Noble Warrior

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  M.D. reached into his bag and handed over his two mustard packets. Fixer grabbed them, went back to his shelf, took down a metal plate, and then set a flat silver dish on top of the stinger’s wires.

  “Fried mustard’ll make my penis play the electric guitar.”

  “Is everything about your penis?”

  “Pretty much. Ever since it died, that is. Then again, don’t all of us want what we can’t have? Have I mentioned I haven’t been laid in over forty-seven years?”

  “You did.”

  “Well, that’ll tell you all you need to know about the cruelty of incarceration.”

  Fixer turned his attention to the mustard and meticulously squeezed every last drop from each of the packets onto the hot plate. Following proper jailhouse protocol, he then reached out his arm and offered the empty packets back to M.D.

  “Suck?”

  M.D. waved the old man off .

  “Suit yourself.” Fixer put the mustard in his mouth and extracted every last bit of flavor he could from each of the already empty packets. “In due time, everyone starts to suck. Ooh...” Fixer turned his attention back to the mustard crackling on the makeshift cooking pan. “Here we go.”

  Like a sous-chef in a five-star restaurant, Fixer mixed the sizzling mustard into the ramen noodle dish, twirled the contents in the bowl, holding two spoons in one hand like a man who’d graduated from a high-end culinary institute, and then blended everything together with musical smoothness, as if keeping a regular rhythm to his twirls enhanced the flavor of the food somehow. Once satisfied with his creation, Fixer unplugged the stinger and served up two evenly divided, heaping portions of sizzling hot grub.

  The old man plunged a spoon into the bowl of the simmering jailhouse cuisine and then offered a nice, big serving to M.D.

  “Dig in.”

  McCutcheon didn’t reply. Instead he stared at the wafts of spiced scents rising from the dish that hit him in the nostrils and caused him to salivate against his will.

  “No owe. You contributed the mustard,” Fixer said. “So if it makes you happy, you can just eat the parts touched by that.”

  McCutcheon understood the logic behind Fixer’s words. Since the mustard touched everything, M.D. could eat the entire bowl without feeling indebted. His new cellie hadn’t just identified M.D.’s problem; he’d offered a solution, too.

  But why, M.D. wondered. No, an apple was never just an apple.

  On one hand, Fixer might have just been friendly, an old man with too much time on his hands, hungry for conversation and a sense of camaraderie. On the other hand, perhaps this was all a scheme, a way of manipulating M.D. into letting his guard down.

  For what, an attack? M.D. considered the age of his new bunk mate.

  Not likely, he deduced.

  “What’d you do?” M.D. asked as he accepted the bowl of food, grabbed a seat on the edge of the bed, and loaded up his spoon. “You know, to get locked up.”

  “Murder one. Two counts. Gonna be fifty years next May,” Fixer said. “And I know you’re next question: how’d I do them?”

  “Yeah, sure,” McCutcheon answered.

  Fixer’s eyes narrowed as he watched McCutcheon take his first bite of food.

  “I did it the old-fashioned way,” Fixer replied. “With poison.”

  Suddenly, a surge of heat blazed in McCutcheon’s mouth. Liquid fire.

  M.D. spun his head around and immediately realized his new cell mate had not yet taken a bite of his meal.

  “There, there, relax into it,” Fixer said. “The pain won’t last that long at all.”

  A guard’s voice bellowed down the corridor. “Lights-out, Tier Three!”

  Like a warehouse factory being closed for the evening, a switch flipped from on to off, and the overhead fluorescent lights in every cell on the block shut down for the night with a staticky buzz.

  Darkness in the cages, however, did not mean there’d be silence.

  “You fill his tank, old man?”

  The thin and angled face of Krewls appeared between the weathered and worn bars of McCutcheon’s cell.

  “I believe he is satisfied.”

  M.D. found the word satisfied to be an interesting choice of terms. His body lay on the cot with only a thin piece of flattened foam serving as a mattress, and the scratchy gray blanket he’d been provided with smelled of mold and vinegar. Yet he’d just eaten one of the most delicious meals he’d tasted in years. The hot sauce burned his tongue like lava with the first bite, but seconds later the heat gave way to a delectable spice that left M.D.’s taste buds yearning for more. So yes, in one way McCutcheon felt extremely satisfied. In most others, however, he did not.

  “Good,” Krewls replied, spitting out the shell of another sunflower seed. “Get some rest tonight, sugar pie. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

  Prisoners at the D.T. outnumbered the guards by a ratio of two hundred and sixty to one, which meant that no matter how much control the officers were supposed to own over the facility, the reality was the inmates were always but a moment away from being in complete and total charge. This is why Puwolsky couldn’t have just staged an “accident” for the High Priest. To do so would have initiated a large-scale uprising from the largest gang in the institution, and Krewls knew that neither he nor his men would survive if something fishy occurred to D’Marcus Rose, while the High Priest was in their custody.

  Shotcallers in the penitentiary didn’t just simply fall down and bump their heads in the shower, and with soldiers protecting him on every inch of the yard, rival gangs couldn’t get to D’Marcus, either. Ironically, in one of the most dangerous places in the United States, the High Priest enjoyed exceptional safety.

  However, if M.D. punched his ticket, all bets were off.

  “Yep, sleep tight, sugar pie,” Krewls said, dreaming of all the money he was going to make. “And let me know if you want us to get you a li’l teddy bear to snuggle up with. We provide those, too.” Krewls cackled as if he’d told that joke to new fishies a thousand times.

  After the major vanished down the hall, McCutcheon closed his eyes. Lots of different thoughts wanted to swirl through his mind, but M.D. knew nothing would be more beneficial to him than shutting down his tired brain and getting some rest. He’d been awake for more than thirty-eight hours. Taking advantage of the quiet before the storm made the most strategic sense. To expend energy tomorrow, he’d need to replenish energy tonight.

  M.D. relaxed his body with a series of full inhalations and exhalations, progressing from slow and deep four-counts to slower and deeper eight-counts. He’d started meditating a few months earlier. Like most new students to meditation, McCutcheon found that his mind often raced from thought to thought. If he focused on his breath, however, with patience and single-mindedness, he learned he could penetrate beyond the bouncing thoughts and get to a deeper, more soulful inner space.

  A place of spirit.

  Relax, he told himself. Be at peace. The wars will come soon enough and you will be ready.

  Suddenly, a bloodcurdling scream rang through the corridor.

  “Nooooooooo!”

  Its voice unmistakable.

  “Ssstttooopppp! Pleeeaaassse!”McCutcheon sprang from his bed.

  “Somebody. Heelllppppp! Oh my God, noooooooo!”

  M.D. strained to see down the hallway, but the bars prevented him from acquiring a view.

  “Guaaaard!! Heeeelllppp!! Pleeeeeeaaase!”

  McCutcheon looked to Fixer for an explanation.

  “There are three reasons new guests don’t sleep during their first night in the D.T.,” the old man said in a calm and even voice from his reclined position in the lower bunk. “Number one is fear. Ain’t no bigger enemy than your own mind inside of prison. Ain’t no greater ally, either. Kind of a puzzle, no?”

  “SOMEBODY! PLEEEEAASSE!!”

  Acoustics caused each plea to bounce like a rubber ball off the walls. Begging pinged from the left. Crying careened from the right. Sc
reams for mercy, yelps for rescue, shouts for savior and relief popped off the ceiling, bars, and floor.

  But no help came.

  “OOOOWWWWWW! NOOOOOOOOO!”

  Fixer reached under his bed, took an orange from his basket, and began to peel its skin.

  “The second reason a new fish doesn’t sleep on their first night in prison,” he continued as he plopped a chunk of the fruit’s juicy flesh into his mouth, “is unaccommodating cell mates.”

  M.D. paced the cage like a tiger, his stomach turning. The guy not named Timmy screamed and screamed, but to no avail.

  “Your buddy got tossed into Cell One One Three. Too bad.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody help him?”

  “A person can lose their humanity in this zoo,” Fixer said. “In fact, most do. Men come in; animals come out.”

  “But why don’t the guards help him?”

  “Help him?” Fixer asked. “They’re the ones who put him in there in the first place. That end of the pod, they call it the Think Tank.”

  McCutcheon spun around. He’d heard that phrase before.

  The Think Tank stood as a medieval theater in the round where the guards staged prison cockfights for gambling, sport, and fun. Conveniently located next to the Think Tank was Cell One One Three, a dwelling designed to motivate the gladiators, because the loser of a fight would sometimes find themselves tossed into the domain like a bloody fish thrown into the tank of a shark should the fighter’s performance not be up to snuff.

  If Krewls didn’t think a combatant showed enough heart, guts, or effort, the con earned himself a little vacation time with Pharmy and Goblin, the longtime residents of Cell One One Three.

  Pharmy was short for Pharmaceutical. As a six-foot eight-inch, three-hundred-eighty-pound mentally retarded inmate serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for stabbing an emergency room nurse to death with a ballpoint pen, the penal institution had been experimenting with pills on him like a human lab rat since the early 1990s. Some inmates felt Pharmy wasn’t even a real person any more; he was more like a forgotten creature existing in the bowels of the penitentiary like some sort of subterranean beast in a horrifying fairy tale.

  He only listened to one person: Goblin, his four-foot two-inch dwarf cell mate who served as Pharmy’s master.

  Outside of lockup, Goblin, orphaned by his parents at the age of two and raised in sixteen different foster care homes over the next fourteen years of his life, struggled to survive in society. In jail, however, Goblin flourished. As a sadistic dwarf with yellowed teeth he’d self-sharpened into fangs and a wandering eye, Goblin owned no moral code and felt no remorse. Like Pharmy, all the years in the pit of the D.T. turned him from a person into a creature, and the two misfits became tied to each other like peanut butter and jelly. Goblin owned the wits and the will, Pharmy owned the brawn and the mass, and as an inseparable team they lived in the intestines of the D.T. as the unofficial regulators of the inmate population.

  Push any of the guards too far and a convict went to solitary. Push a guard even further and an inmate might find himself vacationing for a night or two in Cell One One Three.

  “Every now and then when things have been running dry, Krewls tosses them a bone,” Fixer said.

  “But why him?”

  “’Cause every predator has to feed, and your friend, well...he just wasn’t ever going to make it in here anyway. Somebody was gonna get him,” Fixer said. “Krewls probably just decided to toss a cookie to his pets.”

  “HELLLLLPPP! PLEEEEAASSE!!”

  “But they never gave him a chance,” M.D. said.

  “You should get some sleep.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” Fixer said. “I just lie there.”

  McCutcheon continued to storm back and forth across the cell.

  “You can’t control what you can’t control, kid,” Fixer said. “You got your destiny, I got mine, your friend has his. Best, I learned, to just tune out.”

  Tune out? Impossible, M.D. thought. And even if he could, he knew he would never want to. Only a man who’d lost his soul could ever do such a thing, and McCutcheon felt he’d rather die than become that cold and unfeeling.

  The screams continued.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Fixer said, “it usually stops in about forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

  “Why? What happens in forty-eight to seventy-two hours?” M.D. asked as the whimpering continued to ring up and down the halls. “They get bored?”

  “Bored? No. Goblin’s far too evil to get bored with a human toy,” Fixer said. “What’ll happen is your friend will be offered some shoelaces when Pharmy and Goblin get their hour in the yard for rec.”

  “Shoelaces?” M.D. looked down at his orange colored prison sandals. Most state facilities provided laceless footwear to convicts so they couldn’t hang themselves.

  With shoelaces.

  “Krewls’ll offer your friend an option,” Fixer said. “Many who’ve been sent to Cell One One Three take it. Especially the new fish.”

  “This has been going on for a while?”

  “Years,” Fixer said. “Way I see it, not necessarily a shameful thing, either, ya know? In here, a person’s gotta do what they gotta do to survive, and ain’t a man in this hell ain’t thought at one time or another about ending their own life.”

  The yelling continued. Each time it died down, McCutcheon prayed for it to end, but then a new shriek would come—a different pitch, a different volume, a different tone—and the skin of McCutcheon would crawl again.

  M.D. gripped the bars so tightly, the white of his knuckles looked as if his bones might burst out from underneath his skin.

  “The don’t call this place the Devil’s Toilet for nothin’.” Fixer rolled over onto his side, seeking to go back to sleep. “Really, try to get some rest, kid. Tomorrow, you’re gonna need your strength.”

  “Would you help him if you could?”

  “I can’t.”

  “But would you?” McCutcheon asked needing to know.

  Fixer shook his head. “This here ain’t no place for these kind of questions, kid. In prison you do what you gotta do to survive.”

  The cries continued. All night. Hour after hour of wailing, begging, and screaming for someone, anyone, to put an end to the horror.

  An end that never came.

  Hour after hour passed with M.D. standing at the bars of his cage, wishing there was some way he could get out. How can he sleep? M.D. wondered as he looked down at Fixer. How can anyone in this whole place sleep? There had to be hundreds of other men listening to the same cries as he was.

  “What’s the third reason?” M.D. asked.

  “Pardon?” Fixer said, waking from his slumber. The old man tried to approximate the time. It had to be about three in the morning.

  “You said there were three reasons a new inmate doesn’t sleep during their first night in jail. What’s reason number three?”

  Fixer took a long, deep breath before responding. He could see that his new cellie still had a lot to learn about living in the world of incarceration.

  “Reason number three is because they still have a conscience,” Fixer answered. “But don’t worry, kid. Soon, yours will die, too. Jail eats everyone’s soul.”

  “SOME-BAH-DEEEEE HEE­ELL­LL­LL­PPP ME!!”

  “Only one thing matters in here,” Fixer said. “Your own survival. Remember that, kid. And just be thankful that it ain’t you down there.”

  M.D. tried to open the bars of the cell door again using all his might. Yet it was all for naught. McCutcheon wasn’t Superman, and he wasn’t able to bend iron with superhuman strength. His cage remained locked, and no one would be coming to open it, either.

  “PLEEEEAASSE HELP ME!”

  “Ain’t but two ways out of the D.T., kid,” Fixer said. “Parole or the morgue truck. Till one of those days comes, every last one of us has to do what we gotta do to survive. N
o apologies needed. Now get some rest. Or at least shut the fuck up so I can.”

  The cries bounced from wall to wall all night. By the break of day, begging turned to groaning and by sunrise groaning turned to silence.

  Around 5:00 a.m. the wailing stopped. McCutcheon climbed into his bunk and finally laid his head down. As he closed his eyes, he realized the silence turned out to be the most disturbing sound of all.

  McCutcheon didn’t get a wink of sleep. He’d entered the D.T. voluntarily and remained determined to make his way through this mission with honor. Values, he knew, didn’t change according to the environment. A good person remained a good person regardless of where they were. Locations did not matter; principles did.

  “Why you goin’ to breakfast when breakfast has already come to you?” Fixer reached into his box of goodies and withdrew a couple of hard-boiled eggs. “We got plenty.”

  “’Cause I’m not looking for food,” M.D. answered.

  Fixer stared at his young cell mate. “A guy who goes to the cafeteria not looking for food must be looking for something else.”

  “Conversation.”

  “Or trouble,” Fixer said. “Then again,” he added. “Sometimes, they’re the same thing.”

  “Maybe.”

  M.D. stepped out into the hall and placed his hands behind his back, one wrist holding the other. Adapting properly to prison life meant taking cues from other inmates. They would be his teachers. Head up, eyes scanning the perimeter, gaze not invading other people’s personal spaces, yet also not leaving himself open to unforeseen ambushes, a cold, hard scowl at all times.

  As a new fish, he’d certainly be tested. Where and when he could not know. After the night he’d just endured, however, M.D. felt eager to take on any man with the guts to try him. The first inmate to take a run at him would be the last.

  Scores of prisoners marched single file to the left, hands behind their backs obeying the institution’s rules like broken-spirited horses. M.D. began swimming upstream against the flow of traffic to the right.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” a guard’s voice bellowed.