both slowly close and then reopen. “Good, boy. You stay with me, you hear. I don’t think you’re seeing right now, but you’re awake and responding to my voice. That’s real good.”

  Mike Turner and Kenny Brookman both sat in the corner of the cell, their eyes swollen nearly shut and their faces bloody from the kicking they received. Both men bled from their ears, and Bad John had the crotch of his pants bloody, too. His belly ached worse than he had ever known, and he could hardly breathe due to the pain from his ribs. He felt sure that several of them had broken when Sam Martin kicked him.

  “You know these other two boys ain’t doing much better than Fletch,” Sergeant Fryer said from the bunk, glancing at Harris, who still looked in the cage. “I think old Bad John might have a ruptured spleen, the way he’s bleeding out his ass. You see that puddle under him? That ain’t pee.”

  “So what? The motherfucker can stand to lose a little juice,” Harris said and laughed.

  “Look, a man can bleed to death from a ruptured spleen,” Chief Warrant Officer Holden called from the cell across the aisle. “You depriving these injured men medical attention constitutes complicity to murder if any of them die. Oh, and by the way, the armed forces correctional facilities both at Portsmouth and at Fort Leavenworth still do hang men for capital offenses.”

  “Shut the fuck up, you cracker ass motherfucker!” Harris screamed, and slammed the bat across the front of the cell where the inmates had locked up Holden and Gunny MacMillan along with Nathan L. Todd and Donald T. Wilson. “I ain’t said nothing about you openin’ your honky-ass mouth. When I ask you something, then you can talk. Otherwise, stay the fuck out of a couple brothers’ conversation.”

  The deputy warden went back and sat on the bunk next to Corporal Todd and Gunny MacMillan. Donald Wilson stood in the front corner of the cell and did not flinch when Mau Mau had swung the baseball bat into the cage door, only inches from his face. The sergeant just stared at Harris and said nothing.

  “How come a brother be taking up for white trash like these dudes, man?” Harris asked Michael Fryer. The sergeant tilted his head and shrugged.

  “We all children of the Lord, man,” the sergeant said, and looked back at Paul Fletcher. “Jesus said to do good to those who spitefully use you. Blessed is the peacemaker. I messed up back at my unit when I shot up my battalion CO’s tent. So when they locked me in this jail, I made a promise to the Lord that I’ll never pick up a gun again. I’m a peacemaker, man. These men here, they just doing their job. Lance Corporal Fletcher, you busted up his head, broke bones in his skull. I felt them crunch around when I helped him lay down here. He ain’t never done nothing but treat you and all these other prisoners right. He even called you mister. How many men call you mister in your life?”

  James Harris looked down at the lance corporal and then glanced over at Nathan L. Todd.

  “He call me mister, too, ol’ Chief over there,” Harris said, nodding across the aisle at the corporal. Then he looked back at Fryer. “You done fought my rangers. I think you broke a couple of Ax Man’s fingers, and I know you did in his nose, takin’ him down and gettin’ him and Jones and Martin off ol’ Bad John and Iron Balls there. That ain’t right.”

  “What you’re doin’ ain’t right!” Fryer snapped back. “They’d ’a killed Sergeant Turner and Lance Corporal Brookman, had Wilson and me not pulled them off these boys. I don’t want no truck with you and your Black Stone Rangers. I just want to get on with my life, what I got left, when I ever get out of prison.”

  Harris nodded, and looked at the man.

  “Tell you what, bro,” Mau Mau said, and glanced back at Donald Wilson. “Your white brother over there, Wilson, him and Corporal Todd, they can carry out Lance Corporal Fletcher. I let them slide on out. They can get ol’ Fletch to Charlie Med if they want to go.”

  “Bad John needs to go, too,” Wilson said, and nodded toward Kenny Brookman, who now lay on his side, doubled in a fetal ball. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea to send him and Iron Balls out together. They paid their dues, man. You got your licks on them.”

  Harris laughed.

  “You got a voice after all!” Mau Mau said, and shook another handful of little white pills from a bottle he had stuffed in his pocket when he and the Chu Lai Hippie had raided the drug locker in the cell block sick bay. Then he popped the tablets in his mouth and looked at Turner and Brookman. “Wilson, you probably right. They done paid dues, and it look like they good Christian souls now. You boys done had a change of heart from your racist ways?”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Turner mumbled, and then lay Kenny Brookman’s head in his lap.

  “Okay, Wilson,” Harris said, walking over to where the sergeant leaned against the cage door. “They go, too. We keep Gunner Holden and Gunny MacMillan for barter. My bro, Fryer, he stayin’ here. I call him the Preacher Man. You like that nickname?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Wilson shrugged and then gave Fryer a quick smile.

  “That ain’t all,” Harris said, and glanced back at Michael Fryer, noticing the friendly exchange between him and Wilson. “You gonna set up some negotiations with the boss man when you take these peckerheads out. He gonna come in here and meet me and my war council at the sally port.”

  “What do you want?” Wilson asked, looking at Harris eye to eye.

  “They got to send in somebody that can talk for the man,” Mau Mau said, nodding at the pretrial imprisoned sergeant. “We go
ts demands.”

  “Like what?” Wilson asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Like none of your fuckin’ business, cracker,” James Harris snapped, and tapped the steel door with the bat as he spoke.

  “So your message to whomever is in charge out front is that you need them to send in an officer to the sally port to hear your demands?” Wilson asked, not reacting to the cracker slur.

  “Yeah,” Harris said, and then blinked with an afterthought. “Him and our lawyers.”

  “Which lawyers?” Wilson asked, shrugging.

  “Not my lawyer, that stupid scarecrow-lookin’ motherfucker,” Harris said and laughed. “He a scary-lookin’ scarecrow, too. No, I want some good lawyers.”

  “How many you need?” Wilson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harris said, and looked back at Fryer. “One might be fine, but I think two be better. These be lawyers that’s on our side, not no fuckin’ prosecutor motherfuckers.”

  “Defense lawyers,” Wilson said, and wrinkled his brow. “The one who has my case is a good one. I’ll ask for him. Captain Kirkwood.”

  Celestine Anderson had walked into the hallway and had sat down on the desk at the barred entrance. Complying with General Mau Mau’s orders, he had searched the cell block and surrounding grounds for James Elmore but had not yet discovered where the rat had hidden.

  “You just gonna let these motherfuckers waltz out here?” Anderson said, looking at Mau Mau.

  “Fletch need a doc, and maybe Bad John, too,” Harris said, looking at his cohort and inwardly worrying about how it might feel to swing at the end of a hangman’s rope. “We done with them anyway. Elmore, that’s the dude I want. You ain’t found his raggedy ass yet?”

  The Ax Man shook his head from side to side and then slid back on the desk and leaned against the wall.

  “We need something back for trade,” Anderson said, and glared at Donald Wilson, who had locked eyes with him. Then he shifted his look to Michael Fryer. “I want a piece of that nigger’s ass ’fore we get done here. He broke my nose and bust up my hand, stompin’ shit out of my fingers when he took me down. When him and white boy here be gettin’ me and Jones and Martin off those two assholes layin’ in there.”

  “Tell you what, motherfucker,” Harris said and laughed. “We let ol’ Preacher Man out this cage and you and him can go at it out in the yard.”

  “Maybe we do that tomorrow,” Anderson said, looking at the big man, who had size, strength, speed, and meanness well above his own abilities.

  Harris laughed and then yelled up the hallway to Brian Pitts, who sat at the gunny’s desk in the control unit.

  “Ax Man he gonna take down the Preacher Man out in the yard tomorrow!” Mau Mau called, his voice echoing in the building. Pitts showed a thumbs-up through the control room window and laughed.

  Celestine Anderson spun on the desk to look up the hallway at Pitts, and then snapped back at Harris.

  “I’m gonna kill that smart-ass, white-bread motherfucker sittin’ up there like he in charge,” the Ax Man seethed at Mau Mau.

  “He my soul brother, man,” Harris snapped back. “You ain’t killin’ nobody unless I say. I’m general of the Black Stone Rangers, don’t forget. You a lieutenant, and Snowman, he my colonel. My chief of staff. Ax Man, you my bro, but I ain’t lettin’ you mess with my man. We get out this motherfucker, I let you come live with me in Bangkok. How you like that?”

  “We ain’t goin’ noplace, bro,” Anderson said, and looked at the men in the cells. “Not unless you talk General Cushman outta the keys to this brig.”

  “That’s what we be negotiating, man,” Harris said, and looked back at Wilson. “Our man here gonna set it all up. Bring us lawyers and shit so it be legal. That way they have to give what we say.”

  “Kirkwood’s a good man,” Nathan Todd said, now standing next to Wilson. “I know him from back in Chu Lai.”

  “Who else good, Chief?” Harris asked, looking at Todd.

  “Captain O’Connor is a good lawyer,” Gunner Holden offered, still sitting on the bunk. “Also Captain Ebberhardt. He just got promoted today.”

  “Fuck those two flour bag motherfuckers!” Celestine Anderson shouted from the desk where he sat. “They handle my trial, man. Five years all I be lookin’ at before those two shitbirds fucked up my case and I end up with twenty-five years. Twenty-five years, motherfucker, and I start out sittin’ on just five. No way I want O’Connor or Ebberhardt talkin’ ’bout nothin’ ’bout me.”

  “One lawyer work fine then,” Harris said, shrugging at Anderson. “Yo, bro, I think that Ebberhardt dude he be Snowman’s lawyer.”

  “Why don’t you open these doors and let Wilson get these men out of here so they can go to sick bay?” Michael Fryer said, getting Paul Fletcher to his feet and holding the injured man’s arm across his shoulders. “Yo, Don, you handle this big boy okay?”

  “Sure can, Mike,” Wilson said, and looked at Nathan Todd. “The corporal will have his hands full helping Brookman and Turner, but we’ll make it just fine.”

  “Open them up!” Harris shouted down the hallway, and Brian Pitts pulled down the handle that sent all the cell doors rolling. He looked at Donald Wilson as he carried Paul Fletcher across his shoulders, and Nathan Todd stood between Brookman and Turner, helping both men walk. “Rangers will lead you across the yard, then you go on your own when you deal with the boys in the tower that got those machine guns.”

  Harris laughed as the four guards and Donald T. Wilson walked down the hallway. “Don’t go and get your ass shot!”

  “As long as none of your rangers fuck with us, we’ll make it out in good shape,” Wilson said, walking to the stairwell, now lifting Lance Corporal Fletcher across his shoulders and starting down.

  “I FIGURED IT was only a matter of time before I ran into you boys,” Jack Hembee said, walking onto the blockhouse front porch where Terry O’Connor, Jon Kirkwood, and Wayne Ebberhardt stood by a table with three five-gallon vacuum jugs of coffee lined up on it and several plastic sleeves of insulated paper cups laid next to them.

  “I thought you rotated home back in March,” Terry O’Connor said, filling a cup of coffee for the major and handing it to him.

  “I did,” Hembee said, blowing across the top of his drink and then skimming a sip of the steamy brew. “About six years ago I married this sweet little Texas rose from Tyler. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the place. It’s between Dallas and Houston, kind of down in East Texas. Everything went dandy with her, she loved life as an officer’s wife until I got sent to Vietnam last year and she had to leave base housing at Camp Pendleton. I sent her home to Tyler when I did my tour here.”

  Major Danger blew over his cup and took another careful slurp of coffee, then walked to a wooden bench set near the blockhouse front door and sat down. He patted a place next to him, motioning for the lawyers to take a seat, too.

  “Well, Dixie, that’s her name,” Hembee continued, “she caught the itch and needed to do a little traveling. So she and her girlfriend, Beverly, they hopped in my 1967 Corvette Stingray and shot on down to Houston, where they commenced to having a hell of a lot of fun with an old boy they met at the Hilton Hotel named Spencer Kelly.

  “Now, good old Spencer and his low-life compadres, who never saw a day of military service in their lives because their oil-rich daddies bought and paid for the local draft board, they wined and dined Dixie and Beverly and apparently a few other West Pac widows on a regular basis. They’d hang out at Trader Vic’s and the Warwick Hotel, go to the livestock show and rodeo at the Astrodome, dressed up in their fancy cowboy suits, and generally took up the conjugal slack for the husbands of these women while their men served overseas, here in Vietnam.

  “I get home last March, and the first thing Dixie tells me is that she has found a new life in Houston, with her new circle of wealthy friends, and that she no longer feels at home as the wife of a Marine. Especially now that she is against the war and all.”
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br />   Terry O’Connor laughed and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Major Hembee,” he said. “I don’t mean to laugh at what happened to you. It just reminded me of a blond Swedish girl I left in New York. She sort of has a similar attitude.”

  “She know old Spencer Kelly?” Hembee said with a laugh, and slapped O’Connor across the shoulders. “That boy does get around.”

  “No, but she sure gives me hell about my joining the Marines and serving in this war,” O’Connor said, smiling.

  “Well, shit, boys,” Hembee said, taking larger gulps of his coffee now that it had cooled. “I got my car back, turned it over to my brother to keep care of it, and I put in an AA form, volunteering for another tour in Vietnam.”

  “You didn’t divorce Dixie?” Kirkwood asked, narrowing his eyebrows at the major.

  “No, I didn’t,” Hembee said with a laugh. “I figure the best way to fuck her back is to stay married to her. She can’t file for divorce while I’m over here, so it kind of fouls up her plans of marrying one of those oil-rich Houston boys, or old Spencer himself.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your marriage, Major,” Kirkwood said, and then clasped his hands. “I guess I am awfully lucky. My wife, Katherine, she got a job teaching school in Okinawa just on the off chance that I might get a hop over there during my tour here. She’s back home in California now, and I never got to the rock either. But she did that out of love for me. Just to try to be near me. Lots of wrecked marriages coming out of this war, so I am awfully lucky to have a girl like Kat.”

  “Well, here’s to Katherine Kirkwood then, and all the women like her,” Hembee said, raising his coffee cup in a salute.

  “So you’ve gone back to Seventh Marines?” O’Connor asked, and noticed Movie Star dashing out the blockhouse door and looking around in a big hurry.