Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  “Yeah, I know it, and you know it, but what I got’s a name, too, player by the name of Wookie is what I hear. So if there ain’t some truth to it, rubber band or not, then how come motherfuckers be talkin’ that shit to begin with?”

  “‘Everywhere, from everybody.’” Jordy looked him square-on, the dead-eyed con stare that you learned quick. “How many does that mean really?”

  “Well, maybe a couple…” Lil’ Pun started to squirm. “Well, one, like, but he was telling it wit’ authority, know what I’m sayin’, and there another mofo standing right next to him noddin’ like what he’s hearin’ is word-up righteous.”

  If by Thursday nobody had filleted this fish, Jordy thought he might just have to take care of it himself. Every sentence out of Lil’ Pun’s mouth was accompanied by so many gestures it qualified as choreography. He swayed, he bounced his head from side to side. He bunched his fingers into the weird configurations of gangbanger sign language. Came off like he’d watched every rap video ever made, then practiced in front of a mirror.

  The problem was, he had the patois down, but not the pigmentation. Little Punisher was white as a Swede. And you knew if he’d had any say about the clothes on his back, he’d be swimming around inside an oversize jersey instead of a blue-on-blue uniform, with a ball cap sideways on his narrow white head, and baggy-ass jeans with the crotch hanging to his knees.

  Lil’ Pun was surely destined for a brief but memorable existence at Florence. A whigger, they were calling him. White nigger. Jordy couldn’t see the Brothers doing much more than pop his cherry and pass his pale bitch ass around the cellblock—the reason his money was on the Aryans and their low-tolerance policy for race traitors.

  “So what’s it gonna be, dogg—you waitin’ for me to beg? Cause I ain’t down wit’ beggin’.”

  Jordy started to walk away.

  “Aww, man, don’t be holdin’ out on me like dat!” Lil’ Pun squealed, on Jordy’s heels. “Come on. Please—there, I done said the magic word. Ah’ight?”

  Jordy stopped with a shrug and decided why not. Like granting a condemned man’s last wish. “Okay, I’ll tell you. But only if you tell me something after.”

  “Yo, homes, thass a deal.”

  “You’re right. It was a guy called Wookie. Know why they called him that?”

  “Something to do wit’ that Star Wars shit, be my guess.”

  “Yeah. He was this biker, in the middle of his second bit for dealing crystal meth. Big fucker…lots of hair, lots of sweat. Arms bigger around than your head. He came in with the name, so for all I know he grew up with it.

  “Anyway, I get railroaded into life without parole and here I am, right?” Jordy went on. “From day one, Wookie’s sniffing around me. He’s decided he wants him a bitch, and it’s gonna be me. Except I’m not the least bit cool with the idea of turning one end or the other of myself over to anything that hasn’t got a couple D-cups.”

  Lil’ Pun nodded once and pumped his fist.

  “But Wookie’s got a couple problems in getting over on me. First, it’s not like he’s got a brotherhood backing him up. His situation’s not like the cholos, or the Muslims, or the other black guys, or the Nazis. There’s other bikers here, but even most of them think the guy’s got some screws loose, so they don’t have much to do with him either. So he’s on his own mostly. Which is lucky for me.”

  “So what’s the motherfucker’s other problem?”

  “Right off I got tight with a guy name of Cro-Mag. Anybody tell you about him yet?”

  “Naw, ain’t heard nuthin ’bout him.”

  “Cro-Mag’s not a big guy—he’s like four or five inches shorter than me—but he’s not what you’d call the most stable individual, and not real big on thinking of consequences. He really can’t think in terms of consequences. His brain got out of tilt from a skull fracture. Keeps his head shaved, so you can see the dent along here—” Jordy ran his finger back-to-front over the curvature of the left side of his skull “—like a little trench, where the bone got smashed in by a cue stick during a bar fight. He’s got a metal plate up there, but it didn’t quite even everything out like normal.”

  “Damn, dogg!” cried Lil’ Pun.

  “Happened way before I ever met him, but I guess it changed him. He got the name Cro-Mag because somebody here figured this must’ve been what cavemen were like—always living right in the now, and if he goes off on you, strong as he is, you’re gonna be busted up bad before the C.O.s can pull him off. So he’s way way way at the bottom of everybody’s fuck-with list. But me he likes, and if he likes you, he’d kill for you. For the least little reason, too. Say we were back on the outside. I could point at a car and go, ‘Did you see that asshole cut me off?’ And that’s all it takes—he’s ready to take a sledgehammer to the guy’s car. Maybe to the guy. That’s Cro-Mag. So Wookie doesn’t do much but talk while Cro-Mag’s in the picture.”

  “I’m guessin’ Cro-Mag ain’t around no more, that it?”

  “He made his parole a couple months back. Only miracle I ever saw. Good for Cro-Mag, but bad for me. ’Cause Wookie, he’s been waiting for the day.”

  They were walking by now, across the yard. Never out of sight of those guard towers. Jordy still wasn’t used to it yet—that while this was the only chance to breathe air that felt clean and free of rank sweat, the crosshairs were always a heartbeat away from tracking you. Nobody got in a hurry out here except during moments of pain and suffering. He and Lil’ Pun moved slowly through the neutral area, with the sidelines reserved for the tribes. Approaching one wall, they could hear the clang of weights, the deep bellows-breath of guys sucking wind and grunting. All their resentment and boredom channeled into five more reps, until their veins looked ready to pop through their skin.

  “So Wookie, he’s a regular out here. Pumping iron, that’s his religion. This is where I catch up with him one day, since I know I got to make the first move in the situation. He’s doing bench presses, and I come up ten, twelve feet away from him. No closer. Everybody can see I’m nowhere close enough to even touch him. I just call out, ‘Hey Wookie. How much are you benching these days?’

  “He presses a couple more, then heaves the barbell up onto the rack—he’s got nobody spotting for him—and he sits up and looks at me. Says, ‘Hundred and eighty. Eight sets of fifteen each.’

  “So I tell him, ‘It’s been awhile since I stepped on some scales, but last time I checked, I weighed around one-ninety. So maybe you better work a little harder out here, you think you’re coming after me.’

  “Well, he’s not gonna let a thing like that pass. Which is exactly what I been counting on. But he knows he can’t fuck with me direct, ’cause of all those eyes and rifles up in the towers. So he gets some more weights and slaps ’em on the barbell with the rest. Again, exactly what I expect. Then he looks over at me with this grin and says, ‘Two-ten.’ Then he lays back down on the bench and starts pressing that.

  “So now the asshole’s got thirty extra pounds on there, and he can do it, but it’s a strain. You can tell. He’s huffing and puffing, got his knees braced way wide apart, his arms are getting shaky. I count out six reps, let him get good and worn down, like he can’t manage but one or two more…then that’s when I do it.”

  Lil’ Pun was hanging on every word. “Do what, homes?”

  “Shoot a rubber band and hit him in the balls. And that took care of the Wookie problem.”

  Lil’ Pun’s jaw dropped. “You shittin’ me, man.”

  “Feel something smack you in the balls, what’s your first instinct?” Jordy didn’t wait for an answer. “Protect the balls. So for a second there, Wookie forgets all about barely being able to hold those two hundred ten pounds. Barbell came down like a guillotine blade. Crushed his throat in, broke his neck. An eyeball popped out of the socket and veins blew out in his head. He was dead before he could get his hand on his balls.” Jordy grinned at the sky. “Best day I had since I got to this shithole.”

/>   “Damn, boyeeee!” Lil’ Pun keened a high crack of a laugh. “Dat is too dope! And you got away wit’ it?”

  “What’s to prove? The rubber band, nobody saw that. I shot it from the hip. Sure couldn’t see it from the towers. But just to be safe, after Wookie’s legs quit twitching and everybody was crowded around him, I picked the rubber band off the bench and swallowed it. Far as anybody was concerned, all the way up to the warden, the thing went down exactly how it looked: The asshole was showing off and fucked up.”

  “Man, if you ain’t one conspiratorializin’ motherfucker…” Lil’ Pun shook his head in admiration. A fan. He had a fan now.

  Reviews on the rubber band ploy had been mixed—no way could Jordy have sat on it without a few leaks, to earn credit where credit was due—but in general the move passed muster. You had to admire the cunning. Didn’t take much of a brain to slide up behind a guy and ram a sharpened spoon into his liver. But getting your man to drop two hundred pounds on his own neck took smarts.

  “So you owe me now,” Jordy said. “Simple question, won’t take long.”

  “Yo, all ears.”

  “What the fuck’s your problem with being white?”

  Little Punisher blinked and gawped. “Man…what you dissin’ me for, man?” Unable to believe his ears. “White-trash, rubber-band-shootin’ motherfucker, this’s who I am, a top to bottom gangsta. Respect that!”

  “I mean,” Jordy said, “you have seen yourself in a mirror lately, right?”

  “Dogg…? You got me working up a serious mad-on here, you know? If I was strapped, right about now you’d be looking at a Glock nine up against your spiky-ass head.”

  Jordy grinned, never letting it touch his eyes, and gave him more shit until Lil’ Pun finally ran out of threats. It came down to eyeball-to-eyeball then, beneath the towers, and finally the fish found his voice again.

  “Ain’t over ’tween us, no way, no how,” Pun warned him. “Best be sleepin’ wit’ one eye open, know what I’m sayin’?”

  And then the moron swaggered off like he knew everything there was to know about instilling fear.

  Jordy didn’t bother watching him leave, just stayed put and listened to the clang of iron, the grunts of moving it. Wasn’t long before he had more company, one of the Aryans drifting in from the sidelines. Older guy, close to fifty, if not over. He kept his skull buzzed close, but up top, at least, there wasn’t a lot of stubble left to buzz.

  Mad Dog, the name he went by. Meaning he needed a number, too. That was one of the weird things about prison. You ran into a lot of guys who went by Mad Dog.

  “So what you got going there with the whigger?” he asked.

  “Who—my new soon-to-be-ex-cellie?” Jordy shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “You weren’t in the day hall last night.”

  “I miss something?”

  “Nobody’s told you, then?” Mad Dog stared at him, got a blank look. “Sunday night, American Fugitives…?”

  Jordy tensed. Not a praying man, as a rule, but there were exceptions. “They caught Duncan?”

  “Just a sighting over the weekend.”

  And already Jordy was losing interest. It didn’t take much for the show to run sighting updates. American Fugitives was a huge hit with the cons. Gave them heroes to root for, to bet on the same as they’d bet on football. Every Sunday evening a few of the guys had to settle up over someone who’d been caught, or hadn’t been.

  You’d think that a show like that would fall under blackout conditions, counterproductive to the whole idea behind incarceration. But not the way Warden Foster saw it, according to one of the more talkative C.O.s. Let the scum cheer all they want, was the official take. Because eventually some of them will learn by repetition that they’ll only get caught if they resume their old ways after release. Which Jordy regarded as oddly optimistic, since it required faith that these losers were capable of learning to begin with.

  “But,” Mad Dog went on, “it was a peculiar sighting.”

  Then he explained.

  Jordy’s first reaction, on hearing about the situation with the actor, was that it served the asshole right for helping to bring heat down on a wanted man…even if it was Duncan. But as Mad Dog kept talking, the more unlikely things got. He didn’t have his facts straight. Or some citizen on the outside had, like the dead deputy, hopped onto the bandwagon of confusing one guy for another.

  Jordy could see it happening that someone might mistake an actor for the genuine guy. Plenty of god-fearing, tax-paying imbeciles out there lived in states of permanent confusion, thinking actors were the people they played—that they really did live on a houseboat, or with apes. But a couple of upright civilians swearing they’d spotted a fugitive together with the actor who had played him…that was warped. Because how was Duncan supposed to know this guy in the first place?

  “And where were they again?” Jordy asked.

  “Some gas station toward the northwest. Near Kingman, Saturday afternoon, I think it was. Said your cousin’s pumping gas, and the actor’s in the back seat with some cooze and his head in her lap.” Mad Dog got a faraway look in his eye. “Man, I can smell the pussy just thinking about that…”

  Jordy still wasn’t buying. Nothing but more hype for a TV show built on hype. “There’s a hundred reasons I could tick off why this is bullshit.”

  “Who fucking cares? This actor? They already put him at a rest stop an hour south of there, where another deputy got himself deceased. So the way I see it, so far that’s two less to worry about when I get out of here.”

  Jordy snorted. “This one shoot himself too?”

  Mad Dog shook his stubbled head. “This one somebody really meant to kill. And they didn’t waste bullets, either.” He dropped a finger into his groin, tracing it along the inside of one thigh. “That big artery you got that runs deep in there? They ripped it clean in two with a blade. That’ll flush your radiator, but fast.”

  “A knife? That’s all?”

  “More the size of a machete, by the sound of it.”

  “How about a sword? Like it could’ve been a sword?”

  “They didn’t read off the entire autopsy,” Mad Dog said, irritable now. “From where I sit, it’s results that count.”

  And all at once Jordy was a believer. Because who better would know that his cousin had a thing for swords? Certainly not the law, since Duncan had never used one in a robbery. But he’d wanted to, just because nobody else did anymore. He was like that—reliable, at least until that final day in Phoenix—but strange his whole life, his head somewhere else most of the time.

  Walk into a place holding a sword instead of a gun…that wasn’t robbery. That was an eight-year-old kid playing dress-up. Jordy had talked him out of it, glad now that he had, because it meant he was the only guy around who could confirm that Duncan had resurfaced. Meaning Jordy Rabin was one up on the rest of the world. Not an easy thing to say about yourself from behind a life sentence.

  “Outside Kingman, you said?” Jordy mentally unrolled a state map. Blue lines, red lines—he could almost see them, and wanted to feel a driver’s seat beneath his ass in the worst way possible. “They’re going up to Vegas, is what they’re doing.”

  “That’d be the place I’d go.” Mad Dog looked Jordy up and down and began to laugh. Cruel, heartless laughter—usually the only kind you ever heard in here. With exaggerated concern, he asked, “Didn’t ruin your day, did I?”

  Jordy gave a fierce shake of his head. “Best day I’ve had in here since Wookie got shaky arms. Fact is, I’m having such a great day I’m gonna throw a treat your way. If you’re interested.”

  Mad Dog jammed his tongue into his cheek, wrinkled his mouth and nose into an ugly sneer. Gray teeth. He had gray teeth. “Probably not.”

  “Jewish lineage,” Jordy said. “How is it that that’s traced again?”

  Mad Dog’s face smoothed back into shape, blank and unreadable. If you weren’t looking at his eyes. “The mother.
Through the mother’s bloodline.”

  “Right, that’s what I was thinking.” Jordy tipped his head back across the yard. “Never guess what Lil’ Punisher was telling me before you walked up. He was telling me his mom’s maiden name was Silverstein.”

  “You don’t say.” Mad Dog looked at the ground, jaw muscles starting to bunch and bulge. Gray teeth starting to grind. “That is one confused young man.”

  And when Jordy said he agreed, it didn’t even matter that he was probably throwing away his bet, advancing the schedule for when Lil’ Pun would get folded, spindled, and mutilated.

  He took this as a sign of growth. Because while winning was still the only thing that mattered, sometimes you had to reconsider the prize.

  ****

  By late afternoon Jordy had made up his mind…that with guile and luck he could be stepping out those walls in a few days and never coming back. The way of making it happen, he’d been mulling it over for months, wondering if he could really go so far as to put such a thing into motion. He’d decided that he could. This situation with Duncan had been a boot in his ass.

  He couldn’t say that incarceration had been an altogether bad experience. It made a man more watchful. And he had learned to think farther ahead than he ever had before, plan things more carefully. He’d cleaned up, too, cold turkey—no more speed binges, which definitely cleared your head. These, he decided, were enough for him to say that he had truly been rehabilitated.

  And if it took a sacrifice to get him out of here, that’s what it took. Neither of his parents had come here for so much as a single visit. He was dead to them now, he supposed…but a thing like that could work both ways. Might as well put it to use.

  Late in the afternoon, Jordy carried that resolve with him to the payphone. The hard part wasn’t remembering the number that Cro-Mag had given him before his release. No, the hard part was remembering the guy’s real name. Because in the likely event that his sister answered—he was staying with her while he got his life together—asking for Cro-Mag would guarantee she would hang up in his ear and never accept another collect call.